I have to admit that I find speculation about radically advanced technology to be boring and sort of irrelevant to the myriad human issues that actually concern us here and now. But I also feel like the best science fiction is in fact about taking the here-and-now and pursuing it to a logical extreme. E.g. cyberpunk works because it's about the commodification of everything, including politics, your identity, and your body. In other words, good science fiction is like good fiction in general: it's about real social issues and real human problems.
"Fake Plastic Trees" does happen to have a 90s-style quiet-to-loud transition into a section with lots of crash cymbals and overdrive and warbly Jonny Greenwood leads. The 'Head have done mellower, including "Bulletproof", off of the same record.
Yeah, something like that. Although based on the phrasing of your reply, I think you and I probably stand on opposite sides of the line with respect to global warming. But that's partly what I mean: we both refer to the same rationality to defend diametrically opposing claims. So what do we do now? I feel myself sliding into territory that's been covered much better by any given postmodern philosopher, although I want to reserve the hope that the truth isn't simply based which side is best-armed with scientists and research funding.
I know about as much about environmental science as a regular educated member of the public, which is to say not much. Therefore my belief that humans cause global warming is essentially an expression of faith, in a certain science, or in a certain group of people who propose to know better. I know this doesn't sum to a real argument, but to me the analogy here breaks down because I think audiophile "science" is much more obviously a lie--blatant falsehoods pop up in the immediate sales pitch, e.g. the claim that there are relative degrees of "purity" or "interference" in a stream of bits easily refuted. However, it seems to me that with the global warming issue, there is a real correlation between human activity and average temperatures, and the argument then becomes how to interpret the data to prove causation. And I don't think the conversation can be so superficially discarded as with the kind of "analog bits" claim that goes on above.
Maybe a better way to understand the point we've constructed here is that you could say that audiophile marketing and the global warming debate are basically instantiations of the same generic philosophical or sociological impasse vis-a-vis science, but I think I'd have to insist there is a big difference between the two in the degree of difficulty with which one side can be dismissed as wrong.
Does anybody know if anything reasonably robust has been written about audiophilia as a kind of rich man's insanity? I would love to read it.
Now of course it's true that this kind of dehydrated-water-selling occurs all the time, but I have to admit that I'm continually fascinated by the maturity of audiophile marketing and the kind of self-styled sophistication of the whole audiophile scene. So much about it seems interesting to me: the way periodicals and other community media are used to collectively reassure the sales pitch, the way science is used to flatter the egos of the consumer, how it is truly difficult to know the difference between science and pseudoscience (if not basically impossible in the most essential sense), and the kind of placebo effect (e.g. these 128k MP3s TOTALLY sound better!) that seems really to come about when somebody is a True Believer.
If I had to concoct a theory off the top of my head, it would be that audiophilia works basically in the same way as a cult religion, only one that's stripped of all the traditional meaning-of-life accoutrements, and instead is extraordinarily science/rationality-driven. It's imagined as purely a practical consumer activity but is in fact so much more. And I wonder if this is merely the logical extreme of the way all consumer activity and/or commodity fetishism occurs, to a greater or lesser degree.
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I have to admit that I find speculation about radically advanced technology to be boring and sort of irrelevant to the myriad human issues that actually concern us here and now. But I also feel like the best science fiction is in fact about taking the here-and-now and pursuing it to a logical extreme. E.g. cyberpunk works because it's about the commodification of everything, including politics, your identity, and your body. In other words, good science fiction is like good fiction in general: it's about real social issues and real human problems.
"Fake Plastic Trees" does happen to have a 90s-style quiet-to-loud transition into a section with lots of crash cymbals and overdrive and warbly Jonny Greenwood leads. The 'Head have done mellower, including "Bulletproof", off of the same record.
Yeah, something like that. Although based on the phrasing of your reply, I think you and I probably stand on opposite sides of the line with respect to global warming. But that's partly what I mean: we both refer to the same rationality to defend diametrically opposing claims. So what do we do now? I feel myself sliding into territory that's been covered much better by any given postmodern philosopher, although I want to reserve the hope that the truth isn't simply based which side is best-armed with scientists and research funding.
I know about as much about environmental science as a regular educated member of the public, which is to say not much. Therefore my belief that humans cause global warming is essentially an expression of faith, in a certain science, or in a certain group of people who propose to know better. I know this doesn't sum to a real argument, but to me the analogy here breaks down because I think audiophile "science" is much more obviously a lie--blatant falsehoods pop up in the immediate sales pitch, e.g. the claim that there are relative degrees of "purity" or "interference" in a stream of bits easily refuted. However, it seems to me that with the global warming issue, there is a real correlation between human activity and average temperatures, and the argument then becomes how to interpret the data to prove causation. And I don't think the conversation can be so superficially discarded as with the kind of "analog bits" claim that goes on above.
Maybe a better way to understand the point we've constructed here is that you could say that audiophile marketing and the global warming debate are basically instantiations of the same generic philosophical or sociological impasse vis-a-vis science, but I think I'd have to insist there is a big difference between the two in the degree of difficulty with which one side can be dismissed as wrong.
Does anybody know if anything reasonably robust has been written about audiophilia as a kind of rich man's insanity? I would love to read it.
Now of course it's true that this kind of dehydrated-water-selling occurs all the time, but I have to admit that I'm continually fascinated by the maturity of audiophile marketing and the kind of self-styled sophistication of the whole audiophile scene. So much about it seems interesting to me: the way periodicals and other community media are used to collectively reassure the sales pitch, the way science is used to flatter the egos of the consumer, how it is truly difficult to know the difference between science and pseudoscience (if not basically impossible in the most essential sense), and the kind of placebo effect (e.g. these 128k MP3s TOTALLY sound better!) that seems really to come about when somebody is a True Believer.
If I had to concoct a theory off the top of my head, it would be that audiophilia works basically in the same way as a cult religion, only one that's stripped of all the traditional meaning-of-life accoutrements, and instead is extraordinarily science/rationality-driven. It's imagined as purely a practical consumer activity but is in fact so much more. And I wonder if this is merely the logical extreme of the way all consumer activity and/or commodity fetishism occurs, to a greater or lesser degree.