luka

Well-known member
the one rule is that the further along any path you go, the more alternate paths close off, so it becomes a question of how far back you're going and how far you can then project forward from any points of divergence.

yes. this is the point of pure potentiality. the centre at which the radial roads
converge and depart from. this is the chamber-outside-of-time. and as you say, the first step
along any one of of those innumerable paths collapses it. back into history.
incarnate.

I think there's also a big question about how this dematerialization relates or doesn't reflect the will to and pursuit of dematerialization throughout prior epochs of human history

and this is where we have to talk about this aspect of turning ourselves inside out- of literalising our internal experience as technology and the concomitant impoverishment and flattening that accompanies this process- to go back to porn, porn is a crude representation not of the sexual act but of the sexual fantasy. television is the crude representation and literalisation of the individual imagination. to put it, as a good crypto-christian, in a religious framework, it seems to raise the possibility that what we are seeing here is the anti-christ building itself into existence, stage by stage. which goes back to the AI-theology I was talking through with firefinga.

now what you get in exchange for this coarsening and this literalisation, is the ability to share the experience, the dissolution of the borders and the creation of the flat plane. Finnegan Wakes.
 
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luka

Well-known member
I think we can extend digitalization beyond life in or on the screen, and into life experienced through the screen. Examples: people at events like concerts who “experience” the event through the phone. It’s as if the event exists not to be experienced but to be “recorded” and “shared.”

and this is a neat concept because it suggests that our own eyes are now only secondary and that our real eyes are the cameras we carry.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
been into this guy out of iran these past few years, Ash Koosha.

like a more concentrated fly low style glitch hop. at least if i want music for the 600 tabs open feel.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
and you have to share the experience, else you'll go mad. You have to know what world it is you're living in, and repeat this constantly.

Has anyone watched The Circle on Channel 4? I found it jaw-dropping - contestants in apartment-pods communicating with others only (or almost only) through the internet, being watched as they construct their personas for others to absorb. People developing sexual obsessions with avatars. Mainstream media as ever is way ahead of the theorists.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2018...w-mendacity-vanity-make-maelstrom-species/and the mainstream (ish) pretends they're not as mendacious or vain as those on screen, when a gigantic mirror is being held up to them.
 
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luka

Well-known member
yes, you have to share. or you become mad, as you say, you become solipsistic and you become barren. you deplete your own resources. there is a process of desertification. come out of the wilderness and talk.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
been a couple of mentions of infantilisation and castration.

you see this in dancehall and rap. compare alkaline or kartel's new voice to the hyper-masculine voices of earlier generations dancehall. it's less stark in rap but a similar thing's happened in terms of vocal timbres with the likes of lil uzi and playboi carti (crowl, would this have it's origins in future swag?).

as far as digitalisation goes, autotune is a catalyst for this shift; infantilises/feminises/pixifies vocal timbres.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
and this is a neat concept because it suggests that our own eyes are now only secondary and that our real eyes are the cameras we carry.

I noticed that Rilke quote about the future this weekend - “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

I think this was discussed upthread but I can't now find it - the tremors and foreshocks of the future. In this instance, the idea of cameras as our real eyes has long been a mainstay of a certain kind of arthouse cinema - eg Peeping Tom, possibly Videodrome though I don't remember it well? Metaphor now become daily reality.
 

luka

Well-known member
compare alkaline or kartel's new voice to the hyper-masculine voices of earlier generations dancehall.

and again this is why i love vigilant citizen and that stream of discourse because it is the paranoid tracking of this same process in which it is always imposed from above by the illuminati (im not discounting the notion but i think it is by far the weakest hypothesis)

and this is why they are obsessed with the transgender thing and see it as part of the elite's
transhumanist agenda and birth the post human because again it is the dissolution of boundaries and binaries, the melting of all into a great puddle of oneness and the single plane. hence all this tawdry focus on alpha males and masculinity, proud boys et al.
 

luka

Well-known member
I noticed that Rilke quote about the future this weekend - “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

I think this was discussed upthread but I can't now find it - the tremors and foreshocks of the future. In this instance, the idea of cameras as our real eyes has long been a mainstay of a certain kind of arthouse cinema - eg Peeping Tom, possibly Videodrome though I don't remember it well? Metaphor now become daily reality.

exactly, exactly. foreshadowing. teasers and previews. this is what the synchromystic blogs got up to their elbows in and most eventually went mad tracking it (and a great deal of them turned nazi in fact)
 

luka

Well-known member
futures try to smooth a path for us, load the dice we play with, coo to us, beckon us, in an attempt to make themselves inevitable.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
in the alt right/conspiracist discourse gender is a codified form of pro- or anti- digitalisation (or it's the other way round). they're all flogging survivalist gear because they want to get back to nature. the fetishisation of manufacturing.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
futures try to smooth a path for us, load the dice we play with, coo to us, beckon us, in an attempt to make themselves inevitable.

i said to you the other day on our romantic walk by the river that you can feel a rush to explore all the options with samples during the 90's and early 2000's as though there was some kind of acknowledgment that any tether we still had to real-world instruments will soon be over. it was a two pronged effort:

with hardcore and jungle there was experimentation as to what could be done with samples; stretching, speeding, chopping, etc.

with timbaland, neptunes, alternative rap and the incredible string band era of dancehall there was this rush to expand the remit of what could be sampled.


you can see all of these being reactions to hyper-digitized music: acid house, crunk and ward 21
 

luka

Well-known member
well its time for me to put my earth-suit back on and go and do this same thing in the material world again.
you've all been so interesting you've made me very late for work.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member

in light of the above i have to ask myself if the really quite intense discomfort and irritation this causes me is the result of a new rhythmic template i am not ready to integrate.

the discomfort and irritation are intentional. the drums are in 3 (very uncommon for trap) but then the vocal sample and pizzicato plucks are in 4, so you have these two conflicting subdivisions of time happening concurrently.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
a better question would be at what point this particular form of dematerialization become more or less inevitable, and how are specific qualities driven by some of those "late" capitalist conditions. I don't think that would be an easy question either, but more manageable at least.

