I love to hang online, people do crazy nice stuff here and i’m connected to the whole world.
But i also love to hang irl, even though it means limiting myself to a specific subculture/social circle/city. I love the grit of the real world and just hanging out late at bars in a city, feeling like a low life street rat, enthralled in neonous action, pumping through the veins of the city.
Irl is often a very creative space and I can riff on a lot of funny concepts and thoughts with my friends. The mileues are exuberant with ideas, but anything meaningful rarely makes it out of them (maybe bc of alcohol), and it’s never bleeding edge.
The web is ofc also immensely creative. It’s like following the white rabbit into wonderland, and I am time and time again astonished by the individuals & their creations residing here. In spite of being connected to the front line of human consciousness, the sheer wealth of shiny objects online make me feel a spectator rather than a participant.
‘Tis the ‘live’ context that is somewhat missing from my online presence. One sided ramblings into the ether(net) devoid of social context don’t quite cut it. Typing at a screen is all too uninspiring, and even a lavishly well crafted image stales when posted, if it is not interacted with.
My best ramblings have come through me when out and about— at 4 in the morning walking home with a friend. Marvelous spaces of potential have opened themselves in the guise of street lamps, yet always in the moment— then lost to time.
So what then.? Should I pick and focus on one of these worlds, abandon my friends and dive down the iceberg with my sanity as stake or should I recall my netizenship and devote myself to friends and community? Or am I advocating a union between the internet and real life? Nah, that would probably be horrible.
At the end of the day I am just happy to have two worlds I really like.
Creatively however, I’ve found some evidence of the potential in combining the liveness of real life with the creative abundance of the internet.
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One example was the website mebious.co.uk from serial experiments lain that is sadly unusable since 2020.
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Stockholm based civilpolis.org aims to become the biggest employer in Sweden by 2150.
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Radio station Hbr1 is also a favourite of mine.
Rhizome’s collection of surf clubs lead me to some interesting projects:
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Cloaque is a long vertical internet collage colab between artists.
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Sadly also discontinued dump.fm seems to have been a perfect shitposting ground.
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Last but not least are.na is just like the memex! Check it out:-)