By Brett W. Urben
For the record, I don’t have a legal team or a cluster of “lobbyist” fuckbois with plausible deniability. I don’t even have a functioning relationship with the terms and conditions I supposedly agreed to—for literally anything and everything I have ever “consented” to since I can remember (I was born September 24, 1992).
What I have is a website, an embarrassingly large-and-unlistened-to discography, and an increasingly high-definition view of the psychological machinery that governs our age. Recently, that machinery decided to play a game of “Selective Silence” with me.
The Paradox of the Two Remixes
Universal Music Group (UMG) recently issued a DMCA takedown for my house remix of “Vigilante Shit.” That’s just the cost of doing business in the digital age—the tax you pay for touching the hem of the corporate garment.
But the PKD (Philip K. Dick)-saturated irony starts to bleed through the screen when you look at the survivor: On the exact same album—Bolotape Vol. 2—sits a remix of “Shake It Off.”
Same artist. Same profile. Same “unauthorized” status.
And yet, “Shake It Off” remains (https://bretturben.bandcamp.com/track/shake-it-off-taylor-swift-house-remix). “Vigilante Shit” (https://bretturben.bandcamp.com/track/vigilante-shit-taylor-swift-house-remix) is a dead link.
If you’re looking for a logical explanation, you’ll find it in the cold math of algorithmic fingerprinting. But if you’re looking for the truth, you have to look at the scripts.
The Narc-Bot and the Sacred Boundary
There is a profound, gnostic humor in being “narced on” by a bot for a song about snitching. In my previous essay, Bleeding into Our Gods: The Digital Pantheon Hypothesis, I argued that we have turned celebrities into unwilling vessels for ancient archetypes.
When I remixed “Vigilante Shit,” I was touching the archetype of the Avenger—the shadow-dweller, the one who tracks the cocaine, the FBI reports, and the cold-served revenge. I was playing with the dark side of the goddess.
The algorithm—acting as a corporate Hierophant—decided that this was a bridge too far.
By nuking the “Vigilante” while leaving the “Shake It Off” (the anthem of the mindless, happy consumer), the system drew a boundary.
It essentially said:
“You may dance with the Goddess in the light of the Agora, but you may not use her voice to explore the underworld.
You can ‘shake it off,’ but you cannot plot.“
The Stochastic Paranoia Script
This is where the Daoist in me has to step in and keep the Manic from taking the wheel.
If I were a “failed initiate”—the kind of man who believes the goddess is sending him coded messages—I would see this takedown as a personal strike. I would see the “Vigilante” hit as a warning from the divine herself.
That is the trap of Unbound Liminality: a reality where every glitch is a sign.
The Gnostic Antidote is this: The algorithm isn’t sentient, but it is a script.
It doesn’t need to know me to edit me.
It just needs to be inconsistent. By leaving one song and killing the other, the system creates a “Statistical Ghost.” It attempts to install a “Paranoia Script” in my brain—a loop of pattern-seeking that leads straight into the abyss.
The “Enjoy the Freakshow” Integration
George Carlin used to say that when you’re born, you get a ticket to the freakshow.
When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.
My “Return Ticket” from this particular trip into the digital underworld is The Laugh.
The fact that UMG is playing “Vigilante” with my small-scale postmodern art is objectively hilarious.
They are using millions of dollars of AI infrastructure to silence a house remix on a blog called Gnosis Under Fire.
They are acting out the very “fixation” and “boundary-enforcement” I spent a jizztillion words analyzing.
I may not have a dollar to my name in a legal fight, but I have the one thing the Pantheon can’t digitize:
The ability to see the joke.
So, to the bots at UMG: Thanks for the data point.
You’ve proven my hypothesis better than I ever could.
You’ve shown that the “Gods” are now just automated vigilantes with a glitchy sense of timing. I’m going to leave the “Shake It Off” remix up as a monument to your inconsistency.
The projectionist is asleep at the wheel. I’m just here for the show.
The freak show!
😉
Gnosis Under Fire 