Astonishingly ahead of its time- Gaddis through a narrator that certainly-isn't-just-himself inveighs against the player piano, as it represents the first computer, the first binary switch and the death of art:

...that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?

That quote appears on page 2, and in discussing this book with a friend, we agreed you could probably call it a day within the first 10 pages and leave with a pretty solid understanding of the thrust of Gaddis' argument (if you want to call it that). If you sympathize with him, however, you end up reading the whole 96-page lament, propelled by its breathless pace, thanks to its sparse punctuation and complete absence of even a period until the latter portion of the book.

Gaddis died in 1998 and wrote this in his last days. I'm saddened imagining how he would grapple with generative AI (whatever that terms means now, a useless catch-all).