For me it's gotta be the 80s. Digital technology, virtual spaces, specifically malls, a new breed of consumerism. The shift in media styles as a result of the new tech. Computer generated graphics, synthetic music. Home studios, computer games. Oh and music videos! The redirecting of the attention from the ears to the eyes. With all this new tech came the idea of people being part of a progression into a new age of convenience and comfort, and it was always improving, upgrading. Things would be safer with computers taking control. But with all the advantages there was the beginning of the digital disconnect from human/living. Ofc the industrial revolution with its factories and machinery foreshadowed this by a long stretch but back then there was way more human interaction along the production line. This is not a well hashed out thought, but for me it's got to be the digi revolution.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
also important is the moment at which it was clear that selling hardware was the future rather than selling content (or rather, a reorientation to hardware because content could be pirated so easily, and people didn't mind watching/especially listening to low quality content if they could get it for free). then the tech market goes into overdrive, and dematerialisation accelerates. clearly the record industry and others were caught short at that moment. I'm not sure who did predict that.
 

continuum

smugpolice
Everyone is meticulously curating their own 'content' for public consumption, to a point where it's become utterly unremarkable, conscious to the nth degree of how every picture, word and emoji contributes to their persona(l brand). Competition used to be limited to certain sectors of life, now it's a way of life.

It's got to the point now where the people I'm friends with on social media and in real life, the actual content of what we post is often now used in a sort of art game between us where we try and find pictures or quotes which have relevance to something that happened in real life between us. Does anyone else experience this? It's like a sort of unspoken thing that a lot of people I know engage in. On Spotify too, the people I am friends with on there, we can see in real time what each other is listening to and sometimes this degenerates into conversations between us using song titles and artist names. I've brought this up a few times recently in real life with my friends and we all agree it is happening but nobody ever talks about it. It's very addictive and almost the sole reason a lot of us post even anything.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I feel this video is relevant to the discussion


On the one hand, you have a [cough] becoming-immaterial tendency in the imagery - combined with (but not opposed to) a hyper-materialism (Lamborghini, Chanel, Patek, Givenchy etc).

Not opposed to, because as much as they are fetish objects, insistently solid and irresistibly touchable, the luxury brands are also signs and symbols (Baudrillard, and early Baudrillard too - 1960s!)

You have the combination of a super-sharp digital-aspiring hyper-reality (man-made fabrics, cartoon-absurd hair extensions in flagrantly artificial dyed color) in terms of the image and styling, with a graphic physicality lyrically ("get you a straw nigga you know this pussy is juicy") and bodily (Cardi's cleavage)

The two coming together - hyperreality and physicality - in the initial, er, sighting of Nicki's ass - an impossibly rounded globe of plastic-encased flesh so distended and packed it looks inflated

And then you got this lyric from Cardi

"I turn Offset on
I told him the other day
Man, we should sell that porn"

I have occasionally wondered what goes through the heads of celebrity couples as they fuck

Can they, um, relate without all the mass-mediating images of each other out there in the world intervening?

Do they bring the Spectacle into bed with them?

How could they not?

So those Cardi lines are about mediatized immateriality contaminating and commingling with the Real

The Panopticon-in-reverse - an invitation to the world (cf Beyonce and Jay-Z) to contemplate their intimacy

All eyes on me, all imaginations on us

We are living your fantasy; our fantasy is to be spectated, and envied, by the entire world. Levitating above ourselves as the gaze of Media itself.

A final thing about the track itself: cf Sadmanbarty about the child-like softness and feyness of the new rap voice, there's the contrast between the floaty, angelic, half not-there-ness of especially Quavo and Offset, and the super-potent, marauding, phallic-woman cameos by Cardi and Nicki.

Which are so overpowering, so in your face, they topple the mood of the song - overriding that fluttery ambient / IDM feeling ("Feel like I can fly"). Such that listening, I will actually skip the two female tour de forces, cut straight from Offset to Takeoff, to preserve the dreamy ambient waft.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
On the one hand, you have a [cough] becoming-immaterial tendency in the imagery - combined with (but not opposed to) a hyper-materialism (Lamborghini, Chanel, Patek, Givenchy etc).

Not opposed to, because as much as they are fetish objects, insistently solid and irresistibly touchable, the luxury brands are also signs and symbols (Baudrillard, and early Baudrillard too - 1960s!)

Multiplied by the is-it-real? psychedelic suspicion that anyone who's living the American dream must experience.

And luxury-as-symbol obliterates the variation that personal taste would bring to the issue - hence the mind-numbing consistency/power of the same luxury brands trotted out again and again. This puts me in mind of porn(ification), and the endless symbolisation of a small number of sex acts, always explicitly connected with power. Whether or not something is liked or found pleasurable is secondary - it's the performance of pleasure and the performance of power that are paramount, the point of it. Which obvs links to bedding the Spectacle.
 
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