/reader

 

I was really,
under the weather
all week.

Sucked.

• NoAI Lofi
• On The Blog
• Start Select Reset 📑
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

NoAI LoFi

A couple of days ago the writer and my friend Andrew Dana Hudson sent me a YouTube link with the following note: “I’m obsessed with these youtubers who make “no AI lofi” but in doing so perform, with their live action bodies, the cozy archetypes of lofi beats station anime characters”

The video itself: an hour-long shot of a man and a woman on a picnic blanket in a tranquil outdoor setting. They are positioned by the edge of a still lake, its surface reflecting the surrounding trees and the pale summer sky, with a pavilion and reed beds visible in the distance. The couple sit barefoot on a patterned orange-and-blue cloth, its surface arranged with a tray of fruit, a teapot and cups, and a small MIDI controller, a scene that is at once domestic and performative. The man plays an orange hollow-body guitar, occasionally leaning over the MIDI controller that is making what can only be described as below-effort beats, whilst jamming over the top on his guitar with consonant melodic flourishes. The woman, dressed in a light sleeveless top and white skirt, her arms patterned with tattoos, alternates between reading a book, pouring tea, and sometimes standing to stretch or play with the golden retriever that lies at ease on the blanket, tongue lolling happily in the warm air.

Nothing about the scene is rushed; it has the quality of an idyll, a carefully arranged vignette of pastoral modern life, where leisure, music-making, and companionship coalesce into something approaching a lifestyle advert. The framing is deliberate, the camera static, and the effect, while meditative, leans towards studied; the slow passage of time is not marked by much change at all, save for the looped beats, idle gestures, and the lazy shimmer of light across the water and leaves.

Like Andrew, I’m obsessed now too, because it’s really wierd example of where culture is at in the midst of the first Information Age Iconoclasm. It’s eating it’s own tail.

Everything about it is just so absurd, a culturally recursive symptom of our moment, a kind of high-concept emptiness that demands investigation.

The question I’ve been trying to answer is: why are they doing this? What the hell is going on?

Loop Culture

The answer of course spirals out of the Lofi Girl phenomenon. But before we can talk about her, I want to return us to the jurassic period of the internet, to a time when websites were destinations.

The first musical loop site I remember is Leekspin (or Loituma Girl) an anime girl spinning a leek, accompanied by a chopped up sections of the scat singing Finnish folk song “Ievan polkka”.

In the flat I lived in after university, we’d just leave it on in the background while playing videogames. The repetitive audio dissolved into habituated ambience; like the sensory adaption to the ticking of a clock in a room. Someone would eventually come home hours later and ask what the hell was going on and why were we listening to it.

Leekspin of course isn’t the only example of this, but it was the first I remember. The hamster dance in the late 90’s became an enormous cultural phenomenon. YTMND another, and of course HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA he-man video

All share the same early internet grammar, born from looped GIFS. They are relatives to the Dancing Baby and the Dancing Banana GIF form the 90’s that became paired with ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’. My first year at university is punctuated by the emergence of the Badger Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom flash animation.

Thought the late 00’s and early 10’s the internets loop culture continued to evolve. Looped media reminiscent of the loop sites became durational works. HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA for 10 hours, or this visual loop of Gandalf nodding to the Sax Guy solo from Eurovision for 10 Hours, or keyboard cat.

Of course shorter containers were also available, and this mode of expression, the loop paired with music had become the default mode for music visualisers by the mid 2010’s

The most famous to my mind being Nyan Cat. Nyanners who I’ve written extensively about before, posted a similar visualiser for her 2014 cover of NIki Minaja’s I am UR Leader. Both are embedded below to demonstrate the form.

The looped Gif aesthetic is in these videos could best described as placeholders of motion, and netlabel micro-genres like chillhop and vaporwave ran with it.

I do for a moment want to mention Hyperpop. In 2014 Cultural terraformers PC MUSIC post the video for Bobby which apes the looped visualiser Gif aesthetic of the era, but it’s GFOTY as the looped subject.

For a bunch of reasons I don’t have time to get into right now, I think this song and video represents a really important moment in modern cultural canon.

Youtube first introduced live-streaming in 2011, but it wasn’t until the middle of the decade that netlabel produced 24/7 streams really took of, which because of YouTube video first posture, also adopted the looped gif aesthetic for their video element.

It was out of this visual culture that lo-fi girl emerged

Lofi Girl

Literally this week, as I was sitting down to write this 404 Media published a fantastic long read on the history and rise of the Lofi Empire which I’m really glad about so I can just link to that.

Key points of the article useful for understanding this NoAI LoFi are the following quotes:

The livestream, which is one of the longest running live broadcasts on YouTube, is often hiding in browser tabs, leaving the perpetually busy Jade (the Lofi Girl) to lazily take her notes behind whatever Wikipedia page or spreadsheet you’ve got open. But she is always there, the googly eyes stuck to her headphones wobbling as she looks up from her notes, to peek in on, to study with, or to chill to—the details of the music become secondary to the vibe.

ts music has largely dropped the hip hop. Lofi Girl’s music is now simply its own genre: lofi, where the soft, tonal consistency means it can be hard for the average listener to even see its works as distinct songs. The drum beats of the “chill beats to relax/study to” sometimes even take a backseat to the rounded, flighty melodies Dr. Jenessa Williams, a music and fan culture researcher at Stanford University, called Lofi Girl a “deeply valued background noise community.”

The New York Times, in 2018, declared that 24/7 channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music were “unlikely to have a broad impact on the music industry,” representing “an underground alternative to the streaming hegemony of Spotify and Apple Music.” They were wrong. Lofi Girl’s core audience might not be able to name a single artist broadcast during a livestream (even if it is driving listeners to Spotify and paying dividends for artists). They may not have even known Lofi Girl has a name. But Lofi Girl is hardly underground

In my opinion, the goal and place for Lofi music in the current moment is to be the auditory equivalent of a beige wall. Over time Lofi Girl sanitised itself into a “homogeneous sound” so palatable to the ear that is become audio wallpaper for the chronically online generation.

As one of its own collaborators aptly put it, this isn’t about artists expressing themselves anymore; it’s a record label curating a “functional” experience. The creative brief of lo-fi girl in 2025 is to produce something so predictable and “search engine-optimised” that its greatest selling point is that you hardly notice its presence.

This is important as it’s one of the things I think is insane about the NoAI LoFi couple.

Stylised stillness

The defining visual gesture of LoFi Girl is what in theatre we would call a kind of ‘stylised stillness’. She studies forever, a perfect, looping machine of productivity.

These “no AI” performers have taken this as a creative challenge: to become the animation. The human presence is insisted upon yet their performance is entirely within machinic-constraints, a stylised stillness as empty content, lacking narrative, or any progression. They are capturing a moment, a vibe.

Looped media has of course always meant to be lived with, not watched. Think of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, durational works defined by consistency and mood. Time suspended; attention cushioned rather than captured. LoFi Girl industrialised that and created a perpetual ambience machine.

The music itself is empty too. The same creative brief as LoFi Girl, calling it ‘low-effort’ is generous of me. Improvised guitar lines with predicable progressions that don’t go anywhere over chill hop beats. This genre’s popularity is another example of the smooth flatness of all media in our era that I’ve written about before. It’s lowest common denominator online ambience. Music made not for your ears, but for the cold, dead heart of the algorithm.

Let me be clear: I couldn’t sit on a picnic blanket in a park for an hour and noodle on a guitar without fucking up. But nor would I like to try, I would actually rather have AI generate it for me.

I genuinely find the spectacle on display in this video quite breathtaking: humans, desperate to prove they aren’t AI, performing as looping, predictable machines to create SEO-friendly wallpaper audio. Content and commentary fusing to absurdity. Presence over plot.

Of course this format thrives on YouTube. There are pragmatic reasons.

1. Watch-time incentives: they are long in duration with low narrative overhead.
2. Video compression: tiny gestures read well on small phone screens even if out the corner of your eye.
3. The lamps and contents of LoFi girl’s room, the couples blankets, LoFi girls rainy window all contributes to instant vibe recognition.

