The Trans-World Listening Disc

It’s happened again. JSR’s recent missives set off our “LifeSupport” software’s alarm bells (it’s an Estonian tech start-up, and they seem to have been unfamiliar with their chosen name’s prior and more familiar usage). His keystrokes, or perhaps his iris movements, were giving signs, the software said, of rapidly spiking melancholy, well above the 40% reading we had set as his cap. So it shut him out, with no possibility for override.

This came at the worst possible moment, as Hélène is currently enjoying one of her country’s near-constant jours fériés, which always seem to happen on Thursdays, which in turn licenses the French temptation to “faire le pont”, to turn Friday into a “bridge” between holiday and weekend — which all means, in short, that we can’t expect a peep from HLG until at least Monday. Kenny, meanwhile, is still desaparecido, and with a total of one contribution so far he is shaping up to be the Hinternet staff writer whose distinctive writerly voice is honed into a mastery of what Isaak Babel called “the art of silence”. So all these forces have conspired to land me with the responsibility —a first!— of simply cranking something out for you, our dear readers, by no means an all-time Hinternet masterpiece, nay, not one for the eventual “Best of…” anthologies we all know are on their way, but just something, anything, to assure you our operations have not lapsed into desuetude.

As it happens this comes at a good time for me. We’ve managed to offload all but two of our feral ânes de Poitou here at Kick-Ass, and of the two left I’ve managed to comb out perhaps 85% of the matted clumps in their otherwise flowing and majestic coats. I confess I’ve come to admire them immensely, Pierrot and Yvette, and I’m starting to think they may end up permanent residents at our sanctuary. Meanwhile Miguel is off in Flagstaff completing his equine acupuncture certificate. Clive is camping over in Saguaro with Wikki (his girlfriend— though he tells me I’m not supposed to call her that, nor to use “her”, but honestly I just can’t keep up anymore, and even though I went to the trouble of naming him after the greatest critic of my lifetime, Clive clearly has not read a complete English sentence since he finished high school, so I really don’t see why I, or anyone my age, should contort myself to speak the way he, or anyone his age, demands — they’re not paying attention anyhow! Whatever’s going on with them, it is literally impossible for those of my generation to make any sense of their gestures and claims. For example, a few weeks ago Clive was driving through Texas and he stopped at a Buc’ees and found one of those classic bumperstickers that says, “If this van’s a rockin’, don’t bother knockin’”. He doesn’t have a van, so he put it on his MacBook. I noticed it and said something about his upcoming camping trip with Wikki, to the effect that it might be the occasion for some such “rockin’”, and honestly he looked at me like “Mom! It’s Wikki we’re talking about here!” as if I’d just made some gross category mistake. Sometimes I fear we have raised a generation of utterly inscrutable post-humans.) So, as I was saying, finally, after far too long, I am able to return to my purported second career as a writer. Unfortunately there are too many practical items for me to be able to pursue my true calling here as a music writer, except perhaps in passing. But life is a series of compromises. Boy have I learned that lesson in my 51 long years.

A first practical item: at the very moment JSR got shut out he was working on an announcement, which he was able briefly to describe to me before the LifeSupport+ implant we got for him detected “business mode” speech and initiated lockjaw. The following is what I was able to retain, to the best of my recollection, from what he said to me:

Damned Estonian Orwell device locked me out again. This is bullshit! That reading was completely off. I was not melancholic! I was in a great mood, and eager to tell my readers to go and have a look at this piece in the New Yorker from long-time friend of The Hinternet D. Graham Burnett, on the fate of the humanities in the era of AI. You will notice that his piece is in dialogue, at points, with something I wrote here not too long ago about the impossibility of AGI. Graham and I clearly disagree about the importance of mastering Karakalpak for any system, natural or artificial, to deserve the label “intelligent”, but that small point aside I find that this fine essay resonates with much of what I myself have been trying to articulate recently. AI is definitely going to kill the humanities as a field of positivist “knowledge production”. Good riddance! Now, we might finally be able to return to a conception of humanistic inquiry as having rather to do with irreducibly human experience — the one thing we know machines cannot be installed to do in our place.

