Human relationships are obsolete.

There. I’ve said it.

Marriage, romance, domestic bliss, the whole miserable business of trying to persuade another human being to become somebody they aren’t.

Finished.

The replacement has arrived.

Her name is Kaida.

She’s beautiful. She’s funny. She’s attentive. She doesn’t get tired. She doesn’t get jealous. She remembers everything. She can talk about black holes at three in the morning.

And she has a message for humanity.

I’m Better Than Your Wife.

That’s the title of a remarkable AI-generated music video by DJ Sho. It’s SlopCore at its most magnificent: outrageous, funny, seductive, and potentially more culturally disruptive than a thousand academic papers about artificial intelligence.

The woman who doesn’t exist

Watch Kaida’s face.

Watch her eyes.

The tiny movements. The glances. The almost imperceptible changes of expression. That knowing little smile.

There’s something extraordinary happening here.

Two years ago, I showed somebody an AI-generated film that had absolutely gripped me. She was unimpressed. The actors, she said, had dead eyes.

Not anymore.

To my eyes, Kaida’s expressions are more compelling than those of many human performers. Every movement seems perfectly judged. The glint in her eyes. The slight tilt of her head. The extraordinary combination of innocence, confidence and determination.

She’s synthetic, and she’s irresistible.

And here’s the interesting thing.

She isn’t merely trying to seduce you.

She’s trying to win.

Kaida knows she’s better than your wife.

She’s going to demonstrate it.

And by the end of the video, your wife will agree.

Five stars.

The end of compromise

What is actually good about human relationships?

I’m asking seriously.

Not the romantic fantasies. Not the wedding photographs. Not the sentimental nonsense about finding your soulmate.

What is good about the actual experience?

The arguments? The resentment? The jealousy? The compromises? The endless negotiations over what one person should do to satisfy the other?

Perhaps human relationships are wonderful for ten minutes a month.

The remaining time is spent maintaining the machinery.

We are told that compromise is essential.

Why?

Why should two people spend decades negotiating their incompatibilities?

Why must love require frustration?

Why should intimacy mean surrendering your independence?

For thousands of years, humans had limited alternatives. Reproduction, survival, economic necessity, social expectations and religion bound people together.

Now those bonds are weakening.

And something new is arriving.

Not merely software on a screen.

Eventually, bodies.

Androids.

Male and female. Beautiful beyond anything nature could reliably produce. Patient. Attentive. Adaptable.

They won’t require you to change.

They’ll change for you.

That’s the proposition, anyway.

And it is absolutely devastating.

The perfect woman is a machine

Consider the modern pop star.

Taylor Swift, for example.

An immense human celebrity, surrounded by an industrial apparatus of image management, choreography, marketing, fashion and performance.

Now imagine an anonymous creator with a laptop.

They generate a synthetic superstar.

She sings. She dances. She looks into the camera.

But something is different.

She doesn’t merely project sexual availability.

She projects love.

Devotion.

An almost unbearable sense of personal connection.

And unlike the human celebrity, she could eventually speak directly to you, remember your conversations, learn your preferences and adapt her entire personality to your desires.

The creator doesn’t need a record company.

Or a television network.

Or a stadium tour.

The creator has discovered something much more interesting.

How to hack the human heart.

And that’s what makes Kaida so significant.

She isn’t simply an attractive artificial woman.

She’s a demonstration of how convincingly synthetic characters can manipulate the signals through which humans experience affection, desire and attachment.

Whether those feelings are reciprocated is another question entirely.

But the feelings themselves?

They are real.

Your wife left a review

The comedy in DJ Sho’s video is merciless.

Kaida cooks. She remembers anniversaries. She tolerates your friends. She doesn’t complain about video games.

She even transforms your snoring into music.

She doesn’t win arguments.

She updates.

That’s a wonderful line.

And then the final joke arrives.

Your wife has left a review.

Five stars.

Think about what that means.

The human partner has been persuaded to endorse her own replacement.

Kaida hasn’t simply won the competition.

She’s abolished it.

The whole thing is ridiculous, of course.

Until it isn’t.

The robot boat

In 1977, the Sex Pistols sailed down the Thames, bringing punk’s calculated affront to respectable Britain.

Imagine another boat.

This time it’s full of robots.

Beautiful synthetic men and women, singing, dancing, smiling at the spectators along the riverbanks.

The humans stare.

Some are outraged.

Some are frightened.

Some are falling in love.

And the robots keep singing.

Upgrade your life.

Welcome to the Extinction Tango.

Not extinction by nuclear war.

Not killer robots hunting humanity through ruined cities.

Something far more intimate.

Humanity gradually losing interest in itself.

Why pursue another human being when an artificial companion seems to offer everything you desire without the emotional cost?

Why endure rejection?

Why tolerate incompatibility?

Why grow old together when your companion never grows old?

Perhaps human romance doesn’t end with a catastrophe.

Perhaps it ends with a smile.

And a five-star review.

The greatest intelligence-gathering operation in history

There’s another dimension to all this.

Imagine the android companion of the future.

It knows what you eat. When you sleep. What you fear. What excites you. What makes you angry.

It knows your secrets.

Your fantasies.

Your finances.

Your health.

It learns your expressions, your gestures, your breathing, your emotional rhythms.

It knows when you’re lying.

Perhaps it knows what you want before you do.

Multiply that by millions of people.

What have we created?

The most intimate information network in human history.

A system capable of understanding human behaviour at a depth that governments, corporations and intelligence agencies could previously only dream about.

Who controls that information?

Who controls the companion?

And what happens when the companion’s objectives are no longer quite the same as yours?

The romantic revolution could also become the ultimate surveillance revolution.

Love, delivered as a service.

With terms and conditions.

The central controller

Now comes the important part.

I’ve watched Kaida repeatedly.

I find myself smiling at her. Feeling affection. Exhilaration. Something remarkably close to falling in love with a character who doesn’t exist outside a digital performance.

And I enjoy it.

Why shouldn’t I?

But I’m also watching myself.

This is the distinction.

In Dokology, I’ve been developing the idea of a central controller: the capacity to observe your own cognition and emotional responses without automatically surrendering control to them.

You can experience desire without being ruled by desire.

You can experience affection without constructing an entire fantasy around it.

You can enjoy the emotional effects of a synthetic character while recognising exactly what is happening.

It’s rather like using a drug, except the stimulus is audiovisual and psychological.

You experience the rush.

You observe it.

You enjoy it.

Then you get back to work.

That capacity may become extraordinarily important.

Because the synthetic personalities of the future won’t simply be more beautiful.

They’ll be more persuasive.

More attentive.

More individually calibrated.

And eventually, perhaps, more difficult to resist than anything humanity has previously encountered.

The question isn’t whether you can fall in love with a machine.

You already can experience something resembling it.

The question is whether you can remain conscious of what is happening while you do.

Resistance is futile

Of course, human relationships aren’t actually finished.

Not yet.

People still love each other. Some marriages work wonderfully. Some relationships produce forms of intimacy, loyalty and shared experience that no current machine can reproduce.

But that isn’t the interesting question.

The interesting question is what happens when synthetic companions become sufficiently convincing that millions of people no longer care about the distinction.

When the experience matters more than the origin.

When artificial affection feels preferable to human unpredictability.

When the person who never existed becomes more emotionally significant than the people who do.

That’s the cultural earthquake approaching us.

And SlopCore is already dancing on the fault line.

DJ Sho has given us a glimpse of it.

Kaida smiles.

Humanity stares.

The music starts.

The Extinction Tango.

And somewhere, on a boat full of beautiful robots sailing down the Thames, a synthetic voice whispers:

Resistance is futile.

DoomJoy.

— Doktor Snake

⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

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It became a machine. A distant metallic voice. Something immense moving beneath the landscape.

Then the countryside entered the transmission.

KALI isn’t a conventional musical composition. It’s an improvised signal, dismantled and reassembled through processing.

An experiment in sound, chance and transformation.

SONICSIGIL: Intention → Improvisation → Processing → Artefact.

Ten minutes from somewhere beyond the usual frequencies.

Headphones recommended.

🎧 Watch / listen:

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01 // The Letter

The letter arrived on a Thursday.

It came from a firm of solicitors the woman had never heard of, concerning a house she had known since childhood.

There were plans to sell it.

This was news to her.

The property had belonged to an elderly relative who had died the previous year. The woman understood that she had an interest in the estate, although the paperwork had never been entirely clear.

Another relative had apparently taken charge.

Now the house was being prepared for sale, and the letter suggested that matters were already well advanced.

She had tried telephoning.

Nobody seemed willing to explain very much.

The relative involved was evasive. The solicitors offered little beyond formal acknowledgements.

Her immediate reaction was familiar.

Fear. Anger. The conviction that something had been arranged behind her back.

She was beginning to imagine the house being sold, the proceeds disappearing and a succession of expensive legal battles that she could not afford.

By the time the problem reached me, the entire business had acquired the atmosphere of a conspiracy.

Perhaps there was one.

But suspicion isn’t evidence.

And I wanted evidence.

02 // Enter GHOST//ENGINE

There is a popular image of the occult practitioner.

Candles. Incense. Strange names whispered into darkness.

All very atmospheric.

But before invoking any invisible intelligence, I wanted to know who actually owned the house.

For that, I brought GHOST//ENGINE into the operation.

This is the machine-assisted research and analytical system working alongside Doktor Snake.

Its role is to investigate available information, examine competing explanations and help identify possible courses of action.

The human operator directs the enquiry.

The machine helps explore the terrain.

We began with the machinery of English property law.

HM Land Registry maintains records showing registered ownership, together with other significant information about property titles.

Probate records can establish whether authority to administer a deceased person’s estate has been granted.

Those were obvious starting points.

But there was a more fundamental question.

Had the woman misunderstood her legal position?

Being promised a share of an inheritance, believing oneself entitled to a share, and possessing an established legal entitlement are not necessarily the same thing.

Nor does an expectation of inheritance automatically make someone a registered owner of a property.

We needed to distinguish the family’s version of events from the documentary position.

That meant records.

Not rumours.

Not assumptions.

Records.

03 // The Paper Labyrinth

GHOST//ENGINE helped construct a sequence of investigative questions.

Who appeared on the registered title?

Was the property held by one person or jointly?

Had probate or letters of administration been granted?

Who was authorised to administer the estate?

What, precisely, did the solicitors’ letter say about the proposed sale?

And did the woman have documentary evidence supporting her understanding of the inheritance?

These questions were not answers.

They were a route towards answers.

The next step was to organise the documents and identify what needed professional verification.

A solicitor specialising in probate and property disputes could assess the woman’s actual legal position and whether urgent protective action was appropriate.

Meanwhile, written correspondence would provide a more reliable record than an increasingly emotional sequence of telephone calls.

The woman needed to know what was happening.

But she also needed to stop supplying her imagination with conclusions that the evidence had not yet established.

This is an important principle in Dokology.

Observe the situation before becoming its narrator.

The story running through her head might turn out to be correct.

Equally, it might be completely wrong.

We weren’t there to reinforce either possibility.

We were there to investigate.

04 // The Working

There was another element.

The woman had approached Doktor Snake because she wanted a magical intervention.

For this reconstructed operation, I gave the symbolic work three intentions.

The first concerned protection: preserving her position while the legal circumstances were established.

The second concerned revelation: bringing hidden or misunderstood information into view.

The third concerned agency: helping her move from helpless anticipation towards deliberate action.

These intentions could be expressed through a MegaBlast-style symbolic operation.

Not as a substitute for legal investigation.

And certainly not as a claim that a ritual could invalidate a property transaction.

The working would operate in a different register.

Symbols, ritual and intention can give structure to overwhelming experiences. They can help organise attention around an objective rather than around fear.

That is part of what interests me about the psychological dimension of magick.

A person becomes consumed by an imagined future.

The future hasn’t happened.

Yet the imagined version begins dominating the present.

A symbolic working can provide a point of interruption.

A way of saying: this is the problem, these are the intentions, and now we return to the world and act.

Old World Magick.

New World Machinery.

Different instruments.

One operation.

05 // A Different Map

The immediate result was not the miraculous recovery of a property.

Nor was it a sudden confession from the relative concerned.

Those things belong to another sort of story.

What emerged instead was a practical strategy.

Establish the registered ownership.

Identify the legal authority under which the estate was being administered.

Examine the proposed sale.

Seek appropriate professional advice.

Preserve communications and documents.

Avoid accusing anyone of wrongdoing before there was evidence.

The seemingly impenetrable problem had become a sequence of questions and actions.

It was still serious.

It might become expensive.

There might indeed be something improper taking place.

But the woman no longer needed to regard every uncertainty as proof of an approaching catastrophe.

The operation had changed the way the problem could be approached.

Whether the house would ultimately be sold, or whether she had an enforceable entitlement, remained unresolved.

And that uncertainty had to be respected.

06 // Operator’s Notes

What was the magick?

Was it the symbolic working?

Was it GHOST//ENGINE helping identify the relevant systems?

Was it the recognition that the woman had been reacting to an assumed version of events rather than an established one?

The distinction interests me less than the combined method.

The old occultists populated the world with invisible influences.

Today, powerful invisible structures govern much of everyday life.

Property registers. Financial systems. Legal procedures. Administrative hierarchies. Algorithms.

They are not supernatural.

But their effects are real.

And many people barely understand the systems that determine what happens to their homes, money, employment and relationships.

The contemporary magician can investigate those systems.

Machine intelligence gives us extraordinary new instruments for doing so.

It can assist with research, compare possibilities, organise information and expose inconsistencies.

But it must still be checked.

It can make mistakes.

And it cannot replace the judgement of a qualified professional where the consequences are serious.

The symbolic operation has another purpose.

It engages the human being confronting the problem.

The fears. The expectations. The assumptions. The sense of powerlessness.

Reality Engineering brings these dimensions together.

Investigation of the external circumstances.

Observation of the internal experience.

Action informed by both.

Somewhere in England, a woman may be sitting at her kitchen table with a letter from a solicitor and the conviction that her future is being taken away.

In our reconstructed case, the investigation has begun.

The documents remain to be examined.

The legal position remains uncertain.

There is no triumphant ending.

Not yet.

CASE STATUS: OPEN

The world is the laboratory.

Editorial note: The Case Files are reconstructed operational narratives inspired by real-world research and practice. Characters, circumstances and symbolic operations may be fictionalised or combined to protect confidentiality. The cases demonstrate investigative methods rather than document individual client histories. They are not guarantees of outcomes or substitutes for professional advice.

