Dematerialisation.

[jenks]

which is not to turn a blind eye to the dangers which are real and ever-present. we have to acknowledge the dangers of madness (which is terrifying and destructive) and also to acknowledge the dangers of normalcy (less terrifying, but also destructive in an insidious and life denying way.)

i have had many mad friends, some dead, one in prison, others still with us, and i walk close enough to that line to have been diagnosed once, as a 20 year old, with whatever, so i feel an intense sense of discomfort and unease when people start waving the 'nutter' label around. i feel threatened by it. the threat being what rd laing termed 'the destruction of experience'

I hoped i wasn't doing that - I suppose if part of dematerialism is the loss of a physical self then being overwhelmed by the virtual is at some level inevitable and will lead to all manner of potentially new experiences and one of those will be the kind of psychological trauma my poor friend is going through. As Simon points out it's not new and in a different age it may well have been something else which would have been the trigger or it may be that something different and specific to the net is occuring here.

 

[firefinga]

Another main battle-ground of Dematerialisation is

the "war on cash" and the rise of "fintechs" and cyber-money. Again, not that cash-less payments are something new, however they are being implemented on a mass-basis (again only made possible via the smartphone) and "cash-less" societies are more and more being propagated as the alternative-less future. And the sales-pitch is: crime-hysteria and convenience.

 

[luka]

I hoped i wasn't doing that - I suppose if part of dematerialism is the loss of a physical self then being overwhelmed by the virtual is at some level inevitable and will lead to all manner of potentially new experiences and one of those will be the kind of psychological trauma my poor friend is going through. As Simon points out it's not new and in a different age it may well have been something else which would have been the trigger or it may be that something different and specific to the net is occuring here.

i don't think you were doing that either. but i just know from previous experience where it can lead if people aren't on their guard if you know what i mean. you get this ossification of what previously was fluid. even before madness was introduced you could see the ossifying tendency- it often takes the form of people hiding behind books and theory, it's a defensive instinct.

you'll know that analysts and therapists tend to insist on the 'i' so that the analysand takes ownership of what is being expressed and it's precisely to avoid this kind of distancing and armouring.

the theory and the books are fantastic and hugely helpful provided they are intergrated into the personal worldview and not held up as a shield to hold back/hide/protect.

 

[luka]

the "war on cash" and the rise of "fintechs" and cyber-money. Again, not that cash-less payments are something new, however they are being implemented on a mass-basis (again only made possible via the smartphone) and "cash-less" societies are more and more being propagated as the alternative-less future. And the sales-pitch is: crime-hysteria and convenience.

ive talked about this a fair bit and how much it scares me. plays into the burroughs 'societies of control' thing https://genius.com/2063099

 

[luka]

this is a process i want you all to be aware of and track throughout this discussion. the melting and the hardening. the exposing and the armouring. the flowing and the silting up and think about how it maps onto the process we are attempting to delineate together.

 

[luka]

why intellectualising becomes a problem is not becasue the intellect is not useful and exiciting and fun it is because there is a tendency for it to situate itself above that is, the scientist leering over the vivisected frog, or looking through the microscope with cold abstracted eye. this is the danger and the sin.

we are all caught up in, subject to and a part of, the same universal forces which
flow through and create everything. the game is to feel from within and thereby know what
is happening by tracking those forces which move through your own body-mind-soul-spirit etc.

that's what we are learning to do here.

 

[luka]

and i'm not suggesting that this shying away from contact, this hardening, this clamming up and pushing away is bad, just that it is part of the rhythm of it, the rhythm of coming closer.

we are that small mammal, twitching with fear, quick heart in the breast, caution and alertness, the fine sense for danger, are a key part of our animal inheritance.

so we get closer, and we back away, we get closer, and we back away. i don't condemn it, i'm not suggesting i'm above and immune to the same process and instincts, i just ask you to be aware of it as we enact it.

