Decline

[Corpsey.]

its a development of ideas as well. The modernist obsession with newness has given way to a desire to either accelerate current processes or cynically return flawed but perhaps best available modes of the past.

 

[woops]

i cant fully enjoy the sun

the feeling that there's no exit

don't tease us, full poem or gtfo

 

[woops]

its a development of ideas as well. The modernist obsession with newness has given way to a desire to either accelerate current processes or cynically return flawed but perhaps best available modes of the past.

did someone say we need to psychedelicise the avant-garde?

 

[sus]

That’s observable even with something like dance music. Theorised in Reynolds retromania, hauntology

In undergrad I did a lot of writing about cultural nostalgia, because my peers were just soaked in it. Instagram-filter music.

I remember discovering Retromania and realizing that he'd gotten to it all long before me. Really devastating. I hated that book.

Now I know that's just the way she blows. "The thing I always hated about childhood was feeling like I was on the world's answering machine." The space of historical knowledge production is so goddam big that the default assumption is just, "Yeah, it's been written about before." Sort of a Rule 37 for ideas.

 

[sus]

I guess one of the things that's interesting about Gus, and we all find him interesting as a specimen, is that he's the first person to turn up here not liking anything. He's not a partisan for anything. There's a blanket cynicism which is completely unprecedented for dissensus. His peers are simple enjoying enjoyers of stuff, Gus doesn't like anything. It's brutal.

Hey now, young Gus believed in Indie, it was just beaten out of him.

 

[sus]

Now I know that's just the way she blows. "The thing I always hated about childhood was feeling like I was on the world's answering machine." The space of historical knowledge production is so goddam big that the default assumption is just, "Yeah, it's been written about before." Sort of a Rule 37 for ideas.

The Milton Point is what folks call it. The idea that Milton was the last person able to read basically all the written works of the West—not the canon, the entire (surviving & printed) corpus. Nowadays you can devote your whole life just to reading Hugo and Nebula-nominated sci-fi and you won't be able to get through it, it'll stack up faster than you can pop off.

 

[Murphy]

Is this about hair loss?

 

[luka]

more about comments under rave videos going no one looking at their phones proper having it this generation will never know this freedom

 

[shiels]

and death worship

 

[IdleRich]

I like a bit of decline (and Fall (of the Roman Empire or not)). The debauched, the debased and especially the decadent. Playing in the ruins with the good stuff the better people made for you.... ruined world, ruined culture but sweet still tastes sweet when you find it.

 

[IdleRich]

The Milton Point is what folks call it. The idea that Milton was the last person able to read basically all the written works of the West—not the canon, the entire (surviving & printed) corpus. Nowadays you can devote your whole life just to reading Hugo and Nebula-nominated sci-fi and you won't be able to get through it, it'll stack up faster than you can pop off.

Pascal was supposed to be the last mathematician who knew all of maths (or math if you like but I prefer the plurality implied by the, er, plural). But the fact that once people could know everything but now there is too much stuff for any one person to know is hardly representative of decline.

 

[catalog]

The Dewey Decimal System, invented by Melvil Dewey, was late 1800s, high Victorian era. The idea that you could break the entirety of human knowledge into a numerical, linear, ordered system. Batshit crazy it's still used in libraries, IT and computers get shoehorned somewhere in 'information' in the 004s or something. also hilariously/savagely reveals the prejudice baked into the age eg divisions for 'authors' and 'women authors'. US-centric of course, then Europe, then the rest.

 

[catalog]

The idea that there is 'no exit' is also historically unprecedented. one of the major modernism -> post modernsim delineations.

i think the postmodern impulse is sort of always there, throughout history. when i read aristotle, i thought his focus on the medium of everything was like the postmodern to plato's modern.

 

[IdleRich]

The Dewey Decimal System, invented by Melvil Dewey, was late 1800s, high Victorian era. The idea that you could break the entirety of human knowledge into a numerical, linear, ordered system. Batshit crazy it's still used in libraries, IT and computers get shoehorned somewhere in 'information' in the 004s or something. also hilariously/savagely reveals the prejudice baked into the age eg divisions for 'authors' and 'women authors'. US-centric of course, then Europe, then the rest.

