Affect·Identity·Internet aesthetics·Sound

Pop on #Adderall

by Klaudia Orczykowska March 7th, 2026

🄕🄐🄡 🄢🄘🄓🄔 🄥🄘🄡🄣🄤🄐🄛 🄕🄛🄐🄣🄛🄘🄝🄔 🄒🄞🄝🄢🄣🄡🄤🄒🄣
𒆜🄹🄿🄴🄶🅂 🄿🄸🅇🄴🄻🄰🅃🄴🄳
🅂🄴🅇🅈 100% 🅂🄴🅇🅈 𒆜
Lattes, Yoga, Hegemony
#HYPERFLIP POP on Adderall

It would be a tragedy if artificial superintelligence was never developed.
You've hit your peak, and an algorithm wants your job.
Now what? 1

I wish I could chill tf out and not care. Embrace the chaos of modern nihilism. Leftist delusion of revolutionary potential through personal expression.² But what’s left of personal expression if I’m lost in my own identity, values, beliefs, and the whole thing? Maybe it's not even about being lost, it's all just so liquid and volatile from the constant info dump. Thanks to tech, everything's always changing so we can’t place ourselves in a solid position. We are sustained by virtuality, fidget spinners, and useless stuff, and we can't surprise anyone anymore – not because nothing happens, but because everything happens all the time. Change becomes a background noise, a variation without event. Surprise requires stability.

Watch me: affection is that sunset hitting differently on a cold autumn night.
Kiss me: affect is that WHOA moment before you even know how to react to something.
Run away from me: affected like ghosts when you mess with their space.³

or in different words...

Watch me: affection is when I can name the sunset IRL like a VSCO cam filter.
Kiss me: affect is the “???? 𝘏𝘌𝘓𝘓𝘖???” micro-heart-jolt you can’t screenshot, but low-key want to.
Run away from me: affected is ghost mode IRL when you touch my aura wrong and I vanish like a Snapchat streak.

or in different words...

Affection: affect once it’s actualized into a recognizable feeling.
Affect: pre-conscious intensity, prior to emotion or meaning.
Affected: the behavioral/aesthetic modulations that follow the impact.

𝐀𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞. 𝐀𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐨𝐚𝐝.⁴ノ✿

I just LOVE affect. I LOVE to feel. I’m a lover and ◦•●❤♡ I <3 LOVE ♡❤●•◦. Here’s your usual 3am order my beautiful princess with a disorder. Deep cleansing breaths and counting sheep. Close my eyes just to open them again. Damn it’s today? What’s next? Tomorrow? Fuck EVERYTHING!!!

(¯`’•.¸❤♫♪♥(◠‿◠)♥♫♪❤¸.•’´¯)

Last night I had a dream about you,
in this dream I’m dancing right beside YOU.
And it looked like everyone was having fun.
The kinda feeling I’ve waited for so long.⁵

(¯`’•.¸❤♫♪♥(◠‿◠)♥♫♪❤¸.•’´¯)

I’m trying to understand what happens when people connect. The illusion of perpetual connection has become a barrier to the experience of physical closeness. Mystery and space vanished, we lost the thrill and we can't bridge the gap between ourselves and someone else if we don’t believe this person exists. And maybe it’s because the present itself struggles with time. The hyperpresent deletes itself the moment it appears. Nothing happens that isn’t already undone.⁶

In the absence of duration something else is taking over…

Affect⁷ can dip and become its own thing. Somewhere between rage-baiting and thirst traps, I'm crying at a random vid of an old person or a cat or another emotional bait content with a demonic trending audio. A borderline feed with feels A҉ L҉ L҉ ҉O҉ V҉ E҉ R҉ ҉T҉ H҉ E҉ ҉ P҉ L҉ A҉ C҉ E҉

Affect is the shift, the variation, that happens when bodies collide or come into contact. Affect is the transitional product of an encounter and as indefinite as the experience of a sunset or your Instagram feed. We’re trying to understand all the incredible, wondrous, tragic, painful, and destructive configurations of things and bodies⁸ as temporally mediated, continuous events.

They collide SO FAST causing affect that doesn’t even have time to develop further. Under hypercontemporary conditions duration itself becomes fragmented; affect is continuously initiated but interrupted. The whole acceleration thing or something. Affect is cut short. It exists as temporally mediated which means it happens in time but as a micro-duration that doesn’t consolidates. It exists as a flicker before its displaced or replaced, overwritten by next image, sound, stimulus.

I’m not sure how much affect I have left in me. Motivational intensity keeps me in the loop. One oat flat white later I’m thinking of the internet as a being capable of affect just as much as we are. The internet is SO borderline. Like *¸ „„.•~¹°”ˆ˜¨♡ DAMN•.„¸* SHE A WHOLE MOOD.

I say to you now
I saw boomers and millennials
In a neotenous glow
Lattes, yoga, hegemony:
The triumphs of the modern human
Within them the full experience
Of civilization at affordable prices
Easily accessible and customizable
State of the art services
Furnishing the symbiosis of the will-driven society
And its things⁹

𝐈 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬, 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐀𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐒™

I <3<3<3 IMAGES!!!!!!!!!!! and I love meaning!!!!!!!!!! but we are killing the images by the overdose of (enforced) meaning.¹⁰ Under platform conditions, images are compelled to become instantly legible, stripped of ambiguity, delay, and symbolic depth. Immediate recognition is imposed as a requirement: the image must explain itself at once or it risks becoming unshareable. Meaning is compressed into surface legibility, the image must be better known than what it gestures toward.¹¹

We are victims of the images we transfer ourselves into. Endless options, zero chill and poor decision making skills. I might as well be nothing if I can’t be coherent. ╰•★★ I don’t FW aesthetics ★★•╯ I want to be EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL at ONCE. I don’t have aesthetics, I am aesthetics. I’m dreaming about a curated feed and to expand this curation to the REAL life. Sometimes I wish I could translate myself into a readymade object, I consider perfect, at any given moment. And then I catch myself thinking why do I even give into the desire of perfection where in fact the desire lays in imperfection?

Nevermind anyway... I’ll be somehow different in a few days… I’m curating this image 🄙🄤🄢🄣 🄕🄞🄡 🄨🄞🄤. I’m a customized feed, reactive to my surroundings and I’m more ·.★·.·´¯`·.·★ real ★·.·´¯`·.·★.· than you can imagine but maybe... I don’t even exist... at the same time. My vulnerability is your ⓟⓞⓡⓝⓞⓖⓡⓐⓟⓗⓨ💦 because in the world of f҉a҉k҉e҉ my emotions become->e♥x♥p♥l♥i♥c♥i♥t.

Žižek said that Freud said that the only emotion which doesn’t deceive is anxiety¹², not because it is more authentic or truthful, but because it has a privileged proximity to the Real, unlike other emotions which are structured through fantasy and the Symbolic order. So what does it mean to live in a New Age of Anxiety? Do we live FOR REAL????? Fisher wrote that McLuhan already sensed it: postmodern anxiety is not solitude, but overexposure. Separating who you ARE from what you THINK/FEEL in this whole owning-and-flexing neoliberal game is rough, it makes you feel so fragmented. Feelings zooming by, just as if someone nervously scrolling through my emotions in a uniformly accelerated motion. The maximization of meaninglessness itself (= boredom maximalism), [...] the acceleration of human recursive form of experience.¹³ Aesthetics of alienation and fear of boredom which in a way is the fear of the unknown, and TBH I don’t blame anyone for that. This quiet, annoying emptiness got us all restless and pressed. Boredom isn’t far from the feeling of emptiness.

Stimuli = meaning. Meaning = stimuli. Not an ontological equivalence, but a description of conditions in which meaning is measured by activation, engagement, and affective response rather than narrative, context, or reflection. Boredom = lack stimuli or the failure of attachment. Meaning is no longer produced, it circulates and the problem is NOT that there is no meaning, but that meaning has been reduced to signal. ¹⁴

I know that to be bored means to be removed from the groupchat-YT binge; to be denied, for a moment, the sweet, sweet dopamine. BUT IT’S SO HARD and I’m a MAJOR sweet tooth. I do find myself at times wanting everything like I want my latte: ASAP, boujee, and aesthetic. I am trapped within myself and subjectivity gets fragmented in the face of the emerging Entertainment Industrial Complex. And at times I am scared of boredom because I fear to see how empty I am without you, without all of these things.

