Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

[MacCruiskeen]

Having everything available everywhere all the time induces a kind of nausea. Probably the last thing anyone needs is even more stuff to know about and/or care about, especially as a daily feed.

Personally, I miss silence.

After a decade of "surfing" (sic), I think Internet is the new TV. Numerous sane young people are already starting to avoid it.

Would anyone be substantially worse off if they could only access the Net once a week?

[slomo]

Having everything available everywhere all the time induces a kind of nausea. Probably the last thing anyone needs is even more stuff to know about and/or care about, especially as a daily feed.

Personally, I miss silence.

After a decade of "surfing" (sic), I think Internet is the new TV. Numerous sane young people are already starting to avoid it.

Would anyone be substantially worse off if they could only access the Net once a week?

I worry that you are right. I am pretty self-righteous about my avoidance of TV, but I'm definitely an internet junkie, at least for the "shows" I like (RI being one of them).

[Nordic]

That thing where everybody is standing around, or walking around, head bowed because they're staring at that little glowing thing in their hands .....

Well that's actually quite new. That's only been the last year or so that I've really noticed it taking over.

And it's really taking over.

But other than that, yeah, I agree with the OP.

I think that perhaps -- and I'm just guessing here -- is that we've become so self-reflexive that a certain self-consciousness has set in, culturally, to where people aren't branching out, because they can see themselves too well, and fear they look like freaks.

What's always amazing about looking back at an earlier time (pre 1990) is that we always say "why didn't anyone tell me how STUPID I looked?"

Look at some of TV shows and movies from the 80's, as a perfect example. "Full House" is a GREAT one to check out. OMFG!!! That shit was UGLY. The hair, the clothes, the sunglasses, all of it!! Horrifying, really.

Now, we can all see ourselves so easily, in other people's photos on Facebook, in reality shows, everywhere.

There is no "15 minutes of fame" any more, there's kind of a low-level hum now of everyone being on TV and being on the computers and we all are googleable (almost).

[Cedars of Overburden]

The short-brimmed fedora guys in the Americana scene around here all like to wear -- 20 years ago was there an Americana scene anywhere? Let alone the cool hats? Last night I saw a little boy -- might have been as old as 8? -- wearing a short-brimmed fedora and looking quite pleased with himself. Is this a Knoxville thing or what? I like it. Below the head, the guys pair it with mixed up modern and countrified clothes - a narrow tie and overalls or a suit such as Hank Williams the First might have worn only with a Keep Knoxville Scruffy t-shirt instead of a button up shirt. I realize I am perhaps not watching enough TV when I realize I have no idea if this fedora thing is regional or national....

[IanEye]

*



when i feel lonely here
don't waste my time with tears
i run 'Deep Throat' again
my hand for years and years

They never used to remake old TV shows, as they did Hawaii Five-O and Charlie’s Angels this past season.

weird nightmare



i once was lost - yet now eye am found


"you have always been the caretaker here, Mr. Bentley..."



if you skate, you would be great
if you could make a figure eight
that's a circle that turns 'round upon itself



*

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

Bishop warns of 'evil internet'
Saturday, 8 April, 2000

The internet has the potential to destroy society, the Archbishop of York has warned. Archbishop David Hope said that computer "wizardry" was in danger of creating a "society without a soul". "This technology is something that could ultimately devour us," he said in an interview with Conservatism, the quarterly journal of the Conservative Christian Fellowship.

Dr Hope expressed concerned at the way the internet could limit levels of human interaction. "I fear that we are becoming a nation which simply sits in front of a television screen and orders its lives at the press of a button or mouse," he said. "The danger is in having all this wizardry in individual homes which people never leave and where there is, as a result, no social interaction. Like all these developments, there is that which has the potential for good, and that which has the potential for evil. There is in the internet the potential for destroying ourselves."

Chris Wright, chairman of the group Christians on the Internet, said he was sympathetic to Dr Hope's comments. But he warned against Christians failing to become involved in the development of the new technology. "He has pointed out the dangers of the internet just like there are great dangers in books and other communication mediums. I think there is an even greater danger, though, in being afraid of it," he said. "Just like the Church is deeply involved in work in areas such as red light districts in towns and cities and working amongst the dregs of society, we need to be involved in the internet and using our influence for the good."

E-mail this story to a friend

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/706341.stm

[JackRiddler]

Non-Time and Hauntology

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32011&hilit=hauntology

Yes, that thread is this thread, for those interested in this subject.