Agency Fetish

In their ‘super lecture’ Non-Player Dynamics: Agency Fetish in Game-World, Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo of Disintegrator podcast talk about how “the commentariat is flushed with images of humans spending their time play acting as AI… this trend has gotten kind of weirder and more literal”

They use the example of Pinkydoll and the other NPC TikTok streamers. Performing canned phrases with repeated gestures mapped to gifts. They are in themselves real-time human loops; bodies as event-driven interfaces, like the human statue street performers of Covent Garden reimagined for the digital age.

When someone sits live on YouTube and performs the “study girl” loop, or when Pinkydoll repeats NPC gestures on TikTok, these people are adopting ‘machinic patterns of presence’; they become non-player characters in their own streams. The performance of the loop is a ritual of surrendering agency to platform dynamics, while simultaneously trying to reclaim it through human embodiment.

Their lecture argues that under “exocapitalism”, labour is less about production and more about representation work: stylised gestures, narratives, or symbolic performances that slot into algorithmic loops, and live-action gif loops are exactly that—representation of “studying” or “relaxing” as an endless gesture, consumed as ambience.

The performer isn’t producing knowledge or beats; they’re embodying a ‘node of affect’ in a network of platform aesthetics. They turn themselves into an interface.

In The YouTube Apparatus (2024), Kevin Munger describes YouTube as a dynamic feedback system in which creators, audiences, and infrastructure shape each other in real time. The whole thing is a a Supply and Demand Framework: creators produce, the platform quantifies audience response (views, likes, comments, watch time etc), and these metrics rationalise future production.

My poetic aspiration is that whenever you read the words “YouTube Creator” you think instead of “Audience Creation.” Social media does not create powerful Influencers but rather powerless marionettes, dancing jerkily to quantified audience tugs.

One of the important points Marek and Roberto share with Munger about the algorithmic environment is that whilst platforms deliver the feeling of agency; the actual capacity for action within them narrows. Performance on them becomes constrained by pre-given moves; dictated by platform, by human, and by algorithm. This couple’s “no AI” tag signals agency reclaimed, but in practice they are ceding their creative agency entirely to the platform and the algorithm.

They have become the human equivalent of that cosy fireplace video on Netflix.

Human Wallpaper

I’m sure the NoAI Lofi couple are lovely human beings, but I’ve just written a lot of words to justify why I don’t like something. Which is ironic considering the theme of last week’s weeknotes. But you can just not like stuff too I guess. Their loud signalling that there’s no AI is all very well, but then going on to produce work/art thats completely empty of meaning is to my mind insidious. Foregrounding your own humanity only to turn yourself into human wallpaper is baffling.

But I remind myself that most ‘creators’ on the internet are not creating things for viewers, or for me personally. The algorithm is always the primary consumer. Everyone else is incidental, including the audience. It might as well have been entirely produced by AI to begin with. Thats what people are hearing when they listen to this low effort gunk on Spotify anyway.

These live action videos are the non-player dynamic made flesh, and reveal how far the “agency fetish” has gone: we can celebrate creative self-performance, but what’s really happening is recursive modelling, the human becoming infrastructure.

The whole thing is a sort of Turing test in reverse. The artists are involved in a competition to see if they can be as flawlessly bland and algorithmically pleasing as possible to the machine.

In anyways this sort of thing is the apotheosis of ‘content’ laborious and artisanal production of work so seamless, so devoid of friction, that the only remaining purpose of it all that I can possibly see is to generate enough training data to then go on to automate the whole thing.

On The Blog

I’ve basically been sick all week. But I have been posting over on BYENNE

If the shape isn’t stewarded,

it collapses.

And the stories leak out.

You won’t even notice

until it’s too late.

Start Select Reset 📑

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As a thank you, I’ll send you a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• 2 Calls.
• Working on the game launch.

Mostly been sick.

Terminal Access

Tracy Durnell wrote a fantastic piece this week called ‘Online feels truer than material reality’ its really worth your time. A bricolage of sources and thoughts from across the blogosphere:

Because most people online are funneled into a handful of websites, the signaling environment is competitive. “Status” isn’t like a leaderboard with direct rankings, but we can be high or low status within our taste world. Social media rewards our desire for status with attention and validation for treating every pursuit as an opportunity to signal. 

