I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
Maybe so, but people are still quite capable of dividing the reproduction from the real, and will for a very long time
Hence people going to concerts, still fucking instead of just watching porn, etc.
I think the issue is settling for the reproduction
Like I said, I don't know if it's bad or not. And I don't know that people don't recognize it or not.
The point is that the construction of human meaning, of lived conscious experience, can now be isolated from its socially produced context.
You can go see a concert, sure. But music used to be something people did together. Entire musical tastes were developed solely based on what you could find within transportation distance of your house, and no further.
Now? You can absorb entire cultural experiences from different spatial-temporal eras at will. You could live exclusively in an experiential context which is impossible to reproduce where you live.
This is true even in terms of our politics! We absorb Soviet or Anarchist aesthetics and movements and culture, in an environment where not only can it not be reproduced, but the entire culture is utterly hostile to it! That's very fucking weird. There weren't like, Spanish peasants reproducing Aztec or Mayan culture. The concept wouldn't even have occurred to them.
Who knows what kind of organic politics would exist in the absence of this ability, or if it would arise at all. What would our resistance look like without the ability to reproduce all of these dead cultural signifiers?
Again, not good or bad. Just very different.
I see what you mean... and you're certainly not wrong. But I feel like we're missing something, here. Let me think about this.