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I have a pretty decent idea of what kind of grumpy old man I’ll become, should I live that long. Like some kind of postmodern atheist puritan, I’ll start to becme vocally opposed to Fun. Or opposed to short-term pleasure, at least — opposed to the capitalist agenda of momentary hedonism.

This kind of addictively shallow pleasure-seeking is closely linked to the constant availability of short-term stimulus. Here’s how

K-Punk

describes it in

Capitalist Realism

:

“Many of the teenage students I encoutnered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else _except_ pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ — but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed _beyond_ the pleasure principle”

This is a general social trend, but massively exacerbated by instantaneous new media and mobile communication, and in particular by the commercial interests built around them. In a world of constant, instant news, the economy of attention is built around addiction.

It’s barely a stretch to claim that this is taking its place alongside the better-known socio-cultural distortions which have shaped the world up to now. Planned obsolescence, advertising-fuelled inflation of gigantist consumerist desires — these continue, but news-addiction takes its place alongside them as a market distortion of desire.

It’s a particular problem when combined with ‘walled gardens’, which give one corporation control over the mechanisms of communication, and power to unilaterally change the terms of conversation. We need some kind of ‘escape gardening’, a set of technical innovations and social practices which would let us engage with communities in such closed platforms, while building ways to guide people out of them into the open web, or into interpersonal relationships not mediated by blinkenlights.

Addiction-seeking mechanisms and walled gardens can exist independently, of course, but the latter provides a strong commercial incentive to generate the former.

There are ways out of this situation. But they all require consciously stepping off the hedonic treadmill, and accepting stress and misery on the path towards doing something. There’s no shortage of models for this. Any number of classical philsophical schools, many religious teachings. Walden, and other forms of intentional simplicity. Romanticism, emphasising the intensity of feeling over its quantity or pleasantness. The Aesthetic movement, and the idea of the Lebenskunstler.

But to reach them we need, not necessarily a deceleration, but a willingness to exist in the absence of stimulation.

As you may guess, much of this post comes from my personal frustration at a work-style which requires me to be constantly plugged in, but which hasn’t yet helped me achieve any human closeness or intensity of feeling

tw :yes

Simon Reynolds: how do you write about music when the volume of creation is unmanageably large? You give up on criticism, give up on finding something Significant. Instead, you just churn out excited brief notes on whatever track has dropped into your feed in the last 5 minutes.

That’s what Pitchfork are doing with their offshoot Altered Zones. 15 bloggers post prolifically “

with a sensibility that could be fairly described as post-critical

“. Because, says Reynolds, “

there’s just too much [music], and that filtering doesn’t seem to be quite the thing to do with it

“

So far, so typically net/ADHD/affect-driven. More interesting is the implied link between this cultural surplus and a culture of nostalgia.

“Everybody knows” that we’re drowning in nostalgia. But our nostalgia has two distinct patterns, one transitional, the other here to stay. The first is our parent’s nostalgia — the mainstream, modernist-nationalist TV nostalgia of “remember the 80s” shows. This variant functions as a stand-in for the mass culture of the past, a nicotine patch for modernism. It conjures up a feeling of experiencing the same media alongside your neighbours, friends and enemies. Since that shared culture no longer exists in the present, it’s transposed into the past.

So that form of mass-culture nostalgia is a transition phenomenon: it’ll vanish as there are no longer generations growing up with mass-culture upbringing. “Remember the 90s” is already strugging; “Remember the noughties” perhaps won’t function at all.

But the ‘nostalgia’ currently riding high in music is something else entirely. It’s “ahistorical omnivorousness”:

I don’t think [it] really has much to do with all the ’80s ghosts haunting this music. From YouTube to sharity blogs, the Internet is an ever-expanding data sea, and these young musicians are really explorers, voyaging into the past and diving for pearls.

Bruce Sterling covered this last year in a speech at the Transmediale digital art festival in Berlin:

So how do we just — like — sound out our new scene? What can we do to liven things up, especially as creative artists?

Well, the immediate impulse is going to be the ‘Frankenstein Mashup.’ Because that’s the native expression of network culture. The “Frankenstein mashup” is to just take elements of past, present, and future and just collide ‘em together, in sort of a collage. More or less semi-randomly, like a Surrealist “exquisite corpse.”

tw: yes

If I were a digital artist…

…I’d put a pigeon in a Skinner Box, and connect it to Facebook.

Feed it whenever somebody clicks ‘like’ on an update. Give it a few buttons to post different things: a picture of itself, a lolcat, a political rant. Watch it learn to post crowd-pleasing updates.

I’m pretty sure this would work — both on a technical level, and as something people would like as simultaneously cute and disturbing. I’d be tempted to do it, except that I don’t really have anywhere to keep a pigeon.

