Samedi 21 As 153
Love letter to pre-87 Swans
Pre-87 Swans reached a new level of brutality in rock music through a fascinating deconstruction of the genre's relationship with violence and masculinity. This stage of their career is deeply interesting and criminally neglected by so many fans, so I want to talk about it.
I describe most hard or heavy rock music as taking a "sadistic" approach. By this I'm referring to the characteristic exaggerated masculinity of the genre, with power chords and aggressive riffs designed to induce feelings of empowerment: sadistic rock takes the view of the aggressor in an act of violence. It's all about raising-up, projecting outwards -- I associate it with that classic symbol of comically hyperbolic masculinity, the peacock, with his extensive, ostentatious display of feathers he shows off to try to assert dominance and attract mates (and not just within the music itself -- male rockstars' archetypical flashy style of dress is another commonly noted example of "peacocking").
Swans, rather, took a "masochistic" approach to rock-heaviness. They're essentially an anti-rock rock band. Where archetypical heavy rock projects outwards and empowers, Swans crush inwards and oppress. Taking the view of the victim in the violence they portray, they lay bare the crushing reality of violence, rather than whitewashing it with the sadistic masculine glee of the perpetrator. Their strongest release from this period, the live album "Public Castration Is a Good Idea", makes immediately clear from the title alone its subversion of rock convention: defacing the ultimate icon of masculinity, the male genitalia, and forcing acknowledgement of their physical vulnerability instead.
Pre-87 Swans are utterly devoid of any sort of fun, catchy riffing characteristic of rock music. Gira chants mantras of hopelessness and oppression over crushing, incredibly simple, almost monotonous, rhythms that repeat over, and over, and over... This brutal, seemingly-neverending repetition is the heart of the music. In contrast with the sort of flashy, hyperbolic violence typically portrayed in mainstream entertainment, real violence -- predominantly being systemic oppression and abuse -- is rarely just a one-off, self-contained event: the real horror is in its daily, suffocating, inescapable repetition, slowly grinding you down into nothing.
The brutality of pre-87 Swans comes from their pure, raw misery. Their lyrics reflect an utterly barren world, hollow of any qualities but hierarchy, oppression, and perpetual exploitation of any vulnerability. They expose the hideous truth beneath masculinity: that no matter how tough you may think you are, there's always a bigger, stronger, more powerful man out there, just waiting to beat you into submission and reduce you to a state of childlike, feminised dehumanisation, just the same as you may do to those weaker than you. This is in equal parts figurative and literal: pre-87 Swans deal with exploitation under capitalism as much as they do situations of direct interpersonal abuse. Our world is built on violently-enforced hierarchy, from the inherent physical power imbalances of sexual relationships, to the societally-enforced subordination of employees to bosses.
Children and childhood are a recurring motif in Swans' music. The cover of one of their live albums during this period is a photo of Gira as a child -- it's quite haunting. Here, the child is the icon of victimisation: a person who's utterly helpless and physically defenceless, small and weak, practically seen as subhuman, controlled by and subservient to people much bigger and stronger -- the most abused demographic on Earth, after animals. The child also represents everyone on the losing end of the hierarchy: the power that supposedly comes with adulthood is an illusion; we are all nothing more than helpless, pathetic children.
Unreality
I've long had a mental health industry-critical streak, and I take particular issue with the pathologisation of dissociation. Although not necessarily pleasant, episodes of DPDR are quasi-spiritual experiences that have been and continue to be crucial to my entire worldview. Black space is the dissociative state of mind, and the dissociative worldviee, as well as the underlying darkness they point to. Of course it's deeply disorienting to have your sense of self and reality distorted, but people mistake this superficial disorientation for the dissociative mindstate/worldview themselves being intrinsically "bad". DPDR is in a sense less "disordered" than the typical experience of selfhood and reality: it's true that nothing I perceive exists and that I'm not real; my "healthy" state of mind is the illusion, and my dissociated state is the veil slipping.
The mental health industry has a great problem with such experiences that challenge the societally-enforced idea of the singular discrete self, wrapping myriad unexplored questions in a neat, untouchable little box labelled "DISORDER", in its characteristic fashion. I've mentioned before the very particular model of the self they try to enforce on you: my more minimal sense of self has never gone down well with mental health professionals, leading to incessant attempts for years to convince me that all my problems were caused by some "negative self-image" I did not experience -- that is, I've simply never had a "self-image"; things like "self-hate" and "self-love" are just not a part of my subjective experience. The mainstream understanding of the self refuses to acknowledge that alternative models to the current imposed standard can even exist: no, you do have a self-image, everyone has a self-image, and if you say you don't there's something wrong with you and you need to conform to the standard of "self-love" now.
