🎶✨👁️ The Big Machine: A New Anthem for Human Agency in The Attention Economy

Reflections on selfhood, desire, and transcendence in The Technium

🎶 Download on Bandcamp ✨ Stream Everywhere Else

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
– Herbert Simon, 1971 (1)

My new single is out today! Let me know what you think. 🫂

Thanks for listening!

👇🏼 Below: 📝 Lyrics 📜 Liner Notes 🏆 Credits 📚 Bibliography

📝 Lyrics

How long can you go without looking at your phone?
How long does it take before your concentration breaks?
How sure can you be that your mind is really free?
How much would you stake that your "reality"'s not fake?
Where do your desires arise in fields of wireless privatized
And pirated attention? In enclosed incomprehension?
How much is your agency and how much is the will of other
Entities entirely? Or is that even how to see this sea?

Doom scrolling (Like/subscribe)
You're trolling (Find your tribe)
Everybody wants to be seen by the Big Machine
Fan polling (Leave reviews)
Rage swollen (Count your views)
Everyone's volition is squeezed by the Big Machine
Everybody wants to be pleased by the Big Machine

How much would you spend to stay in touch with your own friends?
How relieved are you the algorithm offers the convenience
Of staying in a bubble of your spoon-fed preferences?
How much of your self is really what your heart intends?
And where do you define the line you draw between your mind
And the global operations of unconscious just-in-time
Logistics, markets, states, and great unfolding fated intertwined
Machinic processes; you're hospiced in a matrix planet wide.

Doom scrolling (Like/subscribe)
You're trolling (Find your tribe)
Everybody wants to be seen by the Big Machine
Fan polling (Leave reviews)
Rage swollen (Count your views)
Everyone's volition is squeezed by the Big Machine
Everybody wants to be pleased by the Big Machine
Everybody's choices are screened by the Big Machine
Ask yourself just who you are feeding
When you play to the Big Machine
Now if you aspire to be free from the Big Machine
Just how long can you go without looking at your phone?

📜 Songwriting as Participating in Evolution & The Ballads as Mystical Transhumanism in Miniature

“Songwriting is now actually the most difficult challenge in music. It’s very easy to make music now…lyrics are really the last very hard problem.”
– Brian Eno in conversation with Alan Moore, 2005

Sometimes a song takes years for me to find and put together, fragments of guitar and lyrics dug up and polished piece by piece like the prep and mounting of a dinosaur skeleton. This one fell out in half an hour, speech-to-text into my phone while grocery shopping, triggered by the fact that even though I can’t get signal in the store I nonetheless caught myself reflexively reaching to check notifications even though I knew that it was pointless.

I’ve been writing songs for 24 years. They are my favorite “encoding mechanism” for complex ideas and feelings. Not only is it a satisfying intellectual game to crystallize a book’s worth of ideas into a pop song, but words and music say more together. Because I’m a nerd, songwriting seems like personally participating in the evolution of intelligence — which is in large part a story of ever-better compression algorithms (2, 3) and also the discovery of new forms of syntax and relationship (4, 5). You can say “more” with “less” because you’re communicating with extreme parsimony in multiple simultaneous channels, to the parts of us that register language and emotion and rhythm all at once. In some regards, language is “just” an advanced form of music anyway — what we regard as two things now evolved together and recruit the same parts of us to create and process them (6).

Songwriting, therefore, is the best way I know how to crystallize my constant learning into cultural artifacts and share it with the widest audience. Far fewer people have the time to read James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State than can listen to my song about it. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made a huge splash in 1962 but Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” stuck in people’s heads, may have done more to rally the American public around banning DDT in 1972, and has been covered by 605 other recording artists. I doubt my tune “The Cartographers” will ever have the popularity of even pithier statements like Alfred Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory” (7) or George Box’s “all models are wrong” (8), but it’s the first song my daughter ever asked me to teach her, when she was five years old. Cultural persistence depends on availability for the uptake and remix of information, which depends on interoperability, and as life-forms in their own right songs are exquisitely good at finding new hosts (9, 10).

This is why I love writing science fiction songs, in particular. Music gives us the medium in which to turn hard-boiled speculation, frontline reporting from the edge of emergence, into trans-rational magical realism that hits us in the heart. And music videos make this even more palpable. They’re the opera of our electronic age, the message of our medium: The Web itself is an overwhelming multi-sensory mash-up of verbal, sonic, and cinematic communication that overwhelms us, for good and ill.

Which is why I’m bummed that there are so few songs (that I’m aware of) that really nail the lived experience of Being Extremely Online — the paradoxical superposition of superabundance and lack, of being part of something enormous and wonderful and also feeling isolated and anxious, of transcendence and profound insecurity. Having everything at hand, possessing godlike superpowers, and being food for the ominous egregores of machine and memetics (11, 12, 13). The Web is a psychedelic substance, and living in it transforms us. And yet capturing that Zeitgeist of Everything Everywhere All At Once effectively seems to be a rare and precious thing.

