The inadvertent future

Leo

Leo

Well-known member
technologists have essentially spent the past decade developing apps that do things that your mom used to take care of: Alexa to turn off lights in a room, uber to call you a taxi, fresh direct to do food shopping, etc. an aspect of futurism seems based on the notion of scarcity of time, the push to develop all these "innovations" designed to save you time. maybe saving time becomes critical in an accelerated culture.

or maybe people are just inherently lazy. how much fucking time does it take to get off your ass and turn off a light?
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Leo said:
technologists have essentially spent the past decade developing apps that do things that your mom used to take care of: Alexa to turn off lights in a room, uber to call you a taxi, fresh direct to do food shopping, etc. an aspect of futurism seems based on the notion of scarcity of time, the push to develop all these "innovations" designed to save you time. maybe saving time becomes critical in an accelerated culture.

or maybe people are just inherently lazy. how much fucking time does it take to get off your ass and turn off a light?
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the future is no longer draconian and austere, but rather nurturing and comforting.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
The thing is futurism as a trope of popular consciousness was always a big fucking fake.

If futurism was really as how it was understood to be it would be ambient, chill out and the variants of eurodisco, not to mention Celine Dion.

Part of our critique of this traditional notion of futurism is half of the jungle we venerate was made with antique technology even then. akai s1000 in 1994? give me a break professionals were using pro tools.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
thirdform said:
close your eyes. imagine you've never seen the city before. does it sound glistening and shiney? does it fuck! it sounds more and more garbled. I'm not sure why an aural form of cognition has been reduced to the fantasies of pictorial artists. Like I said yesterday, internet 2.0 should have given us information overload in music, but apart from people like oneohtrix point never that sort of arty scene it hasn't been done. jungle and early grime did, of course. But rnb has been reduced to a narcotic torpor whilst migos is the age old trick of increasing the economic privilege of a small section of black people whilst still rendering them culturally and sociologically marginal to politically nonexistent. The story of white supremacy in black music even.

Hip hop may not like the cut of whitey's jib, but it sure loves its money.
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Best post. Did you make this up? Good point anyway
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
thirdform said:
The thing is futurism as a trope of popular consciousness was always a big fucking fake.

If futurism was really as how it was understood to be it would be ambient, chill out and the variants of eurodisco, not to mention Celine Dion.

Part of our critique of this traditional notion of futurism is half of the jungle we venerate was made with antique technology even then. akai s1000 in 1994? give me a break professionals were using pro tools.
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very good. there's a big difference.

the future of the 90's was gritty. our one is smooth and shiny like a touchscreen.

this can be heard in the music.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Doc Scott didn't even EQ here comes the drums properly. it was made with a 4 channel mixer, more suitable for djing than any kind of music production. Sven vath and the operatic trance gods had far more advanced studios!

And when the junglists got these sorts of big studios, they didn't know how to adapt, not out of conservatism but simply because their music wasn't suited to being made like that.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
sadmanbarty said:
very good. there's a big difference.

the future of the 90's was gritty. our one is smooth and shiny like a touchscreen.

this can be heard in the music.
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But there was a smooth and glistening future in the 90s. we just rightly hate and hated it.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Absolutely right that the glossy future was first seen in visual art I think and also right to point out that it already existed since... the 70s perhaps?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Brave New World needs an obligatory mention as an early vision of an infantilsed future.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The invention of plastic seems crucial here as aesthetic marker. The brave new world of inorganic matter.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Claude young, future sound of london, biosphere. Any number of glossy futures in the 90s. The glossiness today is best read as retro kitsch.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Think of the pod and bubble visions that dominated the cutesy futures of the 1960s.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Corpsey said:
Smoothness is certainly key - frictionlessness, weightlessness (Dematerialisation)
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Well there is a reason why trance won and jungle lost. Sure, jungle is cannon and trance is not, but that don't matter to Joe Bloggs who never reads the wire.

That's the disgusting irony of all of this. the most middle class dance music won. and that was because no music is as working class as its champions paint it out to be.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
stocks and shares, invisible money, better money

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