Sunshine and Olly

by Jonathan Blaustein

I’m trying to find a rhythm for this blog.

(Don’t think I’ve fully got it yet.)

At first, of course I hit you with plenty of content, because I was launching the site.

It’s an action-oriented phase, the beginning of something. And when you put ALL the effort into social media promotion, it begins to feel like a proper project.

But proper projects are work.

As an artist/writer/journalist/editor, making things is how I pay the bills. (Or teaching people how to do it, anyway.)

Lately, though, I can’t go a day without the media, (my sometimes employer) telling me that Artificial Intelligence is coming for photographers, and journalists.

Hollywood writers are on strike, b/c AI is obviously going to write scripts, but then The Taos News had an AI stock photo published, THIS WEEK, and I just read an article, THIS MORNING, about an AI girlfriend, who’s raking in (actual) money.

The future is here.

It has arrived.

And it’s scary as fuck.

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Now, I don’t want to suggest I’m in a tizzy all the time.

I live in nature.

I’m a Dad with a wife, two kids, and four dogs. Living life, teaching them, leading, loving, it takes a lot of time and energy.

And I smoke plenty of medicinal marijuana.

But the last time my work dried up like this, as quickly, was when the Great Recession and digital camera revolution dovetailed, in ’08-’09.

I had a small digital photo studio here in Taos, and did a bit of everything, to make sure I’d be economically resilient.

Printing, scanning, shooting, retouching, I did it all.

And all of it dried up, within a few months, when the world fell apart.

This feels similar.

Not only are people hurting financially, because of years of inflation, (and now persistently high interest rates,) but they’re also freaked out, simultaneously, about The Terminator being, you know….

REAL!!!!!!

While I may not have figured out the rhythm for this blog yet, I felt a huge urge to write just now…

…so I did.

Maybe that’s the way forward?

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