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By jdb, October 14, 2010

I’ve said for a while that the Internet tends to isolate us, and our opinions, from other people and their beliefs. I believe it’s in the way the Internet was designed. I think Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org, does as well.   

“Instead of connecting us to the world, the Web is connecting us back to ourselves in an invisible feedback loop”

I suppose one could always look for the opposing view, which is rarely offered. Using the system is definitely something that relies on the individual fighting their own instinctual tendency, but I think he skirts the root of the problem which has to do with the nature of search and retrieval systems themselves – the main way we deal with the Internet. We find what we are looking for, and by extension, people who share our views and places that reinforce them. So fighting that tendency is not only fighting human nature, it’s fighting the nature of the network itself.

If the comments are anything to go by, some people are threatened to the point of anger by this article, which seems to criticize their perfect totem.  Another example of the kind of tribal microculture that has become so prevalent in the world.

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By jdb, October 4, 2010

I’ve noticed something that may or may not be happening, and what I’ve noticed is this: In the ‘digital age’, culture hits but doesn’t stick. The artifacts are ephemeral, not only in their physicality but also in their cultural presence. People experience them, enjoy them, then the novelty wears off and they abandon them – and it leaves no lasting resonance with the predominant, ‘mainstream’ culture.  Media, political events, trends in fashion or religion – they all seem to come and go without making much of an impact on people’s way of thinking or doing as they did in previous decades, not much of a dent in the edifice of the ‘overculture’.

If my hunch is right, I think there are a couple of reasons this might be happening. One is that if something has no money potential it doesn’t get the investment it needs to make it enduring in the public mind. Another might be that there are fewer hard and lasting artifacts being created, no discs to transmit culture in a concrete way, it becomes like TV where the hardware is the artifact and the shows are emanations from the artifact – the screens and players are totemistic, the ‘content’ disposable because it has lost it’s object-ness. Clothing etc., is of lower quality so those artifacts are of a more ephemeral nature as well. Combined with the dynamic of speed – not having time to set in, develop and become ritualized the culture is discarded before it can make and impact, these characteristics create a perfect storm where we forget our collective culture as it happens.

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By jdb, January 22, 2010

There was a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that found kid’s daily media use has reached the eight or ten hour mark. What seemed most extraordinary to me is that one fifth of all children use media for sixteen hours a day. Here is a pretty good summary of the findings.

I think it’s important to realize that these are commercial media and that the neuronal pathways of young people are very malleable. What effect could this be having and how does it relate to the effects of early media consumption on the brains of previous generations?

My first thought is that there will be an increased Pavlovian drive to acquire – not just the specific products being pushed on them, but the desire to press a button, to manipulate and get the desired result. The process of multimedia consumption eventually creates a need periodically, which an action then fills, and in turn that creates another psychological need, etc. So kids who grew up watching tv for hours a day in the seventies are conditioned to want something every fifteen minutes – commercials came on every fifteen minutes. Dopamine receptors must be fed. Kids who grew up watching tv in the eighties are conditioned to want something every ten minutes – that’s when commercials got longer and more frequent, and our brains crave the stimulus. Kids who grew up surfing the internet for hours everyday – click, reward, click, reward – are conditioned to want something constantly.

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By jdb, January 9, 2010

OK, where’s the new stuff? I mean the NEW stuff – the new music that sounds new, the new movies that look new, the books that break new ground, the revolutionary stuff.

I’m just one guy looking for stuff but I can’t find many music scenes that didn’t ferment initially before that big ‘net culture push about ten years ago. Music after the year 2000 or so that tends to be less novel, spread faster, die quicker and leave less of a mark.

Maybe there are still scenes, the regions are just larger. USUK is a scene, Europe is a scene. South America, Asia, Africa, China, even if they get the network penetration like we have here, scenes will be on the national or continental scale, because of language distinctions.

Or maybe it’s kind of a global Hellenism, where everything seems like it’s getting sucked up into pop on one hand, with regional variations, and the ‘flipside’ to pop on the other, which is just as similar the world over now, a basic template with national variations.

On the flip side of the overculture, you have things the pop music world doesn’t readily embrace, the bizarre, the kitschy, the depressing, the political, or conservative things like actual people playing actual instruments, but because of the fast nature of the Internet it still relies primarily on novelty as pop does.

