Inhumanity

This song made me cry.

An opinion piece? Not a personal story? I realize I’m way off brand, and that maybe you, my beloved reader, didn’t sign on for this.

But I have to, this week at least, ask you:

What kind of world do we want to live in?

Because, OK… I’ll say it.

I’ve had it.

Uncle.

I warn you: this one’s not for everybody.

Please tell me I’m not losing my mind. Tell me you’ve felt it too!

Preface:

I started writing last year with the simple intention of collecting the stories. A life in music. Yada yada. The rooms, the rigs, the late nights, the weird little NY miracles you only get when a take finally locks and the whole world goes quiet for three seconds. I figured I’d toss them into the universe, maybe make a little archive, because I was constantly being told the classic trope:

“You should write a book!”

Then people actually read my stuff… and they wrote back. And something clicked inside me like a relay. I got way into it. A zone. Turns out I’m also good at this branch of art — and I love it’s similarity to music in the creative process. It’s a different instrument, but it plays, and it’s beautiful. Same same. It either swings or it don’t.

But there’s this problem: the world around us is shaking. Some dark shit. Can you feel it too? Something is tearing the fabric. Is it the internet? Big Tech? Wealth inequality? The body politic? Is it Ai?

WTF?

I’ve got feelings that won’t stay politely in the background anymore. Trust me, I never intended to write about this, nor am I interested in having a voice, or an opinion, or any of that capital-V “Viewpoint” shit.

I leave that stuff to people much smarter than me. The people who can cite the right graphs and name the right amendments. The kids who paid attention in school.

I’m a creative. I’m a music guy. I’m a vibe-and-melody person. I’m a Soul Man.

But holy shit. The world is on fire, ain’t it?

I’ll be back with more stories next week. I promise. For now, I need to put this down while it’s still hot.

Welcome to my purge.

I admit, part of what’s bringing this on is personal. At the risk of appearing less than the cool insider, maybe it’s because my participation in music slowed. Has my luck run out? I’m not catching any fish lately. Not enough work. Was it my choice to raise a family?

Maybe its the fact that music is unrecognizable to me lately. Most of it, anyway.

I realized recently I didn’t know any of the Grammy songs this year. Or records. Not even the names. At least not in the way I used to. It wasn’t even a snobby thing. It was stranger than that. I felt like I was walking into a grocery store and discovering they’ve replaced the produce section with a wall of vending machines that sell “banana-flavored multi-units.”

Where did the Sly section go?

Where did the Beach Boys go?

Where did Jimi and Miles and The Beatles go?

I hope I’m not doing the smelly, decrepit, old-man-yells-at-clouds thing. I’m simply saying something about the whole ecosystem feels different. Like, did I miss a couple of decades or something? I feel like the soul got compressed out of the sound. Like someone optimized the edges off and called it progress.

And the truth probably is: I can’t afford to sit around editing my latest draft, just write and remove myself from music much longer. Not emotionally. Not spiritually. Not if I want to remain alive.

As Kenny Kirkland used to say—usually with a grin that had humor covering the panic—“Gimme a gig!”

Chapter One:

So there’s the setup, and now the final warning: today I am gonna rant, not my usual flow. I just gotta get it out.

Can we afford to remove ourselves?

That question keeps landing in my lap like a vinyl record needle-drop. Not the getting-ready-to-lower-the-lights-and-kick-back-to-enjoy-listening-to-an-entire-album kind, either. Not the warm crackle that says, “Relax, you’re home.”

More like the kind that suddenly digs right into the song and stays there, skipping and repeating the same half-second of damage until you can’t un-hear it.

Can we afford to remove ourselves?

Because it’s happening. Quietly. Gradually. With great customer service.

Since “personal” computers arrived in the mainstream, I’ve been all in. A full-on, hooked-on-the-Apple-brand fanboy. A devoted, habitual early adopter. Pre-digital educated in audio. Pre-compute in music production. I learned sound when it was still made by hands and rooms, magnets and oxide, and deep patience. It’s always been kind of a blessing to have lived right on the cusp of that sea change from analog to digital, Atari to LogicPro, tape to Pro Tools—a lifetime of watching music finally get translated into malleable bits without losing its soul.

At least, that was the promise.

But then, just like Kurtz’s dream in Apocalypse Now (Brando improvising):

“I watched a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor… and survive. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare.”

With perfect attentiveness… with zero ambiguity or room for error, we proceeded on, thinking we were free and had won.

The part nobody told us is that once you translate enough things into numbers, you start treating people like numbers too. And then you start calling it “improvement.”

We’ve got this new religion now. The God word is “optimal.”

Optimal commute.

Optimal sleep.

Optimal workflow.

Optimal parenting.

Optimal body.

Optimal market.

Optimal purchases.

Optimal self.

It’s funny, in a bleak sort of way, because “optimal” sounds clean and scientific and morally neutral. Like it came down from a mountain carrying two tablets: Thou shalt not waste time, and Thou shalt never be awkward.

But optimal is not a value system. It’s a technique.

And the technique starts with surveillance.

And that’s the part that makes my stomach do a little unpleasant remix.

Here are the facts that I think we fall into denial about. It feels like it all happened so fast.

It didn’t.

Chapter Two:

Big Tech had new ideas, and at first (as is always the strategy) they got introduced incrementally, like a slow-moving coup.

Optimization starts with watching. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure, so we measure. We measure everything. We measure where you go, how long you linger, what you click, what you hesitate on, what you buy, what you almost buy, what you might buy if you were slightly sadder, slightly lonelier, slightly more bored. We measure your kid, too. We measure your kid first, actually, because the sooner you build the pattern, the longer you can monetize it.

And then we take that data and organize it algorithmically. We sort you. We rank you. We predict you.

And then we call it personalization, as if the machine has written you a love letter instead of it being a sales trap.

Here’s where I feel it most: the creeping sense that everything is trying to get between me and my own mind, trying to get me to buy things I don’t want.

Targeted ads for my kids.

Just sit with that for a second, without the euphemisms. Not “content.” Not “recommendations.” Not “brand engagement.” Targeted ads. For children. A sentence that should make adults flip out, but instead we shrug because it’s packaged in bright colors and free shipping and the soothing voice of convenience.

We’ve created addictive technologies for children and called it innovation.

We’ve built an entire economy on manipulation and called it user experience.

Empowerment was the pitch. Dependency is the business model.

Speaking of user experience, have you noticed an increased barrage of texts from nobody you know and a mountain of email too big to sift through—yet you do?

And the weirdest part is how syrupy and polite it all is. No one is kicking down your door. No one is making threats. It’s just… the gentle pressure of a thousand tiny nudges, perfectly tuned, like compression on a vocal track. You don’t notice it until you realize the dynamics are gone. Everything is the same volume now. Everything is a pitch.

What kind of world do we want to live in?

Maximum value? Maximum efficiency?

Those phrases show up like slogans on a billboard inside my skull. They sound like prosperity, but they feel like something much colder. Because value, in the way the system means it, isn’t about human flourishing. It’s not about art or friendship or the kind of silence you can finally breathe in after a long day.

Value means extraction.

Efficiency means fewer humans.

And we’re supposed to clap because the line moves faster at self-checkout!

Tap, beep, boop (surveil), go. Weeee!

I get it. I love a smooth process. I love when the technology works. I love when the interface disappears and you can just do the thing. I am not here to romanticize waiting behind a guy looking for a pen to write a check in 2026 like it’s a reenactment of covered wagons on the Oregon fucking Trail.

But I keep wondering: when did “frictionless” become the same thing as “healthy”? When did we start trading freedom for convenience? When did the ubiquitous blue light from the little screens convince us we were better informed and more likely to succeed?

What is healthy?

Healthy is not only speed.

Healthy is not only convenience.

Healthy includes being seen by another person sometimes, goddammit.

Healthy includes a shared moment of human kindness. Healthy includes a cashier who recognizes you, or at minimum recognizes your existence—instead of a camera that recognizes your face and calculates the maximum you’ll tolerate paying for eggs this week.

And yes, that’s a thing. We all feel it now, but sublimate because it is convenient.

Is instant gratification rewiring us faster than we can protect ourselves?

Advertisers following me around, hitting me up some more, with crazy email inbox slop.

And more texts from nobody I know.

Dynamic pricing.

Endless.

The sense that the system is hiding the deal from me, not because it can’t help it, but because it benefits from my friggin’ confusion.

Making me pay the max and hiding it.

Total mistrust.

