The inadvertent future
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
OK cool.
Well related in part to music, I listened to the whole Blade Runner soundtrack at work a few days ago and there's a track in it that's pure old-time jazz, I mean I think it's actually just a really old recording from nearly a hundred years ago now, no added synths or anything, and it doesn't sound at all out of place because it invokes the same sense of 'noire', the same sort of poisoned sentimentality. And it all fits with the film's 2020s-does-1920s aesthetic, and reminds us that technological alienation and fear of and for the future is nothing new. People thought the same things back in the 20s about radio, telephones and telegram that they thought about TV in the 50s, MTV and video games in the 80s and the internet and smartphones today. (Coincidentally, it's funny to see how the present has overtaken the future, as no-one in the film has a mobile (let alone smart) phone, so Deckard has to spend a dollar fifty making a call, albeit with video, to talk to Rachel on a public phone! - and computers barely feature at all.)
Then the sequel a couple of years ago went towards a Kubricky 1960s sort of vision of the future, which made sense seeing it's set in the same universe as the original but 30 years on. Shame it sucked as a story.
Well related in part to music, I listened to the whole Blade Runner soundtrack at work a few days ago and there's a track in it that's pure old-time jazz, I mean I think it's actually just a really old recording from nearly a hundred years ago now, no added synths or anything, and it doesn't sound at all out of place because it invokes the same sense of 'noire', the same sort of poisoned sentimentality. And it all fits with the film's 2020s-does-1920s aesthetic, and reminds us that technological alienation and fear of and for the future is nothing new. People thought the same things back in the 20s about radio, telephones and telegram that they thought about TV in the 50s, MTV and video games in the 80s and the internet and smartphones today. (Coincidentally, it's funny to see how the present has overtaken the future, as no-one in the film has a mobile (let alone smart) phone, so Deckard has to spend a dollar fifty making a call, albeit with video, to talk to Rachel on a public phone! - and computers barely feature at all.)
Then the sequel a couple of years ago went towards a Kubricky 1960s sort of vision of the future, which made sense seeing it's set in the same universe as the original but 30 years on. Shame it sucked as a story.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Still the best cyberpunk IMO. Another film with a great soundtrack - also set in 2019, like Blade Runner.
luka
Well-known member
What the world of 2050 looks like depends on any number of things. There are all sorts of competing dystopias but it's hard to imagine any utopias. What seems most likely is megadeaths, rationing and a severe restriction of freedom under authoritarian global regimes or super states for all but the megarich, with perhaps some blighted areas of the globe escaping control.
But who knows? energy availability counts. Population counts. Food production and land surface all count.
Of course there is the burgeoning field of AI theology which to my mind is already a cult if not a religion. Linked to this is automation and consequently a vast pool of surplus labour who will find it impossible to exert any leverage over the rich and powerful.
What we might actually want to do with ourselves is unclear. People talk vaguely about creativity, but to what end? Doing some watercolours or playing piano like an old dear in a nursing home? Gets boring fast.
Corpse quoted Ballard talking about the search within, the psychedelic journey. The activation of the deep psychic forces. This is, I agree, the only obvious field for genuine discovery. What is the unconscious and what does it want. Is it God? What are the disembodied intelligences? What is the occult etc etc
But who knows? energy availability counts. Population counts. Food production and land surface all count.
Of course there is the burgeoning field of AI theology which to my mind is already a cult if not a religion. Linked to this is automation and consequently a vast pool of surplus labour who will find it impossible to exert any leverage over the rich and powerful.
What we might actually want to do with ourselves is unclear. People talk vaguely about creativity, but to what end? Doing some watercolours or playing piano like an old dear in a nursing home? Gets boring fast.
Corpse quoted Ballard talking about the search within, the psychedelic journey. The activation of the deep psychic forces. This is, I agree, the only obvious field for genuine discovery. What is the unconscious and what does it want. Is it God? What are the disembodied intelligences? What is the occult etc etc
luka
Well-known member
Needless to say there are all sorts of attempts in progress to force the hand of God. Whether this is possible remains to be seen. Will He intervene in the final hour. Will the singularity occur and transfer us to level 2? These things seem perfectly plausible if you are on enough drugs. I've often sincerely believed them, and have never complete discounted them.
luka
Well-known member
You can't rrally depict future political realities (or you can... but its kitsch. Fascoid synthscapes and marching boots) but you can depict a future affectual landscape, future cognitive abilities, posthuman and transhuman bodies, non-physical space and movement within that space (astral body astral travel) you can depict alien life, alien landscapes, evolved life, future cities
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luka
Well-known member
Still the best cyberpunk IMO. Another film with a great soundtrack - also set in 2019, like Blade Runner.
Here you combine the cyberpunk city with the transhuman and posthuman. The mutants. The x men. The midwitch cuckoos. Our replacements. (Or our future selves)
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luka
Well-known member
There's always been a vision of the future which is non-physical. Part of this presumably stems from dualism, not necessarily Cartesian, but also religious, always the division into corporeal and non corporeal. On the one hand the body on the other; mind, soul, spirit.
Eshun makes the point in more brilliant than the sun that the future always used to be represented in sound as diaphanous, floaty, weightless, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, until dance music, acid house, techno, jungle. I don't know if that is entirely true actually. It's a shaky point, but you certainly have the two competing visions.
As I keep saying the switch to the post-industrial and into the Information Age is what seems to be the crucial thing here. We are not the robots any more. Not Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. We are synced to non human rhythms more than ever before perhaps, but not to the factory.
luka
Well-known member
Getting bored now. Where are my bushido Warriors? Where is droid with his science fiction obsession? Where is corpse with his jg ballards quotes? Where is tea with his inside knowledge of the large hadron collider? Where is other life to talk to me about chuck person? Where is Leo with his intimate knowledge of modern stealth marketing and reality manufacture?
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
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
Never been
Sold on the shiny vision of the future.
Those hype Williams videos were never convincing. I've tried listening to Migos a few times I don't get it. I think the future is something to do with travel from very big to very small, the dub thing. Our imagined future is back to a past we've had. The future is smoggy. I can't listen to his stuff for very long but maybe the caretaker has got it right. It's a bit boring tho, can't see it working in a club
Sold on the shiny vision of the future.
Those hype Williams videos were never convincing. I've tried listening to Migos a few times I don't get it. I think the future is something to do with travel from very big to very small, the dub thing. Our imagined future is back to a past we've had. The future is smoggy. I can't listen to his stuff for very long but maybe the caretaker has got it right. It's a bit boring tho, can't see it working in a club