mvuent

Void Dweller
There are battles which have already been fought and won. There is a conversation with a history, a series of moves, we have got to a particular point collectively. We have a past. Certain people have been laughed out of town, certain ideas have been laughed out of town.

this place has been around for a while. there are threads with hundreds or thousands of pages that i've never read. what brutal, traumatic message board wars did latecomers miss out on? what were the high and low points? what’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened on here?
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
josef k dramatically returning by posting epic poetry declaring his enemies to be cowards, accompanied by early 2000s nu metal vids, has to be the weirdest thing i've been around for.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
i found out a while ago that on I Love Music there was a feud occasionally referred to as "the paris wars." i guess the ilm people felt strongly that blissblogger and other critics weren't giving paris hilton's album its due respects. and obviously they were right because we all know what a cultural touchstone that ended up being.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
but yeah obviously I don't have anything against them or anyone else. just thought that argument was funny in hindsight.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
they have like five threads dedicated to complaining about / blatantly misunderstanding his writing
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
It actually used to be really entertaining and interesting, ILM. It had some seriously smart people, some real characters, weirdos. Lots of flare ups, really acrimonious fights that went on for pages and pages and days and days.

It did go the poptimist path though, that became the dominant value-set, although a few hold outs for undergroundism or whatever would still be in the mix. But you know, poptimism was a good adversary to have - in terms of putting over strongly a completely different view of the present (i.e. the 2000s) than the one I would adhere to. You could get nihilatory sparks off sparring with it.

You also had some people who appeared in both message boards, here and at ILM. Tim Finney was quite active here for a while but his enduring home was ILM and he still pops up there every so often i think. I posted a little bit on ILM now and then but felt a bit self-conscious there.

Way more than here, they seemed to be obsessed with music journalism and magazines (e.g. the endless, still going, thousand-page long by now thread Pitchfork Is Dumb). It could get very meta and inside-baseball. Which is fairly interesting if you're a music journalist but for most normal people, not so much.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Other big things were the original Padraig/hundredmillionlifetimes

Kpunk vs the world (niceness is evil etc)

Everyone ganging up on poor old Barty and Luka

I don't look back fondly on any of these things

Vimothy and Craner used to work together as a neo conservative hit squad back when the politics threads were battlegrounds and not the cosy swapping of memes and NYT articles they are today.
 
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luka

Well-known member
We had one great disaster when we got swamped by untermenschen from the sinking dubstep forum.
 

luka

Well-known member
At the start there was a big divide between kpunks theory crowd and the rest of us who couldn't understand a word they were saying. Cold rationalists vs dope smoking dads.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
We had one great disaster when we got swamped by untermenschen from the sinking dubstep forum.

That's when I snuck in.

A callow youth.

At the time I thought dissensus was the most pretentious forum I'd ever encountered.

And I was scared of luka, nothing has changed.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I read back over the "What is Deleuze?" thread - yes, all of it - the other day. Large chunks are Joe/Nomadology galloping up and down on their respective hobbyhorses (sinister power-blocs taking over the cultural sector / the merits of corporate effective altruism versus so-called revolutionary politics) while I issue numbered bullet-point explanations of why I think Badiou is worth reading, and not actually a boring authoritarian who insists that only his opinion is valid, man. Eventually the topic gets back onto Deleuze and how to read One Thousand Plateaus as a trip manual, which is probably much more the conversation Dissensus as a whole was interested in having.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Was it that thread that birthed the short-lived and extremely Dissensus-specific "libidinal goo for Badiou" meme?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I think I missed that, sadly.

Badiou's moment has very much passed, along with Zizek's, which will probably be a relief to most people. I know that luka considered the influence of capital-P "Philosophy" on k-punk to be baneful. "Theory" can be an imaginative, investigative, creative activity; "Philosophy" has dogmatic implications, a passion for rectitude, a stick up its arse. But k-punk without a certain unwavering, intimidatory sternness wouldn't have been k-punk.
 
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luka

Well-known member
At the time, yes, now less so. I was saying to Corpsey earlier today that

What are the things that make us hostile, defensive, snarling, insecure
The things we feel threatened by and pretend our inability to engage adequately is a failing of the material and not a hang up of our own
There's a lot at stake there, hence the violence of the reaction
I was the same for many many years with anything that smacked of the academic because of my ambivilence around not receiving an education
There's a sore spot there
 

luka

Well-known member
I didn't have the ability at that time, I didn't have the reading stamina, the focus, the motivation, the attention levels, the discipline, the academic background to engage with that stuff. I had a lot of the ideas in my own way and language which is why mark used to insist I was a Deleuzeian. Having read a little of that stuff now I know what he meant.
 

luka

Well-known member
In my atavistic world world I tend to see splits like these as very significant, what should be a single intergrated system breaks into two inadequate pieces and communication between them becomes impossible. It's a lost opportunity. A failure. Not good.
 
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