A BEAUTIFUL AND WONDERFUL STORY ABOUT AN AUDIOPHILE. Who Is That?

⌈ Who is the AUDIOPHILE in the world of “artificial intelligence”? What is his role in creating “the new”? And how – finally – should he view himself – as a failure, or perhaps not? That is what this column is about: the audiophile in the second quarter of the 21st century. ⌋

I STARTED THINKING ABOUT IT, not because I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, trembling with excitement, nor even because I was struck by a beam of pink light, like Philip Dick in the novel entitled Valis, whose author, Philip K. Dick, described it this way in Exegesis:

No, that’s not it at all. Various associations and ideas had been building up inside me until, at some point, everything fell into place, forming a single whole: the question, “Who is an audiophile?” It was important to me, even though it might seem that I had already exhausted the topic in March 2012 (No. 95), when I wrote about this phenomenon; more → HERE.

‖ Valis is a 1981 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, the first part of a trilogy of the same title

This time, the question went deeper than just an encyclopedic or dictionary definition; and at that time – that is, in 2010 – according to Bartek Chaciński, who was not yet a member of the Polish Language Council, nor a journalist for Radio Trójka, nor yet the deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly „Polityka” magazine, ironically, but quite aptly described them as: “Trapped between a brightened top and a muddied bottom.” And further:

The author of Totalny słownik najmłodszej polszczyzny (The Complete Dictionary of Contemporary Polish) thus classifies audiophiles as belonging to niche groups. This is an important insight. For him, a niche is, as he puts it in the preface, a “small cog” that is part of contemporary culture, where “they mesh constantly, telling us something about the whole.” A moment earlier, he points out that, in reality, many niches are so-called “small cultures.” That is, something not quite a subculture, but close to it. Subcultures, on the other hand, are usually alternative cultures to the mainstream, striving to change something within it.

As Chaciński puts it, these are not counter-cultural activities because they do not propose a comprehensive revolution. So we already know something. An audiophile, then, would be someone belonging to a small group of supporters (or opponents) of “something,” who focus on this issue. This group creates its own idiomatic culture, complete with language, behaviors, and codes of communication. However, this group does not strive for revolution, but rather for the evolution of the existing world. It is perceived by outsiders in an ironic, malicious, and – looking ahead – a fear-driven manner.

‖ An audiophile, as seen by the layperson: an older man “sipping wine or whiskey”; you can find out if this is true by visiting the Audio Video Show in Warsaw

Interestingly, for many years, the word “audiophile” was not listed by linguists in official compilations, and thus did not appear in either encyclopedias or dictionaries – the Wyż nisz was a pioneer in this regard. This has changed, albeit slowly, with the advent of online normative publications. And so: PWN Polish Language Dictionary in its online version states that it is “a person particularly interested in high-quality sound reproduction and who collects top-class playback equipment,” and Wikipedia defines them as a person particularly interested in “high-quality sound reproduction and collecting top-of-the-line audio equipment.”

The Wikipedia entry strikes me as quite telling. Under the guise of objectivity, it conveys the perspective of people outside the industry, usually associated with technical universities or simply laypeople. For, as the author of the entry notes:

There is a significant disconnect between technical and music universities – each of which has developed its own tools for researching and describing sound – and the audiophile industry, and it does not appear that this will change anytime soon. These two worlds are closest in Japan, where a large number of audio companies collaborate with their engineering and music departments, and often in Germany as well, but in Poland, this is a rarity. After all, the audiophile is still perceived as a sort of “madman” and “infected” (it is no coincidence that the Wikipedia entry refers – incorrectly – to “audiophilia” rather than “audiophilism”).

And this is truly interesting. After all, representatives of other niche cultures – to borrow a term used by Chaciński, such as sommeliers or chefs – appear in the pages of popular, glossy magazines, and even in daily and weekly newspapers. Even though both wine and cooking expertise are activities based on experience, not on measurements. In other words: on observation. This is the scientific method developed by the ancients, whose insights we still use today, constantly amazed anew by their perspicacity.

‖ An Audiophile Through the Eyes of Amateurs: Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) • Photo courtesy of Lionsgate

And yet it is well known that the numerical view of the world – that is, the belief (!) that it can be captured within the framework of mathematics and statistics – is relatively new. And it still has to prove that it has more to say than a science that allows for the possibility that not everything is quantifiable (or rather, that not everything can be quantified). It is no coincidence that those we call “geniuses” very often spoke about the subjects of their research in the language of faith and metaphysics. Usually not because they believed in something beyond reality, but because they allowed for the possibility of ways of perceiving and understanding that we cannot yet name.

But let’s return to the audiophile. The narrative about them is almost always told by outsiders. And these outsiders, as has been noted, view this world as snobbish, self-centered, and irrational – even crazy. In short, to them, an audiophile is someone who listens to equipment and, smugly, rambles on about the differences between one product and another. Where does this attitude come from? I believe it stems partly from the attitude of the audiophiles themselves, and for the most part from the ignorance of the world “outside.”