Dipping the Stacks

AI Companion Conditions

It would be great to see the xAI version of Meta’s 200 page document. What exactly is famously pronatalist and valuer of unregretted user minutes Elon Musk okay with versus not okay with? At what age should bots be okay to say what to a child? Exactly how toxic and possessive and manipulative should your companions be, including on purpose, as you turn the dial while looking back at the audience?

Welcome to the Era of Astroturf Fandom

Once again, the digital era’s ballyhooed capacity for citizen participation and “the long tail” has been crushed in favor of top-down control by giant corporations. The promise of the internet was that the gatekeepers would be dethroned, that cultural movements would erupt from the crowd. Instead, we’re living in a Potemkin village of virality where the audience is always the mark and the trick is always the same.

The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays

Data has created a new and paradoxical social order: the promise of emancipation is made possible by classifying everything

The new solar: what colour panel would you like?

It’s a demonstration that serious solar installations can defy aesthetic expectations. No need to bolt clunky rectangles all over your roof. Solar companies are coming up with snazzy alternatives that can form part of the roof structure itself – or provide an ultra-modern, colourful façade.

Britain’s statistics scandal means it cannot answer its most pressing questions

Autocrats and authoritarians routinely distort or even disappear economic data. In a statistical twist on Hanlon’s razor, Britain is achieving a similar result not out of malice but incompetence.

Reading

Not had that much time this week. Still reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. And still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr

I picked up An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi on Audible but I’ve only just started it. Badawi is fantastic at performing her own words.

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Condemned to Torture – Must Kill

UK thrash metal band Must Kill have a new album out. It fucking rips.

Lead single Nightmares come to life is my favourite track:

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The post NoAI LoFi | Weeknotes appeared first on thejaymo.

 

This weeknotes is 2 days late
I have been under the weather

• Just Like Stuff
• On The Blog
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

Just Like Stuff

I’ve written a lot on here about Attention. What we do with it, where we put it, how it gets siphoned away online. As part of that current, I’ve been thinking more and more about taste. Where it comes from, how you cultivate it, how you hold on to it Tracy Durnell has been exploring similar territory, so credit where it’s due.

Over on Substack, for the last week or so , my notes feed has been dominated by the seasonal online debate about how genre fiction or sci-fi/fantasy “isn’t real literature” and huge comment threads about what is and isn’t ‘literary fiction’. These arguments and the behaviour of the people conducting them is of course entirely about engagement farming.

I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet.

I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB forums. At university I was immersed in the blast furnace of 4chan for days at a time. Maybe it’s the Gen-X hangover I carry as a Gen-Y geriatric millennial, but I realised in my early 20’s that I just don’t care enough. I spent whole days, whole summers even when I was younger, lost to endless back-and-forth about whether a band sold out, what sci-fi books were overrated, or particular egregiously on my side, what choice of operating system or KDE vs GNOME proved you were secretly a poser. My mind boggles at it all now, the thought of spending my youth in a permanent trial by forum post. I saw the pattern in my self, how it was making me feel and how permanently warfare online was effecting other people so I opted out.

The times I have argued about something on the internet as an adult, have all resulted from a lapse in judgement, and without exception left me feeling guilty and full of shame. Not because of what others might have thought about the argument, but because I had wasted my energy and got emotionally involved in something that just… didn’t matter.

The ad-driven narrative economy of social media has been built around using this behaviour as fuel. Flame wars, quote tweets etc juice engagement and dwell time for networks. All day long people are on the internet arguing about pointless shit. Because otherwise how else are people going to spend long enough logged in to see all the adverts?

Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.

This is why people feel the need to back up every preference with a bibliography or stats. There’s so much ablative language used online. People prefacing their joy with “I know this is cringe but” as if they need to apologise before voicing their opinion. Building shields out of caveats.

But for what? and for whom?

Mostly it’s all done to placate the opinions of people that they’ll never meet.

This is a trap. The rhetorical game that keeps the whole engine of user generated content networks humming. But you don’t actually need to play the game.

Just like stuff. That’s all.

There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.

The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.

If your position or thoughts on something emerge from a practice of discernment, and become an actual expression of your taste, then you don’t owe anyone an explanation about why you like (or don’t like) something.