Always trying for novelty in such a ‘fast’ environment means that the culture cannibalizes itself much faster and trends towards homogeneity.

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By jdb, November 28, 2009

Exhibit A: ‘The myth of the starship’, in which the esteemed Charlie Stross starts talking about how ridiculous starships are, and everyone starts grooving on the idea that we don’t need starships in order to colonize the stars because we’ll just upload our minds into computers then download them into fresh bodies grown in a vat, perhaps. Am I the only one who notices the irony? Maybe.

Considering wishful concepts like that of uploading our brains into computers (well, some wish for it anyway) is like considering a moon landing prior to the invention of fireworks – and there is no promise of fireworks tonight. It’s a line of thinking that inhabits the realm of pseudoreligious mythology. People often enjoy the myth of transcending death and the body and floating on (bodiless) unto eternal life, and now those that have faith in their cell phone have a version all their own, in which we get to be reborn into perfect new bodies.

In terms of science fiction, I suppose it’s all a mythologization of the current society of dimishing material wealth and superficial ‘connectedness’ as much as golden age interstellar hack and slash was a mythologization of the international conflicts of the day, the internal combustion engine and atomic weaponry. Did people talk about FTL drives and intergalactic spaceships as if they would be real one day? Maybe we should ask Fred Pohl.

All of this is part of the Singularity Thing, which some people take seriously enough to go to churchie-type meetings and talk about it, and mostly comes from books by Vernor Vinge. The true believers might be partly right, really the singularity isn’t Science Fiction at al (maybe it’s sci fi?). Instead it’s a kind of technofetishism where humanity and the low down condition it’s in is radically transformed by technology and escapes it’s dirty, inconvenient self. This is pure mythology, not science, a mythopoetic projection of current conditions in our civilization, as we institutionalize ourselves, separate ourselves from ourselves and from others, and use technology to do it. We feel acted upon by technology just as we embrace it, as if technology were a living force of it’s own, and we use technological solutions to address problems that a technological solution created. The ghost in the machine made superconductive, recursive and regenerative flesh.

This has become a pervading style of Science Fiction just as a past state of feudal hegemonistic power has become the wish fulfillment of the Fantasy genre. Current science fiction fetishizes technology and promises the reader an escape from humanity itself – like the Internet, communication without communicating, no flesh, no blood, no feeling, nothing but reflexive, eternal, internal desire. Everyone knows that the next gadget coming down the info-pipe will radically change everything, make their life better, just a little bit, please?

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By jdb, August 31, 2009

I pray to the great gods of the hive mind, and entreat my friends and relations, please don’t send me any more fucking Alex Jones links. If you do, make sure you say it comes from the diseased mouth of Alex Jones at the top and spare me the trouble of reading it. The only thing I can think of that’s more unreliable, misleading and just plain goofy than Rev. Moon’s Washington Times is ‘Infowars’.

Alex Jones is the man whose frothy mouthed followers videotaped a train yard that had barbed wire around it and Alex etc. claimed that the ‘new world order’ run by bankers was going to put us all in internment camps. A little research on their part might have revealed that federal prisoners are transported on trains and by law they need to be let out to walk around. Thus the barbed wire. But you can’t have a website and stand up in front of people and shout about the actual, real world, you need a mass hallucination to be really popular.

His conspiracy world-view is a very simple iconography that bears striking resemblance to antizionist garbage from the first half of the century, with any reference to race removed and replaced with other words. Middle class white people are terrified right now, they’ve signed away their wealth, they are losing their demographic power, and they are taking out their frustrations on all sorts of targets. The ‘federal reserve is taking over the planet’ religion is gaining traction, and those people finally found a TV camera they could shout at.

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By jdb, July 30, 2009

The prevalent cultural trends of the 20th century were ‘bottom up’ from a societal perspective.  The resonant and strengthening contributions to culture came from the ‘bottom’ of the traditional social order, the working classes, the outcasts, and those at the geographical fringes. They created great swathes of culture unique to their time, pop music, blues, jazz, rock, Appalachian folk music, and the 60s-onward recycling of fashion from cast-offs in thrift stores, rummage bins, and dumpsters. This stemmed from and went in hand with the pervasive global ideas of egalitarianism, socialism and communism.