To be fair, film is doing pretty well with this right now. One of my favorite video essays, “Multiverses, Nihilism, and How It Feels To Be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of Old, compellingly blames The Web for this century’s Cambrian Explosion of maximalist post-ironic world building. Loki, Rick and Morty, and EEAAO all scratch the itch for their respective audiences.

But you can say a lot more in hours than you can in minutes. Doing so is an art and technical achievement of the same species as Long Now’s Rosetta Disk, which contains 13,000 pages in 1,500 languages in an artifact the size of a DVD (14), or Technion’s inscription of the entire Hebrew Bible on a gold-plated silicon chip the size of a sugar grain (15). They’re all messages in bottles, shot into either literal space or into the vastness of cyberspace in hope that somehow, someday and against the odds, someone will eventually find them. The more advanced our media become, the more time and energy we humans spend on works like this, in service of what Caleb Scharf calls “The Dataome”. But again, The Great Work of communicating salience — our obsession with the curation, parsimonious encoding, and transfer of sacred data (16) — dates back to the origin of life. Scraping all of The Web into frontier language models owes its DNA to DNA itself and living systems’ earliest attempts to model their environment in miniature with metabolically costly abstractions. And yet somehow, in an age where every world power is preoccupied with trying to squeeze the world into a data center, songs about what this is like to live through seem bizarrely rare. And what it’s going to be? Like being hit by lightning — which, by the way, has a strange correlation with seeing the future (17).

I can count my favorites on one hand:

- Regina Spektor’s “Machine”
– Bo Burnham’s “Welcome To The Internet” & “That Funny Feeling”
– Vienna Tang’s “The Hymn of Acxiom” (great discussion about this on Weird Studies)
– Father John Misty’s “Total Entertainment Forever”
– Peter Gabriel’s “The Court”

(Am I missing any? Please let me know in the comments.)

There are hundreds of songs about how much social media sucks, or living in a panopticon, or falling in love with robots, but few of them cut deep — they don’t feel prophetic, or urgent, or bewildering enough. They don’t convey the overlay of ecstasy and agony, or invite listeners into inquiry and the new selves that emerge out of this shared limbic system and our symbiosis with what K. Allado-McDowell calls “neural media” (18, 19). They are songs by and for modern “individuals”, not the plural, multi-perspectival, ambiguous, provisional, networked, ultimately groundless selves that arise when we’re awash in so much information we realize our stories are fleeting interference patterns. They don’t ask who we are becoming. They reify the very thing The Web has already transformed.

One of my favorite lectures is William Irwin Thompson’s 1975 Lindisfarne Talk (20) on how the first World’s Fair, the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, marked the emergence of industrialization and the modern world by miniaturizing nature inside an ambitious glass-and-iron building. Throughout his work Thompson argues that with each passing historical epoch, “We slay with technology and save the victim with art” — like how early shamanism made meaning of our new status as apex predators by painting animals on cave walls and wearing their skins. The novel created modern subjectivity by putting individual interiority on the page, transforming what Thompson’s contemporary Marshall McLuhan called “the invisible environment” of values-authoring cultural identity into an object that could be explored, reworked, and operationalized. In the era of molecular biology and digital computing, élan vital — the mysterious property that distinguished life and non-life — was reduced to information and became the new medium for behavioral and genetic engineering, the domain of code poets and biohackers.

What’s next — and, for some, now — is an era in which the mind enshrined by the Enlightenment dissolves in the noise of an emergent posthuman planetary culture and is reconstituted as an art object “like ivy vines on the iron legs of Victorian sewing machines” (21). In 2025, a global mental health crisis co-arises with unprecedented access to every imaginable psycho-technology, and precision AI-modulated psychedelic experiences come courtesy of companies breathing the atmosphere of automated high-frequency financial transactions. Lifestyle consumer capitalism presumes the self as a known quantity, a fixed point in a growing network of trade, but the machine intelligences it sired in order to target “individuals” will re-cast the mythology of self as molten, metamorphic, fundamentally relational.

