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[tr?id=1356908847688416&ev=PageView&noscript=1]
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[tr?id=279433711742018&ev=PageView&noscript=1] #[1]EDM Tips » EDM Song
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Structure: Arrange Your Loop into a Full Song Comments Feed
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[2]alternate [3]alternate [4]alternate
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IFRAME: [5]https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-N5SBWB6
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[6]EDM Tips
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EDM Song Structure: Arrange Your Loop into a Full Song
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[12]6 Comments
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[13]Share33
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[14]Tweet
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33 Shares
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So you’ve created a killer 8-bar loop and want to take your great idea
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to a full song, but don’t know where to go from here? We’ve all been
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there before!
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The good news is that you don’t need to feel disheartened: this is a
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super common problem that happens to all music producers, and
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thankfully there are some very straightforward steps you can take to
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get out of the loop and to a finished arrangement….
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We get stuck because it can be very difficult to imagine each
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individual section of a track before it exists. So, how do we fix
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this?
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Start 2022 the right way! Download your FREE “New Producer Starter
|
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Pack” here.
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|
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Let’s look into EDM song structure, and use that knowledge as a
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template for our own tracks almost like one of those Paint-by-Numbers
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books. If you use the techniques outlined below, you’ll be writing full
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tracks and streamlining your workflow in no time!
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IFRAME:
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[15]https://www.youtube.com/embed/EXx9At3iUOw?feature=oembed&iv_load_po
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licy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=0
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EDM Song Structure
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So what exactly are the benefits of learning EDM song structure? Well,
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for one, by learning the common ways in which other artists create and
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sculpt their songs, we can use that as a template for when we get stuck
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in creating our own music.
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Additionally, using known song structures helps increase relatability
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and appeal to a wider audience. The practice of purposely arranging
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your music in a carefully crafted way is called arrangement, and is
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used in all types of music – not just Electronic Dance Music.
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In most Electronic Dance Music genres, your track will be in 4/4 time.
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This means that in every bar (also known as a measure), there will be 4
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beats, and that the quarter note (the kick on every beat), will carry
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the song.
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In this format, a bar is 4 beats, and a musical phrase is usually a
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multiple of 2 or 4 bars. In music theory, a phrase is generally just a
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grouping of bars whose energy flows nicely. For example, your build
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might contain two separate phrases; one that first hints at the melody
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followed by a second that introduces a snare or clap build up.
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Phrases build up, take down, or play around with the energy of a
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section of your track to build interest, and create and release
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tension.
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However, let’s take a step back and see what the main overall sections
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of an EDM song structure are.
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They are as follows:
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* Intro
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* Verse
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* Build up
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* Drop
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Each of these distinct sections contains elements of your loop
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simplified, modified, or generally expanded upon. Knowing what makes up
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these sections and how they’re crafted is at the heart of how you
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transform your loop into a full-fledged song.
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Now, let’s see a rundown of which elements each section usually
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contains.
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Intro
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The intro is usually the simplest part of your entire track. It will
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usually contain a stripped down beat to allow DJ’s to more easily
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transition into your track, or – if you’re making a radio or Spotify
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edit – will have a very short 2 to 4 bar phrase introducing the main
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theme of your track. The intro also sets the pace and expectations for
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what the track will deliver. (Will it be a break-neck speed drum-n-bass
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track? Will it be a more chilled-out deep house track?)
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Verse
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The verse is more complex than the intro, but often less complex than
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the drop (or at least, conveying less energy). In vocal driven music,
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this is where the majority of the storytelling of songwriting occurs,
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but in a lot of EDM, this is where you establish your melodic motifs.
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These motifs – or small musical ideas – should hint at your main drop
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melody without giving away your big, exciting, energetic drop.
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Build up
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The build up typically contains risers, repetitive melodic motifs, and
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is generally rather short (a notable exception to this rule might be an
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8-minute trance track). When creating build ups, you can also consider
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stripping down your percussion and drums to the bare essentials, in
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order to juxtapose to the heavy drop.
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Drop
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The drop is the hardest hitting part of your track. This is where the
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main hook of your song lies, and where the energy in your track should
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be the highest. You want people to get up and dance when they hear your
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drop! The drop can be very simple, or very complex; this heavily relies
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on genre, so make sure to listen to your favorite songs and use them as
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reference.
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Structures
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Many songs you hear on the radio or in the club utilize similar song
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structures, with some key variation to keep it interesting. When
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deciding how to structure your own track, listening and referencing
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your favorite track in the same genre can be immensely valuable, as
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that track is likely commercially successful and has a structure that
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is proven and works.
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As a high level overview, structuring your song is a bit like designing
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a roller-coaster. We want to bring the listener on a journey with the
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emotion and energy from the track. This will help keep your listeners
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engaged, prevent them from becoming bored, and hopefully keep playing
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your track for days, months, and years to come.
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You can even analyse the structure of existing songs and draw in an
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“energy map” using an automation line, as shown here.
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There are a few ways of representing song structure, but by far the
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most common is to use letters to represent each part of a track. For
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example, a common song structure in pop music goes as follows:
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A B D B D E D A
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In this instance, the letter A stands for an intro or outtro, B stands
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for a verse, D stands for a chorus or drop, and E stands for the bridge
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of the song, adding variety. Using this notation, we can quickly and
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easily create and plan our song’s structure without getting too deep
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into the details and slowing us down.
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If we wanted to use a similar structure for EDM, we could use A B D B D
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A or A B D E D A, both of which are fairly basic but common structures.
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In this instance, however, the E section is an extended breakdown,
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bridge, or a new section or extended verse.
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Now we understand how song structure notation works, let’s look at a
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common example of a more complex EDM song structure.
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A B C D B C D A
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This structure breaks down like so:
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* A: These are the intro and outtro of the track. They are typically
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8 or 16 bars in length. In some genres, you may have 4 bar intro
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and outtros; it’s important to reference the genre you’re producing
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to ensure your song fits in well with the genre.
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* B: This is the verse in your track. The first verse is typically 16
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bars, and the second verse is 16 or 32 bars.
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* C: This is the build of the track. Both builds are typically 8 bars
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in length, although in some genres can be 4 or even 10 or 12 bars
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long.
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* D: This is the drop of your track. A drop can vary in length but
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are usually 8 to 16 bars. The second drop is typically either the
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same length as the first, or slightly longer to develop a little
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bit of additional energy.
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EDM Song Structure - Track Breakdown
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This is only one example of how you can structure your song, feel free
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to deviate as much or as little as you want. During the music
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production process, there’s tons of room for experimentation,
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innovation, and self-expression; however, the vast majority of the
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time, you do not want to experiment with EDM song structure. By doing
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so you make your track more difficult to understand. No need to
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reinvent the wheel!
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Song Structure and Genre
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Now for a quick note on genre. Genre itself dictates a lot of how your
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track should be structured. A tech house track is going to have a
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different song structure than a future bass track, which will be
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different than an EDM trap track. Additionally, the length of the track
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also fairly tightly correlates to the genre, with pop-y tracks being
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shorter and club and house tracks being on the longer side.
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For example, future bass typically follow a more pop-like structure,
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with longer fleshed out melodic verses and short 4 bar intros and
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outtros. Most house music, however, has a significantly longer intro
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and outtro; 8 to 16 bars, sometimes even 32. House music also typically
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has fewer purely melodic elements focused in the verses and breakdowns,
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and instead focuses on the vibe, atmosphere, and groove, building up to
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an epic drop.
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Let’s take a look at [16]“Chained For Love – B2A & Anklebreaker Remix”.
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This is a hardstyle track and has a song structure of:
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A B C D B C D A
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Where A stands for your intro and outtro, B is your verse, C is the
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build, and D is the drop. This is an extremely common structure in
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hardstyle tracks; the verse is also typically split into a more vocal
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or lower energy first half, and the second half is where your
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saw-driven leads come in to introduce components of the drop melody.
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Now let’s examine a future bass track, [17]“Lifeline – LODIS, Josh
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Rubin”. This particular track has a structure like so:
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A B E C D B E C D A
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Note that this genre has a significantly longer intro than the previous
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hardstyle track, yet the overarching structure itself is remarkably
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similar. The key difference is the addition of E; which is a breakdown
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or pre-build. This component lowers the energy right before the build,
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allowing the producer to create a bigger feeling build.
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Finally, let’s take a look at a big room / EDM track. We’ll use
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[18]“Cold – Timmy Trumpet” as an example here. He utilizes the
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following structure for his track:
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B C D B C D A
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“Cold” also shares a similar structure to the other tracks. In fact,
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it’s virtually identical to “Chained For Love”, save for the lack of
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any sort of intro, even though the sounds and overall general vibe of
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the genre are strikingly different.
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EDM Song Structure and Arrangement
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Now we understand how songs are structured and how to structure our own
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track, we need to decide on the genre we want our loop to fit, or what
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genre the loop already fits. Then, identify which section of a track
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your loop fits into. Is it a heavy and energetic drop, or is it more a
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verse or breakdown?
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Once you’ve figured out these overarching details, we can start to
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think about how we want to structure our track. You can use your DAW or
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even just a piece of paper to map out each section of our song, and
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what should go where. Now it’s as simple as filling in the gaps with
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elements from your loop, and you’re well on your way to finishing your
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track!
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Let’s go over some of the common scenarios you’ll find yourself in.
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Starting with the Drop
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Your loop is energetic and pumping; this is your drop. Let’s use an A B
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C D B C D A structure for our track, just like the “Chained For Love –
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B2A & Anklebreaker Remix” prior example.
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EDM Song Structure - Straring with a Drop
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Now you’ve identified that you have a drop, let’s expand it to two
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sections with a little bit of melodic or rhythmic variation on the
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second iteration.
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Now we’ve gotten a full drop, let’s take a look at the build up. We can
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use more filtered leads and pads, and switch up the snare or clap to a
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contrasting rhythm to build tension. We’ll open up the filters and
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speed up the percussion as the drop builds to further build up that
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tension before the drop.
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Let’s take a look at the intro and outtro. Take the melody, simplify it
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and the instrumentation, and use a stripped down drum pattern. You can
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also experiment with some low and simple bass or some rhythmically
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simple chord patterns. The outtro can be as simple as the intro, but
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instead of bringing in elements, we take them out.
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The verses should be a contrasting force to the drop, while still
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maintaining a similar vibe. To quickly get down a verse idea, you can
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take the drop melody, take it down to a lower register with some more
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interesting rhythmic chord structures that build nicely into the build
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up. We can also add our second verse, build, and drops.
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EDM Song Structure - Starging with a Drop 5
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Starting with a Breakdown, Verse or Intro
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So your loop isn’t super energetic, maybe it fits well as a verse or
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intro. To generate your placeholder verses, take the idea and evolve it
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with moving drum patterns and chord patterns. The build up will then
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come more naturally, and you can introduce a switch-up in drum patterns
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to help contrast this section from the verses and drop. Work up the
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energy in the build up, adding faster drums and risers and other
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effects. After this build is complete, usually you’ll have a solid idea
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for the drop itself; if not, don’t worry! Take your verse idea, take
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apart a one or two bar section, and build upon it to make it as high
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energy as possible.
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Referencing Existing Material
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If you’re still struggling to build out your loop into a full track
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scaffold, try using your favorite song as reference. In this example,
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we’ll use HOLIDAY by Lil Nas X, a pop and rap song.
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Import the track into your DAW, and set the tempo equal to that of the
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track. Sometimes your DAW will do this for you, but if not, you can
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usually find it easily on Beatport or other sites.
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EDM Song Structure - Referencing Existing Material
|
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Take a listen to the song in full. As you listen, mark down where each
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change occurs in the song, and what the upcoming section is.Take a
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listen to the song in full. As you listen, mark down where each change
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occurs in the song, and what the upcoming section is.
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EDM Song Structure- Referencing Existing Material 2
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After going through the entire track, you’ll have an accurate map of
|
||||
the full track, and can use the markers as guidelines on how you can
|
||||
structure your own track.
|
||||
Start 2022 the right way! Download your FREE “New Producer Starter
|
||||
Pack” here.
|
||||
|
||||
Conclusion
|
||||
|
||||
One of the hardest parts of music production is actually finishing your
|
||||
own tracks, and not ending up with a hard drive full of unfinished
|
||||
loops. However, using song structuring techniques, we can use them as
|
||||
scaffolding for us to write better music, faster. When you create each
|
||||
section, make sure that each section captures and holds the user’s
|
||||
interest in its own right; the best songs are interesting throughout,
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||||
(even in the intros and outtros!), not just during the drops.
|
||||
|
||||
What do you struggle with most when it comes to EDM song structure?
|
||||
Let us know in the comments!
|
||||
[19]Share33
|
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[20]Tweet
|
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33 Shares
|
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|
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* [21]Music Theory & Arrangement
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|
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Related Posts
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||||
|
||||
How to Write Catchy Melodies from Scratch (The Ultimate Guide)
|
||||
|
||||
Everything an Electronic Music Producer Needs to Know About Drum
|
||||
Programming
|
||||
|
||||
About the Author
|
||||
|
||||
My name's Will Darling. I've been making and playing dance music for
|
||||
over 25 years, and share what I've learnt on EDM Tips. Get in touch on
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[22]Facebook.
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[23]←Previous post [24]Next post→
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What do you want to learn?
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* [25]Messages
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* [26]Mixing & Mastering
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* [27]Music Industry
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* [28]Music Theory & Arrangement
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* [29]Sound Design
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* [30]Workflow & Creativity
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About EDM Tips
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My name is Will Darling and I'm the founder of EDM Tips. I've been
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producing Electronic Dance Music for over 25 years, and each week help
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my readers achieve their music goals. [31]Read More...
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*
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* [32]Follow @edmtipsofficial
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Popular Posts
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[33]The Ultimate Guide to Success in Music Production in 2022
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[34]How To Make Chords
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[35]The Circle of Fifths (and how to use it…)
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[36]Make Better EDM Using Keys And Scales
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[37]The Ultimate EDM Production Glossary
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* [77]June 2019
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* [79]April 2019
|
||||
* [80]February 2019
|
||||
* [81]January 2019
|
||||
* [82]December 2018
|
||||
* [83]November 2018
|
||||
* [84]September 2018
|
||||
* [85]August 2018
|
||||
* [86]July 2018
|
||||
* [87]June 2018
|
||||
* [88]May 2018
|
||||
* [89]April 2018
|
||||
* [90]March 2018
|
||||
* [91]January 2018
|
||||
* [92]December 2017
|
||||
* [93]November 2017
|
||||
* [94]October 2017
|
||||
* [95]September 2017
|
||||
* [96]August 2017
|
||||
* [97]July 2017
|
||||
* [98]June 2017
|
||||
* [99]May 2017
|
||||
* [100]April 2017
|
||||
* [101]February 2017
|
||||
* [102]January 2017
|
||||
* [103]December 2016
|
||||
* [104]November 2016
|
||||
* [105]October 2016
|
||||
* [106]September 2016
|
||||
* [107]August 2016
|
||||
|
||||
Copyright 2023 EDM Tips Ltd.
|
||||
* [108]
|
||||
* [109]
|
||||
* [110]
|
||||
|
||||
References
|
||||
|
||||
Visible links:
|
||||
1. https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/feed/
|
||||
2. https://edmtips.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/3828
|
||||
3. https://edmtips.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/
|
||||
4. https://edmtips.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/&format=xml
|
||||
5. https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-N5SBWB6
|
||||
6. https://edmtips.com/
|
||||
7. https://edmtips.com/free-guides/
|
||||
8. https://edmtips.com/products/
|
||||
9. https://edmtips.com/about/
|
||||
10. https://edmtips.com/blog/
|
||||
11. https://academy.edmtips.com/login
|
||||
12. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L74532-8332TMP.html#comments
|
||||
13. https://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/
|
||||
14. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=EDM+Song+Structure:+Arrange+Your+Loop+into+a+Full+Song&url=https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/&via=EDMtipsOfficial
|
||||
15. https://www.youtube.com/embed/EXx9At3iUOw?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=0
|
||||
16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-tDyFu-YzQ
|
||||
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVtRH0znmqU
|
||||
18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nld4XNwpZN8
|
||||
19. https://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/
|
||||
20. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=EDM+Song+Structure:+Arrange+Your+Loop+into+a+Full+Song&url=https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/&via=EDMtipsOfficial
|
||||
21. https://edmtips.com/category/composition-arrangement/
|
||||
22. https://www.facebook.com/EDMtipsOfficial/
|
||||
23. https://edmtips.com/how-to-make-edm-like-martin-garrix/
|
||||
24. https://edmtips.com/guide-into-music-production-software-for-beginners/
|
||||
25. https://edmtips.com/category/messages/
|
||||
26. https://edmtips.com/category/mixing-mastering/
|
||||
27. https://edmtips.com/category/music-industry/
|
||||
28. https://edmtips.com/category/composition-arrangement/
|
||||
29. https://edmtips.com/category/sound-design/
|
||||
30. https://edmtips.com/category/workflow-creativity/
|
||||
31. http://edmtips.com/about/
|
||||
32. http://twitter.com/http://edmtipsofficial
|
||||
33. https://edmtips.com/success-music-production/
|
||||
34. https://edmtips.com/how-to-make-chords/
|
||||
35. https://edmtips.com/the-circle-of-fifths-and-how-to-use-it/
|
||||
36. https://edmtips.com/how-to-use-keys-make-edm/
|
||||
37. https://edmtips.com/ultimate-edm-production-glossary/
|
||||
38. https://edmtips.com/2023/04/
|
||||
39. https://edmtips.com/2023/03/
|
||||
40. https://edmtips.com/2023/02/
|
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41. https://edmtips.com/2023/01/
|
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42. https://edmtips.com/2022/11/
|
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43. https://edmtips.com/2022/10/
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44. https://edmtips.com/2022/09/
|
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45. https://edmtips.com/2022/07/
|
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46. https://edmtips.com/2022/05/
|
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47. https://edmtips.com/2022/03/
|
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48. https://edmtips.com/2022/02/
|
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49. https://edmtips.com/2022/01/
|
||||
50. https://edmtips.com/2021/10/
|
||||
51. https://edmtips.com/2021/09/
|
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52. https://edmtips.com/2021/08/
|
||||
53. https://edmtips.com/2021/06/
|
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54. https://edmtips.com/2021/05/
|
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55. https://edmtips.com/2021/04/
|
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56. https://edmtips.com/2021/03/
|
||||
57. https://edmtips.com/2021/02/
|
||||
58. https://edmtips.com/2021/01/
|
||||
59. https://edmtips.com/2020/12/
|
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60. https://edmtips.com/2020/11/
|
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61. https://edmtips.com/2020/10/
|
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62. https://edmtips.com/2020/09/
|
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63. https://edmtips.com/2020/08/
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64. https://edmtips.com/2020/07/
|
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65. https://edmtips.com/2020/06/
|
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66. https://edmtips.com/2020/05/
|
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67. https://edmtips.com/2020/04/
|
||||
68. https://edmtips.com/2020/03/
|
||||
69. https://edmtips.com/2020/02/
|
||||
70. https://edmtips.com/2020/01/
|
||||
71. https://edmtips.com/2019/12/
|
||||
72. https://edmtips.com/2019/11/
|
||||
73. https://edmtips.com/2019/10/
|
||||
74. https://edmtips.com/2019/09/
|
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75. https://edmtips.com/2019/08/
|
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76. https://edmtips.com/2019/07/
|
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77. https://edmtips.com/2019/06/
|
||||
78. https://edmtips.com/2019/05/
|
||||
79. https://edmtips.com/2019/04/
|
||||
80. https://edmtips.com/2019/02/
|
||||
81. https://edmtips.com/2019/01/
|
||||
82. https://edmtips.com/2018/12/
|
||||
83. https://edmtips.com/2018/11/
|
||||
84. https://edmtips.com/2018/09/
|
||||
85. https://edmtips.com/2018/08/
|
||||
86. https://edmtips.com/2018/07/
|
||||
87. https://edmtips.com/2018/06/
|
||||
88. https://edmtips.com/2018/05/
|
||||
89. https://edmtips.com/2018/04/
|
||||
90. https://edmtips.com/2018/03/
|
||||
91. https://edmtips.com/2018/01/
|
||||
92. https://edmtips.com/2017/12/
|
||||
93. https://edmtips.com/2017/11/
|
||||
94. https://edmtips.com/2017/10/
|
||||
95. https://edmtips.com/2017/09/
|
||||
96. https://edmtips.com/2017/08/
|
||||
97. https://edmtips.com/2017/07/
|
||||
98. https://edmtips.com/2017/06/
|
||||
99. https://edmtips.com/2017/05/
|
||||
100. https://edmtips.com/2017/04/
|
||||
101. https://edmtips.com/2017/02/
|
||||
102. https://edmtips.com/2017/01/
|
||||
103. https://edmtips.com/2016/12/
|
||||
104. https://edmtips.com/2016/11/
|
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105. https://edmtips.com/2016/10/
|
||||
106. https://edmtips.com/2016/09/
|
||||
107. https://edmtips.com/2016/08/
|
||||
108. https://www.facebook.com/EDMtipsOfficial/
|
||||
109. https://twitter.com/edmtipsofficial
|
||||
110. http://youtube.com/c/edmtips?sub_confirmation=1
|
||||
|
||||
Hidden links:
|
||||
112. https://edmtips.com/how-to-write-catchy-melodies-from-scratch-the-ultimate-guide/
|
||||
113. https://edmtips.com/drum-programming/
|
||||
114. https://edmtips.com/author/edmtips/
|
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128
static/archive/josem-co-8ssbyq.txt
Normal file
128
static/archive/josem-co-8ssbyq.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,128 @@
|
||||
#[1]alternate
|
||||
|
||||
* [2]Home
|
||||
* [3]Articles
|
||||
* [4]Work
|
||||
* [5]About
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
|
||||
The beauty of finished software
|
||||
|
||||
October 31, 2023
|
||||
|
||||
Let me introduce you to [6]WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from
|
||||
the early 80s.
|
||||
|
||||
Wordstar 4.0 WordStar 4.0
|
||||
|
||||
As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice
|
||||
and Fire”.
|
||||
|
||||
Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000
|
||||
pages? I love how he puts it:
|
||||
|
||||
It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it
|
||||
doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of
|
||||
these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it
|
||||
becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital,
|
||||
I would have typed the capital.[7]George R.R. Martin
|
||||
|
||||
This program embodies the concept of finished software — a software you
|
||||
can use forever with no unneeded changes.
|
||||
|
||||
Finished software is software that’s not expected to change, and that’s
|
||||
a feature! You can rely on it to do some real work.
|
||||
|
||||
Once you get used to the software, once the software works for you, you
|
||||
don’t need to learn anything new; the interface will exactly be the
|
||||
same, and all your files will stay relevant. No migrations, no new
|
||||
payments, no new changes.
|
||||
|
||||
This kind of software can be created intentionally, with a compromise
|
||||
from the creators that they won’t bother you with things you don’t
|
||||
need, and only the absolutely necessary will change, like minor updates
|
||||
to make it compatible with new operating systems.
|
||||
|
||||
Sometimes, finished software happens accidentally; maybe the company
|
||||
behind it has disappeared, or the product has been abandoned.
|
||||
|
||||
There are also some great examples in the UNIX world of finished
|
||||
software: commands like cd(to change the current directory) or ls(to
|
||||
list what’s there) won’t ever change in a significant way. You can rely
|
||||
on them until the end of your career.
|
||||
|
||||
The seduction of constant updates
|
||||
|
||||
Our expectations for software are different from other products we use
|
||||
in our daily lives.
|
||||
|
||||
When we buy a physical product, we accept that it won’t change in its
|
||||
lifetime. We’ll use it until it wears off, and we replace it. We can
|
||||
rely on that product not evolving; the gas pedal in my car will always
|
||||
be in the same place.
|
||||
|
||||
However, when it comes to software, we usually have the ingrained
|
||||
expectations of perpetual updates. We believe that if software doesn’t
|
||||
evolve it’ll be boring, old and unusable. If we see an app with no
|
||||
updates in the last year, we think the creator might be dead.
|
||||
|
||||
We also expect new versions of any software will be better than the
|
||||
previous ones. Once it’s released, most of our problems will be solved!
|
||||
What a deceiving lie.
|
||||
|
||||
Sometimes, a software upgrade is a step backward: less usable, less
|
||||
stable, with new bugs. Even if it’s genuinely better, there’s the
|
||||
learning curve. You were efficient with the old version, but now your
|
||||
most used button is on the other side of the screen under a hidden
|
||||
menu.
|
||||
|
||||
Finished software is a good reminder
|
||||
|
||||
In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software
|
||||
provides a breath of fresh air. It’s a reminder that reliability,
|
||||
consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software
|
||||
development.
|
||||
|
||||
So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update,
|
||||
remember that sometimes, the best software is the one that doesn’t
|
||||
change at all.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
References
|
||||
|
||||
[1] George R.R. Martin in Conan show (2014).
|
||||
[8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg.
|
||||
|
||||
Subscribe below to get future posts in your inbox (no spam)
|
||||
____________________
|
||||
____________________
|
||||
Subscribe
|
||||
|
||||
Or use the [9]RSS feed link.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
This site is ads-free and done in my free time. [10]Buy Me A Coffee to
|
||||
help me keep working on it.
|
||||
|
||||
© 2023 [11]Home | [12]RSS feed | [13]Buy Me A Coffee
|
||||
|
||||
References
|
||||
|
||||
Visible links:
|
||||
1. https://josem.co//articles/index.xml
|
||||
2. https://josem.co/
|
||||
3. https://josem.co/articles/
|
||||
4. https://josem.co/work/
|
||||
5. https://josem.co/about/
|
||||
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
|
||||
7. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75711-7804TMP.html#rf1
|
||||
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg
|
||||
9. https://josem.co/articles/index.xml
|
||||
10. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/josem.co
|
||||
11. https://josem.co/
|
||||
12. https://josem.co/articles/index.xml
|
||||
13. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/josem.co
|
||||
|
||||
Hidden links:
|
||||
15. https://josem.co/
|
||||
16. file://localhost/var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75711-7804TMP.html#top
|
||||
755
static/archive/samkriss-substack-com-5indyq.txt
Normal file
755
static/archive/samkriss-substack-com-5indyq.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,755 @@
|
||||
#[1]Numb at the Lodge
|
||||
|
||||
[2][https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.ama
|
||||
zonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75fb5a16-c295-4898-b7e3-9ab295cd3530_378
|
||||
x378.png]
|
||||
|
||||
[3]Numb at the Lodge
|
||||
|
||||
(BUTTON) (BUTTON)
|
||||
Subscribe
|
||||
(BUTTON) Sign in
|
||||
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
Share this post
|
||||
|
||||
The internet is already over
|
||||
|
||||
samkriss.substack.com
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
Copy link
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
Facebook
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
Email
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
Note
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
Other
|
||||
|
||||
Discover more from Numb at the Lodge
|
||||
|
||||
These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here
|
||||
Over 11,000 subscribers
|
||||
____________________
|
||||
(BUTTON) Subscribe
|
||||
Continue reading
|
||||
Sign in
|
||||
|
||||
The internet is already over
|
||||
|
||||
Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.
|
||||
|
||||
[4]Sam Kriss
|
||||
Sep 18, 2022
|
||||
Share
|
||||
|
||||
A sort of preface
|
||||
|
||||
There’s a phrase that’s been living inside my head lately, a brain
|
||||
parasite, some burrowing larva covered in thorns and barbs of words.
|
||||
When it moves around in there it churns at the soft tissues like
|
||||
someone’s stuck a very small hand blender in my skull. It repeats
|
||||
itself inside the wormy cave system that used to be my thoughts. It
|
||||
says you will not survive. You will not survive. You will not survive.
|
||||
|
||||
Earlier this year, an article in the Cut reported that the cool thing
|
||||
now is to have messy hair and smoke cigarettes again. You might
|
||||
remember it; the piece was widely mocked for a day or two, and then it
|
||||
vanished without a trace, which is how these things tend to go. But the
|
||||
headline was incredible, and it stuck with me. [5]A Vibe Shift Is
|
||||
Coming. Will Any Of Us Survive It? Everyone else seemed to focus on the
|
||||
‘vibe shift’ stuff, but the second part was much more interesting. To
|
||||
talk about survival—what extraordinary stakes, for a piece that was, in
|
||||
essence, about how young people are wearing different types of shoes
|
||||
from the shoes that you, as a slightly older person who still wants to
|
||||
think of themselves as young, wear. Everything is stripped back to the
|
||||
rawest truth: that you are a fragile creature perishing in time. And
|
||||
all you need to do is apply Betteridge’s Law for the real content to
|
||||
shine through. No. None of you will survive.
|
||||
|
||||
There was an ancient thought: that Zeus feeds on the world. ‘The
|
||||
universe is cyclically consumed by the fire that engendered it.’ Our
|
||||
God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing. As it
|
||||
happens, this was the first thought, the first ever written down in a
|
||||
book of philosophy, the first to survive: that nothing survives, and
|
||||
the blankness that birthed you will be the same hole you crawl into
|
||||
again. Anaximander: ‘Whence things have their origin, thence also their
|
||||
destruction lies…’ In the Polynesian version, Maui tried to achieve
|
||||
immortality by taking the form of a worm and slithering into the vagina
|
||||
of Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of night and death.[6]1 He failed.
|
||||
Hine-nui-te-po’s pussy is full of obsidian teeth; when she stirred in
|
||||
the night those teeth sliced clean through his body. He dribbled out
|
||||
again, a loose mulch of the hero who conquered the Sun.
|
||||
|
||||
You will not survive is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope
|
||||
for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but
|
||||
so will everything I despise.[7]2 These days, it repeats itself
|
||||
whenever I see something that’s trying its hardest to make me angry and
|
||||
upset. There’s a whole class of these objects: they’re never
|
||||
particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into
|
||||
thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from
|
||||
wherever you are. One-Third Of Newborn Infants Now Describe Themselves
|
||||
As Polyamorous—Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing. Should I get upset about
|
||||
this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive.[8]3 Meet
|
||||
The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in
|
||||
trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending. Everyone That Matters Has
|
||||
Started Wearing Jeans Over Their Heads With Their Arms Down The Leg
|
||||
Holes And Their Faces All Cramped Up In The Sweaty Groin Region, And
|
||||
They Walk Down The Street Like This, Bumping Into Things, And When They
|
||||
Sit Down To Eat They Just Pour Their Subscription-Service
|
||||
Meal-Replacement Slurry Over The Crotch Of Their Jeans And Lick At The
|
||||
Dribblings From The Inside, And They’re Covered In Flies And Smell Bad
|
||||
And Also They’re Naked From The Waist Down Because Their Trousers Are
|
||||
On Their Heads, That’s Part Of It Too—We Show You How To Get The Look!
|
||||
How proud they are of their new thing. ‘The strong iron-hearted
|
||||
man-slaying Achilles, who would not live long.’
