Books are artifacts of culture. Working class authors have contributed some of the most lasting and affecting work.
David John Baer McNicholas was a residential renovator for twenty years. He connects with the spirit of manual labor, the presence of lived-in spaces, and the vital exchange of knowledge between the living and the living and the living and the dead. David lives in a bus on the high desert mesa in Madrid, NM, with two cats: Oliver and Lady Jane. He is the author of Lemons: In an Orchard and has several manuscripts in process. His short stories, poems, and visual art have appeared in a handful of publications in print and on the web.
He is a graduate of the creative writing program at The Institute of American Indian Arts, where he concentrated in fiction, poetry, and graphic narrative, and studied disciplines as diverse as anthropology and studio arts. He reads nonfiction for BendingGenres.com and moonlights as a noise musician under the name c}{imps 8 my ears.
He loves doom jazz, tostones, and absurdist films.
The only thing I can state with conviction is that AI use should be disclosed.
I do not use AI in my typesetting work, nor do I use it to write or create visual artwork. Some clients use it for their artwork. It’s not for me to judge. Credit where credit is due, of course. The implication when someone uses and credits AI is that, back of that, there are millions of uncredited artists whose work has been mined. The same is true for code development, no? The well-intentioned rat’s nest of copyright law has failed to protect working class artists since its inception. AI did not create this ethical dilemma, but it has heightened it.
This website was coded with an immense debt to Claude.ai. Without its direct support, I’d just have a landing page. I wouldn’t fault you for thinking that would be better. Corporations are invading working class communities all over world with AI data centers. It’s a new form of corporate gentrification for robots and shareholders.
Corporations are not, of themselves, problematic. AI, the same. Even capitalism has existed for thousands of years as mercantilism, without being a huge problem. Something in the scale and implementation of 20th/21st century consumer capitalism and shareholder profit driven corporate motivation combined with a global phenomenon of consolidation and compression is driving toxic relationships between human progress and global personhood. I don’t have the answer.
Meanwhile… we all continue to do our best and be open to dialog. Being working-class artists, let’s avoid the crab-bucket mentality. We all want a better world. We don’t often agree on what that looks like, but I must believe we can do better if we are willing to see and hear each other out.
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