You might have to fiddle a few details. You’d somehow need to avoid too big a time-lag between posting an updates and getting feedback/food. And you’d want to engineer diminishing returns as the account got more popular. If the pigeon got a thousand likes for posting a single update, it might just binge rather than continuing to perfect its technique. Ideally you’d replace food with some kind of drug, something with tolerance effects so that the pigeon would be left always wanting more. But getting a pigeon hooked on heroin might not go down so well in some quarters;(

Afghanistan. Still a war there, y’know.

And every time you look away for a while, the news gets steadily worse.

Here is a horrifying story of bombing a village into oblivion. But the writer is in total sympathy with the military, and doesn’t understand how anybody could dislike their home being destroyed::

Mohammad [one of the villagers]…in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition

…

clearing operations are a necessary evil to weed out the Taliban, and they often leave devastating destruction in the wake. But [critics overlook] the tremendous effort some units, like 1-320th, have made to rebuild his country

There’s been entirely justified outrage at wired and at Central Asia blog Registan

what is happening right now in Southern Afghanistan is

inexcusable

. There were rumors of this policy of collective punishment in the Arghandab before (see this overwrought Daily Mail story that stops right before the village actually was destroyed for an idea of what is going on), and I’m really struggling to see how such behavior does not violate Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention—that is, how this behavior is not a war crime, especially given the explicit admission that such behavior is merely for the convenience of the soldier and not any grander strategy or purpose.

I cannot comprehend why the deliberate destruction of villages seems to be an official, sanctioned ISAF policy in the South. Is is abhorrent, an atrocity, and there is no excuse for it (nor are there words for the anger it’s stirred in me, reading about it from afar; I suspect Broadwell would sniff at me to stop whining as well, were we to discuss it in person). This should outrage and infuriate everyone who reads about it. But, and this is where I move from rage to despair: how could we ever possibly hope to stop it?

Extra horror: read the comments on any of the posts above. They’re all full of people defending the policy of blowing up villages for the good of the inhabitants.

Afghanistan. Still a war there. And every time you look away for a while, the news gets a bit worse.

Here is a horrifying story of bombing an Afghan village into oblivion. Except the writer isn’t horrified; in her eyes, this is a perfectly sensible military tactic. She’s incomprehending when one of the villagers “


in a fit of theatrics


” accuses the commander of “ruining his life”. Because blowing his home, and his neighbours’ homes, and their farmland, is a trivial thing to get annoyed about.

There are outraged posts and further information popping up online.

One of the best responses is from Joshua Foust, writing at Central Asia blog Registan. As he points out, this isn’t an individual outrage. It’s a standard tactic, something that the soldiers involved now barely see as controversial:

I cannot comprehend why the deliberate destruction of villages seems to be an official, sanctioned ISAF policy in the South. Is is abhorrent, an atrocity, and there is no excuse for it (nor are there words for the anger it’s stirred in me, reading about it from afar; I suspect Broadwell would sniff at me to stop whining as well, were we to discuss it in person). This should outrage and infuriate everyone who reads about it. But, and this is where I move from rage to despair: how could we ever possibly hope to stop it?

In the soviet bloc, it was apparently common for punk gigs to happen in churches.

Punk groups were officially banned, or at the least subject to disapproval. The scene was monitored, and being known as a punk meant throwing away pretty much any chance of a career. In the official venues, it was a rare and brave promoter who would give them space.

…so the priests stepped in. Either as an extension of their youth-work, or because some priests were themselves punks — or because the church loathed the state almost as much as the punks did, so “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” applied.

Whatever the reasons, it happened. Certainly in Poland and East Germany, presumably elsewhere as well. It’s fairly well-known among people who lived through it, even as children.

But the internet is being oddly unbountiful with information. I’ve found a bit in German, including on a neo-nazi attack on a punk gig in a Berlin church, on “Blues” masses (which became punk masses), and a documentary. In English, this is about the most I’ve found.

But somewhere out there online, there must be a really good account, ideally complete with beautiful and incongruous photos. Help me; where is it?

John Samson, a mostly-ignored documentary-maker active in the 70s:

In 1977 Samson made Dressing For Pleasure, a documentary about ordinary people who enjoyed dressing in rubber and who approached their fetish with a matter of factness that seems almost quaint. The film was an immediate sensation among British fashion designers and within the London punk scene and was promptly banned as a video nasty. It ended becoming one of the most ripped off British films of the 1970s.

Criticism

Left-wing, liberal and Green MEPs however have expressed their dismay at a “delayed” and “weak” response to the killings by foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton.

Emelie Doromzee, of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, told EUobserver that the EU should suspend its talks with the government and more strongly condemn the regime’s actions: “Until now, the language has been so far from what one would expect and sees elsewhere. The EU has put out a very weak statement. It’s past the stage of written statements. It’s almost a month now that these protests have been going on. We need concrete actions from the EU.”

The Guardian on the wife of the ousted president:

The former hairdresser and her extended family had a grip on business, construction and foreign investment, living a lifestyle so lavish

they would fly in food from other continents

for parties.

What’s hilarious is how this excess is something the supermarkets achieve constantly for European consumers. Just with much greater efficiency.