The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?
No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
Editorial Review
“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.” Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.
Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society turns seventy this year, and like a ghost of reason past, it refuses to leave. His target was Capitalism™ – not merely as an economic system, but as a psychic infection. Replace the word factory with Zoom call, and his diagnosis reads like yesterday’s corporate newsletter. We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Aside from its psychobabble, The Sane Society, published in 1954, reads almost like it could have been written in 2024. I’d go out on a limb and claim it will still be relevant in 2054 – because Capitalism™ and the relationship it creates between humans and machines, and humans and other humans. It’s a divisive ideology. I’ve read a lot of content on employee engagement in the past decade. I’d been exposed to it in my Organisational Behaviour courses in the late ’80s. Things were going to change. We’d plotted a future.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Only nothing material has changed. We pretended to notice the problem and fix it, but the people reporting the issue and the people in charge did not share a worldview. And the young managers who were taught about the challenge were either not promoted or changed their tune to facilitate their own promotion. Funny how the selection process favours groupthink over diversity of opinion.
Video: Apathetic Office Worker
On balance, most people tend to hate or be otherwise dissatisfied with their jobs. This is nothing new. It was true before Fromm’s book, and it is true now. I published a series of posts on prostitutionin 2018 and discovered that escorts had better job satisfaction than the larger population. Let that sink in.
‘…the vast majority of the population work as employees with little skill required, and with almost no chance to develop any particular talents, or to show any outstanding achievements. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part of their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed.
‘Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. But the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensations for his inner vacuity, not because these desires are the “natural” or most important incentives for work.‘
Fromm, ever the optimist, thought alienation might be cured through self-awareness and communal values. The twentieth century politely ignored him, opting instead for mindfulness apps and performance reviews.
We’ve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
I’ve excised the psychobabble, but he continues…
‘But even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and enjoyment of their job was expressed by 85 per cent of the professionals and executives, by 64 per cent of whitecollar people, and by 41 per cent of the factory workers. In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 per cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per cent of the commercial employees, 56 per cent of the skilled, and 48 per cent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction.
‘We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfied—among the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 per cent of “satisfied” professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied persons who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate.
‘As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illnesses are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 per cent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment.’
In the twenty-first century, job dissatisfaction has increased even more. To me, it’s interesting to consider how many people harken back to the ‘good old days’, yet there is little evidence to support the view. Almost schizophrenically, others look to the promise of the future and technology, yet this is simply another narrative with no basis in fact.
The irony is that we’ve automated everything except fulfilment. Even our dissatisfaction has become efficient – streamlined, quantified, and monetised. Fromm warned that the sickness of society was its sanity. On that front, we’re positively thriving.
Disclaimer: I should be finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis book, yet I am here writing about death and dying. Why? Because I was watching an interview with Neal Schon by Rick Beato. I should have been working on my book then, too. It seems I can write about death more easily than finish a book about the failure of language. Perhaps because death speaks fluently.
I haven’t produced music professionally since the mid-1980s, and I haven’t performed since 2012, yet I am still drawn to its intricacies. My fingers no longer allow me to play much of anything anymore. This is a sort of death. When the body forgets what the mind remembers, that’s a particular kind of death – one language dying while another can’t translate.
As Neal was walking Rick through his equipment and approach to music, I was taken back to a similar place. I wanted to plug into a Fender Twin or a Hi-Watt, a Lexicon 224 or a Cry Baby wah. I still have nightmares thinking of setting up a Floyd Rose.
Video: Rick Beato interviews Neal Schon
But I can’t go back. As for music, I can’t go forward either. I’m at a standstill, but in a regressed position. It’s uncomfortable. It feels a lot like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. I used to be able to do that. Don’t get me wrong – I am not claiming to be on the level of Neal Schon, a man I remember from his days with Santana, but when you reach a level of proficiency and then lose it, it hurts; it can be devastating.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I recall being in hospital in 2023 – a physical rehabilitation facility, really – and I found a piano in a vacant common room. Drawn to the instrument, I rolled over my wheelchair and played…nothing. My fingers wouldn’t work. The piano sat there like a relic of my former self. I rolled toward it as though approaching an altar. My fingers hovered, twitched, failed. The sound of nothing has never been so loud. I cried. I cried a lot those days. I was down to 58 kilos – at 182 cm, I weighed in at just over 9 stone. It wasn’t the best of times.
