This was my most ambitious writing project to date, a multimedia piece which I originally hosted in the form of a list on RateYourMusic.com.
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In early 2018 I wrote an ambitious multimedia review. The text consisted of snippets that could feasibly have been cut from a rubbish pulp science fiction book.
"The sonorous hum of the enforcement drone began to tickle the dull air of the office. Dr Ozoliņš knew this could mean only one thing. He would have to take his work under ground, lest he lose it to the empire, along with his life."
I left the review on this album, 東方紅魔郷 ～ Embodiment of Scarlet Devil but properly I was writing only about track 15, U.N.オーエンは彼女なのか?. Usually translated clumsily into English as UN Owen Was Her.
It is by far the best track on the soundtrack. The combination of grandiose creepy organs and strings, cheap midi instruments and demented hardcore kick drums could have only come from this specific time and place for this specific purpose.
I have never played a Touhou game, and years ago I lost all interest in actually playing video games (as opposed to thinking about them and using them as the basis for mystifying internet art projects) so now I never will. I have never played a Touhou game but this song is burned into my memory for one simple reason.
This is the reason why. This video.
It was originally released on new years day of 2008 on impenetrably weird Japanese video streaming site NicoNicoDouga.jp, the name has since changed to NicoVideo. This video takes clips from an older meme, the "Ran Ran Ru" advertisements for McDonald's, and combines them with the then 5 year old Touhou track. This kind of video editing was ubiquitous in my early internet experience and with age it only seems more radical to me. The astonishing segment at 53 seconds is a violent collision of many contrasting flavours of capitalist hellfire with a digital Kali, and it only gets more revolting the longer you think about it. I don't exaggerate when I call it chilling.
One of the (many) peculiar things about that video is that it retroactively seems to have prefigured an older internet. When I was doing the research for this list I found a wiki entry on KnowYourMeme for the video that claimed that it was uploaded to NicoNicoDouga on January 1st, which I assumed had to be a mistake because the English YouTube upload was that very same day. I found that there was no mistake - an anglophone internet user found that video within hours of uploading and wasted no time sharing it again on YouTube. In the last four or five years that sort of thing has become normal, but in 2008 that kind of instant globalisation, the destruction of a local (internet) culture by the process of its transfiguration into a global phenomenon, was all but unheard of. Given the melodramatic, lofty themes of the post apocalypse I was already flirting with for visual side of the review it made a scary sort of sense. Time in that moment stood still, on new years day of 2008 what normally took weeks or months or even years happened almost instantaneously. The dramatic super intelligence of the internet, a gigantic brain of trillions of neurons among billions of separate individuals, it works back from the end. It suggests that, ultimately, culture has to be pursued from out of its future, by itself.
Another ubiquitous aspect of my early internet experience was YTMND.com. YTMND stands for You're The Man Now Dog which is apparently a line spoken by Sean Connery in the film Finding Forrester which seems to make just as little sense in context as it does out. This bizarre site was a home for short video loops and sound, many examples of which featured Ronald himself. This website is inexplicably still up to this day, and as you can probably see I used it to upload the visual parts of the review. These "sites" as the lingo has them have a limited shelf life. Any day now this website could go down, annihilating both hundreds of hours of arguably valuable internet history as well as crucial parts of the review.
Aristotle believed that the universe was finite in spatial dimension, but infinite in time. For him, his own life and civilisation wasn't situated in some position on a timeline of human history, but instead was surrounded by the past stretching backward and the future stretching forward into infinity. His logic famously seems to take for granted that for something to be true according to a deductively valid argument it must always be true. If Socrates is a man, and men are mortal, what happens to the argument if there is no such thing as "man"? In order for individual men to be mortal it seems Aristotle thought that man as a category of object must be immortal. This seems unintuitive and naive to us, which I think tells us more about our differing ideas of extreme longevity than it does about the failure of his logic.
At the beginning of the 20th century my country first learned what it meant for a world to die. In the wake of the Great War a whole generation of working class men were slaughtered, which dealt a mortal blow to the culture of the land. In every successive generation lies the same sickness in the mind. My dad was born in 1957, so while I was writing this I phoned him to ask him a question: When you were growing up, was there an idea that history stretched behind and ahead without end? He told me that there was not, and in fact there was the very real sense that everything could end immediately. The threat of nuclear holocaust to him was so persistent that it provoked a recurring nightmare. When they moved to the UK from Singapore my family settled in a small town in Northamptonshire called Crick, which was about five miles away from the nuclear early warning system. My dad knew that if the bombs were to land, they would land there. The structures were visible from his house. In his nightmare it was a warm summers day, my grandparents and uncles and aunts were all out and he was in the house alone. When the white light of the mushroom cloud washed over the house, he had only a few moments to think. His voice grew shaky. His final moments would not be spent in panic or in trying to remember the safety procedure, but instead in anguish at the thought that they would not be together when they died. If only the bomb had come at night, he said, then they would have all been under one roof together at the moment the world died.