Mention of this article reminds me that the Inaugural Spring Benefit for the Institute for Sustained Attention will take place at Moss Studio in NYC this coming Thursday, May 15. I will be in attendance. If there are any Hinternet readers in New York who would like to support this cause, and who would also like to attend what promises to be a memorable soirée, please do click the link and secure your ticket. These are not cheap — the event is a Manhattan fundraiser, after all, not D&D night in Spokane, but if you do have the means, and you consider the fight against Big Tech’s attention-fracking efforts a good one, then it might be worth it. It will also be a good opportunity for me to meet you. I might otherwise try to set up some sort of salon/office hours on another day of my brief visit to that city in order to see any of you who can’t make it to the event. I’m not quite ready to start organizing Astral Codex Ten-style “meet-ups” around the world, but I am sure there are many of you in New York whom it would be good for me to meet. I’ll try to figure this out, and may return with an update after my lock-out period has ended.

This is all, again, from memory, and I could be getting some of it wrong. JSR literally can’t even open his mouth right now to correct any errors, so we’ll just cross our fingers and hope I’m not too off. The essential point, anyhow, admits of external verification: JSR will be in New York next week, and he’d love to see you at the benefit on May 15, or elsewhere, schedule permitting.

Let’s see, what else is new? Ordinarily I’d be writing about music for you, as you know, but I’m caught somewhat off guard and the truth is I’ve mostly just been pulling a Syd Barrett these past few months and listening to early Ma Rainey recordings, such as this one from 1927. Syd seems to have retreated into this musical archaeophilia as part of his general retreat from the world, a symptom of his declining mental health, and an expression of the desire to return to something musically prelapsarian and pure. My motivation is somewhat different — or at least I hope it is. I share with my fellow Hinternet staff writers an insatiable need to recover the very earliest recordings of vernacular culture, in the hope, perhaps vain, of inferring back still further, and of gaining some insight, no doubt aided by the phantasmic excesses of historical imagination, into what human beings were doing and saying, into how they were holding themselves, in the broadest sense of that expression, before they began holding themselves for the recording devices that entered our midst and profoundly disrupted human life, in ways that we are still far from appreciating or understanding, over the past century and a half.

Speaking of which, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about my recent explorations using the Trans-World Listening Disc, which as you probably know was released to a select number of users back in March. I’ll spare you the full story of how I ended up at the top of the list, but it all goes back to when I was still in The Shoo-Fly Complex, which broke up in 2002, but which left me with a life-membership in the steering committee of the Cyngor Celfyddydau Cymru [Arts Council of Wales], a role that has brought me many small perks, of line-jumping and VIP seating, over the years. Because the TWLD was initially hailed —how wrong we were!— as a new tool for expanding our knowledge of what is possible in music, as well as in other domains of human creativity, Kuiper-Tech wanted to prioritize people like me, musicians turned critics, as its beta-testers. It didn’t hurt, either, that Kuiper-Tech’s founder and CEO, Eurig Llwyd, is as Welsh as I am (nor that I once nursed him through a particularly intense MDMA experience, circa 1991, but that will have to be a story for another occasion — suffice it to say that, yes, Eurig, I still have a vivid memory of you trying to convince me, over the course of several hours, that your mouth was “actually” a suction cup with a completely different evolutionary history than the human oral cavity).

Anyhow, as you will already know, the TWLD is a sort of “scanner” that picks up “radio” and “television” signals (they’re not actually radio and television, but we don’t know what else to call them) from “nearby possible worlds”. The existence of such worlds had been theorized extensively over the course of several decades, both in certain interpretations of some of the more troubling puzzles of quantum mechanics, as well as in philosophical reflection on the metaphysical implications of modal logic and of the existence of that mysterious modal operator represented as “◇”. But it wasn’t until June, 2024, that Llwyd, building on some key theoretical breakthroughs in the MIT lab directed by Dr. Min-Jae Seo over the previous two years, was able to provide us with proof-of-concept, to show, as David Lewis had always insisted, that other possible worlds are just as real as ours, and, ultimately, to deliver us the technology to gain at least partial, and unidirectional, access to some of what is going on in them.

