alt-left music/culture

i feel like there was an insurgency of genuinely transgressive, "alt-left" music in the 2010s with post-internet music spawning out of memetic counterculture and 4chan cyber-magick like sophie, death grips, jpegmafia, 100gecs, machine girl, arca, vaporwave, nightcore, cloud rap, new amalgamative industrial/noise rock sounds, etc. that have since fizzled out into the aestheticism of the hyperreal mainstream. i don't see any of that kind of imaginative deterritorialization anymore now that the internet has been been totalized by capital and the poltards won.

i dont know half the soykaf but pretty sure >vaporwave, nightcore has zero political leaning. Especially nightcore is just speed up songs. Seems you got left/right brainrot

>>12843 the internet is deader than it's ever been. the death grips target audience can pretty much easily be found IRL now at underground venues. in fact as far as I can tell that cloud music dominates small venues these days.

>>12844 vaporwave is marxist and nightcore is queer >>12845 i feel like irl is equally dead, theres nothing really new and transgressive thats actuallty culturally potent in any of the irl scenes around me

>>12845 i dont believe internet translates to IRL music because you cant replace a band with ai gen music. The newest online soykaf is also just remixes with meme lingo. No way that finds appeal among normal people.

when i was feeling sad about a year ago i felt like this trend has gone the place all trends go to die: heavy metal with the HEALTH tour last year and all. that being said, I like what cel genesis is doing now. their shows remind me of the noise shows i used to go to in college, except they have actual songs and are a real band that tours, which, from what ive seen at shows cel is doing something transgressive with. Also, I was able to find some actually good shoegaze bands a few months ago. i dont know how 「online」 they might be, but i went to an amazing show with rabbit, a place to bury strangers, pop music fever dream, and sunset images. all of them were good.

>>12846 Nah, vaporwave is as neutral as it can get. Sovietwave on the other hand...

>>12846 >irl scenes around me That's the issue with underground music irl, it's hard to tell whether or not it's not there or just obscure >>12848 I get what you mean, HEALTH's music after Death Magic has been getting closer to metal and further away from what made them sound so interesting. Way to many collabs with other artists as well, they've flanderised themselves. Machine Girl to a degree too, every album since WLFGRL has gotten a bit more metal. Although, MG Ultra has reversed the trend a bit.

>>12852 > here is my opinion about the political content of these genres based on my reading of their features, context, and audience composition > nuh uh hmm nice post friend

>>12843 >deathgrips, machine girl, vaporwave, nightcore, noise rock > left wing man this is news to me i guess machine girl references lesbians sometimes, but that isn't exactly "le alt-left" death grips does drugs? i mean he's black so he is leftiest but that doesn't really make the music alt-left besides being niggery hell even cloud-rap is only really leftist on account of being black i guess if black people and lesbians mean "politically leftist" and not just "culturally degenerate", then this is a fair categorization. otherwise it seems pretty scuffed. >>12846 >vaporwave is leftist ah yes... blank banshee... macintosh... classic marxists... >nightcore is queer grimy sped up songs are now f4ggotry, of course... >>12848 is HEALTH soykaf now? they had a few good albums back in the day i wouldn't really call them heavy metal though... not that splitting hairs matters but i havent heard the new soykaf >>12854 i aint him but cmon vaprwave is beeping, booping, and remixes of old soykaf hard to just call it marxist without citin some evidence

Increasingly and im fairly confident in this, you will have to seek out in person great art. Whether it is music or paintings or anything, perhaps the best early example would be furniture and more functional works of art and design. If you are told of a great furniture store you can probably go online and they will have a website, but what is pushed to you and what is easily accesible online I think is widely known to be semi crap. Furniture from amazon, or ikea, wayfair, etc. Instead now you go to craigslist or facebook marketplace or whatever to go meet someone and get a really nice dresser, or you discover a local store while driving. Im not.saying some great band wont put their soykaf online or get online attention, but perhaps increasingly you will not discover them via anything fed to you online. Someone will have to tell you about them, you will have to surprise pick their record at a store, you will see them playing live in your area. Im not going to go into every little factor of why but in general to be an artist of any kind who puts in care or effort, this is not whats necessarily rewarded or boosted in the online world, and you are better off distancing your work from the online world entirely save giving it a place few will see unless they already know. It is increasingly more profitable to simply work in person for your local scene than try to compete in online world. If your lucky perhaps people will boost you online and you will catch on, but i think most artists increasingly see little point in working specifically to get traction online. Except for the ones you probably would think are not good or kind of trash, probably because they are making stuff to get boosted and hook algorithms and not people. And that will be the majority from here on out in tha wired. I guess to summarize increasingly you must decide to be an "artist" or be a "content creator". While they arent mutually exclusive, overall great earnest art isnt appreciated as much in content world and content isnt much appreciated in art world. And so I notice they are parting ways with the occasional crossover.