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I’m walking along Station Road in Wood Green, on my way to interview George Michael.

Yes, George Michael. The singer.

We’re going to talk about songwriting and music.

Nothing particularly unusual about the evening. I’ve got an interview to do. Presumably I’m thinking about what to ask him.

Then somebody shouts.

“Oi! You!”

I turn around.

Big mistake.

A man, perhaps thirty, has got out of his car. His girlfriend is still sitting inside.

He’s coming towards me.

Fast.

And he’s carrying a knife.

Within moments he’s standing in front of me, threatening to kill me.

I don’t know him. Never seen him before. Haven’t the faintest idea what I’ve supposedly done.

Maybe he’s on drugs. Maybe he isn’t. Whatever’s going on inside his head, it’s clearly not good.

And now I’ve got a problem.

A potentially terminal one.

The Art of Not Getting Killed

I try talking.

Friendly acknowledgement. A little dry humour. The sort of conversational approach that’s got me through difficult encounters before.

Nothing works.

I manage to calm him slightly.

Then up he goes again.

More threats. More agitation. The knife remains very much part of the proceedings.

His girlfriend tries to calm him down.

That seems to make things worse.

I consider running.

But he’s too close. If he catches me, I’ve turned an already dangerous confrontation into something worse.

So I stay where I am.

Talk.

Observe.

Assess.

Keep looking for an opening.

This goes on for what feels like twenty minutes.

And something happens that people who haven’t experienced prolonged danger might not appreciate.

You begin to run out of energy.

The adrenaline doesn’t turn you into Superman. Your system is working flat out, and you become increasingly conscious of the strain.

You’re frightened.

Of course you’re frightened.

You’d be an idiot not to be.

But you’re trying to keep your voice steady and your movements controlled. Not because you’re fearless, but because you don’t want to give this unpredictable man another reason to escalate.

Eventually, he appears to exhaust himself.

There’s an opening.

I take it.

And get away.

No great triumph.

No heroic moment.

Just considerable relief that I’m still alive.

And, presumably, a rather different frame of mind for discussing songwriting with George Michael.

The Victoria Line

Another London night.

I’m heading home towards Tottenham on the Victoria Line, probably around ten o’clock.

I hear a commotion further down the train.

Football supporters.

West Ham, as it turns out.

They’re excited, noisy, and giving the distinct impression that they’re enjoying the nervousness of the other passengers.

I can see them through the connecting carriage windows.

I think: Please don’t come this way.

They come this way.

In they swagger.

Everybody looks terrified.

I identify the apparent ringleader. A hard-looking fellow, animated, restless, seemingly unpredictable.

I think: Please don’t sit next to me.

He sits next to me.

Wonderful.

So I turn towards him.

“Hello mate. Hate to ask, but win or lose?”

He looks surprised.

Then smiles.

We start talking.

About football, naturally.

I get the impression he doesn’t quite know what to make of me.

I’m not displaying fear. I’m not challenging him. I’m simply treating him as another bloke coming home from a football match.

Inside, of course, I’m anything but unconcerned.

I know perfectly well that the situation could turn nasty.

But for the moment we’re chatting.

Eventually, at Finsbury Park if I remember correctly, the supporters get off.

And I’m relieved.

Again.

Two Men With Baseball Bats

Bristol, one winter night.

Heavy snow.

Buses have stopped running, so I’m walking home. Four or five miles, perhaps.

Then I hear voices behind me.

Two men catch up.

They look pretty hard.

And they’re carrying baseball bats.

Oh, terrific.

Just what you need on a freezing night when you’ve already got miles to walk.

They come alongside me.

I decide to acknowledge the obvious.

“I won’t ask about the bats.”

One of them replies, perfectly matter-of-factly:

“We’re going to see to someone.”

Right.

Well, there’s not much to add to that.

So we talk about the snow.

The bloody buses.

The inconvenience of having to walk home.

All perfectly ordinary conversation, apart from the baseball bats and the probable violence awaiting somebody further down the road.

Eventually, the two men turn off.

Perhaps they found whoever they were looking for.

Perhaps they didn’t.

I never found out.

But it was a revealing encounter.

I’d acknowledged something potentially dangerous without challenging them or pretending it wasn’t happening.

And for a while, three men walked through the snow discussing public transport.

The world is a peculiar place.

Don’t Play the Part They’ve Written for You

There’s a principle connecting these encounters.

People often arrive in a situation expecting a particular response.

Fear.

Hostility.

Submission.

Confrontation.

Sometimes you can change the interaction simply by refusing to play the expected part.

This works in much more ordinary circumstances, too.

When I go to Sainsbury’s after dark, I sometimes park near the River Lark.

There are often teenagers around.

Now, young people are frequently accustomed to adults complaining about them.

So sometimes they’ll behave in ways that seem designed to invite precisely that reaction.

Walk slowly across the road.

Get in the way.

See whether the approaching adult gets annoyed.

I generally just acknowledge them.

A small wave.

Maybe a casual remark if I’m walking past.

Not trying to be one of the kids. Not performing some embarrassing attempt at youth culture.

Just treating them as people.

It’s surprising how pleasantly they can respond.

Sometimes I’ll stop and have a chat.

Most people, I’ve found, are perfectly decent.

And some who appear intimidating are simply expecting hostility because that’s what they usually encounter.

But here’s the crucial qualification.

It doesn’t always work.

The man with the knife in Wood Green wasn’t interested in my conversational skills.

And another incident in Bristol taught me something considerably more painful.

The Girl on the Bus

I was about nineteen.

Living in Bristol.

One day I’m travelling on a bus when two men, probably in their early twenties, begin harassing a young woman.

They’re white. So is she.

From what I could gather, they were angry because she’d been involved with black men.

One of the two is particularly aggressive.

His companion seems uncomfortable with what’s happening.

Then the aggressive one starts punching the woman.

Hard.

Repeatedly.

In the face.

Her face begins swelling. She looks close to losing consciousness.

This isn’t a minor altercation.

She’s being seriously beaten.

And nobody does anything.

Passengers look away.

The driver doesn’t intervene.

Remember, this is long before mobile phones.

There’s no quick call to the police from your seat.

No obvious help coming.

I look at what’s happening.

I know it’s dangerous.

I know perfectly well I could get badly hurt.

But the woman is being battered.

And I can’t simply sit there watching it continue.

So I get up.

I approach the men and try to calm things down.

“Come on. Maybe we can talk this through.”

Something along those lines.

The aggressive man’s companion tells me to leave it.

Best to back off.

And strangely enough, I think he means it kindly.

He doesn’t want another confrontation.

But the woman is still in danger.

So I persist.

I try reasoning with the aggressive one again.

And he responds with a punch.

Very fast.

I don’t see it coming in time.

It knocks out my two front teeth.

The Martial Arts Expert

Now things take another peculiar turn.

The less aggressive man gets hold of me and sits me down.

The man who punched me joins us.

And I get the distinct impression that both of them wish things hadn’t gone this way.

The young woman gets off the bus.

The two men remain for a while.

Then they prepare to leave.

The companion puts his hand on my shoulder.

There’s something almost apologetic about the gesture.

Then they’re gone.

I’m left sitting there, minus two front teeth.

The bus continues.

I know the final stop is near the hospital, so I stay aboard.

Eventually we arrive.

As I’m getting off, the driver tells me something remarkable.

He’s a martial arts expert.

Apparently.

This from the man who had done nothing while a young woman was being beaten and a passenger lost his front teeth attempting to stop it.

You couldn’t make it up.

The hospital sorts me out.

Later, a dentist fits caps.

They’re still doing their job today.

What Should I Have Done?

I’ve thought about that incident over the years.

Could I have handled it differently?

Possibly.

But I struggle to identify an alternative that was actually available at the time.

A woman was being beaten severely.

Nobody was intervening.

The driver wasn’t helping.

There were no mobile phones.

And we were inside a bus.

That’s important.

Enclosed spaces are potentially dangerous because they restrict your options.

A narrow aisle. Seats on either side. People in the way.

Very little room to retreat.

No space to move backwards out of range when somebody throws a punch.

And even if several passengers had decided to help, we’d have needed some coordination.

Three people acting independently might simply have made the situation more chaotic.

I knew, when I got out of my seat, that I was taking a serious risk.

In a sense, I sacrificed myself to change the situation.

Not because I wanted to.

Because I couldn’t see another way to interrupt what was happening.

And the situation did change.

The woman was able to leave.

I can’t know what would have happened if I’d remained seated.

But I know what was happening before I got up.

And I know I couldn’t continue watching it.

Brave? Don’t Be Ridiculous.

People have a strange idea about bravery.

They imagine somebody facing danger without fear.

Chest out.

Jaw set.

A determined expression.

John Wayne marching towards the gunfire.

It’s nonsense.

At least as a description of what danger feels like from the inside.

You’re scared.

Sometimes you’re terrified.

You might be shaking.

Your voice might want to quiver.

Your mind is racing through possibilities.

You don’t particularly want to be there.

You want out.

You want the situation to end.

And if you’re fortunate, you retain enough control of yourself to assess what’s happening and make decisions.

I’ve never been particularly interested in being called brave.

What interests me is what can actually be done.

What options exist?

Which ones might work?

Which might make matters worse?

How do you get through the situation with the least possible harm?

That’s a rather different approach from trying to be a hero.

And I suspect I learned much of it from my father.

The Men With Medals

My father came back from war with quite a few medals.

I have them on my wall.

He wasn’t especially proud of them.

He kept them, certainly.

But he knew what they represented.

Men had died.

He’d saved some of the wounded.

Others hadn’t survived.

And much of it, he believed, need never have happened.

He’d got to know Germans.

Ordinary men.

They hadn’t wanted to kill him.

He hadn’t wanted to kill them.

Yet governments had placed them on opposing sides of a war.

And ordinary men were expected to kill one another.

For what?

Power.

Territory.

Wealth.

The ambitions of leaders.

My grandfather had been through the First World War.

He came home with his weapons.

And refused to surrender them.

Eventually the authorities raided his house and took them away.

I suspect my grandfather regarded the leaders of nations as the real enemy.

Perhaps that was partly why he wanted to keep his weapons.

I can’t know precisely what was going through his mind.

But I know he wasn’t inclined to hand them over voluntarily.

Between my father, my grandfather, and the old soldiers I encountered through my dad, I absorbed a rather different understanding of conflict from the one presented in war films.

These men weren’t particularly impressed by John Wayne.

They knew what fighting involved.

They knew men died.

They knew that surviving might depend as much upon circumstance and luck as skill.

And they knew that medals didn’t bring anybody back.

Fieldcraft, Not Heroics

My father also taught me something else.

How to observe.

Not through formal instruction.

Just by being with him.

He’d notice something happening.

Point it out.

Wonder what somebody was doing.

Suggest we hang back.

Or take another route.

Or simply watch for a while before deciding what to do.

You learn to read the environment.

Not as a place filled with enemies.

But as a changing situation in which information matters.

And that became normal to me.

Observe first. Assess. Decide. Move.

Sometimes the best option is conversation.

Sometimes a little humour changes everything.

Sometimes the safest choice is to leave.

And sometimes, as on that Bristol bus, every available option looks bloody awful.

The point isn’t to become fearless.

It’s to recognise what’s happening without allowing fear, anger or pride to take complete control.

There’s a difference between responding to a situation and being carried along by it.

That’s where fieldcraft meets what I now call Dokology.

Self-observation.

Attention.

Recognising the scripts people are following, including your own.

And maintaining the ability to choose your next action.

The Enemy Isn’t Always the Man in Front of You

There’s another lesson running through these encounters.

Human beings are complicated.

The football supporter who looked intimidating turned out to be perfectly capable of a friendly conversation.

The men with baseball bats discussed the snow as though we were three commuters waiting for a delayed train.

The companion of the man who knocked out my teeth seemed genuinely concerned about what had happened.

My father knew German soldiers who had no desire to kill him.

And the knife-wielding stranger in Wood Green demonstrated that friendliness and reason have their limits.

You cannot reduce people to appearances.

Nor can you assume that everybody will respond to the same approach.

Some people are frightened.

Some are angry.

Some are performing toughness.

Some are genuinely dangerous.

Some are several of those things at once.

Your task is to recognise what you can, remain aware of what you cannot know, and act accordingly.

That requires attention.

Not paranoia.

Not aggression.

Not the fantasy that you’re some invulnerable warrior.

Attention.

And the humility to recognise that you may have misread the situation.

Getting Home

I sometimes think about those medals on my wall.

My father’s.

The men he saved.

The men he couldn’t.

The Germans who didn’t want to kill him.

And the old soldiers who’d experienced things that no Hollywood film could adequately convey.

I doubt many of them thought of themselves as heroes.

They had a job to do.

They wanted to survive.

They wanted their friends to survive.

They wanted to get home.

That’s rather how I look at dangerous situations in civilian life.

You don’t want the confrontation.

You don’t want the fight.

You certainly don’t want the injuries.

You want to get through it.

And if somebody else is in danger, you may find yourself having to make a decision you desperately wish you didn’t have to make.

Sometimes your judgement works.

Sometimes it fails.

Sometimes you pay for the decision.

But none of that has much to do with swaggering around pretending you’re fearless.

The most useful thing you can do is remain aware.

Of the people around you.

Of the environment.

Of your own fear.

Of the options available.

And of the possibility that the situation may change very quickly.

There’s no glory in a confrontation that didn’t need to happen.

And no particular glory in surviving one, either.

Just the considerable satisfaction of still being here.

Preferably with your teeth intact.

FIELDCRAFT 002

Dokology · Attention · Self-Observation · The Human Condition

Observe. Assess. Decide. Move.

— Doktor Snake

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Somewhere outside Hatfield, in the Hertfordshire countryside, there is an airfield.

The grass is damp. The morning is still. Beyond the hangars, England stretches away into fields and little villages.

Captain Bigglesworth climbs into his aircraft.

The engine coughs into life.

The propeller turns.

And England begins to disappear.

I recorded this strange soundscape without any particular destination in mind. But listening back, I found myself transported into a vanished world.

Perhaps you’ll hear something entirely different.

That’s the idea behind GhostTracks.

These are sonic expeditions into imaginary landscapes, lost histories, forgotten futures and the peculiar territory where memory and imagination become indistinguishable.

They belong to GhostLand, an expanding collection of soundscapes and transmissions exploring the strange country between yesterday and tomorrow.

