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I’d been texting for a couple of years when this came out, and had just logged my first full year working as a web developer. The next 5 years or so felt amazing, hardware and software was improving so quickly on all fronts.
Yeah, it was good times back then. Now the technlology has vastly exceeded our wildest dreams, yet it is under the control of greedy mega corporations, resulting in the most expensive shitty experience we have experienced so far.
I miss the old internet. Usenet was magic.
Yeah it’s not about the Internet and virtual reality or fax machines etc, it was about overpopulation and ecological collapse among other things.
The song was inspired by a trip to an underground city in Sendai, Japan if you read Wikipedia. In the late 90s Japan was a gadget obsessed place with neon signs and screens packed into places like Sendai. Japan had industrialised rapidly over the 20th century and gave the impression of a thriving technology and manufacturing industry.
It was seen as a futuristic place by people from the rest of the world when they visited. Of course in reality Japan was in the first of its “lost decades” of stagnation that’s run from the early 90s to now.
Besides not meeting its capitalist expectations, how have Japan’s “lost decades” impacted its people, and how does that impact differ from that within comparable nations that had continuous economic growth during that same time (e.g. the US, Europe, Australia, and South Korea)?
political radicalization. in the past 100 years Japan has seen:
- hypermilitarization
- hyperfascism
- hyperbombs
- hyperdepression
- hypercolonialism
- hyperindustrialization
- hypercapitalism
- hyperrecession
and a lot of people want to know if there will ever be an end to everything being so damn extra all the time, or if Japan is simply expected to burn itself out working. and as is always the case when the people start askrng these questions, there’s a rightwing reaction promising to restore Japan to the glory of an imagined past
Is hyperfascism like regular fascism with neon lights or what?
overt fascism. it contrasts itself from fascisms that hide themselves by claiming to be something they’re not.
hyper fascist regimes:
- italian fascism
- national socialism
- sharia
- christofascism
- israeli zionism
- japanese imperial militarism
- post soviet russia
covert fascist regimes:
- neoliberalism
- feudalism
- republicanism (the roman concept, not the us political party, they actually fit into the above)
- bolshevism/stalinism/marxist-leninism
- anarcho-capitalism
- technocracy
You’re not at all worried about the phenomenon of diluting definitions of powerful words until they lose their power, are you?
it’s more like if we don’t talk about how these schemes of oppression hand off to eachother, pass the baton, now, the knowledge becomes lost to everyone but the academics who study ur-fascism. i work to be very considered in how i phrase things because words have meaning. i also come at it from the angle that a lot of people living in the imperial cores of America, Russia, and China don’t even recognize that they live in the hellscape outlined in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four and that talking about capitalism v communism is not the fight most of the world at large is having, they’re talking about fascism v anarchy.
We tried to cover it with my band, but it sounded really boring. Upon listening closely to it, I was surprised by how minimalist it actually is. I mean there’s barely anything on the track! Some piano, some strings, and drum and bass of course.
It was a happy surprise to find that it’s one of those songs that are carried by the pure energy of the vocalist, which makes it very tricky to cover unless you go a very lateral route and “re-genre” it.
Was born in 1996, please can someone tell me who’s this? I’d like to listen to them. Thank you.
You NEED to watch the video: https://youtu.be/4JkIs37a2JE