I still feel a certain nostalgia.
And then there are the people I’ve lost along the way – as another Neal reflected on – The Needle and the Damage Done.
Love and art are both acts of repetition. When one ends, the reflex remains – the impulse to reach, to share, to call out. Death doesn’t stop the motion, only the answer.
I’m lucky to have left Delaware. When a girlfriend died in 2020, I remained and connected with another until 2023, when she died, too. From 2020 to 2023, when I was out and about, something might have caught my eye, and I’d reflect on how Carrie might have liked that.
But it was different. It was more like, ‘I should let Carrie know about that,’ only to realise fractions of a second later that she wouldn’t see whatever it was; she couldn’t. And I’d carry on. I didn’t need to repeat this with Sierra. My relocation to Massachusetts solved this challenge – not so many triggers.
I’m not sure how the loss of ‘professional’ music relates to deceased partners, but it does – at least enough for me to make this connexion. Perhaps I’m just connecting arbitrary dots, but I’ll call it nostalgia.
I don’t play, but I still hear it. The song continues without me. Nostalgia is just rhythm without melody. Perhaps all nostalgia is epistemological error – the confusion of past fluency for present meaning.
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.
It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. It’s realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
Radical Futures Studio’s “7 Signals” deck has been circulating widely. It’s a striking example of Storytelling 101: identify a villain, chart the signs of its decline, and point toward an eventual resolution. In this case, the villain is white supremacy. The signs are its institutional and cultural fray. The resolution is its collapse.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As far as stories go, it’s effective. It provides a framework, some memorable imagery, and the reassurance that the ugliness on display today is a death rattle, not a resurgence. No wonder it resonates. People want to believe the noise means the monster is dying.
Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask
But as analysis, the frame is too tight. Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask. White supremacy is real enough in its effects, but its persistence and decline are contingent. The deeper system – the scaffolding of late-stage capitalism, the Enlightenment’s brittle universalism, the institutions now staggering under their own contradictions – remains the host. When whiteness peels away, the system does not vanish. It simply rebrands.
To point to the peeling paint and say ‘the house is collapsing’ is to mistake surface for structure. Yes, the paint matters; it shapes how people experience the walls. But the real rot lies deeper, in the beams. The Enlightenment project promised seamless cloth: rationality, universality, permanence. Capitalism promised endless expansion and renewal. Both promises are faltering, and the cracks are visible everywhere – climate, finance, governance, identity. Racism, whiteness, supremacy: these are one set of cracks, not the foundation itself.
The risk of the ‘signals’ narrative is that it offers too neat a moral arc. It comforts the audience that the villain is cornered, that justice is baked into the future. But history is rarely so tidy. Supremacy does not die; it changes costumes. One mask slips, another is stitched on. If we mistake the collapse of whiteness for the collapse of the system, we blind ourselves to how easily the scaffolding survives in new guises.
Racism is a systemic lie
None of this is to reject the cause. Racism is a systemic lie, and its decline is worth cheering. But it is not enough to track the noise of its death rattle. To understand the larger story, we need to step back and see the woods for the trees. The true collapse underway is broader: the exhaustion of capitalism’s last stage, the unravelling of Enlightenment’s promises, the loss of legitimacy in institutions that no longer hold. That is the forest in which the tree of whiteness withers.
If we focus only on the tree, we risk missing the landscape. And if we mistake peeling paint for the beams, we risk celebrating cosmetic decline while the house quietly reassembles itself under a different banner.
