K-Punk

[luka]

Bound inside body and skull wall. Private reflections and memories. A personal past and personal aspirations ideals and Loyalties. Subjectivity.

 

[yyaldrin]

you think this will once be gone?

 

[luka]

Soon

 

[catalog]

de landa has some good lines on this, the body as a temporary bounded repository for bacteria and other cells, just a staging post. decentering the individual. it's all d&g in origin i think.

 

[luka]

Thinking in scales beyond the individual is what that stuff is about yes. The larger processes we are embedded in, folded into. Greater orders of magnitude. Stan is besotted with these ideas.

 

[craner]

Stan is going to end up wanting to eliminate us. Abort the human race, and all of that.

 

[version]

I'm rereading the slow cancellation of the future.

I liked that one. It's just that about halfway into the book you get this run of pieces on and interviews with producers and artists I've little interest in and who've completely disappeared ten, fifteen years later.

 

[luka]

It's a terrible book. They made a pigs ear of that.

 

[luka]

But never mind that. It's just a launching pad for conversation.

 

[version]

I think it's partly because I'm sick of interviews with artists too. They all start to read the same way. How many times have you read a sentence that starts "I remember my mum/dad when I was a kid... " followed by something they think marks them out as having been unique and creative from a very young age?

 

[luka]

It did occur to me that mark is nostalgic for the good old days of socialism in the way that burial is nostalgic for the good old days of rave. Utopias neither of them experienced, arriving at the burnt out fag end of those eras

 

[version]

Has there ever been a good old days? I guess if you were an aristocrat or something then there might have been, but for the rest of us? He makes the point himself that the good old days always seem to be the ones you were just too young to be around for.

 

[IdleRich]

Which makes me think of Stan's rhetoric, which I like and I find illuminating in all sorts of ways

Imagine some kind of mechanical satellite drifting through space, and there are several dozen thrusters around its perimeter-sphere. Each one, individually, moves in a unique direction, quality, and exerts a certain force, quantity. And yet, these thrusters can be harmoniously programmed to steer the satellite - by having many adjacent thrusters activate simultaneously, their averaged direction is where the satellite moves. By activating a thruster that is aimed against that average direction, we can program for resistance of deceleration.

Not sure about this analogy. It implies a focus group is made up of loads of crazy mavericks who, if left to their own devices, would each steer the ship in a totally random direction at an equally random speed, it is only by combining these creative geniuses together that they end up cancelling each other out and the ship travels steadily and boringly in the right direction.
That also implies that we could free these geniuses by simply untethering them and letting them head off on their unexpected tangents.
For me the situation would be better represented by several dozen thrusters all facing in virtually the same direction with only minor differences between them, no harmonious programming is required, they just combine to drive the ship at a nice sensible speed in the correct direction. If you're lucky there might be one puny little thruster pointing off at a strange angle, but going unnoticed cos the consensus is so powerful.

 

[luka]

Ok

 

[yyaldrin]

one day we will make a big bonfire in which we will throw all our tiny computers

 

[constant escape]

Well are we not all individuals, who work together through our own volition, reserving the ability to shoot off in our own direction?

edit: you can make an argument for this or that kind of social genetic programming, but then I'd just push the argument to that physical scale and assert that genetic systems can also operate as individuals to an extent.

 

[shiels]

Has there ever been a good old days? I guess if you were an aristocrat or something then there might have been, but for the rest of us? He makes the point himself that the good old days always seem to be the ones you were just too young to be around for.

Yeah it a universal experience and its a great interview because they’re both adept at communicating what that feels like through writing and music

 

[luka]

I like that shiels has appointed himself the burial defender. It shows a noble spirit.

 

[version]

He doesn't say it in the Burial interview.

 

[constant escape]

The good old days were the young days, the pre-adulterated days.