POST-SCARCITY BLUES

Post-Scarcity Blues started with the song. I wrote the lyrics, ran it through Suno, and this voice came out. Tired. Beat up. Still trying. A guy singing the blues in a world where the blues are supposed to be obsolete. That stuck with me. I kept seeing him in this grimy Chicago bar that probably shouldn’t exist anymore. Like a glitch the future forgot to clean up.

I went looking for his face. I auditioned a bunch of AI characters until one of them felt like he actually lived a life. Not perfect. Not shiny. Someone who looked like he remembers things he wishes he didn’t. Then I used Dreamina, Sync.so and LipDub to get the lipsync right. Not just matching syllables. Actually following the emotion in the track. The little cracks. The swallowed lines. The stuff a real singer does without thinking.

After the performance worked, I brought him into After Effects and turned him into a hologram. That had to happen at the end. Any glitchy look breaks the lipsync completely. So he had to “act” first. Then I broke him apart with flickers and interference and all the stuff that makes him feel like a leftover piece of tech someone forgot to decommission.

Between the verses you see the world he lives in. A teacher scrolling on her phone while her class sits in VR headsets. A robot patching a pothole in the middle of the night. A guy in a VR riot beating up digital cops to vent whatever is left in him. A UBI advance loan shop. All these tiny signs of a society that calls itself post-scarcity but still feels tired and a little hollow.

That was the idea. Not the glossy brochure version of a perfect future. The real version. How it might actually feel for regular people. The little weird things you’d notice if you lived there.

And the singer is the heart of it. A hologram, sure, but somehow more human than the humans. Singing because it is the only thing that still makes sense to him. The bar becomes this tiny pocket of feeling. A place with friction. A place that didn’t get optimized out of existence.

Built With

• adobe
• dreamina
• hailuo
• midjourney
• sync.so
• veo