November Dispatch

content/journal/dispatch-9-november-2023/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,145 @@
+---
+title: "Dispatch #9 (November 2023)"
+date: 2023-11-01T00:00:00-04:00
+draft: false
+tags:
+- dispatch
+references:
+- title: "EDM Song Structure: Arrange Your Loop into a Full Song"
+  url: https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/
+  date: 2023-11-02T03:01:04Z
+  file: edmtips-com-05su6g.txt
+- title: "The Tascam Portastudio 414 Let Me Fall In Love With Music Again"
+  url: https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/audio/a45461959/tascam-portastudio-414-mkii/
+  date: 2023-11-02T03:06:19Z
+  file: www-gearpatrol-com-6mp4nk.txt
+- title: "The internet is already over - by Sam Kriss"
+  url: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over
+  date: 2023-11-02T03:10:20Z
+  file: samkriss-substack-com-5indyq.txt
+- title: "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill - The New York Times"
+  url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
+  date: 2023-11-02T03:15:31Z
+  file: www-nytimes-com-yrjrte.txt
+- title: "The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike - The Atlantic"
+  url: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/reasons-to-get-e-bike-emissions-climate-change-benefits/675716/
+  date: 2023-10-29T18:17:07Z
+  file: www-theatlantic-com-biphm9.txt
+- title: "The beauty of finished software | Jose M."
+  url: https://josem.co/the-beauty-of-finished-software/
+  date: 2023-11-02T03:13:08Z
+  file: josem-co-8ssbyq.txt
+---
+
+It was nice to have a quieter month after so much travel this summer. We got a few extra weeks of warm weather, which meant a few more weeks of biking with Nev, and plenty of time at the [museum][1] and all the local playgrounds. I decided to run the [Bull City Race Fest][2] half-marathon despite having to rest my ankle for the last week of training ([result][3], [certificate][4]). I faded pretty hard down the stretch, but still managed to finish in under two hours -- not bad for an old.
+
+[1]: https://www.lifeandscience.org/
+[2]: https://capstoneraces.com/bull-city-race-fest/
+[3]: /journal/dispatch-9-november-2023/bcrf-result.pdf
+[4]: /journal/dispatch-9-november-2023/bcrf-cert.png
+
+<!--more-->
+
+<div class="image-set">
+  {{<thumbnail ECE91676-CF38-4F4D-9F8F-B6C87048AB16_1_105_c.jpeg "400x" />}}
+  {{<thumbnail 59EA3598-4D50-4783-8EBF-CA35996F19E9_1_105_c.jpeg "400x" />}}
+</div>
+
+## Tech
+
+At my job, I did a cool project working with data from a [Freematics][5] car telematics device. I built a data exploration API using [Gin][6] and learned [`jq`][7] to truncate enormous JSON objects[^1]. I also got to, just like, drive my car around to test things out.
+
+I also made some updates to my [`golong`][8] tool to prep for a fantasy NBA draft. Now it can munge multiple CSVs of data and supports multiple position eligibility (an NBA player is often eligible as both a forward and a center, for example) and average stat projections (NFL projections are typically season-based, NBA are per-game). It worked great, and my team's looking solid so far. I'll open source it one of these days.
+
+[5]: https://freematics.com/products/freematics-one/
+[6]: https://gin-gonic.com/
+[7]: https://github.com/jqlang/jq
+[8]: /journal/dispatch-7-september-2023/
+
+## Music
+
+I'm still having a blast with the Novation Circuit Tracks I got last month. I came up with a track I actually really like, which I'm calling "Radiatus" (which is a [type of cloud][9]):
+
+<audio controls src="Radiatus.mp3"></audio>
+
+[9]: https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/clouds-varieties-radiatus.html
+
+Here's an extended mix:
+
+<audio controls src="Radiatus (Extended).mp3"></audio>
+
+It's really fun once you've got all the parts set up just to _play_ the Novation, bringing drums and leads in and out -- that's how I recorded these tracks. I imagine it'll only get more fun as I learn how to better twiddle the knobs to change the sounds. We'll see -- maybe I'll come up with 2-3 more cloud-themed tracks and release an album!
