Chapter 9: The Hashtags are Due on Maple Street

This chapter begins with critiquing the state of the internet in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s in relation to the protest movements of the time, which lay in sharp contrast to internet culture today. A wide variety of social issues are covered that continue to gets worse over the course of this century. Starting with the rise of demagogues and their tactics-especially in fostering a culture of tribalism to utilize the “divide and conquer” strategy. This tribalism continues with atomization of identity, which is argued to be another tactic to distract the people from thinking critically of, and potentially protesting against the underlying systems within their society. More importantly, the chapter covers the worst consequences of contemporary internet culture in the rise of the loneliness epidemic and online youth radicalization. It is here that the chapter argues that this has negatively correlated with the demise of heavy or transgressive music in mainstream popularity-leading to young people regressing into online extremism. The chapter ultimate comes in defense of the transgressive music that was scapegoated for Columbine in that this is the very music that provides an emotional catharsis for our youth and defends music as an art form as a positive force for humanity.

Chapter 10: Apollo’s Swan Song or New Album Teaser

The book closes with an examination of not only the future of art, but also of society as a whole. The chapter discusses the recent use of AI in music and writing and directly confronts the future existential threat of AI replacing the temporal arts altogether-rendering them extinct rather than simply being usurped. From this, a thorough discussion of technological unemployment in relation to David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” is elaborated on from the perspective of pursuing arts as a form of “work”. The chapter goes further into AI’s dystopian potential to not only obtain God-like powers, but to create a reverse dystopian scenario in regards to technological unemployment-leading to a warning about AI’s potential for the dissolution of not just creativity, but of critical thinking and our dignity as a human being. The conclusion of the chapter discusses the issue of the future of our economic system overall, ultimate advocating for the “non-scarcity” models established by the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project from the perspective of artists being able to continue to sustainably pursue their art in the future.