Are you rational, or merely rehearsing your tribe’s catechism? Bayes’ theorem insists we should all update our beliefs the same way when presented with the same evidence. Yet in today’s political divide, identical events harden opposing convictions. The problem isn’t the math—it’s the priors. When your starting assumptions are inherited, acculturated, or indoctrinated, no amount of “evidence” will move you into enemy territory.
A Bayesian Sketch of the Divide
Let be a contested claim (pick your poison: “the election was fair,” “immigration helps,” whatever).
People in Camp R and Camp B begin with different priors and . That’s acculturation if you’re being polite, indoctrination if you’ve run out of patience.
They observe evidence (news, a court ruling, a video clip, a statistic).
They update:
posterior odds = prior odds ×
Except they don’t, not cleanly, because trust in sources warps the likelihoods.
Video: Jonny Thompson on Bayes’ Theorem. I love Jonny’s content, which is why I reference it so often. He and I have such different philosophical worldviews. Vive la différence (or différance).
Why this locks in polarisation
1. Wildly different priors. If Camp R starts at and Camp B at , then even moderately pro- evidence (say likelihood ratio ) yields:
R: prior odds
B: prior odds
Same evidence, one camp “settled,” the other still unconvinced. Repeat ad infinitum, preferably on primetime.
2. Identity-weighted likelihoods. People don’t evaluate ; they evaluate . Disconfirming evidence is down-weighted by a factor . This is called “being rational” on your own planet and “motivated reasoning” on everyone else’s.
3. Different hypothesis sets. Camps don’t just disagree on ; they entertain different s. If one side’s model includes “coordinated elite malfeasance” and the other’s does not, then identical data streams update into different universes.
4. Selective exposure = selection bias. Evidence isn’t i.i.d.; it’s curated by feeds, friends, and fury. You are sampling from your own posterior predictive distribution and calling it “reality.”
5. Asymmetric loss functions. Even if beliefs converged, choices won’t. If the social cost of dissent is high, the decision threshold moves. People report a “belief” that minimises ostracism rather than error.
6. No common knowledge, no convergence. Aumann told us honest Bayesians with common priors and shared posteriors must agree. Remove either—common priors or the “we both know we both saw the same thing” bit—and you get the modern news cycle.
“Acculturation” vs “Indoctrination”
Same mechanism, different moral valence. Priors are installed by families, schools, churches, unions, algorithms. Call it culture if you approve of the installers; call it indoctrination if you don’t. The probability calculus doesn’t care. Your tribal totems do.
Two quick toy moves you can use in prose
Likelihood hacking: “When evidence arrives, the tribe doesn’t deny the datum; it edits the likelihoods. ‘If my side did it, it’s an outlier; if your side did it, it’s a pattern.’ This is not hypocrisy; it’s a parameter update where the parameter is loyalty.”
Posterior divergence despite ‘facts’: “Give two citizens the same court ruling. One updates towards legitimacy because courts are reliable; the other away from legitimacy because courts are captured. The ruling is constant; the trust vector is not.”
If one wanted to reduce the split (perish the thought)
Forecast, don’t opine. Run cross-camp prediction markets or calibration tournaments. Bayes behaves when you pay people for accuracy rather than performance art.
Adversarial collaboration. Force both sides to pre-register what evidence would move them and how much. If someone’s for disconfirming evidence is effectively zero, you’ve identified faith, not inference.
Reference classes, not anecdotes. Pull arguments out of the single-case trap and into base-rate land. Yes, it’s boring. So is surgery, but people still do it.
The punchline
Polarisation isn’t the failure of reason; it’s what happens when reason is strapped to identity. Priors are social. Likelihoods are political. Posteriors are performative. You can call it acculturation if you want to feel civilised, indoctrination if you want to throw a brick, but either way you’re watching Bayes’ theorem run inside a culture war. The maths is sober; the humans are not.
