“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There a lot of ways this post could go with a title like that, but the enemy here are Advanced Idiots and the the self is to some extent the CC Music Community. To the extent Friends of CC Music is an attempt at a structural embodiment of that community, the self is also the org.

The quote starts with enemy, but I think knowing ourselves is probably more important and simpler in this context. I’ve been involved in the CC community since 2007 and as the world has changed, so has the community. Right now, we aren’t much of a community really. We are a bunch of random of events, podcasts, and musicians with basically no connection.

Said more positively, we are a group of loosely connected communities. Ryno has a community. The Bugcast has a community. Netlabel Day has a community. BlocSonic has a community.

The goal of Friends of CC Music is to bring those communities together.

I think a lot of people are confused about what we are doing here, so I’ll let you read it again: The goal of Friends of CC Music is to bring those communities together.

I am very concerned about the small numbers of folks involved in Friends of CC Music turning FCCM into another community. Maybe that is ok?

Perhaps it is due to my obsession with not being a long-term bottleneck on the organization, but we are just not doing anything. I mean, *I* am doing Jibber Jabber Jambalaya, but the organization is otherwise doing literally nothing except some very modest support of Omar with Netlabel Day.

There are actually two other things I have decided are happening (though one of them is going to be JJJ branded so I guess it kinda doesn’t count, but Netlabel Review will need its own blog post.)

Advanced Idiots is a term that came to me from A23P aka Alien Nesby of Acid All Stars and Nu Kids Off The Block fame.

Despite the title and framing, I am not an AI hater. That said, whatever collective psychosis that technology companies are going through is not making the world a better place. There are definitely some startups that are going to win big before the bubble bursting, but technology users, the environment, and people’s long-term stock portfolios are all not going to win. That, of course, doesn’t even mention the short-sighted lay offs. Hey, just gotta win the quarter, right?

I don’t think it is exactly right to say “I work in AI” but it is not exactly wrong to say “I work in AI.”

I would like to think I know enough to help organize a course for beginners without it being a sells pitch. My sells pitch, so much as there is one, is that AI is not going anywhere. It has been around since the 1950s. It will get better. Whether it is a force for good or a force for evil will depend on humans. Being ignorant about how the evils of AI work and could work is not going to help anyone.

None of this is set in stone, but here is the working release schedule for this course.

2025 – The Foundation

I. AI History – It is difficult for anything else to make sense if people don’t understand what is meant when people say AI.

II. Statistical Under-pining – Math is not required to use AI tools, but if your goal is to change the world, you are going to need to understand a little bit about how we got where we got from a theoretical standpoint, not just historical one.

January 2026 – AI Today

III. Resource Utilization – Overuse of resources is an environmental and economic problem. If your job is pushing AI unnecessarily, this will help arm you with some tools to combat it.

IV. Data Cleanup – Bad data can lead to bias (both in the every day sense of the word, but also the ML sense of the word). Worse still, it just leads to bad outcomes. You might think “no bad outcomes are good and people will stop using it” but I think ChatGPT has shown us all just because stuff is wrong does not mean people will stop using it.

V. Python Tooling – There is a lot of AI tooling in a lot of languages, but Python is known as a good beginner language. Python long-ago was adopted by data scientists because they were not programmers, aka beginners. If folks in the CC Music Community want us to explore other languages in future installments, we can probably do that.

VI. Agents – Model Context Protocol and more! I don’t think this needs more commentary as a teaser, but if you want more, just leave a comment!

March – But This is a Music Org, right?

Part of my thesis for leaning into educational materials is that musicians need tools for the logistics of distributing music, be that physically (including physically distributing one’s self) or digitally, but I also recognize a bunch of the above won’t be of interest to everyone. Maybe the below will!

VII. Legal Ramifications – My hope is to have Jessica Harrison to talk about the state of the law. We will also go over some practical tips for finding a lawyer (spoiler alert: https://vlany.org/national-directory-of-volunteer-lawyers-for-the-arts/) and walk folks through what a legal proceeding might look like. Going to court is a colossal pain in the ass, but the motto of the day is “Know the Enemy.”

VIII. Art? – Josh from Louis Lingg and the Bombs said this to me back in June:
“I actually worked in an AI composition startup. I saw it as a way to compose a song like a 3 dimensional sculpture in that a composer can write a song that’s different every time you listen to it. Like an evolving entity. Unfortunately, no one agreed or used the technology in that way. They just wanted to use it in unethical ways to steal and to flood the streaming market with thousands of pieces of mediocre garbage instead of creating singular works of art with longevity.”

I, perhaps somewhat like Josh, see AI as being like the photograph and sampling before it. I personally find the idea that AI cannot be used for art to be dark comedy. But, I also understand that practically speaking, the scale of AI re-use is far beyond that of sampling. I think a lot of the angst about AI in music is probably more rightly just angst at tech bro douchery.

If Josh doesn’t want to talk about it (or doesn’t have time…he did just open a new studio) or I can’t find someone else, then I might talk to Ryno about security here. I’ve got a few months to figure it out.

The Call to Action

Despite my very tongue-in-cheek meme, I am not, in fact, an AI expert. I noted this in the text already, but for those that scrolled past that, it is worth repeating. I already have some folks I think can help out. I mentioned some of them by name…but I don’t have anything scheduled yet. Particularly for the more technical bits in January I could use some help. Selfishly, part of why I am doing this is to learn, but I am not going to be an expert by January. I have seven beings in my home that I cook and clean for. I am a busy dude.

If you are interested in helping out you can email me at doug@blocsonic.com or hit me up on socials.