There is no alt-left.The alt-right are neoreactionaries and pseudo-conservatives of the post-modern age. Leftists are too conservative. They still cling onto 19th century social ideas that are less and less believable in the post-modern era. Guys like Zizek had a bad influence. They dragged leftists back to a fixation on Hegel and Marx and Enlightenment and away from the direction people like Baudrillard were taking things. The breakdown of Enlightenment humanism is why rightoids can just come out swinging saying pro-corporate, racist soykaf, promote eugenics, femboy nazism etc whatever soykaf they are into. They understand how the hyperreal media world works better than the Deleuze thumpers. Leftists spent the last 3 decades with their heads in the sand. >vaporwave >nightcore >machinegirl Most of this is trash and there's nothing inherently alt-left about it.

one small quasi-collective/scene that I'm still a huge fan of is the circle around Ada Rook (formerly of Black Dresses), including the likes of ESPer99, So Drove, Ash Nerve, etc. They have a small webring you can check out here: https://www.watchusdiedotcom.com/ >>12853 >>12855 HEALTH is still good imo, they're just not transgressive anymore like OP seems to be looking for. i should add that like.. the metal thing for me is just a vibe i get from metal as somebody whos never really gotten that into it. much of it gives me the distinct impression of millenials and their world of warcaft guilds, which i have nothing against, but i am not a WoW-playing millenial. it always gives me the impression of people who don't quite get it. but they're having fun, and maybe that's all that matters. I think the general argument here is that these things contain social commentary that the OP reads as a leftist perspective. 100 gecs for instance being the most obvious, their song "money machine" in an interview they talked about how it was a joke about the equation of wealth to cleanliness. if you're looking for another newer, younger, ~transgressive~ band like that then you should look into frost children. I see death grips as touching on a group i call "wikileaks leftists" which also includes M.I.A., who are basically the alt left overlap with Anonymous. however I don't think that's a big thing to them, I feel like the band has their own community although i forget what its called lol. Machine Girl FWIW is very anti-fascist and explicit about this in their material, i can't bring up any particular songs, but its an annoucement they make regularly on socials. the general tendency of digital hardcore - basically their self declared genre - goes back to atari teenage riot which has a large number of anti fascist songs, such as where they sample hitler speeches and then yell about killing nazis. femtanyl, johnnascus, zombae, and free.99 are some other newer artists i would say doing the "antifascist digital hardcore" angle, although the middle two are more cloud rap-y. some even more obscure ones are 32bitwhore, point click kill, although the "post machine girl scene" i feel is more a spectrum between the sextrance people like purity://filter and the esoteric, post-sewerslvt drum and bass musicians like Xxtarlit. >is vaporwave marxist? i know this subject is bait but Vektroid, the artist behind macintosh plus has explicitly stated that it was meant as social commentary. unless you think the abandoned shopping malls aesthetic, broken greek statues, social-decay-of-the-80s vibe was purely about the aesthetic. >nightcore is queer i think she was trolling with this one. >>12856 >Someone will have to tell you about them I'd say increasingly, but i honestly feel this always is just what online is. back in the old days we had /mu/ to find out new music on, many of us loved pitchfork and the needle drop until they became mainstream. i think what's really happening here is simultaneously lots of people logging off en masse due to the "get back to work" order of the two party system, in addition to us just getting older and having jobs or lives outside of the internet that we don't spend all day on these microcommunities to seek new music. except for me of course, because I'm a NEET with nothing but culture. The thing is, that.. IMO this community in particular is still ideal for importing the sounds you find IRL to internet. we have a soundcloud thread with 200 replies and is one of the longest running threads on the board. people are constantly talking about their zines and other projects on lainchan. its basically on you to cross-pollinate from whatever IRL scene you're a part of to lainchan. if you do, there's a chance somebody will hear it and be inspired to make their own stuff about it. though I would add that I feel the death of twitter as a platform is basically related to what you call a divorce between content creator and artist, the