 

[firefinga]

EDM is the embodiment of "Dematerialisation"

It's somewhat interesting that EDM is almost solely "dematerialised" music, right? There is no CDs or vinly coming from that corner. Everything seems to be centred around youtube vids. But then, I could be totally wrong since I am not really following the Tiestos and Steve Aokis much.

 

[john eden]

I was in HMV on Friday and the only young people buying music seemed to be metal heads - some of them getting several versions of the same new release in different formats.

I don't remember seeing any dance vinyl at all but there was loads of old shite on LP from the 80s. 20 years ago the reverse would have been true.

 

[luka]

what does it all mean john?

 

[version]

and i'm not suggesting that this shying away from contact, this hardening, this clamming up and pushing away is bad, just that it is part of the rhythm of it, the rhythm of coming closer.

we are that small mammal, twitching with fear, quick heart in the breast, caution and alertness, the fine sense for danger, are a key part of our animal inheritance.

so we get closer, and we back away, we get closer, and we back away. i don't condemn it, i'm not suggesting i'm above and immune to the same process and instincts, i just ask you to be aware of it as we enact it.

“To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.”

 

[blissblogger]

Technology promises a dream and delivers a nightmare. McLuhan had it right when he said "... when the full consequences of each new technology have been manifested in new psychic and social forms, then the anti-Utopias appear".

Lovecraft's thing about the terror of scientific progress feels quite apt too:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. “

And then you have Virilio, with his "each new technology is also the invention of a new accident" [that's not a word for word quote]

so the invention of the car, is the invention of the car crash - the invention of the plane is the invention of the plane crash

the invention of the computer / internet is the invention of hard drive crashes, computer viruses etc

perhaps each new technology holds out the invention of a new human pathology - or an inflection of an existing one - a new forum for human self-immiseration

i guess that's what Ballard was looking into with books like Crash, specifically with eroticism

 

[blissblogger]

the topic of mental illness is of great personal interest - not just because of my first girlfriend who went absolutely bonkers in the most alarming way, but there's madness in my family - and i feel like it's in me as a potential. perhaps i have found ways to channel these tendencies in a productive way

certainly some of my own uses of information technology are neurotic and unhealthy

but what i was really getting at, or getting towards is this:

for thousands and thousands of years, the human sensorium / perceptions / neurology /consciousness has been oriented towards immediate surroundings

what was in front of you was all there was

there weren't media, there weren't recordings

if you wanted to hear music, you had to be in the physical presence of musicians

history and collective memory was oral (well, for a tiny elite, there were books, scrolls, whatever)

then, in a very short stretch of history, we get
- mass literacy / books, libraries
- the postal system
(and then really speeding up, within the last 120 years or so)
all the tele's - telegraph, telephone, television
the internet
mobile phones
mass self-broadcasting (YouTube, social media
(not forgetting surveillance and info-tracking of the individual citizen to inconceivable degrees)

so space and distance is abolished (informationally at any rate... although also there's the rise of cheap long-distance flight), and past / present totally confused with the atemporality of instant-access archiving systems

but we still have the sensorium / perceptual apparatus etc that is oriented to millennia of life organised around presence and the materially solid: face-to-face contact, touching and handling things... circadian rhythms...

it seems this exponential acceleration and the switch to informationalized ways of doing everything ought to be placing intolerable pressures on the nervous system, psyche etc

it is surprising how well people are coping with it, in some ways. you see OAPs nimbly operating their phones. (i am old enough to remember when decimalisation was considered by some a trauma that old folks used to shillings and half-a-crowns wouldn't be able to adapt to).

but where it ties into let's say the non-sane or at least non-rational is that the routine stuff of our lives consists of things that really not long ago would have been considered magic

 

[Corpsey]

I wonder if now the internet plays the role that fame or any sort of achievement recognised by other ppl once played insofar as an "I was here" marker (therefore an "I am still here").

