Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Maybe this too?

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time

The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time
The rhythms of American life changed in the 2010s. How everything from TV to Trump to Instagram messed with your head just enough that time feels like it melted.

This long and wearying decade is coming to a close, though, even if there’s no sense of an ending. People are always saying stuff like: Time has melted; my brain has melted; Donald Trump has melted my brain; I can’t remember if that was two weeks ago or two months ago or two years ago; what a year this week has been. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again. Your Facebook feed won’t stop showing you a post from four days ago, about someone you haven’t seen in three years. The Office, six years after it ended, might be the most popular show in the United States. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again. One high schooler dances to a Mariah Carey song from 2009 (“Why you so obsessed with me?”) in a video that loops in 15-second increments on TikTok; then other teens do it; then a high school dance team dances that dance to this Mariah Carey song as a gym full of teens sings along, in a video that loops in 15-second increments on TikTok. Donald Trump tells the story of 2016 again. What was here yesterday no longer is.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
unfleshing / "smooth and impervious"

c.f. the Instagram face article

Saw this essay " Unfleshing" at Real Life webjournal. It's by Nikki Shaner-Bradford and is part of an irregular column series dedicated to identifying "desires, moods, pathologies, and identifications that rarely had names before digital media."

https://reallifemag.com/new-feelings-unfleshing/

The subject is an aesthetic of smoothness in beauty / skin-care / cosmetics. The subtitle: "the desire to become as smooth and impervious as my phone".

Shaner-Bradford writes of her fantasy-drive to create, via skin-care regimens, a perfect casing for her face and body: "the texture of silicon, or glass, or freshly poured resin. The kind of material you’re compelled to touch in a museum.... I use a chemical exfoliating product called Biologique Recherche P50 [that] contains phenol, a controversial ingredient that’s also found in paint remover. What I’ve come to understand about P50, through skincare forums that worship the toner as a miracle elixir, is that it’s for people who dream, like me, of exfoliating until they become something better than human..... I spend hours each day on a laptop that seems much smarter and more skilled than I am, and whose body is smoother and more symmetrical than mine..."

Other morsels:

"The purpose of such advertising is to show what a body could be if it didn’t have to be a body...."

"The K-beauty trend of “glass skin” rhetorically invokes a standard set by device aesthetics, and blinding highlights offer the illusion of plasticity..."

"I fall in love with the sound of a refreshing feed, admire the clean text of an aggregated news site, make faces into filters until I forget what I look like in the mirror. A popular Instagram filter named Kira-Kira adds glittering sparkles to selfie highlights, filling the timeline with faces that shine like chrome. Another called TURFU comes close to my ex machina aspirations; a grid overlay with a holographic sheen suggests something animatronic, a cyborg. The bounds of beauty no longer limited to genetics or flesh."
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
It's a good magazine, they regularly have interesting pieces exploring all this phenomenology of digital life, 'new 21st Century emotions and affects' type territory. One of the people involved, Rob Horning, has been covering this beat for a long while, mostly at the New Inquiry.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
this whole thing with 'glow up' and make-up tutorials online and celebrity 'extreme make-up' artists is quite fascinating, seems to relate to the becoming-digital thing

here's another Real Life piece about "glow aesthetics" by Dalia Barghouty


https://reallifemag.com/glow-aesthetics/


"In the cosmetics aisle in the drugstore, the influence of social media and the cameras we carry with us everywhere is evident. Wet-n-Wild’s display boasts a comparison of a woman’s face with and without their product, asserting that their highlighters are not only good, but specifically good for being captured by your phone....

"Our image on a screen is increasingly how we “really” look to other people, leading to new ways to augment our self-presentation. Social media feeds teem with neon, prismatic shimmers, chrome, filters, and glow. Snapchat and TikTok effects sparkle and glimmer....

"some of these augmentative effects are created with algorithms, filters, and other forms of digital postproduction. But some have long been created on the surface of the skin rather than the image, with makeup highlighters to accentuate and brighten the face and body. Along with contouring, highlighting can create the perception of depth or angles on the face, leaving every area of the skin it touches luminous and glowing in a way that seems to pop in image feeds, capturing attention with an eye-catching gleam as users scroll through. Unlike strictly digital effects, these analog efforts to produce glow foreground the paradoxes inherent in being equally present in images, feeds, and physical spaces simultaneously. They evoke not an edit of reality but something that is at once a process of transformation and its realization."

