Somehow I think we think that cool technology equates with cutting edge culture and this comes from a weird understanding of culture.

Culture and coolness is local. It’s all local. When I am in rural Saskatchewan, a leather John Deere ball cap is cool and a very important part of culture. Yet when I hear people in the church talk about culture, we talk about “emerging culture” (there is no such thing), or global culture (sorry, culture is awfully localized). The thinking is what is cool in San Francisco or New York is going to be cool in Saskatoon or Calgary is incorrect. I always cringe when I read my blog as being listed as an important blog to read for understanding culture. That is totally incorrect, you don’t understand culture by reading a blog about culture...

About half my clinical obsession with web technologies is driven by an ADD-fueled love of all things new and shiny. The other half comes from a fascination with how the technology allows a boolean-packet level quantification of not new behaviors, but ways-of-being that predate history.

...The technologies we employ to facilitate these social transactions, they so often seem to be built with the intention of removing deceit, but...

The tools communicating meaning have replaced actual meaningfulness. And without actual meaningfulness we lose context. And without context we become vapid. We become an un-unified theory of everything...we will continue to make attempts at tools that will give agency to what essentially amounts to some vaguely aesthetic abstraction of our desires.

You can’t destroy or diminish Deep Ellum. It was here long before all of the shiny shopping malls, the overpriced corporate live music venues and trendy “red velvet rope” clubs with their snooty bottle service. As was referenced time and time again last night, the area is the cradle of this city’s creative sensibility.

If you’re content to live in a vacuous, benign existence with little sense of purpose or meaning, then stay at home and jerk off your X-Box.

If you wanna break out of a routine that offers little or no spiritual or creative inspiration, then know you will be embraced and made to feel part of this very eclectic creative community.

...There’s nothing to be afraid of.

• Sociopolitically. Let's face it, thinking about this category will send you into the fetal position. We don't need to be reminded.
• Economically
• Technologically
• Generationally. Generation Xers are no longer the taste makers. And FIIK what the youngins are into these days

We rail against suburbia, but it is not the enemy: it is only our version of the enemy.

Paulo Coelho, author of books such as "The Alchemist" and "The Witch of Portobello", sold over 100 million books last year. In part, he puts this success down to BitTorrent, as he saw a huge increase in sales when his books appeared on sites such as The Pirate Bay. We talked to Coelho to find out more about this remarkable story.

"Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share - from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone," Coelho told TorrentFreak, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.

The Get Out Clause are an upcoming UK band who are currently unsigned. They took a brilliant and I'm sure soon to be much copied method to producing their own video. Unable to hire a production crew for a standard 1980’s era MTV music video, they performed their music in front of 80 of the 13 million CCTV "security" cameras available in England, including one on a bus.

They then used Britain's Data Protection Act to request the footage that was shot of them. Grab some decent and inexpensive video editing tools (say. . . an iMac) and presto! They got themselves a unique and in my opinion quite interesting music video.

"cultural sustainability" is about companies whose actions offset the consequences of their presence (or disappearance)...

For art, the intervention of Wuffie always signals a further degree of mediation. To say that art is wuffified is to say that a mediation, or standing-inbetween, has occurred, & that this betweenness amounts to a split, & that this split amounts to "alienation."

giantlemondrop

There was a depression, so artists, who are certainly blameless in this, discovered low real estate prices and low rents, and they started to move up here. And the gap between the artists and the real estate developers has gotten very small in our modern times, down to where it's almost nothing...

We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. "Sustainable development"--that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture...just yuppie poseurism. It's fashionable to be green, but it's not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we're serving in this economy, I'm afraid we would see that we're basically shills for real estate developers.

when the player chooses to take out their instrument, the keyboard switches to a configuration where specific keys are mapped to specific notes

random rowdiness and role play in the auction house and taverns in the game to bands and guilds of minstrels that spend most of their time playing music in-game

Finally, all of these reservations, as strong and as heartfelt as they are, do not in the end even begin to address my single most important problem with social-networking systems, which is that social comfort and coherence require that by far the majority of actual feelings regarding the people in our lives not be made explicit. In my experience, any degree of smooth and compassionate human concourse absolutely requires plausible deniability, and a certain degree of dissembling regarding your actual, operative feelings for the people you’re engaged with, however much you love them. (Depending on context, that degree may even be greater the more you care about them.) By contrast, having to declare the degree of intimacy you're willing to grant each friend, whether in public and for all to see or simply so that they see it, is a state of affairs I've described, in comments elsewhere, as "frankly autistic." It’s no way to arrange things as absolutely central to life as friendship, of that I am sure.

There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we're all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don't think it's a bad one to aim for.

Many monsters stand between us & realization of Immediatist goals. For instance our own ingrained unconscious alienation might all to easily be mistaken for a virtue, especially when contrasted with crypto-authoritarian pap passed off as "community," or with various upscale versions of "leisure." Isn't it natural to take the dandyism noir of curmudgeonly hermits for some kind of heroic individualism, when the only visible contrast is Club Med commodity socialism, or the gemutlich masochism of the Victim Cults? To be doomed & cool naturally appeals more to noble souls than to be saved & cozy.

...What must be overcome is not individuality per se, but rather the addiction to bitter loneliness which characterizes consciousness in the 20th century (which is by & large not much more than a re-run of the 19th).

...The first & most innocent-seeming obstacle to any Immediatist project will be the "busyness" or "need to make a living" faced by each of its associates.

...Yes, perhaps it's true we can't "live" with a job -- although I hope we're grown-up enough to know the difference between life & the accumulation of a bunch of fucking gadgets.