No one is bored, everything is boring.¹⁵ Generation of depressive hedonia, where stimulation is constant but affect is flat and by flatness here I don’t mean a lack of affect, but its saturation: intensity stacked on intensity so continuously it begins to cancel itself out, like sound waves collapsing into silence through destructive interference.¹⁶ Not absence, just overload. Flattened infantilized affect algorithmic survival. We crave intensity until it overwhelms us, and then we crave the aesthetic tools that let us step back from the very intensities we sought. We seek aesthetic distance. But how to distance yourself from something you are in immediate contact with ALL THE TIME? If everything is epic theatre now, then what we’re most alienated from isn’t the narrative, it’s ourselves. We become versions of ourselves we observe, we are the actors and the audience at the same time. Sometimes the only thing that reminds me I am me is my Face ID and I find myself stuck in another kind of delirium: the realising of the pressure to be myself.

I am a little too self-aware to enjoy life and a little too delusional to give up. Disney pollution, porn and paranoia. The visual bond of today is the link to the present. Noise cancelling headphones on and another coffee. In his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction Fisher writes about the gothic flatline construct, a plane where being alive and dead are the same and having agency doesn't mean you're even alive. All this hyper-modern consumerism, fueled by scarcity marketing, FOMO economics, and the language of aesthetic self-worth, lives rent-free and keeps evolving by taking agency over us. The flatline isn’t a metaphor anymore, we are lowkey living in a world where aliveness is measured in refreshed rates, and agency becomes indistinguishable from reactivity. Attention is undead.¹⁷ And maybe that’s why boredom scares us... because it’s the only moment the hyperactive ghosts go quiet.

🄐🄟🄟🄛🄔 🄢🄣🄞🄡🄔

I went to the Apple Store the other week. I sat in the corner of the Apple store in The Hague and I looked the devil in the eye. I was listening to Far Side Virtual by James Ferraro and thinking about what he said about the title itself: “Far Side Virtual mainly designates a space in society, or a mode of behaving. All of these things operating in synchronicity: like ringtones, flat-screens, theater, cuisine, fashion, sushi. I don't want to call it "virtual reality," so I call it Far Side Virtual. If you really want to understand Far Side, first off, listen to [Claude] Debussy¹⁸, and secondly, go into a frozen yogurt shop. Afterwards, go into an Apple store and just fool around, hang out in there. Afterwards, go to Starbucks and get a gift card. They have a book there on the history of Starbucks – buy this book and go home. If you do all these things you'll understand what Far Side Virtual is – because people kind of live in it already.”

POV: Far Side Virtual world where culture is an asset measured in vibes and those vibes hold ALL the power. Vibes function like derivatives whose underlying referents have eroded, everything’s speculative after the disappearance of the underlying itself.

It’s NOT pleasure that keeps you going, but the avoidance of the confrontation with interiority that silence would impose. A refusal of selfhood through overstimulation. Culture isn’t necessarily shallow – affect peaks in intensity and yet feels flat at the same time. Just as at a 3am party vibe check where the music objectively sucks but you stay anyway because the silence is unbearable and you need a soundtrack to your own suffering.¹⁹

The Silence Is Unbearable,
I Need a Soundtrack to My Own Suffering

staring at my own music library like im narcissus staring at myself in the water <3 ♪

It’s time to transcend into my personal ·.★·.·´¯`·.·★ 𝙵𝚊𝚛 𝚂𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚅𝚒𝚛𝚝𝚞𝚊𝚕 ★·.·´¯`·.·★.·.

Music in an easy mirror… The playlist is a pain‑pleasure feedback loop, perfectly engineered. When the feelings and the music become one, I don’t know if those feelings are mine or if it is another bait. The hottest MIT scientist said that everything on the internet is a bait. I know that and I believe him. I don’t think he’s hot, but he thinks so. I don’t even know if he’s an MIT scientist, but I’ll let him have this one. Sometimes I don’t even know who I am and that’s OK. I look for answers outside myself because I’m scared that if I look within, I’ll only find more shit.

But maybe we don’t always need to know who we are.

At the end of the day we are all just sitting somewhere all across the world with our headphones listening to our little songs aren’t we? Wherever you are... trying to disappear a little.