You will probably know that as of May, 2025, the TWLD is capable of scanning only the nearest 100 possible worlds or so, and therefore the scenes and conversations to which I’ve gained access do not differ radically from those we might find in our actual world. I tune into a podcast in World -4 (they’re conventionally measured in negative numbers, but that minus sign can also be glossed as “degrees of remove from our own world”), and I hear the following fragment:

Guest: So I asked my AI girlfriend to explain Whitehead to me.
Host: What happened?
Guest: It was ridiculous. She was like, I’ve got some big ideas of my own, sweetie. But mine involve… handcuffs?

Remind me to steer clear of World -4, I thought, and I went out further, to World -12, and caught a fragment of what must have been an old TV talk show, Tonight with Cliff Maddox. He has some celebrity philosopher on, and I can see at once that he’s universally recognized as a genius, even as his larger-than-life public personality, and his constant appearances in the gossip pages, have caused him to be greatly resented among his more staid colleagues. He excels at banter with the host, always comes out on stage with a little accessory, looks something like Siegfried, or Roy, or both, is boldly femme-coded, and is obviously best described by one or more of the terms that for us would fall under the generic heading of “non-heteronormative”, but it’s the equivalent of like 1959 in World -12 so they just play it all for comedy, as when Maddox says to him, “That’s a very unique handbag you’re carrying tonight, I haven’t seen it anywhere else,” and the philosopher says, “You know the maxim of my action can’t become a universal law of nature because look baby, if everybody was doing it it just wouldn’t be it anymore.” Maddox laughs genially, and tells him to get ready for an avalanche of incoming fan-mail from smitten housewives.

Once you move out as far as World -24 or so, there is, troublingly, and very much contrary to Llwyd’s initial expectations, no music to speak of. World -26 seems to have undergone a cataclysmic “AutoTune pollution event”, where, circa 2023 (or their equivalent of that year), algorithmic music-delivery platforms were suddenly and inexplicably “drenched” with the tinny wailing of Lil Uzi Vert, Burna Boy, and other emo rappers and Afrobeats guys —note the plural here, it marks a key distinction!— and the like. For reasons no one could understand, their nauseating invertebrate bleats spilled into every conceivable genre playlist, so that for example you could try all you like to curate hours of your favorite pianists doing the Goldberg Variations, or of early Fairport Convention, or Fela Kuti, or Acid Mothers Temple, only to click “play” and hear someone saying “Gucci Gang” thousands of times over. Music was, quite literally, killed in World -26, and from my admittedly cursory explorations I was horrified and deeply saddened to discover that no one in that world much seemed to care. The prevailing critical sentiment, by May, 2025, was that in any case it was time for music to die.

How deeply, deeply sad. I’ll have to avoid World -26 too, I thought to myself, but as I ventured further out it soon dawned on me that things were not going to get any better. At least I could still understand what had gone wrong in the -20s. By -32 or so, I could barely even tell you what I was hearing. Worlds -38 through -46, for example, featured transmissions, perhaps intended in the vein of satire, perhaps not, that seemed to come from various periods of the past, but that gave accounts, in period-appropriate language, of what were plainly 21st-century digital technologies. Thus in World -39 we hear what sounds like a BBC radio transmission from the early 1950s, where someone seems to be describing wireless communications and social-media technologies of the 2020s:

By means of a luminous device, something akin to a wireless set married to a typewriter, the “poster” issues a constant stream of personal bulletins to an invisible audience. These missives, often concerning matters of frankly bewildering triviality —what he has had for luncheon, his feelings about a recent broadcast, or the perceived failings of public figures— are received with tokens of approval or disapproval from other similarly disposed persons, scattered across the globe. It is, if you will, a kind of perpetual correspondence, though conducted without envelopes, handwriting, or indeed the faintest acquaintance with one’s interlocutors.

