The Seam

My phone rang. I walked outside my apartment in North Park, San Diego, and sat under a different jacaranda tree, blooming violet.

My buddy Max was calling to interview me. Max and I were no strangers. We talked every week through the pandemic, but we’d never met in person. He was one of my internet friends. (After the pandemic he made the trek from NYC to my wedding in San Diego and played triangle in the end-of-night jam band.)

When he said he wanted to interview me, I was confused. Then he explained: academic research into memes. And my solo project was named Scoobert Doobert, after all.

So we talked. Mostly about my album Masks and Monsters. Internet culture. Birds not being real. Socratic humor. Absurdism. Platonic love songs. Ya know, the good shit.

It felt like every other call we’d had. I didn’t prepare. And I was honest, in part because I was speaking from behind a felt dog mask. I didn’t think about it again.

Then it got published. ISBN, university press, library-archived, a DOI. My first brush with real academia… as Scoobert Doobert lol. (And there are pictures in there!)

Kept My Appointment

I’d wanted to be a philosopher for a long time — whatever that means beyond ossifying a guy named Phil.

I’d been a songwriter since 2006. And in my twenties I got very sick — Guillain-Barré. My vision doubled, I lost the ability to walk, and then to play guitar.

I got better. But stuck in a body that wouldn’t cooperate. Lying eyes that made me dizzy. So I shut them and went heavy into philosophy audiobooks. My favorite early listen was Daniel N. Robinson’s The Great Ideas of Philosophy on repeat, then Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, because I felt imprisoned in my own body too. Thinking about stuff was how I got a little control back.

Slowly I found my way back onto tour. And somewhere in there I read Plato’s Apology (the account of Socrates’ trial) for the first time. I finished it on a bridge in Chicago, opening for the Doobie Brothers, and cried. Then the Phaedo, where I laughed along with Socrates as he drank the hemlock: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.” The last words of the wisest man, and they’re a joke! Make an offering to the god of healing, since I’m finally being cured of gestures broadly. A man condemned for impiety, calling for a sacrifice from his deathbed.

Robinson and I traded letters after that. They were hilariously verbose. It was so fun to write like that. I hadn’t much before. I got to be a philosopher for a moment.

But he refused to congratulate me. “You finally kept your appointment with Plato,” he said. As if I’d been late, rather than accomplished. Then my friend Brianna, a Wesleyan alum, pointed me to a course, The Modern and the Postmodern. Somewhere in there it clicked! I was late yet again. My music was my philosophy.

Masks Multiply

So I cooked. FEiN with Brandon Woodward, then Scoobert Doobert as an absurdist solo thing — a dog mask doing Dragon Ball Z “hip-hoperas.” A small label, Beformer, signed me (also how Max entered my life), and it took me strange places. I made music as Scoobert with incredible players in Japan — NHK’s Koisenu Futari and the film The Fish Tale.

I got into Japan during the pandemic on a soy sauce importer visa (true story, I know my shoyu) just in time to sit in a packed theater and hear the music I’d produced, played on, and mixed in my tiny apartment ON HEADPHONES come up under the closing credits on the massive theater speakers. The whole room was quiet. (In Japan they even watch the end credits respectfully haha. It was a culture shock.)

But what got me crying was that the same scene was running in thousands of theaters across Japan, day after day. The music everywhere, and me in none of the rooms. Crazy.

I made a record called KŌAN, still one of my favorites — a dog-masked singer chewing on Joshu’s dog. Another mask, another voice.

Somewhere in all that I’d become a lot of people. Scoobert, who reads Plato in a dog mask. Luke, who shows up to the office. Luke from FEiN. Then Accidental Muse — another alias. Corporate Luke after my car got broken into, and I couldn’t pay for it with music alone. MBA Luke when my corporate job got to be too much for me to handle. On and on. It got kind of out of control.

Severed

Back to that call with Max. At one point Max said he’d talked to me more than he’d talked to his own parents — and still didn’t know my real name, or what my face looked like.

The mask did that. The mask is also why any of the work I’m proudest of exists. A bizarre audiobook-meets-podcast of Plato’s Apology (Apology by Plato). Songs about motherfucking senators. None of that gets made by a guy worried about his name being on it, or his job. The mask freed the voice.

But it cut both ways. The same mask that freed the voice severed the self.

Then I started a company, Surmado, and got deep into answer engines: how LLMs are quietly replacing search, how more and more people take one answer from a machine instead of going to look for themselves (The Captured Oracle). So naturally, I ran myself through one.

Severed. “Scoobert Doobert occasionally collaborates with Luke Francis Walton on two songs.”

Two songs. As if they were strangers who’d once shared a room. The machine had done to me (automatically, and with total confidence) exactly what I’d done to myself on purpose with a dog mask: cut the author away from the work and handed you an answer with no one behind it. The same shape as that theater in Japan. The work playing everywhere with the author in none of the rooms.

That’s the thing I research now, commercially and philosophically. The answerability gap. Decisions and claims that get severed from any person who’ll stand behind them. Authorship that goes missing in the machine. I’d been living inside the gap for years; I just hadn’t named it. And that’s where the interview stopped being a funny artifact and became the proof: the masked man with no name, in 2021, was talking about Socrates having no fixed identity, about answerability, about the human work a machine can’t do.

Sewing the Seams Shut

My friends knew me as separate people. The search engines and the AIs knew me as separate people too. And I’m sick of it haha. I want to be whole.

So I built this silly website. I’m writing these essais. I’m looking backwards to look forwards. There was a moment where philosopher-Luke could’ve become yet another identity — a clean new mask to add to the pile. Instead I wanted to come full circle. A recapitulation, if you’re into music!

I am committing to doing it all under my real name — writing, in the manner of the academic establishment that first archived me as a cartoon dog, about the answerability gap. I did that to myself, on purpose, with a dog mask, and I’m telling you: it’s lonely on the other side of that cut!

So I’m taking what the mask gave me and applying it all at once, under my own name. The glance, the bent stick, the whole thing. Lil scary. But it’s real.

And I’m here to answer for it.

Moo.

Luke