That’s the phrase that keeps coming up for me: total mistrust. Not just distrust of a company or an app, but a deeper rot. The feeling that anything presented to me might be arranged. Curated. Tilted. That the world I’m seeing is not the world, but a version of the world optimized for someone else’s profit.

Unregulated surveillance, harms running amok.

Bossware ranking people like cattle at auction. Hidden productivity dashboards behind the digital veil that turn human beings into graphs. A physical worker’s day flattened into “output,” as if the heart and the spine and the life at home aren’t part of the equation.

And then the rankings.

Hang on, folks. I’m in full rant mode now.

Did you know how Google ranking works?

How Amazon works?

On Amazon, what you see isn’t necessarily what’s best. It’s what fits the machine’s incentives. The thing that shows up first is most often the thing that can afford the placement, or the thing that gives the platform the best cut, or the thing that plays the game best. The product willing to make the least profit and give the most to Amazon Inc. gets put forward—and the rest of us stand there like idiots going, Huh? Must be the top choice. It’s number one.

The rankings have an implied tone of authority. They feel like truth. They feel like the natural order of things.

But they’re an arrangement. A choreography.

You’ve been played. Again.

Good luck trying to find the actual best seller, as if that means anything anymore anyway. Crowdsourcing is a thing of the past and has become near impossible.

Dispiriting doesn’t even cover it. It’s like realizing the jukebox has been rigged. You keep putting in quarters for your favorite song and somehow it always plays something you didn’t pick—something just close enough to make you doubt your own taste—and then stuffs an ad in somewhere.

But wait! There’s more! When you zoom out, it just gets darker.

No belief in government.

I don’t have any business talking politics. I really don’t. Sure, I read a lot, but I’m a mook. I’m not a policy expert. I don’t know enough about anything, really, so I don’t qualify to be the guy yelling about “the institutions” over dinner.

But can you feel it?

The slide into some oblivion.

It’s not one dramatic event. It’s not a single orange villain twirling a proverbial mustache while democracy collapses like a cheap, broken lawn chair. It’s more like… a gradual loosening. A slow leak. A sense that the structures meant to protect us are either being bought, outpaced, or just exhausted.

And the platforms more powerful than governments?

That sentence used to sound like paranoia. Now it sounds like the weather report. “Today: scattered clouds, high of 72, and the firms of Zuckerberg and Altman determining what reality looks like for billions of people.”

That picture of all the billionaires visiting the White House.

You know the one. The tech leaders all gathered to kiss some ass, all polished and expensive, arranged in a way that looked less like a meeting and more like a court. It made my skin crawl. The image captured the whole vibe in a single frame: the kneeling, the proximity to power, the unspoken deal.

What the fuck was that?

I keep thinking about music, because of course I do. Music is where I learned what it means to be human with other humans. Not in theory. In practice. In a room, with ears, making something together that none of us could make alone. Timing. Imperfection. The little mistakes that turn into style. The way a song breathes.

And lately, everything feels like it’s being quantized. Everything getting snapped to the grid.

Humanity, flattened into data.

Maybe that’s what I mean by inhumanity. Not cruelty, exactly—though there’s plenty of that too—but something subtler and more pervasive: a world designed to make you less of a person because people are messy and expensive and unpredictable.

A world that would rather have you comatose as a “user.”

A world that would rather have your children as “future lifetime value.”

So I come back to the first question, the one that keeps skipping.

Can we afford to remove ourselves?

Can we afford to hand over the messy, sacred parts—like attention, childhood, trust, and community—to systems built for maximum extraction and maximum efficiency?

I don’t know the answer. I’m not writing this from a mountaintop. I’m writing it from the same compromised place everyone lives now, with my phone in my pocket and my convenience habits and my late-night scrolling and my occasional love of a gadget that actually makes life easier.

But I do know this:

I want a world where humans still matter in the transaction, and we have got to come together.

I want a world where “healthy” includes dignity.

I want a world where my kids don’t grow up thinking being tracked is normal and being targeted is love.

I want a world where we can make technology that serves people without hollowing them out.

And I want, selfishly, to trust again. To feel like I’m not being played at every turn.

Maybe the pivot is toward the original lesson music taught me:

What we build should always have a soul, first and foremost.

What we build should leave room for breath.

What we build should not require us to remove our true selves in order to function.

Because if the price of “optimal” is becoming less human, then optimal can fuck off.

And I’ll take the crackle.

Remember “Love”

Remember “We”