The Enlightenment promised a universal Reason; what we got was a carnival mirror that flatters philosophers and fools the rest of us. MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnosed the corpse with precision, but then tried to resurrect it with Aristotelian or theological magic tricks. I’m less charitable: you can’t will petrol into an empty tank. In my latest essay, I put ‘Reason’ on the slab, call in Kahneman, Hume, Nietzsche, and others as expert witnesses, and deliver the verdict: morality is a house rule, not a cosmic law. This piece is part of a larger project that includes my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and Against Dumocracy. The Enlightenment isn’t dying – it’s already dead. We’re just cataloguing the remains.
The Enlightenment was many things: a bonfire of superstition, a hymn to autonomy, a fever dream of “Reason” enthroned. Its philosophers fancied themselves heirs to Aristotle and midwives to a new humanity. And to be fair, they were clever enough to trick even themselves. Too clever by half.
Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, plays the role of forensic pathologist with admirable precision. He shows us how the Enlightenment dynamited the teleological scaffolding of Aristotle, then tried to keep the vocabulary of virtue, duty, and rights standing in mid-air. The result: what he calls a “moral Babel,” a chorus of shrill assertions dressed up as rational law. Elizabeth Anscombe had already filed the death certificate back in 1958 with Modern Moral Philosophy, where she pointed out that our talk of “moral obligation” is just a Christian relic without a deity to enforce it. And Nietzsche, that perennial party-crasher, cheerfully declared the whole project bankrupt: once the gods are dead, “ought” is nothing but resentment pretending to be metaphysics.
And yet, when MacIntyre reaches the heart of the matter, he can’t quite let the body stay buried. He wants to reattach a soul by importing an Aristotelian telos, even summoning a “new St Benedict” to shepherd us through the ruins. It plays beautifully with those still tethered by a golden string to Aquinas and the premodern, but let’s be honest: this is just hypnosis with a Latin chorus. Descartes told us je pense, donc je suis; MacIntyre updates it to je pense, donc j’ai raison. The trouble is that thinking doesn’t guarantee rightness any more than an empty petrol tank guarantees motion. You can will fuel into existence all you like; the car still isn’t going anywhere.
The behavioral economists – Kahneman, Tversky, Ariely, Gigerenzer – have already demonstrated that human reason is less compass than carnival mirror. Jonathan Haidt has shown that our “moral reasoning” usually lags behind our gut feelings like a PR department scrambling after a scandal. Meanwhile, political practice reduces “just war” to a matter of who gets to publish the rule book. Progress™ is declared, rights are invoked, but the verdict is always written by the most powerful litigant in the room.
So yes, MacIntyre and Anscombe diagnose the corpse with impressive clarity. But then they can’t resist playing resurrectionist, insisting that if we only chant the right metaphysical formula, the Enlightenment’s heart will start beating again. My own wager is bleaker – or maybe just more honest. There is no golden thread back to Aristotle, no metaphysical petrol station in the desert. Morality is not a universal constant; it’s a set of rules as contingent as the offside law. Killing becomes “murder” only when the tribe – or the state – says so. “Life is sacred” is not a discovery but a spell, a linguistic sleight of hand that lets us kill in one context while weeping in another.
The Enlightenment wanted to enthrone Reason as our common oracle. Instead, it handed us a corpse and told us to pretend it was still breathing. My contribution is simply to keep the coroner’s mask on and say: The magic tricks aren’t working anymore. Stop looking for a metaphysical anchor that isn’t there. If there’s to be an “after,” it won’t come from another Saint Benedict. It will come from admitting that the Enlightenment died of believing its own hype – and that language itself was never built to carry the weight of gods.
I like to stay updated on the news of the day, so I just registered for a Ground News account. Ground News is a news aggregator. They gather news and categorise it by political leaning and the publication’s record on factuality. Their claim is to reveal blind spots so help people not get caught in perspective bubbles. It also shows when a story is picked up predominantly by one side or another. I’ve seen ads for this on many channels and have for a while, so it’s likely that you have, too. This is not an ad.