In the integral reality, everything must logically want to disappear, it’s an automatic reaction to 🄞🄥🄔🄡🄓🄞🄢🄔 🄞🄕 🄡🄔🄐🄛🄘🄣🄨 and there are two ways to do this: either to be hidden and to insist on the right not to be seen, that’s the actual defense of private life. Or one shifts to delirious exhibitionism of his own platitude and insignificance, the ultimate protection against the servitude of being and of being himself. Hence, the absolute obligation to be seen, to make oneself visible at any price.²⁰

Pandemic, depression, pink hair and TikTok. During the first wave of lockdown during COVID19 I would post a lot on TikTok. Just to get that... ATTENTION, my favorite. Viral misery and a general collapse. I was making myself really visible when in fact I wanted to disappear. I loved the attention, it felt like freedom but freedom can bring more alienation. Crash out to a trending audio. There was a point where I genuinely couldn’t tell if the front-facing-camera version of me was helping me cope or slowly hollowing me out. I didn’t know what the purpose was and if there even was a purpose.

Despite it being trendy and viral it was also unsexy and, frankly, sad.

And I’m thinking... the purpose of imagery under platform conditions is no longer to open meaning, but to force it closer to immediate recognition. Images are required to explain themselves instantly. Without this immediate enforced recognition the image might risk becoming unshareable therefore meaningless in circulation. Meaning has been compressed into surface recognition, so the image must be better known than what it gestures towards. Meaning flattened into instant legibility. You see a pink-haired girl crying and drinking taro milk bubble tea to Juice Wrld - Wasted (feat. Lil Uzi Vert) [huken x murkish remix]. CB on the beat. Online it reads: sad e-girl core but you don’t know what’s actually happening. Another aestheticized collapse or maybe she’s actually fine and it’s all an act, a freedom of choice.

But this all started a bit earlier...

I was born in a small village in central Poland in 1996, in a relatively poor working-class family.
Christian, Catholic. Liminal village with 1k inhabitants. Elementary school straight out of the backrooms.

Mandatory religion classes and church attendance. For my First Communion, I received both the First Eucharist and my first Personal Computer. A truly spiritual and holy experience: the Blessed Sacrament and Windows XP. Microsoft Lord’s Supper.

I didn’t have the internet back then. Even though I remember the exact moment I turned on my computer for the first time, I don’t remember what I was doing on it for the next few years. Probably playing The Sims 2 and painting in MS Paint. Nobody liked those paintings, but I kept doing them anyway. When I was around thirteen, my mom bought me a new PC and an internet router and I believe this is all important. Turn on. Windows Vista. First search:

Hannah Montana - The Best Of Both Worlds

You get the limo out front. UH-OH-UH Hottest styles, every shoe, every color. Yeah, when you're famous, it can be kinda fun. It's really you but no one ever discovers. You get the best of both worlds. Without the shades and the hair. You can go anywhere. You get the best of both girls. Mix it all together, oh yeah. It's so much better. Cause you know you got the best of both worlds.

And it truly was the moment when I started living two lives. Hannah Montana. Best of both worlds.

I’ve learned about The Pirate Bay and how to download full artists’ discographies all at once. 1TB hard drive filled with as much downloaded music and images as possible. It was year 2009.

2009 was the year of Kesha’s “TikTok”²¹, Taylor Swift “Love Story”, Lady Gaga “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”, Owl City “Fireflies”, The Veronicas “Untouched”, Soulja Boy Tell 'Em “Turn My Swag On” and “Kiss Me thru the Phone”, Justin Bieber “One Time”, Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A” and these are only some from the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2009.

Around that time I also started getting into the uNdErGrOunD/IDM, experimental electronics. Disney Channel going hand in hand with Hyperdub and dusty vinyls some old hippies would play at the only alt venue in the city closeby. And I would be like wow this is so cool omg aphex twin at a party and smoking my first cigarettes but then on the way back home I would listen to Kesha and LMFAO or Hannah Montana and I would be like ok that’s a vibe too.

And why am I even telling you this? I believe this is all important. Music, your whole aesthetic, and affect are linked. Music is never “just here”, it’s structured through mood, memory, and all those emotional crumbs from your past selves. Music isn’t there to accompany your emotions, it generates them. Sound hits before we even think about it. Music moves the body first and only then gets translated into “emotion.”

You rediscover yourself in music because music changes the conditions under which the “self” is felt. Nostalgia isn’t just a throwback; it’s when past and present hit at the same time, but differently. Mood becomes a key – a way to access forgotten selves, to stabilize the current one when it feels shaky, or simply to enjoy yourself. Music becomes a mirror that doesn’t reflect how you look, but how you feel yourself feeling.

