One of the scant benefits bestowed by editing a countercultural magazine born in a time of great financial turmoil is that you eventually develop a state of permanent readiness for the next disaster. In the very early days of the Quietus, when my good friend Luke Turner and I were first unceremoniously shown out of the start up office door onto the street in 2008 \u2013 thanks Global Financial Crisis! \u2013 our magazine was just a matter of weeks old. We had barely established ourselves in a proper headquarters when we realised our existence was to be one of indefinite threat thanks to constant external crisis: from the web 2.0 pivot to video to the artificially weighted stranglehold of search engines to the algorithmic enshitification of social media platforms to the collapse of digital advertising to the creative knotweed choke of the streaming monoliths to the privations dished out by COVID. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In recent years the most imposing ghoul rattling its gore-streaked chains at us has been Artificial Intelligence. As a result we have been considering the implications of SUNO-style music generation software<\/a> for our cultural ecosystem. But already it seems to me that this tech has done little other than create a gigantic contemptible Ouroboros of cow dung, responsible solely for derivative, easy to spot, idiot-dazzling slop, that has little effect on the wider culture than breeding even further creative bankruptcy and depression in people who use it<\/a>. After all it takes an unusually enthusiastic slurper of tech bro snake oil to hit a button which crimps out some synthetic anhedonic \u201cjazz\u201d porridge \u2013 that the show runners on Frasier<\/em> would have turned down for being too beige \u2013 only to announce that he\u2019s created something indistinguishable from John Coltrane\u2019s A Love Supreme<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n