Three Real World Inspirations for My Dystopian EP "Technofeudalism" - Especially You

A new world has dawned, brought about by the digital age and its accompanying AI revolution. What is our place in it? 

 

This is one of the many questions I grappled with while writing and researching for my Technofeudalism EP releasing on September 4, 2026.

 

The clear dystopian concept for all three songs this EP is reflected in my electropunk and rock production that immediately grabs your attention. Getting a "dystopian" sound involved several unusual production choices for me, such as:

• Weird vocal effects that are "glitchy" "phased out" and in some parts, harmonized an octave lower
• Distorted and growling electric guitars, all in drop D tuning.
• Heavy, powerful drums. 
• Gloomy, haunting synths the weave between loud, gritty guitars. 

For example, the title track "Technofeudalism" starts with a sinister riff. Then haunting verse synths ebb and flow before kicking things into high gear with the drums and blistering guitars in the choruses. My favourite chorus is for "Silenced" because it has two extra layers of guitars, one of which has a touch of shoegaze distortion and delay. And overall, my favourite song is "Love Is A Flame" because I alternated between a clean main guitar riff that I kept going through the verses, and fiery, heavily distorted guitars in the choruses!

 

I recorded all the guitars on my 2004 Fujigen made Epiphone Les Paul Custom. If you listen closely, you can hear the sizzle and noise of the pickups, sometimes even the way I sloppily switch into the next chord. I kept this production choice precisely because it sounds rough around the edges, more imprecisely human.

 

As a songwriter, I'm always getting inspiration for the world around me. The lyrics for my Technofedualism EP catalyzed when I saw this graffiti on one of my walks: "Lost in madness, living in dystopia."

 

I thought these words perfectly expressed the frustrations and fears at the heart of my Technofeudalism EP. My lyrics for each song are filled with imagery that's purposefully grounded in natural imagery such as stars and fire, while being contrasted with lines about "digital cascades" and machinery that's trying to snuff out our uniquely human voices.

 

During my creative process, there have been many paradigm shifts for creatives in the ongoing heated debate about AI.

 

There's the alarming Sony-Universal deal that allows fans to remix songs in their entire catalog with AI. On the flip sides, there's encouraging developments such as OpenAI's video generation platform Sora shutting down, and the general public seemingly pushing back against widespread AI.

 

To be clear, I am unequivocally against all AI, especially generative AI, in the creative arts.

My perspective is shaped by my own experiences and values, informed by the daily conversations I have with my creative peers, and reinforced by in-depth research.

I care about the craft of songwriting, music production, and writing lyrics. I'm all about bringing listeners along my music journey as equals, particularly documenting my process through this blog and my YouTube channel.

No paywalls, no middle man, no corporate interests. Instead of money, chasing trends, and trying to conform to someone else's vision of what I should be doing as an artist, I am asking for people to spend their time with my songs and feel them deeply right along with me.

That's why the three songs on my Technofeudalism EP are firmly rooted in my anti-AI perspective. From the moment I started conceptualizing this EP, it took on a dystopian tone that draws from every day realities:

In a world where tech giants control the digital platforms and data that we depend on for access to information, services, and work, I increasingly find myself overwhelmed, concerned, and at a loss. I notice that we wade through the static, grovelling at the altar of AI as it distorts the very reality around us. I sweat alongside you as we slave away in this brave new world of constant chaos and disruption, in exchange for scraps of digital power. Yet we keep our eyes fixed on the horizon. We still feel love, hope, and find the will to fight for a brighter future.

Technofeudalism may have replaced capitalism, but it will never truly replace us–because to be human is to be able to feel deeply and act together to make this world a better place for us all.

And yet, it wasn't until I finished writing the first draft of all the lyrics for this Technofeudalism EP that I realized...I was going about it all wrong, and wasn't actually conveying what's at the heart of this EP.

My Technofeudalism EP is not only about the long dystopian shadow of digital dependency and AI.

It's actually about you, and me, and what truly makes us human.

Inspiration 1 - Joining VerifiedHuman™

I have been a VerifiedHuman™ musician since November 2, 2025.

