The beast is hungry.

Luke Combs took to social media Wednesday morning to say that he was “sick to my stomach” after waking up to learn that he had won a $250,000 judgment against a Florida woman who’d earned $380 selling 18 handmade drink tumblers with his likeness on them. The country superstar said he was “completely and utterly unaware” of the lawsuit in his name, or the judgment that was handed down in Illinois court, until his attention was directed to a television news interview with the crying woman.

“Luke Combs ‘Sick to My Stomach’ to Learn He Won $250K Judgment Against Convalescing Fan Who Made Tumblers; Says He Will Raise Funds for Her” -Variety.com

Now, let’s go ahead and assume that Luke Combs is telling the truth. He admitted that he has lawyers on retainer specifically to “go after folks – only, supposedly, large corporations operating internationally that make millions and millions of dollars”. Somehow, instead they targeted some poor sap who, like Combs, didn’t even know the lawsuit was happening.

The word “Kafka” (or perhaps “Kafkaesque”) gets thrown around a lot, but it desperately fits here. The bureaucratization/automation of legal procedures, to the point of leaving out the primary participants, creates a terrifying unreality. It reminds me of Gibson’s Count Zero, in which the antagonist, all but physically dead, still acts through a series of corporate virtualities representing his financial interests. That was a cyperpunk novel, but this is worse: Luke Combs isn’t dead, nor disabled, nor in need of receivership. He’s just an artist who hired lawyers to perform a service. The service was intended to protect his interests, but did so without giving him any notification of legal action done in his name, nor did it abide by the artist’s understanding of the service.

Of course, Combs himself probably never even sat down with these lawyers; his agent/manager/team probably did it for him, and maybe had a five-minute conversation with him about it. So who knows if the “only large corporations” part was actually what the service understood their task to be, or if that was something Combs’ team told him to get him to sign on.

This is before we consider that judgement was passed down without the defendant being in court, or being part of the judicial process at all, apparently. The system is serving itself.