Modern Life is Rubbish - discuss (not the album)

d e n · Post by **d e n** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 1:58 pm

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned in the thread but I highly recommend reading these two books by Jaron Lanier, who has a lot of ground to stand on when criticizing the digitization of culture and society as a whole (he was partly responsible for inventing virtual reality) He is also a musician and organized both books in a unique way.

his kind of academic word for it is: "cybernetic totalism"

You Are Not A Gadget

Who Owns The Future

I haven't had a Facebook for almost two years and psychologically I feel I'm finally starting to feel like myself again instead of half myself/half computer

infact, twoism is my one social media outlet, which I go through phases of posting and not posting. I think over 50% of my posts came from the Tomorrow's Harvest insanity

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 4:19 pm

MrMessiah wrote:
fujee wrote:Deactivated Facebook today, so for anyone maybe wondering where I've gone.. I haven't deleted you. I already feel better about life haha.
I'm thinking about it. There was a quote that stuck with me by... someone, can't remember. But they were talking about the way that on social media people tend to post about the positive things in their life and how it leads to so many people getting that Cinderella syndrome, y'know? "Everyone else is having fun but me". Meanwhile, everyone else is thinking the same thing.

But anyway the quote was that with Facebook, you run a risk of judging someone else's highlight reel by your behind-the-scenes footage. And it's true, it takes a big effort not to do that. That's before you add up all the other "big data" reasons for avoiding it too.

Absolutely its all just competitive sharing and its one of the primary reasons I have left. It definitely does make you analyse your life in a very critical way, which is not healthy. I am headstrong enough not to make it really impact my outlook or well being, but I can totally understand why it would make others anxious (like it did for my girlfriend). I was considering deleting a good portion of the 'friends' I have no contact or friendship with but I thought that is fairly pointless, I am in contact with all you guys here, and other important people via email and phone so I thought I may as well take the plunge.

Above all though, it is a really useless distraction.. I don't want it to take up any of my time anymore, I never spent that much time on it anyway but it has the propensity to suck you in quickly and before you know it you've been scrolling through the feed for 10 minutes and it offers nothing in return. The online activities I care about are this forum and a few other academic/cultural websites related to my interests. That is all I need really. I want to get back out in to the real world, spend less time staring at a screen.

Techboy · Post by **Techboy** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 4:31 pm

facebook - and social media in general - has opened more doors for me than it has closed, so i just run an adblocker and deal with it. i do have to make a huge effort not to waste an hour a day on it, but i can generally control myself. fortunately i am not particularly prone to comparing my life to other peoples', although that said i guess i do tend to post my highlights to it. i don't go on every day and post my deepest darkest insecurities in either case, but then, if that was the done thing i doubt it would be so popular.

i guess i'm fortunate enough to have a bunch of friends on facebook who post interesting stuff about music and politics; although i reckon facebook just knows to filter out the pictures of babies.

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 4:45 pm

Yeah there definitely is a productive way of using it which is great and obviously its incredibly useful for musicians, promoters, activists, social organisation and such.. but I guess I just feel it brings out the worst in people..and the whole idea we must upload and document everything all the time.. that everything is the 'moment' is so spurious. A lot of the people I have as 'friends' piss me off as well, some of their behavior and items they post are irritating to say the least, a lot of them are people I just have no interest in but it is easier not to delete them for managing cordial social relations.

I just think it degrades the experience of life in some ways.. but that isn't to say I think people can use it for good causes. I believe I am better off without it. I've deactivated it as opposed to deleting it because I may need to use it for organising something but I doubt I will need to.

Mexicola · Post by **Mexicola** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 7:15 pm

It's something I've been giving alot of thought to of late to be honest. I'm not ready to push the button just yet (if nothing else, the Twoism event needs an alternative to FB if I'm going to organise it properly). But I have to say, I think I'm moving towards the same conclusion as Fugee. The negatives are beginning to outway the positives in my view.

Good luck Fugee. You know how to reach me anyway

louise · Post by **louise** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 7:30 pm

Mexicola wrote:Yeah, the 'iPad-at-gig' thing. When did that become ok? Did I miss a meeting or something??

Seriously...

