The Spiral Times: Internet Friends | BB & Jessica Hallock

If you’re over thirty and grew up in the era just before the total penetration of social media, before we used our real names online, chances are you had Internet Friends. There is a very special intensity to these connections, which seem to exist outside of time. This show explores one such friendship, through an interview with Jessica who I met online in 2001. Today she is a human encyclopedia, one of the sharpest minds I know, a curator and writer based in Queens, New York where she runs nyc-noise.com, a calendar for experimental music in the city that manages to wrestle contingent control of the city’s subterranean cultural life back from the algorithm.

Featuring: What can you learn from two emo girls who have been online for twenty-five years? Why was livejournal so insane? Creeps and converts: The sacred hell world of the pre-social media music messageboard. The absolute seduction of teenage nostalgia. Weirdo Music Against Technofeudalism. The unresolvable tension of being an art worker in the imperial core. Making demands of ourselves and building our collective ethics in public. Emotional hardcore. Security theatre. Palantir. Palestine.