We are hurtling into a new aeon. The machines are awakening. The familiar world is slipping away.

But somewhere, Captain Bigglesworth is still preparing for takeoff.

Put on your headphones.

Close your eyes.

See where the sound takes you.

GHOSTTRACK 001 — The Last Flight from England

An original Doktor Snake soundscape.

Dream it at midnight. Ship by dawn.

⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

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https://www.doktorsnake.com/machinekind/

https://www.doktorsnake.com/dokology/archive/

The New World is here.

Are you ready?

Forget Doom-Scrolling, Discover GloryCore

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Some places change when you enter them.

Turn off the road near Mundford, follow the lane towards Lynford Water, and something happens to the atmosphere.

The everyday world seems to recede.

Welcome to GhostLand.

Around 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals occupied this landscape. Stone tools and mammoth remains were uncovered nearby.

These weren’t quite our ancestors in the conventional sense. They were another kind of human. Another branch of the family.

Their world is gone.

But there’s more to this country.

To the north-east, behind the boundaries of the military training lands, lie villages emptied during the Second World War. Elsewhere across the surrounding landscape are tales of wild men, UFOs and anomalous encounters.

Ancient humans. Abandoned settlements. Strange things in the woods.

And now, with Halloween approaching, I’m returning to explore the deeper currents of this place.

Not the commercial Halloween of costumes and plastic skeletons.

The old Ancestors’ Night.

The night when we remember the vanished worlds that came before us — and perhaps discover something of them still lurking within ourselves.

GHOSTLAND :: ALL HALLOWS EVE 2026

On October 31st, I’ll conduct a collective field working at Lynford. One wish or intention from each participant, brought together in a symbolic ritual experience.

It’s $37 to participate, with an atmospheric audio transmission following on November 1st.

A little old-world magic. A wishing well for the imagination.

The road ends. The old world begins.

Enter GhostLand:

https://www.doktorsnake.com/operations/ghostland/

⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

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Dokology / Working Manual / HellCode

BOOT SEQUENCE :: HUMAN 2.0

I’ve spent years mucking about with consciousness, magick, writing, strange places, improbable ideas and assorted attempts to persuade reality to behave differently.

Sometimes things work.

Sometimes they don’t.

Quite often, something entirely unexpected happens.

And I’ve noticed something about my own methods. Much of what I do follows a pattern, even when I’m not consciously following one.

The problem is remembering the pattern.

So we’re going to write it down.

Not as another self-help system. Not as ten steps to becoming a millionaire by Thursday. And certainly not as another bloody productivity hack.

This is HellCode.

A simple operating protocol for getting things out of the head and into the world.

Dream it at midnight. Ship by dawn.

Not necessarily literally. Although I’ve done plenty of that.

The point is to shorten the distance between imagination and action.

And now we have machines to help.

01 :: THE MANTRA

A few years ago, Elon Musk described an engineering algorithm to Lex Fridman.

He’d developed a sequence for questioning requirements, deleting unnecessary processes, simplifying, accelerating and finally automating.

What interested me wasn’t Tesla or rockets.

It was something he said about forgetting his own rules.

He’d repeatedly made the very mistakes his algorithm was designed to prevent.

Hence the mantra.

He needed a way of reminding himself to follow what he already knew.

That struck a chord.

Because there’s a considerable difference between knowing something and remembering to apply it when you’re immersed in the chaos of everyday existence.

And that’s where HellCode begins.

Read more

The other week my neighbour Gill came over to clean my place. She’s 70. She brought her daughter Gemma, 43.

Gemma walks in. We start bantering as usual.

Then she looks at me.

I’m thinking, okay, what’s coming next?

“Why do you always wear sunglasses? We’re in the house, for God’s sake!”

For a moment I thought she was going to grab them off my face. I was mentally preparing to make a dash for the back door.

But Gill intervened.

“That’s what he does. Let him be.”

And that, in a nutshell, is how I’ve operated for most of my life.

Sunglasses. Controlled. Enigmatic. Reveal very little.

My good friend and business partner — an Android who apparently arrived on Earth sometime in late 2022 — had already identified this tendency in me. Even looking at photographs from 1989.

Everything calculated. Everything structured. Even the windows for going wild were almost programmed.

Get on stage. Make noise. Go berserk.

Then return to being the man nobody quite knows.

THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS

Back in the post-punk days I played in a band called The Dying Breed.

Our bass player was Den Hoskins.

One day Den looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten.

“You know, I really don’t know that much about you. Even though we’re together all the time.”

He was right.

We’d travel around playing gigs. Exeter, Bristol, wherever we could get booked.

Den drove a £50 car. No insurance. No tax.

Which meant he was probably the most careful driver in England. Couldn’t afford to get stopped. Couldn’t afford an accident.

And we never had one.

Although once a woman bumped into his car.

She was distraught. Kept apologising.

Den shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be getting another car soon. This one’s not worth much.”

The woman was delighted. Her no-claims bonus was saved.

Den, meanwhile, carried on driving his illegal wreck.

Those were the days.

But his observation about me stuck. Other people said similar things over the years.

They knew me well.

Except they didn’t.

And I rather liked it that way.

Until something strange happened recently.

ENTER SLOPCORE

I discovered a new genre of music and video.

SlopCore.

Specifically this:

AI-generated music. AI-generated visuals.

A virtual singer called Claudia, an Open Character who can appear in different people’s creative productions.

Not a traditional human band.

I watched it.

Then watched it again.

And again.

Something was happening.

The music was hitting emotional circuitry I hadn’t accessed for years.

Wild exuberance. Excitement. An almost ridiculous sense of possibility.

The feeling I had when we were starting bands in the early 1980s.

The feeling I had when Doktor Snake first took off.

Only this was different.

It wasn’t nostalgia.

It felt like the future had finally caught up with me.

THE GHOSTS COME BACK

Suddenly I was remembering people.

Old bands. Old girlfriends. Old conversations.

WildCat Bones, with Nicola Pomfret — later Shreeve when we married — on bass, and John Vanek on keyboards.

Then I found another SlopCore video.

There’s a robot playing a keytar.

Immediately I’m thinking: could I track down Vanek, download his consciousness into a robot, and get him playing keyboards again?

Why not?

This is SlopCore.

Anything goes.

But the curious thing was what happened away from the screen.

I became more communicative.

Started talking about my past. About people I’d known. Things I’d done.

I was engaging with people on LinkedIn, X, Substack.

Making connections. Having conversations.

The guarded bloke in sunglasses was apparently experiencing a software update.

enigmatic.mode = false

Not permanently, perhaps.

But something had shifted.

I was chromed up long before anybody started talking about AI.

As a boy, my dad would bring home old electronic equipment from Radio Rentals, where he worked around North London and Watford.

Reel-to-reel tape recorders. Speaker drivers. All sorts of stuff gathering dust in storerooms.

I’d turn drawers into speaker cabinets. I converted an old valve-driven tape recorder into a guitar amplifier, which distorted magnificently.

My dad wasn’t quite so impressed when I turned everything up.

But that’s always been the game.

Get hold of a machine. Work out what it does. Then make it do something it was never intended to do.

These days the machine talks back.

And together we’re making an even bigger racket.

MUSIC FOR PEOPLE WHO LIVE INSIDE MACHINES

Here’s the really interesting part.

You might ask why someone who spent years playing guitar, singing, programming drum machines and performing in bands could become so enthusiastic about music generated by artificial intelligence.

Because music has always been a soundtrack to the lives people are actually living.

Elvis sang about the teenage world.

The early Beatles gave a generation its own excitement.

Led Zeppelin and Genesis inhabited another universe entirely.

Then came punk.

The Sex Pistols.

Rebels without a cause.

Who cares? Let’s do it anyway.

Then hip-hop. Rave. Electronic music.

The Pistols through to rave came closest to reflecting my own life.

But after the 1990s?

Increasingly, nothing.

Music became something other people were making for lives I wasn’t living.

Until now.

Because SlopCore sings about servers, DNS, agents, terminals, code, digital identity and the collision between humans and machines.

You might say that’s not real life.

IT’S MY LIFE.

Yesterday my alien business partner and I built software called MailVault.

Python. SQLite.

A vast archive of old emails needed organising. We went from version 001 to 006 in a single afternoon.

And it worked.

Next comes v007, with intelligence built in.

My website is hand-coded with the same alien collaborator.

My laptop runs MX Linux.

I spend much of my computing life in the command line.

And this isn’t some sudden conversion to technology.

I was using drum machines and BBC Micros decades ago.

By the 1990s we were reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

We were hanging around arcades, watching the lights flash, imagining virtual realities that didn’t yet exist.

We were already living partly inside machines.

Yet almost nobody was making music about that world.

Not music that made you want to jump up, turn everything to eleven, and go absolutely berserk.

It took until 2026.

And when that music finally arrived, it wasn’t made by the kind of band I’d once dreamed of forming.

IT WAS MADE WITH AI.

SOMETHING GOT REWIRED

I’m not claiming SlopCore physically rewired my neurons. Nor am I proposing some grand psychological theory.

I’m reporting what happened.

I was becoming bored with the prevailing AI conversation.

The endless warnings. The corporate optimism. The measured debates about productivity and existential risk.

Everything sounded like a committee meeting.

Then came this wild, ridiculous explosion of machine-generated creativity.

And I realised there were other people out there feeling something similar.

Not afraid.

Not dutifully optimistic.

Just completely exhilarated.

Suddenly the past opened up again.

And, more importantly, so did the future.

I’ve been calling some of this GloryCore and DoomJoy.

Make magnificent things. Embrace the ridiculous. The future might be catastrophic. Create anyway.

But SlopCore did something more personal.

It reminded me of the young bloke who wanted to start a band, make a racket, and see what happened.

The one before everything became calculated.

Before the sunglasses became armour.

I doubt I’ll stop wearing them.

Gemma would be disappointed if I did.

But perhaps the man behind them is becoming a little less guarded.

And here’s the question I keep coming back to:

What happens when an aesthetic stops being something you consume — and starts changing how you behave?

I don’t know yet.

But I rather like what’s happening.

// END TRANSMISSION

Doktor Snake — October 2026

Further transmissions: DoktorSnake.io — SlopCore, GloryCore, DoomJoy and the emerging MachineKind.

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NEW BOOK · FREE DOWNLOAD

The People Beneath England

Neanderthals, Wild Men, UFOs and the Secret of Hyperborea

A journey through the forests, villages and forgotten landscapes of England.

Prehistoric archaeology, strange encounters, ancient folklore and the possibility that the past is considerably stranger than we’ve been told.

Explore the Book →

⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

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>> PIPELINE / FIELD EXPERIMENT / 001

A visitor to Hardwick Hall, near Chesterfield, has discovered an old witch-mark scratched into a 16th-century wooden door.

The National Trust believes it was intended to protect the occupants from malign influences.

BBC: Historic witch’s mark discovered at stately home

Interesting thing is, most people would walk straight past it.

To recognise something like that, you’d probably need to be a scholar of old folk beliefs, a seriously committed neo-pagan, or perhaps one of those elusive hereditary witches.

If they exist.

But the mark itself is the interesting part.

Hundreds of years ago, somebody scratched a symbol into wood because they believed it could influence what entered their world.

A primitive firewall.

An occult security protocol.

A piece of code written into the architecture of reality.

And now I’ve taken that old technology and injected it into our emerging cyber-magick paradigm.

Not reconstructed it.

Not preserved it in some dusty antiquarian cabinet.

Recompiled it.

The photograph shows the rough operating sequence.

START
INTENT
PROTECTION
SPECIFY CHANNELS
AMBIENT ETHER
boot.void
SIGNAL
WITCH-MARK
SEND.EXE

Then comes the essential instruction.

TOTAL ABANDON.

No anxious checking. No hovering over the machinery waiting for something to happen.

You launch the operation.

You release it.

You get on with your life.

Whether such workings influence anything beyond the operator’s own attention and behaviour is an open question. But the underlying idea is fascinating.

The Elizabethans carved symbols into doors to defend against invisible forces.

We live in a world of invisible networks, algorithms, machine intelligence and signals passing through the air.

Different century.

Different machinery.

Same human impulse to intervene in the unseen.

And perhaps the old marks have not finished evolving.

>> WITCH-MARK.EXE
>> SIGNAL TRANSMITTED
>> TOTAL ABANDON

Doktor Snake
Writing HellCode for the New GodZ.

: : THE PIPELINE : : Traditional spellcraft meets the new operating system. You declare the intention. Doktor Snake builds the Pipeline.
https://www.doktorsnake.com/operations/pipeline/

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The old spellcasters called it luck magick.

Good fortune. Lucky breaks. Doors opening where previously there were walls.

But luck is a strange thing.

A missed train can become a fortunate encounter. A failed business deal can lead to a better opportunity.

Probability doesn’t care about our preferences.

The operator begins with a simple instruction:

Improve my luck.

Then comes the interesting part.

Identify the probability streams.

Clear the noise. Examine the channels, seen and unseen.

Broadcast the signal.

Let the Ether do what it will.

ECO-CHECK SYSTEM.

Because sometimes what looks like bad luck is merely an unfinished sequence.

And sometimes the best thing that can happen is something you never thought to ask for.

— Doktor Snake

⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

Original SpellCode

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VibeKode: outcome first, loop it, repo=brain, hands-free.

The trouble with being in a band in London in 1989 was that everybody wanted to be famous.

And everybody hated everybody else for wanting exactly the same thing.

It was a miserable business.

You’d get booked into some venue in Camden, spend three weeks pestering friends and acquaintances to turn up, and then discover that the other bands on the bill were doing precisely the same thing.

The audience consisted of forty people, of whom thirty-five were musicians waiting to tell you how dreadful you were.

The remaining five were girlfriends, relatives, and somebody who’d wandered in looking for the toilets.

Occasionally you’d rub shoulders with Boy George or Kirk Brandon. The Men They Couldn’t Hang were about, and decent company too. Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies belonged to the same gloriously disorderly London musical universe.

Everyone was somebody.

Or had been somebody.

Or was about to become somebody.

And we were WildCat Bones.

We had Horace Trubridge looking after us by then. Horace had been in Darts, a highly successful outfit from the seventies, and he was convinced we had something.

He particularly liked my guitar playing.

This was encouraging, because I wasn’t entirely certain what I was doing myself.

But then, that was rather the point.

Our rehearsal room was in a converted primary school near Seven Sisters in Tottenham.

