Saved (Public Feed)

She says 'Miss Anthropocene' is about making "climate change fun"—and she can't stop talking about her hopes for an AI-driven future. But she might just be playing with our perceptions. --- But the Internet is notoriously good at simplifying the messiness of reality into cut-and-dry projections of our deepest hopes and fears—symbols so gripping that they can sometimes cause us to make assumptions that go against our values. To believe that Grimes has made an album designed to spread good faith in Silicon Valley is to undermine her intelligence and agency as an artist, one whose artistic reckoning with the world—and her place within it—has never been anything close to straightforward. The trouble with owning one's perceived badness so completely that you transform yourself into a literal demon, though, is that it's a bit of an out. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to use technology to democratize music-making, or to offset our reliance on fossil fuels—but it's hard to take techno-optimism seriously when its proponents also seem strangely blind to the world that exists right in front of them. In the realm of business, that blindness can take the form of building a fortune partly based on the idea that you're trying to stop climate change while also discouraging your employees from unionizing. In the realm of art, it can mean getting so carried away by the grand design of your vision that you fail to realize that it's motivated by something a bit solipsistic, a mirror of your unique prison of pain. At worst, it can produce art that is less a reflection of shared experience than a vision of the world that was dreamed up in a corporate boardroom, by people who have the luxury of turning existential crises into an entertaining thought-exercise.