+
+My phone (and yours probably) sends me these photo slideshows periodically, and I'm an absolute sucker for them. One recently featured a track by [Lack of Afro][10], and I've been listening to his stuff ever since. Check out "For You" (or really any of it -- it's all good).
+
+[10]: https://lackofafro.com/
+
+## Website
+
+I made a few updates to the website this month:
+
+* Created a [music][11] page that aggregates all the MP3s I've uploaded.
+* Imported all the posts I've written on my [company blog][12] into an "[elsewhere][13]" section -- I'm pretty proud of some of this stuff and wanted to make sure I have a copy of it I control. I was able to automate a lot of the process with [Nokogiri][14] and [Pandoc][15], but I still had to manually review every post, which was a fun trip down memory lane, though some of my old ideas are BAD.
+* Polished my [Markdown link renumbering script][25] (keeps my links in numerical order). This might be useful to other folks & might be worth rewriting in Go and releasing.
+
+[11]: /music
+[12]: https://www.viget.com/articles
+[13]: /elsewhere
+[14]: https://nokogiri.org/
+[15]: /elsewhere/pandoc-a-tool-i-use-and-like/
+[25]: https://github.com/dce/davideisinger.com/blob/main/bin/renumber
+
+I'm really happy with Hugo -- it's simple but flexible enough to handle every challenge I've thrown at it. Building and maintaining this site has brought me a lot of joy this year.
+
+This month:
+
+* Adventure: head to upstate New York for Thanksgiving, run [Troy Turkey Trot][16]
+* Project: make another track as good as that one 👆 and finally build that music workstation
+* Skill: get better at playing along with a click track; [write songs, not just grooves][17]
+
+[16]: https://troyturkeytrot.com/
+[17]: https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/
+
+Reading:
+
+* Fiction: 
+  * [_The Secret_][18], Lee Child & Andrew Child
+  * [_Red War_][19], Kyle Mills
+* Non-fiction: [_Step by Step Mixing_][20], [Bjorgvin Benediktsson][21]
+
+[18]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/635346/the-secret-by-lee-child-and-andrew-child/
+[19]: https://www.vinceflynn.com/mitch-rapp-17
+[20]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/step-by-step-mixing-how-to-create-great-mixes-using-only-5-plug-ins-bjorgvin-benediktsson/9946155?ean=9781733688802
+[21]: https://www.stepbystepmixing.com/
+
+Links:
+
+* [The Tascam Portastudio 414 Let Me Fall In Love With Music Again][22]
+
+  > 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 Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII brought it all flooding back.
+
+* [The internet is already over][23]
+
+  > 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.
+  >
+  > They were wrong, but in the process of being wrong, they created a monster.
+
+* [Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill][26]
+
+  > 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 “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.
+
+* [The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike][24]
+
+  > Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. 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.
+
+* [The beauty of finished software][25]
+
+  > 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.
+
+[22]: https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/audio/a45461959/tascam-portastudio-414-mkii/
+[23]: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over
+[26]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
+[24]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/reasons-to-get-e-bike-emissions-climate-change-benefits/675716/
+[25]: https://josem.co/the-beauty-of-finished-software/
+
+[^1]: I was getting back complex nested JSON structures containing arrays with thousands of elements. To truncate all arrays in a JSON response to two elements, you can do `curl [url] | jq 'walk(if type == "array" then .[0:2] else . end)'`.

static/archive/edmtips-com-05su6g.txt

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+    [tr?id=1356908847688416&ev=PageView&noscript=1]
+   [tr?id=279433711742018&ev=PageView&noscript=1] #[1]EDM Tips » EDM Song
+   Structure: Arrange Your Loop into a Full Song Comments Feed
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+EDM Song Structure: Arrange Your Loop into a Full Song
+
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+   33 Shares
+
+   So you’ve created a killer 8-bar loop and want to take your great idea
+   to a full song, but don’t know where to go from here? We’ve all been
+   there before!