Many psychiatrists refuse to believe that plural identities, perhaps the most radical subversion of the singular discrete self, are real, and those who do tend to push the idea of "integration" regardless of whether it would actually be justifiably beneficial for the patient. Not surprising.
I'm a reformist rather than an abolitionist: of course people can benefit from institutional support for the distress that comes with dissociation. The problem is that the mental health industry's rigid pathologisation is incredibly reductive and stigmatising, focusing on bringing patients towards the norm over actually trying to improve their quality of life, and sequestering off exploration into alternative states of consciousness and living by branding them as intrinsically diseased. It also seems like a wildly ineffective method for actually improving patients' quality of life, considering that the current standard model of the self that mental health professionals try to bring their patients towards is evidently deeply flawed: suffering from depression and anxiety is the norm now, it's a fundamental part of our collective conscious.
Again, none of this is to say that dissociation isn't often a profoundly unpleasant experience, and sometimes even dangerous, but I'm simply not interested in chasing absolute comfort and security to the point that it kills off whole areas of life. I think it's vital that we let go of this stubborn idea that any sort of harm to the self (usually amounting to nothing more than simple discomfort) is the ultimate wrong. Experiences like dissociation should be taken as they actually are, as deeply nuanced, alternative states of mind, without being confined by reductive value-judgements. That is to say, I've become more interested in making something more productive of my dissociative experiences than simply trying to eliminate them entirely.
This is the issue with the structure of the mental health system; it's fundamentally reductive. Psychological distress is not, in fact, some "mental equivalent" of physical disease, and should never have been treated as such. The term "mental health" has always had a sort of anachronistic feeling to me despite its persistent use; as if the "mind" is some concrete organ that can be healthy or diseased, just like a stomach or a liver, rather than a fuzzy abstraction of physiological-neurological processes. A different approach should be taken in the treatment of mental health issues -- what that should entail exactly is a whole new question for me to wonder about.
Vendredi 13 As 153
Why I stopped using a smartphone and social media -- a rundown of technophobia in 2025
(okay I haven't finished it yet. but have this anyway. will be continuously editing this for a while.)
Even from my leftist perspective, my interest in accelerationism is much more a morbid Landian fascination with the deterritorialising power of capitalism than actual belief that a left-accelerationism could work. Technooptimism is beyond a joke these days. Don't give me "turning the tools of the oppressors against them" in 2025. Have the last couple of decades not just been one long, brutal demonstration of the utter impotence of this method in the face of contemporary technocapitalism? "We just need more lefty instagram meme pages, then the tide will finally turn in our favour!" You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Technooptimism has been reduced to a shadow of itself, nothing more than a hollow coping mechanism for how thoroughly psychologically hijacked you are by your phone. Anyway, enough ranting:
The corporate domination of cyberspace
Left-accelerationists predicted that technological advancement would spiral out of control of the system, leading to its own implosion, and instead the exact opposite has happened: it's only consolidated its power, dragging us ever-deeper into its clutches. Each step forward in tech unlocks powerful new strategies of social control and exploitation for profit. The corporate domination of cyberspace is encapsulated in the death of the term "cyberspace" itself: the internet is now much less a place, much less a "virtual world", and more a dull, naturalised part of ordinary life. Essentially, what big tech sells is convenience, which is why it seems so suffocatingly ineluctable, how it so quickly and seamlessly blends into the background. The domain of most online activity has utterly shrivelled to just a handful of massive social media platforms worth billions, all because they make it so irresistibly easy, simple, and addictive to use them. Every second you spend on there makes them more money, which is why they've deliberately engineered this pandemic of social media addiction.
The smartphone in particular is the natural home and symbol of the new internet: the embodiment of convenience. Smooth, sleek, slim, portable; light and pocket-sized but with a large enough screen to easily keep your attention; free of all the friction of the more tactile elements of older phones such as hardware-keyboards and flip/slide opening mechanisms, collapsing everything into the pure ease of the touchscreen. GUIs so stupidly straightforward that even toddlers have little trouble using them -- even literal apes have learned to use them. Their app-centrism as opposed to web-centrism is another example, not to mention how it facilitates personal data collection, and how the Apple app store only allows apps pre-approved by them, in stark contrast to the chaotic freedom of the old internet.
No wonder smartphones are "impossible" to put down, when they're so easy to pick up, anywhere, any time. They've thoroughly infiltrated every aspect of life: it really makes my skin crawl how we're expected to carry them with us 24/7, anywhere and everywhere we go.
The dull, minimalist aesthetic of contemporary tech is very deliberate: it's not trying to look attractive and exciting as retro tech aimed for, it's trying to naturalise itself, to make its presence as unobtrusive as possible so that you never question or even really notice it as it gradually encroaches onto everything you do. The aim is to turn itself into a fundamental part of human life itself, which has had enormous success by now considering how the smartphone is treated almost like a detached body part (losing your smartphone feels like being without a limb, and someone not having a smartphone is as unthinkable and unaccommodated as having a disability), and how every aspect of daily life, from buying food, to banking, to catching the bus, is increasingly converging onto smartphone apps. Humans are arguably cyborgs at this point.
People like to say that this is just "progress", and to take issue with it is nothing but old-fashioned cultural conservatism, but they're blind to the context of the system we live under: all of this "progress" functions above all as a method of siphoning wealth and power to the tech elite, and a uniquely effective and potent method at that.
Technooptimism recognised the incredible reality-constructing potential of new tech, but its big mistake was in thinking that it would work from the bottom up.
Meme culture
(Time to explain why I declared the blog a "meme-free zone"...)
Memes are quite fascinating semiotically. There's evidently much more to them than just their superficial appearance as "jokes", as their name would imply. Meme formats (the signifier in this case) have a strong tendency to swallow up and eclipse their original context and meaning (the signified), and essentially become converted into in-group signals. An interesting example of this is the "six seven" meme that I was recently made aware of: I kept pressing the people who introduced me to it about why it was supposed to be funny, only to realise that this was a sort of "pure" meme -- it never carried an original "meaning" in the first place, and its humour comes entirely from the fact that it's a meme, a pure social signal, like a massive-scale inside joke. This drift away from memes functioning as traditional jokes, towards their independence and self-referentiality, seems to continually increase with time. Now, memes have firmly reached the point of being internet cants: not just jokes to be shared on occasion, but the de facto official language of social media -- and, naturally, not conforming to the language use of the in-group can incur social punishment.
The trouble with this is how incredibly restrictive the form of meme-speak is -- in particular, brevity is a defining characteristic of memes -- and the consequences for non-conformity on social media are heavy, with people who break convention typically being brutally mocked and outcast. Naturally, an environment that forces you to mutilate into unrecognisability every idea you want to share, in order to cram it into a palatable little box, is not exactly conducive to critical thought. Rather, memes behave much more like ideology-viruses: they are not designed to be consciously evaluated, but to be subconsciously, uncritically assimilated. Memes seem to be highly effective at implanting and manipulating subconscious beliefs, as has been observed in that whole phenomenon of alt-right radicalisation through the primary medium of memes.
Even the less ostensibly extreme examples of meme-brainwashing are still insidious on closer examination -- commercial astroturfing is an under-discussed issue. For example, for a while there's been a suspiciously intense prominence of memes online valorising "down-to-Earth" mainstream entertainment and denigrating "pretentious" alternatives (such as "let people enjoy things") -- does it not seem awfully convenient for "turn-your-brain-off" social media platforms to be flooded with messaging about how lowbrow entertainment is the virtuous option? It seems unlikely that meme culture would consistently come out supporting the agendas of rich and powerful industries purely by coincidence.
Aided by the concentration of online interaction onto a small number of social media platforms, inhibiting the ability of smaller-scale independent communities to form, the internet is now run on a homogenous meme-megaculture, in which everyone is infected by the same ideas. To use the previous example of the "let people enjoy things" meme, just go on tiktok and everyone, even the edgiest of punks, goths, and so on, will be uncritically parroting the same old anodyne pro-mainstream ideology. It's a very potent system of social control. Anyone bothered by the idea of having their entire ideology and identity written for them by a soulless algorithm, designed for the singular purpose of squeezing as much profit from its users as possible, ought to stay off social media.
Consumer-surveillance capitalism and identity manufacture
The internet has set up an immense system of data-harvesting, targeted advertising, and ultra-convenient shopping that's allowed for consumerism to run wild on an unprecedented scale. I've spoken about traditional identity categories being repurposed into advertising demographics -- what more are gender, age, and sexual orientation these days than information to be harvested from an individual in order to market more effectively to them? In the same sense that a tradition like Christmas has become nothing but a commercial opportunity, so have our own precious identities. People don't seem to realise how far this reterritorialisation has gone: how far is your identity as a woman, for example, affirmed by buying products such as makeup, feminine clothes, jewellery, bags, etc?
Simply repurposing traditional identity wasn't good enough for advertisers: social media has taken it a step further, deliberately manufacturing hyper-specific identities to be exploited for profit. TikTok, with its constantly shifting trendy personal "aesthetics", is a prime example of this. Users are encouraged by the community to identify themselves with a certain "aesthetic" group on the platform -- past examples including "coquette girls", "alt kids", and "fairy grunge" -- which are primarily defined by their distinctive, trendy styles of dress. Naturally, someone wanting to join an "aesthetic" group will be compelled to buy a whole new wardrobe to affirm their new identity. Such social media fashion trends have recently led to the rise of "ultra-fast fashion": sites such as Shein plaster the web with their ads, their incredibly rapid production allowing them to effectively target each and every emergent identity-trend.
This combination of identity-manufacture, ultra-convenient online shopping, and the medium of the smartphone, has been a consumerist disaster. When you don't have to make the effort to take time out of your day for a shopping trip, and can simply make a few taps on a screen, at any time and any place, in order to have virtually any item you desire (often at an incredibly low price) shipped directly to your home within a few days, it becomes very easy to overconsume.
Hyper-identity has an additional secondary purpose of keeping you alienated from the real world, and therefore stuck on your phone. The rapidly shifting, hyperindividualist nature of online identity-trends makes it very difficult for people with such identities to find real-life community -- the only place they can reliably meet and interact with other people like them is on social media. In this sense, identity created by social media is a sort of anti-identity: where its original evolutionary purpose was to create social bonds to strengthen a community, hyper-identity's is to isolate, to turn a person in on themselves and away from the community.
In fact, big tech seems to be converging towards the primary purpose of atomising the individual, replacing the traditional function of the community with their own services. LLMs epitomise this in many ways; instead of seeking another person for companionship, help with a task, emotional support, etc, people are increasingly turning to services such as ChatGPT, as they're a more convenient, accessible option. OpenAI recently made comments describing a vision of theirs of everyone having their own personal chatbot "butler", helping with tasks across every sector of life -- pretty much confirming my suspicions there.
The greatest issue with this is the enormous power it will grant to tech elites. As we know, if they're not charging you money for a service, it's because they're harvesting your personal data to sell: as the hegemony of these services grows over time, it becomes ever more difficult to maintain privacy. Furthermore, according to their vision of the world -- with every individual atomised and cut off from the community, completely reliant on their services to function in life -- we would become utterly powerless to resist them in any way.
TBC
Dimanche 8 As 153
Language troubles
Isn't it hard to express ideas through writing? It's so linear, where ideas in the abstract are sprawling and multidimensional.
Even non-fictional writing is necessarily an art. You can't just write something as it is in your head, because "as it is in your head" is largely obscure, sub-verbal; very far from orderly, structured paragraphs. It has to be translated, abstracted, packed into a neat little box, in order to make it communicable to another person (or even to your own conscious mind). If you've ever done much translation you know that there's no such thing as a "perfect" one, that the process necessarily changes a text on some fundamental level. In translating abstract ideas into language, I'd imagine that the changes are more extreme.
It's practically a cliche at this point to lament the insufficiency of language. It's a truism that language is limiting, I think this attitude tends to lack nuance. Life is the friction between boundaries. Languages are enormous collaborative art projects connecting billions of people around the world throughout time and space. Writing really is an art -- I love the process of trying to pick out the words I want from the rich palette of the English language, building sentence structures, playing with grammar... Would a painter lament that their work is limited by not being able to see every possible colour? Or just not being able to stream their ideas and emotions directly into the viewer's head? A hypothetical "perfect" form of communication would necessarily kill the art form. Having to grapple with the limits of language is exactly what makes it so fulfilling!
Trying to make my own constructed language actually just consolidated further for me the beauty of natural languages. Every word, every grammatical structure, every little detail has such a rich social-historical context, they make conlangs look flat and lifeless in comparison. Natural languages are at a very pleasant point between light and dark, restriction and freedom -- to go too far one way or the other is to tend towards nonexistence.
Black space is a wonderful place to visit, but at its core it is nothingness: I've never intended to suggest completely disappearing into it. As I said, life is friction, difference between things, so throwing a splash of black on the white canvas of social reality really livens things up. I want to keep things moving.
Jeudi 5 As 153
Fascinating stuff on one of the tutorials linked here
Hyperpop is depressing
Beneath its chaotic barrages of memey humour, the genre is an encapsulation of our cultural, generational (Z) attitude of resigned depression. It's significant that possibly the closest we've come as a generation to a cohesive "countercultural" sound is this intensely exaggerated, ironic (or "post-ironic") offshoot of pop music -- "hyperpop" is a very well-named genre; it's hyperreal pop, a simulation.
