This article is based on this dutch article of Martinus Benders
The Work Ethic of the Grocer’s League
Someone called my post ‘rage-bait’ because I asked whether A.I. played a role in the huge number of bands I encountered through Popronde.
But I didn’t say it lightly: in quite a few of those bands I could unmistakably hear that raw, old Suno noise that can’t be mastered away, for example in this track:
Can’t you hear that gritty layer on top of the voice? As if it’s overdriven — that’s either the old Suno or someone who really h-a-s-n-o-i-d-e-a how to mix and master.
Both are possible, and frankly I don’t care if someone fired off a sequence via a synth arpeggiator or asked A.I. to do it — those who do care, well, that’s their problem — I’m interested in the music, not in the work ethic of the grocer’s league.
But humans, those apes, always choose the path of least resistance, like water, so what we’re now seeing is a flood of A.I. disguised as human-made, coupled with a grocer’s league that believes it has the right to discriminate: if you claim to play everything by hand, you’re allowed in, and the rest get “no copyright” — even though prompting is an immense intellectual effort. Is that discrimination? Of course it is.
You might as well say that anything made with a drum computer isn’t copyrightable. Then you end up with thousands of tracks where someone pretends to be drumming over the drum machine. A complete joke, all because everything in ape society must revolve around coins and labor.
I want no part in it. I sculpt music with A.I. And yes, I own full copyright on that work — the notion that I wouldn’t is outright insane.
Yesterday, a post popped up about how Joris van Os, as a young Moroccan woman, quickly received a book deal from the Amsterdam publishing clique.
That always irks me to some degree, because there’s always this aura of being unrecognized, while it’s essentially about fraudulent grocers — the CB (Central Book House) is partially owned by these people, so if you want to get books into shops and start your own publishing house, you’re forced to enrich your competitor, who can then endlessly publish trash without any real financial risk. It’s a scam — and that’s exactly why the wistful longing for inclusion annoys me.
So no, the rumor that these publishers refer to authors as “little exotics” doesn’t surprise me — that’s exactly the level you can expect there.
When Joris van Os came out — why, exactly? Liberation, confession, marketing? — it’s claimed that the publishing house no longer wanted to publish him. Ah, the publisher: that eternal circus of façades and opportunism, where moral poses change faster than the covers in a bargain bin. But the deeper issue isn’t this latest fraud construct, nor the pathetic scheming of frightened little publisher hands. No, the core issue is that readers today buy books as identity votes: you don’t acquire a book for its story, you buy it to support a cause, raise a flag, display a social stance.
The underdog complex thrives in this context. Buy to support! cry the grocers in the bookstore, while gleefully rubbing their white hands at the prospect of selling tasty little exotics. Exotics, yes — a borderline racist logic that applies just as much to another Kader Abdolah, who dutifully delivers all the immigrant clichés the ruling class craves. And the reader? They think they’re participating in a social referendum with their purchase, while really they’re just shopping in a supermarket full of opinion products.
As long as readers aren’t seeking out the best possible book — written by anyone, without identity packaging, without opinion labels — but instead fill their bookshelves with discourse, the literary world is doomed. Because if books are no longer judged by their literary merit, but solely by their moral capital, they become nothing but culture loyalty coupons.
In Lacanian terms, you could say that van Os conjures a new Master figure: no longer the classic authority (the publisher, the critic, the canon), but a hypermodern authority made up of the symbolic field of victimhood. He places himself in the position of someone struck, humiliated, and excluded by the system — and thus lays claim to a new kind of authority, that of the wounded truth.
Van Os does not identify the real issue: the trap into which every writer — regardless of color, gender, or orientation — is being forced by deeply embedded illegitimate market control. The actual literary issue is not that there are supposedly “inclusive publishers” shutting out white authors — that’s a right-wing myth fueled by ressentiment that obscures the real problem.
The real problem is that literature has been fully subjugated to the logic of commercial scarcity, of profiles, niches, sales forecasts, buzzwords. Writers are no longer selected for writing the sharpest book, but for being the most marketable within a specific moral or identity framework. This applies as much to white as to non-white writers, to queers as to straights, to women as to men.
But what does Van Os do? Instead of offering a fundamental analysis, instead of examining the system at its core, he molds his narrative into a right-wing “woke” frame: he claims that inclusive publishers are the problem — that white writers no longer get a chance because publishers are obsessed with diversity.
This is a dangerous inversion. Why? Because he locates power in precisely the wrong place. Not in commercial pressure, not in the reduction of literature to a marketplace, not in the loss of autonomous literary quality as a criterion — no, he shifts the problem to a fictitious enemy: the “woke publisher.” In doing so, he feeds into right-wing ressentiment and hands literature a false enemy: as if the crisis of contemporary letters hinges on too much inclusivity, while the real crisis is the total domination by commercial and political signals, the buzzword circus that reduces books to opinion commodities.
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, this is fascinating: Van Os projects the true threat — complete market-driven logic — outward, and replaces it with a specter that’s much easier to heroically battle: the “woke publisher.” He reimagines himself as a rebel fighting this illusion, but remains blind to the market forces he is wholly subject to.
The result? No real critique of the system, no radical questioning of how literature is written, sold, and read today. Just a theatrical performance, a pseudo-rebellion that ultimately fits perfectly within the media and opinion economy he pretends to oppose. Let’s be honest: who gets media attention for statements like these? Exactly. The same circuits he’s supposedly fighting.
To constantly foment ethnic tensions by suggesting you’re being disadvantaged while you’re actually engaging in marketing — that brings us closer to the true face of Os van Weggejorist.
As Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy said this week about Jim Carrey in an interview: “I get the sense that Jim Carrey is always playing Jim Carrey.” That’s interesting, because that’s exactly where Carrey’s brilliance lies — he is the mask, he embodies the role, showing that behind the mask there’s never a “real” Jim Carrey. That aside.
We see the same mechanism with Joris van Os, but without the ironic spark. Van Os too is, as a person, a 100% rehearsed performance that fits neatly within a popular right-wing narrative. He presents himself as the brave, marginal victim, the writer who dares to speak what others only whisper — yet he does so entirely within the established lanes of what right-wing conservative media now embrace as “daring to swim against the woke tide.”
And here’s where we must be absolutely clear: anyone who believes that ethnic conflicts are not the reason to engage with literature must also dare to say that criticizing writers like Kader Abdolah — often held up as walking immigrant clichés — has nothing to do with skin color, but everything with literary-critical value. The problem isn’t Abdolah’s background, just as Van Os’ gender isn’t the issue; the problem is the pretense of authenticity these figures use to present themselves as voices of extra weight, even as they fully participate in a market dynamic that commodifies those very “authenticities.”
Van Os, just like Carrey, always plays Van Os. But without the self-awareness, without irony, without artistic depth. He is not the mask that exposes itself, but the actor convinced that his rehearsed part reveals the system — while in reality, he is a model student of its codes and spectacles.
Yours sincerely,
Martinus Benders, 10-05-2025