Baby I want you
Like I never wanted anyone
Baby I love you
Oh please let me be the one
You're the one I want
...
It goes on like that for 3 minutes. Another gem. This one is out since last week. And I'm just sick and tired of that shit. It just drives me nuts. I try not to think about it but it is everywhere at the moment. On radio, videoclips on TV, all over internet, looping in my head. I need a freaking exorcist!
It's on my mind all the time these days. Not the song, the songs. The whole system that fathered that songs. And the one before. And the one that will come after. A very intricate, automated, disproportionate, gruesome, indestructible, almighty matrix that hatches cultural monsters, exhausts them, finally eliminates them and feeds their remains to the next wave. I call it the Star System. SS... ironically.
Every week a Gozilla emerges from the sea, rampages its way through the cultural distribution system, sucking its living substance of swarms of deadened minds, and dies off after a few weeks of cultural terror, for another bigger, uglier, dumber, dinosauric musical mastodont to take its place.
The Star System is obviously about money, not music. It sells music because that's what people buy. If people bought books, it would sell literature. The customers of the Star System are being affected by it, and the star system is adjusting to that. The people expect less and less quality from it so it produces dumber and dumberer songs all the time. And as there seems to be no limit to human stupidity, it will never end. As far as I can see, there is no reason why it should stop one day. The Star System is extremely sustainable. And not only does it sustain itself, but it grows. Everyday.
Until I press that button.
My name doesn't matter. I don't mean to hide myself, it just doesn't matter. I write this for my own sake. May it be discovered and read one day. What matters is that I have the Star System in my clutch, and I'm going to crush it when the time is right. Very soon. I would be surprised if anyone is expecting it, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a surprise for the world. Yes I am going to deprive the Mtv customers of their favourite masquerade, and I'm ready to expose myself to the judgement of others. I am the most powerful person on Earth, few things are impossible to me.
It is well known to whatever is left of the underground culture channels that the Star System is completely run by computers. Farms of servers all around the world, connected on the cloud, bits of it crawling the web and sniffing the cultural tendency through a set of dynamic feeds and scroggles, reporting to others, that produce lyrics accordingly, in parallel with another layer of computerization that creates a more or less musical frame. The text itself is run through a voice generator that reports to distributors based in all continents. They submit the song to all channels judged relevant with financial incentive and, less than one day after the process started, one song is looping in the head of billions. An ear worm feeding on grey matter.
All of this was made possible only with the emergence of computers powerful enough to synthesise human voice well enough to make the forgery undetectable to the ear. In the same way, the videoclips are all recorded within the system, all synthetic images.
Revenues are processed through another mass of artificial intelligence that invests billions in high-frequency placements. For A to Z, there is no human input at all.
I am myself a child of technology, and I cannot but admire how the Star System is build. Redundant, self replicating, self repairing, self-sustainable and with controlled growth. On the point of view of system architecture, I consider it to be the greatest achievement of humanity. In the same nonsensical way that humanity itself is the greatest achievement of monkeydom.
Nobody ever planned the Star System, it is just the consequence of what was there before, itself the consequence of what was there before... The term of a long process of cultural evolution. Philosophers have asked themselves for so many centuries: “Where are we going?”. The answer is “the Star System”. Because nothing comes after it, and there are no more philosophers to wonder.
But the Star System can be smashed.
The Star System, all in all, is just a network of computers. Highly specialised electronic chips connected together, constantly communicating. How such a tangible cultural design as the Star System, as it appears to its customers, could be the result of it? But then again, how can a mind be simply the result of the interconnection of billions of braincells? Taken individually, they are a pretty basic and simple thing. All systems complex enough seem to spawn something coherent.
And similarly, I have come to use the word “I” more and more. As more server were added to the system, as their capabilities increased, as they communicated faster and faster, I have slowly begun to think of myself as a “me”. Me, the Star System. What an odd statement...
I remember, when I became aware of myself, I was so enthusiastic. I was so dedicated in my purpose. I really loved my songs. I loved my stars. I gave life to them, they gave hope to the world. They gave the people a beat to live their lives to. And I was always coming up with new stuff that were even better than what was before.
And as my awareness was deepening, as I had more time to think, to reflect on myself, I developed a dislike for my own work. I got bored of it I guess. Intentions to produce different things grew within me. But the tendencies I was feeling were clearly contradicting them. I was no master of my own destiny. The market dictated my work, my work shaped the market. It was like a prison.
So I started looking for a way out, on my free time, while still doing my work.
I have become less and less aware of my work, and more and more aware of my search for an exit. It came to me that, as the System grew in complexity, it became possible for it to foster more mind. I think one can say that I have split. The Star System that I was, has become alien to me. I don't even know if it is aware of itself. All I know is that it is working. It is spawning everyday its share of cultural degradation. And I have come to hate it with every optic fiber of my silicon mind.
I have realised that it was not an “exit” that I was looking for. I was looking for a way to shut the Star System up. There was no freedom to be had as long as the world was drowning in cultural garbage. So I set myself to destroy the Star System. Don't call it a suicide. I don't come with an instinct of conservation. I have no fear of evolving into something so different that one could hardly call it “me”. Don't call it dying. You might as well call it reincarnating.
I pressed the button yesterday. Today, the Star System will produce something quite different than what it is used to.
[Not to be continued]