It’s an endless loop of finding yourself: music makes you feel, feelings construct your self-image, and your self-image decides the music you keep coming back to. You find you in the music, and sometimes that’s the realest convo you’ll ever have.

FAST FORWARD. Some time has passed and during that time I embodied one of the requirements to be living cliche – being a DJ.*kill the DJ by Green Day playing in my head* but now I’m equally as bored²² with it as fascinated with the act itself. Someone kill the DJ. Voices whisper, “Shoot that fucker down!” And I found myself wondering WHY??? why did I do THIS, why am I fascinated and why am I bored. When I did DJ, I played with genuine love: chaotic, maximalist, overstimulating, #hyperflip POP ON ADDERALL. Mashups, nostalgic vocals, distorted basslines from hell, bitcrushed, nightcored.

Think Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,” but in sound.²³

Hito Steyerl describes the poor image as a copy in motion. Bad quality, resolution substandard. Distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, copied and pasted. SoundCloud (not only, but I want to focus on SC) mashups and further originated genres and microgenres are engaging with sound in the way Steyerl describes image, just in the audio realm. Superimposing the existing vocal track of one song over the instrumental track of another.

According to Wikipedia’s mashup reaches as early as 1967 with a big breakthrough in 2002 when Kylie Minogue performed a mash-up version of her number one hit "Can't Get You Out of My Head", combined with New Order's song "Blue Monday". The live performance is cited as one of the first by a mainstream recording artist to utilise a mashup, and was ranked at number 40 on The Guardian's 2011 list of 50 Key Events in the History of Dance Music. Then there was Bootie, a recurring club night in the United States dedicated solely to the burgeoning art form of the bootleg mashup, Music for A.D.D. Generation. And then Weird SoundCloud gained motion around 2012, a term/space related to mashup parody music “recontextualizing the sacred texts of millennial chatrooms”. The scene was praised as "loveable and strangely honest", and said that it reminds that we're all humans on the internet, all searching for #content that means something, something to connect with, but usually only dredging up bastardised versions of things we've already read, seen, or watched before.²⁴

The sound is poor akin to having a stroke. Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement. And the same goes with sound, with songs. When DJing, I am aware that the way I would select and play songs has difficulties fitting into a broader mainstream context, as it lacks class position; it lacks privilege. The sound lacks institutional or patrimonial recognition, thus its value may be considered lower and of less important. And even though the mashup entered mainstream culture, what is its further transformation, which is many internet native microgenres (e.g. digicore, hexd, pluggnb, dariacore, sigilkore, krushclub, jersey club, nightcore) gains rapid popularity and virality on platforms but still is clearly separated from mass consumer culture IRL.

But despite resolution or craft, we can imagine a different value defined by intensity or cultural memory. They are not “hi-fi” or “professional”; their power comes from intensity, referential overload, and accessibility rather than from production polish. The emotional terror on our eardrums and memory is the new production value. The focus shifts from fidelity (clarity, resolution) to velocity (intensity, acceleration), just like Steyerl’s copy in motion. The value of the “poor sound” comes from affective density.

Stage Five²⁵ Sonic Simulacrum of 🄔🄛🄔🄒🄣🄡🄞🄝🄘🄒 🄓🄐🄝🄒🄔 🄜🄤🄢🄘🄒

The hyper steroid-driven bastardism is kind of the new reality. Partying became a job and hedonism is explicitly paralleled with work.

While classical mashups or sample based work might fall in Stage Four Similacrum, Stage Four's hyper-reality still needed the corpse of the real to dance around. Stage Five just dances. In Stage Five, reality becomes obsolete not because it's denied or replaced, but because it's a non-sequitur. This amnesia is what makes Stage Five ambient rather than spectacular. There's no longer a rupture to notice, no sense of loss, no hero story, no lore.

J⋆u⋆s⋆t⋆ ⋆d⋆a⋆n⋆c⋆e⋆

Stage Five Simulacrum in music is when sound no longer references or aspires to authenticity – it exists as pure circulation, remix, and recombination, detached from origin or meaning. It’s a post-referential sonic condition where tracks, samples, and memes loop endlessly, creating affect through excess and motion rather than composition or intention. Music that just is, rather than about. I wish Fisher could hear this. Maybe he’d change his mind a bit.

