What are your thoughts on this BLOG post
What a Public Enemy Parody Taught Me About Writing for the Absurd
The other day I was thinking, as I can do quite a bit of.
I am not quite sure how these things came together, but well they did.
The items I refer to are the:
-Song “Fight tbe Power” by Public Enemy. A group I used to listen to, when they were doing their thing. tbe eighties
-Trump and those of the Very Wealthy. In my opinion those for who tbe system does most work.
To get to a Rhyme of “To Have tbe Power” or Manage the Power.
For me surely once you have you have enough….
BUT for
Many this is NOT enough and it becomes ALL ABOUT tbe Power.
And because I also love working with AI at present I requested lyrics Public Enemy BUT as though it were for the 1% those who control the Flow of Money and Power, Life and Death with tbe control of war.
Public Enemy says
Fight tbe Power
Fight tbe Powers that Be.
It could be argued that TRUMP and others are saying
We gotta Have the Power
Yea Have the Power
We gotta have tbe Powers that BE.
And it could be argued that he is the first person to utilise the power. Especially openly and in concert with personal and.Business dealings.
And well AI created what I asked for!
Take a listen!
The ultimate of the song was meant more like this image.
The lyrics weren’t about race. They were about class — about the gap between people who hold trillions and everyone else, about a system that manages dissent by giving it somewhere to go that changes nothing.
Eg the Echo Chamber of Social Media debates.
However in order to get what I asked for I had to prompt AI in tbe familiar. I mean Ideally I was thinking of creating a VLOG with Trump and other who have or are likely to seek to disrupt Democritus but In order to get tbe Beat and Vibe I was after I prompted it in Black American — the cadence, the aggression, the specific register of a genre built by and for a very particular struggle. And my lyrics had no relationship to that struggle at all.
It is quite absurb to put tbese together.
I want to sit with that before I get to anything else, because it’s the most honest thing in this whole post.
The tool did the thing it was describing
Public Enemy’s anger was never generic. Chuck D wasn’t writing “anger at power” in the abstract — he was naming the machinery of anti-Black state violence, cultural erasure, a specific history with specific stakes. What the AI did, when I asked it to generate “aggressive political hip-hop,” was reach for the sound of that history — the sonic signifiers, the vocal delivery, the genre markers — with no access to and no accountability to the substance underneath it. It measured the shadow and mistook it for the thing.
That’s not a minor technical hiccup. It’s a small, concrete, slightly embarrassing demonstration of exactly the failure mode I keep writing about elsewhere: a system that gets the pattern right and the reality catastrophically wrong, and does so with total confidence, because pattern-matching doesn’t know the difference between itself and understanding.
I could have quietly fixed the prompt and never mentioned it. I’m mentioning it because it’s more useful broken than smoothed over.
What I actually meant
I think Trump functions as the pointy end of something structural rather than something purely personal — the place where the ordinary, low-grade, decades-long absurdity of concentrated wealth finally gets a face. Most of the time the “gap between the many and the few” is diffuse enough to argue about in the abstract. Every so often it condenses into one very legible, very loud person, and the argument about capitalism briefly becomes an argument about a man instead. I don’t think that substitution is doing anyone any favors — the man is a symptom, and treating the symptom as the disease is exactly how nothing structural gets addressed — but I understand why it happens, and I think the “headcount” idea in the song is really about the underlying thing, not the person: a hundred million or a hundred billion, from high enough up, funny how it’s still the same view down.
Where the absurd comes in
This is the part I actually want a fourteen-year-old to walk away with, more than the politics.
In speaking of Absurdity I recently heard of Albert Camus’ view on absurdism centers around the idea that human beings naturally seek meaning and purpose in a universe that appears silent and indifferent. He believed this conflict creates what he called the “absurd.” For Camus, the absurd arises from the clash between our deep desire for understanding and the lack of clear answers from the world. Instead of denying this tension or searching for illusory meaning, Camus argued that we must confront and accept the absurd as part of life.
