Brian Eno Examines the Ecology of Culture in John Peel Lecture [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Brian Eno Examines the Ecology of Culture in John Peel Lecture [pdf]

downloads.bbc.co.uk

55 pointsdpflan9 comments

The BBC6 recording of this interview [ http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/5/redir/version/2.0... ]

Thank you for linking this.

Related, Eno's picks from John Peel's record archive:

I really hope they've spend money on a decent fire suppression system, it would be a huge loss to see John's collection lost due to something stupid like an electrical fire.

Plain text version: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dfc/087c012d163135f5eb3e/...

One of my favorite musicians ever, not to mention the creator of the Windows 95 welcome music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUbjTapNImM

This is interesting to listen to, b/c Eno is well-known and has some interesting observations and ideas, but as far as his main idea, that art is play, he seems tragically unaware of the sexual implications of "hair styles, boob jobs, music," It's not merely play, it's demonstrations of reproductive fitness. Even when he talks about two females on a bus "synchronizing." How can he be so oblivious?

It's ironic b/c he begins the discussion invalidating the idea that art is an "industry," in order to enable it to merit value under contemporary economic systems, but then spends his time constructing an alternate view in which art has value as "play." And this definition of culture as a collection of rituals has already been thought by people hundreds of years ago. Rituals are a subset of culture, not an ersatz.

I'm only halfway in so far...

A lot of what he says about play seems consistent with Huizinga's book. It's not an eccentric theory.

Although presumably only behaviours which demonstrate reproductive fitness get selected for, I don't think wasteful activities (like art) are necessarily evolved in this way. See e.g. Jeremy England on thermodynamic drivers of evolved complexity.

Wow, thanks for the downvotes, everyone! Maybe I'm simply in the wrong community? I thought some intelligent discussion would be welcome, but let's try this:

Go driverless cars!

Microsoft Bad! Google Good!

Javascript Javascript Rah Rah Rah!

"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW, I think the problem with some of your comments, including this one, is that they're too dismissive. It's fine to make substantive critiques, but if the substance/dismissiveness ratio gets too low, people treat those as bad comments.

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