digitalekulturresearch

“ The last thing I downloaded … was a rare, completely out of print album by Marie Jubran, a Syrian artist who recorded mostly during the 50s I think and who doesn't even have so much as an English-language Wikipedia page. I have a lot of Arabic music from the period and a couple of related books, and I'd never even heard of her before visiting Holy Warbles. That is the sort of thing we're talking about. Gone now. Not just the music, mind you, which is lovely. But an artifact that is now once again unavailable for, say, anyone studying the region and period.
[…]
And this, we must assume, is just the beginning. How long before Awesome Tapes from Africa, Moroccan Tape Stash or Monrakplengthai are wiped out as well? Again, we're not talking about shit you throw onto your iPod before heading off to the gym; this is serious cultural evidence. These are, I can't stress it enough, libraries. And thoughtless, good-for-nothing corporate asswipes who supply rat-diarrhea-producing mental aphids like the members of MGMT and Bright Eyes with, like, cocaine-spending money are, essentially, destroying them. ”

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“ Of the 5,000+ spam comments posted to HiLobrow each month, a few slip past WordPress’s filters and land in the “pending” queue, where we editors manually decide their fate. Sounds annoying, but I get a kick out of it — not only because of the non-stop flow of positive feedback (“The content on this article is really a single of the most beneficial material that I’ve ever occur across. I love your publish, I’ll occur back to verify for new posts.”), but because of the made-up monikers. They’re as good as — no, better than — the character names in a Philip K. Dick novel. ”

“ Modern gaming is amazing. It's so amazing bad people let their children die while playing video games. This doesn't happen with poker and basketball. People don't go to a movie and come out 40 hours later with popcorn shirt and a crib full of tragedy. ”

“ Zelda Rae Williams (born July 31, 1989) is an American actress and the daughter of actor and comedian Robin Williams and Marsha Garces. She was named after Princess Zelda of The Legend of Zelda series of video games. ”

“ In a strange type of autoethnography, those most taken with the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s spent a considerable amount of their time online talking about what it meant that they were online. In straightforwardly self-aggrandizing narratives, the most dedicated and involved internet users began crafting a pocket mythology of the new reality. Rather than regarding themselves as tech consumers, the most dedicated internet users spoke instead of revolution.

Vast, life-altering consequences were predicted for these rising technologies.

In much the same way as those speaking about the importance of New York City are often actually speaking about the importance of themselves, so those who crafted the oral history of the internet were often really talking about their own revolutionary potential. Not that this was without benefits; self-obsession became a vehicle for an intricate literature on emergent online technology. ”

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INTERVIEWER

Where did cyberspace come from?

GIBSON

I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spaceship had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didn’t work for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballard’s that it didn’t work for him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps to treat one’s fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didn’t work for me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I needed something to replace outer space and the spaceship.

I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

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You would expect that a label representing an artist knows how that artist sounds, no? I think what really happened is that UMG realized how powerful our message was, how potent it would become, and how positively it would affect Mega’s image. From rogue to vogue. They decided to stop us at all costs, that becomes clear when you see the defense strategy of UMG in court. They have nothing and they don’t even care.

UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers and allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings.

We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free. Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works. You can expect several Megabox announcements next year including exclusive deals with artists who are eager to depart from outdated business models.

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“ Never before have I noticed quite so many people filming stuff on their smartphones during a war. You could see them walking around in the background of news reports on the Arab Spring, merrily gathering souvenir footage of burnt-out vehicles or recently-lynched despots. Still, at least that's history: today the smallest event automatically prompts onlookers to whip out their pocket-size techno-slabs and start filming.

A few weeks ago I was flipping through the channels when I caught part of an Ed Sheeran gig on Channel 4. It looked like roughly 50% of the audience was just standing there, pointing little black rectangles in his direction throughout. Play that back and you'd only get a hazy shot of a singing blob. So why bother? It seems especially fruitless since there was a TV crew present, filming the concert in high definition with stereo sound in order to broadcast it later for free. And if it's not about recording the music, but simply about keeping personal mementos, why watch the screen on your phone while filming it? It's like you're not even there, somehow.

I can understand wanting to distance yourself slightly during a violent uprising, but during a gig? We're a curious species, when it comes down to it. ”