twitter musician is dead, the tiktok musician is also dead, and its probably realistically all just going to be eaten up by Instagram. It would be very nice to see places like here become more important, though. >>12852 sovietwave is retarded, im sorry. you take the fact that fascists who don't understand culture trying to shoehorn in their aesthetics into a vaguely anti-fascist art form, they produce complete slop, and then along come the tankies to say "um vat if we did it like zis actually..." and all the subtlety of the genre was abandoned. if you disagree, post one "sovietwave" piece that does something transgressive, that we should listen to, and why. >>12857 i agree with you about the crippled conservatism of the left but i don't think the right gets it at all, honestly. i see this kind of thinking as primarily emergent from twitter doomcels and like nowhere else, which is a dying platform that was purchased by a fascist. but i will give you that leading up to this, the right *had* cracked twitter. I think the broader issue here is that social media platforms are by and large controlled by a particular clique of wealthy individuals from the san francisco bay area, and while these individuals seemed to be progressive in the past, they now seem like reactionaries - i hesitate to say "fascist" because if there's anything they're not, it's populist, even by fascist standards. In fact I would argue they're the exact caste that historical fascists, especially the post-syndicalist italian variant, would shoot against the wall at first opportunity, or turn on after an uneasy alliance as was the case with the futurists. this is sort of apparent in how the right "winning" this election cycle has lead to an all but complete breakdown of their apparatus. rather than acting in a concerted manner of any capacity, republicans are at each others throats over issues like palestine, in a seeming race to the bottom to see how much damage they can possibly do before one of the right wing cliques has all of the others flayed before a grand jury. i would add that this is because the two party system of USA does not really want to win, it is a caste of losers who base their entire identity off of grumbling over how they should have won last time. Donald Trump and his rapidly-disintegrating cadre are probably going to liquidate each other like last time (the liquidation is very much already in motion, see what happened to the anti-israel crowd) and there would perhaps be a silver lining of schadenfreude in witnessing how many conservatives, especially "tech right" types like nick land or charlotte fang attempt proceed as if there was still a unified party to speak of. this is not to argue they can't cope post their way through it or that it wouldnt be good if some parts of the tech right i specifically know had more power within the republican party & its institutions as people. it still does not look good, and it basically signed off accelerationism to me as having any explanatory power whatsoever - when even the "entropy comes for us all gaben" guys fail to predict and instead tweet seethingly about the breakdown of the supposedly greatest right-wing alliance in american politics, like your pal Nick Land has been doing, you know there was nothing of value here to begin with. this topic however is not really a /music/ oriented topic or probably a great conversation to have on lainchan at all, but these $0.02 have been in the back of my head so i might as well post them.

>>12852 vaporwave is based on hauntology and baudrillardian theory >>12853 how do i get into that stuff >>12855 you have literally no idea what you're talking about i hate reflexive contrarion retards like you >>12856 it just seems weird to go backwards. i guess it makes sense because the internet is stratified by capital and theres next to no radical potential there anymore but there must be some kind of way forward at the edge of capital's destratification... idk its like the new technology is already stratified and the old technology just seems antiquated and impotent. maybe when this epoch of fascism expends itself the gap will widen enough for potential to re-emerge. >>12857 this is exactly what im saying but like baudrillard is a direct descendent of deleuze, though i agree zizek's freudo-marxist-hegelian revivalism is a symptom of postmodern leftism's conservative retardation. i do think there were some moments in which some real memetic subversion seemed to be happening but its all gone now. also i think ur wrong about the music it was sick. death grips was real cyber-magick accelerationism. >>12858 thank you for illustrating what i meant to convey in my original post more eloquently than i could have and this was super informational

>>12858 you actually put all the thoughts ive been having as of recently into words

