Recently I decided to change the css of my blog to reflect a vaporwave-ish aestethic.

Although I don't listen to a lot of electronic music, 2814 has been my go to music when I am programming and I go through a lot of James Ferraro's works during the day.

What is the reason for my recent obsession on vaporwave culture?

A dream that disappeared

The narrative of Western civilization has become a broken record... should we be surprised when a chopped and screwed trip through the cold war period resonates broadly?

Vaporwave creates a language to reflect on the inability to break free from the chains of an Orwellian culture.

Internet gave me a personal space, a community, heck even a lot of fun masked by a sense of purpose for the free software culture.

But from a higher point of view Internet failed us. The Cyberspace has been dead.

John Barlow on the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace wrote:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

But at a certain point in time the Cyberspace didn't want to be left alone and with its own feet headed to real world. Cyberspace blended with the Meatspace

Every manifestation of the Cyberspace into reality is some sort of virus that eats bites of our existences in the Meatspace and translates that to bytes that are stored in virtual treasure chests.

Real life communication is divoured into digital data by Facebook, Amazon doesn't stop at our doorbells anymore but creeps into our house, and sleeping is no more a function of how much we are offline but some sort of distorted self analytics.

There is no shame when a web giant plays with the emotions of the user of the platforms, or sells them.

All of that was done by drying out the so called Hackerspace and transmuting it into "Dataspace", where experiment are conducted on people by means of data and algorithms.

Data on which platforms are built and people are chained to.

Corporate smooth Jazz

Floral Shoppe traces the outlines of the mental prison in which we now live, it gives us hope of one day transcending it. It reminds us what real freedom, the freedom of the heart, tastes like.

In the novel Neuromance by cyberpunk father William Gibson the Internet is conceived as some sort of "consensual allucination". In the world where that book was written Internet is just a collective delusion.

Vaporwave forces us to recognize our helplessness with the Dataspace and for me it is a remembrace of a cyber-utopia that never got off the ground.