+
+   The good news is that you don’t need to feel disheartened: this is a
+   super common problem that happens to all music producers, and
+   thankfully there are some very straightforward steps you can take to
+   get out of the loop and to a finished arrangement….
+
+   We get stuck because it can be very difficult to imagine each
+   individual section of a track before it exists. So, how do we fix
+   this?
+   Start 2022 the right way! Download your FREE “New Producer Starter
+   Pack” here.
+
+   Let’s look into EDM song structure, and use that knowledge as a
+   template for our own tracks almost like one of those Paint-by-Numbers
+   books. If you use the techniques outlined below, you’ll be writing full
+   tracks and streamlining your workflow in no time!
+
+   IFRAME:
+   [15]https://www.youtube.com/embed/EXx9At3iUOw?feature=oembed&iv_load_po
+   licy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=0
+
+EDM Song Structure
+
+   So what exactly are the benefits of learning EDM song structure? Well,
+   for one, by learning the common ways in which other artists create and
+   sculpt their songs, we can use that as a template for when we get stuck
+   in creating our own music.
+
+   Additionally, using known song structures helps increase relatability
+   and appeal to a wider audience. The practice of purposely arranging
+   your music in a carefully crafted way is called arrangement, and is
+   used in all types of music – not just Electronic Dance Music.
+
+   In most Electronic Dance Music genres, your track will be in 4/4 time.
+   This means that in every bar (also known as a measure), there will be 4
+   beats, and that the quarter note (the kick on every beat), will carry
+   the song.
+
+   In this format, a bar is 4 beats, and a musical phrase is usually a
+   multiple of 2 or 4 bars. In music theory, a phrase is generally just a
+   grouping of bars whose energy flows nicely. For example, your build
+   might contain two separate phrases; one that first hints at the melody
+   followed by a second that introduces a snare or clap build up.
+
+   Phrases build up, take down, or play around with the energy of a
+   section of your track to build interest, and create and release
+   tension.
+
+   However, let’s take a step back and see what the main overall sections
+   of an EDM song structure are.
+
+   They are as follows:
+     * Intro
+     * Verse
+     * Build up
+     * Drop
+
+   Each of these distinct sections contains elements of your loop
+   simplified, modified, or generally expanded upon. Knowing what makes up
+   these sections and how they’re crafted is at the heart of how you
+   transform your loop into a full-fledged song.
+
+   Now, let’s see a rundown of which elements each section usually
+   contains.
+
+Intro
+
+   The intro is usually the simplest part of your entire track. It will
+   usually contain a stripped down beat to allow DJ’s to more easily
+   transition into your track, or – if you’re making a radio or Spotify
+   edit – will have a very short 2 to 4 bar phrase introducing the main
+   theme of your track. The intro also sets the pace and expectations for
+   what the track will deliver. (Will it be a break-neck speed drum-n-bass
+   track? Will it be a more chilled-out deep house track?)
+
+Verse
+
+   The verse is more complex than the intro, but often less complex than
+   the drop (or at least, conveying less energy). In vocal driven music,
+   this is where the majority of the storytelling of songwriting occurs,
+   but in a lot of EDM, this is where you establish your melodic motifs.
+   These motifs – or small musical ideas – should hint at your main drop
+   melody without giving away your big, exciting, energetic drop.
+
+Build up
+
+   The build up typically contains risers, repetitive melodic motifs, and
+   is generally rather short (a notable exception to this rule might be an
+   8-minute trance track). When creating build ups, you can also consider
+   stripping down your percussion and drums to the bare essentials, in
+   order to juxtapose to the heavy drop.
+
+Drop
+
+   The drop is the hardest hitting part of your track. This is where the
+   main hook of your song lies, and where the energy in your track should
+   be the highest. You want people to get up and dance when they hear your
+   drop! The drop can be very simple, or very complex; this heavily relies
+   on genre, so make sure to listen to your favorite songs and use them as
+   reference.
