Accelerant

On the left a boy in a suit picks his nose while holding firecrackers in his other hand; on the right the same boy is asleep in the grass with his arms wrapped around a bundle of dynamite
Photos in the liner notes of the 1995 album Kiss Your Ass Goodbye!

There’s a constant flood of AI-related stuff in my world right now — both material generated by LLMs and all kinds of thoughts from people. I’m not sure what I have to add to the conversation that hasn’t already been said, but here are a few things anyway, as I contend with a present and future that affects my own work, not to mention the livelihoods of many others or the moral and ecological harms that the relentless pursuit of LLM-enabled technologies is causing and may bring about.

When I was in college, ska was having a moment. One of the bands on the scene was Blue Meanies, an edgy ska-core group from Chicago. They had just released Kiss Your Ass Goodbye! — which opens with “Acceleration 5000,” an angry song with intense percussion and aggressive horns. I was hooked. Take a listen:1

Until recently I thought this song had pretty run-of-the-mill “get excited” lyrics, stuff about the listener needing to get energy and the singer presenting the possibility of resistance, of having to “slow down,” to “dig … tracks into the ground.” And maybe that’s really all there is to it; songs don’t need to be profound. But then we get to a kind of bridge:2

Why see you stand, frightened
You’re not your dog, frightened
Your stomach pulls, tightens
I think you’re mine

What’s going on here? We have animalistic fear, a tightening stomach and the revelation that the singer considers the listener a possession of some kind — given even more force by by the sudden move into a chant to “move like machine momentum.” There’s something uncomfortable here.

The text is pretty sparse, and really I’m thinking about this song these days for reasons that were the purview of science fiction when the album was released. In an age of technological advancement that appears to be approaching terminal velocity, where venture capitalists are eager to extract everything for themselves and too many of us are willing to abet them (despite or because of our fears), what does it mean to “move like machine momentum / into the ground”? Can we slow down this thing? What if we don’t want to slow it down? Will we burn?3