From Assbook to Zyntoflak – The Future of the Pop Business
Modderpampe
Sunday, March 25, 2012
From Assbook to Zyntoflak
The Future of the Pop Business
By Mark Modsen
Gustav Schmittrich-Schlaffle—“Tavo” to his friends—fumbled for his phone and killed the smell alarm. His flatmates worked night shifts and couldn’t stand the way he used to wake himself with bone-rattling bass from the phone’s woofer. They had “upgraded” him with Smellfire Clocktastic from the Android Market. This morning the app released a pungent whiff of Oriental Pussy to match his morning wood. Half-asleep, Tavo reached down lazily.
Even the dumbest goose knew musicians were losers these days. Groupies lived only in the zyntoflak-hazed stories of the old guard. Zyntoflak: cooked from toner and batteries, cheap as dirt, numbing as bread, heavy as lead.
He rolled off his mattress and blinked on his implanted forehead cam. Stumbling into the corridor, he dropped himself onto the filthy communal toilet. His Assbook profile lit up—2,836 followers now had a direct stream of his bathroom routine. Facebook? That was ancient history. Ever since shady market tricks had pushed Burmese coltan king Huang Dong past Zuckerberg as the richest man alive, Zuckerberg had become the poster child of evil neticalism. Musicians despised him even more for KompoApp, a parasite program that implanted EmoSense and auto-composed songs to match tomorrow’s mood. A whole career delivered—without ever learning a chord.
Tavo thought it was sick. He preferred Assbook, the darknet forum run by Icelandic hacktivists.
His molar speaker buzzed with fan comments.
“Yo, killer set yesterday on Skype.”
“Paper, not fingers, dude, hahahaha.”
“Send me a holo of yourself?”
“Later,” he muttered. “Unless you want one from the shitter. That’ll cost you extra. Rent’s seventeen thousand neuro here—without PlaNet access.”
When he was done with both business and holoshoot, he shuffled to the kitchen. Ever since that Malaysian rapper had broadcast real beheadings in his videos, fans demanded constant access to their idols’ private lives. No scandal, no Assbook likes. No likes, no sponsors. No sponsors, no gigs in MetroMedia’s hypermarket—where PlaNet accounts spat out musician pay.
His ex Queenie, a doomcore diva, had been cut loose by her body agency for refusing to star in a triple-penetration porno. Seven thousand hopefuls had auditioned in her place. She didn’t care. Doomcore concerts usually dissolved into deadly brawls anyway. Genetically juiced kids, fueled by the sports-betting mafia, turned those fight nights into a lucrative enterprise. Some killboxers were more famous than Queenie herself, but as long as she got her cut, it didn’t matter.
Tavo sighed. Brawls didn’t fit his sound. He sampled the mating cries of animals, stitching them into minimalist dance tracks for nude-dating events. No plagiarism bots could sue him for stolen birdcalls and pig grunts; even Sonywarner Emiversal couldn’t trademark rutting noises. It kept him out of jail, but not out of hunger.
With cash abolished, side hustles had dried up. Some musicians farmed organs to survive. Tavo wasn’t desperate enough—yet. He only donated sperm at Aldi SpermBank, in exchange for food stamps and the practiced smile of a quick-tongued clerk. Once a month, that counted as sex. But it didn’t pay for tours. Plant diesel cost thirty-eight neuro per liter, toll booths stood on every road. Clubs had long since replaced performers with 3D projectors. Musicians rented Skype boxes, pretending to play a hundred venues at once. In truth, the ad-holos barely covered the box fee.
Promo day. Tavo slipped on his shoes and headed to the nearest schoolyard. He sideloaded his tracks onto kids’ unguarded phones; one in eighty would eventually click through to his Assbook stream for two and a half minutes. Enough time for a dozen ads.
On arrival he tapped his feelscreen to scan the area. The surface turned into a quivering pincushion. Damn—petabyte stickers nearby. He circled a bush until he found it: a solar chip broadcasting five petabytes of the world’s music archive across a three-kilometer radius. Copyright vandals. The kids’ phones were already bloated with every song ever made, packed to the last memomer crystal.
Crossing to the next schoolyard, he glanced at the eBook pump’s headlines:
SENSATION! BABY BORN WITH SEALABLE EARS
If this keeps up, I’ll end up a zyntoflak dealer, Tavo thought, jamming his in-ears in place. He never heard the FlyTram hiss down on him.
The video of his final seconds pulled 718,945 likes on Assbook.