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symbioidljI've always had an affection for the analog. And I know we're supposed to love the ultra-bright crisp clean shimmer of digital sharpness. Everything copied ever more precisely, just the more data we send to it... Ever more and more accurate mappings, tracings of reality, shaded and filled in by artists and designers, but controlled by their masters.
We are entering the "road to serfdom" through the precise locks that those who control systems of distribution are placing on content. The artist becomes one more slave, a serf to his lord, lord who owns the landscape of creative media.
Everyone is so fucking enamored of "digital" as if it's a perfect reality. It's a fake simulucrum, too perfect to be real. Too precise. The trick in any sort of digital manipulation is to introduce flaws. Ideally, because it lends it a more true feel. Everything is scarred by karmic interaction with other objects.
But digital is granular, it's fine tuned control, it is a minute speck of sand that can be grabbed and placed precisely where it can/should go.
Analog on the other hand is fluid, it's water, it needs a solid container, indeed, but inside that container, it is free to move. It is this precise nature of the analog that gives it a superior status in my heart. In the analog, there are fractures, and discontinuous eddies and vortices which bubble up and arise, and dissipate once again back into the aether. When I hear more about digital shortwave radio, or indeed, any digital media, I begin to cringe. Digital TV. All this data, sure, you can do wonderful things with digitizations of it, but that fact is what allows it to be controlled. And in this world, the lawmakers, and those who hold the money dictate and decide the flow of this information.
They build pipes, and they want to dissect everything into tiny little bits of sand nuggets of information that can be discretely transported across strict channels that are securely locked, and there is absolutely no way for this information to leak out. You need a key to get access, and as long as they own the property, the key then becomes a commodity sought out. It becomes something you HAVE to pay for.
Luckily the internet still has some semblance of freedom, but in reality, if those at the top had their way, they would crush any independent innovation. They would like to harness that creation for their own nefarious deeds, and that one, sole purpose, the worship of their dark lord Mammon.
Ever since I was a child, I enjoyed listening to those waves. For, as an example, as I once posted, sticking the wire of a simple earphone piece into a powersocket and hearing the buzz of electricity flow through. Hearing the crackle of the electrified fences keeping the cows in.
And radio. Tuning in to hispanic chicago radio, amazed, wondering where I was listening to.
And watching tv, in the summer time, because of the atmospheric conditions, allowing me to watch TV from as far away as milwaukee(which I think was about a 3 hour drive from where I lived, if not more)... Channel 44, the Hispanic station. And 18, which had the A-Team. And 24, which I believed had the Monkees on. Or maybe it was also 18. My mom liked to watch her jesus stuff on channel 13, and 67. We didn't get cable, but we could reach some of these stations however faintly.
But with the digital world, if they had their way, this leakage would not occur. You would have to pay. It is on or off.
There is also the imperfection, that riding the point of a wave, like a surfer, like Richard D James' album "Surfing on Sine Waves", to take an analog radio tune it in to where you hit a point of reverberation, a certain frequency sustains itself, but then, take the knob, and jog it just a little past that perfect point, and hear it on the edge of chaos. Right between the point of balance and perfect and sustenance into the event horizon, or rather, dancing around it. Little breaks and fractures dance around, while the pure tone struggles to hold on. Static begins to pierce. But it's quite wrong to call static "static" for it is the exact opposite.
Static is static, because it is so much chaos it becomes one. The polytheists sees the one in their multiplicity of gods, and we see static in the flickering dance of black and white upon an analog screen.
That is our monotheism. That is our unity. It is the great dance of opposites and everything in between, there is no one space, however that remains the same. It is always in motion, and yet one. In the same way that the fluid is in motion, and yet, held in space by the container. That is our unity.
Their unity is a monolithic(Lith, as in stone -- that is the YANG of the Tao) Their hard, cold, monochromatic stone on the screen blazing out in their digital world, a Blue Screen of Death(with no text, just blue, bright, glowing from the screen, with one implicit meaning: No Access. The door is blue and it is one, and there is no leak, there are no dancing insects that pitter patter across this gate.) This blue screen of death, of stone, of impenetrable cold isolation. This is their digital society. The fluid warmth of the analog vs the discrete cold of the digital. The bubbling and whorling of the stream.
Analog is about process itself. Digital is about essence. together, perhaps: Processence? The Tao unification?