Both of these factors cause people anxiety and trigger a defensive reaction. I think this is how – if I’m not mistaken – we should interpret the tendency to associate audiophile equipment with murderers, madmen, sociopaths, or simply people perceived as evil. My filmography – because this approach is most evident there – is extensive, and I have cited it many times. Which leads to an interesting conclusion: if they fear audiophiles, it means they matter to them. Not as a mass, but as a real force.

There is another reason for this hostility. An audiophile can be irritating, or even downright annoying. Their greatest enemy is another audiophile, even if they happen to be in the same “camp” – whether it’s the “tube” camp or the “anti-cable” camp. Aggression toward views other than “ours” is common and has become something of a “landmark” in conversations on forums and social media. Often, it’s not even overt resistance, but rather subtle resistance or irony. But, generally speaking, one audiophile is a wolf to another.

And this is even understandable. The smaller the group, the more “besieged” it feels, the more it tries to be outspoken in its views, and the more strongly attached it is to those views. It’s entrenched in them. You know how it is, right? – When we say something, we SAY it, and when we suggest or advise something, we are still SAYING it. We have grounds for this; we’ve formed this opinion through hundreds of hours of listening. And we’re certain of it – until we change our minds.

‖ Audiophile as he sees himself

We can also be annoying when viewed from the outside. But there’s more to it than that – as I browse through various posts about audiophiles, including those written by people who are critical of the hobby, I even notice a certain radicalization in attitudes. Perhaps this stems from the fact that perfectionist audio is, after all, becoming increasingly prevalent in popular culture. Partly due to the presence of the turntable (as a cultural artifact, not as a music medium), and partly due to the significantly greater amounts of money that entered the audio industry about ten years ago, along with the acquisition of such companies by private equity funds and later by large corporations.

So when someone who previously annoyed us but was rather harmless starts to “make a mark,” the problem grows. And perhaps this is the root cause of negative opinions. Even though audiophiles, as a cultural subgroup, are a kind of immune to the technology market. After all, audiophiles are extremely conservative in their views and approach to new technologies. You surely remember the resistance with which this industry approached digital files and the devices used to play them. And this was even at a time when almost the entire world was walking around with headphones on and listening to playlists.

The resistance to what the tech giants have in store for us cannot be overstated. Big Tech companies are striving – and they say so outright – for a system of managing humanity in which people would be the least important element, needed only as content consumers and payers. We would pay not only with money but, above all, with our data and attention.

In its extreme form, we are viewed as “cattle,” the narrow ruling class as “masters,” and the entire “cycle” would close with us in the role of “batteries” from The Matrix. This is truly what they are striving for.

‖ Science fiction answers the question: “What if…?”; The photo shows Polish editions of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, published by M. Arct in Warsaw in 1902, and H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, published by Jan Łazarz in Przemyśl, also from the early 20th century.

This isn’t just leftist gibberish, unfortunately, but the views of many people in Silicon Valley. Which, incidentally, would be a realization of the ideas found in science fiction. You’re familiar with The Time Machine (1895), aren’t you? It’s one of the classic sci-fi novels about a Time Traveler who stops in the year 802,701, where he encounters the two species into which humanity has divided: the Eloi and the Morlocks. One group is gentle and feeds on fruit; the other is brutal, living underground and emerging to the surface after dark. This vision of a future that appears utopian but is, in fact, a dystopia – depicting the collapse of civilization and the degeneration of the human race – has surprisingly stood the test of time.

Do you see the similarities between what capital strives for and what Wells wrote about? The problem is that this division – between a dominant, narrow group and everyone else – leads to the destruction of humanity, not to the “eternal bliss” of the few. This theme was taken up many times later and discussed from various perspectives, such as the communist one, in the novel Everything Is Permitted (Russian: Всё дозволено, Polish release 1982), written by the father-son duo Alexander and Sergei Abramov, or more recently, in a vein critical of capitalism, in Neill Blomkamp’s film Elizjum (2013).

And before you turn up your nose at the fact that I’ve been referring to the science fiction genre – and thus “fairy tales” – since the beginning of this column, let me say that I’m doing so deliberately. The days when this genre, along with fantasy, was considered pulp fiction – inferior, lowbrow – are long gone. The old fogies who sat in university chairs for years and didn’t want to hear about it simply didn’t understand it. And the fact is that while historical and contemporary literature speaks of who we are and what the world is like, science fiction speculates on who we might be and what the world might be like, thus completing the picture.

This blend of futurology, philosophy, and classical belles-lettres is extremely difficult and demands a wide range of skills and extensive knowledge – not only in psychology and sociology but also in technology and cultural anthropology. SF asks “what if…,” reaching into places where the classical novel has no chance of reaching. When we think of Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, or – as already mentioned – Philip K. Dick, we think first and foremost of philosophers, a fact that the academic world, after many twists and turns, has finally accepted as standard.

‖ Today, Doris Lessing and Michel Faber offer some excellent science fiction stories

After all, writers of the “classical” tradition have also produced outstanding novels of this kind – to name just a few, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), the novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, or Michel Faber’s excellent The Book of Strange New Things (2014).

