Net life

Don't often do this, and to be honest you could do it every week, but here is a round-up of decent stuff off the 'nets in the last week or so. Click 'em up, bookmark them, print them (on recycled paper) for the next bus journey!

Old people like new music, while young people like old music, but convince themselves it sounds fresh. Young people call them 'too old to appreciate new music'; old people worry about a decline in critical standards and a rise in prejudice. Alex Niven crystallises an unseemly row over latest Midlands chuggers Peace (like them if you have to, enjoy their 'moment', just dont claim originality for them).
http://thefantastichope.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/in-which-retromania-gets-personal.html

Coldplay Foldclay. You may not like them, but Phil Knight is right to notice that they are saying something (not especially encouraging) about our condition.
http://phil-zone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/bureau-rock.html

But if you're talking old music that's built to put new music eternally in the shade, Drake's Bryter Layter is a good place to start. Kaptain Kulk shows why, on the advent of its 30th anniversary re-release, it pisses on a whole set of lame singer-songwriter newbies who know not what to take from his oeuvre.
http://fuckyouneilkulkarni.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/nick-drake-bryter-layter-commercial.html

We're Now Here, but this is Where We Were. In an interview about his Bristol rave scene novel, Bert Random deftly explains elements of the rave era and how it is different in a net-led age: "There was a certain amount of post-Cold-War naive optimism in the early 90s ... there was a faint possibility things might actually turn out okay – and that naivety is quite appealing from a distance. Obviously 20 years of grim neoliberal economics and authoritarian politics has screwed that idea into the ground."
http://upclosemaspersonal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/living-for-weekend.html

And on the rave days, Undeleted talks with cute back-in-the-day detail on rediscovering a few old records by first-gen dons like Beltram and Hawtin. As he suggests, none of it sounds too great now but records like Vortex still impress, offering almost utopia-through-dystopia. If you've lost it to this mind-altering barbarity, you deserve the promised land.
http://undeleted.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/second-chapter-by-code-6-nu-groove-records-vortex-by-final-exposure-plus-8/ Go on then. Have a music break.

A short debate about digital immaterialism, and the dancer-serfs: 'There is a perfect symmetry and social discipline going on in this metronome beat which apes behaviour at all levels of work, rest and play'. Yes, it's by me and an old mate on shifting work and play patterns. Getting sticky with the links here.
http://originalsonictruth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-short-debate-about-digital.html

And this is excellent from Ashleigh Young on the various perspectives of loneliness on the internet.
http://eyelashroaming.com/2013/05/13/skeleton-notes-on-aloneness/

Wayne Kasper meanwhile notes the squeezing of all but the most financially valuable immigrant and 'native' poor.
http://perelebrun.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/nation-equals-rate-times-time.html

and lastly, 'The future must be cracked open once again' quoth these white, male and deadly serious Accelerationist academics with a manifesto, an event at Goldsmiths and everything. Hurry!
http://accelerationism.wordpress.com