the Ain't Nothin' Free 'bout Free Jazz edition

NF, One L
​Issue SEVENTEEN

1. So here's definitive proof that AI will soon be AGI, and at that point will take over the lives of every person on earth, directly through the wired cities of the world (ever see a map of how little of Africa is connected?) and indirectly to everyone else economically and culturally dependent upon those cities.

2. AI is not going to build machines to kill us or pull off dramatic and cinema-worthy stunts. We will not go back in time to stop it, primarily since time is simultaneous and there is no linear narrative to return to, but also because it won't be necessary. AGI is going to take control by allowing us to believe we are still in control, and since control is illusion to begin with, we'll happily swallow the binary worm.

3. Yesterday, on my IG vinyl account Today In Fat Wax, I posted a very rare (and awesome) Gary Wilson record. So rare that they only pressed 1000 of them forty-eight years ago and you generally can't buy one for under the price of a used Tesla, if you can find it at all, and Wilson himself was a performative iconoclast nerd-genius whose music has a VERY niche audience. And then today on Facebook, I was twice solicited like the cheap street prostitute that FB advertising is, by a modern company that makes the exact same sunglasses Wilson is wearing on the cover of the record in 1977. If AI can target and commodify small details inside a much larger and unconnected narrative (the music) and less than twelve hours later be hawking at me dreamlike elements of my subconscious-for-purchase, what manipulative horrors will AGI show me?

4. Hey, did you know that back in 1890's Versailles, courtesans-for-cash (prostitutes) were called "grande horizontales"? Leave it to the French to be simultaneously callous and metaphorically astute.

5. So yeah, we're all being informationally fleeced all the time by FB, IG, and Google for marketing information, as it turns out that The Matrix is really just a giant product fee for targeting useless if not landfill-ready consumer goods to everyman Keanu Reeves. Which means that Laurence Fishburne is the metaphorical shrug of our not giving as shit that we're being intensely, insistently, interrogatorily product-groomed 24-7, as long as social media remains (like music) free.

5. "Free" is an interesting and wholly relative word bizarrely important to us as 'Mericans, while simultaneously having no fixed meaning and therefore just the sort of slick political marketing ruse a sunglasses company might crank their profit margin with. If Spotify has more or less made music (not ad) free while destroying the structure of the industry itself, what does it actually cost? If Jeff Bezos destroyed publishing by undercutting publishers for whom literature was just as important as profit margin, does that mean the huge stacks of remaindered hardbounds on the big tables at Costco are of higher quality?

6. Okay, so the Internet knows every single thing about us: our concerns, our tendencies, our vulnerabilities, our weak spots, what we want, how we spend, the conduits we use to send or store digital currency, the names of our friends, our lack of friends, our fears, and especially what we masturbate to. (I'm just going to go out on a limb here, making myself entirely vulnerable as a matter of full disclosure, by admitting that shirtless Pete Hegseth candids are my "quiet time" jam.)

7. Doesn't it seem clear that to our coming AGI Overlords, guns might as well be Model T Fords for all the use they will provide, when Mass Control is simply a matter of image manipulation and targeted irritation? The rise of MAGA is nothing but a dissertation on using the leverage of conceptual anger in words and images that are inarguable for being, if not dimwittedly vague, deliberately incomprehensible.

8. Like, for instance, pet eating and chem trails and Deep State Machinations, and the hilarious notion that we have a say in what our taxes are spent on, or tariffs not being taxes, or campus protests or wokeness viruses. Politicians have learned that tangible issues that can actually be deconstructed and debated, like, say, the 1970s obsession with unilateral disarmament, are dangerous precisely because intelligent and actionable opinions which lead to solutions might be formed by concretely identifying them. Much easier (and more evil) to dangle the bauble of, say, state-funded trans prison surgery, which might affect a tiny fraction of 1% of the population, if it's even happening at all, and present it as the 2025 Battle of Midway. It's the ideal wedge as it's not possible to hold an intelligent stance upon, regardless of political or personal ideology, since no one really knows that the fuck they're even talking about.

9. Gary Wilson's Sunglasses are our future: a meaningless wink and flash of alley-thigh that distracts enough to be confused about, but has no surface to grip on to, derived from insanely accurate meta-data bored like marrow from our bones that we willingly hand over in exchange for what old college crushes are up to, and how much we still hate our Right Wing cousins.
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10. Listen to this record, an odd and beautiful little album of arty trinkets from an Art Brut compositional magician with a side of Experimental Onanism. Which probably, like the end of "Mars Attacks", will be the only thing, when cranked aloud on sound systems around the world, able to melt AGI's brains, and once again set us free.

​Or at least free-ish.

​Next week: What We Talk About When We Talk About Edward Furlong