|
||||
|
||||
In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself:
|
||||
trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical
|
||||
time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new. It’s
|
||||
already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our
|
||||
bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all
|
||||
our pop music sounds like a tribute act.[9]4 But consider that the
|
||||
cultural shift that had all those thirtysomething Cut writers so
|
||||
worried about their survival is simply the return of a vague Y2K
|
||||
sensibility, which was itself just an echo of the early 1980s. Angular
|
||||
guitar music again, flash photography, plaid. We’re on a twenty-year
|
||||
loop: the time it takes for a new generation to be born, kick around
|
||||
for a while, and then settle into the rhythm of the spheres.
|
||||
|
||||
Every time this happens, it coincides with a synodic conjunction of
|
||||
Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, the triumphant present; Saturn,
|
||||
senescence, decline. The son who castrates his father, the father who
|
||||
devours his sons: once every twenty years, they are indistinguishable
|
||||
in the sky. Astrologers call this the Great Chronocrator. The last one
|
||||
was at the end of 2020, and it’ll occur twice more in my lifetime: when
|
||||
these witless trendwatchers finally shuffle off, they’ll be tended on
|
||||
their deathbeds by a nurse with messy black eyeshadow and low-rise
|
||||
scrubs. Jupiter and Saturn will burn above you as a single point, and
|
||||
with your last rattling breaths you’ll still be asking if she thinks
|
||||
you’re cool. You don’t get it. ‘For oute of olde feldes, as men seith,
|
||||
cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere.’ We are entering a blissful
|
||||
new Middle Ages, where you simply soak in a static world until the
|
||||
waters finally close in over your head.
|
||||
|
||||
The things that will survive are the things that are already in some
|
||||
sense endless. The sea; the night; the word. Things with deep fathoms
|
||||
of darkness in them.
|
||||
|
||||
The internet will not survive.
|
||||
|
||||
The argument
|
||||
|
||||
1. That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the
|
||||
internet
|
||||
|
||||
In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual
|
||||
to have a computer in his home.’ In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in
|
||||
InfoWorld that the internet would go ‘spectacularly supernova’ and then
|
||||
collapse within a year. In 2000, the Daily Mail reported that the
|
||||
‘Internet may be just a passing fad,’ adding that ‘predictions that the
|
||||
Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly
|
||||
inaccurate.’ Any day now, the millions of internet users would simply
|
||||
stop, either bored or frustrated, and rejoin the real world.
|
||||
|
||||
Funny, isn’t it? You can laugh at these people now, from your high
|
||||
perch one quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Look at
|
||||
these morons, stuck in their grubby little past, who couldn’t even
|
||||
correctly identify the shape of the year 2022. You can see it
|
||||
perfectly, because you’re smart. You know that the internet has changed
|
||||
everything, forever.
|
||||
|
||||
If you like the internet, you’ll point out that it’s given us all of
|
||||
human knowledge and art and music, instantly accessible from anywhere
|
||||
in the world; that you can arrive in a foreign city and immediately
|
||||
guide yourself to a restaurant and translate the menu and also find out
|
||||
about the interesting historical massacres that took place nearby, all
|
||||
with a few lazy swipes of your finger. So many interesting little
|
||||
blogs! So many bizarre subcultures! It’s opened up our experience of
|
||||
the world: now, nothing is out of reach.
|
||||
|
||||
To be honest, it’s difficult to reconstruct what the unbridled
|
||||
techno-optimists think; there’s so few of them left. Still, those who
|
||||
don’t like the internet usually agree with them on all the basics—they
|
||||
just argue that we’re now in touch with the wrong sort of thing: bad
|
||||
kids’ cartoons, bad political opinions, bad ways of relating to your
|
||||
own body and others. Which is why it’s so important to get all this
|
||||
unpleasant stuff off the system, and turn the algorithm towards what is
|
||||
good and true.
|
||||
|
||||
They might be right, but you could go deeper. The internet has enabled
|
||||
us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people. It
|
||||
replaces everything good in life with a low-resolution [10]simulation.
|
||||
A handful of sugar instead of a meal: addictive but empty, just enough
|
||||
to keep you alive. It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it
|
||||
with more cheap, synthetic [11]ersatz. Our most basic biological drives
|
||||
simply wither in its cold blue light. People will cheerfully admit that
|
||||
the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really
|
||||
done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing
|
||||
something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post
|
||||
office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean
|
||||
warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that
|
||||
broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on
|
||||
the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not
|
||||
there. That rectangular hole spews out war crimes and cutesy comedies
|
||||
and affirmations and porn, all of it mixed together into one
|
||||
general-purpose informational goo, and I remain in its trance, the
|
||||
lifeless scroll, twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark
|
||||
and I’m one day closer to the end. You lose hours to—what? An endless
|
||||
slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text.
|
||||
Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing,
|
||||
but the internet addicts you to your own boredom. I’ve tried heroin:
|
||||
this is worse. More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide
|
||||
booth; a device for turning off your entire existence. Death is no
|
||||
longer waiting for you at the far end of life. It eats away at your
|
||||
short span from the inside out.
|
||||
|
||||
But lately I’m starting to think that the last thing the internet
|
||||
destroys might be itself. I think they might be vindicated, Ken Olson
|
||||
and Robert Metcalfe and even, God forgive me, the Daily Mail.
|
||||
|
||||
In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will
|
||||
remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or
|
||||
the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email
|
||||
or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where
|
||||
culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will
|
||||
seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the
|
||||
phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several
|
||||
decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those
|
||||
novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping
|
||||
noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so
|
||||
lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet
|
||||
plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to
|
||||
predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with
|
||||
exactly the same laugh.[12]5
|
||||
|
||||
2. That exhausted is a whole lot more than tired
|
||||
|
||||
You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing
|
||||
is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All
|
||||
language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged
|
||||
mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt
|
||||
the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces,
|
||||
spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple
|
||||
and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the
|
||||
end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the
|
||||
ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves;
|
||||
that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world.
|
||||
It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions,
|
||||
chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even [13]literalise this:
|
||||
everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible
|
||||
call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw
|
||||
the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with
|
||||
their negronis. This is called being real.
|
||||
|
||||
Whoever you are, a role is already waiting for you. All those pouty
|
||||
nineteen-year-old lowercase nymphets, so fluent in their borrowed
|
||||
boredom, flatly reciting don’t just choke me i want someone to cut off
|
||||
my entire head. All those wide-eyed video creeps, their inhuman
|
||||
enthusiasm, hi guys! hi guys!! so today we’re going to talk about—don’t
|
||||
forget to like and subscribe!! hi guys!!! Even on the deranged fringes,
|
||||
a dead grammar has set in. The people who fake Tourette’s for TikTok
|
||||
and the people who fake schizophrenia for no reason at all. VOICES HAVE
|
||||
REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM
|
||||
BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET
|
||||
LAUNCHER. Without even passing out of date, every mode of
|
||||
internet-speak already sounds antiquated. Aren’t you embarrassed? Can’t
|
||||
you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient
|
||||
whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?
|
||||
|
||||
When I say the internet is running dry, I am not just basing this off
|
||||
vibes. The exhaustion is measurable and real. 2020 saw a grand, mostly
|
||||
unnoticed shift in online behaviour: the [14]clickhogs all went
|
||||
catatonic, thick tongues lolling in the muck. On Facebook, the average
|
||||
engagement rate—the number of likes, comments, and shares per
|
||||
follower—fell by 34%, from 0.086 to 0.057. Well, everyone knows that
|
||||
the mushrooms are spreading over Facebook, hundreds of thousands of
|
||||
users [15]liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same pattern
|
||||
is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter.
|
||||
(It’s [16]kept falling since.) Even on TikTok, the terrifying brainhole
|
||||
of tomorrow, the walls are closing in. Until 2020, the average daily
|
||||
time spent on the app kept rising in line with its growing user base;
|
||||
since then the number of users has kept growing, but the thing is
|
||||
capturing [17]less and less of their lives.
|
||||
|
||||
And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing
|
||||
to do except engage with great content online—and in which, for a few
|
||||
months, liking and sharing the right content became an urgent moral
|
||||
duty. Back then, I thought the pandemic and the protests had
|
||||
permanently hauled our collective human semi-consciousness over to the
|
||||
machine. Like most of us, I couldn’t see what was really happening, but
|
||||
there were some people who could. Around the same time, strange new
|
||||
conspiracy theories started doing the rounds: that [18]the internet is
|
||||
empty, that all the human beings you used to talk to have been replaced
|
||||
by bots and drones. ‘The internet of today is entirely sterile… the
|
||||
internet may seem gigantic, but it’s like a hot air balloon with
|
||||
nothing inside.’ They weren’t wrong.
|
||||
|
||||
What’s happening?[19]6 Here’s a story from the very early days of the
|
||||
internet. In the 90s, someone I know started a collaborative online
|
||||
zine, a mishmash text file of barely lucid thoughts and theories. It
|
||||
was deeply weird and, in some strange corners, very popular. Years
|
||||
passed and technology improved: soon, they could break the text file
|
||||
into different posts, and see exactly how many people were reading each
|
||||
one. They started optimising their output: the most popular posts
|
||||
became the model for everything else; they found a style and voice that
|
||||
worked. The result, of course, was that the entire thing became rote
|
||||
and lifeless and rapidly collapsed. Much of the media is currently
|
||||
going down the same path, refining itself out of existence. Aside from
|
||||
the New Yorker’s fussy umlauts, there’s simply nothing to distinguish
|
||||
any one publication from any other. (And platforms like this one are
|
||||
not an alternative to the crisis-stricken media, just a further
|
||||
acceleration in the process.) The same thing is happening everywhere,
|
||||
to everyone. The more you relentlessly optimise your network-facing
|
||||
self, the more you chase the last globs of loose attention, the more
|
||||
frazzled we all become, and the less anyone will be able to sustain any
|
||||
interest at all.[20]7
|
||||
|
||||
Everything that depends on the internet for its propagation will die.
|
||||
What survives will survive in conditions of low transparency, in the
|
||||
sensuous murk proper to human life.
|
||||
|
||||
3. That you have been plugged into a grave
|
||||
|
||||
For a while, it was possible to live your entire life online. The world
|
||||
teemed with new services: simply dab at an app, and the machine would
|
||||
summon some other slumping creature with a skin condition to deliver
|
||||
your groceries, or drive you in pointless circles around town, or meet
|
||||
you for overpriced drinks and awkward sex and vanish. Like everyone, I
|
||||
thought this was the inevitable shape of the future. ‘You’ll own
|
||||
nothing, and you’ll be happy.’ We’d all be reduced to a life spent
|
||||
swapping small services for the last linty coins in our pockets. It’s
|
||||
Uber for dogs! It’s Uber for dogshit! It’s picking up a fresh, creamy
|
||||
pile of dogshit with your bare hands—on your phone! But this was not a
|
||||
necessary result of new technologies. The internet was not
|
||||
subordinating every aspect of our lives by itself, under its own power.
|
||||
The online economy is an energy sink; it’s only survived this far as a
|
||||
parasite, in the bowels of something else.
|
||||
|
||||
That something else is a vast underground cavern of the dead, billions
|
||||
of years old.
|
||||
|
||||
The Vision Fund is an investment vehicle headquartered in London and
|
||||
founded by Japan’s SoftBank to manage some $150 billion, mostly from
|
||||
the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it’s
|
||||
poured into Uber and DoorDash and WeWork and Klarna and Slack. It
|
||||
provides the money that [21]effectively subsidises your autistic
|
||||
digital life. These firms could take over the market because they were
|
||||
so much cheaper than the traditional competitors—but most of them were
|
||||
never profitable; they survived on Saudi largesse.
|
||||
|
||||
Investors were willing to sit on these losses; it’s not as if there
|
||||
were many alternatives. Capital is no longer capable of effectively
|
||||
reproducing itself in the usual way, through the production of
|
||||
commodities. Twenty-five years ago manufacturing represented a
|
||||
[22]fifth of global GDP; in 2020 it was down to 16%. Interest rates
|
||||
have hovered near zero for well over a decade as economies struggle to
|
||||
grow. Until this year, governments were still issuing negative-yield
|
||||
bonds, and [23]people were buying them—a predictable loss looked like
|
||||
the least bad option. The only reliable source of profits is in the
|
||||
extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of
|
||||
trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set
|
||||
on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands—men
|
||||
like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—ended up sitting on
|
||||
a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through
|
||||
which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it
|
||||
in the tech sector.
|
||||
|
||||
It didn’t matter that these firms couldn’t turn a profit. The real
|
||||
function was not to make money in the short term; it was to suck up
|
||||
vast quantities of user data. Where you go, what you buy; a perfect
|
||||
snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this
|
||||
would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff
|
||||
that rules the world.[24]8
|
||||
|
||||
They were wrong, but in the process of being wrong, they created a
|
||||
monster. Your frictionless digital future, your very important culture
|
||||
wars, your entire sense of self—it’s just a waste byproduct of the
|
||||
perfectly ordinary, centuries-old global circulation of fuel, capital,
|
||||
and Islam. It turns out that if these three elements are arranged in
|
||||
one particular way, people will start behaving strangely. They’ll
|
||||
pretend that by spending all day on the computer they’re actually
|
||||
fighting fascism, or standing up for women’s sex-based rights, as if
|
||||
the entire terrain of combat wasn’t provided by a nightmare
|
||||
head-chopping theocratic state.[25]9 They’ll pretend that it’s normal
|
||||
to dance alone in silence for a front-facing camera, or that the
|
||||
intersection of art and technology is somehow an interesting place to
|
||||
be. For a brief minute, you’ll get the sociocultural Boltzmann entity
|
||||
we call the internet. ‘But nevertheless, it was only a minute. After
|
||||
nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the
|
||||
clever beasts had to die.’
|
||||
|
||||
The tables are already being cleared at the great tech-sector
|
||||
chow-down.[26]10 Online services are reverting to market prices. The
|
||||
Vision Fund is the worst performing fund in SoftBank’s history; in the
|
||||
last quarter alone it’s [27]lost over $20 billion. Most of all, it’s
|
||||
now impossible to ignore that the promise propping up the entire
|
||||
networked economy—that user data could power a system of terrifyingly
|
||||
precise targeted advertising—was a lie. It simply does not work. ‘It
|
||||
sees that you bought a [28]ticket to Budapest, so you get more tickets
|
||||
to Budapest…All they really know about you is your shopping.’ Now,
|
||||
large companies are cutting out their online advertising budgets
|
||||
entirely, and seeing [29]no change whatsoever to their bottom line. One
|
||||
study found that algorithmically targeted advertising performed worse
|
||||
than ads [30]selected at random. This is what [31]sustains the entire
|
||||
media, provides 80% of Google’s income and 99% of Facebook’s, and it’s
|
||||
made of magic beans.
|
||||
|
||||
A dying animal still makes its last few spastic kicks: hence the recent
|
||||
flurry of strange and stillborn ideas. Remember the Internet of Things?
|
||||
Your own lightbulbs blinking out ads in seizure-inducing Morse code,
|
||||
your own coffee machine calling the police if you try to feed it some
|
||||
unlicensed beans. Remember the Metaverse? The grisly pink avatar of
|
||||
Mark Zuckerberg, bobbing around like the ghost of someone’s foreskin
|
||||
through the scene of the recent genocides. Wow! It’s so cool to
|
||||
immersively experience these bloodmires in VR! More recent attempts to
|
||||
squeeze some kind of profit out of this carcass are, somehow, worse.
