I’m a black and white TV survivor. I remember the appearance of microwave ovens. They called them radar ranges. I worked in a record store when CDs first came out in those long boxes so they could stick up in an album bin.

I was a flaming youth.

I’m pretty grateful for the digital age, but I lament the millions of once potentially crazy people that are now full blown nuts. People can find purchase and solace for the most absurd shit they can possibly imagine on the internet.

Technology has lent itself to the random ability of individuals to create their own little world. Impenetrable bubbles of custom fit ideology and singular paranoia that are immune to reality. I doubt Ronald Reagan was a pedophile, but search online for “Reagan pedophile” and you may start to believe it.

It’s nothing new. It’s just more efficient. There’s all manner of seductive gossip dominating the interwebs. Used to be we had to generate all that gossip ourselves or at least maintain a group of like minded, three dimensional friends that did. And watch the same television as those friends and hate the same people.

Thanks to digital technology, there’s no need to even try anymore.  We can now fear the Sasquatch while living in rural Texas without ever discussing it with our actual neighbors.  What’s worse, we can send our neighbors links to our crap and get them sitting on the porch, armed to the teeth after midnight too.

The digital age coincides pretty much with our second guilded age but it’s not coincidental.  The last one was about a hundred years ago. Back when they had to burn a lot more calories to fool the stupid.  The stupid had to burn a lot more calories to stay stupid.  They had newspapers back then but barely any radio.  Back then people traveled for miles to be bullshitted.

Now it’s just too goddamn easy.  The alt right movement learned to make and use primitive tools.  Insipid memes and empty headed slogans. The neoliberal left barks and points but can seldom answer a serious question. All the goddamn whack jobs are way too happy and feeling way too tolerated and complacent.

The antidote is youth.  It always has been.  Nascent generations have always had the potential to inoculate the masses against our worse intentions and inclinations.  They have yet to suffer our burdens and hard earned biases. They enjoy the shortest path to objectivity.

They aren’t excited about either one of these loser candidates and it’s no wonder.  The millennials have always had the ability to extract the salient and germane from the steady flow of information that is suddenly a maelstrom.

I’ve always been anxious for the generations before mine to die off so the backward ass notions and elaborate prejudice they host are buried with them.  They’ve been drunk from the cocktail of right wing radio and cable news for decades.  Now I’m confronted with my own generation lapsing into the same twisted and archaic nonsense because that cocktail has been spiked with a search engine Mickey.  My generation’s aptitude for bigotry and hate has a new force multiplier.   The harmless and fresh faced from my high school now mean spirited and ugly.  Stupid racist, redneck hypocrites. Jackasses accusing everyone of blaming everyone while they languish and blame everyone.

They know the Google.  They don’t understand that the algorithms feed them every page they want to read when it comes to Michelle is a tranny or Obama is a communist Muslim Kenyan socialist homo.  Mine is the first generation to be humiliated by the digital age.

Because we don’t read but we like pictures with captions.

We are a cautionary tale.  The archetype of what’s wrong with instant gratification media.  Everybody else is doing it but we are the first generation to be fooled by it.  I would go as far as to posit that my generation is most culpable for pissing in the pool of online information.  We are smoking our own shit.

Someone once said that it is far easier to fool a man than it is to convince him he’s been fooled.

Drinks for my friends.

*Agnes Gooch again.  Yup.  Compare and contrast to my last blog with an acoustic song by the same band recorded and mixed in entirely different venues .  This one is all Studio C A&M Recording Studios with the power and punch of the best sounding rock and roll console I’ve ever worked on.  The little 32 input API.  The tracking room was a closet no bigger than your average apartment living room.  

My goal was the biggest goddamn wall of guitars you’ve ever heard.

We put the mix to bed on a Saturday night with the intention of putting up another mix Sunday morning.

Ordinarily if the band had any minor tweaks, they would phone them in and I’d run some alternates and they would show up late afternoon the next day for the middle of the next mix in progress. I arrived at the studio the next morning and band was already there.

They wanted it “louder”.

Up is louder.  I made it louder.*

 

 

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