COLLAPSE AND RISE

1 July 2024

Back in the car on our way home it got dark we were listening to Amaarae. It started raining, it got colder yet again, and this is it. Another summer. Cycling along the river. I somehow tried to think together Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content by Caroline Busta from New Models and Nonsense/acc: Why ‘chronically online’ memes will destroy the internet by Thom Waite for Dazed.

When did our digital communication get so difficult to decode? And what do our impenetrable memes say about our desire (or lack of desire) to make and maintain relationships with other humans in 2024? Writes Waite.

"I ask a 20-something New Yorker whose intuition I trust how she would describe her style and she tells me that she doesn’t really have one. It’s more about a way of searching networks, she explains, a shared logic among her friends of traversing online space that delivers her to certain objects, places, experiences. It doesn’t matter whether the item actually fits or looks good or if the location is conventionally significant—just that it existed along an interesting network pathway. The style is incidental." What Busta describes here to me sounds like a daily routine of the ordinary, a cultural technique that not necessarily seeks to decode but to bricolage.

In an infinite media environment, all encompassing but fleeting we might interpret the very now as noise (Eryk Salvaggio), a polluted media environment (Philipps & Milner) of information disorder (Wardle), we might lament the end of a fixed and singular eventual public sphere, the end of a century and the end of an imagined order, we might lament "chronically online memes" and the end of the world as we know it. Or we might just listen, embrace, curate, combine, remix and imagine. Spinn dich in das Rauschen ein / Und versuche gut zu sein.