Mind Control
“The spectacle is a negation of life.” -Guy Debord
The first draft of the argument.
Mind Control was a hardcore punk band active from 2013–2017 that I did vocals in, named in reference to the mass onset of digital mediation in modern society.
The band started shortly after Tristan Harris released his presentation, A Call To Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention, while he was working at Google, which immediately went viral within the company and seeded a cascade of whistleblowing that informed how misaligned incentives in Big Tech can be changed.
I was an early observer of the societal neuroses Big Tech enabled through manipulative technology—notably, the covert manufacturing of narcissism, addiction, loneliness, and autism—and this band was an expression of my anger in the face of that. Over a decade later, Tristan's message was largely ignored and the incentives have only gotten worse—now seeping into generative AI.
I wrote lyrics about mediated communication, banal repetition, and ideological capture. We released a few cassettes and a self-titled 7", which included tracks like Robot Mode, Dead Communication, and Trends—respectively about life reduced to mechanistic banality, texting replacing genuine conversation, and surrendering oneself to mimetic trends at the expense of one's integrity.
These songs were written and performed years before the attention economy was something most people talked about. It's an early version of the same argument I'm still making, just louder.