Won't Get Fooled Again: On aesthetic morality and neo-luddism [Season 11 preamble]
Why banning tools may not lead to a virtuous cultural renaissance.
Entering a year of great cultural discord, the predictions for 2026 by the many journalists and writers on the culture journalist podcast connected to a few recurring topics, including:
-Leaving streaming services, both audio and video
-Back to the land content foraging, analog and physical media passions
-The desire for new platforms or no platforms, i.e., leaving social media
-Anti-AI sentiment
One of the more provocative thoughts came from Mano Sundaresan of Pitchfork & No Bells, who reluctantly, and without zeal, predicted that this year we’ll likely have to “reckon with the quality of the song that is AI-Generated.” This perceived moment of truth, where something generative threatens to enter the critical discourse as something other than slop, is one that perturbs both me and serious music-types, like admitting you like a very fruit-forward cocktail, or realizing there’s a unironic reality TV show you deeply, unabashedly like.
This week, Bandcamp put a hit out on AI-assisted songs, much to the pleasure of their user base and internet onlookers. It felt like a line in the sand against an increasingly aggressive push to adopt tech that will more than likely displace artists and musicians and continue to litter the cultural landscape with uninspired waste product.
If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team. We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.
from Bandcamp’s Keeping Bandcamp Human, 1/13/2026
Bandcamp, which, in full transparency, is a platform I adore and believe to be crucial to independent music, is acting as the farmer’s market manager here, hissing away would-be bad actors trying to set up a table. It’s a trade-off, aimed at establishing deeper values, akin to Dick’s Sporting Goods' decision to drop gun sales in 2018, one that risks sales in order to create affinity and trust.
Bandcamp is also likely trying to accomplish a few other things: expand their TOS to take down music of dubious provenance/quality, discourage soundspammers and automated drecklords, and enact a canny marketing/positioning move away from other music vendors. While this language is bound to change with time and has yet to reach their Terms & Conditions from what I can see, the certitude or closure of creative thinking on this topic was striking, and I write this as someone with zero or maybe even less-than-zero interest in consuming or creating “AI music” as a key goal.
On a call with Michael Cina this week, I expressed my concerns about this ban and how its tone could harm innovation in the arts by having such a powerful cultural platform darken a still largely unexplored corner of music creation. Cina smartly pushed back, reminding me that AI had already damaged social media, now replete with crap images, and that he had seen the effect on platforms like Etsy, where AI-aided dropshippers have flocked, which led me to survey how they’ve handled things, being a few years ahead of music. It’s an unenviable position to be in.
So why do artists have to sit out yet another revolution? is the question. As much as we say we love artists, we increasingly expect them to maintain our comfort, rather than realizing that their own comfort is what gives us the work we love in the first place. I’m aware there is an inherent darkness, or maybe just murkiness, so far regarding copyright use and the intention of the chief platforms. Though we expect artists to use/misuse the cultural moment to make art, they often bear the brunt of society’s expectations, and this is yet another slap on the wrist, while the rest of us get to make memes for each other with minimal reproach.
The rancor around AI in early 2026 in culture fields feels like yet another slight by big tech for many: a last straw of disillusionment after the potent buzz of the social media era has worn off. People don’t want to feel tricked yet again by another tech wave, it is clear. Bandcamp’s original appeal as a direct path to artist patronage created a new space (alongside Soundcloud, Mixcloud, etc.) where any musician, even an amateur, could upload their music. As such, there is no promise of quality across the site, and there’s more than a fair share of illegal bootlegs/mashups (many are very good), but we accept this as part of the deal with a free-range platform. Bandcamp has also built one of the most robust editorial platforms of any music retailer, which is more than enough keep fans away from the sludge. As a Bandcamp user, you’re not exactly bumping into pages you don’t want to see, so fan-side or even artist/label side, it’s not an inherent problem.
