Decline

sus

sus

Moderator
luka said:
You shouldn't judge the world by YouTube comments of course but it's notable how fixated they are on nostalgia and regret and the sense that things will never be good again. There's no hope. I mean, YouTube is a nostalgia machine, so it's weighted in that sense of course, and I've built that into my equations.
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The alternative hypothesis is that humans are nostalgic by nature, always have been. For instance, basically every society we view as a Golden Age—Renaissance Florence, Socratic Athens—itself believed that the golden age had come *just before* them, that they were a hundred years too later or whatever, that all the good stuff was past.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
woops said:
do you mean yourself though or do you mean the mafia
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OK you got me

I feel bad for taking this thread sincerely but it's serious guys! This isn't a joke! It's not funny! Nostalgia is BAD BAD BAD. It needs to be stamped out everywhere it pops up. The only way through is forward!

I only hope young me is around to spank old me in 20 years
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
This is obviously something that is always around k-punk was defined by his sense that the future has been stolen it just seems to have seeped out into the wider culture in a massive way aided by as I say 2008 Brexit trump virus and other smaller bumps and scrapes
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
We have solved it I'm not being cynical. It's just holding onto it which proves tricky.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
shiels said:
There’s the line that this is a quantitative thing. Core function of thought and information processing being awareness of threat. Excess info meaning constant sense of doom despite relatively great living conditions. The pinker argument I think, maybe
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pattycakes_ said:
the difference between now and all those other times is the internet
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There is definitely always millenarian/willing on the end times thought, it exists in every age, but the sheer volume of information we now have to deal with is something else. There's a qualitative difference cos the quantitative difference is so vast.

I was at a talk a few years ago by an archivist, and he was talking about archiving webpages, he was saying they want to take as many snapshots of certain youtube video pages as they can, so they can preserve the comments, the related videos, the ads even, so people can get a sense of how the video was embedded. I mean imagine that as a project. Very difficult to get any kind of hold on conventional 'history' or what's important.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I guess one of the things that's interesting about Gus, and we all find him interesting as a specimen, is that he's the first person to turn up here not liking anything. He's not a partisan for anything. There's a blanket cynicism which is completely unprecedented for dissensus. His peers are simple enjoying enjoyers of stuff, Gus doesn't like anything. It's brutal.
 
shiels

shiels

_
I don’t think that’s totally fair but I do think gus and stan need to lay out their manifesto right now . We need to know what they’re optimising for, plain English bullet points
 
shiels

shiels

_
no its mine. im being reasonable. lets not ban them lets have them write their manifesto here for all to see thursday 9pm GMT no later and then decide
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Did a belle epoque exist to counter-point a decline? Was Thatcher worse? Can I get through this without killing someone?

If the year has done anything, it’s made people seek re-enchantment. Stories. Music. The past. The day to day can be brutal and the future is unclear. Daily death numbers from Covid are ringing loud from the soul rotavator, but I can almost filter them out. Work is even worse and impossible to filter and I fully empathise how lucky that all is too, when there could be even more chaos.

Weird times require a consolidation of stresses. Not to sound like a hippy, but the muse is dancing too right now, so I welcome fun as an ideological position.
 
M

mvuent

Void Dweller
suspendedreason said:
OK you got me

I feel bad for taking this thread sincerely but it's serious guys! This isn't a joke! It's not funny! Nostalgia is BAD BAD BAD. It needs to be stamped out everywhere it pops up. The only way through is forward!

I only hope young me is around to spank old me in 20 years
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although this attitude can get a bit tiresome as well if what gets held up as "forward" doesn't seem all that exciting or even confusing. a while ago i was talking to luka about this kid Roage's Foam who had a blog at the turn of the 2010s. i guess it was part of a larger debate but basically he proselytized about artists like zomboy in order to combat the narrative advanced by blissblogger et al that the younger generation's club music was boring. he's obviously really smart but his attempts to explain why the music he liked was forward thinking seem like a hilarious cope in retrospect. he'd make ridiculous claims like that zomby's decision to end a track by fading it out was "quite innovative" or that the old timers simply couldn't wrap their minds around rhythms involving triplets.
 
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K

kumar

Well-known member
its entirely to do with the decline of radio thats why the last period anyone on youtube is allowed to get nostalgic about is grime. with centralised broadcasting technologies like radio transmission or the postal system people could hijack them with pirate stations and mail art communiques to get one over on the man but thats not possible with social media and smartphones
 
shiels

shiels

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the decline frame is fundamental to dissensus. its soured things even through say dubstep, funky, deeptech

in terms of what i was saying earlier in terms of info overload - theres the obvious inignroable fact of environmental collapse seeping in, thats gradually becoming something were absorbing into the nervous system rather than an abstract thing. were seeing, feeling it now
 
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