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Wed Oct 22, 2014 8:37 pm

Aye, if anyone needs to reach me.. message me for my email or phone... but I think most people have that anyway

d e n · Post by **d e n** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 3:52 am

fujee wrote:Yeah there definitely is a productive way of using it which is great and obviously its incredibly useful for musicians, promoters, activists, social organisation and such.. but I guess I just feel it brings out the worst in people..and the whole idea we must upload and document everything all the time.. that everything is the 'moment' is so spurious. A lot of the people I have as 'friends' piss me off as well, some of their behavior and items they post are irritating to say the least, a lot of them are people I just have no interest in but it is easier not to delete them for managing cordial social relations.

I just think it degrades the experience of life in some ways.. but that isn't to say I think people can use it for good causes. I believe I am better off without it. I've deactivated it as opposed to deleting it because I may need to use it for organising something but I doubt I will need to.

yes, it does tend to bring out the worst in people

think about the 'troll' ... which can be defined as using the internet as a way to be abusive without consequence

its not a coincidence that youtube comments are often full of arbitrary hate and just nasty energy in general

Cupz · Post by **Cupz** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 11:44 am

I only use the internet for a couple of things now:

Twoism.org
APIs, tutorials, books
4 emails a week
4 chat contacts
Watch a couple of movies

Going great

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:54 pm

Fantastic article about cultural malaise in the Quietus..

http://thequietus.com/articles/15092-bl ... ary-review

jcnporter · Post by **jcnporter** » Sun Oct 26, 2014 9:03 pm

fujee wrote:Fantastic article about cultural malaise in the Quietus..

http://thequietus.com/articles/15092-bl ... ary-review

That was superb. I've said before that I reckon the late 80s to mid 90s were, in my opinion, one of the best periods in music. Probably looking at it with rose-tinted spectacles, right enough, but hip-hop, dance, indie, rock and so on all seemed to peak together and start-cross-referencing into one big glorious mix. Everyone I knew were indie and grunge kids, but they were also into hip-hop, going to raves. Britpop seemed to bring all that crashing to a halt in just a few years. Those bits about the death of modernity, the rise of looking backwards, so spot on.
Even other bands not really involved in that, such as the Manics (and I was a huge Manics fan) who traded on overt intelligence and politics, seemed to dumb themselves down in the face of it.
It was like your Dad took a look at your record collection and said "enough of that noise, depressing crap and bleep-bleep shite, here's proper music that you can play on an acoustic guitar, sing and makes you feel good - just like the 60s when I was a lad"

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Mon Oct 27, 2014 10:08 am

Yep, its depressingly spot on. Most people thought he was chatting shit when he said it, but Kevin Shields said last year in the Guardian that Britpop was manufactured and courted from the highest echelons of power, and he is totally right.

Britpop is strange because from the aritists perspective, namely Damon Albarn, it was probably convoluted into something he never envisaged. From what I can gather he saw it mostly as a general reactionary idea to the globalisation of American culture (not so much a calculated patriotic reaction to it) but of course it ended up embracing that entirely through a nauseous brand of nationalism, and the blame is squarely with the media and not so much Albarn. I still think his initial artistic intentions were good in some way, he seems contrite and introspective about much of the shit which has happened subsequently, but he let it sway and drift so far from those initial good intentions, that it created a monster which we are still reeling from today.

Damon was definitely was reaching for something subtle and nuanced at times which was pretty good, but like the article demonstrates, it missed more than it hit. I'd still maintain that stripped of the cultural associations of the time (I know the article is saying its very difficult to do this) Blur were a great band, 13, Think Tank and their self titled album are all pretty top notch and even their earlier work is commendable in some ways, mostly for Coxons great guitar work. But I guess when you look at from a more sobering perspective Britpop virtually halted the genuine counter culture movements of the time.. rave/free party movement, shoegaze, environmentalism etc..

The thing is, while this article is pretty spot on through the lens it is focusing it's argument on, could it be equally true that maybe the dire situation we find ourselves in now is more just to do with the total postmodernist cultural burnout?

Negamuse · Post by **Negamuse** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:39 pm

fujee wrote:But I guess when you look at from a more sobering perspective Britpop virtually halted the genuine counter culture movements of the time.. rave/free party movement, shoegaze, environmentalism etc..