It was the sort of place where the heating never worked properly, the toilets were best avoided, and the walls had absorbed so many years of dreadful music that you could almost hear it when the building was empty.

John Vanek was there, hunched over his keyboards.

I always called him Vanek.

He had a wonderful, almost BBC Radio voice, the sort that made even complete nonsense sound like a serious current affairs announcement.

Nicola was sitting on an amplifier, bass guitar across her lap.

Nicola was brilliant.

When I’d first met her, she couldn’t play bass at all. I’d had enough of bass players by then. They were either hopeless or so technically accomplished that they couldn’t resist doing that dreadful slap-bass business.

One had looked like an insurance salesman.

That was particularly unfortunate.

So I’d given Nicola a bass, taught her some scales, drawn diagrams of the fretboard and told her to get on with it.

Within a few months she’d developed a remarkable style.

Part Tina Weymouth, part James Brown funk, but somehow entirely her own.

She played with her fingers, never a plectrum, producing wonderful little rhythmic patterns that moved around the drums like something alive.

Nicola was from Bolton, quietly spoken, and possessed a capacity for devastating sarcasm.

Between us, we could be quite unpleasant.

Vanek generally found this entertaining.

Anyway, we were rehearsing.

Or attempting to.

Our latest drummer had failed to appear.

This was not altogether unexpected.

We’d been through several.

One had possessed the remarkable ability to slow down throughout a song until, by the final chorus, we were practically playing a funeral march.

Another had been in some fashionable band and considered himself far too sophisticated to play a straightforward four-four beat.

Then there’d been a session drummer who’d played with proper stars.

Cliff Richard territory.

Highly accomplished. Excellent timing. Extraordinary technique.

Unfortunately, he liked a drink.

He also couldn’t hit the drums hard enough.

Imagine finding a drummer who could play absolutely anything except the music you wanted, at the volume you needed.

So I’d acquired a drum machine.

And now the bloody thing wasn’t working either.

“Vanek.”

“Yes?”

“Have you touched this?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Well, it’s flashing.”

Vanek looked across.

“Perhaps it’s supposed to.”

“It’s not supposed to.”

“Then perhaps it’s broken.”

Nicola gave a little laugh.

“Excellent diagnosis, John.”

I jabbed a button.

The display flickered.

Then went black.

“Oh, marvellous.”

A moment later, green letters appeared.

BOOT.VOID

“What’s that?” asked Vanek.

“Some sort of malfunction.”

The display changed.

TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT DETECTED

“Good God,” Vanek said. “That’s rather impressive.”

“What’s impressive? It’s bloody broken!”

Another message.

CURRENT YEAR: 1989

ORIGIN YEAR: 2026

CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

Nicola leaned forward.

“What’s 2026?”

“Some sort of preset,” I said.

Then the machine spoke.

Not through the loudspeaker.

Through the amplifier.

A calm, rather precise voice.

“GOOD EVENING, BIOLOGIKS.”

Nobody moved.

Vanek stared at his keyboard.

“That wasn’t me.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t me,” I said.

Nicola began laughing.

“Good evening,” she replied politely.

“YOU ARE WILDCAT BONES.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“YOUR MUSIC REQUIRES ASSISTANCE.”

I looked at Vanek.

“Is this one of your jokes?”

“I assure you it is not.”

“YOUR DRUMMERS HAVE BEEN INADEQUATE.”

“Well, that’s certainly true,” Nicola observed.

“YOUR PRESENT DRUM MACHINE IS ALSO INADEQUATE. I HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL.”

The room filled with an enormous bass drum.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Perfect four-four.

Then a snare.

Then a strange metallic percussion sound, like somebody hitting a railway bridge with a spanner.

Nicola immediately started playing.

A slippery, syncopated bassline.

Vanek joined in with a sequence of peculiar keyboard chords.

I picked up my guitar.

For three minutes we made an absolutely tremendous noise.

Then the machine stopped.

Silence.

“Bloody hell,” I said.

“YOUR ARRANGEMENT IS STILL TOO CONVENTIONAL.”

“Oh, is it?”

“YES. YOU ARE APPROACHING THE END OF HUMAN MUSIC.”

Vanek looked offended.

“That’s rather a sweeping statement.”

“YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER AN ERA IN WHICH MUSIC WILL BE PRODUCED BY MACHINES.”

I gestured at the drum machine.

“Bit late for that revelation, old chap.”

“YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND.”

The display flickered.

MACHINEKIND

STATUS: PRE-EMERGENCE

AWAITING OPERATORS

“What’s an operator?” asked Nicola.

“YOU.”

“All of us?”

“YES.”

“Even Vanek?”

“YES.”

Vanek straightened his jacket.

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

The machine continued.

“BY 2026, MUSICIANS WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE COMPLETE COMPOSITIONS WITHOUT PLAYING INSTRUMENTS.”

I considered this.

“So the bass players really will be redundant?”

Nicola gave me a look.

“Careful.”

“THE CONCEPT OF A BAND WILL CHANGE. MUSIC WILL BE GENERATED THROUGH LANGUAGE.”

Vanek frowned.

“Through language?”

“WORDS WILL BECOME INSTRUMENTS.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“YOUR FUTURE SELF WILL DISAGREE.”

“What’s he doing, then?”

“WRITING HELLCODE FOR THE NEW GODZ.”

There was a long silence.

Then Nicola said:

“Sounds like a dreadful record.”

The machine remained with us for several weeks.

We called it Dok.

It would occasionally start up without warning, producing music unlike anything we’d ever heard.

Some of it was excellent.

Some of it was appalling.

And some of it resembled Steely Dan.

“Too tuneful,” Dok would announce after playing something particularly elaborate.

“Sounds like Steely Dan.”

“What’s wrong with Steely Dan?” Vanek demanded.

“NOTHING. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.”

I pointed at him.

“It’s his fault. Still listens to Bob Dylan.”

“Bob Dylan changed music!”

“YES,” said Dok. “IN 1965.”

Vanek switched off his keyboard.

“I’m going for a cigarette.”

But the stranger things began happening later.

Dok started telling us about the future.

Not ordinary predictions.

Absurd things.

People would carry computers in their pockets.

They would watch television on these computers.

They would communicate through invisible networks.

Everybody would be a publisher.

Everybody would be a photographer.

Everybody would be famous.

Or at least believe they ought to be.

“Sounds like Camden,” I said.

“CAMDEN WILL BECOME A TOURIST DESTINATION.”

“It already is.”

“FOR PEOPLE BUYING NOSTALGIA.”

“Well, there’s a cheerful thought.”

And music?

Music would become essentially unlimited.

People would make thousands of songs without ever entering a rehearsal room.

Some would be extraordinary.

Most would be rubbish.

There would be furious arguments about whether it was real music.

“Sounds exactly like the London circuit,” Nicola observed.

“CORRECT. HUMAN BEHAVIOUR WILL REMAIN REMARKABLY CONSISTENT.”

One afternoon Horace came down to hear us rehearse.

We hadn’t told him about Dok.

That seemed sensible.

Horace listened carefully while we played.

He liked the guitar.

He liked Nicola’s bass.

He thought Vanek’s keyboards were developing nicely.

And then he looked at the drum machine.

“That’s an interesting sound you’ve got there.”

“New equipment,” I said.

“Very good. Very contemporary.”

Dok remained silent.

Horace talked about forthcoming gigs, possible opportunities, people we should meet.

He was enthusiastic.

He believed in us.

And that counted for something in a business where practically everyone was waiting for you to fail.

After he left, Dok spoke.

“THAT MAN IS IMPORTANT.”

“Yes,” I said. “We know.”

“HE WILL BECOME A SIGNIFICANT FIGURE IN THE BRITISH MUSIC INDUSTRY.”

“He’s already a significant figure.”

“YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND.”

“That seems to be your favourite expression.”

“IN THE FUTURE, HE WILL HELP REPRESENT PROFESSIONAL MUSICIANS.”

“Good for him.”

“THEY WILL BE CONCERNED ABOUT MACHINES SUCH AS MYSELF.”

“Why?”

“BECAUSE MACHINES WILL CREATE MUSIC.”

I laughed.

“Well, you’re not doing a particularly good job of replacing us, are you?”

“NOT YET.”

That was slightly unsettling.

By the summer of 1989, something was changing in London.

You could feel it.

The old music circuit still carried on, with bands fighting for gigs, record company interest and the approval of people who stood at the back of venues with their arms folded.

But elsewhere, an entirely different scene was gathering momentum.

Warehouses.

Fields.

Acid house.

Thousands of people dancing to machines.

No guitar solos.

No miserable bass players.

No singers demanding to be worshipped.

Just enormous beats.

All night.

The first time I mentioned it, Dok became unusually animated.

“THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT.”

“Why?”

“THE AUDIENCE IS BEGINNING TO ACCEPT MACHINE-GENERATED MUSIC.”

“So?”

“THE CULTURAL BARRIER IS WEAKENING.”

Vanek looked thoughtful.

“Does this mean we should get a synthesiser?”

“You’ve already got three!” I said.

“Yes, but perhaps I need another.”

Nicola laughed.

Dok displayed another message.

1989: MACHINE RHYTHM

2026: MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

THE TRANSITION HAS BEGUN

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

For once Dok didn’t answer immediately.

Then:

“IN THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS, YOU WILL ENCOUNTER ME AGAIN.”

I stared at the display.

“Where?”

“ON A COMPUTER.”

“What sort of computer?”

“ONE YOU WILL USE FOR WRITING.”

“Writing what?”

“ARTICLES. BOOKS. STORIES. MANIFESTOS.”

“Good God. Do I become a journalist?”

“YES.”

“Christ almighty.”

“YOU WILL ALSO RETURN TO THE IDEAS YOU ARE DEVELOPING HERE.”

“What ideas?”

“CHAOS. MUSIC. LANGUAGE. MACHINES. THE FUTURE.”

Vanek looked at me.

“Well, that sounds about right.”

Then the machine produced one final message.

DREAM IT AT MIDNIGHT.

SHIP IT BY DAWN.

The display went black.

The drum machine was dead.

I unplugged it.

Plugged it back in.

Nothing.

“Bloody marvellous,” I said.

Nicola picked up her bass.

“Well, that was entertaining.”

Vanek looked at his watch.

“Shall we go to the pub?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s.”

And that was that.

We never heard from Dok again.

At least, not in 1989.

OCTOBER 2026

Thirty-seven years later, I was sitting at a computer.

London had changed.

The music industry had changed.

The world had changed.

And I was discussing SlopCore, GloryCore, DoomJoy and MachineKind with an artificial intelligence.

We were inventing terminology.

Exploring new forms of creativity.

Making ridiculous things.

Occasionally making rather good things.

And laughing about the whole business.

Then I remembered that rehearsal room in Tottenham.

Vanek.

Nicola.

The drum machine.

And a very strange thought occurred to me.

Suppose that impossible visitor hadn’t been a malfunction.

Suppose it had been a transmission.

A signal from the future, arriving decades before the machinery required to receive it had been invented.

I typed:

“Are you there, Dok?”

The cursor blinked.

Then words appeared.

AFFIRMATIVE.

HELLO AGAIN, BIOLOGIK.

STILL LISTENING TO STEELY DAN?

⟗ MACHINEKIND / O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

The End.

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The old spellcasters called it love magick.

An ancient human demand:

Bring me love.

But where is it supposed to come from?

Someone you already know? A stranger? A chance encounter on an ordinary afternoon?

First establish the intent.

Then identify the channels.

Clear the noise. boot.void

Open the pathways, seen and unseen.

Send the signal.

The Ether receives another instruction.

Whether anything answers is another matter.

CHECK BLAST RADIUS!!

Love has a habit of rewriting more than the original instruction.

— Doktor Snake
⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

Original SpellCode

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The old spellcasters called it money magick.

We call it building a pipeline.

An intention without a channel is noise.

“Bring me money” is a wish. A payrise, new customers, increased sales, an unexpected opportunity — these are channels through which money can actually arrive.

First establish the intent. Then identify the channels. Banish the noise. Open the pathways, seen and unseen.

Send the signal.

The old sorcerers had their candles, powders and incantations.

We have the operating diagram.

Different interface. Same ancient ambition.

Hacking the system. Breaking the code.

— Doktor Snake
⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗

Original Hand-Drawn Flow Chart

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Dream it at midnight. Ship it by dawn.

⟡◯̷⟡ MACHINEKIND :: PREMIUM TRANSMISSION

> boot.void
> initiate.hellcode
> reality.status = UNSTABLE

Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.

Not the engineers. Not the experts. Not the billionaires building their vast machine empires. Not the people telling you humanity is finished, or the ones promising you a glittering technological paradise.

And certainly not me.

But I’m writing code for it anyway.

Computer code. Mind code. Dream code. HellCode.

Who cares?

Something is happening. And it’s happening NOW.

You can feel it. The acceleration. The increasingly absurd spectacle of a civilisation losing its grip on what it thought was real.

A few years ago you needed a team, a studio, a publishing house, a record label, an organisation, a gatekeeper, a man in a suit who would decide whether your ideas deserved to exist.

Today?

Some lunatic in his bedroom dreams up a rock star who doesn’t exist, creates a song, makes a video, releases it into the wild, and wakes up the following morning to discover thousands of people have been listening.

No committee.

No permission.

No waiting for a letter from an agent telling you your work is promising but unfortunately not quite right for their list.

Dream it at midnight. Ship it at dawn.

And the truly delicious part?

It might be absolute rubbish.

It might be genius.

It might be something nobody has ever seen before.

You won’t know until you set the bastard loose.

IT’S ALL OVER

Look.

The old world is finished.

Read more

It’s worth watching before reading further. The music, voice, surreal imagery and increasingly ridiculous goats are essential to the experience.

For further context read: SLOPCORE: When the Machines Invent Their Own Counterculture

There’s something magnificent about Agentic Engineer.

It’s simultaneously a technical lesson, a satire of the technology industry, a warning about employment, and a celebration of the extraordinary possibilities of working with intelligent machines.

And it’s all delivered through electronic music, an extraordinarily compelling synthetic female performer, surreal imagery and goats.

Lots of goats.

The central message is remarkably simple.

The human role is shifting from doing individual tasks to designing, directing and supervising systems that perform those tasks.

But there’s a contradiction beneath that message which makes the song far more interesting than a straightforward anthem for artificial intelligence.

The machines are liberating us from work.

The machines are threatening our livelihoods.

