Algorithmic Gravity

I’ve been putting music online for roughly twenty years. Long enough to remember when platforms felt more like open fields than casinos. You made something, posted it, and it either found people or it didn’t.

That has changed.

I’ve started calling it algorithmic gravity. It doesn’t command you. It just pulls, constantly, patiently. Artists shorten videos because people click away. They return to the same style, same format, same emotional register, because repetition and dopamine are what the system rewards. None of it feels like compromise in the moment. That’s what makes it dangerous.

The question slowly shifts from what do I want to make to what performs. And that shift changes everything.

Meaningful work almost never comes from optimization. Some of the most important creative breakthroughs happen when an artist disappears into something difficult for months, with no metric to validate the direction. From the outside, that work often looks like bad strategy. It underperforms. It refuses easy categorization.

But it matters. Often more than anything that scored.

The things that genuinely serve art, slowing down, going deeper, risking failure, are precisely the things the algorithm punishes most. That work exists outside gravity’s reach. Which is exactly where it needs to be made.

If any of this resonates, join my mailing list. No feed. No algorithm. Just writing that arrives when it’s ready.