In this age of AI when everything can be automated, copied, and mass-produced, VerifiedHuman™ protects and values the authenticity of human work.

VerifiedHuman ™ provides a values-based mark for human-made work. Like Fairtrade does for coffee, VerifiedHuman™ signals authenticity, transparency, and integrity in creative expression. It’s a global movement of 170+ creators and 9 organizations across education, music, publishing, and the arts who champion equity, spotlight human contribution, and remind the world of the inherent value of every person.

I joined because I want my listeners to have trust in my music. The VerifiedHuman™ label helps build this trust. Listeners can be confident that when they listen to my music and see the VerifiedHuman™ label, every aspect of lyrics, songwriting, and music production was actually done by me with skill, the human heart of emotion, and an optimistic approach to problem solving and creativity.

While VerifiedHuman™ is not "anti-AI," they are certainly all about critically engaging with it and spotlighting the importance of legal, policy, and verification frameworks that protect human made work. I think this will only become increasingly important over time.

Joining VerifiedHuman™ got me thinking about what it truly means to be human. It's a big question that everyone has tackled in their lives, from ancient philosophers to our family, friends, and neighbours. It makes for lots of interesting pillow talk, too. I certainly don't have the answer, but I do believe art is the antidote to suffering.

VerifiedHuman's founder Micah wrote a wonderful blog post about the nature of humanity, particularly his section on The Human Ingredient:

When humans create and share work, everyone's tilt comes into play: the creator's, the performer's, the listener's. Tilt is that invisible lean of personality, presence, and perspective that seeps into everything you touch. It's the bend in phrasing, the surge in energy, the unwritten pause that changes how something lands — and how it lives in someone's memory.

 

[A] work that stirs hearts in one decade might fall flat, or even be offensive, in another. Creative reception is never fixed. It moves because people move.

 

And creative work — no matter who or what makes it — will always have one primary audience: people.

 

We don't make songs for machines. Machines don't make songs for other machines. The audience has always been human. And it still is. 

This beautiful idea as at the heart of Micah's book Human Is The New Vinyl: Why Human Creativity Still Wins in the AI Revolution.

 

I highly recommend this book because it's meticulously researched, written in a warm, vivid, and accessible style, and is tremendously inspiring for creatives!

 

As we grapple with this digital era and the dominant presence of AI, the most valuable aspect of this book is its powerful call to action: artists should thoughtfully engage with the digital age we live in without losing our humanity, which means creating from a place of integrity and trust, which produces art that celebrates our humanity.     

My favourite quote from this book speaks to both the digital dependency my Technofeusalism EP explores and what makes us human:

The digital world has revolutionized how we live. Now, AI is poised to change how we express what makes life worth living. And that’s when the revolution gets personal.  

Inspiration 2 - New Bohemia

New Bohemia is the world's first 100% free, Anti-AI multimedia creativity platform!

 

 

 

I joined on January 13, 2026. I'm overjoyed to be the Head Curator of  this warm, inviting human-only creative community for writers, musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, actors, comedians, photographers, sculptors, and other creatives all supporting one another without generative-AI content in the mix!

Some of the discussions I've had with our artists revolve around skepticism of new music releases. I wondered if it was too extreme of me to assume that new releases, including those by well-established artists, were AI assisted or even wholly AI generated, unless stated and proven otherwise. In fact, I found other people held this same view and thought it was only rational given the prevalence of AI, reinforcing the great need to build trust and verify authentic human-made work.

 

I do not believe that AI in the creative arts is an inevitability and something we must all eventually succumb to. The enjoyment and challenges found in the creative process are precisely the point of making art, and AI takes this away from us.

I believe we always have a choice to prioritize and celebrate human beings rather than cutting corners with the latest technology. The New Bohemia community exists exactly for this purpose of connecting artists, appreciating their process, and valuing their art. I'm inspired every day by the hundreds of fearless art works that are shared in our vibrant Gallery and the heartfelt conversations artists have about what they've overcome to create a particular piece or a new creative method they've experimented with.

 

This is why I think AI is not "just" a tool. More accurately, I think it's a disruptive and destructive technology that only grows more dangerous if left unchecked. For one thing, tools require prior knowledge and skill, learned over time by a human being choosing to dedicate themselves to their craft. Artists making real things that we envision with our bare hands is fundamental to being human.

