OI, BLOG

HYPERLINKS, HYPERPOP, 'PC SYNDROME' & the 'WEBGEN' ERA

A few days ago, adult swim [as] uploaded this video.

A completely animated 'ambient drum and bass' mix with everything from liquid dnb to breakcore. I know I wasn't the only one in 'the undergound' [ug] playing this the night it came out, as i've seen a few collegues and friends from 'the scene' react to it on instagram (where we all at, musicians and artists alike). And with already over 300k views I'm sure it's not just me who's playing this in the background since then. To me what's interesting about this video is that this is a internet format through and throgh (the title, the aesthetics, everything) and yet Adult Swim posted this. A borderline sacred institution in 'mainstream counterculture' by this point, and a million dollar one at that. But yeah, this thing definetly does have a 'WEBGEN' feel to it, don't you think? It is even entirely comprised of indie animators and musicians who could all be considered 'WEBGEN' themselves - famous for building their careers on Social Media Sites [SMS] - like Andy Kolesov, Nuphory, Star Odyssey, Michiel Stender, or Felipe Bolivar.

Not only that, but looking deeper into the aesthetics here you can clearly see a throughline of computer inspired aesthetics, from the low-poly PSOne inspired graphics these creators tend to favor, to the beats that feel like they could've been MADE on that thing themselves, it is clear that the Adult Swim video is coming from and to a heavily digitalized culture.

'Music 2000', the famous music production software for the PSX

It's been 80 years since the MEMEX was conceived, that's 20 years short of a century. TimBL gave us the World Wide Web in march of '89, so as of today we've been on a steady diet of hyperlinks for about 35 years (and let me tell ya' I eat well). That's enough time for computers to shrink to the size of a single grain of rice, or even smaller, and Leary's LSD-to-PC pipeline to fully compile. Here comes a culture defined by a hyperassociative array of the 'everything, everywhere, and the everywhen'. Where then and now, local and global squash and stretch to animate a distintc sense of e-motion. Have you felt the binary blues, the hijack rage, or the vaporware nostalgia yet? It makes you wonder: when did simulations become so intimate? We might be past the cultural craze of Gibson's cyberpunk imagination, or even the niche yet dispondant Post-Cyberpunk blues of Nihei (or are we?). But we are in the middle of a compression-led SERUM and AUTOTUNE rage, just as we are in the middle of a nostalgia-filter tumblr obssessed everything-revival. Both these sound really different, yet share cognitive and virtual space with very little to no dissonance, often described as 'internet genres'. Sharing space not only on fan's playlists, but also on festival lineups, magazines, and collaborator's contact lists.

These are the times of the web where everything is connected. We are the Web Generation, and for those of us who came in at just the right intersection of time it is not uncommon to feel like a part of something by joining a many soundcloud cults. We live in a timeline where Adult Swim published that mix 6 days ago, pushing these aesthetics to a much more 'mainstream' public (or did it?). This is interesting because it points in the direction of a certain sense of community, not that of a niche, but of a broader community. Some may describe it as a scene or a movement, or even some kind of cultural fad. Let me share my views on it, as someone pretentious enough to run a Cyerbculture Mag and unserious enough to write comics about aliexpress microchips exploding children's brains. As not to completely handwave questions such as 'how can a scene be global?' and 'How can it be a movement if it moves in so many directions?' I'll touch on these quickly and swiftly here and state that I do intend on writting more about such things at a later point. As I do have a lot of thinking to do on all of this still. About the first question... Well it is and it is not, I suppose strictly local scenes are a relic of a simpler time or sum' like that... Just think of it as a network of scenes that still when looked at from afar paints a somewhat coherent picture of a scene itself. Besides these are not necessarily opposite. Then again what does grassroots even mean to people who never touch any grass? We can try to dig deeper at a later date. Now with regards to question number two. May I say that the concept of 'Youth Movements' as it's become widely thought of comes off to me as a little simplistic in the current world. That is for a few reasons, but mainly because it is way too dependent on a Linear conceptualization of movement, maybe because it was the image progressive politics and vanguard artists (as sophisticated as they were/remain to be) were operating on back then. We now live in the era of Recursiveness, of feedback loops as well as the era of fruity loops (maybe I'll repeat that line next time we touch on this subject).

The loop dominates the line in most areas of knowledge and imagination, so the world reflects that notion in a highly chaotic and self-referential modus operandi. Sampling is the most obvious example, but I'm sure we do not need to be that literal with this.

That is troublesome/worrysome in many ways I suppose, but in many others I do think it might be closer to some 'Truth' even if not always in a pleasent way, although very often it is actually pretty fucking cool (in my opinion) and COOL DOES RULE in counterculture. One of the ways it bothers me is thinking about how does this constant remix of things lead anywhere new? or are any political frontlines being fought by this hypercultural youth? I can't give you an answer to these questions in complete good faith (as we'd need hindsight for that), but I can present you with a model of thinking about movement that may give us some insight on how to think about this. Movement in a recurssive environment can look stale if we are talking about a system simple enough to fit the mold of a perfect circle. But in a chaotic system, with way more complexity, such as culture on the internet it might look a lot more like this:

(Visualization of a 'Lorenz Attractor', also known as 'The Butterfly Effect Graph') 'The Lorenz Equations describe a system of differential equations originally developed by Edward Lorenz to model atmospheric convection. This system exhibits chaotic behavior and is characterized by the ‘butterfly effect,’ where small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes. The plot to the right illustrates the Lorenz attractor, a strange attractor that resembles a butterfly and visualizes the chaotic nature of the system, showing how the system’s state evolves over time, never repeating exactly, but staying within a set range of values.' (excerpt I took from some facebook group where an old hag explains this thing)