|
||||
Here’s how web3 is about to disrupt the meat industry. Every time you
|
||||
buy a pound of tripe, your physical offal will be bundled with a
|
||||
dedicated TripeToken, which maintains its value and rarity even after
|
||||
the tripe has been eaten, thanks to a unique blockchain signature
|
||||
indexed to the intestinal microbiome of the slaughtered cattle! By
|
||||
eating large amounts of undercooked offal while trading TripeTokens on
|
||||
secondary markets, you can incentivise the spread of your favourite
|
||||
cattle diseases—and if one of the pathogens you own jumps the species
|
||||
barrier to start infecting humans, you’ve successfully monetised the
|
||||
next pandemic! Once you get sick, you can rent out portions of your own
|
||||
intestinal tract to an industrial meat DAO in exchange for
|
||||
SlaughterCoins. Because SlaughterCoins are linked via blockchain to the
|
||||
progressive disintegration of your body, they’re guaranteed to increase
|
||||
in value! And when your suffering becomes unbearable, local abattoirs
|
||||
will bid to buy up your SlaughterCoin wallet in exchange for putting
|
||||
you out of your misery with a bolt gun to the head! Yes, the future is
|
||||
always capable of getting worse. But this future is simply never going
|
||||
to happen. Not the next generation of anything, just a short-term
|
||||
grift: the ship’s rats stripping the galley of all its silverware on
|
||||
their way out.
|
||||
|
||||
4. That the revolution can not be digitised
|
||||
|
||||
If you really want to see how impotent the internet is, though, you
|
||||
only have to look at politics.
|
||||
|
||||
Everyone agrees that the internet has [32]swallowed our entire
|
||||
political discourse whole. When politicians debate, they trade crap
|
||||
one-liners to be turned into gifs. Their strategists seem to think
|
||||
elections are won or lost [33]on memes. Entire movements emerge out of
|
||||
flatulent little echo chambers; elected representatives giddy over the
|
||||
evils of seed oils or babbling about how it’s not their job to educate
|
||||
you. And it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly,
|
||||
it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that
|
||||
produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads. But
|
||||
as a political instrument, all it can do is destroy anyone who tries to
|
||||
pick it up—because everything that reproduces itself through the
|
||||
internet is doomed.
|
||||
|
||||
Occasionally, online social movements do make something happen. A hand
|
||||
emerges from out of the cloud to squish some minor individual. Let’s
|
||||
get her friends to denounce her! Let’s find out where she lives! You
|
||||
can have your sadistic fun and your righteous justice at the same time:
|
||||
doesn’t it feel good to be good? But these movements build no
|
||||
institutions, create no collective subjects, and produce no meaningful
|
||||
change. Their only power is punishment—and this game only works within
|
||||
the internet, and only when everyone involved agrees to play by the
|
||||
internet’s rules.[34]11 As soon as they run up against anything with a
|
||||
separate set of values—say, a Republican Party that wants to put its
|
||||
guy on the Supreme Court, #MeToo or no #MeToo—they instantly crumble.
|
||||
And if, like much of the contemporary left, you're left with nothing on
|
||||
which to build your political movement except a hodgepodge of online
|
||||
frenzies, you will crumble too.
|
||||
|
||||
The post-George Floyd demonstrations might be our era’s greatest
|
||||
tragedy: tens of millions of people mobilised in (possibly) the largest
|
||||
protest movement in human history, all for an urgent and necessary
|
||||
cause—and achieving precisely nothing. [35]At the time, I worried that
|
||||
the mass street movement risked being consumed by the sterile politics
|
||||
of online; this is exactly what happened. Now, even that vague cultural
|
||||
halo is spent. Whatever wokeness was, as of 2022 it’s so utterly burned
|
||||
out as a cultural force that anyone still grousing about it 24/7 is a
|
||||
guaranteed hack. More recently, there’s been worry about the rise of
|
||||
the ‘[36]new right’—a oozingly digitised political current whose
|
||||
effective proposition is that people should welcome a total
|
||||
dictatorship to prevent corporations posting rainbow flags on the
|
||||
internet. You can guess what I think of its prospects.
|
||||
|
||||
5. That this is the word
|
||||
|
||||
Things will survive in proportion to how well they’ve managed to
|
||||
insulate themselves from the internet and its demands. The Financial
|
||||
Times will outlive the Guardian. Paintings will outlive NFTs. Print
|
||||
magazines will outlive Substack. You will, if you play your cards
|
||||
right, outlive me. If anything interesting ever happens again, it will
|
||||
not be online. You will not get it delivered to your inbox. It will not
|
||||
have a podcast. This machine has never produced anything of note, and
|
||||
it never will.
|
||||
|
||||
A sword is against the internet, against those who live online, and
|
||||
against its officials and wise men. A sword is against its false
|
||||
prophets, and they will become fools. A sword is against its
|
||||
commentators, and they will be filled with exhaustion. A sword is
|
||||
against its trends and fashions and against all the posturers in its
|
||||
midst, and they will become out of touch. A sword is against its
|
||||
cryptocoins, and they will be worthless. A drought is upon its waters,
|
||||
and they will be dried up. For it is a place of graven images, and the
|
||||
people go mad over idols. So the desert creatures and hyenas will live
|
||||
there and ostriches will dwell there. The bots will chatter at its
|
||||
threshold, and dead links will litter the river bed. It will never
|
||||
again be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation.
|
||||
|
||||
A conclusion, or, where I’m going with all this
|
||||
|
||||
I am aware that I’m writing this on the internet.
|
||||
|
||||
Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not
|
||||
click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email
|
||||
address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love
|
||||
of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me
|
||||
any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can
|
||||
still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean
|
||||
absolutely nothing.
|
||||
____________________
|
||||
(BUTTON) Subscribe
|
||||
|
||||
As far as I can tell, Substack mostly functions as a kind of
|
||||
meta-discourse for Twitter. (At least, this is the part I’ve seen—there
|
||||
are also, apparently, recipes.) Graham Linehan posts fifty times a day
|
||||
on this platform, and all of it is just replying to tweets. This does
|
||||
not strike me as particularly sustainable. I have no idea what kind of
|
||||
demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be
|
||||
lying in a meadow by a glassy stream, rien faire comme une bête, eyes
|
||||
melting into the sky. According to the very helpful Substack employees
|
||||
I’ve spoken to, there are a set of handy best practices for this
|
||||
particular region of the machine: have regular open threads, chitchat
|
||||
with your subscribers, post humanising updates about your life. Form a
|
||||
community. I’m told that the most successful writing on here is
|
||||
friendly, frequent, and fast. Apparently, readers should know exactly
|
||||
what you’re getting at within the first three sentences. I do not plan
|
||||
on doing any of these things.
|
||||
|
||||
This is what I would like to do. I would like to see if, in the belly
|
||||
of the dying internet, it’s possible to create something that is not
|
||||
like the internet. I want to see if I can poke at the outlines of
|
||||
whatever is coming next. In a previous life, I was a sort of mildly
|
||||
infamous online opinion gremlin, best known for being extravagantly
|
||||
mean about other opinion writers whose writing or whose opinions I
|
||||
didn’t like. These days, I find most of that stuff very, very dull. I
|
||||
wonder if it’s possible to talk about things differently. Not
|
||||
rationally or calmly, away from the cheap point-scoring of online
|
||||
discourse—that would also be boring—but with a better, less sterile
|
||||
kind of derangement. I’m interested in the forms of writing that were
|
||||
here long before the internet, and which will be here long after it’s
|
||||
gone. Not thinkpieces or blogs, but the essay, the manifesto, the
|
||||
satyr, and the screed. Ludibria, pseudepigrapha, quodlibets. Or
|
||||
folktales. Prophecy. Dreams.
|
||||
[37]1
|
||||
|
||||
I am very disappointed that this scene never appears in Disney’s Moana.
|
||||
[38]2
|
||||
|
||||
It’s the same thought that, in Marx’s 1873 postface to Capital, Volume
|
||||
I, ‘includes in its positive understanding of what exists a
|
||||
simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction.’
|
||||
Or Hegel’s famous line on the flight habits of nocturnal birds. Or
|
||||
Baudrillard after the orgy, sticky and spent, announcing that the
|
||||
revolution has already happened and the Messiah has already been and
|
||||
gone.
|
||||
[39]3
|
||||
|
||||
As a general rule: by the time you hear about any of this stuff, by the
|
||||
time it’s in general discursive circulation, whatever was motive and
|
||||
real in the phenomenon has already died. Every culture warrior spends
|
||||
their life raging at the light of a very distant, long-exploded star.
|
||||
[40]4
|
||||
|
||||
Every few weeks, there are ads for some new band plastered over the
|
||||
Tube. The acid, whipsmart voice of twenty-first century youth! Then you
|
||||
listen, and they’re just ripping off the Fall again. ‘You think your
|
||||
haircut is distinguished, when it’s a blot on the English landscape.’
|
||||
[41]5
|
||||
|
||||
Chances are, though, that it won’t be remembered at all. Gregory of
|
||||
Tours was a Roman aristocrat, the son of a Senator, raised on Virgil
|
||||
and Sallust, but in his dense ten-volume History he never bothers to
|
||||
even mention the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The old imperial
|
||||
world had ended so decisively that its passing wasn’t even considered
|
||||
particularly important; the new world of barbarian kings (governing
|
||||
through a system of ecclesiastical administration inherited from the
|
||||
empire, and that still functioned, if haphazardly, with only the most
|
||||
nominal connections to central authority in Italy or the Bosporus) had
|
||||
become the only possible world order, even as the cities shrank and
|
||||
Mediterranean trade vanished. Syagrius, magister militum in the Roman
|
||||
rump state around Noviodunum, becomes the King of the Romans; his
|
||||
imperial holdout becomes the Kingdom of Soissons. It took several
|
||||
centuries for people to decide that anything particularly significant
|
||||
had happened when Odoacer overthrew the teenaged Romulus Augustulus in
|
||||
476 AD. This is why the internet has not been a true revolution:
|
||||
everyone online is still obsessing over how much has changed, and
|
||||
fondly remembering the time before we all spent all our waking hours
|
||||
staring at phones.
|
||||
[42]6
|
||||
|
||||
Actually, I have two slightly overlapping theories on what might be
|
||||
happening. The main one is above; the second, which is weirder and
|
||||
makes less sense, has been shoved down here. Samuel Beckett describes a
|
||||
version of the internet and its exhaustion, one made of small pebbles.
|
||||
Here is Molloy on the beach, this limping old bird in his shabby
|
||||
overcoat, rolling in the sand. ‘Much of my life has ebbed away before
|
||||
this shivering expanse, to the sound of waves in storm and calm, and
|
||||
the claws of the surf.’ He has sixteen stones in his pocket, and every
|
||||
so often he puts one in his mouth to suck on it for a while. ‘A little
|
||||
pebble in your mouth, round and smooth, appeases, soothes, makes you
|
||||
forget your hunger, forget your thirst.’ The problem: how to make sure
|
||||
that when he next reaches into his pocket, he doesn’t take out the
|
||||
stone he’s just sucked? How to make sure he’s getting the full
|
||||
enjoyment out of each of his sixteen stones? Novelty is mysteriously
|
||||
important, even though ‘deep down it was all the same to me whether I
|
||||
sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the
|
||||
end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same.’ For a while, his
|
||||
coat and his trousers and his mouth are turned into a series of
|
||||
machines for creating sequences of stones. Supply pockets and store
|
||||
pockets, modes of circulation: curated algorithms, organising the world
|
||||
and its information. Beckett spends half a dozen pages (in my edition)
|
||||
describing these systems, as each of them arrives in a flash of divine
|
||||
inspiration and fails in turn. Eventually, Molloy has exhausted every
|
||||
possible arrangement of atoms and voids. ‘The solution to which I
|
||||
rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I
|
||||
kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon
|
||||
lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed. It was a wild part of
|
||||
the coast.’ In The Exhausted, his grand study of Beckett, Deleuze
|
||||
comments on the distinction between the exhausted and the merely tired.
|
||||
‘The tired has only exhausted realisation, while the exhausted exhausts
|
||||
all of the possible.’ To exhaust the world as it is you only need to
|
||||
experience it: wander through reality, and get bored. But for true
|
||||
exhaustion, you need to know that everything that could be is as empty
|
||||
as everything that is. To reach exhaustion, you need some kind of
|
||||
device, made of ‘tables and programmes,’ a technics. Something like
|
||||
Molloy’s overcoat. ‘The combinatorial is the art or science of
|
||||
exhausting the possible, through inclusive disjunctions.’ The ars
|
||||
combinatoria is also the system of formal logic, revealed in holy
|
||||
visions to Ramon Llull in his cave on Puig de Ronda in 1274, eventually
|
||||
refined by Gottfried Leibniz, that powers the device you’re using to
|
||||
read this now. Exhaustion is the mode of life integral to a
|
||||
computerised society; the internet comes to us already long worn out,
|
||||
combining and recombining stale elements, shambling through the dead
|
||||
zones of itself.
|
||||
[43]7
|
||||
|
||||
You could compare this process to Marx’s law of the tendency of the
|
||||
rate of profit to fall: as each individual actor, follows its
|
||||
incentives and inflates the organic composition, the entire system ends
|
||||
up stumbling into crisis.
|
||||
[44]8
|
||||
|
||||
People claim to be deeply worried by this stuff, but I think you
|
||||
secretly like it. You like the idea that your attention is what creates
|
||||
the world. You like the idea that the entire global economy is
|
||||
predicated on getting to know you, finding out what you like and
|
||||
dislike, your taste in music and your frankly insane political opinions
|
||||
and the gooey little treats you buy. Global capitalism as one vast
|
||||
Buzzfeed personality quiz. The faceless empire of yourself.
|
||||
[45]9
|
||||
|
||||
One of the largest shareholders in Twitter is the Kingdom Holding
|
||||
Company, chaired by Prince al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud.
|
||||
For some reason, people seemed to think that replacing him with Elon
|
||||
Musk would shift the tenor of the site to the right.
|
||||
[46]10
|
||||
|
||||
When I was younger, my brother and I had a running joke about a lemon
|
||||
that could connect to the internet. Not for any particular reason: a
|
||||
light would blink just below the lemon’s skin, and it would do nothing,
|
||||
just slowly rot in your fruitbowl. A few years ago, that lemon would
|
||||
have immediately secured half a billion dollars in first-round funding.
|
||||
Now, not so much.
|
||||
[47]11
|
||||
|
||||
The ‘cancelled’ always participate in the theatre of their own
|
||||
cancellation. In Greco-Roman sacrifices, the animal was expected to nod
|
||||
before being led to the altar; the victim had to consent to its
|
||||
slaughter. And that nod always happened, even if a priest had to induce
|
||||
it by pouring a vase of water over the animal’s head.
|
||||
Share
|
||||
Next
|
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Top
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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Ready for more?