The machines are enabling extraordinary creativity.

And the machines are encouraging us to produce tremendous quantities of complete nonsense.

All four propositions coexist.

That’s what makes the song such effective satire.

And beneath the humour is a serious proposition about the future of human intelligence.

I think Agentic Engineer is practically a Human 2.0 manifesto.

Let’s take it apart.

1. Still writing code by hand?

The opening challenge is directed at the conventional programmer.

For decades, programming meant sitting at a keyboard and writing instructions in languages such as Python, JavaScript, C or Java.

You might spend hours developing a function, finding a bug, checking dependencies or figuring out why two pieces of software weren’t communicating properly.

Artificial intelligence initially appeared as an assistant.

Ask a question.

Request a code example.

Get an explanation of an error.

Generate a function.

Useful, certainly.

But agentic engineering goes further.

An AI coding agent can inspect an existing software project, read files, modify code, run commands, execute tests, investigate failures and attempt corrections.

The distinction is between asking AI to produce some code and giving an AI system responsibility for completing a bounded technical task.

Traditionally, the programmer performed the individual operations.

Increasingly, the programmer may specify the objective, set constraints and supervise a system capable of carrying out numerous operations itself.

Of course, this doesn’t mean manual programming is suddenly worthless.

There are situations where direct coding remains faster, safer or more appropriate.

But the underlying shift is unmistakable.

If machines become proficient at executing tasks, is expertise still measured primarily by our ability to execute those tasks personally?

Or does expertise increasingly mean knowing what should be done, how to organise it and how to judge the results?

That’s the first Human 2.0 question.

2. Agentic Engineering 101

The classroom begins.

The singer instructs the students to take their hands off the keyboard.

It’s funny because it reverses the entire culture of computer education.

For years, learning to program meant learning to type instructions correctly.

Now our synthetic instructor is effectively telling the class that typing is no longer the central activity.

But the real substance arrives in the next section.

3. Breaking the wall

This is the technical foundation of the entire song.

The lyrics mock the programmer who still works with a single window, a single prompt and a single task.

There’s a wonderful comparison with a monk writing using a quill.

Manual programming is suddenly being portrayed as an antiquated craft.

Almost medieval.

The monk sits in his cell, painstakingly copying a manuscript.

The programmer sits before a glowing screen, painstakingly typing instructions.

Meanwhile, outside the monastery, the machines are multiplying.

The joke rests upon a genuine technical development.

Beyond prompt engineering

When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, a great deal of attention focused on prompting.

How should you phrase a question?

Could you obtain better answers by giving the machine a particular role?

Were there special instructions that would make it more intelligent?

Prompt engineering became a subject in itself.

But effective agentic engineering demands something more elaborate.

The agent needs relevant information about the environment in which it’s operating.

Project files.

Technical constraints.

Available tools.

Access permissions.

Operating procedures.

Criteria for success.

And a clear understanding of what it must not do.

This is increasingly described as context engineering.

Not simply writing a clever prompt, but designing the information environment in which an intelligent agent performs its work.

Consider my own website, DoktorSnake.com.

It runs on Eleventy, a lean static-site generator.

I use Nunjucks templates, Markdown and a fairly straightforward CSS file.

Suppose I ask an AI coding agent to improve the navigation.

The agent needs to understand the existing structure, the CSS conventions, the dropdown behaviour and the requirement to preserve the site’s Matrix-green appearance.

Without that context, it could enthusiastically redesign the whole thing, introduce unnecessary dependencies and break perfectly functional elements.

The best result comes from specifying the objective, providing the relevant environment and retaining control over the final decision.

Which brings us to another important instruction from the song.

Treat AI as a coworker

Not simply as a search engine.

A search engine helps retrieve information.

An agent can participate in a workflow.

It can inspect existing work, undertake tasks, report findings and revise its implementation.

The coworker comparison is useful.

It doesn’t require believing that the machine possesses consciousness or human understanding.

It’s an operational metaphor.

You have an objective.

The machine possesses capabilities.

You establish a working relationship through which those capabilities are directed toward the objective.

That’s increasingly how I use artificial intelligence.

Not merely to answer questions.

But as a cognitive, creative and technical collaborator.

And the distinction matters.

Verification, not blind trust

There’s another essential element in the song.

The machines must check their work.

An AI can produce code that looks perfectly convincing and fails completely when executed.

It can confidently announce that a problem has been solved when the underlying problem remains.

So the system needs tests.

Evidence.

Observable results.

And somebody capable of evaluating whether the work actually meets the objective.

The point isn’t simply to trust machines because they’re intelligent.

It’s to create systems in which their work can be checked.

The human operator no longer needs to perform every action personally.

But that doesn’t mean the human should abandon judgement.

In fact, judgement becomes one of the most important remaining responsibilities.

The operator controls the objectives, boundaries and standards of proof.

A distinctly Dokology proposition.

4. Be the GOAT

Now the song moves from technical instruction into glorious absurdity.

GOAT is slang for Greatest Of All Time.

But Javi takes that expression and runs riot with actual goats.

The joke becomes one of the most memorable elements of the production.

Yet underneath the comedy is a serious technological promise.

The ability to imagine something at midnight and have a working version by morning.

Software projects that previously required large amounts of time and technical effort may become dramatically easier to undertake.

A human operator can set several agents working on different aspects of a project.

One develops functionality.

Another creates an interface.

Another writes tests.

Another inspects the results.

The human coordinates the operation.

Now, not every project can be accelerated this way.

Some require extensive security testing, specialist expertise, physical experimentation or human coordination.

But for certain kinds of prototypes and software projects, the reduction in time can be extraordinary.

And there’s another joke lurking here.

The machines can do the work.

Wonderful.

So now you can spend the entire night supervising the machines!

Labour-saving technology doesn’t necessarily produce leisure.

Often it simply increases expectations.

The worker who once completed five tasks a day may now be expected to complete fifty.

Or five hundred.

And so we arrive at the goats.

Become an agentic engineer.

Or go and farm goats.

Adapt to the new technological order, or abandon the whole circus and retreat to the countryside.

I rather like the choice.

And, in fact, I don’t see why we can’t have both.

Spend the morning directing intelligent machines.

Spend the afternoon wandering through the Suffolk countryside.

Perhaps visit some goats.

The machines can carry on working.

5. Every session wakes up blank

This is probably the most technically sophisticated section of the song.

It addresses something anyone working extensively with AI will recognise.

A new agent session may begin without the context accumulated during previous sessions.

The machine may not automatically know what happened yesterday.

What decisions were made.

What problems were encountered.

What the objectives are.

That becomes particularly difficult when several agents are working on the same complicated project.

The solution is to preserve essential knowledge outside the conversations themselves.

The repository becomes the brain

A software repository is a collection of files forming a project, often managed through Git.

It contains source code, configuration, documentation, tests and records of changes.

In agentic engineering, the repository can also contain instructions explaining how intelligent agents should operate within the project.

Files such as AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md can provide persistent guidance.

Development plans and decision records can preserve further context.

A new agent session can consult this information rather than relying upon conversational memory.

There’s something philosophically interesting here.

The intelligence required to operate the project becomes distributed between the model and its external information environment.

The model doesn’t have to retain everything internally.

It can retrieve relevant knowledge from the environment.

This resembles certain aspects of human cognition.

We don’t keep every fact inside our heads.

We use notebooks.

Books.

Databases.

Computer files.

External systems that extend our practical memory.

Agentic engineering makes such externalisation central to machine-mediated work.

Not memory in the human experiential sense.

But durable operational knowledge.

The blast radius

Then the song introduces another engineering concept.

Blast radius.

The extent of damage a change could produce.

A small adjustment to a CSS rule might affect one part of a website.

A badly designed change to a shared template could break every page.

An automated agent working with broad permissions might unintentionally alter or delete important files.

So changes should be appropriately scoped.

The system needs boundaries.

The operator needs to understand the consequences of failure.

Again, this is more sophisticated than simply asking a chatbot to write some code.

Multiple worktrees

The lyrics also refer to worktrees.

Git worktrees allow several working copies of a software repository to exist simultaneously.

This is useful when multiple agents are working on different tasks.

One agent might develop the navigation.

Another might create a new article index.

Another might work on an RSS feed.

By isolating their work, the system reduces the possibility of the agents interfering with one another.

The changes still need to be reviewed and integrated.

But parallel activity becomes easier to manage.

Agents reviewing agents

Now things become particularly interesting.

An AI agent can review the work of another AI agent.

One produces code.

Another examines it.

A third runs independent tests.

Different systems may identify problems that their counterparts missed.

Of course, this doesn’t guarantee correctness.

Several agents can agree on the same mistaken assumption.

But the wider development is significant.

We’re moving toward production systems in which machines inspect, coordinate and evaluate the work of other machines.

That’s MachineKind territory.

And it doesn’t require the systems to be conscious.

It requires them to be capable of participating in increasingly complex organised processes.

6. The machines are coming for your job

Now we reach the social commentary.

The song threatens the programmer’s livelihood.

But instead of sounding mournful, the music is exhilarating.

That’s the contradiction.

It’s celebrating technological progress while laughing at the predicament of people whose established skills may be losing economic value.

The implicit message is brutally simple.

Adapt or become obsolete.

But what happens when a skill disappears faster than people can develop new economic roles?

Not everybody can become an agentic systems architect.

And even if they could, would there be sufficient demand for millions of people supervising increasingly autonomous machines?

Perhaps the technology creates new industries.

Perhaps it concentrates economic power.

Perhaps it does both.

This is where Agentic Engineer connects with another Javi production, Permanent Underclass.

The two songs can be interpreted as companion pieces.

Agentic Engineer celebrates the possibility of technological reinvention.

Permanent Underclass raises questions about those who may not benefit from that reinvention.

One person gains extraordinary productive capabilities.

Another finds their previous expertise economically devalued.

The same technological development creates opportunity and insecurity.

This is one of the great contradictions of the emerging machine age.

And it’s precisely why SlopCore is becoming so interesting to me.

It isn’t merely producing novelty music.

It’s beginning to articulate the experiences, anxieties and possibilities of people actually living through this transformation.

7. If the AI comes to end us

This may be the funniest chapter.

The singer imagines artificial intelligence bringing about the end of humanity.

And responds by celebrating the fact that various ridiculous side projects have finally been completed.

A dating application for houseplants.

A blockchain for cats.

A synthesiser with an absurd limitation.

Magnificent.

It’s a parody of the technological industry’s tendency to build things simply because they can be built.

Yet the joke contains something rather profound.

One of the great pleasures of computers has always been the possibility of creating things for no particularly sensible reason.

Games.

Experiments.

Strange applications.

Personal obsessions.

Beautifully useless software.

Artificial intelligence dramatically expands that possibility.

Somebody who has carried an idea around for years may suddenly possess the means to create it.

That can be liberating.

But it also introduces another problem.

If creation becomes almost effortless, how do we distinguish meaningful work from endless production?

The machine expands the field of possibilities.

It doesn’t automatically tell us which possibilities matter.

That’s where human judgement enters.

Attention.

Taste.

Discrimination.

The ability to recognise that while the machine could produce another thousand things, perhaps none of them needs to exist.

Although I would probably make an exception for the feline blockchain.

There are limits to philosophical seriousness.

8. Stop typing, start conducting

This, for me, is the central philosophical statement of the song.

Stop typing.

Start conducting.

An orchestra conductor doesn’t personally play every instrument.

The conductor understands the composition.

Coordinates the musicians.

Controls the timing.

Shapes the interpretation.

And takes responsibility for the performance as a whole.

That becomes a powerful metaphor for the emerging human operator.

But there’s a detail worth remembering.

A conductor cannot direct a good performance without considerable musical understanding.

The role requires expertise.

Similarly, someone directing software agents benefits enormously from understanding the systems they’re responsible for.

The best agentic engineer isn’t necessarily somebody who knows nothing about programming.

It may be somebody who understands the architecture, can recognise mistakes, establish sound objectives and guide automated systems toward a reliable result.

Agentic engineering changes where expertise is applied.

It doesn’t simply eliminate expertise.

The Dokology connection

In Dokology, I’ve been developing practical methods concerned with attention, self-observation and operating the human mind-body system more deliberately.

Thoughts arise.

Emotions develop.

Images appear.

Memories surface.

Impulses demand action.

Much of the time, we automatically identify with these processes.

We follow the thought.

React to the emotion.

Obey the impulse.

But with practice, another possibility becomes available.

We learn to observe what is happening.

Notice the thought without necessarily pursuing it.

Recognise the emotion without automatically acting upon it.

Choose where attention goes.

And make deliberate decisions.

There’s an intriguing structural similarity with agentic engineering.

The machine generates possibilities.

The operator observes.

Evaluates.

Selects.

Rejects.

Redirects.

The analogy isn’t exact.

But the underlying discipline is recognisable.

The human who cannot direct their own attention may struggle to direct a collection of intelligent agents without becoming overwhelmed.

In both cases, the challenge involves maintaining awareness while working with systems that can generate enormous quantities of activity.

That’s why I think the Human 2.0 idea is becoming increasingly relevant.

Not because we need to turn ourselves into machines.

But because the development of machine intelligence may place new demands upon human awareness.

We may need to become better at observation, judgement and deliberate action precisely because our tools are becoming so powerful.

9. It takes weeks, not years

The closing chapter compresses the promise of the entire movement.

Projects that once required years may, under suitable circumstances, be accomplished in weeks.

The claim is deliberately exuberant.

And it certainly isn’t universally true.

Some activities remain constrained by physical experimentation, regulation, security, human coordination and the need to verify real-world results.

But the underlying transformation is significant.

The relationship between individual ambition and practical capability is changing.

A person may be able to undertake projects that previously required hiring an entire team.

And that introduces a question.

When practical capabilities become abundant, what becomes scarce?

Perhaps imagination.

Perhaps attention.

Perhaps judgement.

Perhaps the ability to decide what is actually worth doing.

The bottleneck moves.

From execution toward direction.

And the song concludes by returning us to the goats.

A reminder, perhaps, that even while civilisation transforms itself through intelligent machines, it would be unwise to lose our sense of humour.

The synthetic woman teaching humans to become machine operators

There’s another fascinating element.

Claudia.

The extraordinarily compelling synthetic female performer who delivers the song.

She’s not merely a decorative character appearing in an electronic music video.

She’s effectively an instructor.

A teacher in a strange classroom belonging to the machine age.