As I have said many times before, artists – including writers and poets in particular – are like an ultra-sensitive membrane. They pick up on subtle shifts in patterns – in what is happening around us – and turn them into metaphors. Usually, they don’t even fully understand what they are conveying, but the fact remains that they are like that canary in the coal mine. It’s similar to people involved in science fiction and fantasy. That’s why Wells’s vision is so unsettling – it sends chills down your spine when you look at what’s happening today.

So an audiophile, trying to improve what’s being served up, would be a sort of “witness”. To the fact that it can and should be better. When Canadian writer, journalist, and activist Cory Doctorow first used the word “enshittification” in 2022, he likely didn’t think the process would accelerate so quickly. It is a process whereby the quality of online platforms declines over time, but one that can also be applied more broadly to all activities.

According to Kyle Chayka of „The New Yorker”, this phenomenon involves three stages: initially, platforms serve users; then, they exploit them to achieve business benefits; and finally, they lower the quality of service for both parties to maximize profits; more → HERE https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-age-of-enshittification. Mainly thanks to AI.

It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley is so eager for its development and so insistent on its proliferation in every area of life. AI is, in fact, the ideal tool for shaping the world (language, the labor market, sociology, worldview, politics, war, etc.) in such a way that its administrator (the owner of the rights to the algorithm) will act from a position of power, preferably absolute power. And this will happen in a quasi-democratic manner, without bloodshed, indeed at the very request of the subjects of this manipulation.

An audiophile cannot stop this. Not even an entire army of audiophiles. But everyone can oppose it. Precisely by striving for “something better” to use such a generic term – a term from the realm of naive language, but one that aptly describes what I wish to convey. We do this by striving for perfection. Even when everyone around us laughs at cables and cable stands, when they mock our rituals and behaviors. So be it.

‖ Audiophile impatiently waits for the next versions of the album he already knows by heart

And it’s going to get even worse. After all, with a trained AI, one could be tempted to create a program that would evaluate sound quality in a real-world system. I imagine it like this: all you need is a microphone and a computer, or in a simpler version, a smartphone with an external microphone. We play a few albums (files), and the system analyzes the sound against predefined reference parameters. After thousands, or perhaps millions, of replays, it will begin to evolve, taking into account the fact that real-world systems have their own flaws and unique characteristics. Add to this profiles that allow for calibration to specific needs (tube sound, clear, analog, etc.), and we have a ready-made recipe for success.

I’m sure work of this kind is already underway, and perhaps such a product is already available. A program that “objectively” evaluates sound, suggests changes, and, in a pleasant voice, directs you to a specific retailer. With its help, technocrats will seek to eliminate humans – the “weak link,” i.e., the audiophile – from the decision-making chain. This is the wet dream of people who call themselves “objectivists,” who are, in essence, people limited to numbers. And those numbers say a lot, but not everything – certainly not in perfectionist industries.

And once the program has taken its measurements, and the generative AI has processed and compared them, it will be able to query other programs of this type. Do you know what Moltbook is? For the record, let me remind you that it is a social media platform launched in early 2026, designed specifically for AI agents, not for humans. It is often referred to as “Reddit for bots.” Dr. Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, quoted in the Guardian article, says:

If so, it would be conceivable to design a specialized Moltbook for each specific problem and industry. Also, for comparative models, where audio would be just a fragment. In this way, humans would no longer be needed at all. That said, the first step was taken some time ago. The only thing is that training AI on texts generated by other AI systems has led to an excessive amount of garbage in the texts. Many readers won’t notice this because they lack the linguistic competence to do so, and even long pauses in the text – a hallmark of AI – won’t serve as any clue to them.

In this way, the general public is getting used to – there’s no other way to put it – crap. Marcin Wilkowski summed this up well by asking those who rely on GPT as if it were “Zawisza” (the one you can always rely on) whether, if an “intelligent” kettle were standing before them, they would also ask it for guidance in their lives. And that is essentially what advanced machine learning models known as “artificial intelligence” are; more in: Does the Internet Have a Future, “Tygodnik Powszechny,” February 11–17, 2026, p. 15.

‖ One of the hot topics among audiophiles is new technology related to CDs

This has led to a paradoxical situation – it turns out that writers of creative texts are increasingly in demand, even by the world’s political elites. Those relying on AI have proven helpless in the face of its idiocy, which arises from learning off the texts of other AIs. Significantly, Microsoft recently launched a 120-page, printed (!) magazine called “Signal,” aimed at business leaders and focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), corporate strategy, and leadership. Other “Silicon Valley” figures are also signaling the need to hire writers. At the same time, they’re suggesting that AI will write for us and that journalists, writers, and the like are “dying” professions.

For a thinking person is precisely what Big Tech hates and what it is trying to eliminate with all its might. In this, too, I see the role of the audiophile as – as I said – an immune protein. So let’s listen, let’s audition, let’s compare, let’s grumble, let’s be egotistical, and let’s hold views that are “the only correct ones.” Creativity and independent thinking are what will save us. And the audiophile can be a tiny, tiny, tiny cog in this resistance, reaching for yet another CD or vinyl record in its 150th – and this time surely the best – version. ‖ WP

WOJCIECH PACUŁA
Chief editor