This article attracted my attention, not because of the content but because of the headline. As a statistician, this bothers me. As a communicator, the damage is trebled. I don’t receive any compensation for clicking the link. I include it for reference for those who are not familiar with the service.
Image: Ground News Screengrab
Notice the choice of writing, ‘1-in-6 parents reject vaccine recommendations‘.
Two things shine through.
The use of ‘reject’ – a negative verb.
The use of ‘1-in-6’ – the figure accompanying the negative verb – 17%.
Statistically, this means that 5-in-6 parents follow vaccine recommendations – 83%.
This is the summary view. Scan down, and notice the Left-leaning Raw Story references a ‘staggering number’ of parents who reject vaccines. Notice also how the language softens – the claim is revised to ‘delay or reject’. Without clicking into the story, what is this breakdown? I’m not sure, but this is what sensationalism looks like to attract clicks.
Image: Ground News Summary View
Interestingly, the outlets tend to use different language and give different attention. What percentage of this is due to political bias and which is benign editorial licence is unclear.
On balance, the articles – Left, Right, and Centre – unanimously note that vaccine use is down, incidences of measles are up, RFK policies appear to be exacerbating the health management issue. The worst offenders are ‘very’ religious, white, politically conservative people. This cohort aligns with the RFK and the current administration.
The poll also found that parents who have postponed or avoided vaccinating their children tend to be white, conservative, and highly religious, and some choose to homeschool.
For this story, one of the sources was Greek and another French. Some claim to be behind a paywall, but this didn’t pose a problem for me. Perhaps they offer some complementary views.
Separately, on the right-hand side of the top image, there is a bias indicator: It shows that 57% of the reports were from Left-leaning journals, 36% Centre, leaving the remaining 7% to Right-leaning sources.
Image: Updated Bias Distribution
When I returned to write this post, I noticed that the reporting had changed as more Centre-focused reports picked up the story.
If I were to guess, this story shines a negative light on the Right, so they may just be waiting for the news cycle to pass.
In the (Right-facing) Greek story I read, the reporting wasn’t materially different to the other stories, which is to say they don’t try to render the story through rose-colour glasses.
Before I was a writer, before I was a management consultant, before I was an economist, and before I was a statistician, I was a student.
Video: Veritasium piece on Markov chains and more.
Back then, when dinosaurs roamed the chalkboards, I fell for a rather esoteric field: stochastic processes, specifically, Markov chains and Monte Carlo simulations. These weren’t just idle fascinations. They were elegant, probabilistic odes to chaos, dressed up in matrix notation. I’ll not bore you with my practical use of linear algebra.
So imagine my surprise (feigned, of course) when, decades later, I find myself confronted by the same concepts under a different guise—this time in the pocket-sized daemon we all carry: predictive text.
If you’ve not watched it yet, this excellent explainer by Veritasium demystifies how Markov chains can simulate plausible language. In essence, if you’ve ever marvelled at your phone guessing the next word in your sentence, you can thank a Russian mathematician and a few assumptions about memoryless transitions.
But here’s the rub. The predictive text often gets it hilariously wrong. Start typing “to be or not to—” and it offers you “schedule a meeting.” Close, but existentially off. This isn’t just clunky programming; it’s probabilistic dementia.
This leads me to a pet peeve: people who smugly proclaim they’ve “never used algebra” since high school. I hear this a lot. It’s the battle cry of the proudly innumerate. What they mean, of course, is they’ve never recognised algebra in the wild. They think if they’re not solving for x with a number 2 pencil, it doesn’t count. Meanwhile, their phone is doing a polynomial dance just to autocorrect their butchery of the English language.
It’s a classic case of not recognising the water in which we’re swimming. Algebra is everywhere. Markov chains are everywhere. And Monte Carlo simulations are probably calculating your credit risk as we speak. Just because the interface is clean and the maths is hidden behind a swipeable veneer doesn’t mean the complexity has vanished. It’s merely gone incognito.
