Sunday 22 November 2009

Digital Necrophilia - I Like To Fork Myself


Now I think about it there's a lot of outstanding posts percolating in my head and which I've made rushed notes to in various places, though this is one post I feel like writing and which was originally sparked by some of the excellent conversations I had with Teflon John, before his Goldman Sachs girlfriend discovered I'm a Metrosexual Marxist. 

Well... (dot dot dot) I'm sure he's got a different perspective but as he was in the rest room during the chilly silence that descended before his return, I can only say that I was admirably unfazed by the inappropriate but not unique assertion of bi/curious sexual preferences that the monologue drifted onto after a long soliloquy on Goldman culture. But I think my conversation switcher of  'let's talk about me' may have closed the deal.

Unlike Goldman Sachs of Hyenaville, money isn't my main driver. Though I hasten to add I don't know if I'd be any better a pack dog if fate had slipped me into that alpha male club instead of the ability to write about it with a mixture of candour, humour and disgust. But we don't really know that stuff until we're in the context itself though having lost all my possessions and money recently I'm pretty happy with what I don't have as well as what I do. Which is a reality tunnel topic I'm dwelling on since discovering Robert Anton Wilson over at the Media squat through the increasingly funny and brilliant Douglas Rushkoff.

Anyways (as the Jamaican bad boys say): 

Digital Necrophilia. 

Like so many subjects in accelerated culture (and it's so fast I'm in my element) the early thinking has been superseded by this podcast I listened to and then followed by Neil's post on learning to forget which is quicker to read though I recommend you check out The Forum on BBC radio to listen to Victor Mayer-Schoenberger if you didn't attend the talk Neil did.

But the reason for resurrecting this topic is twofold. A few years ago I was asked to write a presentation about beauty on the net for Unilever regionally in Asia, and despite having 300 slides chopped down to a very primitive 150 I did pick up on some of the themes in blogging and internet culture including discovering Daul Kim's blog which I predicted would be a taste of the intimacy of reading into the lives of people who inhabit the trillion dollar beauty business. 

This has come back to haunt me like an Ave Maria curling round a cathedral choir during a requiem mass. 

Depressing.

She was seventeen ish when I discovered her blog, and died in Paris on Friday, at the age of 20. Here's her last blog post where she says 'hi to forever' with Jim River's "I go deep". One thing we had in common was our love of British minimal tech. See you on the other side Daul.