Alice's Wizardly Void-Space

“Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot… He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar… He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

And it always would continue to expand…right?

Hah. Even back then the idea was a bit of a smokescreen, the dumping of endless streams of anime torrents and ‘zine pdf’s not done by a digital weltgeist but instead by a disparate groups of like 20 guys in Lvov or Hong Kong, who time and boredom could easily destroy. But of course far more sinister in the past twenty years has been the brick-by-brick dismantling of the digital commons to erect paywalled fiefdoms of exclusive DRM’d content. In the face of the dual forces of greed and entropy, your saved links have rotted, your go-to torrent sites flit from registry to registry if they don’t die entirely, your favourite alt-rock AMV from middle school that first got you into Inuyasha got DCM-striked in 2014 and you didn’t even *notice* until 2018. The Akashic Record turned out to not be a monument, but a front in a war - one that hasn’t been lost yet, sure, but *could be lost* at any time, and you won’t receive any more warning than you already have. And once you know this, not by reading words but the only way one can - from the first time you look for something you thought was always there only to find it locked away forever - you can’t regain the innocence lost. Now you download out of fear.

The man above is man fully embodying an ethos of a time and place. Not simply because he is obtaining free songs; in the end, if you want the song, you can buy the song, or use spotify, you can find a way to listen! But precisely because he does not care, in the moment, to listen, he has achieved enlightenment; to take with reckless abandon from a moment in history, a moment of spatial infinity and infinitesimal temporality, is worth the sleep deprivation. Maybe you should too, if you still can, while the moment lasts.

Hitachi:

"That's cool, but i'm also really horny, you got anything for that?

Hitachi: