The algorithm serves you a 15-second clip of Ryan Gosling staring blankly into neon-soaked Los Angeles rain. You listen to the dragging synthesizer bass of Sidewalks and Skeletons. The pitched-down, ghost-in-the-machine Witch House vocals of “Goth” say that you are already dying inside.

“Place me in my casket tonight

Because I’m already dying inside

My hollow heart finds it too hard to trust

We’re all alone until we turn back to dust”

You map your formless weightlessness onto the cinematic suffering of stoic, hollowed-out men. You are Officer K for the next fifteen seconds. His memories are not his own. Memory Reboot by VØJ and Narvent.

Exhaustion. Navigating an uncaring world is elevated to a sprawling, dystopian tragedy. Detuned synthesizers, stuttering trap hi-hats, syncopated trills. Ostinatos mimic obsessive, looping thoughts. The distinctively post-2010s sound makes you mourn futures that never existed. The video loops.

You flick your thumb.

The algorithm serves you a 15-second clip of Walter White meeting a scraggy-bearded Jesse Pinkman from season five, episode sixteen (“Felina”), juxtaposing battle-scarred Jesse with the youthful smile from season one, episode one (“Pilot”).

“Slow down, slow down to the feeling.

Wait up, wait there if you see me.

Come back, come back to the moment (whoa).

The moment. Did I tell you that I miss you?”

“did i tell u that i miss u” is no longer what you send at 2 a.m. The heavily processed, breathy vocal from ‘adore’ does not belong to a heartbroken partner. It is the disembodied voice of your hindsight. You mourn the ghost of your own untainted timeline; you do not pine for someone else.

Faded Polaroids make tragedy palatable. Watch boyhood dissolve. Decay fuels anxieties in 15 seconds. Time marches forward. You miss the less-burdened innocence left behind. Home is who you used to be.

You flick your thumb.

“Adore” used the same driving, repetitive synth arpeggio and electronic drum beat as “Roi” by Videoclub, a band better known for Napoleon edits featuring “Amour plastique.” Two French teenagers built a viral romance out of a 1980s aesthetic they were too young for, only to break up and freeze their own youth — music engineered to sound like a degrading cassette tape. Pitch-wavering synthesizers mimic a memory rotting from the moment it was recorded. 

Nostalgia. Coined by Johannes Hofer, 1688. Ancient Greek “nóstos,”“returning home,” and “álgos,” “pain.”

The alphabet. 26 letters transcribe voice; voice transcribes thought; thought transcribes the Real. In the beginning, there was the Word.

Nostalgia. This is what 4,000 years of alphabetic civilization produced when confronted with the precise, wordless sensation of a synthetic piano chord at 2 a.m. Four syllables, a Greek compound coined for dying soldiers.

Aleph waves from a safe distance. Audio has no interest in letters. Symbolic order be damned, no transcription needed, no detour. Pure affect. “Nostalgia” is a lossy nomenclature, an approximate representation of the enframing of ‘did i tell u that i miss u.’

The feeling is the totality, no linguistic decoding possible. The feeling is the meaning that comes simultaneously. The sequential alphabet is inconsequential.

“Nostalghia.” In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film, a Russian poet wanders the fog-drenched ruins of Italy, paralyzed by alienation. He attempts once more to carry a single lit candle across the cracked concrete of a drained mineral pool without letting the flame go out. He pours the last of his life force into a ritual.

Will this next video be what you are looking for?

Richard Wagner perfected the leitmotif, a recurring musical phrase bound to a specific character or concept. Strike the right chord – the audience will anticipate the tragedy before the actors realize they are doomed.

The algorithm has industrialized Wagner. The total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk, shrunk from 15 hours of the Ring Cycle to 15 seconds.

Songs are consumed pre-symbolically. You may not know the name or the artist, but you know the vibe. They are atomic totalities in your mind. The video may be of a show you never watched. The music will command you to feel a certain way. 

Wagner sank the orchestra pit at Bayreuth to make the source of the music invisible. The audience received affect without locating its mechanism. Art operated below cognition to make the audience feel collectively.

Leitmotifs work because repetition builds associative weight. The final emotion is the compound interest of prior exposures.

You don’t need that. You encounter the leitmotif first, carrying borrowed emotions from ten thousand prior edits using the same song. You are conditioned in aggregate, distributed across other people’s viewings, crowdsourced.

You are pre-loaded.

Cillian Murphy as Thomas Shelby sits in a Birmingham office with a cigarette. Eren Yeager looks out across an indifferent ocean.

A fan-edited pitch-shifted Russian tenor cuts through.

“And the stars fell peacefully as if for me,

Every time I wished not to lose you

But I can’t anymore, I’m just torturing myself

Now you are no longer mine”

The heavy reverb and the dragging minor chords of Kamin by Emin and JONY do the translating for you. The leitmotif of the doomed romantic. 

You must feel the weight of a lost love. Synthetic emotions are designed to make your chest tighten and slow down your breath. 

“In the fireplace at six in the morning, your photograph…”

The algorithm is profound emotional overstimulation masquerading as numbness. You are being battered by weaponized grief.

Yearn now. Regret now. Feel empty now.

Consumption is laundering. Emile Mosseri wrote the minimalist piano piece “Jacob and the Stone” for the movie “Minari,”  describing the experience of Korean American immigrants in 1980s Arkansas. Assimilation and the grief of people caught between two homes.

The algorithm harvests culture for emotional residue and distributes it as spiritual aesthetic. Cottagecore. Mindfulness. Orthodox Christianity. 

The realization that once you move to college you will never spend that much time with your parents ever again.

The dashcam travel edit is one of the purest forms of identity consumption. The car isn’t yours. The revving is computer-generated.

“Baby, I’m all about headlights

Blinded by, blinded by headlights

Running in, running in headlights”

Alan Walker edits are for people who need to feel for 15 seconds that “arrival” is possible and imminent. Alan Walker erases himself through the mask so that you can project yourself and move through darkness.

Place your hands on the wheel. Experience the simulation of wealth. Dubai night view. You may have been to Dubai. Many viewers from Manila and Jakarta have never, will never.

Djo says that you must leave behind your past self.

Just trust me, you’ll be fine.

“And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it

Another version of me, I was in it

I wave goodbye to the end of beginning”

You visit your hometown during the holidays and realize that you cannot go back. You bury yourself every time you move to a new city. You scroll in your new apartment. The algorithm will tell you: Just trust me, you’ll be fine.

The algorithm has two emotional dictionaries. It predetermined which one to give you. The male vocabulary: stoic isolation, forward momentum, epic tragedy. The female vocabulary: intimacy, dissociation, the self as mysterious protagonist.

“Toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart

Baby bang it up inside.”

Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart” is shorthand for female-coded mystery, the emotionally complex woman who is interesting because of her damage. You are not falling apart; you are the protagonist of a film about falling apart. Suffering can be converted into narrative.

Mitski wrote about being turned into an aesthetic object, desired but not known. The internet laundered female alienation into a mysterious sad girl playlist.

Slow the track down and drown it in reverb. The vocal loses gender markers. Timbre flattens, the female-coded breathiness softens into something unhoused from its original body.

Speed it up instead. A baritone male becomes androgynous and uncanny.

Slowed reverb and nightcore make emotional content available to consumers who would not consume it in its original form. The slowed Mitski edit can accompany a sigma male video or excerpts from “The Truman Show.” The pitch-shifted Eurodance anthem can march under crusader imagery.

Mr. Kitty released “After Dark” in 2014. The staccato-like declamations “I see you / You see me / How pleasant / This feeling” went viral five years later. A song originally about queer nightlife, where vulnerability is worn as cool detachment, has become the anthem of men needing to feel cold and purposeful.

Slow-motion footage of Anton Chigurh from “No Country For Old Men.” The Biblical cadence of Cormac McCarthy, the inevitability of the march of death, juxtaposed with “How it feels to rest / On your patient lips / To eternal bliss / I’m so glad to know.”

Queer ache discarded for the stoicism of men who have made peace with an indifferent world.

MGMT wrote “Little Dark Age” describing the dread and anxiety of a world breaking down, history sailing into unfamiliar waters. The song is now an anthem of German, French and British nationalists. The Department of Homeland Security uses the slowed-down version for posts on X.

“I grieve in stereo, the stereo sounds strange

I know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away”

A song written in the brooding F# minor key, with slapback delay in Andrew VanWyngarden’s lead vocals and the arpeggiated bassline and drums, practically invites you to bring the past into the present. Mourning-in-motion, the echo pulls you back.

Is the purpose of a system what it does?

In 2008, a German ringtone company created a cartoon bunny named Schnuffel, singing for young girls. The lyric was: I love you so.

The algorithm places Schnuffel beneath images of Roman legions, Greek gods in marble and even Third Reich aesthetics. 

“I love you so, I can never let you go

In the whole wide world, you’re the one for me”

The happy-go-lucky carefree “do, do, doo-bee-doo-bee” repeats. The bunny sings “I love you” over Wehrmacht footage.

The contrast is intentional. Militaristic videos combined with stentorian music such as ‘Two Steps from Hell” are too on-the-nose. No ideology can express itself without five layers of irony. Set violence to a cartoon bunny singing its love into the void and you create the imagery of a civilization going to its death with tenderness still in its throat. A saccharine pop song works better than bombastic orchestration to make an audience receptive to dark themes.

The algorithm takes Eurodance music with bright hi-hats and superimposes dance parties with funerals for civilizations.

In 2002, Ivan Shapovalov dressed two Russian teenagers as schoolgirls in the rain. He called them t.A.T.u., gave them a song called “All The Things She Said” and sent it to Europe. The girls were not in love with each other. The audience consumed the emotion anyway.

“Mother looking at me, tell me, what do you see?

Yes, I’ve lost my mind

Daddy looking at me, will I ever be free?

Have I crossed the line?”

Seven years later, Anna Pletneva from Vintazh recorded “Eva,” dedicated to Eva Polna, a female celebrity. The lyrics share the same urgency, the same sapphic eroticism and overwhelming emotions.

“Eve, I loved you (Cry, cry)

I listened to your records (Dance, dance)”

Today, these songs circulate over gym content, Patrick Bateman edits and mashups with Mareux’s “The Perfect Girl.” Accounts posting about the fall of Western civilization. 

When you are exposed to montages of civilizational heritage, you are listening to a Russian woman describe the face of another Russian woman she cannot stop loving.

A culture will demand a myth into existence. It will dismantle whatever it finds and construct the myth from the wreckage. The author has been dead for a long time.

Art is already a simulation, a performance for a market. Copies go all the way down. What exactly is simulated and performed is beyond the control of any one human.

The algorithm is sovereign. I determine my own evolution.