|
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____________________
|
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(BUTTON) Subscribe
|
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|
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© 2023 Sam Kriss
|
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[48]Privacy ∙ [49]Terms ∙ [50]Collection notice
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Start Writing[51]Get the app
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[52]Substack is the home for great writing
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References
|
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1. file:///feed
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2. https://samkriss.substack.com/
|
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3. https://samkriss.substack.com/
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4. https://substack.com/@samkriss
|
||||
5. https://www.thecut.com/2022/02/a-vibe-shift-is-coming.html
|
||||
6. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-1-71503638
|
||||
7. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-2-71503638
|
||||
8. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-3-71503638
|
||||
9. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-4-71503638
|
||||
10. https://damagemag.com/2022/04/21/the-internet-is-made-of-demons/
|
||||
11. https://onlyfans.com/
|
||||
12. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-5-71503638
|
||||
13. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/aug/21/its-a-modern-day-facebook-how-bereal-became-gen-zs-favourite-app
|
||||
14. https://www.rivaliq.com/blog/social-engagement-benchmark-trends-2020/
|
||||
15. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/2/2/22915110/facebook-meta-user-growth-decline-first-time-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg-tiktok-competition-earnings
|
||||
16. https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2022/03/this-new-report-reveals-surprising.html
|
||||
17. https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/time-spent-tiktok-decline
|
||||
18. https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/
|
||||
19. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-6-71503638
|
||||
20. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-7-71503638
|
||||
21. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/say-goodbye-millennial-urban-lifestyle/599839/
|
||||
22. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS
|
||||
23. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-01/trillions-of-negative-yielding-debt-redeem-europe-s-bond-bulls
|
||||
24. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-8-71503638
|
||||
25. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-9-71503638
|
||||
26. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-10-71503638
|
||||
27. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-12/softbank-vision-fund-posts-a-record-loss-as-son-s-bets-fail
|
||||
28. https://www.idler.co.uk/article/adam-curtis-social-media-is-a-scam/
|
||||
29. https://marketinginsidergroup.com/marketing-strategy/digital-ads-dont-work-and-everyone-knows-it/
|
||||
30. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.1188
|
||||
31. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n09/donald-mackenzie/blink-bid-buy
|
||||
32. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
|
||||
33. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3632191-the-dark-brandon-rises/
|
||||
34. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-11-71503638
|
||||
35. https://samkriss.com/2020/06/10/white-skin-black-squares/
|
||||
36. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets
|
||||
37. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-1-71503638
|
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38. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-2-71503638
|
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39. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-3-71503638
|
||||
40. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-4-71503638
|
||||
41. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-5-71503638
|
||||
42. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-6-71503638
|
||||
43. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-7-71503638
|
||||
44. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-8-71503638
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45. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-9-71503638
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556
static/archive/www-gearpatrol-com-6mp4nk.txt
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556
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Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,556 @@
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tascam portastudio 414 mk 2 on a desk
|
||||
Eric Limer
|
||||
|
||||
1. [103]Tech
|
||||
|
||||
[104]Audio
|
||||
|
||||
[105]This Four-Track Tape Recorder Made Me Fall In Love With Music
|
||||
All Over Again
|
||||
|
||||
This Four-Track Tape Recorder Made Me Fall In Love With Music All Over Again
|
||||
|
||||
The cassette is still cool.
|
||||
|
||||
By [106]Eric Limer
|
||||
Oct 11, 2023
|
||||
|
||||
For the past ten years or so I've been a musical rut, playing the same
|
||||
half-dozen, half-written songs on guitar once every other blue moon and
|
||||
listening to the same handful of punk bands I listened to in high
|
||||
school. I’ve been a musician for most of my life. Between church
|
||||
choirs, garage bands, and a cappella groups, I’ve been involved in
|
||||
organized (but never professional) music-making for the better part of
|
||||
several decades. But, after so long uninspired, I thought that maybe
|
||||
the musical part of my life was mostly behind me. Until the [107]Tascam
|
||||
Portastudio 414 MKII brought it all flooding back.
|
||||
|
||||
* Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII 4-Track Cassette Recorder
|
||||
[108]$475 AT REVERB.COM
|
||||
[109]Read More
|
||||
[110]$475 AT REVERB.COM
|
||||
|
||||
Released at the tail end of the 90s, the Portastudio 414 MKII harkens
|
||||
back to a time before MacBooks shipped with Garageband. If you wanted
|
||||
to record music with multiple tracks that could be altered
|
||||
independently, you were looking at booking studio time or buying
|
||||
something like this lovely big blue beast. And make no mistake, this
|
||||
chunky boy can deliver if you've got the chops. Bruce Springsteen's
|
||||
Nebraska, a few early Ween records, and some vintage Weird Al tunes
|
||||
[111]were all recorded on a Portastudio of one make or another. More
|
||||
recently, Nine Inch Nails' Alessandro Cortini has been almost single
|
||||
handedly responsible for making the 414 MKII in particular cool again
|
||||
with [112]his unorthodox (and extremely sick) use of the device as an
|
||||
instrument in live performance.
|
||||
Eric Limer
|
||||
|
||||
Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII 4-Track Cassette Recorder
|
||||
|
||||
reverb.com
|
||||
$475.00
|
||||
[113]SHOP NOW
|
||||
|
||||
The 414 MK II lets you record four independent tracks to a humble
|
||||
cassette tape, just enough room for bass, guitar, vocals, and drums,
|
||||
with the ability to add more if you’ve got the nerve to "bounce down"
|
||||
multiple instruments to the same track, irrevocably intertwining two
|
||||
rivers of sound to free up a slot for additional recording. It’s
|
||||
ridiculously limited compared to the "digital audio workstations" you
|
||||
can get literally for free today. but it does come with one killer
|
||||
feature that has only truly emerged in the millennium following its
|
||||
original launch: You don’t have to stare at a fucking screen to use it.
|
||||
close up of leds
|
||||
Much like celluloid photographic film, magnetic tape handles peaking
|
||||
more gracefully than digital mediums.
|
||||
Eric Limer
|
||||
a close up of a play button
|
||||
There’s nothing quite so satisfying is pressing play and feeling the
|
||||
tape start to move.
|
||||
Eric Limer
|
||||
|
||||
I only ever recorded one (very poorly performed) song with my
|
||||
Portastudio when my parents gifted it to me back in the mid-aughts, and
|
||||
for almost twenty years I hadn’t really thought about it at all. But
|
||||
when an album cover featuring its unmistakable visage cropped up on my
|
||||
Spotify, it lit a spark in my brain. Mom knew just the closet where it
|
||||
had spent a decade plus hiding and soon, with a package of fresh
|
||||
cassette tapes in hand, I was ready to hit record.
|
||||
a stack of cassette tapes
|
||||
The Portastudio is designed to use pricey "Type II" cassette tapes for
|
||||
optimal performance, but cheaper Type 1s work fine (or better, if you
|
||||
actually want that telltale hiss).
|
||||
Eric Limer
|
||||
|
||||
The joy of working in an analog medium, as [114]lovers of film
|
||||
photography can attest, is both the friction and the flavor it brings.
|
||||
Light leaks can spice up an otherwise average photograph. A little tape
|
||||
hiss can give your jam that extra flair. The cost, of course, is that
|
||||
your mistakes get baked all the way in, for better or worse. No undo
|
||||
buttons here. You have to move slowly and skillfully to find success.
|
||||
And so my plan to record guitar, bass, and vocals quickly hit a
|
||||
not-insignificant snag: I am neither a particularly good recording
|
||||
artist nor a remotely competent audio engineer.
|
||||
|
||||
After a few hours of trying and failing to adequately record the
|
||||
beat-to-shit [115]Yamaha FG-335II I stole from my dad on my way to
|
||||
college 16 years ago with a unidirectional dynamic mic not remotely fit
|
||||
for the task, I tripped and fell into a whole other rabbit hole. What
|
||||
you really need, the gear gremlin between my ears sweetly whispered, is
|
||||
a drum machine. Also a synthesizer.
|
||||
|
||||
A bit of research and a few impulse buys later, I was finally in
|
||||
business:
|
||||
|
||||
This content is imported from Third party. You may be able to find the
|
||||
same content in another format, or you may be able to find more
|
||||
information, at their web site.
|
||||
|
||||
Featured in this track:
|
||||
|
||||
Korg Volca Keys
|
||||
Korg Volca Keys
|
||||
Korg amazon.com
|
||||
$237.00
|
||||
$147.99 (38% off)
|
||||
[116]SHOP NOW
|
||||
|
||||
Arguably the cornerstone of Korg's budget "Volca" line, the Volca Keys
|
||||
has old-school analog circuitry, basic sequencer functionality and
|
||||
limited polyphony so you can play chords. It's also optionally
|
||||
battery-powered and I've spent dozens of hours jamming on it while
|
||||
sitting on the couch. Oh also it sounds fat as hell.
|
||||
Korg NTS Digital Synth Kit 1
|
||||
Korg NTS Digital Synth Kit 1
|
||||
Korg amazon.com
|
||||
$95.00
|
||||
[117]SHOP NOW
|
||||
|
||||
You have to assemble this tiny, digital synth yourself, but it packs a
|
||||
ton of functionality into an itty bitty and affordable package. It
|
||||
supports [118]a library of community-programmed instrument sounds and
|
||||
effects and doubles as a capable FX pedal for my other gear thanks to
|
||||
its passthrough reverb, chorus and modulation effects.
|
||||
Arturia KeyStep 32-Key Controller
|
||||
Arturia KeyStep 32-Key Controller
|
||||
Arturia amazon.com
|
||||
$149.00
|
||||
$129.00 (13% off)
|
||||
[119]SHOP NOW
|
||||
|
||||
My Korgs all sport touchpad keyboards that are... technically
|
||||
functional. If you want any sort of precision, an external MIDI
|
||||
keyboard is essential. Arturia's KeyStep is a go-to choice that sports
|
||||
some useful features of its own, like a sequencer for recording complex
|
||||
patterns and an arpeggiator for auto-playing simpler ones.
|
||||
Korg Volca Sample 2 Korg Volca Sample 2
|
||||
Korg guitarcenter.com
|
||||
$109.99
|
||||
[120]SHOP NOW
|
||||
|
||||
It's not a drum machine, but I used it as one because it comes
|
||||
preloaded with a number of drum recordings (and other sound clips) and
|
||||
the ability to load your own. It served me well enough, but I'm putting
|
||||
this one back on the market because I've made it redundant with some
|
||||
other buys and I've learned that I much prefer synthesis to sampling.
|
||||
|
||||
Like any amateur analog artifact, this track contains mistakes encased
|
||||
in amber. The hi-hats are too hot because I didn’t balance the levels
|
||||
of the individual drums in my sampler before committing the whole drum
|
||||
track to tape. The bass comes in awkwardly because I was doing dynamics
|
||||
live to tape with the synth's volume knob instead of using a fader
|
||||
during mixdown. The solo, well, it is what it is. But the Portastudio
|
||||
saved my ass, not (only) with tape hiss, but by helping me take a deep
|
||||
breath and put this song to bed. I won’t waste hours trying to improve
|
||||
on the raw material with endless tiny tweaks, because I can't. Lessons
|
||||
(hopefully) learned, on to the next jam!
|
||||
a piano with a keyboard
|
||||
Controlled over MIDI by the Arturia KeyStep, the Volca Keys outputs its
|
||||
audio through the NTS-1 for reverb before heading into track one on the
|
||||
Portastudio.
|
||||
Eric Limer
|
||||
|
||||
In the months since that inaugural recording, the road of my obsession
|
||||
has taken me away from analog, and towards digital devices that can
|
||||
synthesize and sequence a song’s worth of instruments inside themselves
|
||||
(still no computer screens allowed). At the moment, I’m in love with my
|
||||
[121]"Woovebox," a petite-but-powerful one-person labor of love out of
|
||||
Australia, while I simultaneously lust after [122]the wickedly slick,
|
||||
murdered-out Dirtywave M8 Tracker, a Gameboy-sized studio in a
|
||||
handheld.
|
||||
|
||||
If the two of us didn't go so far back, I might consider flipping my
|
||||
Portastudio on the secondary market, where the prices are currently
|
||||
sky-high. I could probably get more for it now than my parents
|
||||
originally paid and finance a big chunk of this or that digital
|
||||
dalliance. But in a way, I'm glad to be spared the temptation. Because
|
||||
if there's anything I've learned over the past twenty-something years,
|
||||
it's that the odds are very high I'll come crawling back to cassette.
|
||||
|
||||
* Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII 4-Track Cassette Recorder
|
||||
[123]$475 AT REVERB.COM
|
||||
[124]Read More
|
||||
[125]$475 AT REVERB.COM
|
||||
|
||||
Related Stories
|
||||
The Best Vintage Cassette Tape Players
|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
|
||||
More From [126]Audio
|
||||
The Best Dolby Atmos Soundbars of 2023
|
||||
These Turntable and Speaker Combos Make Vinyl Easy
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
The Best Accessories for Your Sonos Speakers
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||||
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|
||||
6 Tricks All Sonos Owners Should Know
|
||||
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||||
How to Play Vinyl Records on Your Sonos Speakers
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||||
AirPods Pro Don’t Fit Your Ears? Get These
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||||
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||||
|
||||
The Best Cheap Wireless Earbuds (All Under $100)
|
||||
The New Sony WF-1000XM5 Are Elite Wireless Earbuds
|
||||
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||||
|
||||
Update Your AirPods and Get More Features
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
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|
||||
Your AirPods Pro Just Got Way Better — Here's How
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__________________________________________________________________
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Gear Patrol – For Life's Pursuits Gear Patrol participates in various
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|
||||
107. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&xs=1&url=https://reverb.com/p/tascam-414-mkii&sref=https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/audio/a45461959/tascam-portastudio-414-mkii/
|
||||
108. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https://reverb.com/marketplace?product_type=pro-audio&query=TASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
109. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75009-3138TMP.html#product-1018365f-aed1-4bbd-86ea-466ab005acb7-anchor
|
||||
110. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https://reverb.com/marketplace?product_type=pro-audio&query=TASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
111. https://mixdownmag.com.au/features/the-10-best-recordings-on-the-iconic-tascam-portastudio/
|
||||
112. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11BP4Pe8iYk
|
||||
113. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https://reverb.com/marketplace?product_type=pro-audio&query=TASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
114. https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/a43946858/formula-1-film-photography-tips/
|
||||
115. https://terrifyingtonetrip.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/guitarsenal-early-80s-yamaha-fg335ii-acoustic/
|
||||
116. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CAKSVTU
|
||||
117. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XH591BH
|
||||
118. https://korginc.github.io/logue-sdk/unit-index/
|
||||
119. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BPSBU40
|
||||
120. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https://www.guitarcenter.com/KORG/Volca-Sample-2-Digital-Sample-Sequencer-White-1500000332703.gc
|
||||
121. https://www.woovebox.com/
|
||||
122. https://dirtywave.com/
|
||||
123. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https://reverb.com/marketplace?product_type=pro-audio&query=TASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
124. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75009-3138TMP.html#product-1018365f-aed1-4bbd-86ea-466ab005acb7-anchor
|
||||
125. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https://reverb.com/marketplace?product_type=pro-audio&query=TASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
126. file:///tech/audio/
|
||||
127. file:///about/a2281/about/
|
||||
128. file:///briefings/today-in-gear/
|
||||
129. file:///deals/
|
||||
130. file:///gift-guides/
|
||||
131. https://www.dpreview.com/
|
||||
132. file:///watches/
|
||||
133. file:///cars/
|
||||
134. file:///style/
|
||||
135. file:///outdoors/
|
||||
136. file:///fitness/
|
||||
137. file:///food/
|
||||
138. file:///home/
|
||||
139. file:///tech/
|
||||
140. file:///about/a40849193/about-gear-patrol-magazine/
|
||||
141. https://email.gearpatrol.com/subscribe
|
||||
142. https://studios.gearpatrol.com/
|
||||
143. file:///about/a43276360/how-we-evaluate-products/
|
||||
144. https://studios.gearpatrol.com/contact/
|
||||
145. https://info.wrightsmedia.com/gearpatrol-licensing-reprints
|
||||
146. file:///rss/all.xml/
|
||||
147. https://www.hearst.com/-/us-magazines-privacy-notice
|
||||
148. https://www.hearst.com/-/us-magazines-privacy-notice#_ADDITIONAL_INFO
|
||||
149. https://www.hearst.com/-/us-magazines-privacy-notice#_ADDITIONAL_INFO
|
||||
150. https://www.hearst.com/-/us-magazines-privacy-notice#_OPT_OUTS
|
||||
151. https://www.hearst.com/-/us-magazines-terms-of-use
|
||||
152. file:///sitemap/
|
||||
153. file:///about/a42158740/do-not-sell-my-personal-information/
|
||||
|
||||
Hidden links:
|
||||
155. file://localhost/var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75009-3138TMP.html
|
||||
156. file://localhost/var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75009-3138TMP.html
|
||||
157. file://localhost/var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75009-3138TMP.html#sidepanel
|
||||
158. file://localhost/
|
||||
159. file://localhost/var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L75009-3138TMP.html
|
||||
160. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https%3A%2F%2Freverb.com%2Fmarketplace%3Fproduct_type%3Dpro-audio%26query%3DTASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
161. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https%3A%2F%2Freverb.com%2Fmarketplace%3Fproduct_type%3Dpro-audio%26query%3DTASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
162. https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=31959X896062&url=https%3A%2F%2Freverb.com%2Fmarketplace%3Fproduct_type%3Dpro-audio%26query%3DTASCAM+Portastudio+414+MKII+4-Track+Cassette+Recorder
|
||||
163. file://localhost/tech/audio/a41601961/vintage-cassette-player/
|
||||
164. file://localhost/tech/a36356719/cassette-tape-player-revival/
|
||||
165. file://localhost/tech/audio/a44446015/best-atmos-soundbars/
|
||||
166. file://localhost/tech/audio/a553650/best-vinyl-setups/
|
||||
167. file://localhost/tech/audio/a36511887/best-sonos-accessories/
|
||||
168. file://localhost/tech/audio/a36792654/sonos-speaker-settings-to-change/
|
||||
169. file://localhost/tech/audio/a36877979/how-to-connect-bluetooth-turntable-sonos-roam/
|
||||
170. file://localhost/tech/audio/a726852/airpods-pro-comply-eartips/
|
||||
171. file://localhost/tech/audio/a45549852/best-wireless-earbuds-under-100/
|
||||
172. file://localhost/tech/audio/a44590793/sony-wf-1000xm5-wireless-earbuds-review/
|
||||
173. file://localhost/tech/audio/a34056968/how-to-update-your-airpods-pro/
|
||||
174. file://localhost/tech/audio/a45507522/airpods-pro-new-features/
|
||||
175. file://localhost/
|
||||
176. https://www.facebook.com/gearpatrol/
|
||||
177. https://twitter.com/gearpatrol
|
||||
178. https://www.youtube.com/gearpatrol
|
||||
179. https://www.instagram.com/gearpatrol/
|
||||
667
static/archive/www-nytimes-com-yrjrte.txt
Normal file
667
static/archive/www-nytimes-com-yrjrte.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,667 @@
|
||||
#[1]alternate [2]Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill
|
||||
|
||||
The Magazine’s Culture Issue
|
||||
|
||||
* [3]Jesmyn Ward’s Literary South
|
||||
* [4]The Heart of Swiftiedom
|
||||
* [5]Culture at a Standstill
|
||||
* [6]Can Usher Save R&B?
|
||||
* [7]Sparring With Errol Morris
|
||||
|
||||
An illustration of various people all bunched together.
|
||||
Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
|
||||
|
||||
[8]Skip to content[9]Skip to site index
|
||||
(BUTTON) Search & Section Navigation
|
||||
(BUTTON) Section Navigation
|
||||
|
||||
Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill
|
||||
|
||||
A Times critic argues that ours is the least innovative century for the
|
||||
arts in 500 years. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
|
||||
|
||||
Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
|
||||
|
||||
Supported by
|
||||
[10]SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
|
||||
* (BUTTON) Share full article
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
* [11]1240
|
||||
|
||||
[12]Jason Farago
|
||||
|
||||
By [13]Jason Farago
|
||||
* Oct. 10, 2023
|
||||
|
||||
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its fall blockbuster show,
|
||||
[14]“Manet/Degas,” is a painting from 1866 of a woman in the latest
|
||||
fashion. Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model, stands in an empty
|
||||
room, accompanied only by a parrot on a bird stand. Her trademark red
|
||||
hair is tied back with a blue ribbon. Her head is slightly bowed as she
|
||||
smells a nosegay in her right hand: probably a gift from an absent
|
||||
admirer, just like the gentleman’s monocle in her left. She’s wearing a
|
||||
silk peignoir, which Manet has rendered in buttery strokes of pink and
|
||||
white. This is a full-length image, more than six feet tall, but
|
||||
Victorine hasn’t even put on her best clothes. She’s in a dressing
|
||||
gown, and the gown is amorphous. The gown is only paint.
|
||||
|
||||
Listen to This Article
|
||||
|
||||
Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.
|
||||
|
||||
Manet called this painting “Young Lady in 1866,” and the title is the
|
||||
briefest manifesto I know. After ages in which artists aimed for
|
||||
timelessness, Manet pictured a woman living in 1866, in the Paris of
|
||||
1866, wearing clothes from 1866. The painting was a radical eruption of
|
||||
temporal specificity. An art for this year, in this place, in a form
|
||||
possible only now.
|
||||
|
||||
Image “Young Lady in 1866”
|
||||
“Young Lady in 1866,” by Edouard Manet.Credit...Metropolitan Museum of
|
||||
Art
|
||||
|
||||
Most artists and audiences at the time did not think this was such a
|
||||
virtue. “Young Lady in 1866” got bad press at the Salon, the annual
|
||||
exhibition of France’s official art academy, where artists aspired to
|
||||
eternal beauty and eternal values, expressed through classicized motifs
|
||||
and highly finished surfaces. Thomas Couture, Manet’s own teacher,
|
||||
specialized in bloated but very technically proficient tableaux of
|
||||
nymphs and heroes. Only a few Parisians could see, in the thick pallor
|
||||
of Victorine’s face and the impetuous brushiness of her peignoir, the
|
||||
mark of a new cultural dispensation. Baudelaire, Manet’s great friend,
|
||||
articulated it in “The Flowers of Evil”:
|
||||
|
||||
O Death, old captain, it’s time! Lift anchor!
|
||||
We’re sick of this country, Death! Let us sail ...
|
||||
To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!
|
||||
|
||||
To find something new! That was the imperative of modernism, not only
|
||||
in painting but also in poetry, in theater, in music, in architecture
|
||||
and eventually in the cinema. Your job as an artist was no longer to
|
||||
glorify the king or the church, nor to imitate as faithfully as
|
||||
possible the appearance of the outside world. It was to solder the next
|
||||
link in a cultural chain — fashioning a novel utterance that took novel
|
||||
shape even as it manifested its place in a larger history. “You have to
|
||||
be absolutely modern,” Rimbaud declared; “Make it new,” Ezra Pound
|
||||
instructed. To speak to your time, we once believed, required much more
|
||||
than new “content.” It required a commitment to new modes of narration,
|
||||
new styles of expression, that could bear witness to sea changes in
|
||||
society.
|
||||
|
||||
Manet, classically trained, figured out quickly that if he painted
|
||||
scenes of Parisian prostitutes in the same manner as his teacher
|
||||
painted Roman orgiasts, that wouldn’t cut it; he would have to invent a
|
||||
new kind of painting — flatter, franker — if he wanted to capture
|
||||
modern life. From then on, the creators who most decisively marked the
|
||||
history of art, again and again, described their work as a search for a
|
||||
new language, a new style, a new way of being. “I have transformed
|
||||
myself in the zero of form,” Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, and in his
|
||||
black square he found “the face of the new art.” Le Corbusier insisted
|
||||
that his open floor plans, enabled by reinforced floating columns, were
|
||||
not just an architectural aesthetic but an age: “Nothing is left to us
|
||||
of the architecture of past epochs, just as we can no longer derive any
|
||||
benefit from the literary and historical teaching given in schools.”
|
||||
Aimé Césaire, who would revolutionize French poetry in the 20th century
|
||||
as Baudelaire did in the 19th, understood that a modern Black
|
||||
expression required “a new language, capable of expressing an African
|
||||
heritage.” “In other words,” he said, “French was for me an instrument
|
||||
that I wanted to twist into a new way of speaking.”
|
||||
|
||||
For 160 years, we spoke about culture as something active, something
|
||||
with velocity, something in continuous forward motion. What happens to
|
||||
a culture when it loses that velocity, or even slows to a halt? Walking
|
||||
through the other galleries of the Met after my third visit to
|
||||
“Manet/Degas,” I started doing that thing all the Salon visitors used
|
||||
to do in Paris in 1866: ignoring the paintings and scoping out the
|
||||
other spectators’ clothes. I saw visitors in the skinny jeans that
|
||||
defined the 2000s and in the roomy, high-waisted jeans that were
|
||||
popular in the 1990s; neither style looked particularly au courant or
|
||||
dated. Manet was a fashion maven, and I’d been marveling anew at the
|
||||
gauzy white-striped gown with flared sleeves that Berthe Morisot wears
|
||||
in [15]“The Balcony” to signal that she is a contemporary woman — that
|
||||
she is alive right now. What piece of clothing or accessory could you
|
||||
give a model to mark her as “Young Lady in 2023”? A titanium-cased
|
||||
iPhone is all that comes to mind, and even that hasn’t changed its
|
||||
appearance much in a decade.
|
||||
|
||||
To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural
|
||||
birthright. Susan Sontag could write in 1965, with breezy confidence,
|
||||
that new styles of art, cinema, music and dance “succeed one another so
|
||||
rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to
|
||||
prepare.” Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s
|
||||
far less capable of change. Intellectual property has swallowed the
|
||||
cinema; the Hollywood studios that once proposed a slate of big, medium
|
||||
and small pictures have hedged their bets, and even independent
|
||||
directors have stuck with narrative and visual techniques born in the
|
||||
1960s. Have you tried to furnish an apartment lately? Whether you are
|
||||
at Restoration Hardware or on Alibaba, what you are probably buying are
|
||||
replicas of European antiques: “contemporary” designs first seen in
|
||||
Milan in the 1970s or Weimar in the 1920s. Harry Styles is rocking in
|
||||
the ’80s; Silk Sonic is jamming in the ’70s; somehow “Frasier” has been
|
||||
revived and they barely had to update the wardrobes.
|
||||
|
||||
If the present state of culture feels directionless — it does to me,
|
||||
and sussing out its direction is literally my job — that is principally
|
||||
because we are still inculcated, so unconsciously we never even bother
|
||||
to spell it out, in what the modernists believed: that good art is good
|
||||
because it is innovative, and that an ambitious writer, composer,
|
||||
director or choreographer should not make things too much like what
|
||||
others have made before. But our culture has not been able to deliver
|
||||
step changes for quite some time. When you walk through your local
|
||||
museum’s modern wing, starting with Impressionism and following a
|
||||
succession of avant-gardes through the development of Cubism, Dada,
|
||||
Pop, minimalism, in the 1990s you arrive in a forest called “the
|
||||
contemporary,” and after more than 30 years no path forward has been
|
||||
revealed. On your drive home, you can turn on the decade-by-decade
|
||||
stations of Sirius XM: the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will each
|
||||
sound distinct, but all the millennial nostalgia of the 2000s station
|
||||
cannot disguise that “We Belong Together” and “Irreplaceable” do not
|
||||
yet sound retro. When I was younger, I looked at cultural works as if
|
||||
they were posts on a timeline, moving forward from Manet year by year.
|
||||
Now I find myself adrift in an eddy of cultural signs, where everything
|
||||
just floats, and I can only tell time on my phone.
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
|
||||
|
||||
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go
|
||||
down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least
|
||||
pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing
|
||||
press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are
|
||||
new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more
|
||||
diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in
|
||||
hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with
|
||||
smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in,
|
||||
though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a
|
||||
handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have
|
||||
been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical
|
||||
standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture
|
||||
in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling
|
||||
through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The
|
||||
suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and
|
||||
place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
|
||||
|
||||
To any claim that cultural progress is “over,” there is an easy and not
|
||||
inaccurate retort: Well, what about X? And sure enough, our time has
|
||||
indeed brought forth wonderful, meaningful cultural endeavors. I find
|
||||
the sculptures of [16]Nairy Baghramian, the [17]videos of Stan Douglas
|
||||
and the [18]environments of Pierre Huyghe to be artistic achievements
|
||||
of the highest caliber; I think [19]Ali Smith is writing novels of
|
||||
tremendous immediacy; I believe [20]“Transit” and [21]“Drive My Car”
|
||||
reaffirm the vitality of cinema; I love [22]South African amapiano and
|
||||
[23]Korean soap operas and [24]Ukrainian electronic music. My own
|
||||
cultural life is very rich, and this is not some rant that once
|
||||
everyone was so creative and now they’re all poseurs. I am asking a
|
||||
different and peskier question: why cultural production no longer
|
||||
progresses in time as it once did.
|
||||
|
||||
I have a few theories, but one to start with is that the modernist
|
||||
cultural explosion might very well have been like the growth of the
|
||||
economy more generally: not the perpetual forward march we were
|
||||
promised in the 20th century, but a one-time-only rocket blast followed
|
||||
by a long, slow, disappointing glide. As the economist Robert Gordon
|
||||
has shown, the transformative growth of the period between 1870 and
|
||||
1970 — the “special century,” he calls it — was an anomalous superevent
|
||||
fueled by unique and unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation,
|
||||
the combustion engine) whose successors (above all information
|
||||
technology) have not had the same economic impact. In the United
|
||||
States, the 2010s had the slowest productivity growth of any decade in
|
||||
recorded history; if you believe you are living in the future, I am
|
||||
guessing you have not recently been on United Airlines. In this
|
||||
macroeconomic reading, a culture that no longer delivers expected
|
||||
stylistic innovations might just be part and parcel of a more generally
|
||||
underachieving century, and not to be tutted at in isolation.
|
||||
|
||||
But more than the economics, the key factor can only be what happened
|
||||
to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our
|
||||
screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to
|
||||
algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers
|
||||
them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of
|
||||
cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that
|
||||
progress itself made no sense. “It’s still one Earth,” the novelist
|
||||
Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now subtended by a layer of
|
||||
highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective
|
||||
unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one unmediated
|
||||
plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to
|
||||
distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their
|
||||
dimensions. Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a
|
||||
thing to nibble at, to graze on.
|
||||
|
||||
If there is one cultural work that epitomizes this shift, where you can
|
||||
see our new epoch coming into view, I want to say it’s [25]“Back to
|
||||
Black,” by Amy Winehouse. The album dates to October 2006 — seven
|
||||
months after Twitter was founded, three months before the iPhone
|
||||
debuted — and it seems, listening again now, to be closing the door on
|
||||
the cultural system that Manet and Baudelaire established a century and
|
||||
a half previously. As the millennium dawned, there had been various
|
||||
efforts to write the symphony of the future (the last of which was
|
||||
probably Missy Elliott’s “Da Real World,” a “Matrix”-inspired album
|
||||
from 1999 that promised to sound like “not the year 2G but the year
|
||||
3G”). There had also been various retroprojections, trying to
|
||||
inaugurate a new century with pre-Woodstock throwbacks (waxed
|
||||
mustaches, speakeasies; perhaps you recall an embarrassing circa-2000
|
||||
vogue for swing dancing).
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
Amy Winehouse at the Highline Ballroom in New York in
|
||||
2007.Credit...Michael Nagle for The New York Times
|
||||
|
||||
“Back to Black” was the first major cultural work of the 21st century
|
||||
that was neither new nor retro — but rather contented itself to float
|
||||
in time, to sound as if it came from no particular era. Winehouse wore
|
||||
her hair in a beehive, her band wore fedoras, but she was not
|
||||
performing a tribute act of any kind. Her production drew from the
|
||||
Great American Songbook, ’60s girl groups, also reggae and ska, but it
|
||||
never felt anachronistic or like a “postmodern” pastiche. Listen again
|
||||
to the title track and its percussive piano line: a stationary,
|
||||
metronomic cycle of D minor, G minor, B-flat major, and A7. The bass
|
||||
line of the piano overlays the chords with a syncopated swing, while a
|
||||
tambourine slaps and jangles with joyless regularity. We are back to
|
||||
Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, we are waiting for the Shangri-Las or the
|
||||
Ronettes to come in, but instead Winehouse delivers a much more ragged
|
||||
and minor-keyed performance, with a vulgarity in the song’s second line
|
||||
that Martha Reeves would never pronounce. There is a discrepancy
|
||||
between vocals and instrumentation that is never resolved, and the
|
||||
artistry is all in that irresolution.
|
||||
|
||||
Who cares if it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful?
|
||||
|
||||
What Winehouse prefigured was a culture of an eternal present: a
|
||||
digitally informed sense of placelessness and atemporality that has
|
||||
left so many of us disoriented from our earlier cultural signposts.
|
||||
Each song on “Back to Black” seemed to be “borrowing from all the last
|
||||
century’s music history at once,” as the media scholar Moira Weigel
|
||||
once observed, though there was something contemporary about that
|
||||
timelessness too. Extracted from the past into lightweight MP3s, all
|
||||
the girl-group and jazz prefigurations began to seem just as immediate
|
||||
as Winehouse’s North London present.
|
||||
|
||||
As early as 2006, well before the reverse chronology of blogs and the
|
||||
early Facebook gave way to the algorithmic soup of Instagram, Spotify
|
||||
and TikTok, Winehouse sensed that the real digital revolution in
|
||||
culture would not be in production, in the machines that artists used
|
||||
to make music or movies or books. It would be in reception: on the
|
||||
screens where they (where we) encountered culture, on which past and
|
||||
present are equidistant from each other. One upshot of this digital
|
||||
equation of past and present has been a greater disposability of
|
||||
culture: an infinite scroll and nothing to read, an infinite Netflix
|
||||
library with nothing to watch. Though pop music still throws up new
|
||||
stars now and then (I do really like [26]Ice Spice), the market for new
|
||||
music fell behind older music in the middle of the last decade, and
|
||||
even the records that sell, or stream, cannot be said to have wide
|
||||
cultural impact. (The most popular single of 2022 in the United States
|
||||
was [27]“Heat Waves,” a TikTok tune by a British alternative-pop group
|
||||
with little public profile called Glass Animals; and what’s weirdest is
|
||||
that it was recorded in 2020.)
|
||||
|
||||
Outside of time there can be no progress, only the perpetual trying-on
|
||||
of styles and forms. Here years become vibes — or “eras,” as Taylor
|
||||
Swift likes to call them. And if culture is just a series of trends,
|
||||
then it is pointless to worry about their contemporaneity. There was a
|
||||
charming freakout last year when Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up
|
||||
That Hill” went to the top of the charts after its deployment on yet
|
||||
another nostalgic television show, and veterans of the big-hair decade
|
||||
were horrified to see it appear on some 2022 playlists alongside Dua
|
||||
Lipa and the like. If you think the song belongs to 1985 in the way
|
||||
“Young Lady in 1866” belonged to 1866, the joke is now officially on
|
||||
you.
|
||||
|
||||
Down at the baseline where cultural innovation used to happen, in the
|
||||
forms that artists once put together to show us something new — in the
|
||||
sounds of the recording studio, the shapes on the canvas, the movements
|
||||
of the dancers, the arrangements of the verse — something has stopped,
|
||||
or at least slowed to such a lethargic pace as to feel stopped. Such a
|
||||
claim may sound familiar if you were around for the postmodernism
|
||||
debates of the 1980s. The philosopher Arthur Danto averred that art
|
||||
ended with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, while the literary critic
|
||||
Fredric Jameson declared in 1984 that the whole of modernity was “spent
|
||||
and exhausted,” that there was no more style, indeed no more self, and
|
||||
that “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past:
|
||||
the imitation of dead styles.” As for the influence of digital media,
|
||||
as early as 1989 the cultural theorist Paul Virilio identified a “polar
|
||||
inertia” — a static pileup of images and words with no particular place
|
||||
to go — as the inevitable endpoint for culture on a “weightless planet”
|
||||
constituted of ones and zeros.
|
||||
|
||||
And yet looking back now, the “postmodern” turn of the later 20th
|
||||
century looks much more like a continuation of the modernist commitment
|
||||
to novelty than a repudiation of it. John Cage’s noteless composition
|
||||
“4'33"” was no last music, but flowered into the impostures of Fluxus
|
||||
and the ambient experiments of Brian Eno. The buildings of Frank Gehry
|
||||
and Zaha Hadid did look like nothing that came before, thanks in part
|
||||
to new rendering and fabrication technologies (CAD software, laser
|
||||
cutting machines). The digitally produced music of Massive Attack and
|
||||
even, I hate to say it, Moby did sound different from what was on the
|
||||
radio 10 years before. No one style could be called the true vanguard
|
||||
anymore, sure — but that did not preclude the perpetual discovery of
|
||||
new ones. The forecast at the end of the 20th century was a plurality
|
||||
of new images and sounds and words, powered perhaps by new, heavy
|
||||
desktop production machines.
|
||||
|
||||
Since the start of the 21st century, despite all recent digital
|
||||
accelerations of discovery and transmission, no stylistic innovations
|
||||
of equivalent scale have taken place. The closest thing we can point to
|
||||
has been in rap, where the staccato nihilism of drill, deeply
|
||||
conversant with YouTube and SoundCloud, would sound legitimately
|
||||
foreign to a listener from 2000. (When the teenage Chief Keef was
|
||||
rapping in his grandmother’s Chicago apartment, he was following in the
|
||||
tradition of Joyce and Woolf and Pound.) In fact, the sampling
|
||||
techniques pioneered in hip-hop and, later, electronic dance music —
|
||||
once done with piles of records, now with folders of WAV files — have
|
||||
trickled down into photography, painting, literature and lower forms
|
||||
like memes, all of which now present a hyperreferentialism that sets
|
||||
them slightly apart from the last century’s efforts. In the 2010s,
|
||||
hip-hop alone seemed to be taking the challenge of digital progress
|
||||
seriously, though it, too, has calcified since; having switched from
|
||||
linear writing and recording of verses to improvising hundreds of
|
||||
one-verse digital takes, rappers now seem to be converging on a single,
|
||||
ProTools-produced flow.
|
||||
|
||||
There have also been a few movies of limited influence (and very
|
||||
limited box-office success) that have introduced new cinematographic
|
||||
techniques: Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2016) was the
|
||||
first film shot at an eerily lifelike 120 frames per second, while at
|
||||
the other extreme, Steven Soderbergh shot all of “Unsane” (2018) with
|
||||
an iPhone 7 Plus. Michael Bay’s “Ambulance” (2022) included
|
||||
first-person-view drone shots, flying the viewer through the windows of
|
||||
exploding cars the way your dad shot your last beach-vacation memory
|
||||
reel. But by and large the technologies that have changed filmmaking
|
||||
since 2000 have stayed in the postproduction studio: computer-graphics
|
||||
engines, digital tools for color grading and sound editing. They have
|
||||
had vanishingly little influence on the grammar of the moving image, in
|
||||
the way that lightweight cameras did for the Nouvelle Vague or digital
|
||||
kits did for American indie cinema. Really, the kind of image that
|
||||
distinguishes this century is less the spectacular Hollywood image than
|
||||
what the German artist Hito Steyerl has called the “poor image” —
|
||||
low-res compressed pictures like memes, thumbnails, screenshots — whose
|
||||
meaning arises from being circulated and modified.
|
||||
|
||||
It may just be that the lexical possibilities of many traditional media
|
||||
are exhausted, and there’s no shame in that. Maybe Griffith and
|
||||
Eisenstein and Godard and Akerman did it all already, and it’s foolish
|
||||
to expect a new kind of cinema. Certainly that exhaustion came long ago
|
||||
to abstract painting, where every possible move can only be understood
|
||||
as a quotation or reboot. (Kerstin Brätsch, one of the smartest
|
||||
abstract painters working today, has acknowledged that any mark she
|
||||
makes is “not empty anymore but loaded with historical reference.”)
|
||||
Consider last year’s hit “Creepin’,” by The Weeknd: a 2022 rejigger of
|
||||
the 2004 Mario Winans song “I Don’t Wanna Know” with no meaningful
|
||||
change in instrumentation in the nearly two intervening decades. It was
|
||||
hardly the only recent chart-topper to employ a clangingly obvious
|
||||
sample, but it’s not like the endeavors of the 1990s, when Puffy and
|
||||
family were rapping over “Every Breath You Take.” Back then the critic
|
||||
Greg Tate could still celebrate such sampling as a motor of cultural
|
||||
progress; by “collapsing all eras of Black music onto a chip,” a new
|
||||
generation had new tools to write a new chapter of sound. Twenty-five
|
||||
years later, the citation and rearrangement have become so automatic as
|
||||
to seem automated — as our recent fears about artificial intelligence
|
||||
and large language models suggest we already know.
|
||||
|
||||
Trapped on a modernist game board where there are no more moves to
|
||||
make, a growing number of young artists essentially pivoted to
|
||||
political activism — plant a tree and call it a sculpture — while
|
||||
others leaned hard into absurdity to try to express the sense of
|
||||
digital disorientation. You saw this Dadaist strategy in the hyperpop
|
||||
of 100 gecs, in the crashed-and-burned “post-internet” art of the
|
||||
collective Dis, and above all in the satirical fashion of Virgil Abloh.
|
||||
(Abloh, who died in 2021, was outspoken about how comedy functioned as
|
||||
a coping mechanism for a generation lost in a digital fog: “It’s not a
|
||||
coincidence that things have gravitated toward this invented language
|
||||
of humor,” he said in 2018. “But then I often wonder: Is streetwear
|
||||
hollow?”)
|
||||
|
||||
It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just own our static position; who
|
||||
cares if it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful? But that
|
||||
pesky modernist conviction remains in us: A work of art demonstrates
|
||||
its value through its freshness. So we have shifted our expectations
|
||||
from new forms to new subject matter — new stories, told in the same
|
||||
old languages as before. In the 20th century we were taught that
|
||||
cleaving “style” from “content” was a fallacy, but in the 21st century
|
||||
content (that word!) has had its ultimate vengeance, as the sole
|
||||
component of culture that our machines can fully understand, transmit
|
||||
and monetize. What cannot be categorized cannot be streamed; to pass
|
||||
through the pipes art must become information. So, sure, there are new
|
||||
songs about texting and ghosting; sure, there are superhero movies
|
||||
about trauma and comedies about climate change. But in privileging the
|
||||
parts of culture that can be summarized and shared — the narratives,
|
||||
the characters, the lyrics, the lessons — digital media have bulldozed
|
||||
an autonomous sphere of culture into a moral terrain that Aristotle
|
||||
would find familiar: We again want our “content” to authentically
|
||||
reflect the world (mimesis) and produce healthy feelings in its
|
||||
consumers (catharsis).
|
||||
|
||||
Very unfortunately, this evangelical turn in the arts in the 21st
|
||||
century has been conflated with the long-overdue admission of women,
|
||||
people of color and out sexual minorities into the culture industry —
|
||||
conflated, not least, by its P.R. departments. A gay rom-com is trotted
|
||||
out as “the first”; a Black Little Mermaid is a “breakthrough”; our
|
||||
museums, studios and publishing houses can bring nothing new to market
|
||||
except the very people they once systematically excluded. If resisting
|
||||
such market essentialism was once a primordial task of the artist — “I
|
||||
am not burying myself in a narrow particularism,” Césaire made clear in
|
||||
1956 as he forged a French poetry that could span the Black Atlantic —
|
||||
today identities keep being diminished, brutally, into a series of
|
||||
searchable tags.
|
||||
|
||||
This institutional hunger for novelty combined with digital
|
||||
requirements for communicability may help explain why so much recently
|
||||
celebrated American culture has taken such conservative, traditionalist
|
||||
forms: oil portraiture, Iowa-vintage coming-of-age novels, biopics,
|
||||
operettas barely distinguishable from musical theater. “It scandalizes
|
||||
progressive sensibility to think that things were so much more complex
|
||||
in this domain a generation ago than they are now, but there you have
|
||||
it,” said Darby English, the art historian and author of “How To See a
|
||||
Work of Art in Total Darkness,” when asked in 2021 about the recent
|
||||
efflorescence of Black American art in museums and the market. “Because
|
||||
the core project is communication,” English said, “anything that
|
||||
resists the art-communications apparatus fails to leave a mark. Form
|
||||
has become increasingly irrelevant during these 20 years.”
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
|
||||
|
||||
There is no inherent reason — no reason; this point needs to be clear —
|
||||
that a recession of novelty has to mean a recession of cultural worth.
|
||||
On the contrary, non-novel excellence has been the state of things for
|
||||
a vast majority of art history. Roman art and literature provides a
|
||||
centuries-long tradition of emulation, appropriating and adapting
|
||||
Greek, Etruscan and on occasion Asian examples into a culture in which
|
||||
the idea of copying was alien. Medieval icons were never understood to
|
||||
be “of their time,” but looked back to the time of the Incarnation,
|
||||
forward to eternity or out of time entirely into a realm beyond human
|
||||
life. Even beyond the halfway point of the last millennium, European
|
||||
artists regularly emended, updated or substituted pre-existing artworks
|
||||
at will, integrating present and past into a more spiritually
|
||||
efficacious whole.
|
||||
|
||||
Consider also the long and bountiful history of Chinese painting, in
|
||||
which, from the 13th century to the early 20th, scholar-artists
|
||||
frequently demonstrated their erudition by painting in explicit homage
|
||||
to masters from the past. For these literati painters, what mattered
|
||||
more than technical skill or aesthetic progression was an artist’s
|
||||
spontaneous creativity as channeled through previous masterpieces.
|
||||
There’s a painting I love in the Palace Museum in Beijing by Zhao
|
||||
Mengfu, a prince and scholar working during the Yuan dynasty, that
|
||||
dates to around 1310 but incorporates styles from several other
|
||||
periods. Spartan trees, whose branches hook like crab claws, derive
|
||||
from Song examples a few centuries earlier. A clump of bamboo in the
|
||||
corner coheres through strict, tight brushwork pioneered by the Han
|
||||
dynasty a thousand years before. Alongside the trees and rocks the
|
||||
artist added an inscription:
|
||||
|
||||
The rocks are like flying-white, the trees are like seal script,
|
||||
The writing of bamboo draws upon the bafen method.
|
||||
Only when one masters this secret
|
||||
Will he understand that calligraphy and painting have always been
|
||||
one.
|
||||
|
||||
In other words: Use one style of brushwork for one element, another for
|
||||
another, just as a calligrapher uses different styles for different
|
||||
purposes. But beyond the simple equation of writing and painting, Zhao
|
||||
was doing something much more important: He was sublimating styles,
|
||||
some from the recent past and some of great antiquity, into a series of
|
||||
recombinatory elements that an artist of his time could deploy in
|
||||
concert. The literati painters learned from the old masters (important
|
||||
during the Yuan dynasty, to safeguard the place of Han culture under
|
||||
Mongol rule), but theirs was no simple classicism. It was a practice of
|
||||
aesthetic self-fulfillment that channeled itself through pre-existing
|
||||
gestures. Without ever worrying about novelty, you could still speak
|
||||
directly to your time. You could express your tenderest feelings, or
|
||||
face up to the upheavals of your age, in the overlapping styles of
|
||||
artists long dead.