There's much more, but this is quite long. And I have to add that one of the big pieces of the symgnostikon is about pipes, about how man builds for itself(and I say man in the fully sexist meaning of the word, man the builder, the builder who destroys in order to make his pathetic toys. man, the "Oedipal" creature who kills his own mother. Man, the "Elektric" creature, who devours the flesh(earth) in order to make spirit(god)... Man who partakes of the flesh of the gods. Transubstantiation. Like a great cancer sweeping across the face of the planet. Pipes that man builds to digest all that he consumes. Pipes, like the esophagous and the stomach which converts and transmits to blood vessels and nervous fibers. Man constructs it's own god-body upon the face of the planet. Man transmogrifies the female organic mother into the technological father. The slow fire burning across the planet in energy consumption, in war, not in sustaining technology... A slow star with infinitely less energy.
Metaphors, all of these.
We are entering the "road to serfdom" through the precise locks that those who control systems of distribution are placing on content. The artist becomes one more slave, a serf to his lord, lord who owns the landscape of creative media.
Everyone is so fucking enamored of "digital" as if it's a perfect reality. It's a fake simulucrum, too perfect to be real. Too precise. The trick in any sort of digital manipulation is to introduce flaws. Ideally, because it lends it a more true feel. Everything is scarred by karmic interaction with other objects.
But digital is granular, it's fine tuned control, it is a minute speck of sand that can be grabbed and placed precisely where it can/should go.
Analog on the other hand is fluid, it's water, it needs a solid container, indeed, but inside that container, it is free to move. It is this precise nature of the analog that gives it a superior status in my heart. In the analog, there are fractures, and discontinuous eddies and vortices which bubble up and arise, and dissipate once again back into the aether. When I hear more about digital shortwave radio, or indeed, any digital media, I begin to cringe. Digital TV. All this data, sure, you can do wonderful things with digitizations of it, but that fact is what allows it to be controlled. And in this world, the lawmakers, and those who hold the money dictate and decide the flow of this information.
They build pipes, and they want to dissect everything into tiny little bits of sand nuggets of information that can be discretely transported across strict channels that are securely locked, and there is absolutely no way for this information to leak out. You need a key to get access, and as long as they own the property, the key then becomes a commodity sought out. It becomes something you HAVE to pay for.
Luckily the internet still has some semblance of freedom, but in reality, if those at the top had their way, they would crush any independent innovation. They would like to harness that creation for their own nefarious deeds, and that one, sole purpose, the worship of their dark lord Mammon.
Ever since I was a child, I enjoyed listening to those waves. For, as an example, as I once posted, sticking the wire of a simple earphone piece into a powersocket and hearing the buzz of electricity flow through. Hearing the crackle of the electrified fences keeping the cows in.
And radio. Tuning in to hispanic chicago radio, amazed, wondering where I was listening to.
And watching tv, in the summer time, because of the atmospheric conditions, allowing me to watch TV from as far away as milwaukee(which I think was about a 3 hour drive from where I lived, if not more)... Channel 44, the Hispanic station. And 18, which had the A-Team. And 24, which I believed had the Monkees on. Or maybe it was also 18. My mom liked to watch her jesus stuff on channel 13, and 67. We didn't get cable, but we could reach some of these stations however faintly.
But with the digital world, if they had their way, this leakage would not occur. You would have to pay. It is on or off.
There is also the imperfection, that riding the point of a wave, like a surfer, like Richard D James' album "Surfing on Sine Waves", to take an analog radio tune it in to where you hit a point of reverberation, a certain frequency sustains itself, but then, take the knob, and jog it just a little past that perfect point, and hear it on the edge of chaos. Right between the point of balance and perfect and sustenance into the event horizon, or rather, dancing around it. Little breaks and fractures dance around, while the pure tone struggles to hold on. Static begins to pierce. But it's quite wrong to call static "static" for it is the exact opposite.
Static is static, because it is so much chaos it becomes one. The polytheists sees the one in their multiplicity of gods, and we see static in the flickering dance of black and white upon an analog screen.
That is our monotheism. That is our unity. It is the great dance of opposites and everything in between, there is no one space, however that remains the same. It is always in motion, and yet one. In the same way that the fluid is in motion, and yet, held in space by the container. That is our unity.
