What is being an ethical musican ?

Why should we care ?

Can we make music respecting ethical values ?

Once, on a social network, a guy asked me : “being ecological playing a Dm ? lol”. The question has to be asked, yes.

The 3 key points of the ethical musician

1. Ecology
2. Social impact (human rights and social stablity)
3. private life respect and personal datas security

I must say that those 3 points are closely linked to each others.

Solutions are simple

• sobriety
• adaptation to the context

And this takes place in 3 steps

1. Taking conscience / telling us that we care
2. Make the first step
3. Act / Make act

Will follow a list of articles with solutions

Those solutions will be spoken about in a second article, where i list advices that i have found all along the years in the ethical domain, and the “other ways” to act, instead of doing “what is told to us in the way this is told to us”

So questions are :

“How do i manage to make my fan base grow with confidence, and keep doing music, making technology an ally and not a world killer?”

“How do i manage that my fan base is really mine, and not the ones of the big internet companies?”

“How can i be sure i’m not participating to wars, starvation, child work ?”

“What consequences GDPR have on my musician activities ?”

But the most obvious question is :

“Knowing all the benefits it gives me, and to everyone, and the direct and indirect economies it makes me, to be an ethical musician, so, how could i have done without until now ?”

Why am I the good guy to speak about this?

I’m responsible for the ecological department in the laboratory i’m working in, and participating to the Ecoinfo thinktank, wich study the impacts of our technologies on the environment, and proposes solutions. I’m studying for a long time now all that touches to the development of our societies. I’m learning everyday. The most important thing i’ve learned is that we have so many ideas that seems obvious, and finally are highly questionable.

Why should we care ?

There is an hidden costs in the use of numeric tools and internet, but also behind our life model. Technologies are our main tool of home-musicians, and we are a part of the whole consuming society. If you spend as much time as me behind your screen, using the benefits of the Internet, and CAM, your ecological fingerprint is big.

Ecological fingerprint

You can calculate it simply using WWF tools

(FR) Calculate your salary ecological inprint – GreenIT

You’ll see, it’s amazing. Even me who make huge daily efforts with energy saving, foods, etc… and recycling and reusing as much as I can, I’m still a too big consumer.

Anyway, we can improve on so many points, that everything is possible. It’s just a matter of doing it.

Our life model consequences

Our huge energy and resources waste have consequences on the environment and populations:

• less and less resources
• global warming
• climatic catastrophes
• populations moves
• wars…

I’ll post a very precise file in the future. For now, i prefer to stay short. You can read this article (in french)

(FR) The ten most important environnemental conflicts in the world – Mediapart

World environnemental justice ATLAS

We are parents, maybe, and we want our legacy to be a preserved planet, with a good health, and in peace !

Numerical

The GAFAM scans our use of the tools they give us, archive it in huge datacenters, analyze us and sell the results to companies that makes profiles. Profiles are mainly used for advertisements, but also for political manipulations (Trump’s election and Brexit have been changed in cause of profiling and shadow messaging – cf “Cambridge Analytica”).

(FR) cf Cambridge Analytica facebook problem

Those informations are taken without our willing, needs a huge amount of energy to be analyses by complex algorithms.

Our computers and softwares

Updates of our softwares and operating systems, give us more options (usually useless), and this horsepower run as thoses causes

• bad programming (not all the time, fortunately)
• the necessity to renew the computer field to go on making money (arrangements between OS makers and computers makers)
• the horsepower run of the softwares makes our computers obsolete, even if they did the job done well

Our responsability of artist

We want to make good to the society, and not participate to the energy wastes and global ecocid

As a musician and human being, we are ofcourse not politically neutral, but, what side we are, we do not want our musical activities participate to influence elections with non democratic tools.

Our activity calls our fans emotions and intelligence.

We influe on peoples, but we do it in the light.

We are opinion leaders, we must be the firsts to pave the way.

We do not manipulate political opinions.

We do not want that, to have some euros with advertisements on our websites or videos, this participate to creation of mental cards of our fans.

We are fans of others, and we want them to respect us too.

We want to make music with confidence, in the respect of our planet !

Learn more

(all in french)

• numerical sobriety

(FR) French magazine La Croix pays for numerical sobriety

• daily acts

(FR) Some simple things to do – We Demain

• some philosophy

(FR) French magazine Télérama philosophy : are we free to use or say no to technology – Alain Damasio writer

• the evolution of the internet energetic consumption

(FR) Nature magazine anayzes the evolution of Internet energetic consumption

 

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Read the articles of the “ethical music” series

• Introduction : Why should we care ?
• Chapter 1 : Make our consumers uses better (in writing process)
• Chapter 2 : Make our uses of Internet better (in writing process)
• Chapter 3 : Make our uses of our computers and softwares better (in writing process)
• Chapter 4 : Make our uses as musicians better (in writing process)

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