The Homebound Symphony

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of cont

... See more

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of con

... See more

Human expression was perfected into pithy thought-capsules (Twitter, LinkedIn), glamour shots (Instagram), and performative soundbites (TikTok), all perfect carriers for human emotions and — most importantly — ADVERTISING, which we were also now expected to do, newly equipped with our “personal brands.”

The dominance of these formats and mindset mad... See more

“[On one end, you have] auto-tune that perfectly puts music into tune…which is sort of flawless and faultless. [In contrast, the other side] is clumsy, awkward, crude and unfinished things that we all actually like in the right context. 

The reason we like the Velvet Underground is not for their gloss. It's for their roughness. For the feeling we ha... See more

More recently, similar games of language and form were generated by the “Vibe Shift,” by which I mean the strange ways of writing that appeared in 2021 in places such as Remilia Corporation’s “I long for Network Spirituality” chatroom; Instagram “cellectuals” accounts, which adopt other people’s personae; schizo-affect Substack poetry blogs; Honor ... See more

Maybe the feeling that things are in decline is just a bias against new forms of media. Socrates thought writing destroyed the mind, and the novel as a literary form was originally considered vulgar. My suspicion is it’s just the age-old pattern of disliking new things.