Music: Grimes's Terrifying, Dystopian Vision
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full version here.
Last November, Claire Boucher, the singer-producer who performs as Grimes, appeared on Mindscape, the podcast of theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. At a technology conference in Texas, Carroll had encountered an AI system that helps songwriters compose their melodies. When asked what she thought of this technology, Grimes said it was the future, not just of music but of artistic creation altogether. Within the next few decades, she predicted, computer intelligence will surpass the human brain, at which point all creative endeavours will be outsourced to machines—an achievement sometimes known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “Once there’s actual AGI, it’s going to be so much better at making art than us,” she said. People will still crave human connections, she later added, but these too might be convincingly replicated: “Everyone wants to be in a simulation. They don’t actually want the real world, even if they think they do.” What we’re yearning for, she continued, is “the shimmery perfected Photoshop world.”
On Twitter, the musicians piled on, with many calling her a techno-fascist, a proponent of a new world order, spurred by Silicon Valley innovation, in which humans merge with machines to become smarter, faster, and ultimately, less human. Nicole Hummel, who performs as Zola Jesus, called Grimes “the voice of silicon fascist privilege,” then wrote an essay on Patreon about the need to defend democracy against the Palo Alto elite. Devon Welsh, former frontman of electropop group Majical Cloudz—and a former boyfriend of Grimes—tweeted “lol sorry but fuck this” in response to the Mindscape appearance. He added, “Silicon-fascism is real, and has a vested interest in framing technological domination as the ‘natural progression’ of things. It isn’t, and I think most of us are not interested in being owned by unelected Silicon Valley kings.”
To understand the charges against Grimes, it helps to know a thing or two about accelerationism, a once-obscure philosophy that originated at the University of Warwick in the ’90s and then migrated to the Bay Area, where it found adherents among programmers, futurists, and venture capitalists. For accelerationists, liberal democracy—with its messy electoral politics and bloated state bureaucracies—cannot bring about the radical changes that humans crave. What we need instead, they argue, is technological upheaval. Left-wing accelerationists expect robotics and artificial intelligence to solve the climate crisis and liberate us from mind-numbing work. Far-right accelerationists see technology as an efficient means of social control; for this reason, some idealize the Chinese surveillance state.
Adjacent to accelerationism is the notion of transhumanism—the idea that we will soon overcome the limitations not only of our sclerotic social order but of our corporeal selves. Adherents envision a future in which virtual reality offers an escape from life, sex robots deliver new erotic highs, and a range of technologies, from computerized brain implants to performance-enhancing drugs, enable us to transcend our bodies and minds.
Not all forms of accelerationism and transhumanism are synonymous with fascism, but these philosophies are certainly influential among people with illiberal views. Central to accelerationist thought is a belief that the individual—the social unit around which liberal democracy is based—will soon become obsolete as technology subsumes (or, if you prefer, unites) us into a larger digital superstructure. Some accelerationists imagine a centralized intelligence that we will all plug in to. Others envision autonomous kingdoms run by CEO-monarchs who deliver social services and maintain order with extreme efficiency.
Is Grimes a proponent? Her critics argue that she’s at least guilty by association. In seemingly every online debate about her politics, somebody inevitably mentions her romantic partner, Tesla founder Elon Musk. Musk has at times spoken about the dangers of AI, yet his ventures have a transhumanist ring: he has co-founded, for example, a company dedicated to building brain-to-machine interfaces. Grimes’s connection to Musk was the clear subtext to Hummel’s and Welsh’s criticism. The implication was that she’d abandoned art and humanism to side instead with a tech-industry plutocrat whose values she was promoting. Other people were less coy about making this point. “Grimes has submitted to the corporate AI overlords,” one user exclaimed on Reddit, summing up an opinion that has been repeated across the internet. The Mindscape controversy rippled outward from social media, becoming part of the journalistic conversation on Grimes and her politics.
It’s a debate worth revisiting in light of her fifth record, Miss Anthropocene, released last Friday. Had critics faulted her merely for failing to think before she spoke, they would’ve had a point. (Grimes acknowledged as much recently in Interview magazine: “I just run my mouth like a fucking asshole, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”) But the larger accusation—that she’s a propagandist for a kind of techno-dystopian future—is a misreading of her work.
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