>>12859 >>12860 thank you lains.. im glad as i dont feel i thought this through completely, I'll probably take this apart later if i think about it more, was really just jotting down my immediate thoughts on subjects. for starters i dont actually think the proximity i mentioned is good even if it might have some minor positives, its more like seeing the asshole you went to school with continue to be an asshole to a larger audience. also i should admit - i never really used /mu/, watched the mantano or read articles on pitchfork, i initially found out about underground music by looking at wikipedia articles and then being given a what.cd invite by a friend i got into that scene after finding out about trackers on /g/. i literally found out about PC music through youtube in like 2015 when i was looking for music to perform to in a theatre production. if it helps to get more involved, i i got into my local music scene by going to a relatively popular music venue that seemed to have a distinctive personality, making friends there, then letting them bring me out to other shows, making other friends, and so on. there's a website https://19hz.info/ that lists parties in a bunch of american regions, while these are mostly DJing events but the venues themselves will host other performances. you can look for flyers. i also find out about shows in less cool ways like using instagram and spotify, although i think last.fm has this feature too if you want to use an aggregator thats slightly more alternative-feeling.

>>12858 >i should add that like.. the metal thing for me is just a vibe i get from metal as somebody whos never really gotten that into it oh, this makes more sense then never played WoW, but i love me some metal check out maudlin of the well if you haven't already >Machine Girl FWIW is very anti-fascist and explicit about this in their material, i can't bring up any particular songs, but its an annoucement they make regularly on socials oh maybe this is why i don't check social anything, barely check the news i used to listen to WLFGRL and one other album a ton and never got this anti-fascist thing- weird. note i wouldn't really consider anti-fascism transgressive... but definitions vary IMO anything you can say without losing a job isn't transgressive, and "man i hate nazis and want to kill fascists" certainly doesn't seem controversial in 99% of the world... >newer artist list ah i never listened to them, explains how i missed it. >something something interviews no social strikes again. glad i dodged all this honestly... >unless you think the abandoned shopping malls aesthetic, broken greek statues, social-decay-of-the-80s vibe was purely about the aesthetic. I mean kind of, yeah. none of those screams "marxist" to me... >many of us loved pitchfork hearty chuckles p4k was decent for anything that wasn't metal they had pretty soykaf taste in metal and adjacent genres > i see this kind of thinking as primarily emergent from twitter doomcels and like nowhere else, which is a dying platform that was purchased by a fascist. oh, i see we use words differently and differ politically... i guess that explains some of our differences of opinion... >republicans are at each others throats over issues like palestine this seems EZ to explain, right? some right-wingers are actually right wing (small %, maybe growing?) some are libertarians (small %) some are just neocon liberals (large percent) first group doesn't like israel second group doesn't care third group LOVES them but again, i'm not really following the newsblogtwattersphere enough to keep up with whos farting on who, so maybe i'm off-base >nick land still posts on twatter about modern politics hearty chuckles >>12859 > hate reflexive contrarion retards like you hey man, i love you too if i don't hear it in the song, i'm not gonna project it or make it up if i have to read the singers blog to "get" it, it wasn't there to be got

>>12843 Before this thread turns into a political insider trade, i have a question- what does it mean for music to be "transgressive" here? I am assuming the term is being used in a political sense, and this is where my confusion arises. I can understand the idea of a song being transgressive musically (e.g: a song than perverts the expectations of a genre by doing some cool trickery, etc.). But when we speak of music being transgressive in a political sense, what do we mean? Just that it expresses messages that are not "in-vogue" at the moment? That it expresses old ideas in a trendy new way? That is creates new critiques/ideas? But in these cases: why is the music there at all? Couldn't you just make the same statement in words, more efficiently? To me, one interesting remaining possibility might be: that the music imposes a new way of being upon you. Not through words, but through the music itself. As a hilariously crude example: it's a lot easier to twerk to "rump shakerzz" than to "the songs in a tripartite mass".

