'The Future' Weaponized For Intergenerational Warfare.

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
the music nerd elders talked down to or ignored us when were in our 20s-30s, why should we make it any easier on the young 'uns now that we've risen up the ladder and have our boot on their neck?

OK boomer
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I’m very pro-future. I love it.

I went to this planetarium once and it was space projected all over the walls and you were being launched through all these stars and galaxies and it had all these things where all these machines were being disassembled and all this. Amazing. I told the girl I was with (who was baffled by my taste in music) “this looks like what the music I like sounds like”.

A couple of years ago I was really sad listening to jungle thinking “fuck, the future happened before I was born”. Why I love the music of the last couple of years so much is that it’s the first proper future in decades. Not just a little tinkering with ing frameworks we already have, but full on alien music.

I feel sorry for dance music fans; you have a music who’s whole lexicon is based on the future and yet it’s been relegated to being the past. Dance music hasn’t had a new idea in maybe 20 years.

Again this seems to be a question of how the future imaginary works for someone. I'm not sad when listening to jungle because it was the future it forecasted backwards from the 70s into today - well, maybe not so much the more jazzy stuff I'm talking about the ruffer polyrhythmic clattering breaks business. Similar thing with acid.

But i can imagine that if what attracted me to jungle was its utopian promise like progressive trance or something then i can very much imagine feeling melancholic and sad. The thing with the 'future' is not just dance music, the whole concept is stuck in the past. noone is actually confused by the concept of futurism or futurist music.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you have to bring something to the table of future. it is quite selfish in that regard it doesn't hold out a helping hand. you take its hand and it sucks you in. but it in my experience doesn't work the other way. If my idea of future was ethereal space I wouldn't be listening to nasty techno in 2019. sci-fi as a genre of literature is quite boring. it's not deep enough to be proper novels but it's not pulp enough to be crime/gangster/skinhead fiction. it's stuck in that sort of aching middle. what makes Ursula Le Guin so great in that regard is how she wrote her books like novels, very heavy on the dialogue and quite terrestrial. But you read Isaac Asimov and he's a terrible writer in terms of structure. he tries to tell basic cold war stories by crambing as many cool robotic devices and imperial galaxies into them. not for me in 2019 (nothing to do with the politics, just crap writing and crap literature.)
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
usually what I mean by future is mad headfuck shit. but future just sounds like so mmuch more of an appealing proposition than headfuck. But it's bragadosio, and pimping, really.
 

version

Well-known member
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when Leo ruled on the earth, and He had had great cities. Remains of Leo, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. Leo died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Him when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. He had, indeed, come himself from the stars, and brought His images with Him.
 

version

Well-known member
Whenever I've heard something and thought 'fuck me, this sounds like the future' it's just been a way of saying it sounds different and exciting. I don't actually think that's how things will sound in ten, twenty years time, more that it sounds as though it's broken through from a different timeline, somewhere inaccessible, perhaps running in parallel. It's an intrusion I didn't anticipate rather than a prophecy.
 

version

Well-known member
The younger generations can seem as stuck in the retromania/nostalgia trap as anyone, but I guess shit like "OK, Boomer" is actually a decent example of 'weaponising the future for intergenerational warfare' as it's directly attacking the boomers and distributed via memes and hashtags through stuff like TikTok.

A lot of people left Facebook once their parents started using it.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
The younger generations can seem as stuck in the retromania/nostalgia trap as anyone, but I guess shit like "OK, Boomer" is actually a decent example of 'weaponising the future for intergenerational warfare' as it's directly attacking the boomers and distributed via memes and hashtags through stuff like TikTok.

A lot of people left Facebook once their parents started using it.

To me, "OK,Boomer" is an expression of helplessness and weakness. It'a a little bit of scorn, which will "trigger" a lot of people on social media, but in reality, it apparently STILL is the boomers who are calling the shots. For 25 years now, I might add (taken into account Clinton was the first "boomer" president, which exactly was quite a topic at the time.
 

luka

Well-known member
Whenever I've heard something and thought 'fuck me, this sounds like the future' it's just been a way of saying it sounds different and exciting. I don't actually think that's how things will sound in ten, twenty years time, more that it sounds as though it's broken through from a different timeline, somewhere inaccessible, perhaps running in parallel. It's an intrusion I didn't anticipate rather than a prophecy.

Pretty much. It's evolution as a mad lurch into the unexpected not an orderly progression of development. It's what you didn't see coming.
 

luka

Well-known member
Is it true that we can't build the compound until we have worked out how to square Bartys neoliberal market fundamentalism with thirds Marxist critique?

What do you think?
 

luka

Well-known member
Critique, as the only thing universities teach, is something I am violently opposed to. It's always a way to undo and undermine. It's resntiment as intellectual practice. It's vicious and mean and spiteful. It refuses to recognise what's great and beautiful and strong.

But the other side of that is totalitarianism.
 

Leo

Well-known member
weirdly, some 90s Detroit techno still feels futuristic to me. sleek, a night drive in a flying car.

maybe it's because after growing up a rock/punk/indie guy, that was my first exposure to this whole other world of electronic music. hard to express now how alien techno sounded in the early 90s, there were no predecessors. taking bits of minimalism and dance music, soulful and emotional while at the same time strangely empty and anonymous. heartfelt yet cloned, made in a sterile lab.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think what's dated about it is the romanticism. It can really tug at the heartstrings unbearable poignancy alongside the coldness and alienation
 

Leo

Well-known member
that dated romanticism is a key element, foregrounding the nostalgia for what we imagined would have been a brighter, more hopeful future instead of what we have today.

ironically, overall global standards of living are higher today than they have ever been. modern day dread, coldness and alienation are largely felt in the first world, where we compare things to the past and feel that our dreams have been vanquished. in many parts of the world, it's the best of times in relation to life expectancy, healthcare, diet, economic opportunity/growth, etc. yes, of course many parts of the world are in turmoil, but on whole things have improved.
 
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