In March, Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, co-founders of the digital music-promotion agency Chaotic Good Projects, gave a live interview to a Billboard reporter at South by Southwest in which they breezily described using sock-puppet accounts to manufacture enthusiasm for artists at every level of the music industry, from major-label pop stars to niche indie acts. Spelman called the practice “trend simulation.” His motto: “Everything on the internet is fake.”
Chaotic Good’s interview went viral the old-fashioned way: by making lots of real people mad. Some were appalled by the cynicism of the company’s pitch, others by its client list, which included indie artists whose popularity fans preferred to imagine had spread organically. Most of the outrage focused on the Brooklyn band Geese and its frontman Cameron Winter, whose strangled, water-buffalo caterwaulings became inescapable in 2025. To skeptics, Chaotic Good seemed to provide the missing explanation for the group’s unexpected ubiquity. Wired called Geese’s success “a psyop,” which triggered Paste to defend the band in a piece headlined, “Congratulations, You Discovered Digital Marketing.” ...
But the fight over Geese missed the larger point. The issue wasn’t really whether one rock band had been fraudulently foisted on unsuspecting listeners. It was that the same techniques that Coren and Spelman bragged about onstage are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip. Shady marketing and propaganda aren’t new, of course, but what is new is that the entire infrastructure of public conversation has been quietly captured by both.
You're a cynical shit!
For real though, I'm probably an overly optimistic shit, but I think your second analogy is closer to the truth, but even still a bit short of it. You're right about hidden crevices becoming havens, but life doesn't just survive in those havens, it mutates and evolves. Inevitably it grows out of those havens, and usually it gets eaten by some predator at that point, but sometimes that can make a predator really sick, maybe even kill it. And the forest overall can start to change again. So really I don't think the Internet is a forest as much as it's one big organism, and we can be the viruses.
To torture another metaphor, give a million monkeys typewriters and I think it's inevitable you'll get monkey Woody Guthrie and there will be a monkey revolt, because creating any kind of art and thinking artistically rejects the premise of objective valuation that capitalist logic has as a necessary premise. Art does not have inherent value like a tool or other made objects do, and it continually resists and undermines its own abstracted commodification in its pursuit of novelty/originality/authenticity. Disney tries to copy paste a Star Wars plot and only succeeds in setting a pile of money on fire, but people will be talking about Sinners for years even though nobody knew they wanted a Jim Crow horror film until it was a thing.
The fact that throughout human history and all sorts of different social conditions the impulse to make silly useless valueless art rises up again and again tells me this social structure of capitalism is built on quicksand.