Recorded Music as Superstimulus

24 Sep, 2026

For reasons I dare not guess, dudes occasionally tell me how they're being oppressed by pornography. Sometimes, it fucks with their qi and deprives them of superpowers. Other times, it fucks with their hormones and makes their balls shrivel up. But, to me, their most interesting proposal is that pornography is a supernormal stimulus. A dude in the Pleistocene would rarely see a Hot Naked Person. If he did, it would be because they were about to make sweet love. Sure, he could carve a Venus figurine or something, but it would remain a pale imitation of the real thing. The modern dude, forced to cope with industrial society and its future, has no such luxury. He has a practically infinite number of Hot Naked People in his pocket, each one of them sexier than any Hot Naked Person he could ever encounter in real life. Thus, he comes to prefer anime girls to real girls, and he probably wants to do unspeakable things to sparkplugs.

Now, there's obviously some truth to this. We all know that one dude who can't live within three miles of a sparkplug. In such extreme cases, I'm sure porn addiction is part of the problem. But, if porn is a supernormal stimulus, it's kind of shitty at it. Humans do not normally try to replace dating with porn. If someone does, we find it sad, and we suspect he needs therapy. We recognize that sex and romance are meant to social activities, and we think something is lost when we forget that.

But, when reflecting upon the words of our dear bro, it occurred to me that there is a digital technology which is much better at being a supernormal stimulus. It has almost destroyed a natural, social activity, and it has replaced it with a solitary and passive one.

That technology is music streaming. If your ancestors wanted to make music, they made it themselves. They sang as they worked and they walked. They sang in church.¹ They sang to their children. They sang ditties, they made rhymes. They bought broadside ballads and sang them themselves. Perhaps they paid another to sing, but this was an occasional thing, often confined to a single place. You couldn't marinate in it. It was like going to a concert or listening to live music in a bar.

This is no longer true. In wake of the phonograph, the speaker, and the earpod, normal people have stopped singing. There are vestiges of the old ways. You might sing karaoke. You might sing in church. You might sing along in the car. You might sing happy birthday to your friends. But the old, omnipresent music is gone. Instead, we spend years listening to inhumanely beautiful voices -- voices made beautiful by singular talent, years of training, and careful editing. Then, we judge ourselves because we don't sound like them.

I don't think this is altogether bad. I love modern music, with its unnatural instruments and inhumanely beautiful voices. If we destroyed all the speakers and all the headphones, something beautiful would be lost. But, there is also beauty in simple, social singing, and something beautiful has been lost with its demise.