Useless twisting of our new technology

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.

Underground city in Sendai? Did they get radicalised by visiting a shopping center connected to the subway?
- Cheeba cheeba is a helluva drug
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
- Overworked, or refusing to work at all. No one's having sex. Their economy is further collapsing, their population is converging to the point of a death spiral. No one can afford to have a family.
  They still like tech in Tokyo and pump out anime, though.
Yeah, sure. I suppose next you're gonna say that The Return of the Space Cowboy is not about the movie Serenity.

Don't forget Radiohead releasing Planet Telex in 1995, then OK Computer in 1997.

Was born in 1996, please can someone tell me who's this? I'd like to listen to them. Thank you.

It's Jamiroquai.
This video is for: "Virtual Insanity".
The video to : "Automaton" is also worth a watch in my opinion.
You NEED to watch the video: https://youtu.be/4JkIs37a2JE
- I really love this cover of virtual insanity.
  https://youtu.be/ZTDcdRTziMM
  I know it's almost unrelated to the discussion because you're talking about the music video, but how often is Jamiroquai brought up?
- I remember my mind being blown away by a TV segment that explained how the practical effect was achieved.
- Isn't this just Pasttime Paradise by Stevie Wonder?
While you're checking out the video for virtual insanity, also check out the one for Canned Heat, another great tune and another great video from Jamiroquai. I was only a kid then, but I'd turn on MTV in the morning before school to watch videos back in like 97-99, and these videos popped up every so often, and they had a lasting impact.
Check out also the Wikipedia article on Sterno, sometimes referred to as Canned Heat, because people would drink the shit to get fucked up and would ultimately die, and the coroner would rule it a death by canned heat.
It’s your real dad.

Banger music video

Plus JK is a cool dude.
Great tune too tbh
ty OP for making my afternoon playlist a lot funkier

TIL "gaff" is UK slang for your house or home.

And a fuck up.
Gaffer is a boss.
- That’s gaffe though.
- I don't know why people say that English is hard it all makes perfect sense.

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.

It starts minimal, but it does progressively fill out.
- Not that much actually! There's not even any bass for the first verse, as it punches in at the first chorus. By the end, the strings appear to come a bit forward in the mix, and there are 2, maybe 3 additional vocal tracks but no additional instruments that I can hear.

Then your mind will literally explode if you listen to "Computer Love" by Zapp & Roger, released in...... 1985!

Also, System Addict by 5 Star was 1985 IIRC

Reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain, an anime released in 1998 that talks about the power of social networks and how companies will compete to gain control of the internet. Some of the predictions are outstandingly good.

I remember the that summer. Always wanted a Jamiroqoi hat

Always wanted a Jamiroqoi hat
You'll have to be way more specific than that.

I miss the old internet. Usenet was magic.

ASCII pr0n anyone? [nsfw]
- Magic
- Be right back....
Ah, convergence. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Web would just get extended to do all that stuff. The part that was harder to predict was corporations taking over all the platforms. I guess I just waited to believe that everything would stay democratized.
Check out the gemini protocol and the small web.
- Or ... you know, the Usenet?

Before the modern web, before Wikipedia, before pocket computers, Encarta was the shit!

yeah i spent so much time reading random shit on it. to be fair i already did that with physical encyclopedias so it was natural. but the fact that Encarta allowed what's now known as wiki surfing was next level for me.

Looks like the The Expanse main character throwing a hat party inside the Rocinante.

😂🤣

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.
- There's exceptions, though; that's why we're here :)
  I totally read what you're saying. My work requires me to maintain a personal cell phone (Intune business profile) and, with any OEM implementation of a smartphone OS you're essentially paying to donate everything about you to a megacorp to sell it to another megacorp to siphon more of you're life away from you. The beauty of modern advancements, though, is that if you don't care to be within 20% of the "bleeding edge" of attention extraction and intention fabrication you can spend your time in communities like this and with tech like graphene and linux making few sacrifices, if any.
  I don't know about you, but the lemmy atmosphere feels a lot like that of early forums to me. Not quite the same, but the community aspect is more present.
  I think my stance is that technology doesn't suck, as is the case with most things; it's the unchecked and rampant abuse of a given thing.

https://xkcd.com/1227/

Went down a rabbit hole bc of this (thank you) and found out JK is a twinkess twin and so is Elvis

Not sure what that means but I saw him live a few years back and I was shocked how extremely British he is, both in accent and great sense of humour. Also the whole band is now a bunch of old dudes. I guess that shouldn't be surprising but it was very different from the picture I had in my head since my childhood.
Except the music. The music was just as good as ever. It was awesome.
- Did he actually have canned meat in his heels when you saw him?
- Original post made me search for jamiraquoi, which led to me listening to their music, then finding a yt about their music video which led me to the jk wiki page, which had the term twinkess twin, so then I started on that etc. Internet Rabbit hole.
  Im glad he's still robustly british.

It's all about the Pentiums baby.

I'm walking into spiderwebs, so leave a message and I'll call you back.

I don't know that I've ever actually registered any of the lyrics within this song, save for "vurchahwuhh insayynatyy!"

Same, I'm not a native speaker though ...

Oh jfc teletext.. now that's a blast from the past. used to love reading it lol

Yeah sometimes I wish the internet had never been invented and we all just kept using teletext.
i used to go on the jokes page. it was awesome. I miss teletext

I see you have good taste.