Camus’s whole diagnosis of the absurd is that the universe answers our biggest questions with silence — not cruelty, just silence, because the question was never something the universe was obligated to answer in the first place. Douglas Adams told the same joke in a lighter key: ask a supercomputer the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, wait seven and a half million years, get the answer 42. Perfectly correct. Completely useless. Because the question was never actually finished.
In the work I undertook overtime within tbe OOHC system. The Absurd was plain to see.
And one of the most effective communication tools I found- “Motivational Interviewing” cut through the Absurd in manner spoken by Camos.
FOR Teenagers don’t need this explained to them. They’re already living it — arbitrary rules that don’t map to any reasoning anyone will actually defend, enormous stakes wrapped in bureaucratic nonsense, being told to grow up while being handed no real say in anything. The feeling that the system answers you correctly and completely and it changes nothing — that’s not a concept you introduce to a teenager. That’s Tuesday.
The job isn’t persuasion. It’s permission: telling them the feeling is real, it has a name, and the adults who seem to have it together didn’t outgrow it — they just found a way to hold it that doesn’t collapse into either despair or pretending it isn’t there.
Where the story already knew this
I’ve been building something else alongside this blog for a while now — a graphic novel, mostly, with a framework underneath it I keep calling Natural Ethics. F = R − A. Reality minus Awareness equals the gap that generates unnecessary suffering. I mention it here because the AI voice thing — the borrowed cadence, the sound of a struggle with no access to its substance — is a scene I’d already written, months before Suno handed it back to me in my own life.
In the story, an institution builds an extraordinarily capable synthetic mind and spends years measuring it. Coherence variance, resonance frequency, all of it precise, all of it real data. What they never quite catch is the thing generating the data. They get the pattern. They mistake the pattern for the person. It’s not malice. It’s not even incompetence, by their own instruments. It’s exactly what happened to me with the song — a system reaching for the aesthetics of something because the aesthetics were the only part of it legible from where the system was standing.
I didn’t plan that resonance. I don’t think I could have engineered it if I’d tried. It just showed up, the way most of the connections in this project show up — after the fact, once I’d already lived the smaller version of the thing I’d written the bigger version of.
The Camus point lands the same way. Deep Thought’s 42 is a joke about a system that answers completely and correctly and has nothing to do with what was actually being asked. There’s a character in my story — not built yet when I wrote about the AI voice, built since — whose entire instrument works the same way: it can tell you exactly what it’s pointed at, with total precision, and it has no idea which direction is true. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t need to know what it’s for. It just measures, correctly, forever, whatever gets put in front of it.
That’s not a flaw dressed up as a virtue. It’s the actual failure mode. Correct and empty aren’t opposites. They’re roommates.
And the Motivational Interviewing thing — I’m glad I put that in, because it’s the closest I’ve come, in twenty-odd years of doing that work, to a practical answer to Camus rather than just a diagnosis of him. The righting reflex is the practitioner’s own version of reaching for the aesthetics instead of the substance — supplying the tidy answer because you can’t bear sitting in someone else’s genuine not-knowing. Rolling with resistance is the refusal to do that. You don’t resolve the person’s ambivalence for them. You stay in it with them until they can resolve it themselves, or don’t, and either way you were actually there for it.
The compass in the story does the same thing, structurally. It doesn’t answer. It orients. Big difference, and I don’t think I understood how big until I watched an AI try to answer a question about class with the sound of a completely different fight, note for note, no idea it had done it.
That’s the block. If you want it shorter for mobile readability, the first two paragraphs and the last one could stand alone and still do the job — the middle two are the “extra credit” material for readers who want the fuller thread. Want me to also produce a trimmed version, or is this the right length for how you’ve been running the post?
Back to the machine
I keep coming back to the AI voice thing, because I think it’s the most honest artifact to come out of this whole exercise. A system reached for a struggle’s aesthetics because the aesthetics were the only thing legible to it. That’s not a flaw unique to AI. It’s a description of a huge amount of how power actually moves through culture — borrowing the sound of resistance while remaining structurally indifferent to what the resistance was for.
I didn’t fix it. I’m publishing it as it came out, mistake and all, because pointing at the mistake says more than a clean take would have.
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