

William Gibson on Punk Rock, Internet Memes, and "Gangnam Style" - bootload
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/william-gibson-part-3-punk-memes/

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jentulman
I'd just like to posit that, in the UK at least, rave and the beginnings of
drum and bass were the last pre-digital youth/music based counter culture. Not
that I'm trying to call him out as wrong, I wouldn't expect Gibson to be a
massive rave aficionado.

I think this article also shows up something about youTube I've noticed within
my social group. It's half a decade old and yet it's become pervasive and it
feels almost like it's always been there. Friends have said that like me they
feel like they've been using it since about the turn of the century.

~~~
nigelk
In Australia where in many ways it felt like we were second-hand consumers of
UK rave/dnb culture, the "digital" was a big part of that experience in the
early 90s.

Think of all the newsgroups, mailing lists and blogs. Think hyperreal.org and
the community around all that.

The music itself may not have spread digitally as we saw from the mid-90s
onwards, but discussion of the music certainly did.

~~~
meej
Hyperreal was an integral part of a lot of the local scenes in North America,
too. Ishkur, who is something of an Internet rave culture celebrity, known for
his guide to electronic music, guide to rave culture, and his rave captions
project, once posted an essay to the nw-raves mailing list arguing that rave
culture was inherently a geek culture. Which was arguably true for the PNW and
northern California.

~~~
samstave
You guys might like my friends, DJ Morgan's, site for some nostalgic and
fantastic mixes.

He owned Lotek Records as well.

Http://djmorgan.com

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ddw
I didn't grow up during the Punk movement but the commercial "revival" of
sorts kicked off by Green Day in the mid-90s. Green Day was on a indie label,
Lookout! Records, before hitting it big with "Dookie." When you bought their
first two CDs/cassettes a small catalog of Lookout! Records' other albums fell
out with a listing of bands I'd never heard of before. None of these bands had
websites so information was really limited. You'd have to buy fanzines or know
other people in your town that listened to those bands. If you were lucky
maybe one of those bands came to your town and you got to see what they looked
and talked like for the first time. I can't even imagine what it was like to
see Black Flag touring every town in America in the early 80s introducing
thousands of kids to a new subculture and form of music.

My point is, maybe I'm jaded now but music was so much more interesting then
when there was mystery and not everyone had an opinion about a band before
their first mp3 came out. I think the disposable quality of mp3s makes music
less valuable too.

The internet also killed regionalism in music for the most part where a
certain "scene" would have a certain sound as bands around an area being
influenced by each other. See [1]. I'm not sure what could have been done,
it's a natural by-product of the internet, but I miss it.

[1] [http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43235/our-
band-c...](http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43235/our-band-could-
be-your-band-how-the-brooklynization-of/)

~~~
vectorbunny
I did come of age during the Punk movement, and I sympathize with your
perception of what has been lost (see
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529054> below). The benefits of a
somewhat slow and poorly distributed dispersal of culture are largely gone.
The real question, as I see it, is what unpredictable cultural effects will
the technology generate.

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rolux
I think the following (quote from the article) is a very good observation:

 _"I suspect — and I don’t think this is nostalgia — but it may have been able
to become kind of a richer sauce, initially. It wasn’t able to instantly go
from London to Toronto at the speed of light. Somebody had to carry it back to
Toronto or wherever, in their backpack and show it, physically show it to
another human. Which is what happened. And compared to the way that news of
something new spreads today, it was totally stone age. Totally stone age!
There’s something remarkable about it that’s probably not going to be that
evident to people looking at it in the future. That the 1977 experience was
qualitatively different, in a way, than the 2007 experience, say._

~~~
gaius
On Amazon now, I have learnt not to buy a Kindle book that doesn't also come
on paper, because that is the quality filter, than the author managed to get a
publishing deal. I don't think that signal will be around for much longer.
It's the same thing as Gibson says, a thing had to have a certain momentum
behind it to make it into the outside world, that is missing now.

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WiseWeasel
" _The recorded music industry was a huge deal for those of us who lived
through it, and we took it absolutely for granted, and now it’s really gone;
it’s not what it used to be. You can’t really get super rich just doing that;
you have to be able to sell merch or something to go along with it, or have
concert tours._ "

Is it optimal or sustainable that a band needs to sell t-shirts and concert
tickets to support themselves as musicians, let alone be super rich? The
recordings and the concert tickets are the only product offered by bands that
we place value in; t-shirts hold some slight social value, but little personal
value. Revenues from concert tickets go mostly to the venue operator,
especially for smaller venues of 100-200 people that most bands play in, and
the amount going to the band is hopefully enough to pay for the cost of
touring, and probably not much more than that.

So that pretty much leaves recordings as the only valuable product that bands
can hope to sustain themselves with. Merch and tour ticket sales are not going
to cut it for most artists, so without sales of recordings in some form,
they're going to need to work a regular job, and the music is relegated to a
hobby.

Making good recordings costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time in a
recording studio, so hobby bands have difficulty producing them. Recordings
are valuable to us because they allow us to integrate music into our lives.
How can we expect musicians to invest the time and resources to make good
recordings for us to enjoy if we don't recognize their value by directly
rewarding the artist for making them? Buying a t-shirt does not send the
message to the artist that we value their recording; only buying recordings
does that.