Throughout the later half of the century another trend developed – as the middle classes of America and Western Europe embraced, at least nominally, an egalitarian and globalizing culture, corporate interests supplied their needs in the mass market. Initially only commercializing what was already there, they moved to altering it more and more, until culture began to be created in boardrooms. So instead of a bottom up culture, we now have a top-down culture – a culture that is fed to the people from a central source, with a variety of messages that reinforce the status quo. Unlike the medieval top-down culture of the church or the enlightenment top-down culture of the aristocracy, this culture is the 21st century culture of capitalism at it’s zenith.

In America, where previously vast regional differences gave rise to vital and turbulent subcultures, there is no more culture/subculture social structure, consisting of a variety of cultures in geographic regions, held together by some common threads. In it’s place is the proverbial ‘monoculture’, divided into groups defined by their choice of product and those product’s associated value systems. Geographic divisions remain only inasmuch as it takes time to ship hard goods towards the middle of the country. This is a fine distinction, but valid.

Each group and it’s value associations creates for itself a virtual geography, choosing appearance, language, and ideology that delineates a space apart from other groups, expressed largely in electronic form. On the whole, this mode of operation and the overall conditions of living and working in global society create more similarities between ‘product-value groups’ than differences, so no group can rise as a threat to the corporate monoculture.

The so-called ‘alternative’ culture of the second half of the 20th century, the culture of Rock and Roll, Youth and Rebellion, doesn’t truly exist now, having been devoured by the mainstream long ago. Only the idea remains with it’s associated products, an idea receding into a subtle mythology where the false concept of a ‘commons’ made up of discarded corporate product has replaced a genuine culture that emanated from the creativity of the people. What we have now was cooked up by commerce alone, a backward-looking hybrid of cultural memories that is neither vital nor productive. It is the flipside of the same old cultural coin, an arbitrarily opposite answer to the same irrellevant question, a different lifestyle choice for the privelaged minority. Culture has been stolen from the people just as we had it in our grasp for what might have been the first time in history. How do we take it back?

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By jdb, April 7, 2009

Pop uses the indigenous music of the host country, whether that be blues or another folk music, it pretends to be familiar:

Some stuff is completely American sounding:

pop goes the world:

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By jdb, April 6, 2009

Pop has become the true international music. Every nation on earth not only worships American Pop, but they have their own endless stream of britneys, coming and going and lip syncing, no one can remember when they started and there is no end in sight. It is the perfect distillation of the global overculture, cheap, disposable, eternally in the impulsive moment. Little marionettes dancing and chanting to the ever present machine.

Rock could have been the global culture. Great behemoths endured for decades, the Zeppelins, the Floyds, known the world over as testaments to a past that could have been – freedom along with flash, the human heart with a leash on the technique, weilding it as a weapon and casting light on hidden areas of the human spirit. But now, Rock has come to resemble it’s enemy, processed cheese food melted in the oven of computerized studio magic, the little puppets wear black instead of colors, the little puppets play guitars instead of dancing. Rock in it’s defeat has become the B-side of Pop, the coin toss is over and the assholes won.

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By jdb, April 3, 2009

Let me tell you (let me tall you ALL about it, no really) the real problem of Rock. Its about freedom, or more succinctly, liberty. Rock in all its forms was about libertas, same as jazz. For rock and jazz, the lowest common denominator was a deep and personal cultural freedom. You can hear it in the way the stick hit the drum, and all the instruments played at once. No church, no state, just me and thee and whats between. Like Jazz was the map to Liberty for the Black Man in America, Rock was the map to Liberty for Every Man.

But some people hate freedom. We hate freedom. If we loved freedom we’d love Rock and we’d love each other. We’d follow the map on home. But instead we spend our teenage years crying about the immense gulf between us, the ideal isolation of the existentialists made real and ugly in the ‘burbs, in the apartments, in the Starbucks that litter the endless road. Then when the Ritalin or Prozac really takes, we are content with unreal dreams, staring at tiny screens, stretching our wings with virtual fashion, we get cool tatoos, and buy expensive dogs. We are Free To Buy and We Are What We Buy, save the planet with a new car, thats culture, buy organic, that’s politics… Because we could never NEVER touch each other, never care, with sweat ground against sweat, blood sliding on blood, all souls together in the dark uneven cities we’ve lost to time.