Some thoughts from my very limited, US-European urban-based perspective. Apologies if repetitive:

I think the changes in -- what shall we call it? -- the look and practices and institutions of the common civilization in the last 20 years have been as enormous as in any other 20-year period but as an accumulation on top of prior transformations they aren't as obvious as in prior decades. We're still in the cultural era that began and started to spread worldwide after 1945, which is now 66 years ago. The pace of cultural-technological change is still accelerating (perhaps the acceleration has slowed). Abundance of styles, hobbies and accessories to choose from results in greater apparent homogeneity.

Labor is still intensifying with the difference between labor time and leisure time or work place and home ever less evident, as wealth disparity becomes more extreme. These trends began more like 40 years ago, however, so they seem less remarkable as they accelerate.

Accumulation of changes causes a kind of flattening of time. All styles and recordings that were ever made (if they survive) are available simultaneously. Stuff from all of the mass-media decades is available for sampling. You can choose from thousands of movies to watch, any given night. More film-makers than ever are exposed to and trained in more than 100 years of technique and artistry from every place and period. Outside and even within the Hollywood system, joint multinational productions are the norm. They make more movies than ever, more great ones than ever, and greater enormous quantities of the same old bullshit than ever. Now in 3D (using the same glasses).

The police state of 20 years ago differs from today in the technological power, the multiplication of joint authorities, the evolution of techniques, not in the implicit attitude of the agencies that the mass of people are potential enemy. It's gotten worse through salami tactic. (Example: I was a lot more shocked by the first appearance of large armored police vehicles in the 1980s than I am by the gargantuan mobile fortresses they have today.) We could go on for many pages on this aspect, but it's well covered on the RI board.

Little has changed in the national political show, the false dichotomies and empty rhetorical invocations and fascist rants are similar but the level of self-parody has gone off the scale. We're now on something like the 20th year of continuous media-produced individual sex or corruption scandals each taking their turn as the big show of the moment to distract from systemic questions that most people can't even formulate. It all starts to feel the same. Multiplication of news media has been accompanied by a unification of source stream; never have as many corporate news media simultaneously all run the same daily agenda. (And yet you can get more alternatives than ever.)

The feeling of cultural stasis comes in large part from the multiplication, convergence and globalization of media and the styles they transport. 20 years ago, even when merely consuming media, people were more often with other people (e.g., couch potatoes together, no cell phones or Internet). Now the time spent consuming media or using communications individually may be greater than the time spent with other people in any context.

Paradoxically, in the wired world, everyone's watching/hearing at least parts of what everyone else is watching/hearing. There have been so many swaps and fusions of styles and entertainments on a global scale that new arrivals and fusions don't seem as out of place. There may be more niche options than ever, but the common media space is larger and faster and more homogeneous than ever.

On the body-sculpting front, it's gotten very hard to stand out - most everyone still comes with the same set of limbs and organs, so what's left to wear or not to wear, to pierce or tattoo, to enhance or extend, train or bloat or amputate? (Ha, I remember my shock when I saw someone in my high school had three earrings on one ear! And these were just on the lower lobe, mind you.)

Advertisers are well aware of the similar dilemma their useless, corrosive and by-definition corrupt profession faces. What sell hasn't been tried, what surface is still uncovered? Can they start paying offices and public spaces to use lightbulbs that project messages to the cubicle rodents? Can they turn on your TV by central remote to remind you about the available savings on car insurance while you're sleeping? Maybe offer you a discount on CC purchases if you accept this as a service? Can they add another jumbotron to Times Square? Can they get Congress to ban the mute function as an infringement on the transport of intellectual property? They're running out of frontiers for mental harrassment. People are maxed out.

We're 20 years closer to whatever end the show will ultimately take, and it's evident.

.

[82_28]

All, as usual, very well said, Jack.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Consumer economics. What we've witnessed since the tumultuous year I was born has been a steady tightening of the noose with a hard margin on the top of end of conspicuous consumption as a function of individual and household income. The process of strip-mining value, the bastard twin of Bucky Fuller's "ephemeralization," has been the driving engine behind economic growth. It's a very cynical game built on simple scale -- population ramps up, so a higher percentage of overall value can be directly extracted. There's no innovation aside from social control technology. (The changes in technology as "products" is a matter of iteration, not innovation.)

The Chinese method of manufacturing is the blueprint. Find the cheapest, fastest possible means of production and then start removing/replacing core ingredients as much as possible, for as long as possible, until you are caught or out-competed by someone else who wants it more and is willing to take more risks to get there. End result is food without nutritional content, status symbols without value, and hollowed out currency from dollars to dinars. The house always wins until we burn it down.

If you want a prototype to study, observe the nostalgia marketing and manufacturing chain behind Urban Outfitters and their family of stores/catalogs.

[Project Willow]

The short-brimmed fedora guys in the Americana scene around here all like to wear -- 20 years ago was there an Americana scene anywhere?

