Yeah it’s not about the Internet and virtual reality or fax machines etc, it was about overpopulation and ecological collapse among other things.
The song was inspired by a trip to an underground city in Sendai, Japan if you read Wikipedia. In the late 90s Japan was a gadget obsessed place with neon signs and screens packed into places like Sendai. Japan had industrialised rapidly over the 20th century and gave the impression of a thriving technology and manufacturing industry.
It was seen as a futuristic place by people from the rest of the world when they visited. Of course in reality Japan was in the first of its “lost decades” of stagnation that’s run from the early 90s to now.
Underground city in Sendai? Did they get radicalised by visiting a shopping center connected to the subway?
Cheeba cheeba is a helluva drug
Maybe I’m gonna have to get high just to get by
Besides not meeting its capitalist expectations, how have Japan’s “lost decades” impacted its people, and how does that impact differ from that within comparable nations that had continuous economic growth during that same time (e.g. the US, Europe, Australia, and South Korea)?
political radicalization. in the past 100 years Japan has seen:
- hypermilitarization
- hyperfascism
- hyperbombs
- hyperdepression
- hypercolonialism
- hyperindustrialization
- hypercapitalism
- hyperrecession
and a lot of people want to know if there will ever be an end to everything being so damn extra all the time, or if Japan is simply expected to burn itself out working. and as is always the case when the people start askrng these questions, there’s a rightwing reaction promising to restore Japan to the glory of an imagined past
Is hyperfascism like regular fascism with neon lights or what?
overt fascism. it contrasts itself from fascisms that hide themselves by claiming to be something they’re not.
hyper fascist regimes:
- italian fascism
- national socialism
- sharia
- christofascism
- israeli zionism
- japanese imperial militarism
- post soviet russia
covert fascist regimes:
- neoliberalism
- feudalism
- republicanism (the roman concept, not the us political party, they actually fit into the above)
- bolshevism/stalinism/marxist-leninism
- anarcho-capitalism
- technocracy
You’re not at all worried about the phenomenon of diluting definitions of powerful words until they lose their power, are you?
it’s more like if we don’t talk about how these schemes of oppression hand off to eachother, pass the baton, now, the knowledge becomes lost to everyone but the academics who study ur-fascism. i work to be very considered in how i phrase things because words have meaning. i also come at it from the angle that a lot of people living in the imperial cores of America, Russia, and China don’t even recognize that they live in the hellscape outlined in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four and that talking about capitalism v communism is not the fight most of the world at large is having, they’re talking about fascism v anarchy.
The problem is if everything becomes fascism, then nobody cares about it. I remember in high school people calling Obama a fascist. So now they have nowhere to go when Trump showed up.
That kind of vague academic language screams of “word salad”, of people using big words to make themselves feel smart and feel like they’ve said and done a lot without doing anything at all. Like this Calvin and Hobbes comic:
Honestly a lot of these terms are quite old and not great at describing current politics.
Overworked, or refusing to work at all. No one’s having sex. Their economy is further collapsing, their population is converging to the point of a death spiral. No one can afford to have a family.
They still like tech in Tokyo and pump out anime, though.
That just sounds like South Korea, which AFAIK is doing worse than Japan on most quality-of-life metrics - they work longer hours, have even less sex, population is shrinking even faster and AFAIK the common Koreans aren’t exactly getting rich off it, either.
Look to Japan to see what’s the future like in the West a decade for now.
Yeah, sure. I suppose next you’re gonna say that The Return of the Space Cowboy is not about the movie Serenity.
Reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain, an anime released in 1998 that talks about the power of social networks and how companies will compete to gain control of the internet. Some of the predictions are outstandingly good.
Looks like the The Expanse main character throwing a hat party inside the Rocinante.
😂🤣
Don’t forget Radiohead releasing Planet Telex in 1995, then OK Computer in 1997.
Before the modern web, before Wikipedia, before pocket computers, Encarta was the shit!
yeah i spent so much time reading random shit on it. to be fair i already did that with physical encyclopedias so it was natural. but the fact that Encarta allowed what’s now known as wiki surfing was next level for me.
Was born in 1996, please can someone tell me who’s this? I’d like to listen to them. Thank you.
It’s Jamiroquai.
This video is for: “Virtual Insanity”.
The video to : “Automaton” is also worth a watch in my opinion.
You NEED to watch the video: https://youtu.be/4JkIs37a2JE
I really love this cover of virtual insanity.
I know it’s almost unrelated to the discussion because you’re talking about the music video, but how often is Jamiroquai brought up?