~~~
tesseractive
> Making good recordings costs a lot of money

Even now?

My impression was that anyone with even a modest amount of technical savvy
could put together a recording incredibly cheaply using a computer these days.
Decent software, audio interfaces, and microphones aren't that expensive, and
you can tweak the production and lay in new tracks to your heart's content.

It still takes a ton of time to get right, but it doesn't have to be expensive
studio time anymore.

~~~
WiseWeasel
It's true that the costs for equipment and software are going down, and in
some cases, such as electronic music, it's possible to get good recordings
with very cheap and accessible equipment. If you've got a band with drums and
other acoustic instruments, however, that means isolation rooms, sound-
proofing, and other measures needed to get good recordings, not to mention the
software and skills needed to mix them; these are still relatively
inaccessible and costly.

My point is that regardless of the cost, if we don't reward artists for making
recordings, despite their great value to us, why should they bother with the
effort to make them?

~~~
shardling
You might need all that for _good_ quality, but you can get an _acceptable_
recording cheaply. (Minimum viable recording quality?)

That wasn't something trivial to do in ages past.

~~~
WiseWeasel
I guess the question would then be how many of us are content to be listening
to minimally viable recordings while the artists are largely unrewarded for
their efforts. I'd rather demonstrate my support for their efforts in the
hopes of getting _good_ recordings.

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pervycreeper
The internet has led to an arms race of exclusivity, giving rise to such
phenomena as hipsterism, un-google-able band names, private (offline mediated)
online communities, etc. These are merely the growing pains of a culture which
has not yet acclimated itself to total, ubiquitous access to information.

~~~
vectorbunny
While I generally agree with your assessment, I suspect the phenomena of
hipsterism emerged as soon as the development of agriculture allowed the rise
of specialization. As an old man, seeing the kids these days unabashedly
dressing like the Small Faces brings to mind Paul Valéry's old saw:
"Everything changes but the avant-garde."

While I am not personally all that nostalgic about the passing of the cultural
distribution channels that Gibson mentions in the OP's link, I wonder how the
reduction of meatspace contact in cultural transmission will play out. Many of
my long standing friendships were formed in prehistoric book and record
stores. As a kid today, I might meet those people, even more of them, no
doubt... but would the tight bonds that sustained those relationships over the
years have formed in the absence of non-virtual presence?

I guess this problem, if it even is a problem (and not the distortion of my
limited perspective), will sort itself. It could be that increasing arrays of
relatively weak social bonds in conjunction with smaller sets of strong bonds
are what the social meta-organism requires moving forward.

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bane
Imho a "punk" style, anti-authority counter culture has emerged. It's called
anonymous and just like punk it's a reaction to the excesses of the
"establishment". Only unlike punk, instead of demonstrating membership via
your hair, music and clothes, this one uses the shiboleth of computer literacy
and meme awareness as the group identifiers.

And unlike punk's self destructive near impotence to do anything but rage. The
modern movement actually has some tools to fight back with.

~~~
vectorbunny
Tools more effective than bodily fluids. ;)

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corporalagumbo
Clearly a modern punk-esque counterculture would have to make radical anti-
internet privacy a, or the, central tenet. The whole point would be to
construct a totally invisible subdigital culture. What else would define
membership is anyone's guess. (also, such a subculture, or multiple, may
already exist, as by its nature we wouldn't know anything about it.)

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peterwwillis
Communities still are human-powered. The only difference is now keeping people
informed is easier, so building the community is easier, but it's still
largely offline.

Couchsurfing, autocross, bdsm, ska, anime, hiking, slacklining... all
communities i've become involved in with human beings at real places because
the internet made it easier to find out. I still needed a human to show me it.
But then the community was opened up to me much quicker through the 'net.

The next counterculture, to me, was 4Chan's /b/ and Anonymous. As stupid as it
sounds, those retards brought a new kind of rebellion to people's lives - even
if it was largely online. But it's not the method the message gets out that
matters. It's the culture that develops. I think it's clear that the internet
isn't holding anyone back.