You don’t need to defend what you like to people whose opinions shouldn’t mean anything to you.

On The Blog

Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania

I was recently a guest on Lance “it’s ya boi” Robotson‘s alt-futures discussion podcast Neomania.

It’s one of my favourite shows, so it was a real pleasure to join him on air. Lance has interviewed a whole cluster of online weirdos recently, and I think the pod will become a fascinating record of where a certain current of people find themselves intellectually in the mid-2020s.

Across 100 minutes we covered many of the usual hits from this blog: Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking, and the importance of Worlds as a lens. We also touched on AI in the present moment, blogging, and making podcasts, and in an unguarded aside I think I shared some spicier opinions about copyright.

August 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 8.
Photo-a-day for the month of Aug 2025.

BYENNE

My 100 notes on storydwelling continues over on my leaftlet pub.

BYENNE

A leaflet about storydwelling. Byenne is what’s left. After the storm. After the telling.

by Jay Springett @thejaymo.net

Subscribe with Bluesky

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my writing, podcasts, and creative projects.
As a thank you, I’ll send you a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

No spam. No email. Just ink on paper, four times a year.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• More writing on SLOP MACHINES
• Recorded and started editing a new episode of Experience.Computer
• Several Meetings and Calls
• Wrote all the press and marketing copy for the game i’ve been working on. More to do
• Long call / workshop about next 18-24months. On device inference and what capabilities it we might see.

The ink stamp for Family of Giants logo arrived. Unfortunately my ink pad was at the end of its life, but you get the idea:

Terminal Access

‘White People Spicy’. This recent piece in Vittles mag on how the regulation of spicy food feeds racial anxieties is really interesting!

The danger invoked by Buldak’s spiciness functioned as a proxy for many other anxieties: the xenophobia that finds public salience in questions of food and eating; fears about children’s online media consumption and the ways that the internet can encourage stupid, painful and risk-taking behaviour; and the racial disgust and desire that coalesce around spicy food products. And in doing so, the Buldak ban awakened anxieties of my own: that Asian food products, no matter how popular they become, might never escape their status as spectacle.

Dipping the Stacks

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine

Part of the reason that science has been hesitant to embrace cellular-scale memory is sociological, Gunawardena said. The findings of early researchers such as Jennings and Gelber were memory-holed because they didn’t resonate with the prevailing theories of their time: Jennings’ discovery of memory in Stentor went against the dogma of “tropisms,” which inspired the behaviorist psychology dominant in Gelber’s day. Both of these views presumed a living world populated by biological automata, cycling through preprogrammed responses. Cells that can learn and adapt didn’t figure into such models.

How Social Media Shortens Your Life

your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Is low turnout undermining growth?

“The new development in the twenty-first century is the rise of an almost post-economic voting block: the retired and those nearing retirement who are insulated from the day to day gyrations of the economic cycle by guaranteed pensions and asset ownership. And what is more is that they are a group whose share of the population is rising and who are much more likely to vote”.

» Bullfrog in the Dungeon The Digital Antiquarian

The Dungeon Keeper story didn’t end with the original game. Late in 1997, Bullfrog and EA released a rather lazy expansion pack called The Deeper Dungeons, a collection of leftover scenarios that hadn’t made the cut the first time around, with no new campaign to connect them. Far more impressive is Dungeon Keeper 2, which arrived in the middle of 1999.

How OpenAI Misled You on RLHF

Putting it all together, when a model is a Reliable Instruction Follower, then that means it always reads its instructions and provides a useful response based on them. Simple as that.

Reading

This week I read and finished Family Wealth–Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations by James E. Hughes Jr.

Started reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr 

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Emergence – AM sin

Just got round to listening to the new AM sin record, which came out a few weeks ago. I’ve been waiting for a full length feature and this does not disappoint. It’s a real breath of noisy air next to all the lo-fi rock i’ve also been listening to this week. My favourite track is the remix of their previous single The Abyss by Sakr. After finishing the album I immediately went and listened to the newest Sakr album which like this track is all fat distorted kicks and snares. love it all.

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The post Just Like Stuff appeared first on thejaymo.