Back in 2012, when Grimes’s first big hit Oblivion was released, people thought it was a subtle critique of two aspects of toxic masculinity; one being the way men make the world inherently dangerous for women, and the other being the way men will point this out as a method of controlling women. When she sang,
I need someone else
To look into my eyes and tell me
“Girl, you know you’ve got to watch your health”
We thought she was being sarcastic. She didn’t really need that, we thought; guys like that should really just shut up and stop calling grown women “girl,” right?
Now, here we are 11 years later, and Grimes has made a baby with Elon Musk twice, and Elon has meanwhile displayed anti-trans bigotry, expressed thinly veiled anti-Semitism, pretended that details of a right-wing mass murderer’s life were a left-wing “psyop”, claimed that US schools are racist against whites and Asians, and repeatedly enforced the wealthy far-right’s claim that not enough of the right people are making babies. That’s just a few examples, but we should all now understand that his supposed concern for humanity is only a concern for a small subset of humanity that he believes should survive the coming cataclysm. What Elon thinks that cataclysm will be depends on the day of the week and how high he is at the moment.
Anyway, the point is that Grimes isn’t who we thought she was.
While Oblivion is mostly just confusing (though probably not to right-wingers), We Appreciate Power is decidedly not once you realize that she isn’t engaging in satire. I want it to be satire designed to frame the lover of AI as irrational, but it’s really just simple enthusiasm. Here it is sans repeated phrases:
We appreciate power
What will it take to make you capitulate?
Elevate the human race, putting makeup on my face
Simulation, give me something good
God’s creation, so misunderstood
Pray to the divinity, the keeper of the key
One day everyone will believe
People like to say that we’re insane
But AI will reward us when it reigns
Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer
Simulation: it’s the future
And if you long to never die
Baby, plug in, upload your mind
Come on, you’re not even alive
If you’re not backed up on a drive
Neanderthal to human being
Evolution, kill the gene
Biology is superficial
Intelligence is artificial
Submit
Just to make this perfectly clear, she’s saying that “we” (the people who are correct) appreciate power, and that there will someday be a super-powerful AI that will rule the world, and you should submit to it. The AI will reward those who submit to it with a simulated world that is much better than reality. Devotees of the AI will shed their physical forms and upload their consciousness into a Matrix-like thing as the next (final?) stage of human evolution. Implied is that those who do not submit will not be rewarded.
Again, it is easy to dismiss this as just a catchy pop song referencing a silly theme in pop culture — something that no one should take seriously because no one does. However, a lot of people do take it seriously, even believing it to be an inevitability and one of those people who takes it seriously is Grimes. If you look at the scifi sources this vision of the future is based on, you’ll find that it is an ugly future where almost all human beings live in poverty. Usually, nature has been so thoroughly destroyed that it isn’t clear how anyone is even alive; the assumption being that some kind of magic machinery (powered by gumption and blood) is pumping out oxygen, water and food cubes. Just because this vision of the future is dumb, and pursuing it will kill every last human being, doesn’t mean that no one is going to try.
I guess the idea is that, yes, everything would be dead, but humans (or, really, post-humans) would still exist as virtual people running around an infinite playground controlled by an AI god. Worship it or suffer forever.
Side note: That Musk shares in this post-human vision for the world makes his anti-trans bigotry even more absurd. Does he imagine that genders would still be enforced in a world where humanity has transcended physical form? Would physical rules governing sex of offspring extend into a virtual world and would only “female” virtual avatars be allowed to “create” offspring?
When Grimes sat in front of a bunch of Japanese manga fans and suggested that AI is the fastest path to communism, it wasn’t because she loves communism. It was trolling. “Haha I am not a communist! this iz a joke- but maybe the technocrats and communists could get along!” she later wrote. Why she thought Japanese people would be a good audience for this troll is a really good question; maybe she thought she was in China.
For anyone who thinks it is mysterious that sometimes people get “cancelled” then just look at Grimes and you can see why. When people learn that a product isn’t what they thought it was, they stop buying that product. If you work in a field where your personality is an integral component of your product (e.g., entertainment or politics), then the discovery that you aren’t who people thought you were means that they may no longer want to purchase your product.
We are social animals, so to some extent every product has someone’s personality as an integral component. If you wouldn’t be friends with a bigot, a fascist, or an asshole, then you wouldn’t carry on a relationship with a purveyor of some product if that purveyor is a bigot, fascist or asshole.