“You’ll like this mate!”

Will I? Let’s see. Or “wait til you hear this, it’s hilarious!” Why do I hate it?

Is it a pathetic little anti authority thing? Is it about the expectation to enjoy creating disappointment? A resistance to being understood?

I’ll throw in fireworks and singing happy birthday here. Maybe festivals too. But it’s more than just resisting organised fun. It’s about the ‘injunction to enjoy’ and maybe removing the element of surprise.
 

sufi

lala
on the other hand, it's always tough when you find a great bit of internet - a meme that you really get, or a discussion that just hits the spot, and there's no fucker irl with whom you can share it without feeling like a wierdo, getting that effortful " uhuh oh yeah i see what you mean" polite insincere agreement.
it's a specific new type of disconnection between our real life normy projections and our wild and woolly online personae

"o yeah i saw this great comment on dissensus" said noone ever irl
 
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Thank you for replying to my dead thread. It’s badly named and doesn’t know what it’s about. I’ve brought together vaguely related things that don’t quite fit. I do it a lot. It reads like the rough notes of what’s to be a shite Guardian column by a middle-aged alcoholic.
 
Now I think it’s about a feeling of misrecognition. I obviously don’t hate recommendations, it’s brilliant when they’re good. But boring ones happen regularly and you feel disappointment and a pressure because someone made an effort and it didn’t land. An unwanted gift. And the fireworks thing, and happy birthday, that’s the feeling of alienation when you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself or celebrating but it doesn’t connect.

There’s the misrecognition from algorithms too, that’s an odd feeling. Maybe the thread should be about that.
 
it's a specific new type of disconnection between our real life normy projections and our wild and woolly online personae

"o yeah i saw this great comment on dissensus" said noone ever irl

We can’t tell people IRL we post here, it’s shameful. They might read your posts out at a party in a cringey voice. And they’d be like what is this shit are these people your real friends? What’s it all about you pretentious dick? And you couldn’t really say, you’d just sit there with a red face.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Is it about the expectation to enjoy creating disappointment? A resistance to being understood?

I’ll throw in fireworks and singing happy birthday here. Maybe festivals too. But it’s more than just resisting organised fun. It’s about the ‘injunction to enjoy’ and maybe removing the element of surprise.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Enjoyment as a task is a big thing - I'm sure this came up on another thread recently. I'm fascinated by all those songs exulting in this lifestyle where 'we party like it's our job'
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
For the misrecognition - sharing bits of culture has become more than ever a dominant form of communication through social media, so the effect of someone not 'getting' something you like might be magnified...what does it mean about me etc. New forms of alienation when no-one else but your internet friends understands why that meme is hilarious or that obscure song is genius
 

kumar

Well-known member
The feeling of horror usually hinges on the inaccuracy of the recommendation or the gracefulness of its delivery. Youre getting at something slightly different to this but if youve absorbed certain cultural objects as core components of your identity, like i imagine most people here, then any thing that misses the mark will provoke the type of frothing disgust i felt at being given an oasis t shirt aged 15 by a well intentioned, but clearly temporarily deranged, aunt. similarly, if a gesture of inclusion by way of a recommendation feels exactly likely a barely disguised gesture of inclusion, at a work party for instance, you are likely going to feel the raw shame of sticking out as someone who must obviously be in need of special social care. once i brought a girl to a family gathering, and my mum, who was aware that this person couldn't get on trains without suffering panic attacks, made a typically reprehensible and insane leap and said, with some of the best will in the world "hello, if you want to take a break at any point don't worry you can go and take a walk or anything, it wont seem rude" which would have been quite lovely and sensitive but she then blurted out "because i know you sometimes, you know, freak out on trains and stuff".
 

kumar

Well-known member
more to the point, theres the common flattening effect, a deflated feeling, that you get when you see a version of yourself mirrored back in the reduced form of a stock character, its the heightened sense of being a targeted demographic. lots of the time seeing the fraudulent, cliched parts of yourself is a funny and healthy thing to do, its the main point of having friends, but sometimes it can really take the wind out of you.

This has probably become more prevalent with the types of archiving the internet provides, the feeling that there isn't an underground in the supposed former sense of the word, that "alternative cultures" are more clearly coopted and supported in a far franker way by the evil doers than they perhaps seemed to be in the past.

Shiels do you get this sense specifically from a personal encounter? I had it quite a lot from internet radio mixes, especially when they were really good, and i enjoyed all the recommendations. I could get a bit despairing after listening, the recommendations felt too particular, too choice that there was something sinister and a little depressing about it. Maybe theres some untreated puritanical impulse behind that because it felt gluttonous. One of the best thing about dance music is when it feels completely impersonal, inhuman, unartistic in the romantic auteur sense, its a very inviting and accepting field in that respect, theres the liberating feeling of being an infinitely small particle in a huge disinterested machine. But the feeling i'm talking about in response to too many accesible online mixes, endless archives and playlists that you never remember, the frailty of them not being physical things etc, doesn't give the kind of freedom of being lost in the crowd, it feels perhaps creepily personal. you are very bluntly made to feel like a customer. or not.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall..."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"more to the point, theres the common flattening effect, a deflated feeling, that you get when you see a version of yourself mirrored back in the reduced form of a stock character, its the heightened sense of being a targeted demographic. lots of the time seeing the fraudulent, cliched parts of yourself is a funny and healthy thing to do, its the main point of having friends, but sometimes it can really take the wind out of you."

This is a more complex version of what it feels like to come into work or a party or whatever and find out there's another person wearing exactly the same shirt as you—the shirt that you thought would somehow help define you.
 

luka

Well-known member
The sorting mechanisms have got so good, the combs so fine toothed and the markets so niche
 

kumar

Well-known member
yeah its the exactitudes thing i suppose, just checked their instagram and it is really good but like peep show its very dangerous for sensitive sausages.
 
Ha! Yes. It’s usually from personal encounters, a feeling of being trapped in a claustrophobic identity, tarred with the wrong brush.

I’ve said to people “that version of me in your head, kill him, let’s start again, clean slate”. This is partly a narcissistic need of mine to remain somehow unquantifiable or mysterious. So there’s a churlish resistance to labelling. But there’s also a tension between that need and the need to be fully understood, absolutely seen and heard.

I also think that with the shortened attention span of internet days we tend to make rapid assumptions and categorisations about others, and they’re out there for the picking, circulating, viral personality templates.
 

luka

Well-known member
I xkeep getting the urge to go on the weatherall is dead thread and go weatherall was a bit shit. Bland middle age man music. I keep repressing it and it keeps coming back. I've never even heard Weatherall. Not heard a single tune or mix. It's just this perverse instinct.
 
I xkeep getting the urge to go on the weatherall is dead thread and go weatherall was a bit shit. Bland middle age man music. I keep repressing it and it keeps coming back. I've never even heard Weatherall. Not heard a single tune or mix. It's just this perverse instinct.

It’s the creative dissent of the id that drives the forum in its unadulterated form
 
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