Numbers don’t lie, but they certainly exaggerate.

Three days. Three point three million views. That’s more eyeballs than a mid-season HBO premiere or a particularly spicy Congressional hearing. The subject of this digital pile-on is a track called "Bitcoin Man," the latest audio-visual fever dream from Herbert R Sim. You might know him as the guy who wears a literal cape and calls himself "The Bitcoin Man." At least he’s consistent with the branding.

The hook? The song wasn't written by a starving artist in a basement. It was spat out by an Artificial Intelligence.

We’ve officially hit the era of the "viral slop" economy. It’s a place where the barrier to entry isn't talent or a catchy bridge—it’s just a prompt and a decent internet connection. Sim’s track is the perfect case study in how the uncanny valley is becoming our new permanent residence. It’s catchy, sure. In the same way a car alarm is catchy if it hits the right frequency for long enough.

But let’s look at the friction. To make a high-fidelity music video and a radio-ready track five years ago, you needed a budget. You needed a producer who’d tell you your lyrics were trash, a session drummer who’d complain about the catering, and a studio that smelled like stale coffee and ambition. Now? You need a $20-a-month subscription to Suno or Udio and a mid-range GPU.

The trade-off is the soul. You can hear it in the vocals—that weird, metallic sheen that AI can’t quite shake. It’s the sound of a thousand math equations trying to simulate human longing. It’s technically perfect and emotionally vacant.

Sim isn't a musician. He’s a "venture billionaire" and a "philanthropist," according to his bio. In the old world, a guy like that would buy a football team or a yacht. In 2024, he buys an algorithm to make him a pop star. It’s vanity as a service. And based on those 3.3 million views, the service is working.

But who is actually watching? In the crypto world, numbers are often as synthetic as the music. We’re talking about an industry built on wash trading and "engagement farming." When a video hits three million views in 72 hours, you have to ask how much of that is genuine human curiosity and how much is a bot farm in a warehouse somewhere clicking "replay" to juice the metrics.

The conflict here isn't just about Herbert R Sim’s musical career. It’s about the displacement of the creative class. Every time a "Bitcoin Man" goes viral, a real songwriter loses a fraction of the airwaves. Why hire a composer for your commercial when you can generate "uplifting corporate indie" for the price of a sandwich?

The industry is leaning into this. Labels are already experimenting with AI "artists" because algorithms don't get hangovers, don't demand royalties, and don't tweet something career-ending at 3:00 AM. Sim is just the tip of the spear—the guy with the cape showing us how easy it is to flood the zone.

The song itself is exactly what you’d expect. It’s an anthem for the "HODL" crowd, a digital pat on the back for people who think decentralization is a personality trait. It’s glossy. It’s loud. It’s relentlessly optimistic. It’s also entirely hollow.

We’re being buried under a mountain of generated content. Every day, the pile gets higher. We used to worry about "fake news," but we should probably be more worried about "fake culture." If 3.3 million people are tuned into a song that was essentially "math-ed" into existence to promote a personal brand, what does that say about the value of the human touch?

Maybe the views are real. Maybe there are millions of people out there who truly want their music served to them by a black box that doesn't understand what a heart feels like. Or maybe we’ve just given up on the idea that art should be difficult.

If a billionaire can prompt his way to the top of the charts in a weekend, what’s left for the rest of us?

The algorithm doesn't care if you like the song. It only cares that you clicked.

Is it a hit if nobody actually felt anything?