>>12864 If I had to guess, a transgressive sound in the context of this thread involves bands that combine influences of other genres in ways that might piss off traditionalists of said genres. For example, Machine Girl heavily uses electronic instrumentation but draws from anti-authoritarian themes associated with hardcore punk. In my experience, a lot of old school guitar music guys hate sythesizers and DJ sets because they take the skill out of music, and I also imagine that die hard electronic music fans (the kind that go to club nights) would rather longer songs with apolitical lyrics, if any lyrics at all. There's plenty of ways to transgress through music/sound. The easiest is to just use objectionable material (i.e Peter Sotos' Buyers Market); another way like you mentioned is music imposing a new way of being upon you. A violent mosh pit is inherently sadomasochistic and imposed on you because you're in a venue listening to music. Sure, within the scene it might be seen as normal but a group of people consensually beating the soykaf out of each other to loud noises seems pretty transgressive to me regardless of politics. >>12858 I grew up listening to a lot of metal and HEALTH's appeal to me was being loud, aggressive music that didn't involve po-faced uber serious black metal tryhards or unwashed sweaty thrash nerds. 17 years later and the rare time I see someone wearing a HEALTH t-shirt in public and it's usually a generic metalhead covered in patches

>>12858 >I'd say increasingly, but i honestly feel this always is just what online is I agree honestly, I phrased it like what im saying is a new thing but we all remember when this was just the norm. I think peoples expectations of the net kind of over-reached, with this idea that somewhere like spotify is a "place" you go to listen to music. Fundamentally materially I think the the digital soft world will always be strictly for communication, and any attempt to turn it into a "space" or create something material on it will fail, burst, and the net will regress to its original intended purpose (communication). You put art on it and soon enough its value drops so so low its pennies or less for someone to have access to it. They can change ownership legalities around as much as they want so that in the abstract you dont really own it or include various drm tools to block you from recording or screenshotting something, or prop up the bizzare clicks and views are currency system we have right now, but fundamentally a song on the net is worth magnitudes less than a song in a cd or record or played to you live (even when in terms of just content they are the same or hardly dissimilar). Its unfortunate because this has shifted perception and means in general the majority value art at its online retail value, but there will always be the crowd that wants to put down some money and I guess what I think is really increasing is a subgroup of people parting ways with subscription services and the "over reach" of the internet im talking about. The idea that the same thing in content is worth more in material than online I cant really be convinced out of its clearly happening in real time to me, but I guess my more controversial less grounded take or idea is that without some kind of intervention the internet as anything but a tool of communication is going to kind of rot and become a trash heap. The talent will leave, good information and archives will exist online but be increasingly hard to find with search engines, it will once again be far easier to ask a friend for music reccomendations than sort through endless slop online. I also think its weird to go backwards and I dont think its something that happens almost ever but in this case I see it as we never really went forwards to begin with. We went forwards here and there but I think many of the "advancements" in the online world were not really advancements and we kind of have just been spinning around in circles in fufu fairy land. I know there is this idea that since the internet things have been advancing at a blinding rapid of a pace and things have certainly been advancing faster, but I think maybe its not as fast as many imagine and part of whats going on is things are moving so fast that we havent had enough time to reflect on how many of these things are actually advancements or just things that in time will fall apart. I think many companies, and even cities that rely on these comanies economically, are going to be blindsided at some point with the realization that they put a lot of stock and faith in essentially nothing. Why make music to put on spotify when it gets to a point you make 10$ for every 1 million listens, why use spotify when half of the artists you like arent on there anymore and its essentially just radio hits? Why put music on spotify when as a result of all this you start having dubious ownership of your own material once you put it on there cause spotifies scraping songs for ai content generation now and data brokering to earn some more bucks? I see a downward spiral to all of this honestly, when music first started going online the story was "its easier to make it big than it ever has been now", thats increasingly not true I think. At some point it wont be "just too convenient" over having your own library of music whether thats digitally or physical. The ability to share music and information online was definitely an advancement but in a jail world of value and dollar amounts all transactions built on top of this new ability are unsustainable tail eating and I think really the only advancement is that im optimistic we will all come out of this with a new perspective on whats valuable. My personal view on the mountain of content is kind of like my approach to juice or something where I could and have a desire to drink juice everyday but I know if I do that I will not get as much joy out of drinking the juice so there is a benefit to me not being able to access juice whenever I want (even though I easily could). I like to think (like everyone does) that eventually others will see things this way and realize they dont really get anymore enjoyment out of their music and life in the convenience this digital streaming system offers and as that is one of the primary points of music its not actually an advancement or convenience at all its just sort of nothing. It will take some time but I think it will happen.

