Ok, so first let’s watch an awesome browser music video thing which replicates early internet. Very clever, lots of pop ups appear as part of the video and it brings back a load of tropes from the old days.
You need to disable your adblock to allow the pop ups.
So go watch it. Then come back, and I’ll give you something else to listen to while I ramble on a bit..
music video about early internet
That was fun, wasn’t it?
Ok so here is another kind of retro futuristic thing. Let me ramble on about predictable nostalgia.
I’ve actually seen this come up quite a lot about how the internet is dead now. It is weird being middle aged and having grown up with the internet, and things in general, like it’s so normal when you are 45 to go ‘things aren’t what they used to be’
But now everything I read including by young people seems to agree with me that everything is worse. Of course I’m not going to go into politics because there are plenty of people who know more than me to go read, but like they still make ‘The Simpsons and South Park, and even those were best in the 90s, and they kind of revive them, but it’s all zombie stuff.
I remember the phrase ‘Zombie Capitalism’ was from around the Occupy movement, which itself is more than 10 years old. Seems to go in a spiral. When I was a kid in the 90s we protested against globalisation, then in the 00s there were the American wars in the Middle East, then there was the crash, by which time I was abroad, but by then it was all AntiCap again. And now we are back at wars. But it seems worse
Anyway, Hawk Tuah Girl, what about that eh?
I do actually have a more optimistic take on the future than you would imagine.
I do believe that things have been going in a spiral, but I also believe that this is going to cause a big shift. Like the 90s was kind of the beginning of something, maybe that’s just me of course, this is just a way of looking at things, let’s put it in 40 year cycles.
So you have the 1950s to 1980s where youth culture appears and develops into all these different directions, and you know, we have all seen how important everything was, and it was. All of this post modernism and individualism for better and for worse wasn’t really a thing until the 1950s unless you were one of the elite.
It was all super new in the 50s and everyone has heard that stupid story where some granny heard Rock Around the Clock and just spontaneously started Rock n Roll dancing. What a lerd of shite.
I saw a really good YouTube the other day about Back to the Future and how that is actually quite deep how despite it being such a light breezy set of films, there is actually this darkness at it’s core how they are all doomed to repeat the same patterns through the generations, and BttF 3, is not in fact rubbish, it demonstrates them breaking the cycle of obsession with the past.
I love over analysis.
I actually think that there is a longer one but I spent 5 minutes looking and got bored.
But anyway. the new cycle started in the 90s, Global Capitalism, blah blah blah, likewise it all seemed new, lots of new countries, new drugs, all of these new genres of music. Mad to think now that electronic music and hiphop were still ‘Anyone could do that’
Remember when Rap first got big and everyone did a rap song, not just pop stars, like everyone popular in light entertainment tried to have a rap song
And of course, everything was fueled by The Internet.
I should probably elaborate this more but to be honest I never read anything this long so I am just going to brush over all of that. All of this stuff like hyper individualism, atomisation, hauntology, there has been so much written about it, I am just assuming that people kind of know what I mean. As well as the hyperreal aesthetic and so on.
The point being that we are now at the end of another cycle, and that is why everything feels so weird over the last few years.
Quick anecdotal example for me which I know is very common because I have read proper writers say the same thing. It is very hard to enjoy social media now, Facebook actually feels like a very small loop where you see the same memes and so on appear again and again, Instagram which I admit I never got, is kind of the same, only with hot women. I did not follow any hot women except a couple of singers, but half of what I see is these hot Americans who I would have nothing to do with, Twitter is quite frankly rubbish…..all of this stuff is just repetitive, and while the news is ‘crazy’ it is so ‘crazy’ that it’s just boring.
An interesting thing that I heard about the other day, it’s something that people know about or intuit anyway is ‘Second Screening’
Like most people watch films and shows and so on playing with their phone or iPad or whatever, everyone knows this and probably does it. What I didn’t know was that they actually design TV shows to be second screen, and that is why so many films are rubbish. They are designed to be put on in the background while you play on your phone on the sofa. Apparently some stuff is actually flagged for being too interesting, if something is too exciting you might look up and decide to change the channel, it has to be a nice low hum in the background.
Mental
So yes, but let’s move past ‘Everything is Rubbish’ (after 2000 fucking words or whatever you terrible writer) this cycle is coming to an end, you can see the old stuff dying, and new stuff emerging. I’m the right age to have teenagers, although I don’t, so I do know and know of some young teenagers from my friends age, and it makes me quite optimistic because although they are ‘Digital Natives’ (yuk!) their parents are young enough to have a grasp on the internet, so they have been coached and looked after to some degree, I think the young people now grew up with parents who didn’t understand the internet and were kind of experimented on.
You can already see new kinds of films and new kinds of videos and so on. Weirdly because of how the internet works, pop songs have to be pretty much a hook and should not last over 2 minutes, which is what punk rockers were all about. Think about it.
Another cause for optimism is that you can see young people who are super talented at things just because they have access to so much information. I am super jealous because I grew up always dreaming of having a computer and synths and so on to make music on. I was quite lucky because my dad loved computers and could always get us something, but it’s just so cheap and easy now.
And needles to say, I’m 45 and a hermit, so I just don’t know what is actually going on, I bet there are some arty kids in Beijing or Milan or whatever who have made this totally new kind of art which my 13 year old niece is into. Or some new computer game that they are inventing in Tokyo or San Francisco etc, like it’s rubbish now, but in 2035 everyone will be on it and everything now will look rubbish because the new thing changed it all.
And that is the reason for the dislocation that we feel now. Everything feels out of date, but they keep doing it, which means something new is on the way.
Actually that isn’t that long, it felt longer typing it out. I may come back to the ideas properly at a later date
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