What I mean is we know that if we died today our social media feeds and forum posts would survive us, in public, for an indeterminate period of time.

We feed ourselves (or parts of it) into the immaterial zone in order to escape our mortality. (And all our other flaws.)

 

[Corpsey]

But on some level of course we know it's madness and it's making us miserable. Reconnecting with the material is good for your brain.

Something I've experienced through acid. I expected to commune with some transphysical realm but actually it made me conscious of how the material is everything, for better or worse.

 

[version]

But on some level of course we know it's madness and it's making us miserable. Reconnecting with the material is good for your brain.

Something I've experienced through acid. I expected to commune with some transphysical realm but actually it made me conscious of how the material is everything, for better or worse.

I get a sense of glazing over when online for an extended period, it can feel almost like sleep deprivation. Everything becomes kind of blunted, lethargic and unconscious. The material world feels much more powerful, fifteen minutes of fresh air kind of blasts it all away and 'wakes me up', even just sticking your head out the window into a breeze feels much more substantial than anything that happens online.

 

[baboon2004]

I had exactly that experience today - half an hour outside in the final glorious sunshine of the year, the rest spent working behind a screen. No question which was the realest portion of the day. Screens intensify the visceral sense of importance in ultimately ephemeral and unimportant things, as does work culture, so the combination of the two is appalling.

 

[baboon2004]

I wonder if now the internet plays the role that fame or any sort of achievement recognised by other ppl once played insofar as an "I was here" marker (therefore an "I am still here").

What I mean is we know that if we died today our social media feeds and forum posts would survive us, in public, for an indeterminate period of time.

We feed ourselves (or parts of it) into the immaterial zone in order to escape our mortality. (And all our other flaws.)

Yet the final insult is that what remains behind in the public realm is a false self - one of my friends died in a traumatic way during the Facebook era, and the digital detritus and its untruthfulness was uncanny in the sickest way*.

Leaving behind a diary where you say what you really meant and what you really felt, i.e. you, is a much better idea (and Dissensus posts, for example, might be a decent halfway house in this regard).

(*also, on a more pragmatic level, the digital is only eternally accessible insofar as whoever is deemed to own the information says it is)

 

[firefinga]

I wonder if now the internet plays the role that fame or any sort of achievement recognised by other ppl once played insofar as an "I was here" marker (therefore an "I am still here").

What I mean is we know that if we died today our social media feeds and forum posts would survive us, in public, for an indeterminate period of time.

We feed ourselves (or parts of it) into the immaterial zone in order to escape our mortality. (And all our other flaws.)

No, socialmedia posts diminish almost at the moment they get posted, it's like immediate oblivion. The Library of Congress stopped their project to preserve all tweets sometime ago due to the sheer amount (I think). Servers get switched off on a regular basis, companies getting bought and stuff getting deleted all the time. I'v been on forums since the mid2000s and most of them are gone buy now without a trace. Now, Google said to switch off Google+

That sentence "The Internet doesn't forget" is humbug. "Older" parts of the net are being deleted and weeded out continuously.

 

[luka]

my experience is different and more nuanced, and, i'd gently suggest, that yours is too.
i often use the internet badly and sometimes i use it well. if you can make a connection it is very good and very rewarding just as if you make a connection in real life it is very good and very rewarding.

i work outside, watch the river rise and fall with the tides, watch the clouds drifting and the light changing and the sun moving west and i talk to strangers and they tell me about their lives, about what is preoccupying them, whether good or bad, and i write a poem for them and sometimes they laugh and sometimes they are moved to tears and of course all that kind of carry on sounds like it is the complete opposite of online life.

but it's not

it's just the act of making a human connection. and if you make that connection, regardless of whether it is done there or here, it's very powerful and it's very productive. and the more you open yourself up to that, the more rewarding it becomes. the less you give of yourself the less real you are to other people, 2 dimensional, flickering like a weak television signal, in and out of focus.