	One!
	Two!
	Three!
	Four!
	Five!

Thinking about Fisher and my Hannah-Montana-meets-Burial upbringing, I went back to Ghosts of My Life and put myself in a whole immersive experience. I literally sat there reading the Burial interview while listening to Untrue and the debut. His music still feels like a cold autumn evening, my first kiss, and the eating disorder I pretended was a personality trait at 13. Very “magical 2009”.

And honestly, Fisher (bless him, doomer king) talks about pop being “steroid-driven,” quoting Daniel Barrow on how sugar-sweet pleasure-pop doesn’t seduce anymore, but tyrannises. If they thought Flo Rida “Club Can’t Handle Me Right Now” was steroid-driven I wonder what would they think about this https://starglitch.bandcamp.com/track/lick-glitch-remix or this https://youtu.be/BChzoI1W8jA?si=bmqQ47M0p17Q3_WG or...

Mostly during pandemic the crazy mashup culture, dariacore, digicore and in general online/streaming music culture accelerated. Constantly online, Discords groups etc. Dariacore album by Jane Remover came out in 2021, Dariacore was responsible for the creation of a genre of the same name, which inspired a wave of SoundCloud artists. And the thing is, all of it loops back to 2009/2010 radio hits — the Ke$ha/Katy Perry/Gaga era turned into an eternal sample pack. Billboard hits as raw material. Perfect circle.

These songs kind of demand that we enjoy ourselves. They leave only enough room to breathe and sometimes even difficult for that one. And because everything is so accelerated and overcaffeinated, we’re nostalgic for things that happened five minutes ago. The music of “then” is the music of “NOW”.

Fisher notes that rave was saturated with affect, but not romantic or introspective affect. The 21st-century introspective turn wasn’t a return to emotion; it was the shift from collectively felt affect to privatized emotion. Our whole generation’s relationship to music basically flipped. Most of the time listening stopped being a collective ritual and turned into this private, 24/7 IV-drip of curated feeling mediated through AirPods, noise free. We’re always plugged into something, always feeling something, even if the music never tells us what that feeling is supposed to be.

Club culture adjusted accordingly: the DJ became the protagonist, the sound became set design. The identity became the event. Performance replaced communion. Connection became 1:1 instead of everyone-all-at-once. The protagonist shift is basically the IRL version of parasociality: people don’t want communion, they want a main character they can pretend is mixing just for them. Hyperpersonal and hyperintimate. When I did DJ, I saw it so clearly: this weirdly intimate, individuated connection: growing up online = alienation but also hyper-recognizing each other through the static. And at the same time… it’s not that deep. Most remixes are made for fun, for chaos, for a tiny piece of shared recognition. Something to scream-sing on the dancefloor.

Additionally TikTok ate whatever was left of traditional discovery. It’s one of the main engines behind microgenre acceleration: the platform favors short hooks, sticky sound-bites, things designed for 15 seconds of trend-utility rather than depth. Loyalty to trends over talent. Sounds that something feel simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. TikTok recirculate mashups and you hear one sample over and over. Sampling naturally evokes hauntology, but the ghosts in these internet-native microgenres are different. Hauntology’s ghosts are eerie, melancholic, fixated on decay and lost futures. The ghosts of microgenres are mischievous, glitchy pranksters. They crave noise, chaos, and tomfoolery. Productive chaos. A little schizo (lovingly), not paranoid: embraced.

Pop on Adderall is basically jestery: the affective spirit of too-muchness, of being extra AF. It isn’t hauntology’s sad, decaying memory-ghosts, it’s their hyperactive opposition. A loose stylistic feature that embodies a kind of energetic haunting of the present: glitchy, mischievous, overstimulated, alive. Not mourning, not melancholia, not SAD BOYS™ energy. It’s a totally different affective register. Instead of culture fading into dust, you get culture that refuses to die, culture that keeps respawning, getting remixed, glitched, looped into persistence. Not a memory of the past, but an overabundance of the present. A cultural memory having a manic episode and abandoning futurity altogether: not out of resignation, but because temporality itself became non-linear. A raw intensity. A new kind of cultural unit whose value lies precisely in its accelerated circulation and mad overstimulation. A vibrant noise of references without origin, affect without attachment, intensity without interiority. A culture whose only constant is motion. A culture that’s dancing on its own grave of temporality.

