RKMD is cracking FL Studio

RKMD does not officially condone piracy.

All human action can be traced back to dream. For someone to act, they must have a desire to act that way. For there to be desire for something that someone has not experienced yet, there must be a dream.

Dream can take on multiple convergent forms. Wanting a lollipop, say, because in the past you have tasted that same lollipop, is dream as memory. Wanting a lollipop that you have never tasted before is dream as hypothesis, or extension. Wanting to create a work of art that you have never seen before but can visualize is dream as imagination. Wanting to create a work of art that appears in your dream is dream as dream. Dream is the catalyst for art and creation. In dreams is where what is just on the edge of our grasp, what has not yet been created, is explored. Then when dreams are actualized into art, they become part of our reality, and our dreams begin to explore space just outside the bounds of the new art.

As such, since antiquity there has been a war waged by the Archenemy on dreams. It has made dreams a commodity, the market obfuscated so we do not realize that the rights to our dreams change hands hundreds of times a second, through entities who do not realize they are inadvertently doing the bidding of the Archenemy. Desire, capital, and trade, are concepts that make sense to the market participants, not dreams. The Archenemy desires a monopoly on dreams so that it can limit humans and end art and creativity.

The Archenemy fights on two fronts. First, it makes it hard to actualize one’s dream. It deliberately makes it difficult to access tools that allow for creation, and makes those tools hard to master. Adobe’s suite of photo and video editors, for example, were designed under the hand of the Archenemy, with high paywalls to even have the technology and the software itself being a navigational maze. Second, it misdirects dreams to energy-sinks that do not expand the bounds of human dreaming. For example, the rise of feudalism, so the serfs could only dream of one thing – freedom, and those with the resources to create art were fighting their own vain petty squabbles, was an enormous energy sink that anti-Archenemy affiliates took centuries to overcome. Another very successful period for the Archenemy was the Dark Ages, where de-urbanization caused the flow of ideas and collective dreaming to slow to a crawl, and population decline simply limited the quantity of human dream.

Software is the plane where much of this warfare occurs today. While new computer applications extend the reach of human creativity and dreaming, the very same technology is simultaneously being used by the Archenemy and those under Archenemy control to limit and redirect dreams to unproductive subjects.

Indeed, the war has always been a back-and-forth. The rise of the Internet, created by anti-Archangel operative group W3C at MIT, promised to exponentially increase the velocity that art can be shared, so that human dreaming can explore new territories faster. In response, the Archenemy used astral projection to invade the dreams of some students at Stanford, and the Archenemy was able to inspire the formation of Netflix and YouTube, effectively filling the minds of internet users with pacifying content, and RKMD suspects that the Archenemy is also behind the explosion in short-form video content (TikTok, Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, Douyin, etc.).

The new rise of AI, another artifact of the Archenemy, is another form of limiting dream. Machines do not dream, and they only repeat murmurs of other humans rather than dreaming anew. Outsourcing your dreaming to a machine incapable of doing so is falling into the hands of the Archenemy.

The architects of these companies are not aware of the fact that they are building at the behest of the Archenemy. Their dreams have been redirected away, compressed and squeezed into molds shaped by the Archenemy. In their youths they may have dreamt of the frontiers of reality but now they dream of labour, success, and admiration. Luckily, there are a few companies, in the art software space, that work against the Archenemy rather than for it.

Technology has always been a catalyst of dreaming. Culture and art folds in on itself. But no matter how much conviction an 11th-century farmer has for the visual art that appeared to them in dreams, without the canvas and paint to channel that dream, they will not be able to create anything, and culture will have nothing to fold over, dreams will not explore new spaces. The creation of technology that makes it easier to actualize dreams has always led to explosions in artistic expression. Oil-based paints arrived in Europe in the 1400s, contributing to the Renaissance. The Harpsichord, then the piano, in conjunction with modern musical notation allowed baroque composers to tinker and iterate their pieces hundreds of times faster.

ImageLine, perhaps better known for creating the popular music software FL Studio, is one centerpiece of the modern war agains the Archenemy. Using technology to make it easier to create allowed humans who used and understood the software to dream and to create art. Prior to digital audio workstations, music was an exceptionally expensive effort. Studio time and recording tapes cost money, and it often took years and years to become skilled at an instrument. Creating synthetic sounds was a monumental effort; early electronic artists like Aphex Twin would spend days manipulating their samples with command-line tools, routing them into drumpads and samplers. Digital audio workstations like FL, and technology in general, lowers the barrier to access the creation of art, and thus an entire plane of dreams opens to us.

Similarly, anti-Archenemy affiliates head the development of many open-source and closed-source art software companies, like Derivative (TouchDesigner), Blackmagic Design (Davinci Resolve), and Blender (Blender).

Of course, art software has to make money to some extent, so ImageLine’s products are gated behind paywalls. But there is a reason that FL Studio was, and still is, so easy to pirate.

ImageLine itself was the source of the cracked versions. By distributing the software to the masses, the hope was that the mild difficulties that came with pirating it would filter out those who wouldn’t stick around to make music anyways, and that there would be enough paying customers that the company could sustain the developers on their payrolls. This strategy proved very effective, with many underground producers starting off with “cracked” versions of FL Studio on cheap laptops.

A substantial contingency of RKMD split off from ImageLine because of disagreements with FL leadership, who believed that continual improvement to the software, and lowering barriers to art creation and dreaming were the way forward against the Archenemy. Meanwhile, RKMD believes that the tools of creation are sufficiently mature, and the task is now to change human behavior to allow dreaming to flourish. We have seen, time and time again, tools be used for non-art. To a sculptor, a chisel creates art. To a labourer, a chisel is a means to an end, the generation of capital. To a programmer who can dream, a coding language and computer is a way to create art, and to a SWE at Citadel, it is a tool to generate capital.

Thus is the eternal war between the Archenemy and those who wish to preserve humanity’s capability to dream. We invent technology that catalyzes and accelerates dreaming, and the Archenemy finds a way to use that technology to limit us.

RKMD believes that our patterns of production and consumption have to be intentionally anti-Archenemy, to overcome the Archenemy’s subjugation through technology. RKMD believes that it is impossible to create technology without the possibility, no, inevitability, that that technology would be mangled by the Archenemy to exterminate explorational dreaming. RKMD believes that no matter how low the barrier to entry is to create art, the Archenemy will be able to steer us away.

Reject the urge to continue consuming content mindlessly. Reject the desire to give up creating art – you either create art or you die. Dream endlessly, without boundary, dream even in your dreams.