I saw them when I was in Europe two years ago, and everyone, men and women, was wearing scarves draped closely around the neck and flowing down the chest. This style lasted even into the summer months of '09. The scarf trend never made it here, except among a few hipster folk and it took almost two years before it showed up in my town this fall.

Advertisers are well aware of the similar dilemma their useless, corrosive and by-definition corrupt profession faces. What sell hasn't been tried, what surface is still uncovered? Can they start paying offices and public spaces to use lightbulbs that project messages to the cubicle rodents? Can they turn on your TV by central remote to remind you about the available savings on car insurance while you're sleeping? Maybe offer you a discount on CC purchases if you accept this as a service? Can they add another jumbotron to Times Square? Can they get Congress to ban the mute function as an infringement on the transport of intellectual property? They're running out of frontiers for mental harrassment. People are maxed out.

My mute button is the most worn on my remote, they can pry it from my cold, ... anyway, I disagree with your last statement. People may be maxed out, but there is plenty more to come.

The other night I had a terrible nightmare that I had been kidnapped. Throughout the dream I kept trying to escape, but I could not. I woke up shivering and terrified, it was 3:30 am. A moment later, across the room, my computer came to life, all on its own.

Fun times.

[vince]

Even my favorite music 'style' of the 21st Century, The Mash-Up, has lost it's punch.
It's as dead as new-wave now.

From the article:

Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

True, that!

[JackRiddler]

.

It's an old story of growth and limits governing cycles of creation and eventual destruction or surprise renewal. 150 years ago you could be some middle-level machers in Manhattan and imagine creating Central Park. Today you can be the richest dumbfuck in the world and all you can build there is another fucking supertower. (Even Bloomberg didn't get his stadium. Not that I was for it.) We see the same dynamic at work with peak oil and peak everything else, the tendency in the rate of possible profit in any given industry to decline over time, the arrival of the same fashions and TV shows to every corner of the globe, the filling out of possibilities in fashion and music. There are always frontiers, but they tend to get smaller until some general upheaval or new technology opens up new space.

[JackRiddler]

What we've witnessed since the tumultuous year I was born

Uh, that must mean 1989?

has been a steady tightening of the noose with a hard margin on the top of end of conspicuous consumption as a function of individual and household income. The process of strip-mining value, the bastard twin of Bucky Fuller's "ephemeralization," has been the driving engine behind economic growth. It's a very cynical game built on simple scale -- population ramps up, so a higher percentage of overall value can be directly extracted. There's no innovation aside from social control technology. (The changes in technology as "products" is a matter of iteration, not innovation.)

Yes, yes. (I suspect it's a higher absolute amount of overall value, not a higher percentage, or we're getting there.) Very good observations.

The Chinese method of manufacturing is the blueprint. Find the cheapest, fastest possible means of production and then start removing/replacing core ingredients as much as possible, for as long as possible, until you are caught or out-competed by someone else who wants it more and is willing to take more risks to get there. End result is food without nutritional content, status symbols without value, and hollowed out currency from dollars to dinars. The house always wins until we burn it down.

Yes yes. I hate you because you're smarter than me. No, but seriously I've been wanting to tell you: that Angleton piece was brilliance, very well-invested work, and I look forward to reading it again tonight.

.

[Nordic]

Reading this thread just now made me think of this news story:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-New ... dent-VIDEO

Air Jordans spark fights, vandalism and pepper spray incident (VIDEO)

Fights, vandalism and arrests marked the release of Nike's new Air Jordan basketball shoes as a shopping rush on stores across the United States led to unrest that nearly turned into rioting.

The outbursts of chaos stretched from Washington state to Georgia as shoppers — often waiting for hours in lines — converged on stores Friday in pursuit of the shoes, a retro model of one of the most popularAir Jordans ever made.

In suburban Seattle, police used pepper spray on about 20 customers who started fighting at the Westfield Southcenter mall. The crowd started gathering at four stores in the mall around midnight and had grown to more than 1,000 people by 4 a.m., when the stores opened, Tukwila Officer Mike Murphy said. He said it started as fighting and pushing among people in line and escalated over the next hour.

IN PICTURES: Take the ridiculous with the stylish

Murphy said no injuries were reported, although some people suffered cuts or scrapes from fights. Shoppers also broke two doors, and 18-year-old man was arrested for assault after authorities say he punched an officer.

"He did not get his shoes; he went to jail," Murphy said.

And in a "related story" (more related than they realize):

Marty McFly shoes go on auction to benefit Michael J. Fox Foundation

[Hammer of Los]

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Just a quick note to say how much I loved IanEye's post!

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