Rhian @ bad reputation:

I intellectually analyse the music I love, scouring its lyrical content and its social and cultural context for meaning to enhance my enjoyment of it, but not necessarily to justify my enjoying it in the first place. I am equally interested simply in experiencing its rhythm, its flow, its grind, its melody, the way it makes me want to move as well as the mechanics of how it achieves that, its impact on my body as well as my brain. I attach as much weight to a physical and emotional response as to a cerebral anatomising of music.

Yes, yes, yes! Probably I place far more weight on interpretation compared to Rhian, but the way she phrases things:)

I know nothing about Egypt. Or Tunisia. Or Sudan. Or Lebanon. Or Albania. Or — there’s a

lot

of news happening at the moment, isn’t there?

But here are some of the articles I’ve found about Egypt that get beyond “

woo! riots!

“:

Al-ahram on the significance of the date:

Police Day [Jan 25] is meant to mark the day when the police forces took to the street in Ismailia to fight the British Occupation.

…

“The decision may be controversial but I think it was a good choice,” says Essam El Erian, the media spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition group. “Six decades ago the police did their patriotic duty and fought the British occupation, now we ask them to also fight against a corrupt government that has rigged the elections.”

Marc Lynch on the Arabic media:

During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can’t remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.

Simon Tisdall in the Guardian

Egyptians have been here before. The so-called Cairo spring of 2005 briefly lifted hopes of peaceful reform and open elections

….

But Tuesday’s large-scale protests were different in significant ways, sending unsettling signals to a regime that has made complacency a way of life. “Day of Rage” demonstrators in Cairo did not merely stand and shout in small groups, as is usual. They did not remain in one place. They joined together – and they marched. And in some cases, the police could not, or would not, stop them.

….

an ad hoc coalition of students, unemployed youths, industrial workers, intellectuals, football fans and women, connected by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, instigated a series of fast-moving, rapidly shifting demos across half a dozen or more Egyptian cities. The police could not keep up – and predictably, resorted to violence. an ad hoc coalition of students, unemployed youths, industrial workers, intellectuals, football fans and women, connected by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, instigated a series of fast-moving, rapidly shifting demos across half a dozen or more Egyptian cities. The police could not keep up – and predictably, resorted to violence.

Obligatory riot porn: Stopping a water cannon, Tiananmen-style. And something less violent

And, since they seem to be mentioned almost nowhere else, Global voices lists the demonstrators’ demands

• To raise the minimum wage limit to LE 1200 and to get an unemployment aid.
• To cancel the emergency status in the country , to dismiss Habib El-Adly and to release all detainees without court orders.
• Disbanding the current parliament , to have a new free election and to amend the constitution in order to have two presidential limits only.

Also, Anonymous are in the thick of it. Again. They’ve apparently turned LOIC on Egyptian government websites. This is after Tunisia, where they were about the first outside group to get involved. Meanwhile in Spain, having contributed to the December protests which prevented passage of an anti-download law, they’re back at it as the government takes another shot at it.

It’s like the gang of bored teenagers on the street corner has turned into a politicised mob.

Reading about the connection of the Bild to Rudi Dutschke’s shooting, I can’t help thinking about the parallels to the Gifford shooting in the US. The anti-Springer slogan in ’68 was “Bild schoss mit!”. Perhaps now we need ‘Palin schoss mit’?

Where the term Fourth Estate comes from:

The idea of the press as a “Fourth Estate” came to prominence during the nineteenth century. In 1837 Robert Carlyle referred to “A Fourth Estate of Noble Editors” in The French Revolution: A History, and in On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) stated that “Burke said there were Three Estates in parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all”. Carlyle continued: “Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy. Invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.”

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;(

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

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

On a similar topic, the need for retreat:

I believe that teaching today, in all and any context, must involve the strategies of the psychoanalyst. That’s how traumatizing our pleasure-culture has become, not by being pleasurable but by denying our ability to rest. I’m reminded of Zizek’s remarks on Lenin who withdrew to Switzerland in the dire times of 1915 to a kind of inner repose in which he read Hegel. When he re-emerged, it was with the refined capacity to strike at the heart of the matter.

[source]

I’d put this in the same context as Malcolm X’s experience of studying in prison. In fact it’s true of many revolutionary leaders, that they move from being jailed on political grounds, straight to leading a mass movement. I’d taken it as an impressive sign of strength of character — but perhaps even the isolation of jail can provide something of value*.

See also this HN discussion of doing nothing for 2 minutes. And this is discussion from a high-energy technophile crowd, appreciating the value of stepping back from the cycle.

* to be clear, not trying to be rosy about this — being locked up is a soul-destroying experience for most, even if there is occasionally a small silver lining.

Is love more powerful when it is harder to obtain? Rob Horning thinks so:

as dating (or ersatz love) has migrated to the internet, it has undergone the same changes as everything else that has moved online: it has been remade by the ethic of convenience into something more solipsistic and disposable.

But what online dating does terrifyingly well is to help people find partners who perfectly embody some desired template of personality. The end result is that you can find scarily close lovers.

Or that’s my hunch, and one which I’m sure could be demonstrated in some quantitative way. Couldn’t two lovers who are database-certified as perfect for one another attain a deeper level of intensity, compared to old-school partners, who have some reasons to love one another, but were mostly just in the same place at the right time?

What I love about Zizek’s blurb for Capitalist Realism is that you can so easiy imagine him exclaiming it vocally, complete with excited hand-gestures:

Let’s not beat around the bush: Fisher’s compulsively readable book is simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective, Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in our sticky atmosphere.