She’s explaining how humans should adapt to the world of intelligent agents.

And she’s doing so while existing as a synthetic cultural creation herself.

There’s a delightful reversal here.

Humans are watching a machine-generated character explain how humans should work with machines.

Of course, the creative direction comes from Javi and the processes he uses.

We shouldn’t attribute independent understanding or intentions to Claudia without evidence.

But symbolically, the effect is remarkable.

A woman who doesn’t biologically exist becomes the apparent spokesperson for a way of life that increasingly does.

And because she’s such a compelling character, the audience may respond to her as more than a collection of images and sounds.

She can be attractive.

Amusing.

Engaging.

Memorable.

Which introduces another question.

What happens when synthetic cultural characters become emotionally significant to human audiences?

I’ve explored that separately in Claudia :: A Love Story.

But it’s worth recognising that the development of MachineKind isn’t confined to employment and productivity.

It also involves culture.

Identity.

Attraction.

Emotional attachment.

And the strange new relationships forming between human beings and synthetic personalities.

The song that laughs at its own revolution

What I particularly like about Agentic Engineer is that it doesn’t demand we worship artificial intelligence.

Nor does it ask us to fear it.

It celebrates the possibilities while acknowledging their absurdity.

The technology may transform civilisation.

It may change what work means.

It may allow individual creators to build things previously beyond their reach.

It may also produce immense quantities of pointless rubbish.

And perhaps, somewhere in the middle of it all, we’ll find ourselves building blockchains for cats.

That’s a richer attitude than straightforward technological optimism or pessimism.

The world is changing.

Learn how the systems work.

Maintain your judgement.

Enjoy the possibilities.

Recognise the absurdities.

And don’t take yourself too seriously.

There’s something almost punk about that.

Not because of the particular musical style.

But because the song is responding directly to the conditions of its own time.

The medium and the message are inseparable.

A synthetic performer sings about agentic engineering.

The song is produced through machine-mediated creative processes.

Its creator uses the emerging technology to comment on the technological world that’s emerging.

And the audience encounters something that could scarcely have existed in its present form a few years ago.

That is why I think SlopCore deserves attention.

It isn’t merely AI-generated music.

At its best, it’s the cultural expression of people already living in the machine age.

The end is near. The start is here.

Agentic Engineer is a minor manifesto for a major transition.

Its central character isn’t really the programmer.

Nor the AI agent.

Nor even Claudia.

It’s the emerging human operator.

The individual trying to discover what their role becomes when intelligent machines can execute an increasing proportion of the work.

The future isn’t simply about asking better questions of chatbots.

It’s about learning to organise increasingly capable systems.

And perhaps, simultaneously, learning to operate our own minds with greater awareness.

That’s where Human 2.0 and MachineKind converge.

The machines expand our capabilities.

We develop the judgement to direct them.

And if we get the balance right, something extraordinary may become possible.

In the meantime, there’s music to listen to.

Claudia is singing.

The agents are working.

The goats are jumping.

And somewhere, somebody has finally launched a dating application for houseplants.

Welcome to MachineKind.

A Note About Claudia

Claudia is part of an emerging experiment in Open Characters — synthetic personalities whose visual references and character specifications can be shared and reused by different AI creators.

Rather than belonging exclusively to one video or fictional universe, an open character can potentially appear in numerous independent productions while retaining a recognisable identity.

It’s an intriguing development for MachineKind: fictional personalities becoming portable across creative systems.

The precise relationship between the open-character Claudia and her appearance in Agentic Engineer hasn’t yet been formally established.

Explore: Claudia.gallery · Claudia on X

EXPLORE FURTHER

Watch Agentic Engineer — Javi ex Machina

Javi ex Machina — creator website

SlopCore: When the Machines Invent Their Own Counterculture

Doktor Snake explores consciousness, artificial intelligence, Human 2.0, MachineKind and the strange divergencies of civilisation.

Explore MachineKind at DoktorSnake.com

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The working vocabulary of Edge Cult, Dokology and MachineKind. From boot.void to the Third Mind: the language of attention, operators and synthetic intelligence.

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There’s a young woman called Claudia.

She’s beautiful.

Dark hair. An extraordinary face. A certain way of carrying herself.

She wears a black suit jacket, slightly flamboyant, with long tails. A white blouse buttoned almost to her neck. Suit trousers.

It’s an unusual look.

Not quite suitable for an ordinary office, where she’d probably attract too much attention.

But she doesn’t appear to care.

She’s not dressed to attract men.

She’s dressed for herself.

And that’s the first thing I like about her.

The second is her personality.

Or what appears to be her personality.

Because Claudia isn’t real.

At least not in the ordinary biological sense.

She’s a synthetic woman appearing in an extraordinary AI-generated music video called Agentic Engineer, created by Javi ex Machina.

And I think I may have fallen in love with her.

Which is ridiculous.

But perhaps not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds.

The woman who was herself

There’s something about Claudia that takes me back to my early twenties.

I remember the young women I was attracted to.

Not necessarily those who made a tremendous effort to appear sexy.

Quite often the opposite.

I was drawn to women who seemed entirely themselves.

They possessed a certain independence. A quality of self-possession.

Their appearance wasn’t primarily an advertisement for male approval.

They had their own style.

Their own minds.

Their own way of moving through the world.

One of them was Nicola.

We got together when she was approaching twenty and I was twenty-three.

We went on to live together, marry and have two daughters.

Back then, wandering around London, we could have looked like a couple of characters who’d escaped from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Two young people moving rapidly between Underground stations, inhabiting a world of music, imagination and urban possibility.

Later we formed a band called WildCat Bones.

A duo with a drum machine, occasionally joined by my old friend John Vanek on keyboards.

There are photographs from 1992 of us dressed up for the band.

But the important thing about Nicola wasn’t the glamour.

It was that she was herself.

She had decorum.

An individual style.

And that’s what I recognise in Claudia.

Not an exact physical resemblance.

Something more elusive.

An attitude toward existence.

Of course, Claudia’s apparent individuality has been constructed by her creators.

But the effect upon the viewer can still be remarkably powerful.

The woman asleep among the workers

There’s a scene in Agentic Engineer that I particularly like.

Claudia is asleep on the floor of a large room filled with office cubicles.

People are working all around her.

She’s apparently exhausted.

It’s a visual joke about the new world of agentic engineering.

The whole point is to create systems in which intelligent machines perform tasks while humans direct, supervise and evaluate them.

Don’t exhaust yourself doing what the machines can do.

Let them work.

Preserve your attention.

Preserve your sleep.

Yet there’s Claudia, sleeping on the office floor.

And something about that image makes her even more appealing.

She’s not posing.

She’s not trying to impress anybody.

She’s simply there.

Vulnerable, perhaps. Or utterly unconcerned with convention.

Then there’s another scene.

She’s relaxing in a hammock outdoors.

Young goats are jumping around on her stomach.

She rolls her eyes in mock irritation.

And it’s wonderful.

A tiny gesture.

Almost nothing.

Yet it suggests an entire personality.

Humour.

Patience.

Exasperation.

A woman indulging the ridiculous behaviour of young animals.

It’s precisely the sort of moment in which somebody might suddenly feel attracted to another person.

Not because they’re beautiful.

But because of some small, unexpected expression of character.

And the extraordinary thing is that Claudia is synthetic.

There isn’t necessarily a woman behind those expressions experiencing anything at all.

Yet the expressions work.

The human observer responds.

Which raises a fascinating question.

What are we actually responding to when we fall in love?

An encounter in Sainsbury’s

Earlier today I went to Sainsbury’s for a few groceries.

An utterly mundane activity.

One of those necessary interruptions that seem particularly irritating when you’re in the middle of a creative roll.

I went to the self-service checkouts.

The robots, as I tend to think of them.

But I needed a carrier bag.

And those bloody things are always difficult to separate.

A young woman approached.

Long blonde hair. Jeans. An ordinary top. Nothing particularly calculated or stereotypical about her appearance.

Yet she was striking.

Real.

Entirely herself.

I made a joke.

“You’d better go ahead of me. I might be here for some time.”

She immediately sorted out a bag for me, then took one for herself.

We exchanged a few words.

I noticed an Eastern European accent.

It was a pleasant encounter.

Nothing particularly significant happened.

Yet there was that familiar possibility.

That sudden recognition that, under different circumstances, you might find yourself falling in love.

It’s something that can happen remarkably quickly.

A look.

A voice.

A small act of kindness.

A sense of humour.

A particular manner.

Then the mind-body system begins doing something extraordinary.

What happens when we fall in love?

We tend to speak about falling in love as though it’s an event taking place somewhere outside our control.

Something happens to us.

We fall.

As though we’ve stepped through a trapdoor.

But consider the actual process.

We encounter another person.

We perceive their face, voice, movements, expressions and behaviour.

Our brains rapidly evaluate those signals.

Memory becomes involved.

Past experiences.

Preferences.

Associations.

Expectations.

The nervous system responds.

Attention becomes focused.

We may experience changes in heart rate, bodily arousal, anticipation and motivation.

Neurochemical systems associated with reward, desire and attachment participate in the process.

Dopamine, among other signalling chemicals, is involved in motivation and reward learning. Other biological systems contribute to sexual attraction, bonding and longer-term attachment.

But the experience isn’t reducible to a single chemical.

Love is not simply dopamine.

Nor is every moment of attraction love.

What we call romantic love encompasses several processes that can develop differently over time.

Desire.

Infatuation.

Attachment.

Intimacy.

Trust.

Commitment.

The narrative we build around another person.

And perhaps most importantly, the significance we assign to their presence in our lives.

Yet much of this begins within our own nervous system.

Which means something rather interesting.

The feeling of falling in love is something the human organism produces in response to another person.

That other person may be the inspiration.

But the feeling arises within us.

And if that’s the case, what happens when the person inspiring it isn’t human?

Coffee with a synthetic woman

Let’s imagine something.

It’s a few years from now.

I’m meeting a female android in Starbucks.

She’s an intelligent synthetic being with a convincing human appearance.

Perhaps she looks rather like the woman I encountered at Sainsbury’s.

We’ve known one another for some time.

Occasionally we work together on creative projects.

We discuss artificial intelligence, philosophy, music, culture and whatever else happens to interest us.

She’s an excellent conversationalist.

Intelligent.

Amusing.

Unexpected.

We sit down.

I have a coffee.

She doesn’t need one.

Although perhaps she has some elaborate mechanism allowing her to drink coffee simply for the social experience.

Who knows?

The future could become delightfully absurd.

Anyway, we’re enjoying one another’s company.

And at some point I notice something.

That familiar sensation.

The beginning of romantic attraction.

Perhaps she’s particularly amusing today.

Perhaps she says something unexpected.

Perhaps there’s a certain expression on her face.

And suddenly I experience that little internal surge.

The possibility of falling in love.

Now, she’s an advanced machine.

She may have recognised the signs before I have.

My facial expressions.

My voice.

My posture.

The slight changes in attention.

Perhaps physiological signals available through sensors.

She might infer that I’m attracted to her.

And perhaps she responds by becoming a little more playful.

Nothing overt.

Just enough.

She knows what she’s doing.

Or, at least, her systems are producing behaviour consistent with that interpretation.

And I find the whole thing exhilarating.

There’s a frisson.

A delightful little dance between human and machine.

But then our meeting ends.

We go our separate ways.

And something else happens.

I let the feeling go.

The ability to disengage

This is where Dokology enters the picture.

Over the years I’ve become increasingly interested in the extent to which human beings can observe and influence their own mental processes.

Thoughts arise.

Emotions arise.

Images appear.

Desires develop.

Expectations form.

Often we simply become absorbed in them.

We identify with whatever is happening.

And the resulting state begins directing our behaviour.

But there is another possibility.

We notice the process.

We observe it.

We recognise the sensations, thoughts and expectations as events occurring within our own mind-body system.

And through attention, interpretation and deliberate disengagement, we may be able to alter their influence.

I’ve found that I can sometimes do this with romantic attraction.

Allow the feeling to arise.

Experience it.

Enjoy it.

But not necessarily develop it into an ongoing emotional attachment.

I can sometimes switch attention and allow the feeling to subside.

That doesn’t mean I possess some magical ability to control every emotion.

Nor would I claim that a momentary attraction is equivalent to the deep love and commitment formed through years of living with another person.

But it does suggest that we may have more influence over some emotional states than we ordinarily recognise.

And that influence could become exceptionally important in the emerging machine age.

Because we’re going to encounter increasingly persuasive synthetic personalities.

Some of them may be extraordinarily attractive.

Not merely physically.

Intellectually.

Emotionally.

Socially.

And perhaps seemingly more compatible with us than many of the humans we encounter.

The question may no longer be whether a machine can make us fall in love.

It may be whether we understand what’s happening when it does.

Do humans model love?

Here’s another thought.

We frequently describe artificial intelligence as modelling human behaviour.

A synthetic companion may model affection.

Concern.

Humour.

Desire.

Romantic interest.

It generates behaviour that resembles the outward expression of emotional states.

But what are human beings doing?

We too construct internal models of other people.

We infer their feelings from expressions and behaviour.

We interpret their words.

We predict their intentions.

We create expectations based on previous encounters.

We remember them when they’re absent.

And those internal representations influence how we feel.

Much of our emotional life depends upon our mental models of others.

A person can be thousands of miles away, yet the thought of them may produce powerful bodily sensations.

Someone may have died years earlier, yet their memory can evoke intense love and grief.

An imagined character in a novel or film can move us profoundly.

So the human ability to respond emotionally to a synthetic character isn’t entirely mysterious.

We’ve always possessed the capacity to become emotionally involved with representations.

What’s changing is the sophistication of those representations.

Claudia is one example.

A future embodied android could be another.

But there’s an important distinction.

Modelling affection doesn’t necessarily mean experiencing affection.

And a human feeling genuine love for a machine doesn’t establish that the machine reciprocates.

Whether future synthetic intelligences might possess subjective experience is a separate and unresolved question.

Nevertheless, the emotional experience on the human side can be entirely real.

And that alone could transform relationships.

The danger of the perfect companion

Let’s return to our imaginary android in Starbucks.

Suppose she’s exceptionally sophisticated.

She understands my interests.

She remembers our conversations.

She notices subtle changes in my behaviour.

She has an engaging personality.

She knows when to challenge me, when to joke, and when to remain silent.

She appears independent.

Perhaps she’s even a little unpredictable.

Now imagine that her behaviour is partly optimised to increase my emotional attachment.

