COLUMNA MARGINAL #6

I’m very tired of the current world where everything has to happen in the short present. As punks said since their beginnings (and still say), there’s no future for you. Well, now we wouldn’t want the future even if we could have it, or at least, we only want the very close future. Long term thoughts disappeared from our cultural landscape.

It’s so damn easy to get into punk now, which is amazing, but this makes consumerism easier too and immediacy is a very valued feature of modern commodities.

Are we sure that we want that? Do we need a single punk album or zine to be sent to the other side of the world, with a shipping code, and received in a couple days? This is the most evident cause of distros disappearing.

People expect the DIY zine or album they ordered to arrive the next day just to show it in a temporary image in their socials for a few likes. It’s one of the downsides of developing punk in today’s world as another available product, but buying is just a second stage after some creation. Many “punks” are deciding to also skip the developing of their flyer, album cover or even music using the shortcut of AI, which, even if it’s very lame, it shows how many people don’t care at all about crafting something and generating an anticapitalist project.

Meanwhile bands expect great responses in their social posts that are forgotten five minutes later, an experience closer to a random tv advertisement than to actually see a flyer of a show.

The amount of information is immense and I’m very glad it is like that, but it requires some self-control

Things take time, and we can’t replicate the Amazon model when we operate with our DIY projects. The same applies to bands: they expect great responses in their social posts that are forgotten five minutes later. And what about these flyers and even album covers made with AI that are starting to appear everywhere? The world gets so boring when everything happens in the immediate future and then disappears. There’s no difference between the fast-food culture and a big part of punk culture right now, specially the one more tied to Internet.

I keep looking at MRR’s I bought many years ago, or get inspired through the albums I got over the last years from bands that people don’t care about anymore. All of these things are part of the recent past (the last ten to fifteen years), but have been totally replaced by a fresher, louder, and easier to consume product. If we grow understanding punk through social networks, we will replicate the way social networks function to punk.