RE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html?pagewanted=1
I'm just as guilty of all of this as anyone, but I couldn't help having these thoughts and feeling inclined to record them last night after reading the article linked above. If nothing else, it's inspired me to become more conscious of what wellsprings the things I create come from. Hopefully it or the text below does the same for someone else.
The real problem with Culture and The Digital transcends commerce. Ultimately, we're becoming a less experiential mass. The electronically social are convinced they're experiencing culture and are actively engaged in the scenes and discoveries they study and repost second and third-hand via blogs. The Digital Hive and those invented by it have little to show for themselves in terms of unique discovery. These personalities lack access to--or even awareness of--the pieces of culture never digitized. The Hive can't connect dots visible only to those who've explored, collaborated, observed and invented first-hand.
The limits of our Digital Extended-Consciousness are set by our abilties to recall and recount the textures of our collected physical interactions and observations. The ubiquity of opportunities to smell, feel, taste and fuck have somehow been shelved in favor of fashionably sterile transmissions watched, read and heard. Opportunities to engage the entire quiver of senses now exist as massively staged, predictably curated midways of pseudo-experience intended to be documented and distributed virally for virtual consumption. Texture is all but lost. Memories of events not cached in people's gmail, RSS aggregators, iphones and twitter timelines fade ever-faster. Where are all of the Harry Smiths since Harry Smith? They exist, but they're silent--conscious that the value of the culture they've collected is cheapened by surrendering it to the attention-deficient binary-breeze.
That's what the internet is, right? It's just this box--this bunch of different looking boxes--packaging what haphazardly falls willy-nilly from the binary-breeze. It's just a box that people throw shit into, rifle around in and steal from--that's it. It's fostered in all who've observed it an ever-increasing, unreasonable sense of entitlement and that's just the reality anyone creating anything must face. The real damage that Digital Culture is inflicting on Physical Culture isn't monetary. It's creative. Artists are lazy. Musicians are lazy. Writers are lazy. Theoreticians are lazy. Anthropologists are perhaps the laziest of all. Few people are living in the physical and raping it for all its damp, vivacious beauty. We're a population of socially-retarded academes caught-up in researching nuggets of the esoteric and obscure--the same nuggets every other asshole is compulsively researching nightly til 4AM. Creatives re-eximine and re-hash--in lock-step--these same once-interesting ideas.
As to Lanier's pet-issue--music--look to music's underground since the web has errupted. It's there that the concepts lifted one-generation further by mainstream producers are all initially collaged. Electroclash was likely the first mongoloid child of bookmark-based scene-sequencing. More crucial even than Larry Tee was the internet in proliferating that truckstop abortion. Likewise, Noise has crossed the tipping-point. Multigenerationally xeroxed mimes mimic the sounds and pixelated youtube videos they dig from the click-worn bins of Web 2.0. There are those who continue to explore and experiment--to channel the Free borrowed so liberally from Jazz, but their efforts are almost immediately parroted by scores of others who effortlessly pull/ execute/ post/ repeat. Look at this sad and sorry Cold-Wave revival happening right now. It's appropriate that a band like Cold Cave--knocking off pre-Emo 80's synth-pout was selected as the soundtrack to a commercial for a brand once known best as the source for cheap, knock-off 80's electronics. All of the post-Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs/way-post Sue Tissue nuevo-nowave Brooklyn churn makes the list too--and that list continues. Look then at the mainstream--even at just one example. Lady Gaga--perhaps the most successful synthesis yet of web-born, web-built, meta-mash-up-regression--pilfered the personalities of performers already twice-removed from something more-or-less unique. Very few performers deliver anything authentic--styles or concepts lifted from life instead of bookmarks--because, sadly, those bookmarks are somehow now *life*. THAT is where culture is being killed.
People steal music because there's nothing worth buying. Everything on offer for heist has been stolen and re-thieved twice already. Theft-bare shelves aren't the problem, valueless stock is. Culture is supported when it demands that consumers live and not even the most miniscule of micro-payments will change that.
