The idea of post-humanism sounds almost absurd. We are conquerors of the globe, overpopulating to the point of ecological disaster. Yet the defining feature of the contemporary moment is not the triumph of humanity, but its redundancy – a condition anticipated long before it was named, and rendered with remarkable clarity in the austere electronic visions of Kraftwerk.
This became clear to me through a turn-of-the-millennium spectacle. Disaster films like James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009) were not merely bad movies (although their artistic rottenness was almost the point) but also served as signals from a new world. What mattered about them was throughput: their global appeal, demographic coverage, and technical scale. The individual human – whether movie star or cinema-goer – had become secondary to the smooth operation of a system that had been fixed from top to bottom.
Once this logic is visible, you can see it everywhere. Pop culture is now sweated intellectual property. Politics is about attention, not governance. All that matters is moving the needle. The systems we have created do not care for the individual. We are now living in a post-human world.
What’s startling about this is not that revelation, but that Kraftwerk had already created its soundtrack more than 50 years ago.
Kraftwerk’s Post-Human Promise
Kraftwerk’s Glossy Seduction
Kraftwerk‘s music is often described as cold, cerebral, and ironic. This is a misunderstanding that protects the listener from something more unsettling: their music is actually glossily seductive. It promises not domination by machines, but relief from being ourselves.
When “Kometenmelodie 2”, from 1974’s Autobahn, drifts into its transcendent glide, it offers a vision of life without friction, without mess, without the exhausting drag of human inconsistency. This was not a nightmare for those of us growing up with home computers in the 1980s. It was the dream: a silicon-pure future of gleaming, frictionless ecstasies, where error, labour, and emotional turbulence had been engineered out.
Kraftwerk don’t scold you into alienation, like Radiohead; they invite you into this new world. Their repetition is calming, a technological lullaby. Album closers “Ohm Sweet Ohm” from 1975’s Radio-Activity and “Endless Endless” from 1977’s Trans-Europe Express are somnolent, caressing you into accepting Kraftwerk’s vision. You are powerless to resist.
Indeed, you can hear the gradual discarding of the human throughout Kraftwerk’s discography. The title track on Autobahn is something of a novelty hit, but on reflection, its combination of synthesised rhythms, car horns, and Doppler effects, and the human sound of a flute is a staging post.
Radio Activity (1975) articulates this development thematically, reducing human communication (radio) to radio pulses and electric signals. All the humanity is flattened, ironed out. The cluster of human voices that make up “News” is, by the next track called “The Voice of Energy”, transfigured into inhuman electric speech.
On Trans Europe Express (1977), every sound except the voices is processed, though the synthesizers sound relatively clunky. On The Man Machine, a year later, all the sounds are notably silkier and at least half of the voices are robotic, as on “The Robots”, “Space Lab”, and “The Man Machine”. On these songs, every human source has been carefully removed. The power of Kraftwerk lies precisely in how firmly they persuade us that the human – sweaty, inefficient, psychologically noisy – is the least necessary component of the future they are offering.
Optimally Processed People
Like all great art, Kraftwerk emerge from a specific historical or cultural need. Postwar West Germany required rebuilding without memory or emotion. The old romanticism of blood, soil, and heroic labour had become radioactive. All it had was the appeal of efficiency without ideology.
In this context, Kraftwerk’s sound is not anti-human so much as post-labour. The body disappears not because it is hated, but because it is unreliable. “Blood is a big expense,” as Virgil Sollozzo says in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Musicianship, therefore, becomes a process, and performance a system.
Kraftwerk, however, do not perform alienation in the Marxist sense – they are not about struggle, conflict, or enmity – but rather the optimisation of the human. So often their songs, like “Trans Europe Express” and “Neon Lights”, are wry celebrations, ironic manifestos conjuring a world beyond effort, sweat, or even intention.
The blank affect of Computer Love (1981) is not incidental. It articulates a future in which interiority – thought, hope, love – is redundant. This is why the songs are so calm, without the glowing futurist optimism of “Europe Endless” or even the teasing cynicism of “The Model”. Now, with most of the humanity refined out of the music, there is nothing at stake.
The Relief Found in Our Vanishing
As Kraftwerk’s aesthetic matures, the human subject recedes. Voices become schematic. Lyrics shrink to repeated labels (as on “Computer World”: “Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard”), instructions (on “Pocket Calculator”), and signals (as on the aptly-named “Boing Boom Tschak”). This is the sound of alienation as normality. The listener is no longer positioned as a witness to feeling, a consumer of articulated emotion, but simply a node within a system.
This is Kraftwerk’s emotional great leap – to articulate a world beyond emotion. This is why their inheritors remain inferior replicants – because in most cases, they use the style of Kraftwerk’s sound, but ignore its implications. The machines have arrived, but the sense of emotional excess remains.
Take A Flock of Seagulls: the synths shimmer, but the emotion is pure romantic excess. Longing, abandonment, cosmic heartbreak. It’s arena emotion dressed in futurist clothes. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are similar. For all the electronics, they’re deeply humanist, even sentimental. Nuclear anxiety, love letters, nostalgia. The machines amplify feeling rather than drain it.
Soft Cell are even more revealing. The synths don’t cool emotion but intensify the raw feelings of humiliation, desire, and sleaze. “Tainted Love” and “Bedsitter” are torch songs for the electronic. In other words, most synth music keeps the rockist assumption that intensity equals authenticity.
Kraftwerk reject that assumption entirely. Whereas Thomas Hardy said the poet’s role was “to touch our hearts by showing his own”, Kraftwerk’s music moves from feeling to process. The system is all. In doing so, it anticipates a cultural shift in which subjectivity has become an obstacle to smooth functioning.
The post-human here is not monstrous or violent. You can see this world in corporate appraisals and online recruitment applications. It is tidy, legible, unerringly calm – and deeply inhumane. It is souls demarcated on spreadsheets. The human is tolerated only insofar as it does not interrupt the process. Kraftwerk sound like a world that has decided it no longer needs interiority to keep running. Their albums could play on loop forever.
Kraftwerk Soundtracks Our Lives
This is why Kraftwerk are still fiercely relevant. Their legacy is less musical than structural and existential. We now live inside the world their sound projects. We spend our days on platforms that promise frictionless interaction while hollowing out human contact. We work for, and are governed by, institutions that have replaced responsibility with procedure. We submit to systems designed to operate without reference to human consequence.
All of this gestures at a more humane and inclusive world, while profiting from its erosion. Yet this is not dystopia. It is administration.
Kraftwerk did not predict this world. They made it seductive. That is their enduring power, and their quiet accusation.
When I listen to Kraftwerk now, I remain stunned at their achievement. Not only did they articulate this world, but they also supplied its aural grammar and its entire atmosphere of post-desire urban processes. Kraftwerk’s music remains beautiful and dangerous, like a perfectly functioning system, because it no longer requires us to feel anything at all.