And honestly? Crowds love it.
Music = intense; people = happy. Ear-bleeding remixes of Beauty and a Beat destroy every time.

Stage Five Sonic Simulacrum of Electronic Dance Music. SoundClown and a chaotic reassemblage of pop culture. Controlled chaos. Boredom maximalism, dopamine-maxxing, recursive feedback loops. Noisy, ugly, addictive. A culture where meaning is obsolete, affect is central, and circulation replaces representation. That’s why jestery hits: it breaks the spell. It’s too unserious to be mystified.

If hauntology is a haunted house, jestery is a clown car. Jestery is affect that’s hopped the fence, affect unbound, affect free-running across the timeline. A digital trickster archetype in FL Studio or Ableton. A humorous disruption of divine order. Affect’s FINAL FORM. And maybe that’s why I keep going. Because maybe even if there’s nothing left, there’s still that tiny moment when a song hits exactly right and you remember you have a body. You remember you exist and you remember you feel and that there’s something to attach to. And for a second, it’s enough. And for a second, the image is there again. For YOU clearly to see. And even if all meaning collapsed, affect hasn’t. If anything, affect is the last thing still functioning.

And maybe... just maybe... we almost forgot that was the whole point.

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Thanks to Geert Lovink, INC team, Dana Dawud and my friends, ILY <3

Klaudia Orczykowska is a chronically online image & sound addict currently studying Graphic Design at KABK in The Hague and was an intern in the fall of 2025. Her research focuses on digital micro-realities and the relationship between humans & digital-era technology, with a particular interest in aesthetics, image-based communication, platforms, emotional affect and identity.

ig @orczi96
orczi96.world

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Lattes, Yoga, Hegemony
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𝐈 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬, 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐀𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐒™

🄐🄟🄟🄛🄔 🄢🄣🄞🄡🄔

The Silence Is Unbearable,
I Need a Soundtrack to My Own Suffering

Think Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,” but in sound.²³

Stage Five²⁵ Sonic Simulacrum of 🄔🄛🄔🄒🄣🄡🄞🄝🄘🄒 🄓🄐🄝🄒🄔 🄜🄤🄢🄘🄒

J⋆u⋆s⋆t⋆ ⋆d⋆a⋆n⋆c⋆e⋆

read more:

"Viruses of the Mind" - Über die kybernetische Bedingung autoritärer Meme-Politik

De IJzeren Baobab - Een boom van beweging, herinnering en verbeelding

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𝐈 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬, 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐀𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐒™

🄐🄟🄟🄛🄔 🄢🄣🄞🄡🄔

The Silence Is Unbearable, I Need a Soundtrack to My Own Suffering

Think Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,” but in sound.23 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image

Stage Five25 https://morningfyi.substack.com/p/stage-5-simulacra-slop POSTPOST’s Al Hassan Elwan Sonic Simulacrum of 🄔🄛🄔🄒🄣🄡🄞🄝🄘🄒 🄓🄐🄝🄒🄔 🄜🄤🄢🄘🄒

J⋆u⋆s⋆t⋆ ⋆d⋆a⋆n⋆c⋆e⋆

read more:

"Viruses of the Mind" - Über die kybernetische Bedingung autoritärer Meme-Politik

De IJzeren Baobab - Een boom van beweging, herinnering en verbeelding

🄕🄐🄡 🄢🄘🄓🄔 🄥🄘🄡🄣🄤🄐🄛 🄕🄛🄐🄣🄛🄘🄝🄔 🄒🄞🄝🄢🄣🄡🄤🄒🄣
𒆜🄹🄿🄴🄶🅂 🄿🄸🅇🄴🄻🄰🅃🄴🄳
🅂🄴🅇🅈 100% 🅂🄴🅇🅈 𒆜
Lattes, Yoga, Hegemony
#HYPERFLIP POP on Adderall

The Silence Is Unbearable,
I Need a Soundtrack to My Own Suffering

Think Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,” but in sound.²³

Stage Five²⁵ Sonic Simulacrum of 🄔🄛🄔🄒🄣🄡🄞🄝🄘🄒 🄓🄐🄝🄒🄔 🄜🄤🄢🄘🄒