In it Reynolds mentions a discussion that he'd had recently, with a friend who said that they'd completely given up on music and had become "entirely consumed by following politics."
The article that he links to is a rather priestly (but still very modern!) attack on the virtual reality of the web / news. His point of issue in particular is with people's attitudes towards spectacles in a time when everyone spends all of their time online - spectacle, as Reynolds points out, being a word that cannot fail to conjure up old Situationist ideas about "the poverty of everyday life" (ones which, I really do have to agree with our man here [here!], seem more relevant than ever before in today 2.0).
He goes on to draw some interesting parallels between people's passive obsessivness online towards the compsumption of politics, and that of music; that "addictive, stim-buzz-snacking, distracted-drifting, more-more-gimme-more" approach to current affairs, and the "flitting and skimming, tldr, dl-ing-but-never-getting-round-to-listening, half a YouTube here, half a streamed track there" current every day mode of engaging with music.
I don't like to get too poli'ical on here (as a matter of principal), but I must say that I do think it sheds some light on why so many people seem to be "getting off" on politics at the moment (via blog hype [2nd one's by a friend of mine!] about the student protests, constant coalition goverment as "tory scum" chat etc etc...) in the same way that a lot of us get off on music.
It does appear, at very least, that people actually do give a shit about all of this stuff.
Serious times, indeed.
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