I mean, I guess yea? They was already putting out 2 albums of classic modern soul before traveling without moving and the world couldn’t be bothered…
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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JK was inspired to write the song after he spent all night exploring a web ring - all of which were GeoCities sites with an “under construction” animated gif.
I heard he wrote this song after visiting a fancy underground mall in Hong Kong/Japan and seeing how gnarly the tech was there at the time.
"Travel Without Moving". Appropriate way to describe VR, even if it's Dune quote.
Looks like the The Expanse main character throwing a hat party inside the Rocinante.
😂🤣
This song would probably be number one if a popular artist did a cover of it. It hits A LOT harder now
Reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain, an anime released in 1998 that talks about the power of social networks and how companies will compete to gain control of the internet. Some of the predictions are outstandingly good.
Before the modern web, before Wikipedia, before pocket computers, Encarta was the shit!
yeah i spent so much time reading random shit on it. to be fair i already did that with physical encyclopedias so it was natural. but the fact that Encarta allowed what's now known as wiki surfing was next level for me.
I'd been texting for a couple of years when this came out, and had just logged my first full year working as a web developer. The next 5 years or so felt amazing, hardware and software was improving so quickly on all fronts.
Yeah, it was good times back then. Now the technlology has vastly exceeded our wildest dreams, yet it is under the control of greedy mega corporations, resulting in the most expensive shitty experience we have experienced so far.
There's exceptions, though; that's why we're here :)
I totally read what you're saying. My work requires me to maintain a personal cell phone (Intune business profile) and, with any OEM implementation of a smartphone OS you're essentially paying to donate everything about you to a megacorp to sell it to another megacorp to siphon more of you're life away from you. The beauty of modern advancements, though, is that if you don't care to be within 20% of the "bleeding edge" of attention extraction and intention fabrication you can spend your time in communities like this and with tech like graphene and linux making few sacrifices, if any.
I don't know about you, but the lemmy atmosphere feels a lot like that of early forums to me. Not quite the same, but the community aspect is more present.
I think my stance is that technology doesn't suck, as is the case with most things; it's the unchecked and rampant abuse of a given thing.
Oh I agree 100%. The technology doesnt suck, It is fantastic beyond my wildest dreams as a young lad. What we are capable of doing now is amazing.
My complaints are with "subscriptions" and "accounts" to that technology. When I die, my accounts and subscriptions are non transferable. Meaning my $XX,000.00 dollar audible account with over 1000 audiobooks i bought and paid for dies with me. I now pay a yearly/monthly fee to use things like excell(which hasnt changed much) that i used to be able to buy and use indefinitely for 50 dollars.
The technology is amazing. The greedy corporate overlords are the problem.
TIL "gaff" is UK slang for your house or home.
People have always complained about how new tech warps people’s minds. Like back in the day there were people saying the same thing about books when the printing press was invented
And they had a point. While the printing press (not books, those are way older) was a tool that could be used for good, many quickly realized that it gave propagandists a whole new set of tools to manipulate people with. Newspapers had a ridiculous amount of opinion-making power for quite a while there, they just got replaced by radio, TV, and then social media and now LLMs.
What if very powerful people are literally using tech to warp people's minds on purpose?
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Every generation has said stop X it'll rot your brains.
Like you said, it was books at first, children told to go outside, then book readers centuries later told their children to stop watching TV and read a book. Now video games are the latest
Tiktok and ChatGPT
True, showing my age
The other day I heard a Joe Walsh song playing from a coworker's phone on break, and I was ready to excitedly nerd out over classic rock with someone.
But my coworker went, "Who? It's a TikTok," and my enthusiasm deflated like a balloon.
I guess we're both showing our age. Sigh
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Yeah it's not about the Internet and virtual reality or fax machines etc, it was about overpopulation and ecological collapse among other things.
The song was inspired by a trip to an underground city in Sendai, Japan if you read Wikipedia. In the late 90s Japan was a gadget obsessed place with neon signs and screens packed into places like Sendai. Japan had industrialised rapidly over the 20th century and gave the impression of a thriving technology and manufacturing industry.
It was seen as a futuristic place by people from the rest of the world when they visited. Of course in reality Japan was in the first of its "lost decades" of stagnation that's run from the early 90s to now.
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I'm walking into spiderwebs, so leave a message and I'll call you back.
We tried to cover it with my band, but it sounded really boring. Upon listening closely to it, I was surprised by how minimalist it actually is. I mean there's barely anything on the track! Some piano, some strings, and drum and bass of course.
It was a happy surprise to find that it's one of those songs that are carried by the pure energy of the vocalist, which makes it very tricky to cover unless you go a very lateral route and "re-genre" it.
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Don't forget Radiohead releasing Planet Telex in 1995, then OK Computer in 1997.
Well we could start with a name...
It's so strange for me, having been born in 1988, to hear someone not know who this guy is, and this song.
I fully understand that it's been just about 30 years since this came out, and there are multiple generations of kids that will never have heard it that are fully grown adults now.
Its just that this song was not only massive, one that everyone knew, but it lived on way past its release date, it was played on radio, tv, used in films and tv shows (silicon valley is a recent one of note). The same band also had a meme based on the film "napolean dynamite" with the song canned heat, which the main character did a dance to that made it into games such as world of warcraft and fortnite.
The band is a part of pop culture, and despite it all, there are still places in the world where people dont know instantly what this picture is from and who that is.
I get it. It just boggles my mind how vast the world is. Even 10 years ago there were people living in the north west of england asking who the beatles were. (Beatles are from liverpool in the north west of england and liverpool is littered with beatles murals, staturs and that kind of shit) its insane that anyone could not know who they are.
But hey ho. Just thinking out loud.
I'm between 1 and 2 years older than you and I just found the song. As far as I can tell I've never heard it or anything about that dude before.
Not sure where I would have heard it... But I am pretty good at guess that tune from about 1970 to 2010 when I switched to streaming my own playlists.
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It's a very common name. Jamiroquai.
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