The thing is, while this article is pretty spot on through the lens it is focusing it's argument on, could it be equally true that maybe the dire situation we find ourselves in now is more just to do with the total postmodernist cultural burnout?

See that first bit's where I disagree with the article, it's only true in the sense that it's true for mainstream rock music. And while Britpop will be what everyone remembers of the 90s, even the writer of the article accepts that the really authentic stuff was happening elsewhere. Now I was a couple of years late to rave at the head end of the 90s but it was still pretty authentic while I was into it. By the end of the 90s it had been noticed, commodified and appropriated along with everything else.

That was the 90s problem... authenticity. And it's a pretty important currency in music, but the 90s were a very culturally inauthentic time. Doesn't matter if you're talking about New Labour spin politics, middle-class debt-fuelled pseudo-affluence, the early 90s profound, inside-out E experience being replaced by cocaine-induced hollow swagger, or yeah, the mawkish competitive greaving at the loss of Princess Di in 97.

And I don't even know how it applies to where we are now, I just don't. A whole lot I could write about that but I think like a lot of people my age we've seen the world get better in some ways... maybe more comfortable underneath our feet with often little effort from ourselves and assumed that's how the world goes - now it seems to be backsliding. And the looming specters of inequality and environmental catastrophe remind us that we never really solved our problems just inauthentically patched over the worst cracks in the road. There's that word again.

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:38 pm

I think the article is suggestive that it is because of Britpop that we find ourselves in this cultural depression, but what I took from it after another read is that it was mostly a contributing factor to the seizing up of authenticity in this unoriginal redundancy we now have. I get the feeling the author has bitterness about it as a cultural moment because it was most prominent reification of how globalisation and late capitalism has stifled creativity and stunted any creative/cultural momentum. It also looks like it pretty much destroyed his profession for a time as well.

jcnporter · Post by **jcnporter** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 6:31 pm

fujee wrote:I think the article is suggestive that it is because of Britpop that we find ourselves in this cultural depression, but what I took from it after another read is that it was mostly a contributing factor to the seizing up of authenticity in this unoriginal redundancy we now have. I get the feeling the author has bitterness about it as a cultural moment because it was most prominent reification of how globalisation and late capitalism has stifled creativity and stunted any creative/cultural momentum. It also looks like it pretty much destroyed his profession for a time as well.

That's pretty much my take on it as well - that Britpop was more of an effect rather than a cause. It seems to me in retrospect that from the 70s through the 80s and 90s, there was pretty much a rise in commercialism and a consequent decline in alternative culture - in the 80s, the advertising/marketing/consumerism machine really kicked into gear and the time between a cultural movement starting and it being assimilated into the mainstream became less and less, until the late 90s, when the process became almost instantaneous. Now, it is beyond even that, the corporations are starting the cultural movements.
It's no coincidence that the moment that neoliberal capitalism started to appropriate wholesale alternative cultural movements was the moment neoliberalism also appropriated and stamped out the last radicalism from mainstream politics, New Labour was born and Tony Blair became PM.

A_Northern_Soul · Post by **A_Northern_Soul** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 7:02 pm

I remember reading that article at the time. Interesting, but I honestly think the whole Britpop thing gets a bad name. Sure there was a lot of dross, but being into it at the time (I was 14 in 1994) ended up leading me down some interesting musical paths I might otherwise have missed.

As for the good and bad points if social media, I'll admit I was more than a bit freaked out when Facebook recently suggested I might "know" someone I slept with twice in 2003. We have no connections in common, I don't have her email address anywhere, phone number no longer on my phone book, but there she is.....

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Mon Nov 03, 2014 5:50 pm

Seems pertinent. All good advice.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... ier-person

fujee · Post by **fujee** » Sun Nov 16, 2014 12:48 pm

Sorry to plug this thread again, but there is so much good related stuff out there.. great article by Lauren Laverne...

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... en-laverne

Mexicola · Post by **Mexicola** » Sun Nov 16, 2014 1:22 pm

Fugee that's an incredible article. Thanks for sharing.

A_Northern_Soul · Post by **A_Northern_Soul** » Sun Nov 16, 2014 6:19 pm

That is a great article, cheers.

Oh, Lauren....