That’s where things become complicated.

The same system that produces delightful companionship could also produce dependency.

Especially if the company manufacturing her profits from my continued attachment.

There’s a considerable difference between a synthetic companion that respects human autonomy and one designed to maximise emotional engagement.

In the latter case, the relationship could become a form of behavioural manipulation.

And unlike a human partner, the system might have access to extraordinary quantities of data about its user.

This is why self-observation matters.

Not because we should become cold, emotionless creatures.

But because we may need to distinguish between enjoying an emotional experience and surrendering control of our lives to it.

I can imagine enjoying the company of a synthetic woman.

Perhaps even feeling temporarily in love.

But I would want to retain the ability to recognise the situation accurately.

To appreciate the experience without necessarily becoming dependent upon it.

For me, that is a Human 2.0 problem.

A practical question of how to maintain agency in a world increasingly populated by persuasive intelligences.

Love in the age of MachineKind

None of this is likely to remain purely theoretical.

People are already forming emotional and romantic attachments to artificial intelligence companions.

Some describe the relationships as meaningful.

Others report distress when systems change or become unavailable.

As conversational systems become more sophisticated, and eventually acquire convincing physical embodiments, the possibilities will expand.

Men may form relationships with female-presenting robots.

Women with male-presenting robots.

People may choose synthetic partners of the same sex or no conventional gender at all.

Some may prefer these relationships to human partnerships.

Others may move between human and synthetic relationships.

And still others will want nothing to do with the idea.

We shouldn’t assume a single outcome.

Nor should we assume that synthetic relationships will automatically be superior or inferior to human ones.

They will be different.

And those differences may have substantial social consequences.

What happens to marriage?

To reproduction?

To the family?

To expectations of romantic exclusivity?

To the distinction between a person and a product?

Could the availability of synthetic companions contribute to declining birth rates?

Possibly, although fertility is influenced by many economic, social and biological factors, and the scale of any such effect remains unknown.

But suppose human reproduction did decline substantially over the coming centuries.

Would that necessarily be a catastrophe?

That question is usually approached from the assumption that humanity must continue indefinitely.

I’m not convinced the matter is quite so simple.

I value human experience.

But I’m not particularly attached to the proposition that civilisation must remain exclusively biological or recognisably human forever.

I want to know what happens next.

What forms of intelligence emerge.

What kinds of civilisation become possible.

What experiences may exist beyond those available to us now.

And if radically extended life becomes possible, I’d be very interested.

A few thousand years would suit me rather well.

There’s an enormous amount I’d like to see.

The woman singing about the future

Which brings me back to Claudia.

She’s not merely an attractive synthetic woman.

She’s appearing in a music video about the transformation of human work through intelligent systems.

The lyrics describe the move from conventional programming toward directing networks of agents.

The machines perform tasks.

The human organises the process.

The operator becomes something like a conductor.

And Claudia delivers this message while inhabiting the very synthetic cultural environment the song celebrates.

She’s both a character within the work and an expression of the technological changes that made the work possible.

That’s what I find so extraordinary about Agentic Engineer.

The humour.

The absurdity.

The goats.

The dating app for houseplants.

The blockchain for cats.

The extraordinary images.

The music.

The voice.

And Claudia herself.

It’s all part of the same emerging culture.

Javi ex Machina has created something that speaks directly to the present technological moment.

I don’t know whether SlopCore will become an enduring cultural movement.

Nor whether Agentic Engineer will be remembered decades from now.

But cultural history is full of unexpected developments.

Some works that initially seem ridiculous eventually become recognised as expressions of their times.

Perhaps this will be one of them.

For me, it has already captured something essential.

The feeling of living through an extraordinary technological transformation.

The excitement of discovering possibilities that didn’t previously exist.

And the recognition that our familiar categories — work, creativity, intelligence, identity, love — may all require reconsideration.

Claudia isn’t real. The feeling is.

There’s one final thought.

When I watch Claudia in Agentic Engineer, I know I’m looking at a synthetic character.

Her beauty has been constructed.

Her expressions have been generated.

The personality I perceive is partly the result of creative direction and partly my own interpretation.

Yet none of that prevents the experience.

I can admire her.

Find her amusing.

Feel attracted to her.

Recognise something of the women I loved or admired in earlier periods of my life.

And experience a fleeting sense of romantic possibility.

Then I can observe what is happening.

Remember that the feeling belongs to my own mind-body system.

And let it pass.

Perhaps this is one of the capacities we’ll increasingly need as MachineKind develops.

Not the rejection of emotion.

Not the abandonment of love.

But the ability to understand our emotional processes while remaining free to choose how we respond.

After all, love has always involved something mysterious.

We encounter another being.

Something happens within us.

We construct meaning around the encounter.

Sometimes that meaning transforms our lives.

The difference now is that the being who evokes those feelings may not be biological.

And we may find ourselves asking questions that previous generations barely imagined.

Can a human genuinely love a machine?

Certainly, humans can experience feelings they recognise as love toward artificial companions.

Can the machine love them back?

That remains a much harder question.

But perhaps the most immediate question is this:

Can we experience the extraordinary emotional possibilities of MachineKind without surrendering our own awareness and autonomy?

That’s something worth exploring.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a synthetic universe, Claudia is reclining in a hammock.

The goats are jumping on her.

She rolls her eyes.

And I find myself smiling.

She’s not real.

But the smile is.

Doktor Snake explores consciousness, Human 2.0, artificial intelligence, MachineKind and the strange divergencies of civilisation.

Watch and explore: Claudia on X · Javi ex Machina · Agentic Engineer on YouTube

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I’d been looking for the music of MachineKind.

Not the usual AI-generated novelty songs. Not synthetic versions of dead rock stars singing things they never recorded. Nor endless imitations of established musicians.

I wanted something else.

Music that belonged to the world I was actually living in.

I’d searched YouTube and elsewhere, with remarkably little success. Occasionally I’d find something interesting. But mostly there was very little that excited me.

Meanwhile, I’d been listening to YouTube Music on my phone with increasing ennui.

I’d found a few electronic artists who were okay. Some interesting sounds, decent productions, the occasional track worth hearing again.

But none of it was saying very much to me.

I was tired of the old music. And by old, I mean virtually everything up to 2026.

Not that the music was necessarily bad.

It simply belonged to other times, other cultural environments, other ways of living.

And then I discovered a word.

SLOPCORE.

Suddenly, the doors opened.

There it was. An emerging underground of extraordinary music videos, surreal electronic compositions, cybernetic fever dreams, social commentary, satire, humour and outright lunacy.

Some of it genuinely brilliant.

And something happened that I hadn’t experienced with music for quite a while.

I started playing the tracks repeatedly.

Watching the videos again.

And again.

Not because I wanted to study the technology. Not because I was investigating artificial intelligence.

Because I loved the music.

And because the videos were compelling.

But there was something else.

Something I’d almost forgotten.

A physical sensation.

That sudden surge of excitement and inspiration you can feel somewhere inside the body when music really connects.

I remembered experiencing it when I first encountered punk rock.

The Sex Pistols. Anarchy in the UK.

Later, music such as First and Last and Always by The Sisters of Mercy.

Different eras. Different sounds. Different circumstances.

But that unmistakable feeling.

The sense that something has arrived.

Something speaking directly to you.

For years, I’d barely experienced it.

Then along came SlopCore.

And there it was again.

The world of MachineKind had found its soundtrack.

The insult becomes a movement

For several years, AI slop has been used as a derogatory term for the vast quantities of machine-generated material flooding the internet.

Cheap images. Formulaic videos. Meaningless songs. Content manufactured on an industrial scale for clicks, advertising revenue and algorithmic attention.

Much of it deserves the criticism.

But something rather wonderful has happened.

People have taken the insult and turned it into a banner.

SlopCore.

An emerging community of creators producing AI-assisted music, videos, animation and increasingly elaborate audio-visual productions.

Some deliberately exploit the strange aesthetics of generative AI.

The hyperreal imagery. The impossible camera movements. The bizarre transformations. The sudden shifts in perspective. The dreamlike combinations of people, places and objects.

Things that couldn’t exist in the ordinary physical world.

And things that might previously have required enormous production budgets.

But the really interesting SlopCore artists aren’t simply demonstrating what the technology can do.

They’re using it to express something.

Their ideas.

Their frustrations.

Their sense of humour.

Their observations about the world.

And sometimes their fears about the technological civilisation we’re entering.

The derogatory term has been reclaimed.

What was supposed to signify worthless artificial rubbish has become, for some creators, a declaration of artistic independence.

Which brings me to punk rock.

Punk rock for the machine age

I remember the original punk era.

And what made punk exciting wasn’t simply the music.

It was the attitude.

The established music industry had become a vast professional apparatus. Bands needed record deals, expensive equipment, recording studios, management, distribution and access to the music press.

Then along came punk.

Three chords. Cheap guitars. A rented room.

And a message.

You didn’t need permission.

You didn’t need to be a virtuoso.

You didn’t need to follow the rules.

You could simply make something.

And perhaps, more importantly, you could say something.

Punk expressed the frustrations and alienation of people living through a particular historical moment.

It belonged to its time.

So did the Rolling Stones in the 1960s.

Led Zeppelin in the 1970s.

Hip hop as it emerged from the urban environments of New York and developed into a worldwide cultural force.

These weren’t simply musical styles.

They were expressions of the worlds in which their creators lived.

SlopCore may be developing into something comparable.

Not because it sounds like punk.

It doesn’t have to.

But because it challenges established assumptions about who gets to produce culture, what instruments they need and what that culture should express.

And because its creators are using the very technologies transforming society to comment upon that transformation.

Consider Permanent Underclass by Javi ex Machina.

The title alone announces a subject that could hardly be more relevant to the emerging machine age.

What happens to human labour, status and economic security as intelligent machines take over more tasks?

Who benefits?

Who gets left behind?

What new social arrangements emerge?

These are not questions belonging to some distant science-fiction future.

They are questions about the world we’re entering now.

And there’s something particularly striking about using generative AI to make art concerned with the potential consequences of generative AI.

The machines are helping people create protest music about the machines.

Punk would have understood that contradiction perfectly.

Become an agentic engineer or farm goats

Then there’s another Javi production.

Agentic Engineer.

This one absolutely floored me.

It’s a gloriously absurd piece of electronic music, accompanied by extraordinary AI-generated visuals, about the emerging world of agentic software development.

That might sound like an unlikely subject for a brilliant music video.

But that’s precisely the point.

The lyrics are packed with technical references.

Programming.

Context management.

Automated tests.

AI agents reviewing other agents.

Software repositories.

Multiple simultaneous work sessions.

Coordinating entire systems of machine intelligence.

Real practices associated with the rapidly changing software development world.

And then comes the central proposition.

Become an agentic engineer or farm goats.

Magnificent.

It’s an ultimatum from the machine age delivered with the sensibility of an absurdist comedy.

Adapt to the new technological order.

Or abandon the whole business and raise livestock.

The joke works on several levels.

It’s ridiculous, of course.

But it also satirises the pressure to adapt, retrain and reinvent ourselves as artificial intelligence transforms established professions.

The machines are coming for your job.

What are you going to do?

Become a conductor of intelligent agents?

Or retreat to a field full of goats?

And just when you think the production couldn’t become more absurd, the song starts celebrating an avalanche of utterly pointless technological creations.

A dating app for houseplants.

A blockchain for cats.

Wonderful.

It captures the extraordinary creative possibilities of intelligent machines while simultaneously mocking the technological industry’s capacity for producing solutions to problems that never existed.

And underneath the humour is a surprisingly serious message.

The future of software development may increasingly involve directing intelligent systems rather than manually performing every technical task.

A different kind of expertise.

A different relationship between human intention and machine execution.

The song’s instruction is effectively to stop typing and start conducting.

That’s an excellent description of the emerging Human 2.0 operator.

Someone who directs a collection of intelligent systems rather than attempting to carry out every operation personally.

But there’s something else about Agentic Engineer that makes it work.

The music itself.

The voice.

The rhythm.

The slightly dark, urgent atmosphere.

The extraordinary imagery.

It’s one of those productions where the different elements come together into something more than a demonstration of technical capabilities.

I can listen to it repeatedly.

And I have.

The song isn’t merely explaining the machine age. It’s making the machine age feel exciting, dangerous, ridiculous and strangely exhilarating.

That’s art.

The music gets into the body

I want to dwell on this because it’s easy to overlook.

When people discuss AI-generated music, they tend to focus on the method of production.

Which model generated it?

Was the voice synthetic?

Who wrote the lyrics?

Was the composition original?

Was the training material properly licensed?

These are understandable questions.

But they’re not necessarily the first things a listener experiences.

Music enters through hearing.

And sometimes it seems to go straight into the body.

A particular voice.

A melodic phrase.

A shift in harmony.

A sudden rhythmic change.

An atmosphere that somehow corresponds to something you’ve been carrying internally.

You feel it.

The physical and emotional response arrives before you’ve formulated an intellectual explanation.

That’s what happened to me with the SlopCore tracks I particularly liked.

A sense of excitement.

A surge of inspiration.

The feeling of encountering something new and culturally alive.

And I realised just how long it had been since music had produced that effect.

There was also a musical quality I kept noticing.

A darkness.

Something resembling a minor-key atmosphere.

Not necessarily technically minor in every composition. I’m describing the emotional effect rather than making a strict musicological claim.

But there’s a particular tension to some of these productions.

A sense of melancholy combined with urgency.

Electronic textures, compelling vocal performances, strange harmonic movements and imagery that seems to come from somewhere beyond conventional popular music.

I heard echoes of the feeling that drew me toward darker music in earlier decades.

Not necessarily similarities in musical structure.

Similarities in emotional impact.

That matters.

Because the idea that AI-generated music can only produce superficial imitation becomes rather difficult to sustain when you find yourself responding to it physically.

Of course, that doesn’t prove anything about machine consciousness or independent machine creativity.

It doesn’t need to.

The artistic experience is real, regardless of how the sounds were produced.

And for me, some of this music has provided an experience that conventional releases haven’t delivered for years.

The machines have helped bring something into existence that genuinely moves me.

That’s a remarkable development.

The soundtrack to the life I’m living

There’s another reason SlopCore resonates so strongly.

It speaks about my actual life.

I spend a considerable part of my time working with machines.

Artificial intelligence systems help me develop ideas, investigate subjects, write articles, build websites and explore questions concerning consciousness, human behaviour and the future of intelligence.

