Politics & Power Quote by Sean Booth

Booth is doing that sly Autechre thing: sounding like he’s talking about gear and ending up indicting a whole ecosystem. On the surface, he’s describing a material pipeline - cheaper electronics in the U.S., more disposable income, more kids able to release tracks. Underneath, he’s diagnosing an aesthetic contagion: Warp Records’ sound and logic spreading not just as influence, but as a kind of default setting for would-be producers.

The word “infected” is the tell. It frames taste as something you catch, not something you choose, and it carries a faint disgust at how quickly “Warp stuff” becomes a template. Booth isn’t romanticizing grassroots creativity; he’s wary of a scene where access and output accelerate faster than discernment. When tools get cheap and distribution becomes easy, imitation isn’t a moral failure - it’s the path of least resistance. The subtext is about how technology doesn’t just democratize production; it standardizes ambition. Everyone can make tracks, so everyone makes the same kind of “serious” tracks.

Context matters: Warp-era IDM was built on scarcity - rare machines, niche knowledge, small audiences, a UK label acting as tastemaker. Export that into a richer American consumer base and you get a different energy: less apprenticeship, more instant publication, more identity built from recognizable signifiers. Booth’s critique isn’t anti-American so much as anti-feedback loop. He’s pointing at a culture where influence moves at the speed of commerce, and originality has to fight the convenience of presets, both literal and cultural.