When I Am a (Romantic) God
Monday, June 24, 2024  
by Aleksander Poniewierski, APConsulting

In my hometown of Katowice, in the district of Bogucice, lived the king of early Polish hip-hop - Magik. He wrote in the words of an iconic song:
> "(...) Because I am God, realize that  
> You hear the words that make your hair stand on end  
> Oh dear, oh dear, I am unbeatable (...)"
He was talented but born in the wrong place and time. Nowadays, Paktofonika’s music and its bone-chilling lyrics would likely struggle to get airtime on commercial radio stations, but at least he’d have a chance to pay the electricity bills with royalties. As the saying goes, you have to choose: either you're a legend, or a commercial influencer leaving nothing behind. The band was great, and Magik’s story will live on in the history of the Polish music scene. Probably, his death significantly contributed to the myth. Mystery and speculation fuel imagination. Assumptions are made, and a sense of injustice grows. This is precisely what drives popularity—in his case, unfortunately, posthumously.
Last week, we had two viral stories. The first was about the departure of one of the masterminds behind OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, who decided to start his own AI firm based on deep ethical values—a company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. The announcements are enormous. Safe super AI, ethical creation and use. The internet buzzed because, either with Elon Musk’s circle of investors, he’s trying to prove it can be done differently, or he knows something we are not fully aware of and wants history to judge him not as a misjudged genius but as a rebellious one. On the other side of the internet, we have a girl known as "hawk tuah," who participated in a street interview, gave a humorous answer to a question, and not only went viral but within just 48 hours generated a craze for T-shirts, caps, and song remixes with her answer (which I won’t quote here for obvious reasons). In Tennessee and even other states in America, people are searching for this “star,” while tattoo studios are recording record profits from creating tattoos of her likeness and the slogan that will undoubtedly become the summer hit.
We need idols and contemporary crowd-pleasers. It has always been this way and always will be. We need sensation and speculation. We need legends, even if they are stars of a single sentence, like our “spitter.” We need moving stories and, as Gen Z says, drama. We need to envy, even if just for a moment, the luck of being in the right place at the right time. We need heroes who defy the mainstream. Defiant rebels. Konrad Wallenrods fighting the system, or Magiks who tell of their lives in a romantic way. We need someone to say "no" for us—rebels. We also need the circus of “pathology” to say... what kind of people, what kind of values, while sharing their content further, for laughs, for fun, and for a semblance of disapproval.