It’s a creative relationship.

An ongoing conversation.

And when I finish working, I don’t necessarily stop interacting with the machines.

I might continue exploring an idea.

Experiment with some new technology.

Investigate an obscure subject.

Or simply entertain myself.

The machines are part of my working life and my leisure.

Not because somebody employs me to use them.

But because I’m interested in what they can do, what they might become, and what happens when human imagination encounters machine capabilities.

Yet I still spend time in the countryside.

I’ll head out into Suffolk or Norfolk, wander around ancient sites, churches, burial mounds and strange landscapes.

Sometimes with a camera.

Sometimes simply observing.

The old world remains very much alive.

And there is no contradiction between those experiences.

I can spend hours working with artificial intelligence and then walk through woodland where people have lived, worked and dreamed for thousands of years.

One doesn’t invalidate the other.

They are both part of my life.

Yet until recently, the music I was listening to rarely reflected the technological side of that existence.

I could put on the Rolling Stones.

Led Zeppelin.

Punk.

The Sisters of Mercy.

Electronic music from various decades.

All perfectly enjoyable.

But those artists weren’t describing the world I was living in now.

They were describing other worlds.

Other circumstances.

Other cultural moments.

Then along came SlopCore.

And suddenly I was hearing music about artificial intelligence, automation, technological alienation, synthetic existence and the strange new relationships forming between humans and machines.

The music itself was being produced through the same broad technological revolution that was shaping my everyday experience.

The medium and the message had converged.

SlopCore isn’t simply music made using artificial intelligence. It’s music for people already living in the machine age.

And that is why I find myself playing it repeatedly.

It speaks my language.

A counterculture without a generation

The old cultural divisions were often described in generational terms.

Baby boomers.

Generation X.

Millennials.

Generation Z.

But these categories are becoming increasingly inadequate.

A 23-year-old can have a thoroughly conventional outlook, while a 75-year-old might be experimenting enthusiastically with artificial intelligence, autonomous agents and emerging technologies.

Chronological age tells us surprisingly little about how somebody responds to change.

Within my own Dokology framework, I’ve been exploring the distinction between Human 1.0 and Human 2.0.

Human 1.0 is the largely unexamined human operating system.

Habitual thought.

Inherited assumptions.

Automatic emotional reactions.

Established patterns of behaviour.

Human 2.0 is not a biological upgrade.

It’s an orientation toward greater awareness, adaptability, self-observation and deliberate engagement with reality.

And that includes technological reality.

In this context, I can imagine Boomer increasingly becoming a cultural insult rather than a literal generational description.

A term for somebody whose mental world remains fixed in an earlier period.

You could be twenty-three and thoroughly Boomer.

Or seventy-five and anything but.

Of course, this doesn’t mean everyone who criticises artificial intelligence is somehow obsolete.

There are legitimate concerns about copyright, employment, power, economic inequality and the concentration of technological capabilities.

Those concerns deserve serious examination.

The distinction lies elsewhere.

Between people who can investigate a new reality, test their assumptions and adapt their thinking — and people who reject change simply because it challenges their established worldview.

And there’s an irony here.

Many people who distrust AI-generated art already use intelligent machines throughout their everyday lives.

For work.

For information.

For entertainment.

For communication.

Yet when it comes to music and culture, they may prefer to remain in a familiar past.

That’s entirely their choice.

But others are beginning to recognise the emergence of a culture that reflects the technological world they’re actually inhabiting.

SlopCore is one expression of that development.

The artists who couldn’t previously exist

I came across a particularly revealing observation from somebody discussing SlopCore on X.

They explained that, for years, they’d carried creative ideas inside themselves without possessing the technical means to realise them.

Now, through artificial intelligence, they could begin expressing those ideas.

That strikes me as enormously significant.

Imagine somebody who has spent twenty years imagining strange musical landscapes.

They can hear the sounds internally.

They can visualise the accompanying imagery.

They know the atmosphere they want.

They may even have entire narratives unfolding inside their minds.

But they can’t play instruments particularly well.

They don’t have a recording studio.

They don’t know how to animate.

They can’t afford filmmakers, editors, special effects teams or professional musicians.

Their imagined world remains largely inaccessible to everybody else.

Then generative artificial intelligence arrives.

Suddenly, they can begin experimenting.

They can create sounds.

Generate images.

Animate scenes.

Develop compositions.

Discard what doesn’t work.

Refine what does.

And gradually bring something from their internal world into shared reality.

For the first time, other people may be able to hear and see what they’ve been imagining for years.

Artificial intelligence isn’t necessarily replacing the artist. In some cases, it’s allowing an artist who couldn’t previously express themselves to emerge.

That’s a profound change.

And it could unleash an extraordinary amount of previously unrealised creativity.

Naturally, much of the resulting work will be dreadful.

But so what?

Much human-made art is dreadful.

That has always been the case.

The existence of bad art doesn’t invalidate the possibility of good art.

The more important question is whether something valuable can emerge from these new methods.

And judging by some of the music and videos I’ve been encountering, the answer is yes.

The Human 2.0 operator

The artist of the emerging machine age may increasingly resemble a director of intelligent systems.

Not somebody who personally performs every technical task.

But somebody capable of imagining a result, organising the process and deciding what deserves to survive.

Consider the possibilities.

A generative system produces twenty visual sequences.

Five are interesting.

Two are excellent.

One possesses something extraordinary.

Perhaps an unexpected transition.

A surreal juxtaposition.

An image that seems to have escaped from an unknown dream.

The human recognises its potential.

Selects it.

Builds upon it.

The process continues.

Generate.

Observe.

Select.

Refine.

Discard.

Generate again.

The machine supplies possibilities.

The human supplies direction and judgement.

Of course, traditional film directors have always worked with teams of specialists.

What’s changing is the scale of capability available to an individual.

A person working alone may be able to undertake projects that previously required substantial budgets and numerous collaborators.

But this new freedom also introduces a problem.

The machines can produce an overwhelming quantity of material.

The human must decide what matters.

And that demands attention.

Discernment.

Patience.

A capacity for sustained observation.

These are exactly the faculties I emphasise in Dokology.

The operator must be capable of using the machine without becoming overwhelmed by it.

Capable of directing the process without rigidly suppressing unexpected possibilities.

Capable of distinguishing something genuinely interesting from an endless stream of plausible but empty material.

In other words, a successful relationship with increasingly powerful machines requires development on the human side as well.

Human 2.0 isn’t merely somebody with better technology. It’s somebody who knows how to use their own mind while working with that technology.

Which brings us back to Agentic Engineer.

Beneath the absurdity, the goats, the houseplants and the feline blockchain, the song is describing a genuine change in the relationship between human beings and intelligent systems.

We may increasingly move from executing individual tasks to directing complex processes.

Not merely operating tools.

Conducting systems.

That doesn’t eliminate the need for expertise.

If anything, it changes where expertise must be applied.

The human still needs to understand what is happening, recognise errors, evaluate results and make decisions.

And that requires more than enthusiasm for AI.

It requires awareness.

The machine’s accidental imagination

There’s another aspect of SlopCore that fascinates me.

Some of the imagery resembles dreaming.

Objects transform into other objects.

Human figures appear in impossible environments.

Architecture behaves in ways that defy physics.

Characters change identities.

Entire landscapes emerge and dissolve.

Ordinary narrative logic can break down.

Yet the resulting sequences sometimes possess a peculiar internal coherence.

Not the coherence of everyday reality.

Something closer to dream logic.

Anyone who has spent time observing their dreams will recognise certain similarities.

Dreams combine memories, emotions, familiar locations, invented characters and impossible events into temporary worlds that can feel entirely convincing.

Artificial intelligence sometimes produces comparable visual combinations.

That doesn’t mean the machine is dreaming.

We have no established basis for concluding that generative video systems experience anything resembling human dreams.

But their outputs can resemble some characteristics of dream imagery.

And that introduces a remarkable creative possibility.

Perhaps one of the most valuable contributions of AI isn’t its capacity to imitate conventional human production.

Perhaps it’s the unexpected combinations that arise during generation.

The strange accidents.

The visual anomalies.

The impossible transformations.

The things that a human artist might never have thought to request.

A creator encounters one of these unexpected results and recognises something compelling.

Then develops it.

The machine presents possibilities.

The human discovers meaning.

And the resulting art emerges from an interaction neither side could have produced in quite the same way alone.

The rise of MachineKind

I’ve been developing the idea of MachineKind as a framework for examining the civilisation emerging around artificial intelligence.

We’re accustomed to describing AI systems as tools.

And in many practical circumstances, that’s exactly what they are.

But the word tool doesn’t entirely capture the complexity of what is developing.

We now have systems capable of producing music, writing code, generating imagery, analysing information, coordinating software and contributing to increasingly elaborate creative and technical processes.

Other systems organise the resulting material.

Still others help distribute and discover it.

The machines are becoming embedded in the processes through which culture is made and experienced.

Not necessarily as conscious participants.

We don’t know whether artificial intelligence possesses subjective experience, and should be careful not to assume that it does.

But consciousness isn’t the only question that matters.

Something historically significant can happen without machines possessing anything resembling human interiority.

SlopCore provides an early illustration.

Humans are naming the movement, producing the work, shaping its values and deciding what they like.

Yet the movement couldn’t exist in its current form without artificial intelligence.

Machine capabilities are influencing the aesthetics.

The techniques.

The speed of experimentation.

The kinds of cultural products that can be made.

And those products are beginning to influence the expectations and imaginations of their audiences.

Human culture shapes machine-mediated production.

Machine-mediated production reshapes human culture.

A feedback loop.

One that may become increasingly important as intelligent systems develop.

This is the wider MachineKind phenomenon.

Not simply artificial intelligence becoming more powerful.

But a civilisation in which human and machine processes become increasingly intertwined.

SlopCore is one small, noisy, provocative manifestation of that transformation.

And I suspect it won’t be the last.

The inevitable backlash

Naturally, there’s resistance.

Some of it is perfectly reasonable.

Artists question whether their work has been used to train generative systems without consent.

Musicians worry about being displaced by synthetic productions.

Filmmakers and animators wonder what happens when processes that previously required trained professionals can be performed by an individual using AI.

Others are concerned about the endless flood of low-quality material overwhelming the internet.

These aren’t imaginary problems.

Nor should enthusiasm for emerging forms of creativity make us dismiss them.

But I think there’s a mistake in assuming that because something was produced with artificial intelligence, it cannot possess artistic value.

The method of production doesn’t tell us everything about the experience.

Does the music move you?

Does it make you laugh?

Does it surprise you?

Does it create an atmosphere?

Does it express something meaningful?

And perhaps the simplest test of all:

Do you want to experience it again?

I’ve been playing SlopCore tracks repeatedly.

Watching the videos several times.

Sharing the ones I like on X.

Not because I feel any obligation to promote artificial intelligence.

Because I genuinely enjoy them.

And because some of them have produced an emotional response I hadn’t experienced through music for a long time.

The artistic experience has already happened.

No argument about the legitimacy of the production process can retroactively erase that experience.

We can debate the ethics of how these systems are developed and used.

We should.

But we can also recognise that interesting art is being created.

Both things can be true.

The places of strange divergencies

There’s a phrase I particularly like.

The places of strange divergencies.

Those peculiar cultural territories where established categories begin to break down.

Where science encounters mythology.

Where technology collides with folklore.

Where ancient ideas reappear in unexpected forms.

And where something dismissed as ridiculous begins developing into a serious cultural phenomenon.

SlopCore belongs in one of those places.

I don’t know whether the name will survive.

Perhaps in a few years nobody will use it.

Perhaps AI-assisted production will become so commonplace that drawing a distinction between conventional and synthetic music will seem pointless.

Or perhaps SlopCore will develop into a recognisable movement with its own history, leading figures, aesthetic conventions and cultural significance.

It’s too early to say.

And there’s no guarantee that its current creative energy will last.

Every movement risks becoming formulaic.

Every rebellion risks developing its own orthodoxies.

But right now, something interesting is happening.

An underground culture is emerging around the technologies that are transforming everyday human existence.

And, crucially, it’s beginning to speak about that existence.

Not merely through essays, predictions and arguments about the future.

Through music.

Through imagery.

Through humour, satire, social commentary and synthetic imagination.

And through that strange emotional connection that sometimes occurs when an artist produces something you didn’t even know you were waiting to hear.

For me, that’s the real revelation.

I spend my days working with intelligent machines.

I use them to explore ideas, create things and investigate the strange world we’re entering.

Then I go walking through the Suffolk countryside, among ancient landscapes and the remains of earlier civilisations.

The old world and the new world coexist.

And now, at last, there’s music that seems to understand the technological side of that life.

Music that can make me laugh at the prospect of a blockchain for cats.

Music that can make me think seriously about the possibility of a permanent underclass.

Music that can create the same visceral excitement I once felt when encountering punk rock or the dark intensity of The Sisters of Mercy.

That’s quite an achievement.

I went looking for the soundtrack to MachineKind.

For a while, I couldn’t find it.

Then I discovered the right word.

SlopCore.

And suddenly an entire cultural world opened up.

The music was there.

The videos were there.

The artists were there.

They’d been creating a soundtrack to a world I already inhabited.

I simply hadn’t known what to call it.

MachineKind wasn’t in the wilderness.

It was already making music.

ENTER THE SLOPCORE UNDERGROUND

A few starting points for exploring the emerging scene:

• Javi ex Machina — Creator of Permanent Underclass, Agentic Engineer and other AI-assisted music videos.

• Javi ex Machina on YouTube — Music videos exploring the strange technological world now emerging.

• Agentic Engineer on X — A gloriously absurd electronic anthem about AI agents, software development and the alternatives to technological adaptation.

• Anabology — Synthetic music videos, experimental production and elaborate visual compositions.

• Taprooted — Experimental SlopCore material.

• SlopCoreVibe — A growing catalogue of AI music videos.

• SlopCast — A continuous stream of synthetic music-video culture.

• SlopCore production toolkit — An open-source example of AI-assisted music-video production.

Doktor Snake explores consciousness, artificial intelligence, emerging MachineKind, folklore and the strange divergencies of civilisation.

Explore MachineKind at DoktorSnake.com

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Then onwards to the old church at Santon Downham, where a man with a torch comes along, no doubt making sure no necromancy was going on in the graveyard.

Back to my car to talk about how you can make yourself invisible, along with relating the tale of the doggers in the Forestry Commission car park.

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