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
“Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees,” by Zhao Mengfu, circa
|
||||
1310.Credit...Palace Museum, Beijing
|
||||
|
||||
Someone foresaw, profoundly, that this century was going to require
|
||||
something similar: that when forward motion became impossible,
|
||||
ambitious culture was going to have to take another shape. Winehouse,
|
||||
as producers and collaborators have reminded us since her death, was an
|
||||
inveterate collector and compiler of musical clips. (The drummer and
|
||||
music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, remembered:
|
||||
“She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s: ‘Listen to this,
|
||||
listen to this. ... ’”) She was living through, and channeling into
|
||||
“Back to Black,” the initial dissolution of history into streams of
|
||||
digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further
|
||||
from the present than a Google prompt. She freely recombined those
|
||||
fragments but never indulged in nostalgia; she was disappointed by the
|
||||
present but knew there was no going back. And at enormous personal
|
||||
cost, she created something enduring out of it, showing how much harder
|
||||
it would be to leave a real mark amid fathomless data — to transcend
|
||||
mere recombination, sampling, pastiche.
|
||||
|
||||
If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe
|
||||
that they can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they
|
||||
can constitute a Geistgeschichte, or “history of spirit,” as the German
|
||||
idealists used to say. This was entirely possible before modernism, and
|
||||
it is possible after. The most ambitious abstract painters working
|
||||
today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von Heyl, are doing something
|
||||
akin to Winehouse’s free articulation: drawing from diverse and even
|
||||
contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have effects.
|
||||
Olga Tokarczuk structured her 2007 book, “Flights,” as a constellation
|
||||
of barely connected characters and styles, more fugitive than the last
|
||||
century’s novels in fragments; to read her is less like looking at a
|
||||
mosaic than toggling among tabs. Bad Bunny, working at the crossroads
|
||||
of trap, reggaeton, bachata and rock, is crafting pick-and-mix
|
||||
aggregations of small pieces, like “Back to Black,” that are digital in
|
||||
every way that matters. All of them are speaking out of parts of the
|
||||
past in a language that is their own.
|
||||
|
||||
We have every ability to live in a culture of beauty, insight,
|
||||
surprise, if we could just accept that we are no longer modern, and
|
||||
have not been for a while; that somewhere in the push and pull of
|
||||
digital homogeneity and political stasis we entered a new phase of
|
||||
history. We have been evading our predicament with coping mechanisms
|
||||
and marketing scams, which have left all of us disappointedly asking,
|
||||
What’s new? Surely it would be healthier — and who knows what might
|
||||
flower — if we accepted and even embraced the end of stylistic
|
||||
progress, and at last took seriously the digital present we are
|
||||
disavowing. And the perpetuity of “Back to Black,” still playing in the
|
||||
background of avocado-toast dispensaries in East London and West
|
||||
Hollywood after 17 years, suggests to me that we have not lost our
|
||||
ability to identify voices of our time, even if they are fated to speak
|
||||
a language yoked to the past. Culture is stuck? Progress is dead? I
|
||||
died a hundred times, a poet once said, and kept singing.
|
||||
|
||||
[28]Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and
|
||||
culture in the U.S. and abroad. [29]More about Jason Farago
|
||||
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 38 of the Sunday
|
||||
Magazine with the headline: Out of Time. [30]Order Reprints |
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References
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|
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11. file:///2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
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||||
12. https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-farago
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13. https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-farago
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||||
14. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/arts/design/manet-degas-met-museum.html
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||||
15. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/le-balcon-707
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16. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/arts/design/nairy-baghramian-met-facade-nyc-sculpture.html
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17. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/design/stan-douglass-the-secret-agent-offers-a-refracted-vision-of-history-and-terrorism.html
|
||||
18. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/arts/design/pierre-huyghe-serpentine-gallery-london-artist.html
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19. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/02/books/review/companion-piece-ali-smith.html
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||||
20. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html
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21. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/movies/drive-my-car-review.html
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22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou0luMrf1mU
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23. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/watching/k-drama-streaming-guide.html
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24. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/arts/music/cxema-ukraine.html
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25. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/arts/design/amy-winehouse-design-museum.html
|
||||
26. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/arts/music/ice-spice-like.html
|
||||
27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRD0-GxqHVo
|
||||
28. https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-farago
|
||||
29. https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-farago
|
||||
30. https://www.parsintl.com/publication/the-new-york-times/
|
||||
31. https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper
|
||||
32. https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY
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33. file:///2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
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34. file:///2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
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35. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L76170-8570TMP.html#after-bottom
|
||||
36. https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792127-Copyright-notice
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49. https://www.nytimes.com/international/
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||||
Hidden links:
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|
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56. https://www.nytimes.com/audio/app/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html?referringSource=audioAppPromo
|
||||
293
static/archive/www-theatlantic-com-biphm9.txt
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293
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Normal file
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#[1]The Atlantic [2]Best of The Atlantic
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[43]Explore This Series
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* Satellite imagery provided by GOES-16 satellite shows Hurricane
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Otis making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, as a Category 5 storm.
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It's bright red in the center.
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Hurricane Otis Was Too Fast for the Forecasters[44]Zoë Schlanger
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* Cropped images of fruit and bread in a grid
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The Great Underappreciated Driver of Climate Change[45]Alexandra Frost
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* White threads of mycelium growing on tree bark.
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The Invisible Force Keeping Carbon in the Ground[46]Zoë Schlanger
|
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* A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink
|
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background
|
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The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike[47]Michael Thomas
|
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|
||||
[48]Health
|
||||
|
||||
The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike
|
||||
|
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It’ll cut your emissions. It’ll also make you happier.
|
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|
||||
|
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By [49]Michael Thomas
|
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A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink background
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
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October 20, 2023
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Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice
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for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night.
|
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Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of
|
||||
these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life:
|
||||
Ditch your car.
|
||||
|
||||
A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an
|
||||
e-bike. As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was
|
||||
doing something good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are
|
||||
responsible for much of our greenhouse-gas emissions—[51]16 percent in
|
||||
the U.S., to be exact—and that the pollution spewing from gas-powered
|
||||
cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it could increase the risk of
|
||||
[52]premature death. I also knew that electric cars were an imperfect
|
||||
fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution than gas
|
||||
cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply
|
||||
chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce
|
||||
their batteries are, in some cases, mined via a process that
|
||||
[53]brutally exploits workers and harms [54]ecosystems and sacred
|
||||
Indigenous lands. An e-bike’s comparatively tiny battery means less
|
||||
electricity, fewer emissions, fewer resources. They are clearly better
|
||||
for the planet than cars of any kind.
|
||||
|
||||
[55]Read: America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all
|
||||
|
||||
I knew all of this. But I also viewed getting rid of my car as a
|
||||
sacrifice—something for the militant and reckless, something that
|
||||
Greenpeace volunteers did to make the world better. I live in Colorado;
|
||||
e-biking would mean freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer.
|
||||
It was the right thing to do, I thought, but it was not going to be
|
||||
fun.
|
||||
|
||||
I was very wrong. The first thing I noticed was the savings. Between
|
||||
car payments, insurance, maintenance, and gas, a car-centered lifestyle
|
||||
is expensive. According to AAA, after fuel, maintenance, insurance,
|
||||
taxes, and the like, owning and driving a new car in America costs[56]
|
||||
$10,728 a year. My e-bike, by comparison, cost $2,000 off the rack and
|
||||
has near-negligible recurring charges. After factoring in maintenance
|
||||
and a few bucks a month in electricity costs, I estimate that we’ll
|
||||
save about $50,000 over the next five years by ditching our car.
|
||||
|
||||
The actual experience of riding to work each day over the past year has
|
||||
been equally surprising. Before selling our car, I worried most about
|
||||
riding in the cold winter months. But I quickly learned that, as the
|
||||
saying goes, there is [57]no bad weather, only bad gear. I wear gloves,
|
||||
warm socks, a balaclava, and a ski jacket when I ride, and am almost
|
||||
never too cold.
|
||||
|
||||
Sara Hastings-Simon is a professor at the University of Calgary, where
|
||||
she studies low-carbon transportation systems. She’s also a native
|
||||
Californian who now bikes to work in a city where temperatures tend to
|
||||
hover around freezing from December through March. She told me that
|
||||
with the right equipment, she’s able to do it on all but the snowiest
|
||||
days—days when she wouldn’t want to be in a car, either. “Those days
|
||||
are honestly a mess even on the roads,” she said.
|
||||
|
||||
And though I, like [58]many would-be cyclists, was worried about
|
||||
arriving at the office sweaty in hotter months, the e-bike solved my
|
||||
problem. Even when it was 90 degrees outside, I didn’t break a sweat,
|
||||
thanks to my bike’s pedal-assist mode. If I’m honest, sometimes I
|
||||
didn’t even pedal; I just used the throttle, sat back, and enjoyed my
|
||||
ride.
|
||||
|
||||
Indeed, a big part of the appeal here is in the e part of the bike:
|
||||
“E-bikes aren’t just a traditional bike with a motor. They are an
|
||||
entirely new technology,” Hastings-Simon told me. Riding them is a
|
||||
radically different experience from riding a normal bike, at least when
|
||||
it comes to the hard parts of cycling. “It’s so much easier to take a
|
||||
bike over a bridge or in a hilly neighborhood,” Laura Fox, the former
|
||||
general manager of New York City’s bike-share program, told me. “I’ve
|
||||
had countless people come up to me and say, ‘I never thought that I
|
||||
could bike to work before, and now that I have an option where you
|
||||
don’t have to show up sweaty, it’s possible.’” (When New York
|
||||
introduced e-bikes to its fleet, ridership tripled, she told me, from
|
||||
500,000 to 1.5 million people.)
|
||||
|
||||
[59]Read: How to get fewer people to commute in cars
|
||||
|
||||
But biking to work wasn’t just not unpleasant—it was downright
|
||||
enjoyable. It made me feel happier and healthier; I arrived to work a
|
||||
little more buoyant for having spent the morning in fresh air rather
|
||||
than traffic. [60]Study after [61]study shows that people with longer
|
||||
car commutes are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and
|
||||
lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the [62]happiest
|
||||
commuters. One day, shortly after selling our car, I hopped on my bike
|
||||
after a stressful day at work and rode home down a street edged with
|
||||
changing fall leaves. I felt more connected to the physical environment
|
||||
around me than I had when I’d traveled the same route surrounded by
|
||||
metal and glass. I breathed in the air, my muscles relaxed, and I
|
||||
grinned like a giddy schoolchild.
|
||||
|
||||
“E-bikes are like a miracle drug,” David Zipper, a transportation
|
||||
expert and Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, told me. “They
|
||||
provide so much upside, not just for the riders, but for the people who
|
||||
are living around them too.”
|
||||
|
||||
Of course, e-bikes aren’t going to replace every car on every trip. In
|
||||
a country where sprawling suburbs and strip malls, not protected bike
|
||||
lanes, are the norm, it’s unrealistic to expect e-bikes to replace cars
|
||||
in the way that the Model T replaced horses. But we don’t need everyone
|
||||
to ride an e-bike to work to make a big dent in our carbon-pollution
|
||||
problem. [63]A recent study found that if 5 percent of commuters were
|
||||
to switch to e-bikes as their mode of transportation, emissions would
|
||||
fall by 4 percent. As an individual, you don’t even need to sell your
|
||||
car to reduce your carbon footprint significantly. In 2021, half of all
|
||||
trips in the United States were less than three miles, according to
|
||||
[64]the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Making those short trips
|
||||
on an e-bike instead of in a car would likely save people money, cut
|
||||
their emissions, and improve their health and happiness.
|
||||
|
||||
E-bikes are such a no-brainer for individuals, and for the collective,
|
||||
that state and local governments [65]are now subsidizing them. In May,
|
||||
I asked Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy
|
||||
Office, to explain the state’s rationale for [66]a newly passed
|
||||
incentive that offers residents $450 to get an e-bike. He dutifully
|
||||
ticked through the environmental benefits and potential cost savings
|
||||
for low-income people. Then he surprised me: The legislation, he added,
|
||||
was also about “putting more joy into the world.”
|
||||
|
||||
This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s
|
||||
Science and Educational Media Group.
|
||||
|
||||
References
|
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Visible links:
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1. file:///feed/all/
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2. file:///feed/best-of/
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3. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L8425-8528TMP.html#main-content
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4. file:///most-popular/
|
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5. file:///latest/
|
||||
6. file:///newsletters/
|
||||
7. file:///politics/
|
||||
8. file:///ideas/
|
||||
9. https://www.theatlantic.com/category/fiction/
|
||||
10. file:///technology/
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11. file:///science/
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12. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/
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13. file:///business/
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14. file:///culture/
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15. file:///projects/planet/
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16. file:///international/
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17. file:///books/
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18. file:///podcasts/
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20. file:///education/
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21. file:///projects/
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22. https://www.theatlantic.com/category/features/
|
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23. file:///family/
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24. file:///events/
|
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25. https://www.theatlantic.com/category/washington-week-atlantic/
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26. https://www.theatlantic.com/progress/
|
||||
27. file:///newsletters/
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28. file:///archive/
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29. file:///free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
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30. file:///magazine/
|
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31. file:///magazine/backissues/
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32. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products/gift
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33. file:///projects/dear-therapist/
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34. file:///free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
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35. file:///archive/
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36. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/accounts/subscription/
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37. file:///most-popular/
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38. file:///latest/
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39. file:///newsletters/
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40. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/login/
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41. https://www.theatlantic.com/subscribe/navbar/
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42. https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
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43. https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
|
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44. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/zoe-schlanger/
|
||||
45. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alexandra-frost/
|
||||
46. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/zoe-schlanger/
|
||||
47. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/michael-thomas/
|
||||
48. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/
|
||||
49. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/michael-thomas/
|
||||
50. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/accounts/saved-stories/
|
||||
51. https://energy.mit.edu/news/us-passenger-cars/
|
||||
52. https://qz.com/135509/more-americans-die-from-car-pollution-than-car-accidents
|
||||
53. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
|
||||
54. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/lithium-mining-leaving-chiles-indigenous-communities-high-and-dry-literally
|
||||
55. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/04/electric-ev-rickshaw-sales-climate-change/673629/
|
||||
56. https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-ownership-crosses-10k-mark/
|
||||
57. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/how-socialize-outside-winter/617520/
|
||||
58. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518306054
|
||||
59. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/seattle-car-commute/553589/
|
||||
60. https://travelbehaviour.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/caw-summaryreport-onlineedition.pdf
|
||||
61. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-commuting/long-commutes-may-be-bad-for-health-study-idUKBRE8470U520120508
|
||||
62. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518305255
|
||||
63. https://peopleforbikes.cdn.prismic.io/peopleforbikes/e3dad6f7-d81b-4e59-9208-b012406ffa8e_E-bike-Potential-Paper-05_15_19-Final.pdf
|
||||
64. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021#:~:text=A research study for the,were greater than 50 miles.
|
||||
65. https://electrek.co/2023/02/19/free-electric-bikes-rebates-us-cities-and-states/
|
||||
66. https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/10/colorado-ebike-rebates-how-to-qualify/
|
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Hidden links:
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68. file://localhost/
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69. file://localhost/magazine/
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70. file://localhost/
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71. file://localhost/
|
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72. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/10/hurricane-otis-forecast-warming-oceans/675773/
|
||||
73. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/american-families-have-massive-food-waste-problem/675744/
|
||||
74. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/10/tree-survival-fungi-corsica-climate-change/675739/
|
||||
75. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/reasons-to-get-e-bike-emissions-climate-change-benefits/675716/
|
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Reference in New Issue
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