My own generation doesn't have this existential threat, ours is less sudden. Most of you reading this are probably roughly my age, and you know very well where I'm going with this. Throughout my entire life I have believed deep down that ours is maybe the third or second-to-last generation. Over our heads is the notion that not soon, but within our lives, civilisation while grind to a halt as the neoliberal Rube-Goldberg machines that barely keep us going collapse into fascism and violent disputes over land and resources. Quite apart from the massive heart attack of the nuclear holocaust, the millennial apocalypse slowly approaches like a cancer.
It's impossible to overstate the psychic anxiety that the last one hundred years has wrought upon our cultural consciousness. In what aspect of our lives does this insidious influence not appear? In writing about the death of YTMND, I realise that my own concept of death is impossibly stained with this psychic anxiety. I don't think I can ever afford death the kind of poetic beauty that Plato describes in the final moments of the Phaedo. My natural inclination upon considering the destruction of a frivolous archive of memes is apparently to call my father and ask him about the nukes.
In my original review, the pulpy sci-fi parts were there in order to give the thing the feeling of low-brow profundity that I think permeates much of the litter of the internet. Shitty image macros with pictures of animals, millions of them, are scattered across the internet like microscopic plastic in the sea. No individual creator laboured under the pretence that their work mattered. I think the luxury of a classical writer is that they knew that if their work was good enough it would echo through the annals of history, but to us it's all just flecks of shit billowing on turbulent fart wind toward the final, embarrassing destiny of our species. As a sand mandala is designed with all the care and love that one would give a permanent object before being ceremonially destroyed, pulp media is often the reverse. Made with no attention paid to whether it does any good or is beautiful in its own right, designed to be thrown away, it then lingers on. The audience looking at the tasteless, vulgar, spitting fury of the most radical of the NicoNicoDouga videos might have been unable, necessarily unable I mean, of seeing them for what they were back then. Only now that the globalisation and centralisation of the internet has gentrified those corners of the frontier is it obvious that what they represented was a decentralised, democratic revolution of video art. Now the culturally empty liberal bourgeoisie of Facebook meme pages reach in ugly struggle towards something that can even approach that level of urgent fervour, and they come up short.
Dr Ozoliņš is a Latvian professor working on the Riemann hypothesis. In his study a single small filthy window gives a pretty poor view of a back street you wouldn't want to look at in any detail anyway. The only sound in the room is the alternating hum and halting squeak of a barely functional computer and the rustling of a pencil darting around a grubby notebook. Suddenly the doctor gasps and staggers back from his desk.
"It's all here... Donald... all connected"
The idea that a piece of art, a meme even, originating in our hyperactive age of disposable wank could possibly matter on a cosmic scale was just absurd. Imagine a lone wanderer, a billion years from now, struggling under our red giant sun only to for some reason come across a comedy video collage of otaku culture and adverts for McDonald's...
I still think about that video often. Shortly before making the original loops I joked with a friend about how it's baked into the fabric of our universe, so that if one studies the patterns of prime number distribution or the magnetohydrodynamics of star birth one finds the unmistakable mark of shitty burgers and gothic anime witch children. Like the enlightenment of the Buddha, we can put a timestamp on the moment in history when the video happened, but its "release" in the true sense interpenetrates all of time, happening all at once continuously and everywhere.
Dr Ozoliņš has to hide his discovery from a nameless, possibly techno-fascist, police state. It's one of those inane dystopian stories where books are illegal or something.
I wrote the review as an ambitious multi-media project because I wanted to mimic what I saw as the noble doggedness of creators making technically demanding and often radical pieces of art with no realistic prospect of personal or social benefit. The profound uncertainty of the future of the medium surrounds those works. They feel as though with the decision of just one man in a suit to shut down an unprofitable wing of their online enterprise everything could vanish, though instead they often far outlast their specific window of history in which they make sense. Living on into new ages of the internet where they are no longer understood as they were, but placed as an historical artefact or repackaged endlessly according to more cutting edge conventions.
Fittingly, my original review was deleted by RYM mods, all the text parts I included here were rewritten from memory. Only the YTMND sites remained, and who knows how long they will remain live.
