THE FUTURE IS HUMID EVEN IN OCTOBER

Neofuturism and the Economy of Affect, a Noise Primer for Nueva York.
Or, Why Are We Working For Free?

I meant to say: 11 years ago I did this Welmo remix and someone just took the time to upload it to YouTube along with a pic of kids sniffing glue. Or inhaling goldfish. The song is Pre-Tropical anti-cop anti-gunman Spanish language rapping with a piano, and wikipedia tells me that I can add proto-breakcore or salsa-edits to the list. I was living in the future back then; I still am. The future is incredibly humid, even in October. Not much works here, including me. The distractions are draining but fabulous, even better than the sunsets in White Noise. I think the guy who posted my song is Polish. I love you all just not evenly. Remind me to sell a version of 4’33 on iTunes.

Before, the advertisers had to guess; now, with all the information we provide with keyword searches, on social networks, and in emails, advertising can be more precise. On top of that, the “content” of social networks, email, search engines, blogs—it somehow magically produces itself, that is to say the users produce it, that is to say it’s free. The extension of advertising to the domain of private chatter undermines the competitiveness of anything that costs more than private chatter to produce. Marx blamed the below-subsistence wages of the proletariat on the reserve army of labor; the below-subsistence revenues of the Times can be blamed on the reserve army of the social networks. . . Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads.

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