Positive portrayals of the genre posit it as a sort of detournement, mocking current mass culture, but this is a naive idea. Hyperpop is obviously a mockery, but it's completely defanged: it's irony for its own sake, with any larger purpose lost entirely, to the point that you can barely even tell anymore what the supposed subject being parodied is. Hyperpop embodies consciousness of the spectacle, as in the classic gen-z "self-awareness", but has no interest in actually challenging it in any meaningful way -- all it does is laugh, and laugh, and laugh, endlessly. It's happily subsumed itself into the spectacle: of course, most people who laugh at "chronically online" culture are very much part of it themselves, using self-mocking memes as just another form of spectacular entertainment -- the meta element just makes it funnier. Countercultural music of the past tried to fight the spectacle, despite arguably being ultimately defeated and assimilated by it -- hyperpop is more hyperculture than counterculture, it gave up resisting before it even started in favour of an "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude: it's about hopelessness. Hyperpop decided that there's no escape from hyperreality, and so threw itself into it headfirst instead. It's really the perfect representation of the gen-z zeitgeist in a genre of music.
I remember a certain hyperpop song that got popular online a few years ago, it had a line that went "get your ass off Twitter cos it gives you fucking mental illness", clearly meant to be taken as a joke, but with some level of underlying authenticity to the statement: I don't get the impression that the artist said that because they believe Twitter is in fact good for your mental health. These sorts of jokes are everywhere online, tongue-in-cheek memes about how awful and destructive social media is -- we even came up with a name for social media-induced psychological harm recently: "brainrot", and immediately memed the term to death (if it was ever even intended to be taken remotely seriously in the first place). They're jokes because ultimately we would never seriously consider getting off of social media no matter how much it harms us, no matter how much we wish we could, we've simply decided that it's impossible, so there's nothing to be done but laugh at it -- it's gallows humour.
I dislike hyperpop because I strongly reject the depressive defeatism of our times. It's certainly not impossible to unplug from social media: I did it. It's necessary to ask, who benefits from you believing that it's impossible to overcome the spectacle?
Hope to write more later elaborating on how "realism" is hyperstitional...
Lundi 2 As 153
Hypnotic music
My distaste for pop music is (evidently) not at all a problem intrinsically with catchiness, repetitiveness, or simplicity, as common criticism of it goes. Aside from my issues with the corporate side of things, it's that it's completely devoid of allure. Whether a fluffy, campy bubblegum-pop hit; a downcast adult-contemporary ballad; or whatever other flavour popular in the mainstream right now, these songs tend to use catchiness for the intended purpose of unobtrusively blending into the background, and worming their way into the subconscious unnoticed in order to gradually naturalise themselves as part of popular culture -- like a sort of subtle brainwashing. It makes no attempt to seduce: it solidifies itself by pure brute-force into the collective cultural (sub)conscious.
"Catchiness" has significant psychological power, and thereby deserves to be taken much more seriously than it generally is. Along with having the power to brainwash, it can also be profoundly hypnotic. The key difference between these two states is that brainwashing puts you at the foreground as the music dissolves into the background, while hypnosis puts the music at the foreground while you dissolve. This temporary erosion of the self is what makes musical hypnosis so blissful: the baggage of anxiety, responsibilities, identity, etc, melting away into the intensity of the music.
Hypnotic music is rhythmic above all (as opposed to the typical emphasis on melody in pop music), tapping into the instinctual power of entrainment. Michael Gira of Swans once said that rock music is fundamentally sexual: its visceral, rhythmic, heavy character seems to make the genre particularly effective at inducing a hypnotic state, analogous to the depersonalising forces of sexuality. He also specifically compared Swans' own music to "brutal intercourse": incredibly apt in this analogy. Swans stretch rock-heaviness, repetitive rhythms, and catchy, simplistic riffs to their absolute extreme, to the point of transcending "catchiness" as colloquially understood (and arguably even the label of rock, being considered a "post-rock" band) into something else entirely: they're a sort of ultimate, distilled form of rock music, pure hypnosis.
Atmosphere, while more elusive than catchiness, is also an important element of hypnotic music: it creates interest and immersion, it's the difference between repetition being intrusive and annoying, and being smooth and alluring. It can be created either externally -- think being at a live show, or in a church singing hymns in unison -- or from within the music, which is the more emphasised option these days now that music can be (and generally is) entirely isolated from the context in which it was created. Atmosphere is why I heavily prefer post-punk over its originating genre of punk rock: its characteristic deep, dark atmosphere is extremely seductive -- for instance, Joy Division's blend of straightforward punk songwriting techniques with their crushingly bleak atmosphere into an enthralling pitch-black catchiness is the heart of their appeal.