+
+Structures
+
+   Many songs you hear on the radio or in the club utilize similar song
+   structures, with some key variation to keep it interesting. When
+   deciding how to structure your own track, listening and referencing
+   your favorite track in the same genre can be immensely valuable, as
+   that track is likely commercially successful and has a structure that
+   is proven and works.
+
+   As a high level overview, structuring your song is a bit like designing
+   a roller-coaster. We want to bring the listener on a journey with the
+   emotion and energy from the track. This will help keep your listeners
+   engaged, prevent them from becoming bored, and hopefully keep playing
+   your track for days, months, and years to come.
+
+   You can even analyse the structure of existing songs and draw in an
+   “energy map” using an automation line, as shown here.
+
+   There are a few ways of representing song structure, but by far the
+   most common is to use letters to represent each part of a track. For
+   example, a common song structure in pop music goes as follows:
+
+   A B D B D E D A
+
+   In this instance, the letter A stands for an intro or outtro, B stands
+   for a verse, D stands for a chorus or drop, and E stands for the bridge
+   of the song, adding variety. Using this notation, we can quickly and
+   easily create and plan our song’s structure without getting too deep
+   into the details and slowing us down.
+
+   If we wanted to use a similar structure for EDM, we could use A B D B D
+   A or A B D E D A, both of which are fairly basic but common structures.
+   In this instance, however, the E section is an extended breakdown,
+   bridge, or a new section or extended verse.
+
+   Now we understand how song structure notation works, let’s look at a
+   common example of a more complex EDM song structure.
+
+   A B C D B C D A
+
+   This structure breaks down like so:
+     * A: These are the intro and outtro of the track. They are typically
+       8 or 16 bars in length. In some genres, you may have 4 bar intro
+       and outtros; it’s important to reference the genre you’re producing
+       to ensure your song fits in well with the genre.
+     * B: This is the verse in your track. The first verse is typically 16
+       bars, and the second verse is 16 or 32 bars.
+     * C: This is the build of the track. Both builds are typically 8 bars
+       in length, although in some genres can be 4 or even 10 or 12 bars
+       long.
+     * D: This is the drop of your track. A drop can vary in length but
+       are usually 8 to 16 bars. The second drop is typically either the
+       same length as the first, or slightly longer to develop a little
+       bit of additional energy.
+
+   EDM Song Structure - Track Breakdown
+
+   This is only one example of how you can structure your song, feel free
+   to deviate as much or as little as you want. During the music
+   production process, there’s tons of room for experimentation,
+   innovation, and self-expression; however, the vast majority of the
+   time, you do not want to experiment with EDM song structure. By doing
+   so you make your track more difficult to understand. No need to
+   reinvent the wheel!
+
+Song Structure and Genre
+
+   Now for a quick note on genre. Genre itself dictates a lot of how your
+   track should be structured. A tech house track is going to have a
+   different song structure than a future bass track, which will be
+   different than an EDM trap track. Additionally, the length of the track
+   also fairly tightly correlates to the genre, with pop-y tracks being
+   shorter and club and house tracks being on the longer side.
+
+   For example, future bass typically follow a more pop-like structure,
+   with longer fleshed out melodic verses and short 4 bar intros and
+   outtros. Most house music, however, has a significantly longer intro
+   and outtro; 8 to 16 bars, sometimes even 32. House music also typically
+   has fewer purely melodic elements focused in the verses and breakdowns,
+   and instead focuses on the vibe, atmosphere, and groove, building up to
+   an epic drop.
+
+   Let’s take a look at [16]“Chained For Love – B2A & Anklebreaker Remix”.
+   This is a hardstyle track and has a song structure of:
+
+   A B C D B C D A
+
+   Where A stands for your intro and outtro, B is your verse, C is the
+   build, and D is the drop. This is an extremely common structure in
+   hardstyle tracks; the verse is also typically split into a more vocal
+   or lower energy first half, and the second half is where your
+   saw-driven leads come in to introduce components of the drop melody.