If every different niche of ideas in the 'scene' is a line going through it's own cycle, if although it can deviate and evolve in each cycle it remains in unison then these little deviations can overtime amount to great change. That is to say: even though it may appear aimlessly chaotic at a glance, the system is still evolving and therefore moving reality in a certain direction. The recurssive system is not opposed to foward momentum, so to say, therefore it is safe to say that it also contemplates change. And it may do so in a more comprehensive way than single lines ever could. Savy people from my city may have a little dejavu reading this, but yeah we had some of this shit figured out in the 90s. In a more localized way. I'll tell this story in a later entry. But that's neither here nor there... Moving foward to make things easier on me as a writer I'll just adress this whole 'scene', 'movement', 'fad' as we do casually between ourselves: 'The Underground' (We can talk about that naming later, but honestly that's a discussion I'm not as interested in if it sounds cool at the time it's the right way to call it in my opinion). I myself did not understand this whole debbaco until I got into soundcloud music (cloudmusic for short), but I suppose we can get into that another time. Even so, allow me to talk about Soundcloud for a second because I do think talking music makes culture a bit easier to digest. I was on the trenches when 'HYPERPOP' became a thing in Brazil, circa 2021 (hilariously just 2 years after that infamous playlist). Trenches made of clouds, I suppose. I can share more of the experience with my colleagues at CYBER5UPREMACY another time, but what I will say is that it really wasn't much deeper than 'doing whatever we wanted, despite whoever we were'. That was the prevailing ethos behind it all, I think. I mean they were a collective comprised of mostly periferic trans/queer people in Brazil making not only cutting edge music but 'gringo music' (musica de gringo) as people call it, meaning music that sounds like 'foreign music'. (If you're curious maybe try this song or maybe this one). There is a lot of stigma that comes with that, but cultural barriers held little meaning when faced with genuine passion for all kinds of music (often stuff we listened to online as we grew up). As I understand, that was also how a lot of artists that came on the second wave after PCMusic and Sophie, such as 100gecs, described their 'no fucks given' attitude to genre-mixing. This kind of 'melting pot' philosophy was not really the focus of those earlier 'Deconstructive Club' Artists who were more interested in making awe-inspiring music drenched in post-ironic pop aesthetics with a lot more campyness and a lot less thrashiness. The DIY ethos of cloudmusic fused with the boundary-pushing sound design and fauxpop aesthetics of PCMusic. And with it came a wave of new and exciting artists. As this is a WWW's world, it wasn't long until wave eventually hit us here too. They were not the only ones though, as at the same time Soundcloud was finally amassing a cult userbase in Brazil, and along and among them there were people doing all kinds of music from all over the world. A hyperlinked community one might say. Which may lead into a hyperlinked sound. And then it kept evolving everywhere, going on to become ever less pop and ever more hyper.

Interestingly despite all efforts and advancements in balkanization some sort of a monolithic sense of contemporary culture remains in these 'internet genres'/'internet styles'. They have organic audience crossover and feel artistically and culturally linked, even between themselves and through different mediums. This is because they live on Cyberspace. Which despite being fragmented as it is nowadays, still reminds people of a distinct kind of place. Even if this place is their phone. There they were born and nurtured, and there they may return time and time again. This 'internety' feel has become heavily associated nowadays with a sense of authenticity, for it chooses to acknowledge the now instead of imitating a nostalgic image of counterculture.

Bitcrush and low-poly feel authentic because they acknoledge the presence of the computer in our lives which is bound to appeal to an increasingly computirized global youth, inspite of other differences kids may have. They found community in the web. As all niches come to the web, they join the melting pot and become silicon too. In 1999, 'The Matrix' hit cinemas worldwide.

At the time critics were aprehensive about the potential mass audience reactions, they thought the movie was 'too tuned in' for it's own good and that the cyberculture backdrop might go over general audiences' heads. Be it the hype around the subject at the time, or general familiarity being higher than expected, or mayeb even the sheer quality of it, the film was an absolute hit. Giving wake to a massive culturak phenomenon in it's stead.

Now even though we are a quarter through the 21st century these independent artists in the UG scene face the same kind of worries. And despite that not only are people are showing up in droves to live performances, visual artists famous for 'internet styles' are headlining gallery exhibitions worldwide.

It remains to be seen weather or not the scene remains cohesive in any way through it's internal tensions, the mainstream push it's being given and the influx of IRL subcultures into the net. Only time will tell.

'Kids these days got a PC SYNDROME'! All they think about is computers!'

While that may sound a bit 'too 90s' to come off as genuine 2026 ParentSpeak, it might not be that far from the truth. Although I suppose it's more accurate to say 'All we think about goes through a computer'. Be it in politics, science, or taste, FEEDBACK IS A MERE REALITY. Cybernetics are rewiring our brains. They might've been doing it since the 80s. Computing has been a big part of culture for a while and it is no coindence that a highly cybernetic sensibility is emerging now after programmed drums have been making us dance for more than half a century.

'My implant is an NTAG216 I bought off of some sketchy vendor and inserted it between my index and thumb. In order to read and write it I’ve gotten an Arduino Leonardo + a violently chinese RC522 module'.