>>12867 Sam Kriss had some thoughts on a similar wavelength to you in 2022: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over >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 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 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. 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. The article goes into several points as to why this is going to happen, but the tldr is all content has become rote and predictable, the people actually out there changing things in the world aren't doing it on the internet and that physical media will have far more longevity over the mountain of digital crap. >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.

>>12863 >check out maudlin will, thanks. do you know litvrgy or panopticon? the second one first got me into metal and the latter one is the most forward thinking thing i feel like ive heard in metal, but I'd love to find more like it. >>12866 >die hard electronic music fans (the kind that go to club nights) would rather longer songs with apolitical lyrics, if any lyrics at all. you'd be surprised, much has been written about the inherent politics of electronic music, in a way that ironically seems to mirror punk rock. is any of it legitimate? maybe, but there's a lot more woke bullshit than is interesting. >HEALTH is generic metal now maybe this is just what happens when something is good: everyone thinks its good, and its not a diamond-in-the-rough anymore. >>12867 your post is very hard to parse, due to its run-on paragraphs. but this is my attempt at a response.. I think I've updated my opinion by now. videogames are a use of the medium that do something beyond chatting, they encourage you to communicate in different ways, in structured ways, and also to do things besides communication they also mean something for music. >fundamentally a song on the net is worth magnitudes less than a song in a cd or record or played to you live (even when in terms of just content they are the same or hardly dissimilar)... this has shifted perception and means in general the majority value art at its online retail value disagree. the internet is not the largest market, i would argue its not a singular market at all, and mystifying it as a singuler Internet is not very materialist either. rather, its a series of networks developed between similar communities around the world. and what is a community? a network of people who have the capability to share resources and care. one in which friendships exist. importantly, to me, one that i don't want to soykaf on when they've brought me joy. IRL communities are certainly often stronger in many ways than virtual ones, because literal objects can be transferred - objects that are encoded with meaning. they also involve people having to see each other every day - even intentional communities have this aspect. the internet does not involve this coercion, even if it might be accused of coercion in other ways. I would argue that, if we are to equivocate "meaning" with "value", as you seem to be doing here, then the encoding of objects i mention doesn't matter exactly - well, that's not entirely true either, because the internet as a singular entity might also incorporate other networks, like the postal service, trains, and airlines. but my point is that this isn't the primary way of thinking about it, this is a domain where "chair" does not mean "my desk chair in particular", but rather "any old desk-chair". in this light, virtual communities are not less valuable than IRL ones - why would they be? I would argue for a subtle difference, that later-on branches into serious distinctions. It would be a good idea to remove your thoughts from the equivocations of meaning with financial value - they are connected, but your understanding of "trash" might include things that have been thrown away unfairly - actually, i think this is a relatively core anxiety to where pessimism might arise. what I mean by that is that I think on some level, you recognize this, and accept it preconditionally to signing off on optimism. >we kind of have just been spinning around in circles in fufu fairy land >I see a downward spiral to the spotify situation I hope you're right on the second one. It's important, I think, to see through the supposed circularity of these trends - if you've identified something that is the same, then the next step feels like a cue to identify something that is different. for starters, the music industry is a *lot* friendlier to musicians than before streaming and the internet. this means a lot - in terms of value, I'm ultimately concerned with money making it back to the musician over the retail value of a CD. if I can pay less while the musician I love makes more, that's a win-win, and I frankly don't see why a label should get between us. from a non-financial perspective, it could arguably become a reduction in meaningless slop content that might as well be generated by an AI. at the very least, it provides a glimmer of hope, or a crack that can be widened, to see past inescapable tragedy. >It will take some time but I think it will happen. i suppose you could say im hopeful too. as the returns on these things become marginal for their owners, id like it if something more community-oriented can form to surpass them. >>12868 much discussion on this subject, especially that on lainchan is building on a theme from one of the zine issues, i think it was volume 4. attached

There's still some lefties in the hardcore techno scene, but most of them live in countries going through a McCarthyite phase with weak free speech laws at the moment (such as Germany) and have been under strong pressure to avoid rocking the boat.

>>12855 dude Health is amazing, also Projekt Red put some cool indie refs in their game quests