+
+   Now let’s examine a future bass track, [17]“Lifeline – LODIS, Josh
+   Rubin”. This particular track has a structure like so:
+
+   A B E C D B E C D A
+
+   Note that this genre has a significantly longer intro than the previous
+   hardstyle track, yet the overarching structure itself is remarkably
+   similar. The key difference is the addition of E; which is a breakdown
+   or pre-build. This component lowers the energy right before the build,
+   allowing the producer to create a bigger feeling build.
+
+   Finally, let’s take a look at a big room / EDM track. We’ll use
+   [18]“Cold – Timmy Trumpet” as an example here. He utilizes the
+   following structure for his track:
+
+   B C D B C D A
+
+   “Cold” also shares a similar structure to the other tracks. In fact,
+   it’s virtually identical to “Chained For Love”, save for the lack of
+   any sort of intro, even though the sounds and overall general vibe of
+   the genre are strikingly different.
+
+EDM Song Structure and Arrangement
+
+   Now we understand how songs are structured and how to structure our own
+   track, we need to decide on the genre we want our loop to fit, or what
+   genre the loop already fits. Then, identify which section of a track
+   your loop fits into. Is it a heavy and energetic drop, or is it more a
+   verse or breakdown?
+
+   Once you’ve figured out these overarching details, we can start to
+   think about how we want to structure our track. You can use your DAW or
+   even just a piece of paper to map out each section of our song, and
+   what should go where. Now it’s as simple as filling in the gaps with
+   elements from your loop, and you’re well on your way to finishing your
+   track!
+
+   Let’s go over some of the common scenarios you’ll find yourself in.
+
+Starting with the Drop
+
+   Your loop is energetic and pumping; this is your drop. Let’s use an A B
+   C D B C D A structure for our track, just like the “Chained For Love –
+   B2A & Anklebreaker Remix” prior example.
+
+   EDM Song Structure - Straring with a Drop
+
+   Now you’ve identified that you have a drop, let’s expand it to two
+   sections with a little bit of melodic or rhythmic variation on the
+   second iteration.
+
+   Now we’ve gotten a full drop, let’s take a look at the build up. We can
+   use more filtered leads and pads, and switch up the snare or clap to a
+   contrasting rhythm to build tension. We’ll open up the filters and
+   speed up the percussion as the drop builds to further build up that
+   tension before the drop.
+
+   Let’s take a look at the intro and outtro. Take the melody, simplify it
+   and the instrumentation, and use a stripped down drum pattern. You can
+   also experiment with some low and simple bass or some rhythmically
+   simple chord patterns. The outtro can be as simple as the intro, but
+   instead of bringing in elements, we take them out.
+
+   The verses should be a contrasting force to the drop, while still
+   maintaining a similar vibe. To quickly get down a verse idea, you can
+   take the drop melody, take it down to a lower register with some more
+   interesting rhythmic chord structures that build nicely into the build
+   up. We can also add our second verse, build, and drops.
+
+   EDM Song Structure - Starging with a Drop 5
+
+Starting with a Breakdown, Verse or Intro
+
+   So your loop isn’t super energetic, maybe it fits well as a verse or
+   intro. To generate your placeholder verses, take the idea and evolve it
+   with moving drum patterns and chord patterns. The build up will then
+   come more naturally, and you can introduce a switch-up in drum patterns
+   to help contrast this section from the verses and drop. Work up the
+   energy in the build up, adding faster drums and risers and other
+   effects. After this build is complete, usually you’ll have a solid idea
+   for the drop itself; if not, don’t worry! Take your verse idea, take
+   apart a one or two bar section, and build upon it to make it as high
+   energy as possible.
+
+Referencing Existing Material
+
+   If you’re still struggling to build out your loop into a full track
+   scaffold, try using your favorite song as reference. In this example,
+   we’ll use HOLIDAY by Lil Nas X, a pop and rap song.
+
+   Import the track into your DAW, and set the tempo equal to that of the
+   track. Sometimes your DAW will do this for you, but if not, you can
+   usually find it easily on Beatport or other sites.
