If you don't want to pay for other people's music and events, how are you different from a generative-AI user?

Whiteboard Journal put four Jakarta collectives in a room in July 2026: Fengshui, Paguyuban Crowd Surf, Kolibri Rekords and Club Vixxxen. Most of the conversation is about the unglamorous machinery of running gigs. Then Zara from Club Vixxxen said this:

Kalau nggak mau bayar untuk musik dan acara produksi orang lain, apa bedanya dengan pengguna generative AI?

"If you don't want to pay for other people's music and events, how are you different from a generative-AI user?"

It is a genuinely unusual argument, and it lands because it refuses the comfortable version. The comfortable version of the AI conversation is that a large company scraped your work and that is theft. Zara's version points the same logic at the person who turns up to the show expecting it to be free, or streams the record and never buys it: extraction is extraction, and scale is not a moral category.

From the same round-table, Daffa of Kolibri Rekords on longevity, which reads like the other half of the same thought:

Kolektif yang panjang umur adalah yang bersenang-senang dan tidak terburu-buru.

"The collectives that last are the ones having fun and not rushing."

Related, and worth reading, though it is an essay rather than an interview: Areispine Dymussaga Miraviori wrote "Blooming Through Concrete" for Norient about hosting independent touring bands in Jakarta, including the line "Building a scene with love, to me, is the purest form of resistance amidst the authoritarianism and commercialization of space." That is the author writing, not a quoted source, and we are flagging it because other people have quoted it as though someone said it out loud.