Frotcast 305: Mad About The Internet, With Werner Herzog’s New Doc

Herzog-Lieb
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With Werner Herzog’s new internet documentary, Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World expanding this week, the Frotcast is all about the internet. We discuss the actual documentary as well as tangents from it. The internet is one the most scalable technologies ever created, but did our humanity scale with it? In Don’t Woke Daddy (name inspired by this Tim Faust tweet) we discuss “the satire paradox,” and Malcolm Gladwell’s recent critique of SNL’s Sarah Palin sketches and Steven Colbert. Are we actually trying to change anyone’s mind or just make people laugh? After that, Crystal Corner. Apparently “mysticore” is the new normcore. Hooray for CHAOS MAGICK. Comedian Jane Harrison guests, with Irregular Regular Matt Lieb joining Vince, Bret, and Brendan via Skype.

Excerpt from Salon’s article on “Mysticore,” which, frankly, does a pretty incredible job explaining our fascination with Crystal Corner.

Last fall the folks at trend-forecasting firm K-Hole — which coined the term “normcore” — looked into the cultural crystal ball to release a paper dubbed “A Report on Doubt.” […]

After an endless stream of articles about how wearing dad jeans was indeed the ultimate hipster power move, time had come for the cultural pendulum to swing. K-Hole’s new prediction was that logic and “sameness” were becoming relics and people were about to head into the mystic.

Call it post-reason or pro-intuition, this new phase rejects the positively beige normcore values in favor of highly personal, emotional responses to fashion, culture and politics. (Donald Trump’s rise certainly reads as more of a manifestation of personal desire than a reasonable course of action paved by logic and solid judgment.) Dubbing this new philosophy “Chaos Magic,” a term that’s been bantered about in the postmodern Magick community for decades), K-Hole prophesied, “The fundamental element of magic is the ability to manifest or sublimate things.” […]

Plus, K-Hole observed, “Chaos Magic lives in the same realm as the cult of positive thinking. But it goes beyond making mood boards of high end apartments you’d like to will into your possession. . . . You opt into whatever belief system you think will help you reach your intended goals.” Put simply, K-Hole’s version of Chaos Magic is the antidote to overthinking, a means of manifesting individual desires onto the universe — a “radical DIY.”

It’s like The Secret meets the Dark Ages! Bow before CHAOS MAGICK.

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