You gotta have a system. I don't think it's that crazy... Dewey is pretty good, you want something you can find it, what's wrong?
My friend came round today and we were talking about record filing systems, I mentioned a friend who stored them in the order he bought them... I think like that, if anyone went to his house and wanted to find a particular record (he's got a lot of records) they wouldn't be able to, but for him if you say something he can go to it cos he remembers (roughly) when and where he was when he was into that stuff. But in general... yeah Dewey is trying to hold back the tide but I'm glad someone is.

 

[IdleRich]

When I went to another friend's place the other day to watch the election I saw her book collection which is filed by... colour... so she has shelves of blue turning into yellow or whatever. Everyone who sees/hears about that hates it - and rightly so cos that's the least important detail of a book right? I think there's even a saying about that or something.

 

[catalog]

'you gotta have a system' i dunno man, the moment we are in right now, everyone has their own... i agree some kind of overarching organising system is useful, but dewey really only applies to physical stuff, and like your friend says, people have their own idiosyncratic systems... like i used to know someone who arranged his things by colour.

and the issue with any organising system is that it contains prejudice and the hand of the organiser. like the system you choose will privilege certain things, ideas, like my eg with how men and women authors are split in dewey, so you don't find them near one another, women are at a totally different number, lower down. same with black people and so on.

obviously it's fine if you're doing your own collection, but as a global standard, to me, now, it's weird. although you are right in a way, probably has not changed cos it would be so difficult to come up with another one, nothing would ever be prefect.

but it's sort of moved on anyway, cos it's for print only, and online stuff is organised more by recommenders, free tags, search also huge over browse etc.

it's definitely interesting, it makes me think of that tesla thing of how atoms only move when you look at them, the organising, the lens you put on things, it does something, it doesn't ever sit neutral.

 

[IdleRich]

Of course any global standard has to include prejudices and a brutal flattening out... but that's (sort of) what universal means. Were you talking about Borges? Funes the Memorious when he creates his own number system of completely unique numbers and it's great but it's totally insane cos no-one else can use it. Yes prejudice is built into everything... there is no neutral... and yet, I'd like to be able to find what I want and I'm glad someone tried.
Like with the mercator projection (speaking of flattening out) - and people think it's racist cos it makes the African countries look small or whatever... but it's just the way to do it if you want to navigate using latitude and longitude. It kinda grates with me when people get on that one.

 

[sus]

and the issue with any organising system is that it contains prejudice and the hand of the organiser. like the system you choose will privilege certain things, ideas, like my eg with how men and women authors are split in dewey, so you don't find them near one another, women are at a totally different number, lower down. same with black people and so on.

obviously it's fine if you're doing your own collection, but as a global standard, to me, now, it's weird. although you are right in a way, probably has not changed cos it would be so difficult to come up with another one, nothing would ever be prefect.

Yes, this is the argument against structure that the pro-flux queer demo pushes. Nelson's Argonauts epitomizes it.

Yes, systems have bias, because a system reflects an ontology, and ontologies reside, in part, in the eyes of the observer. "In part" because there are structural distinctions and real, formal patterns in nature—there's a meaningful difference between a plant and an animal that will get picked up cross-culturally—but at the same time, people taxonomize to fulfill pragmatic purposes, based on their own subjective understandings of the world. The system is an instrument based on an understanding of the problem-space, which is partly cultural.

This goes for language too, or binomial nomenclatures (speciation—which, any biologist will tell you, is basically constructed, rather than inherent). This goes for anything really, it's an inescapable law, it's definitional to what classification is. (Enter postmodernism.)

But the alternative to systems, as @IdleRich points out, is (obviously) no system. And "no system" is a really bad place to be. No basis for curation. No ability to classify or organize. No ability to speak or communicate! Nada, zilch, it's all out. The only real option is to improve on the system or suggest an alternative.

On alternative to seeing the system as constraining is to see it as enabling. Yes, it's imperfect, but it's far better than pure chaos, which is only "unbiased" so far as its "precognized."

I can get behind the idea of making library taxonomies more local, less standardized, so it can be adapted to the purpose at hand. (Note that many specialty, research and archival libraries already do this.) But note that comes with a tradeoff: they'll be less accessible to outsiders. C'est la vie—tailoring for locals is hostile to foreigners, another inescapable law.

 

[IdleRich]

Really really drunk by the way (also lots of speed. ketamine)

 

[sus]

ketamine?! you're arguing with me about American medical debt on ketamine?!