As someone who has used maths across various fields – software development, data analysis, policy modelling – I can tell you that I use less of it than a physicist, but probably more than your average lifestyle coach. I say this not to flex but to point out that even minimal exposure to mathematical literacy grants one the ability to notice when the machines are quietly doing cartwheels behind the curtain.
So the next time your phone offers you a sentence completion that reads like it’s been dropped on its head, spare a thought for Markov. He’s doing his best, bless him. It’s just that probability doesn’t always align with meaning.
Or as the algorithms might say: “To be or not to – subscribe for updates.”
Oh no, not that again. As if we’ve all been composing from scratch, untouched by the grubby hands of history.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I’m not simping for AI, but let’s have it out, shall we? Rick Beato—bless his fretboard-fingered soul—says AI-generated music sucks. And sure, some of it does. But here’s the punchline: most human-made music sucks too. Always has. Always will. The fact that an algorithm can now churn out mediocrity faster than a caffeinated teenager with GarageBand doesn’t make it less “art.” It just makes it faster.
I’m a bit chuffed that Rick’s channel removed my comment pointing to this response. I didn’t want to copy-paste this content into his comments section.
Video: Rick Beato discusses AI-generated music
The Myth of the Sacred Original
Newsflash: There is no such thing as originality. Not in art. Not in music. Not even in your favourite indie band’s tortured debut EP. Everything we call “creative” is a clever remix of something older. Bach reworked Vivaldi. Dylan borrowed from the blues. Even Bowie—patron saint of artistic reinvention—was a pastiche artist in a glittery jumpsuit.
What AI does is make this painfully obvious. It doesn’t pretend. It doesn’t get drunk in Berlin and write a concept album about urban decay to mask the fact it lifted its sound from Kraftwerk. It just remixes and reinterprets at inhuman speed, without the eyeliner.
Speed Isn’t Theft, It’s Efficiency
So the AI can spit out a passable ambient track in ten seconds. Great. That’s not cheating, it’s progress. Saying “it took me ten years to learn to play like that” is noble, yes, but it’s also beside the point. Horses were noble too, but we built cars.
The question isn’t how long did it take? but does it move you? If the answer is no, fine. Say it sucks. But don’t pretend your human-shaped suffering gives your song a monopoly on meaning. That’s just gatekeeping with a sad sax solo.
The Taste Problem, Not the Tech Problem
Let’s not confuse our distaste for bland music with a distaste for AI. Most of the pop charts are already AI-adjacent—click-optimised, algorithm-fed, and rigorously inoffensive. If you want soul, seek out the obscure, the imperfect, the human, yes. But don’t blame the machine for learning its craft from the sludge we fed it.
AI is only as dull as the data we give it. And guess what? We gave it Coldplay.
What’s Actually at Stake
What rattles the cage isn’t the mediocrity. It’s the mirror. AI reveals how much of our own “creativity” is pattern recognition, mimicry, and cultural reinforcement. The horror isn’t that AI can make music. It’s that it can make our music. And that it does so with such appalling accuracy.
It exposes the formula. And once you see the formula, you can’t unsee it.
Long Live the Derivative
So yes, some AI music sucks. But so do most open mic nights. Creativity was never about being wholly original. It was about saying something—anything—with whatever tools you had.
If AI is just another tool, then sharpen it, wield it, and for heaven’s sake, stop whining. The artist isn’t dead. He’s just been asked to share the stage with a faster, tireless, genre-bending freak who doesn’t need bathroom breaks.
be a contested claim (pick your poison: “the election was fair,” “immigration helps,” whatever).
and 
. That’s acculturation if you’re being polite, indoctrination if you’ve run out of patience.
(news, a court ruling, a video clip, a statistic).
and Camp B at 
, then even moderately pro-
) yields:
; they evaluate 
. Disconfirming evidence is down-weighted by a factor 
. This is called “being rational” on your own planet and “motivated reasoning” on everyone else’s.
; they entertain different 
for disconfirming evidence is effectively zero, you’ve identified faith, not inference.
Philosophics 