In 1984, American science fiction writer William Gibson defined “cyberspace” (a term he coined) as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators” in the near-future world of his novel, Neuromancer, where human consciousness drifts through a blinding data-world of corporate geometries. More than three decades later, the English documentarian Adam Curtis traced how that hallucination became reality in his BBC documentary HyperNormalisation: “Over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers, and technological utopians—rather...

“Kay Redden, founder and operator of Seattle cassette-tape label Den Tapes, likens the choice to interact with physical media to shopping local, given the increasingly competitive attention economy of today: “It’s kind of like voting with your dollar, like when you’re opting to support a local business rather than go to Home Depot or whatever.” In this way, devoting time to the making or consuming of physical art can be seen as a net positive in the war over our time and data points—each non-technological activity we participate in has become an act of micro-revolution.”

  • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
    0·
    1 day ago

    I’m not so sure. The non-local digital internet is amazing when it allows us to connect to people from across the world to share ideas and stories and to empathize with one another. I am grateful for its existence. I cannot believe that social media is doomed to be structurally bad for people when people can benefit from being social irl, and places like VRChat go a long way towards proving that. Meanwhile local physical media can be tools of hierarchy, such as the 15th century Catholic bible.

    I think the locality and physicality of media described here are both forms of protection, a way to take their joy outside of the reach of capitalism which seeks to weaponize it against them. If capitalism could control our physical media more than our digital media then I’m certain hacker culture would be hailed as our one true way to defy the meatspace overlords (like Unimatrix Zero from Star Trek: Voyager).

    So in the end, I think the discrete boundary between categories you’re looking for boils down to the boring answer “technologies that enable hierarchy” vs “technologies that dismantle hierarchy”.