"error" // Feb. 20, 2026
Digital Audio Composition; Original Music and Reclaimed Sounds.
For Stereo Speakers (00:04:30)
For Stereo Speakers (00:04:30)
Are you happy with the way things are?
The arranged marriage of capitalism and technology has improved our lives in many ways, but there has been serious collateral damage. The demise of the passive, free and open internet in favour of an algorithmically driven, personalised user experience is already well documented. The once mighty household desktop computer—a benign, landlocked terminal to be visited much like a library—has been abandoned for the utility and immediacy of the smartphone: a predatory, omniscient, seductive (and addictive) device designed to extract data and hemorrhage time.
But perhaps what is more insidious is the near-ubiquitous filtration of human connection through technological middlemen. Customer service is now abstracted through layers of complexity to be anything but of service to the customer. Idiosyncratic email prose has been replaced by incomprehensible online forms. “Support” phone numbers on websites have been mostly supplanted by AI chatbots, and those that remain deliver infinite hold music and pre-recorded messages crafted to reduce staff overheads, maximise corporate profit, and assimilate interactions into digestible, extractable data points.
When you talk, who listens?
There is a pervasive impotence to our continued engagement with these models—to our obedience to the automated voice on the other side of the phone asking us to “please hold”. Hold what? Our tongue, our temper? Our own precarious position in the status quo? Our loved ones close, as the social contract crumbles around us?
The annoying inconvenience of a 45-minute hold time, the dopamine-fueled attention vortex of social media, and the devastating threat of technologically-driven environmental collapse with consequences for our continued survival as a species are all to be viewed as part of the same continuum; an attitude born from technofeudalism, facilitated by late stage capitalism and worshipped with the fervent religiosity of a new god; “Your time on this earth belongs to me”.
We are living in a house of cards.
Will you continue to hold?
The arranged marriage of capitalism and technology has improved our lives in many ways, but there has been serious collateral damage. The demise of the passive, free and open internet in favour of an algorithmically driven, personalised user experience is already well documented. The once mighty household desktop computer—a benign, landlocked terminal to be visited much like a library—has been abandoned for the utility and immediacy of the smartphone: a predatory, omniscient, seductive (and addictive) device designed to extract data and hemorrhage time.
But perhaps what is more insidious is the near-ubiquitous filtration of human connection through technological middlemen. Customer service is now abstracted through layers of complexity to be anything but of service to the customer. Idiosyncratic email prose has been replaced by incomprehensible online forms. “Support” phone numbers on websites have been mostly supplanted by AI chatbots, and those that remain deliver infinite hold music and pre-recorded messages crafted to reduce staff overheads, maximise corporate profit, and assimilate interactions into digestible, extractable data points.
When you talk, who listens?
There is a pervasive impotence to our continued engagement with these models—to our obedience to the automated voice on the other side of the phone asking us to “please hold”. Hold what? Our tongue, our temper? Our own precarious position in the status quo? Our loved ones close, as the social contract crumbles around us?
The annoying inconvenience of a 45-minute hold time, the dopamine-fueled attention vortex of social media, and the devastating threat of technologically-driven environmental collapse with consequences for our continued survival as a species are all to be viewed as part of the same continuum; an attitude born from technofeudalism, facilitated by late stage capitalism and worshipped with the fervent religiosity of a new god; “Your time on this earth belongs to me”.
We are living in a house of cards.
Will you continue to hold?