"... There has been a vogue recently for ostentatious, almost unwearable displays of makeup glow across the range of social media users... As opposed to more additive forms of makeup meant to masquerade or completely transform, highlighter in its translucent sheen scintillates across the face and body, in and out of focus, allowing us to luxuriate in the sheer self for an instant. Glow can appear to happen to us spontaneously, even when we deliberately pursue it, allowing augmentation also to play out as a discovery. This light is captured via the flash of a phone camera and then shared on social media, resulting in a “more real” self-presentation...."
 
This is a very good thread, it articulates a lot of my feelings thank you. But I don’t like the title.

I read padraig’s comment about ‘club’ music on the sideways not forwards thread

like there's no there there.

And I thought “there’s no here here either”, and I wanted to take it away from music. So I was going to do another thread, I’d thought it out on my walk into work, the thread was going to be called ‘Here and Now’ and it was going to start with me asking if you’ve felt alive since 2010 and talking about living in London for the last 7 years but not actually being here. The most basic way to explain it is things Citymapper usurping my spatial navigation. And popping in and out of different holes in a metropolis without feeling you’ve moved, and rootlessness.

I was going to talk about mediated time, the idea that the more time we spend in our screens and in the songs, and our series, and timelines of social media,with less slowness, less boredom, the more we destabilise the ‘inner clock’, and gradually we undermine our trust in our inner clock, in the history of ourselves. It also ceases to sync with the inner clocks of others.

And news events never fully settle, they’re continually retold and recontextualised, their significance goes up and down in an epistemological stock market. Collective beliefs are produced but never fully accepted.

We outsource memory, maybe because we don’t trust our own recording and timekeeping, to the internet. And we float the moments of our lives in the stock market of social media too, trade them for social capital, assess their value, build a portfolio, use insights to inform future decisions. And we consume our own timelines, rearrange and we rewrite, maybe something from your past that you thought was cool could be dragged up and cancelled.

I was going to talk about Mcluhan’s ideas of media as extensions of mine, and how there’s always a numbing that happens along with the extension. I was going to mention conceptronica as a failed attempt to enliven the senses, to imbue a now, somewhere... by filling in the weight and mood and texture of the old time and space before the internet flattened and numbed us. Onehotrix’s myriad show was a fully immersive audio visual assault, with even smells. Concept and themed events are attempts to do the same… we are here!!! This is happening!!! Can you feel it!!!

It was going to be really pretentious and exciting, it was going to help me articulate my feelings to people, maybe a woman I fancy, maybe several, speaking of popping in and out of different holes in a metropolis. You could have all helped me to sound smart, and I could make her feel really present, really connected, really there, she’d forget about her phone.
Because you didn't really "do" anything, didn't "go" anywhere. All that time and information gathering or whatever just falls into a void.

Which is why I've occasionally found myself blogging, sometimes almost word for word, the same blog entry on one of my nonsense blogs like Hardly Baked that I did four or five years earlier, because it was similarly impulse-blogged in response to some video I'd stumbled on at YouTube. I stumble on it again and the same mental responses, amusement/bemusement are triggered. Thanks to the amnesiac effect of internet life I've completely forgotten that I blogged it before.

Perhaps that's why I'm getting a horrid feeling of deja vu - creeping suspicion that I have typed in thoughts similar to these at Dissensus before, on some earlier thread…

I get this feeling too, but I don’t wonder if they were my thoughts, more if they were someone else’s.

‘Here and now’ would have been a great thread, even better than this one.
 

luka

Well-known member
Oh I didn't see that. You know a lot of people think the virus is a cover for the digitalisation of cash right?
 

catalog

Well-known member
I keep hearing (in my head) more and more about this: cash is like the last vestige of personal sovereignty so it's gotta go. If it can't be audited centrally by a computer we can't have it lads sorry
 

luka

Well-known member
I keep hearing (in my head) more and more about this: cash is like the last vestige of personal sovereignty so it's gotta go. If it can't be audited centrally by a computer we can't have it lads sorry

That's absolutely the state of play. It will go. I don't have a doubt in my mind.
 

version

Well-known member
I said cashless transactions were one of the four horsmen a while back, but I can't remember what the other three were.
 
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