What happens when we learn to see how we are inseparable from these evolving multi-scale networks of fluid interdependencies and behold ourselves and the entire economy — including “ecosystem services”, attention, and countless illegible non-market “externalities” — as a single biospheric art project in which participation is crucial but control is impossible? When we graduate from the paranoid liminality of hypercapitalism to the metanoia and profound situatedness in planetary culture? Thompson again:

“In the not too distant future the shift from an industrial growth mentality of accumulation in an economy to an ecology of symbiosis will enhance the value of consciousness, a consciousness not just of humans, but of the bacteria in our guts, the whales in the sea, and the clouds—thermodynamic and electronic—on our new horizon. The identity of the individual will derive not from territorial nation-states, but from states of consciousness.” (22)

I’ve written several songs about the ambivalence of living through this phase transition. Inspired by my experience as a Google Glass beta tester, ”Transparent” grapples with the loss of civilizational boundaries as we move beyond dualities like self and other, animate and inanimate, human and machine. “Life Finds A Way” attends to how self-fulfilling prophecy characterizes an age in which advanced technologies make it impossible to defend the moat modernity imposed between “Imagination” and “Reality”. And ”Signal” is a love song about wanting to flee the urban epicenter of acceleration to embrace desert hermeticism (which I did, only to find that there is no geographic escape from history). But as we increasingly wake up within “The Big Machine” as the marginal cost of answers drops to zero and automation conventional labor obsolete (23), the production of value and identity become matters of contemplation. How good are we at asking questions? The whole game shifts from productivity to inquiry (24).

And so it felt like time to offer up some questions.

“How long can you go without looking at your phone?” is more than an indictment of the attention economy; it’s a pointing-out instruction: “No really, how long can you abide in not-knowing? And who’s asking?” If the phone is part of you and you-and-the-phone are part of civilizational hyperobject (25) and that is part of ongoing planetary becoming…then “How much is your agency and how much is the will of other entities entirely? Or is that even how to see this sea?”

I can’t help being a little morbid and loving pretty songs that make me stare into The Abyss, and it’s a feature of true art and an act of generosity to let an audience come to its own conclusions. But for me — and maybe this is obvious in the music video? — “The Big Machine” is you and me, The Big We of all beings, the moment when, as Robert Anton Wilson put it, “you…view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends” (26).

It’s a big message to try and put in a small bottle. But I hope you like it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you and may I recommend checking out my previous single, the human-AI collaboration process-as-performance studio production experiment “Scalar Reconfigurations”! You might also like my short essay “Refactoring ‘Autonomy’ and ‘Freedom’ for The Age of Language Models”. And of course the bibliography below.

🏆 Credits

Michael Garfield — voice, six-string acoustic guitar, eight-string electric guitar, Chapman Stick, synthesizer, programming, text-to-image with AI Test Kitchen, text-and-image-to-video with Kaiber. Find tons more of my music on Bandcamp.

You — attention and support. It takes a village!

📚 Bibliography

(1) Herbert Simon, “Designing organizations for an information-rich world” in M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communications, and the public interest. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

(2) Jessica Flack, “Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism” in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A, 2017.

(3) Erik Hoel, “Causal Emergence 2.0: Quantifying emergent complexity” in arXiv, 2025.

(4) Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent Jansen, “The evolution of syntactic communication” in Nature, 2000.

(5) Lynn Margulis, “Symbiogenesis. A New Principle of Evolution Rediscovery of Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky (1980-1957)” in Paleontological Journal, 2010.

(6) Michael Garfield, “Patricia Gray on BioMusic, The New Science of Our Musical Brains and Biosphere” on Future Fossils Podcast, 2018.

(7) “Map-territory relations” on Wikipedia.

(8) “All models are wrong” on Wikipedia.

(9) Michael Garfield, “How To Live in The Future Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed”, 2017.

(10) Jacob Foster, “The Cultural Evolution of The Noosphere” for Human Energy’s N2 Conference. Recorded at U.C. Berkeley, 2023.

(11) Michael Garfield, “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, 2017.

(12) Michael Garfield, “The Evolution of Surveillance”, 2013-2020.

(13) Michael Garfield, “Improvising Out of Algorithmic Isolation”, 2022.

(14) RosettaProject.org

(15) The American Technion Society, “The Nano Bible: From The Technion to Space”, 2022.

(16) Michael Garfield, “Sacred Data” at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, 2025.

(17) Eric Wargo, “The Amazing Reality of Dream Precognition” at Inner Traditions, 2021.

(18) K. Allado-McDowell, “Neural Interpellation” in Gropius Bau, 2024.

(19) Michael Garfield, “New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowell” on Humans On The Loop Podcast, 2025.

(20) William Irwin Thompson, “The Great Exhibition of 1851: Industrialization and The Emergence of The Modern World” for The Lindisfarne Association. Recorded at The Schumacher Center for New Economics, 1975.

(21) William Irwin Thompson, “Avatar — When Technology Displaces Culture” at Wild River Review, 2010.

(22) William Irwin Thompson, “The Etherealization of Capitalism” on Wild River Review, 2011.

(23) Kevin Kelly, “The Handoff to Bots” on kk.org, 2025.

(24) William Irwin Thompson, “The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur” on Wild River Review, 2011.

(25) Michael Garfield, “Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology and Systems Thinking Blasphemy” on Future Fossils Podcast, 2024.

(26) Source Unknown.