Oh, yeah.
I remember the day I came home from school, and I went to my friend’s house who lives across the street and seeing the first YouTube ad I saw and being, like, “What the fuck?” Like, being so angry as a teenager that there was a commercial on YouTube.
When we first talked about you doing these covers, I remember you saying that you grew up looking at the technology industry and thinking, “This is amazing, and these people are doing amazing things and are going to save the world and change things for the better,” and that you have, obviously, over the years become very much disillusioned with that notion and disappointed and angry. I think that so many people share that view. Can you talk a little bit more about what your interest was in technology when you were younger and how it’s changed?
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy and was obsessed with The Matrix and Aliens and just anything futuristic. I loved Ghost in the Shell. I loved anything that felt like a synthesis of technology and the organic. I think a lot of that comes from just being a bored hillbilly kid.
In the show that I’m doing, I do an impression of a Boston Dynamics robot dog. And I tell the audience, “OK, I’m gonna do an impression, and you guys tell me what you think it is, and you can just yell it out.” Then I pull my shirt up over my head, and I get on all fours and jerk around the stage. I always bump into the mic stand, knock it over. Usually someone will say, like, “Darpa dog” or, like, “Boston Dynamics robot dog,” which is so funny.
Those are very specific references.
It makes me feel happy that those people are coming to my shows. But I’ll go on this long tear about how when I was a kid I was really excited about this future where there would be artificial intelligence, and there would be self-driving cars, and there would be robot animals walking amongst us.
But then there’s the disillusionment that comes with realizing that capitalism will sour everything. Capitalism reveals grifters. Capitalism reveals the rot and shows you how quickly people will fold against their proclaimed morals to make money or to make a name for themselves.
These companies, when they’re developing these robotics that have the potential to really hurt people, they promise these aren’t gonna be used in combat. We see them using these robot dogs in Gaza. We see them experimenting with this tech in combat situations. Combat, I feel, is a generous way to put it, considering it is a full-on genocide.
I don’t have a way to reconcile that at this point, because it makes you lose faith in this community that I have always seen as intrinsically progressive, because it’s science, it’s progressive by nature.
I think the idea behind capitalism is that it creates positive competition so we get innovation. But then once they see the best way we can have it, someone buys that way and then takes it away from everybody so that they can offer us shittier versions of the thing that used to be good. I feel like we used to have good social media. We used to have social media without ads, without algorithms. We saw things chronologically. Things that in moderation are good for your brain. You can learn.