Their unity is a monolithic(Lith, as in stone -- that is the YANG of the Tao) Their hard, cold, monochromatic stone on the screen blazing out in their digital world, a Blue Screen of Death(with no text, just blue, bright, glowing from the screen, with one implicit meaning: No Access. The door is blue and it is one, and there is no leak, there are no dancing insects that pitter patter across this gate.) This blue screen of death, of stone, of impenetrable cold isolation. This is their digital society. The fluid warmth of the analog vs the discrete cold of the digital. The bubbling and whorling of the stream.
Analog is about process itself. Digital is about essence. together, perhaps: Processence? The Tao unification?
There's much more, but this is quite long. And I have to add that one of the big pieces of the symgnostikon is about pipes, about how man builds for itself(and I say man in the fully sexist meaning of the word, man the builder, the builder who destroys in order to make his pathetic toys. man, the "Oedipal" creature who kills his own mother. Man, the "Elektric" creature, who devours the flesh(earth) in order to make spirit(god)... Man who partakes of the flesh of the gods. Transubstantiation. Like a great cancer sweeping across the face of the planet. Pipes that man builds to digest all that he consumes. Pipes, like the esophagous and the stomach which converts and transmits to blood vessels and nervous fibers. Man constructs it's own god-body upon the face of the planet. Man transmogrifies the female organic mother into the technological father. The slow fire burning across the planet in energy consumption, in war, not in sustaining technology... A slow star with infinitely less energy.
Metaphors, all of these.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-30 04:05 am (UTC)I love the new ways, but I remember how it was when I was a kid, too. ( and yes, 18 and 24 were/are Milwaukee stations.) I also don't see anything wrong with paying to support technologies and services that I use and benefit from. Don't get me wrong, I love the amount of content I can access on the 'Net just for the price of my connection, but if it's a service you use and you *can* give back, why not do that? I can't give back as often as I'd like, but I understand the give/take principle.
-Nathan, sorry if this rambled.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-30 10:40 pm (UTC)I always get sick of the old "turntable" dj's are the only real dj. No, I completely agree with you 100% on the fact that these are all tools. I am a big fan of digital. Most of my music is digital. That's too literal of a point.
But, when dealing with this issue, I'm dealing more about the eventual serfdom that will result if corporations further intrude on our liberties.
I'm not saying be a music pirate(at least don't steal all your music) Of course, I believe you should support artists that you can, and I try to do that as much as possible. If you can't afford music right now, I don't think it's a problem if you get it for free. Especially if you intened to purchase more music from that artist. I say this, of course, as an artist myself. But I believe that the way technology issues are coming to a head, that too many people are ignorant of the situation.
I know you're pretty geeky when it comes to stuff, so I hope you know about these issues. Do you know about the broadcast flag?
My concern is that the way the rules are made, there isn't an equity for the creator of the works. They sell their soul to distribute this. As the pathways for distribution of information become ever more regulated, guess who wins? Not the consumer.
I don't recall if this was part of my post, but I had to, now that I've installed WinXP instead of Win98, reauthorize my downloaded legal music from MusicMatch. I only have 3 devices I can have authorized. Now, I am using the exact same damn device. But, because I upgraded the OS, I lose one copy. One can call that a fault of the way things are coded, but the fact is, it's my fucking music. Why the hell am I limited to three devices? They really believe that your copy is "their" material. Your CD isn't yours, it's theirs.
But this is really getting into the mundane aspects of what I was dealing with.
Anyways, broadcast flag info(very good detail in the first document, and others have some interesting views, the last two re: digital radio bcast flags.
http://www.cdt.org/copyright/031216broadcastflag.pdf
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000148.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,62619,00.html
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/digitalradio.html
http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1085448318.html
no subject
Date: 2004-05-31 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-01 06:46 pm (UTC)I hope that's not the case, cuz if it is, I don't wanna booty-dance. then again, i don't wanna riverdance either.
or, as KISS(of, course, KISS means Knights In Satan's Service, or so I was told by my ever fearful fundie xian teachers) said:
"I don' wanna romance,
I don' wanna dance..
I just wanna - Fuh...
I just wanna - Fuhh....
I just wanna Fuhget you..."
no subject
Date: 2004-06-01 07:37 pm (UTC)I haven't listened to (or thought of!) KISS in years. I knew the Knights In Satan's Service thing, though. And WASP? We Are Sexual Perverts? Good times. Very gradeschool, but good times. :)
-Nathan