By casting suspicion on how the music is made, however, this week’s move encourages their users and staff to become witch hunters, fretting over the platform’s music and its chemical purity rather than its aesthetic, political, or other redeeming value. How are we going to decide what % AI is too much? How can one truly tell what is used? Isn’t all music and digital art enmeshed in some form of AI?
Acclaimed electronic music and AI music innovator Holly Herndon raised some of these concerns in her tweets this week, trying to decipher the ban's actual aims, with many of her posts being met with abrasive dismissal in the replies. Her statements, compiled by Stereogum, are striking, and many seem cogent to me, especially coming from someone who has been immersed in the space and has fought for artists’ advocacy alongside her partner Mat Dryhurst for years now.
I understand why Bandcamp is taking this measure but it’s a tourniquet
The human / AI binary is not going to hold, and will become a matter of superficial optics
I already have more authorship in my models than most pop stars do in their songs
People will already be using models to generate songs they then put a human filter on
Artists will integrate generated passages into works they orchestrate, and will soon train their own models
Another protection might be to flag accounts that post an inhuman amount of content, but that too may seem retrograde
We live with infinite media now
I encourage platforms to be more curated, but enforcing a hard human / AI binary is not the right way to address this long term …
This moment dovetails with the collective grief of a couple of generations who have felt the internet has spoiled on their watch. “Slop” was the word of 2025, and it’s fun to throw around, a catchall for the enshittified now, all boring building designs and banal lunch bowls, a collective sigh of resignation, and a rally cry for a bleary new dissonance towards culture. But these aren’t new paradigms, slop predates mainstream AI; one could argue we just hit a threshold moment of distrust, as the love for company mantras of yore, those of “bringing the world closer together” or “organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” feel as distant and quaint as a high school yearbook.
Indeed, the dreams of the first two decades of this century have been, in pop culture at least, a seeming rush towards a would-be cheapening of art. An individualized search for a seemingly attainable personal fame, and now with a financial urgency that is cozied up to gambling in its haste and recklessness. High art elitism is neck and neck with other vestiges of authority (i.e., medical), a threat to be extinguished. To be erudite is to invite suspicion. In 2025’s Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx summarizes: “With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence, culture has become a lowest-common-denominator fight for attention. Where there is no value other than money, honor is meaningless; and where there is no honor, there cannot be shame. And without shame, fame and infamy become indistinguishable.”
The issue with focusing on inputs is that the music and art that form the bedrock of my passions come from cracked software, misused hardware, toys, hearsay, illegal samples, or electronic recreations of real instruments, most of which are as dim and cold as a robot’s thumb. It is the artist who organizes this immoral or amoral detritus into human shape. Many of the most dynamic images in my memories come from the tip of an odious and brutal aerosol can. Artists didn’t create these objects and systems, but they dignify our lives in spite of them, transfiguring the banality and disgust of our age into something worth living for.
Generations of purists condemn(ed) all forms of Electronic and Hip-Hop music provenance, and they have fair points about originality and skill; that said, if we’re doing the moral thing, I’d reckon these new genres have enabled musicianship and innovation at a level far greater scale per capita than that of music schools in this century, for better or for worse. De La Soul and Prince Paul were denigrated by the industry and their forebears, only to be fully redeemed in recent years.
The problem with the moral logic is that it is already the armor of the companies that are out in front of AI music. In a rage-baiting 2025 post by a Suno employee (on the back of its founder’s comments last year that “people don’t like making music”) proposes that music making should be more democratized, which is hard to argue with until you read the why, and it’s because it’s supposedly too hard. Cultural production is indeed hard. Its hard to become good at anything, that’s not a bad thing. Maybe we can follow LLM usage in writing so far, which probably doesn’t deflate the value of good writing after all; it only makes us appreciate it more. No data to back this up, but the enthusiasm for film on this platform flies in the face of the claims about reduced attention spans we hear.