 

More to the point, most people don't seem to understand the difference between talent and skill. Anyone can be talented. But skill is carefully learned and improved regardless of innate ability. In other words, hard work will eventually win against natural talent every time. 

 

So when AI is fundamentally negatively changing how we think and express ourselves, and is advancing far too rapidly without proper ethics, oversight, and regulation, in combination with distorting reality itself...this is cause for deep concern.

 

Several organizations and advocacy groups have spoken up about these concerns. 

 

For example, LessWrong is an online forum and community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making. Thanks to its academic and philosophical resources, it trains people to think rationally and analyze the most burning problems of our times.

 

Their case for AI Control argues that AI must be aligned with the goal of human safety and benefit. It needs to align with the betterment of our whole species, and this can only be done when powerful AIs are controlled through ethics, risk management (especially by trained professionals who stop AIs from subverting lab safety mechanisms), regulations, and laws.

 

Similarly, the PauseAI organization and movement is all about "stopping powerful AIs until we know how to make them safe." Although there are benefits to AI (usually in already highly regulated industries such as healthcare), PauseAI shows through research and case studies, including advocacy by renowned professionals and scholars, that AI could end humanity.

As PauseAI shows, AI "takes away our independence and autonomy, erodes our democracy, destabilizes our economy, and could be used to create devastating cyber weapons."

 

All this is possible in the first place because of technofeudalsim. 

 

Technofeudalsim is the idea that capitalism has been replaced by new "digital capital" through Big Tech companies that have make us dependent on technology in every aspect of our lives. We have once more been reduced to serfs, exchanging our data, privacy, and autonomy for the e-governance, goods, services, and conveniences offered by our feudal lords in Big Tech.

Inspiration 3 - The Technofeudalism Book 

As a woman who makes music because it's my lifelong passion, I've noticed numerous worrisome trends accelerated by AI across the creative arts that only result in net negatives for us:

• Deterioration of creative skills.
• Difficulty distinguishing human made art from AI generation.
• Complete replacement of artists.
• Ethical and copyright infringements.

The Entertainment Equity Alliance has published several policy reports across the American entertainment industry. One such 2024 report, "FUTURE UNSCRIPTED: The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Entertainment Industry Jobs" shows that "Creative industry leaders are largely embracing GenAI technology, and most recognize that operational benefits in the future will come at a cost to many creative workers."

The precise numbers are highlighted by the German animation guild International Nights and Days of Animation Cologne (INDAC). Here are some quoted key findings from the report:

• Three-fourths (75%) of survey respondents indicated GenAI tools, software, and/or models had supported the elimination, reduction, or consolidation of jobs in their business division. At the same time, most executives and managers indicate GenAI has already led to the creation of new job titles and roles in their organization. Whether these new jobs will offset inevitable job losses is not clear.
• Almost half (47%) of business leaders felt that over the next three years, GenAI will be effective in generating 3D assets as well as realistic sound design for film, television, and video games.
• About 21.4% of Film, Television, and Animation jobs (or approximately 118,500 jobs) are likely to have a sufficient number of tasks affected to be either consolidated, replaced, or eliminated by GenAI in the U.S. by 2026.   

To make matters worse, it's not just creatives who are impacted by destabilization and job loss due to AI. 

 

It's everyone, across every industry, and it's happening now.  

 

In fact, job scarcity and outright human replacement has become such a pervasive issue that it's commonly referred to as the "AI job squeeze" or outright "AI human replacement."

 

Consider the conclusion of a Mercer consulting firm report published in 2024: "99% of CEOs plan to lay off workers and replace them with AI within two years." This number comes from almost 1,000 American executives surveyed, where "98 percent of them said they have major organization design changes in the works around AI, while 99 percent expect AI will lead to layoffs over the next two years." This report also notes AI is directly responsible for the "collapse of worker well being."