+
+   EDM Song Structure - Referencing Existing Material
+
+   Take a listen to the song in full. As you listen, mark down where each
+   change occurs in the song, and what the upcoming section is.Take a
+   listen to the song in full. As you listen, mark down where each change
+   occurs in the song, and what the upcoming section is.
+
+   EDM Song Structure- Referencing Existing Material 2
+
+   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,
+   (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
+   [20]Tweet
+   33 Shares
+
+     * [21]Music Theory & Arrangement
+
+Related Posts
+
+   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
+   [22]Facebook.
+
+Leave a Reply 6 comments
+
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+
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+   What do you want to learn?
+     * [25]Messages
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+
+   About EDM Tips
+
+   My name is Will Darling and I'm the founder of EDM Tips. I've been
+   producing Electronic Dance Music for over 25 years, and each week help
+   my readers achieve their music goals. [31]Read More...
+
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+   Popular Posts
+   [33]The Ultimate Guide to Success in Music Production in 2022
+   [34]How To Make Chords
+   [35]The Circle of Fifths (and how to use it…)
+   [36]Make Better EDM Using Keys And Scales
+   [37]The Ultimate EDM Production Glossary
+
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+     * [50]October 2021
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+     * [86]July 2018
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+     * [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
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+     * [105]October 2016
+     * [106]September 2016
+     * [107]August 2016
+
+   Copyright 2023 EDM Tips Ltd.
+     * [108]
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+
+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/
+  41. https://edmtips.com/2023/01/
+  42. https://edmtips.com/2022/11/
+  43. https://edmtips.com/2022/10/
+  44. https://edmtips.com/2022/09/
+  45. https://edmtips.com/2022/07/
+  46. https://edmtips.com/2022/05/
+  47. https://edmtips.com/2022/03/
+  48. https://edmtips.com/2022/02/
+  49. https://edmtips.com/2022/01/
+  50. https://edmtips.com/2021/10/
+  51. https://edmtips.com/2021/09/
+  52. https://edmtips.com/2021/08/
+  53. https://edmtips.com/2021/06/
+  54. https://edmtips.com/2021/05/
+  55. https://edmtips.com/2021/04/
+  56. https://edmtips.com/2021/03/
+  57. https://edmtips.com/2021/02/
+  58. https://edmtips.com/2021/01/
+  59. https://edmtips.com/2020/12/
+  60. https://edmtips.com/2020/11/
+  61. https://edmtips.com/2020/10/
+  62. https://edmtips.com/2020/09/
+  63. https://edmtips.com/2020/08/
+  64. https://edmtips.com/2020/07/
+  65. https://edmtips.com/2020/06/
+  66. https://edmtips.com/2020/05/
+  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/
+  75. https://edmtips.com/2019/08/
+  76. https://edmtips.com/2019/07/
+  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/
+ 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/

static/archive/josem-co-8ssbyq.txt

@@ -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)
+   ____________________
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+
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+     __________________________________________________________________
+
+   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

static/archive/samkriss-substack-com-5indyq.txt

@@ -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
+   Top
+   New
+
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+
+   Ready for more?
