The Great Apathy
The Velvet Sundown has over a million monthly listeners on Spotify. The band doesn't exist. No musicians, no instruments, no studio sessions—just algorithms generating songs sophisticated enough to fool streaming platforms and accumulate real fans. When I learned this, I felt nothing. Not surprise, not outrage, not even curiosity about how they pulled it off. Just the flat recognition that of course this was happening.
This absence of reaction reveals something more troubling than fake bands: our collective adaptation to artificial everything. We've developed emotional calluses for an environment where authenticity has become functionally irrelevant.
I know this intimately because I use GenAI in my own creative work—generating elements for collages that I later manipulate by hand. Out of every hundred outputs, I'm satisfied with perhaps three. The other ninety-seven are technically competent but emotionally vacant. I've learned to mine for accidents, to find the moments where the algorithm breaks down and becomes interesting. Perhaps it's the failures, not the successes, where humanity lives.
This mirrors what's happening across digital platforms. Meta plans to fully automate ad creation through AI. Social media feeds operate on the same principle as my rejected AI outputs—technically competent, completely forgettable. Content engineered to avoid offense, to trigger no strong response in either direction.
The result is beige content: sufficient stimulation to keep scrolling, but so emotionally neutral it satisfies nothing. Perfect sunsets that might be generated, inspirational quotes drained of inspiration, lifestyle photography optimized for engagement but stripped of emotion.
When engagement becomes genuinely meaningless—when users scroll without absorbing, when ads generate clicks but no purchasing intent—the economic model breaks down.
The psychological response is protective numbness. When constant verification becomes exhausting, we stop caring. The cognitive load of treating every post as potentially artificial creates aesthetic shutdown—a defense against an environment that can no longer deliver genuine human expression.
Users scroll without absorbing, double-tap images that barely register. The muscle memory of engagement persists while emotional connection severs. We've created the most sophisticated content distribution system in human history, then filled it with sophisticated mediocrity.
But this trajectory contains its own correction mechanism. When engagement becomes genuinely meaningless—when users scroll without absorbing, when ads generate clicks but no purchasing intent—the economic model breaks down. Businesses paying for beige content will notice conversion rates flatlining. Platforms dependent on advertising revenue will discover that apathetic users are worthless users.
The apathy isn't malfunction—it's our humanity asserting itself by refusing to engage with what isn't real. And eventually, that refusal will force a return to content that actually means something.
The Velvet Sundown still has over a million monthly listeners. But here's what's changed: I don't feel fine about feeling nothing. The Beatles (32.6 million monthly listeners) sang "I Feel Fine" with pure joy—the feedback squeal that opens the song was an accident that became iconic. That's what I'm searching for in my own work: the accidents, the breaks in the algorithm where something real bleeds through. I want to feel something again, and I suspect I'm not alone in that hunger.
