"cultural gridlock"

JC: "I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It’s like we’ve found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can’t do that. It's an overabundance of information. Ultimately, it must be quite tough to be confronted with that. If you wanted to be a creative person and you are confronted with the sum product of mankind's creativity up to this moment in history, that's pretty daunting, like, “Where can I fit my voice in amongst all that?”

Pitchfork: Yeah, the idea of making something new can seem pointless because you know it's going to be thrown on top of this endless pile of stuff.

JC: What people have to make sure of is that they're not replicating something that already exists. You really have to ask yourself: “Is there a point in me doing this? Has this already been said before? Is this moving things along or is this just adding to the giant pile of junk that's already there?” Social commentators give this kind of idea names like “cultural gridlock,” where things like music don’t seem to be developing so much. It's not like the music of 1994 is that different than the music of 2014—and that's 20 years worth.

".... People are learning that you've got to find some way of shutting things off in order to give your own mind a chance to produce something. It's interesting that most gadgets are called “iPhone” and “iPod,” with that "i" prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led—a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you're not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You've got to let the subconscious in—that's my main message to the world." 

(Jarvis Cocker interviewed by Ryan Dombal at Pitchfork) 

too much memory / the internet as hyperthymesiac



piece at the Atlantic by Megan Garber on "making the internet more like our brains" and how "the next wave of digital products won't just be about archiving the web; they'll be about destroying the archive":


"Anti-archival tools provide a countervailing force to one of the defining features of the Internet: that, with its nearly infinite space, "save all" is its default setting. Without even trying, the Internet remembers. And that doesn't just mean that the comment you left on that Joss Whedon fan site that one time is still sitting there, emoticon-ed and gif-ed and captured for posterity within the all-knowing neurons of Google. It also means that the web, as a broad space, operates on both an assumption and an architecture of continuity. Within it, and all around it, archive is assumed. Even when we die ... there, still, we are.

"... But there are also drawbacks to digital omniscience. It's telling that people diagnosed with hyperthymesia have described their limitless memories not as blessings, but as burdens -- ones that are "non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting." Near-perfect recall of their experiences doesn't make these people smarter; it makes them miserable.

(Hyperthymesia (wiki says) is a syndrome in which individuals possess superior autobiographical memory... its two defining characteristics are 1) the person spends an abnormally large amount of time thinking about his or her personal past, and 2) the person has an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from his or her personal past. Hyperthymesiacs can recall almost every day of their lives in near perfect detail, as well as public events that hold some personal significance... it takes the form of "uncontrollable associations", recollection occurring with out without hesitation or conscious effort)


now what did Jim say about this?"Speak in secret alphabets/Learn to forget"...

these bits (from Gerber's piece)


"when we talk about the Internet, we talk about feeds and flows and rivers and currents -- things determined by their dynamism and their lack of obvious containers....  The only problem, however, is that constant flux-and-flow is not actually how we humans are programmed to move through the world. We live in fits and starts, in cycles and phases, and we divide our time not just socially, in shared minutes and hours, but physically. We wake. We sleep. We have beginnings. We have endings.... When we disparage the digital environment as "overwhelming," what we're also faulting it for is its lack of a narrative. The Internet moves, but it doesn't necessarily move forward. It expands, but it doesn't necessarily follow any particular trajectory. It lacks, in that sense, a purpose. It lacks a plot. "

 reminded me (again, as so often) of Rem Koolhaas's "Junkspace". Specifically...

"Junkspace is often described as a space of flows, but that is a misnomer; flows depend on disciplined movement, bodies that cohere. Junkspace is a web without spider; although it is an architecture of the masses, each trajectory is strictly unique. Its anarchy is one of the last tangible ways in which we experience freedom. It is a space of collision, a container of atoms, busy, not dense... There is a special way of moving in junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful."

flotspam and botsam

in the Toop piece in The Wire, I write about how the ocean-of-information that is the internet has become clogged with data-trash... i compare it to the Gyre, aka the Pacific Trash Vortex, where all the disintegrated-into-teensy-nodules plastic litter has been carried by tidal systems to form one gigantic disgrace-to-the-species sargasso-sea of non-biodegradable dumpage

well, news that "software is using more bandwith than people" and that "51 percent of total online traffic is non-human" makes Tower of Sleep reach for the same analogy:

"This kind of makes me think of the Great Pacific Trash Vortex or how the airspace in low Earth orbit is all cluttered full of “space junk” already from all the satellites we’ve sent up. Even in a space that we’ve created and that we usually (and somewhat erroneously) think of as immaterial or virtual, we have managed to make a mess. I think we have a long way to go in terms of developing a more ecological frame of thinking that accounts for all the assemblages that compose reality. This is a good reminder that we need ecological thinking for the internet, too."

often trawling through the internet is does strike me as this teeming,
abject waste-land... a right DUMP

naive to expect it to be otherwise, though, i suppose... anything that humans make is going to mirror our condition... our vices and virtues alike

that article and Tower of Sleep's gloss on it makes me think of two further things:

Rem Koolhaas's deliriously writhing text Junkspace, which is ostensibly mostly about architecture but keeps blurring repeatedly such that it seems to be about the internet, or some of the stuff Retromania is talking about (glutted and clotted) or ALL CULTURE NOW

and that doomsday-scenario conjured up by those who worry about the development of nanotechnology: Grey Goo

aka (via wiki) "out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves, a scenario known as ecophagy ("eating the environment")"

Eric Drexler coined the concept in his book Engines of Creation:

"Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be grey or gooey, the term "grey goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be "superior" in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable"