luka

Well-known member
in response to the big blissblogger post.... yes, but those are neurotic tendencies. what i respond to and what drew me to your writing and made me want to correspond with you were the traits that lie on the other end of that spectrum. not the holding on but the letting go. the kind of things you mentioned in regard to the hardcore essay from 1992. virtualy everything im talking about on this thread i could quite easily find correlates for in your writing, every idea and sensation. im very confident about that.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's a fair point, but I still think that the 'affect' (or choose whatever name you want for it) that manifests when two people meet in person, is a whole different level of communication...things which are avoidable online are no longer so, different stimuli. Even if you've been meeting minds at a high/deep level online. You have a whole world of qualifying information to deepen the experience/contact. In fact, I'd say that most times it makes you appreciate someone more.

i do think there are disadvantages in the face to face model that need to be acknowledged. for instance the animal aspect of submission and dominance. the way large people often use that physical heft to subdue others. if you think of trump for instance, the way he loomed over Clinton in the debates.

there is a whole dark side to the animal and the embodied that has to be factored in.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
i do think there are disadvantages in the face to face model that need to be acknowledged. for instance the animal aspect of submission and dominance. the way large people often use that physical heft to subdue others. if you think of trump for instance, the way he loomed over Clinton in the debates.

there is a whole dark side to the animal and the embodied that has to be factored in.

If you're encountering enemies, absolutely. But at least you know what you're dealing with. Imagine if you'd been forum buddies with Trump and then met him....no, that doesn't work
 

luka

Well-known member
“Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?"

At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this:

"Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.”
― William S. Burroughs, Nova Express
 

luka

Well-known member
dematerialisation shouldn't need wires and plug sockets and god is not a computer.

we still need to determine whether the internet is a trap or a training programme (or both)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading a book is I suppose as dematerialised an experience as browsing the internet. (Just happens to involve different materials as a stimulus.)

But it's different isn't it, it's compulsive and induces passivity like watching TV does, it doesn't permit you to think or imagine, it fills every vacuum imagination could flourish in. And it's omnipresent now, it isn't even a cordoned off experience (for those of us with smartphones).

Perhaps it's actually less boring (in terms of the extreme short term). Boredom is smothered by it. Not an original thought.

Of course it's not all bad. Dissnesus has made me think about things for example...
 

luka

Well-known member
Reading a book is I suppose as dematerialised an experience as browsing the internet. (Just happens to involve different materials as a stimulus.)

But it's different isn't it, it's compulsive and induces passivity like watching TV does


yes, the page is a screen as mentioned on the first page of the thread. i know what you are trying to say i think but im not sure it is a question of passivity. in theory a book requires more passivity because it can't be answered back. it should be more of a one-way relationship.

is it perhaps something to do with the level of attention and engagement?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Reading can be used in an addictive, anti-life way, if you read to avoid your emotions. It just doesn't fracture the concentration, which is perhaps the ever-present danger with the internet. Hard to get into a k-hole with books, though I'm sure someone will have had a contradictory experience
 

luka

Well-known member
i mean, for my part this thread has been the stimulus for coalescing a huge range of thoughts and feelings and intuitions so i don't feel at all passive or disengaged in relation to it. quite the opposite.
and it's not something i could have done alone in my notebook. it has been dependent on other peoples responses and questions and contributions. a book can't do that for you.
 

version

Well-known member
But it's different isn't it, it's compulsive and induces passivity like watching TV does, it doesn't permit you to think or imagine, it fills every vacuum imagination could flourish in. And it's omnipresent now, it isn't even a cordoned off experience (for those of us with smartphones).

Perhaps it's actually less boring (in terms of the extreme short term). Boredom is smothered by it. Not an original thought.

It's like a development of muzak that fills every space, liminal or otherwise. The usual dynamics are flattened, the peaks and troughs level out under the weight of constant information. It's numbing in the way that channel hopping is but much more enticing because you can always find something you're interested in.

I think David Foster Wallace's thing about boredom forcing people to confront a sort of low level, ambient pain rings true:

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.”
 

luka

Well-known member
yes. this is the whole deal with psychedelics. it's only when you stop moving, stop distracting yourself, stop running away from yourself, that the full weight of the thing hits you. if you can sit still on them and be quiet it all comes flooding in.

of course the same is true of normal life it's just drugs amplify the underlying dynamics to the point you can't ignore them.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose your experience of the internet is different to mine, and why shouldn't everyone's experiences be different? But for me the internet is mostly passively scanning images and text, responding to certain things with a "like" or a glib little comment. Dissensus is as interactive as it gets for me. Once I left university (and tbh even when I was there) I never had ppl to discuss music and literature with around me. I've got a few friends with whom I might, but they're rare. So dissensus is great in that respect, of far more interest to me than anything else I do online, really.
 

luka

Well-known member
I suppose your experience of the internet is different to mine, and why shouldn't everyone's experiences be different? But for me the internet is mostly passively scanning images and text, responding to certain things with a "like" or a glib little comment. Dissensus is as interactive as it gets for me. Once I left university (and tbh even when I was there) I never had ppl to discuss music and literature with around me. I've got a few friends with whom I might, but they're rare. So dissensus is great in that respect, of far more interest to me than anything else I do online, really.

me too. i like dissensus and im indebted to it and im commited to it. i think it is special and as i said earlier it is an independent sovereign state not a vassal of the vast imperial powers, the facebooks and the googles and etc
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Two quotes I'll chuck into the pot

"Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it." Yeats

"The river is within us, the sea is all about us" T.S. Eliot.

(Joyce's river/sea metaphor similar to this, isn't it?)
 
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