+   ____________________
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+
+   © 2023 Sam Kriss
+   [48]Privacy ∙ [49]Terms ∙ [50]Collection notice
+   Start Writing[51]Get the app
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+
+References
+
+   Visible links:
+   1. file:///feed
+   2. https://samkriss.substack.com/
+   3. https://samkriss.substack.com/
+   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
+  38. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-2-71503638
+  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
+  45. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-9-71503638
+  46. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-10-71503638
+  47. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-11-71503638
+  48. https://samkriss.substack.com/privacy?utm_source=
+  49. https://substack.com/tos
+  50. https://substack.com/ccpa#personal-data-collected
+  51. https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_campaign=app-marketing&utm_content=web-footer-button
+  52. https://substack.com/
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+
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+  58. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa51b61a9-059d-45ed-8104-eaa81b678cd5_1536x1099.jpeg
+  59. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd3debefc-91c1-4a45-8509-fa16b752a687_1100x781.jpeg
+  60. javascript:void(0)
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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
+   The Comeback of the Classic Cassette
+
+   (BUTTON)
+
+   More From [126]Audio
+   The Best Dolby Atmos Soundbars of 2023
+   These Turntable and Speaker Combos Make Vinyl Easy
+     __________________________________________________________________
+
+   Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
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+   6 Tricks All Sonos Owners Should Know
+     __________________________________________________________________
+
+   How to Play Vinyl Records on Your Sonos Speakers
+   AirPods Pro Don’t Fit Your Ears? Get These
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+   The New Sony WF-1000XM5 Are Elite Wireless Earbuds
+     __________________________________________________________________
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+   Update Your AirPods and Get More Features
+     __________________________________________________________________
+
+   Your AirPods Pro Just Got Way Better — Here's How
+     __________________________________________________________________
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+  19. file:///buying-guides/
+  20. file:///watch-buying-guides/
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static/archive/www-nytimes-com-yrjrte.txt

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+   #[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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+   3. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/magazine/jesmyn-ward-let-us-descend.html
+   4. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/magazine/taylor-swift-eras-tour.html
+   5. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
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+   7. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/08/magazine/errol-morris-interview.html
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+  11. file:///2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html
+  12. https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-farago
+  13. https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-farago
+  14. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/arts/design/manet-degas-met-museum.html
+  15. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/le-balcon-707
+  16. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/arts/design/nairy-baghramian-met-facade-nyc-sculpture.html
+  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
+  19. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/02/books/review/companion-piece-ali-smith.html
+  20. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html
+  21. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/movies/drive-my-car-review.html
+  22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou0luMrf1mU
+  23. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/watching/k-drama-streaming-guide.html
+  24. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/arts/music/cxema-ukraine.html
+  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/
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+       It's bright red in the center.
+    Hurricane Otis Was Too Fast for the Forecasters[44]Zoë Schlanger
+     * Cropped images of fruit and bread in a grid
+    The Great Underappreciated Driver of Climate Change[45]Alexandra Frost
+     * White threads of mycelium growing on tree bark.
+    The Invisible Force Keeping Carbon in the Ground[46]Zoë Schlanger
+     * A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink
+       background
+    The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike[47]Michael Thomas
+
+   [48]Health
+
+The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike
+
+   It’ll cut your emissions. It’ll also make you happier.
+
+
+    By [49]Michael Thomas
+
+   A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink background
+   Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
+   October 20, 2023
+   (BUTTON) Share
+   [50]Saved Stories (BUTTON) Save
+
+   Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice
+   for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night.
+   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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+   4. file:///most-popular/
+   5. file:///latest/
+   6. file:///newsletters/
+   7. file:///politics/
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+  22. https://www.theatlantic.com/category/features/
+  23. file:///family/
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+  25. https://www.theatlantic.com/category/washington-week-atlantic/
+  26. https://www.theatlantic.com/progress/
+  27. file:///newsletters/
+  28. file:///archive/
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+  30. file:///magazine/
+  31. file:///magazine/backissues/
+  32. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products/gift
+  33. file:///projects/dear-therapist/
+  34. file:///free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
+  35. file:///archive/
+  36. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/accounts/subscription/
+  37. file:///most-popular/
+  38. file:///latest/
+  39. file:///newsletters/
+  40. https://accounts.theatlantic.com/login/
+  41. https://www.theatlantic.com/subscribe/navbar/
+  42. https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
+  43. https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
+  44. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/zoe-schlanger/
+  45. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alexandra-frost/
+  46. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/zoe-schlanger/
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+  48. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/
+  49. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/michael-thomas/
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+  52. https://qz.com/135509/more-americans-die-from-car-pollution-than-car-accidents
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+  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
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+  60. https://travelbehaviour.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/caw-summaryreport-onlineedition.pdf
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+  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/
+
+   Hidden links:
+  68. 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/