Last month, Rosie Tucker announced their new album UTOPIA NOW! and shared the gnarly single “All My Exes Live In Vortexes,” which followed November’s “Unending Bliss.” Today, they offer another song with a memorable title: “Paperclip Maximizer.”

“‘Paperclip Maximizer’ is a cautionary tale about watching from afar as a former loved one pursues constant growth and career accolades with totalizing, universe collapsing abandon,” Tucker said in a statement. They continued:

The song is partly inspired by watching former pals pursue outwardly impressive music careers while absolutely trashing their private relationships. When I wrote it, I felt lonely and belittled in my attempts to articulate how my interactions with the music industry often left me feeling isolated, angry, and distressed. When I started trying to channel my frustrations into art, the songs that emerged were not simply critical of the artist’s experience but of capitalism as a system.

It’s kind of impossible to explain the song without coming across as a real dork but here goes: philosopher Nick Bostrom first described the paperclip maximizer in a 2003 thought experiment meant to illustrate how artificial general intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity. I find some of Bostrom’s thinking to be harmful and regressive (he is a proponent of longtermism, the latest garbage ideology that tech billionaires are trying to pass for moral integrity) but I really liked the metaphor, not as a statement about AI, but as a description of the destructive perils of capitalism, especially when its logic is internalized and recreated in our personal lives.

People seem to fear that new technologies will oppress and dehumanize even as we are already immiserating and exploiting one another with great efficiency. It’s like, if you think it’s scary that a machine might control you, wait til you hear about what human beings have been up to!

Hear “Paperclip Maximizer” below.

UTOPIA NOW! is out 3/22 via Sentimental Records.