A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

C

catalog

Well-known member
suspended said:
Thousands of words have been written, asking this question, but no satisfying answer has ever been found
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This is like everything to do with twitter culture, podcast people isn't it. There's nothing actually at the bottom of any of it apart from party gossip.
 
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sus

sus

Moderator
catalog said:
This is like everything to do with twitter culture, podcast people isn't it. There's nothing actually at the bottom of any of it apart from party gossip.
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It's like cryptocurrency. Network effects. Value built on memes. The home range of hyperstition. No grounding, only pure belief. Suspended reason. A cathedral in the sky. Roadrunner falls when roadrunner looks down. These are beautiful things.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
suspended said:
It's like cryptocurrency. Network effects. Value built on memes. The home range of hyperstition. No grounding, only pure belief. Suspended reason. A cathedral in the sky. Roadrunner falls when roadrunner looks down. These are beautiful things.
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spot-on summation. the question is: doesn't the shallowness, or hollowness, of it all eventually get a little tiring and depressing? isn't there the eventual creep of emptiness, the wear of an entertaining shell game for people privileged enough to be able to indulge without worrying about real life? pure belief and suspended reason have led some dreamers to come up with amazing discoveries that change the world, but most of it, as catalog says, amounts to party gossip (which is fine for what is, but hardly something to base one's life around).

there's no there there.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Leo said:
the question is: doesn't the shallowness, or hollowness, of it all eventually get a little tiring and depressing? isn't there the eventual creep of emptiness, the wear of an entertaining shell game for people privileged enough to be able to indulge without worrying about real life? pure belief and suspended reason have led some dreamers to come up with amazing discoveries that change the world, but most of it, as catalog says, amounts to party gossip (which is fine for what is, but hardly something to base one's life around).

there's no there there.
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Yes.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
A lot of it, such as in crypto, runs on "community value" or "cultural value" or the like, things that are intangible and abstract but can nonetheless be substantial.

If the particular culture or community itself has nothing more than ephemeral gossip to base its value on, then the value is not only abstract but also insubstantial.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
This is what is transcendent about what @suspended is talking about, as well as much of what gives the good zeitgeist NFTs value, what gives the classic memes value, etc.

Value that doesn't always reliably translate to $, but does in some cases.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It will be a strange but inevitable day when the institutional monetization of memes is the status quo. In fact we are seeing it already with major brands using memes to advertise on Reddit.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Amusingly, -cellectual meme culture sounds a lot like Dissensus meme culture c. 2021

There was Angelicellectuals, Containcellectuals, Howlonggonecellectuals, Ioncellectuals, Taolincellectuals, Wetbraincellectuals, Cellectualcellectuals, and so on, most of which were eventually banned, or have just disappeared or ground to a stop. On these pages, fan culture and meme culture were combined in novel ways. Most of the posts were not jokes, but copies of images other people posted and things they said, collaged, combined, and remade to be weirder. A postmodern act, Sean Monahan writes in our current print issue #69, of “making content out of content”. There was clowning, shitposting (absurdist posting intended to confuse or provoke), hard-to-parse esoteric nonsense, quotations and found images, beautiful sentiment, deconstructions of identity, annoyance and frustration, all joined by a shared aesthetic of bold text and degraded images.
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sus

sus

Moderator
Clinamenic said:
A lot of it, such as in crypto, runs on "community value" or "cultural value" or the like, things that are intangible and abstract but can nonetheless be substantial.

If the particular culture or community itself has nothing more than ephemeral gossip to base its value on, then the value is not only abstract but also insubstantial.
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Also important to point out that we already have massive economies built on this second-order, ungrounded, "it's valuable if other people find it valuable" mentality. A lot of sexual fitness, runaway effects; the value of gold above and beyond its material qualities; the fashion world.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Side note: it's incredible how much digital decay happens even in the span of a year. The first page of this thread is already missing images, videos.
 
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