“This was the dawn of a new digital-era way of experiencing time, something we’ve since become totally familiar with. And every gain in consumer-empowering convenience has come at the cost of disempowering the power of art to dominate our attention, to induce a state of aesthetic surrender. Which means that our gain is also our loss. It is also becoming very clear that the brittle temporality of networked life is not good for our psychological well-being; it makes us restless, erodes our ability to focus and be in the moment. We are always interrupting ourselves, disrupting the flow of experience.”
Simon Reynolds in Retromania.
Bro. It really explains well how ten years later we are now slugging through mountains of art and entertainment, how we are basically intellectual zombies. My good friend R was telling me last week how he downloaded a new album and listened to it without listening to it. How he didn’t understand what had changed, why he didn’t enjoy music as much as before (he’s a big music fan).
We have too much. We don’t make any choices. We are drowning.
And it feels like there is no end. It’s one of the most bizarre thing about the West today.