Reciprocity Nexus

“9-5 (Paradigm) Shift” – is a synth-driven companion track to. “Monkey Business”, in that both are essentially about evolution. But whereas the soulful, brass-driven “Monkey Business” is literally about Darwinian evolution; “9-5 (paradigm) Shift” is about evolution into the future…where people might load their consciousness up on the internet and the species might evolve into digital cyber creatures cf. Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Age of Spiritual Machines”.

The song contemplating a post-work existence, where we all spend our time self-actualising in the metaverse. It’s posited as:
• one answer to the plug the gap left by an absentee God
• the next stage of our evolution

The song references Fukuyama’s self-congratulatory work “The End of History” which somewhat hubristically interpreted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communist Russia at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s as somehow a triumph of capitalism. But as the lyric says:

“…Money men claimed
End of history
When the wall came down

But all that money spent
Killed the environment
Robots had to save the day

Automation meant
A leisure class that spent
A universal wage
Tech machines engineer a brave new world!
A brave new world!...”

So the song also anticipates a post-capitalist society, where a necessary “leisure class” spends all their time self-actualising in technology simulations. More optimistic than Orwellian dystopia, the song is somewhat whimsical – with only brief shades of Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman, both of whom were major influences on its writing.