 

The linked article about this report lays out the grim conclusion that "AI has made human labor obsolete" in the following ways:

To the business owners and corporatists of the world, this is the point of AI: to discipline human labor. That’s the large-scale economic process by which capitalists undermine workers’ bargaining power, through systemic mechanisms like debt, the so-called gig economy, unemployment, deskilling — and, according to some theorists, even the nuclear family.

In the workplace and outside of it, AI boosts these mechanisms, eroding workers’ power to demand change or even hold onto basic concessions like healthcare and pensions — labor rights begrudgingly pried from corporations after decades of workplace struggle.

The technology doesn’t even need to be particularly effective to achieve any of this. Business leaders like Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke are already using AI to squeeze more value from their workers, while venture capitalists use it to pry equity back from theirs. In some cases, managers are even using AI chatbots to decide who to fire.

To reinforce this very conclusion of the same Mercer report, Tech Spot further points out the troubling narrative shift regarding AI and human labour:

When companies first started embedding AI more widely, executives constantly talked about the technology augmenting and helping humans, rather than replacing them. Today, firms such as Block and Meta are more candid about AI-related layoffs, something reflected in the survey: just over three out of 10 execs think their workforce can optimally combine human and machine capabilities. 

All these developments been even more evident since I started writing this blog post earlier in 2026, judging by the rampant mass global layoffs supposedly justified by AI. Not to mention the fact that 86% of women make up the workers most at risk of losing our jobs due to AI, and the devastating environmental costs of AI, including water and electricity shortages. 

 

To bring all these concerns down to a more understandable level as it relates to the creative arts, AI is replacing our unique lived experiences, memories, feelings, and creative skills with automation, convenience, and ultimately, obsolescence. 

 

This is a lot to take in. 

 

Information like this initially made me feel overwhelmed, angry, and hopeless. 

While making my Technofedualsim EP, I channeled these feelings through music and lyrics that helped me make sense of the turmoil and reflected my small creative contribution to this ongoing debate.

 

And while researching and writing this blog post, I struggled with putting a name to all these restless concerns. I thought, surely there's a concept or pinpoint term that could explain what's happening to all our lives.

 

I firmly believe that knowledge dispels fears and quiets concerns. However, the more I’ve been learning throughout the years about the different types of AI, how rapidly this technology is advancing, and the dangers that come when there aren't proper frameworks in place, the more concerned I am. 

 

Then I finally read Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. A free and accessible PDF version is available here.

The entire point of this book perfectly describes the dystopian reality we're living in. As Yanis explains:

So, what is my hypothesis? It is that capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I hope to show makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is...capital itself.

Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.

Real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. 

As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance. 

Does all this matter to the way we live and experience our lives? It certainly does.

Now that I could put a name to what was troubling me, the words and music naturally followed. 

I wrote pages and pages of lyrics, all about my fearful feelings and concerns regarding AI, only to eventually realize that grappling with AI is bigger than any one artist or community. 

 

And AI isn't truly what I wanted Technofeudalism to be about. 

On top of that, AI certainly isn't who Technofeudalism is meant for.

My Technofeudalism EP is meant for you.

The Real Inspiration - You

All the data sets and informative articles in the world cannot predict the future. Each new iteration of a powerful AI model brings fresh concerns and problems, meaning the conclusion of many people and organizations is that the worst is only yet to come because powerful AI models haven't even remotely reached their full potential.

 

Connecting with other people, especially artists, and making music are joys that make me feel much less hopeless, and much more human.

 

Realizing this meant that I refocused the outlook of my Technofeudalism EP and led me to create the closing track "Love Is A Flame," one of my most hopeful and favourite songs!

 

Rather than fixating on my grim concerns about AI, I wanted my Technofeudalism EP to celebrate what makes us truly human.

In my opinion, being human is all about our intrinsic ability to feel deeply and connect with each other, then express ourselves creatively. 

 

I express myself through music; finding connection, happiness, self-actualization, and a whole lot of fun. Music has always been an ancient, beautiful, and sacred practice for humans. Music is how we listen, connect, laugh, grieve, love, learn, celebrate, and come together.

 

I think about you, the listener, finding my Technofeudalism EP like a howl cutting through static noise. I hope that you ultimately feel inspired to do and share what makes you feel the most happy, and the most human.