I was very skeptical. You did not disappoint.
Excellent
I remember my mind being blown away by a TV segment that explained how the practical effect was achieved.
Not sure if this is the video you’re referencing, but it explained it for me: https://youtu.be/MzwY7ii582Y
Isn’t this just Pasttime Paradise by Stevie Wonder?
I’m a fan of both. I don’t hear it. Different key, different progression. What are you hearing that I’m not? Also, IMO it’s absolutely impossible to not be influenced by Stevie if you play this type of music, so there’s that.
Nah my bad it was Stayin Alive by Bee Gees
It’s a stretch, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. 😀
While you’re checking out the video for virtual insanity, also check out the one for Canned Heat, another great tune and another great video from Jamiroquai. I was only a kid then, but I’d turn on MTV in the morning before school to watch videos back in like 97-99, and these videos popped up every so often, and they had a lasting impact.
Check out also the Wikipedia article on Sterno, sometimes referred to as Canned Heat, because people would drink the shit to get fucked up and would ultimately die, and the coroner would rule it a death by canned heat.
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It’s your real dad.
TIL “gaff” is UK slang for your house or home.
And a fuck up.
Gaffer is a boss.
That’s gaffe though.
In french too.
And “make gaffe” (fait gaffe!) means watch out! when you are potentially doing a “gaffe”.
I don’t know why people say that English is hard it all makes perfect sense.
We tried to cover it with my band, but it sounded really boring. Upon listening closely to it, I was surprised by how minimalist it actually is. I mean there’s barely anything on the track! Some piano, some strings, and drum and bass of course.
It was a happy surprise to find that it’s one of those songs that are carried by the pure energy of the vocalist, which makes it very tricky to cover unless you go a very lateral route and “re-genre” it.
It starts minimal, but it does progressively fill out.
Not that much actually! There’s not even any bass for the first verse, as it punches in at the first chorus. By the end, the strings appear to come a bit forward in the mix, and there are 2, maybe 3 additional vocal tracks but no additional instruments that I can hear.
I’d been texting for a couple of years when this came out, and had just logged my first full year working as a web developer. The next 5 years or so felt amazing, hardware and software was improving so quickly on all fronts.
Yeah, it was good times back then. Now the technlology has vastly exceeded our wildest dreams, yet it is under the control of greedy mega corporations, resulting in the most expensive shitty experience we have experienced so far.
There’s exceptions, though; that’s why we’re here :)
I totally read what you’re saying. My work requires me to maintain a personal cell phone (Intune business profile) and, with any OEM implementation of a smartphone OS you’re essentially paying to donate everything about you to a megacorp to sell it to another megacorp to siphon more of you’re life away from you. The beauty of modern advancements, though, is that if you don’t care to be within 20% of the “bleeding edge” of attention extraction and intention fabrication you can spend your time in communities like this and with tech like graphene and linux making few sacrifices, if any.
I don’t know about you, but the lemmy atmosphere feels a lot like that of early forums to me. Not quite the same, but the community aspect is more present.
I think my stance is that technology doesn’t suck, as is the case with most things; it’s the unchecked and rampant abuse of a given thing.
Oh I agree 100%. The technology doesnt suck, It is fantastic beyond my wildest dreams as a young lad. What we are capable of doing now is amazing.
My complaints are with “subscriptions” and “accounts” to that technology. When I die, my accounts and subscriptions are non transferable. Meaning my $XX,000.00 dollar audible account with over 1000 audiobooks i bought and paid for dies with me. I now pay a yearly/monthly fee to use things like excell(which hasnt changed much) that i used to be able to buy and use indefinitely for 50 dollars.
The technology is amazing. The greedy corporate overlords are the problem.
I heard he wrote this song after visiting a fancy underground mall in Hong Kong/Japan and seeing how gnarly the tech was there at the time.
Banger music video
Plus JK is a cool dude.
Great tune too tbh
ty OP for making my afternoon playlist a lot funkier
JK was inspired to write the song after he spent all night exploring a web ring - all of which were GeoCities sites with an “under construction” animated gif.
Then your mind will literally explode if you listen to “Computer Love” by Zapp & Roger, released in… 1985!
Also, System Addict by 5 Star was 1985 IIRC
I miss the old internet. Usenet was magic.
ASCII pr0n anyone? [nsfw]
Magic
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Be right back…
Ah, convergence. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Web would just get extended to do all that stuff. The part that was harder to predict was corporations taking over all the platforms. I guess I just waited to believe that everything would stay democratized.
Check out the gemini protocol and the small web.
