✨ Smattering 01: Hallucination
Eclectic collections of fragments, quotes, and anecdotes from our on/offline lives.
"I have all but given up hope on tech being part of the solution, i think it is almost always a part of the problem”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
INTERVIEW MAG: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?
TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.
Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope
from Interview Magazine, July 2020
NU-TROGLODYTE MANIFESTO by Jarvis Cocker
Where can you find peace? Where can you find peace?
Where can you find total silence?
Complete darkness?
Here.
No phone reception.
No Wi-Fi.
No TV.
No radio.
This is the REAL Sound of the Underground (cos it is, y’know, actually underground).
No outside influences whatsoever.
A blank canvas.
BURNING CHROME
Instead of fantasizing about future worlds, Bill Gibson sets his novels in the ongoing, alarming realm of the present.
The word "cyberspace", coined by Gibson, was first used in this story, in reference to the "mass consensual hallucination" in computer networks.
One line from the story—"...the street finds its own uses for things"—has become a widely quoted aphorism for describing the sometimes unexpected uses to which users can put technologies (for example, hip-hop DJs' reinvention of the turntable, which transformed turntables from a medium of playback into one of production).
On The Creation of ‘Cyberspace’
On a legal pad, Gibson tried inventing words to describe the space behind the screen; he crossed out “infospace” and “dataspace” before coming up with “cyberspace.” He didn’t know what it might be, but it sounded cool, like something a person might explore even though it was dangerous.
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”
On Extreme Presentness
Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
On Email Signatures
Following the election of Trump, he signed off his emails:
Crazy times,
Bill
Richie Culver
Richie Culver creates banners of the shared belief system and his set of themes means reference to social issues, policy failings and media.
…then along came instagram, that wrecking ball of the status quo, which is how i scrolled down to first encounter the work; in thirty years in art (i have the scars to prove it), i’ve never seen such a democratizing force of nature. decades of hierarchies have all but washed away and this is only the beginning; more, much more, art-anarchy is to follow.
i for one couldn’t be more pleased. in a grim world with little to look forward to or aim for, there’s always another blank canvas (for better or worse), and a buzzing insta-screen with like-minded freaks and weirdos—it’s the closest we have to something approximating a community nowadays.”
🌻In Memory of David Graeber
via. David Graeber’s website.
🔜 His Carnival Memorial on 11th October
Offline Matters: The Less-Digital Guide to Creative Work
When did creative work become so boring?
How did ‘digital-first’ come to dominate everything?
...and why is nobody talking about it?
Now they are.