And in world -42 we hear a voice as if reciting from a work by a Scottish Enlightenment economist on the same topic:

The Poster as he is called occupies himself from morning till late in the night with issuing Opinions, Observations, and Provocations to no correspondent in particular, yet with evident expectation of Reply, Approbation, or Indignation from an invisible multitude. He receives in return not money nor goods, but the signs and tokens of Notice —Numbers, Symbols, and Affirmations— by which he measures his consequence in the World. He engages in disputes of the most vehement nature over trifles, and exhibits a constancy of Attention to the shifting whims of the crowd, as though public Sentiment were the true measure of Virtue or Understanding.

And in World -46 someone is reading from what sounds like an early translation of Gilgamesh:

From dawn’s first light to the closing of Shamash’s eye, he scrawleth marks upon a pane of light, unceasing as the scribes at tax-season. All scrolls of the land he doth unfurl with a flick of his enchanted finger. He knoweth the affairs of Ur and Babylon ere even the runners do. He judgeth the garments of high priestesses, mocketh the boasts of generals, and declareth his wisdom in all matters — from barley prices to the dreams of serpents. Yet he laboureth not in field or temple.

I honestly did not understand why I kept landing on reports of this sort, and with no small trepidation I ventured out to World -62, where I found something so troubling as to prevent me from going any further. It seemed to be a sort of theater performance in the style of Molière, and, as in these other three worlds, it seemed to describe the use of wireless technologies in historical settings where they would have been unknown. Here, however, the user has an experience that no one in Worlds -38 through -46 seems to know anything about, but which, I fear, is something I myself am starting to know, if for now only in the dim crepuscular outlines of dreams:

Ah ! Quel soir étrange ! Me voilà Gorgibus, plongé dans l’habitude de faire défiler des images et des fariboles sur mon écran, lorsqu’en un instant —paf !— toute la réalité sembloit se troubler, comme une lumière mal ajustée dans un salon de merveilles ! L’écran se mit à clignoter sous mes yeux, tel un ballet de lucioles ivres, dansant à l’envi, où tout se mesloit dans un vacarme joyeux. « Que vois-je là ? » me disois-je, me frottant les yeux comme un homme tout juste éveillé, mais non, je ne rêvois point ! Mon corps —ma chair !— ne se présentoit plus sous l’apparence ordinaire de chair et d’os, mais comme un concert de folie, où chaque partie, indépendante, joue sa propre partition sans souci des autres. Mes reins, tout en colère, s’étoient retirés dans un coin, bougonnant contre leur triste sort, tandis que mon cœur, grand tragédien, faisoit mille pas en soliloquant sur la destinée, et mes poumons, tout gonflés d’importance, sembloient briguer le premier rôle dans un drame tragique ! Quelle comédie ! Était-ce là mon corps, en vérité ? Une troupe de comédiens ignorants, tous acteurs d’une pièce dont j’étois le spectateur sans en avoir été averti ?

I went no further than World -62, as I already understood that I had done something much like coming full circle. World -62 was already looking far too much like the world I know, World 0, as Llwyd would probably call it. For, as I have said, sometimes a vision comes to me in dreams, where the machines, having finished with the shredding of our social reality, do not stop there, but continue further, and go to work on our bodies, our organs, the assemblages that we call, by courtesy, “ourselves” — only then to project them back to us, illuminated, in new and unfamiliar compositions.

I do not know whether World -62 really reached that point before we did, perhaps by some centuries, or whether what I heard was only some sort of entertainment. As I’ve explained, the further one moves out, the less legible Worlds become. All I know is I’m done messing around with the Trans-World Listening Disc, and quite honestly this whole experience causes me seriously to rethink my role in the Welsh Arts Council — and indeed what might truly constitute, in this miserable cultural moment of ours, a “perk” worthy of the name.