The general cultural sentiment around AI and music might recall the “Drum Machines Have No Soul” bumper sticker/mindset, which was popular in the early 2000s alongside the early days of Ghostly, when most of our acts had one, if not more, laptops on stage. The subtext was that this wasn’t performance, i.e., not music. Fast forward to 2025, and two of the most astonishing live performances I experienced were on both sides of the humanistic spectrum. The shows were drink sum wtr’s Annahstasia (all live/acoustic, capital M music) in Los Angeles and Autechre in Brooklyn (in the dark, on laptops). Both were astonishing feats of live music. No one knows what software Autechre is using at this point; it doesn’t really matter. It’s what they elicit.
Avoiding a culture business that starts to resemble the contemporary snack aisle, each package with a little picture of the founder, some platitudes, and a litany of labels of non-this/that markers, a move further into stan-dom and saddling artists with increased burdens to perform for our needs and wants, as opposed to their own. Besides, some of the most rhapsodic music I’ve heard deals in vagaries and sounds of uncertain origin. I don’t want to know how Wolfgang Voigt’s early GAS music was made; I just want to imagine I’m traipsing through the Black Forest.
In another prediction from the the culture journalist podcast, jaime brooks, sees the formation of a “Techno Nihilist” cohort, or those who have lost hope in an optimistic technical future, but who use the available tools and see them from what they are, as a means of pleasure or creation. It’s this path, I’m guessing, that will yield more exciting results than either full-throated techno-optimism or pure Luddite mindsets. After all, we’ve had a perfect analog chain for a long time now, but there are other roads to run.
Instead of worrying about the tools, there is aesthetic morality to consider, not as a way to prop up neo-poptimism in reaffirming the status quo sonically, or a return to classical aesthetics, but instead to judge art on its face. An interesting case of this came recently, with pushback from fans regarding the final season of Stranger Things and a perceived drop in script quality, potentially because it was written by ChatGPT. The gotcha part is semi-interesting, but the criticism is actually only valid if the script indeed sucks, which is more compelling.
Culture fails, or should fail, because it’s of poor quality, not what tools it was made on; as that’s the last, maybe naive, meritocratic promise of art. We want art that makes us feel more human, which can come from discordant or non-human inputs (i.e., Dylan going electric, early Pixar, etc.). As the Don DeLillo passage (Mao II, 1991) suggests, the shock of the new is supposed to be a crap shoot: “Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street…Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next.”
So bring on the slop, it’s already here, in every crevice of society. It’s not going anywhere. Let’s use our disdain to foster more critique and a keen desire for greatness. Let bad actors defame themselves with lazy usage, and let the skill and uncanny ability of artists to use tools be the differentiator. Please, bend these tools to your human will. I’m committing my time to getting behind art and artists who can make sense of this all.
Bonus Beat:
I spoke with Jarrett Fuller for his Scratching The Surface design podcast
Like your take here. I was interviewed by WDET during the Velvet Sundown hubbub. My thoughts lean toward Herndon’s (and I guess a version of yours). AI is a tool, like a KAOSS Pad, an 808, but just more advanced. I get the point on the difficulty of cultural production but if anything I think th ease of it separates wheat from chaff now, and as it improves, maybe makes some things easier for the less well funded maker. The other take might be that th ease of things makes more people get into music making and learn more about tweaking / playing what’s coming out of the box. If we are wired about a shift to the medial middle, that has been hashed forever (Schubert to Baby Shark). I am curious how things pan out and what I am telling my students is to play with it, learn it (for awareness) but focus on your craft - not the tech or tools.
driving an old mackie mixer into the red doesn’t hasten climate catastrophe though (or rather to the same degree). all for “the tools are what you make of them” argument in principle but you’re eliding some pretty important detail here, which is exactly the framing suno/altman/etc want — to overlook the actual cost. haven’t read the BC argument so it’s possible they misframed it themselves in a corny indie fuxxor sort of way. if bandcamp banned plastic physical media sales for environmental reasons would this essay remain the same?