WORKS
"error" // Feb. 20, 2026
ABOUT
Are you happy with the way things are?
The arranged marriage of capitalism and technology has improved our lives in many ways, but there has been serious collateral damage. The demise of the passive, free and open internet in favour of an algorithmically driven, personalised user experience is already well documented. The once mighty household desktop computer—a benign, landlocked terminal to be visited much like a library—has been abandoned for the utility and immediacy of the smartphone: a predatory, omniscient, seductive (and addictive) device designed to extract data and hemorrhage time.
But perhaps what is more insidious is the near-ubiquitous filtration of human connection through technological middlemen. Customer service is now abstracted through layers of complexity to be anything but of service to the customer. Idiosyncratic email prose has been replaced by incomprehensible online forms. “Support” phone numbers on websites have been mostly supplanted by AI chatbots, and those that remain deliver infinite hold music and pre-recorded messages crafted to reduce staff overheads, maximise corporate profit, and assimilate interactions into digestible, extractable data points.
When you talk, who listens?
There is a pervasive impotence to our continued engagement with these models—to our obedience to the automated voice on the other side of the phone asking us to “please hold”. Hold what? Our tongue, our temper? Our own precarious position in the status quo? Our loved ones close, as the social contract crumbles around us?
The annoying inconvenience of a 45-minute hold time, the dopamine-fueled attention vortex of social media, and the devastating threat of technologically-driven environmental collapse with consequences for our continued survival as a species are all to be viewed as part of the same continuum; an attitude born from technofeudalism, facilitated by late stage capitalism and worshipped with the fervent religiosity of a new god; “Your time on this earth belongs to me”.
We are living in a house of cards.
Will you continue to hold?
The arranged marriage of capitalism and technology has improved our lives in many ways, but there has been serious collateral damage. The demise of the passive, free and open internet in favour of an algorithmically driven, personalised user experience is already well documented. The once mighty household desktop computer—a benign, landlocked terminal to be visited much like a library—has been abandoned for the utility and immediacy of the smartphone: a predatory, omniscient, seductive (and addictive) device designed to extract data and hemorrhage time.
But perhaps what is more insidious is the near-ubiquitous filtration of human connection through technological middlemen. Customer service is now abstracted through layers of complexity to be anything but of service to the customer. Idiosyncratic email prose has been replaced by incomprehensible online forms. “Support” phone numbers on websites have been mostly supplanted by AI chatbots, and those that remain deliver infinite hold music and pre-recorded messages crafted to reduce staff overheads, maximise corporate profit, and assimilate interactions into digestible, extractable data points.
When you talk, who listens?
There is a pervasive impotence to our continued engagement with these models—to our obedience to the automated voice on the other side of the phone asking us to “please hold”. Hold what? Our tongue, our temper? Our own precarious position in the status quo? Our loved ones close, as the social contract crumbles around us?
The annoying inconvenience of a 45-minute hold time, the dopamine-fueled attention vortex of social media, and the devastating threat of technologically-driven environmental collapse with consequences for our continued survival as a species are all to be viewed as part of the same continuum; an attitude born from technofeudalism, facilitated by late stage capitalism and worshipped with the fervent religiosity of a new god; “Your time on this earth belongs to me”.
We are living in a house of cards.
Will you continue to hold?
GULFF is a multidisciplinary collaboration by Owain Kelly and Tod Lippy.
Lippy is an artist, editor, and the founding editor of the arts publication Esopus in Brooklyn. Kelly (NO CEREMONY///) is an electronic musician and composer in Manchester.
The project's first offering is a self-titled album exploring the cultural, political, commercial, and technological ruptures of the mid–2020s. This exploration is communicated through the auditory byproducts of late capitalism — sometimes eerie, sometimes uplifting, and always world-building textural layers of sampled robocalls, rolling newscasts, studio audience soundscapes, electric static, manosphere podcasters — permeating the album's 10 tracks. Phrases culled from these sources inform the lyrics, which follow a narrator experiencing personal loss and isolation while reckoning with a splintered present and expectations for a dystopic future.
For Kelly and Lippy, latency, static, and digital distance are personal: These two collaborators, who live six time zones and nearly 3,500 miles apart, have never met in person and say they never will.
The distance between them — and the intrusive and sometimes terrifying marvels of digital connectivity they use to navigate it — are central to their collaborative process and to the final product.
Lippy is an artist, editor, and the founding editor of the arts publication Esopus in Brooklyn. Kelly (NO CEREMONY///) is an electronic musician and composer in Manchester.
The project's first offering is a self-titled album exploring the cultural, political, commercial, and technological ruptures of the mid–2020s. This exploration is communicated through the auditory byproducts of late capitalism — sometimes eerie, sometimes uplifting, and always world-building textural layers of sampled robocalls, rolling newscasts, studio audience soundscapes, electric static, manosphere podcasters — permeating the album's 10 tracks. Phrases culled from these sources inform the lyrics, which follow a narrator experiencing personal loss and isolation while reckoning with a splintered present and expectations for a dystopic future.
For Kelly and Lippy, latency, static, and digital distance are personal: These two collaborators, who live six time zones and nearly 3,500 miles apart, have never met in person and say they never will.
The distance between them — and the intrusive and sometimes terrifying marvels of digital connectivity they use to navigate it — are central to their collaborative process and to the final product.