I heard he wrote this song after visiting a fancy underground mall in Hong Kong/Japan and seeing how gnarly the tech was there at the time.

People have always complained about how new tech warps people’s minds. Like back in the day there were people saying the same thing about books when the printing press was invented

And they had a point. While the printing press (not books, those are way older) was a tool that could be used for good, many quickly realized that it gave propagandists a whole new set of tools to manipulate people with. Newspapers had a ridiculous amount of opinion-making power for quite a while there, they just got replaced by radio, TV, and then social media and now LLMs.
What if very powerful people are literally using tech to warp people's minds on purpose?
- You mean like gasp writing subverting books?!
Every generation has said stop X it'll rot your brains.
Like you said, it was books at first, children told to go outside, then book readers centuries later told their children to stop watching TV and read a book. Now video games are the latest
- Tiktok and ChatGPT
People have always complained about how new tech warps people’s minds.
Because it does.
Ask a 20yo to do simple math without using a calculator.
The more "helping" technology we rely on, the stupider we become.
- Ask a 20yo from the 70s to use Excel. Nobody could do that back then. How stupid.
  It's an equally wrong argument.
  People's skills adapt to what they need frequently. If they need something, they will learn how to do it and they will know how to do it. If they don't need it, they will lose it. Why would you want to keep maintaining a skill you don't need? It doesn't make you a better person.
- When common core math was introduced across the US, I wanted to know what all the hubbub was about, so I looked into it. Funny that, despite so many parents decrying it, a few instruction pages ended up giving me (as an adult) the number sense that hadn't fully developed from my time in school. I use constructs from it all the time now and mental math has never been easier.
  Calculators are great tools, but being able to do quick math in your head before everyone else can finish punching the numbers in makes people wonder if you have super powers.
- joke's on you. I've always been stupid

JK was inspired to write the song after he spent all night exploring a web ring - all of which were GeoCities sites with an “under construction” animated gif.

Well we could start with a name...

Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity
https://youtu.be/4JkIs37a2JE
It's so strange for me, having been born in 1988, to hear someone not know who this guy is, and this song.
I fully understand that it's been just about 30 years since this came out, and there are multiple generations of kids that will never have heard it that are fully grown adults now.
Its just that this song was not only massive, one that everyone knew, but it lived on way past its release date, it was played on radio, tv, used in films and tv shows (silicon valley is a recent one of note). The same band also had a meme based on the film "napolean dynamite" with the song canned heat, which the main character did a dance to that made it into games such as world of warcraft and fortnite.
The band is a part of pop culture, and despite it all, there are still places in the world where people dont know instantly what this picture is from and who that is.
I get it. It just boggles my mind how vast the world is. Even 10 years ago there were people living in the north west of england asking who the beatles were. (Beatles are from liverpool in the north west of england and liverpool is littered with beatles murals, staturs and that kind of shit) its insane that anyone could not know who they are.
But hey ho. Just thinking out loud.
- Even 10 years ago there were people living in the north west of england asking who the beatles were.
  I once head 20yis on the bus saying how lucky that old guy Paul McCartney was for being in Rihanna video, like, it'll really be a boost for his career...
- I'm between 1 and 2 years older than you and I just found the song. As far as I can tell I've never heard it or anything about that dude before.
  Not sure where I would have heard it... But I am pretty good at guess that tune from about 1970 to 2010 when I switched to streaming my own playlists.
- Also, little kids are going around in Nirvana t-shirts, so they can can all the “before my time” natter.
- I only knew the song years ago from one single source which was a DDR game on Xbox. Born the same year too lol. Until my 20s I thought it was some obscure song with cheap to buy licensing for the game.
  In the last 5-10 years though I did see the music video for the first time and in the past couple years I have seen his name pop up several times at least.
  That's about it though. I guess I never really listened to music until my teens and any car radio was 70-80s rock or even older pop music.
- Well it's possible people have heard the song and just not know where it is from. I've seen the music video in muted online clips about film production, but I don't think I've ever actually heard the music.
  I don't think I've ever heard the music and the video together at once so I wouldn't have made any connection. Assuming that you have heard the music because I have no idea what it would even sound like.
- I was born in 1988 as well; I just don't recognize most musicians by their faces. (Is that a normal thing to do?) No need for the freak out.
  Sorry for not always seeing every music video for every popular song. My bad, yo.
It's a very common name. Jamiroquai.

I mean, I guess yea? They was already putting out 2 albums of classic modern soul before traveling without moving and the world couldn’t be bothered…

Hah, one of those coincidences.

Just 2(?) weeks ago Virtual Insanity popped up on stream and I wondered if Jamiroquai are prophets now or the song is just way younger than I remember

This song would probably be number one if a popular artist did a cover of it. It hits A LOT harder now

"Travel Without Moving". Appropriate way to describe VR, even if it's Dune quote.

And yet you somehow think that all posters on the internet are being absolutely literal?
Was thinking earlier about how, before becoming prominent crypto-Zionists, Radiohead were singing about the numbing effect of working in a cubicle job as a tiny cog in the machine of a monolithic consumerist society, but then thought - didn’t this band form at public school, paid for by their parents, and might they possibly never have worked a 9-to-5 in their life? And could they be cashing in on the aesthetic of pre-millennial salaryman angst as seen in many movies of the time such as Office Space, Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty, etc etc?
Sabrina Carpenter clearly does. It all describes how much of a stuck up, insecure, bratty cunt monster she is anyway.

i don't know who this is

waits

walks away