Sorry everyone, but perhaps for the more impressionable readers out there, not to mention in light of the tenor of the times, I might go to the trouble of pointing out that I do NOT, in fact, advocate for the actual death of Bandcamp curators. I was writing somewhat flippantly and it was not at all intended to be taken seriously. I also don't happen to think that the title of the 2004 film "Kill Your Idols", a great doc directed by Scott Crary about the progenitors of punk in New York City in the late 1970s and their various aesthetic heirs apparent, was meant to be taken seriously either. Actually I generally have a great deal of respect for the various guides on offer at BC where they coincide with my general area of interest, containing as they do many of the notable entries in what may very well have been the only formats possible, in a public forum, to present or render the modes and suggestions of stylistic nuance in the theater of the mind. In other words, I respect that it must be a difficult job, and one that is inevitably apt to rub certain people the wrong way by way of the inclusion or exclusion of this or that plausibly relatable entity. These kinds of considerations are of course fascinating, and used to be great fun to discuss at parties while stoned before social media and the onset of late-stage capitalism started driving people to various extremes of isolation, escapism and... well, extremism.
In turn, these developments were indeed the frequent topic of many rambling yet well-informed and impassioned discussions in Bradley's basement before a truly tragic turn of events rendered even that no longer possible for the likes of misunderstood weirdos like me.
It IS interesting to note that the promise of the "opt-out" cultures of the early computer hackers and that of psychedelic enthusiasts - movements that were at one time very much entwined and seemed to promise not endless enslavement to some neo-consumerist ideal but rather a path toward a truly free and egalitarian society; a culture free from the many historically-derived shackles often mindlessly dictated by the demands of commerce. And yet we remain divided on just that point. The structure of society didn't take very long, so it would seem, to integrate the new technologies into the infrastructure of commerce; a move that has apparently rendered its liberating potential somewhat meaningless in the context of a marketplace hopelessly skewed towards the resourceful and well-connected.
The situation would seem hopeless. And yet, there are encouraging signs. The real promise of the internet, despite its origins as a post-apocaplyptic defense department emergency hotline, is that a new kind of human understanding may yet be generated via new modes of interaction. In other words, cultures tend to adapt to change in ways that are both constructive AND destructive. It may simply take human beings a bit longer than anticipated to fully recognize the consequences of a tool so powerful that the ability it enables, namely near-instantaneous global communication and lightning-speed access to information almost anywhere, plus the ability to manipulate that information ad lib, in real time, would surely have seemed to any earlier culture or human society as nothing short of black magic.
The question is, and perhaps always has been: do we have enough time to adapt successfully before we are overrun with the downsides? At what point do the accumulated errors render the code useless, and we have to - as the early punks indeed felt they had to - rip it up and start over again?
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