trickypath

[trickypath]

An Evening with the Jordanites

‘Why do those feminists go on about the patriarchy?’ - This was an overheard conversation in a pub after an evening watching a documentary film called the ‘Rise of Jordan Peterson’ at the Camden Odeon. I went there out of respect for a friend who asked me to go and also on some level to break the spell around Peterson that the online world has created. Jordan Peterson was a little known Canadian psychology professor until 2016 when he made a series of controversial stands on trigger issues like transexual pronouns and the position of masculinity in 21st century society. These views launched him onto the global stage of public intellectuals. His notoriety has been sustained by both his fans and detractors.

I personally have always felt a queasiness about the man and until tonight I couldn’t place my distaste. It isn’t so much that he pursues a very unoriginal socially conservative agenda under the mask of intellectual rigour, or that he seems to confuse, the accommodation of the vulnerable into society with authoritarianism, or even that like many self-help gurus before him mistakes personal revelation with universal truth - in fact my principle objection is all about instinct. That instinct is located in his general demeanour. There something in the pinched humourlessness and barely repressed anger that has echoes of past intolerant voices. His annoyance has two forms: his coquettish piques and then his more eruptive rants that seem to come from deep personal animus rather than considered analysis.

It’s always hard going to watch something with the fan boys because the audience is not there with open minds to the spectacle before them. I know this from my own bubbles of adoration for any film made by David Lynch or Jonathan Glaser I want it to be excellent. I am willing the experience to fulfill the expectations I have brought with me.

It was interesting to sit amongst the converted and feel their adoration from outside the circle. I could feel that every word uttered by the films subject would be a further building block for the belief system.

It’s also mystifying for the outsider to hear laughter in the audience to comments I could see no humour in. But I also realised that sometimes the laughter is a shared signal, an in-group reinforcement, from a shared meme I wasn’t party to. What I personally saw and felt was clearly so different from the reverence around me.

The film took a fairly conventional arc of describing the rise of Peterson through a series of set pieces and in fairness to the film makers there were a number of contrasting voices present, including transsexuals opposed to him and some fellow academics who had some clear points of difference to his world view but by and large the film operated as a biopic love-in. Starting with his early years teaching in Harvard, the publishing of his first book ‘Tracks of Meaning’ through to his more recent, internet ‘phenomenon’ status.

It’s focus seemed to be on exploring the human face of Peterson. Spending long periods at home with him in discussion with his wife and children and getting up close and personal with his daily routine and his huge oppressive collection of totalitarian propaganda painting. He waxed lyrical about these outsized socialist realist paintings of Lenin in his study, blanketing the walls. Apparently put there to remind him of the evils of socialism. He seemed happiest when he was picking away at the faults

of Lenin and Marx, yet a brief cut away revealing a painting in another room of a figure in Nazi regalia was not mentioned or discussed. In this collection of art I saw something of the obsession of the man, a mammoth project of immersing what seems a sensitive soul (long bouts of depression are mentioned frequently) in a cave of fury, where everything the left represents is simplistically reduced to the disastrous consequences of Russian communism and yet the dangers evident in his own attempts to harangue the marginal is never linked to the rise of fascism. The demagogue is always blind to the dark extremes of his own views .

I didn’t see Peterson as a committed right winger but as the film rolled on I saw a fragile ego becoming emboldened. His escape from the ‘black dog’ depression through personal discovery and his wife’s yoga is illuminating but too short. The delicate soul of the man is glimpsed but like his Nazi paintings never truly explored for fear of a soft underbelly being revealed. But this to me is the real source of his zeal. Tracking the classic new age hero’s tale, Peterson like Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle before him has experienced a personal epiphany that lifts the cloud of anguish and reveals a path to redemption through a method. Peterson has converted his own personal salvation into a series of lessons to save humanity with his reflections . Suddenly the college professor with the righteous argument is exposed as simply another self help salesman. Leveraging his psychology background and Harvard tenure as respectable cover in a hum drum campaign for the hearts and minds of the emotionally fragile.

The clips of him signing books and greeting his fans (in largely empty venues) shows Peterson gleeful as his converts echo his divisive language, hugging a young fan as he talks of ‘neo Marxist’ take downs. Peterson uses the mantra of ‘personal responsibility’ to bring a set of political values into sharp relief. Rather than correct his awkward followers at their lack of intellectual inquiry he bolsters their shallow world view and plays the daddy role with dandyish aplomb.

What bothers me about Peterson is the fact that he does not want to question the needy assumptions of his fan base in the same way that he would his inquisitors on university campuses because he is a snob who knows his audience are followers, like all remedy sellers he doesn’t want to stop the consumption of the snake oil. Despite the fact as a professor he should be there to challenge young minds not play up to unhelpful language that boxes us all in.

This is a thread of conservative thought that dates back to the late 80’s. Peterson creates a set of pigeon holes to force the opposition into - ‘Political Correctness’, ‘neo marxist’, ‘social justice warrior’ all these are terms created by the right to define and target a series of affirmative actions undertaken on American campuses at that time. They are divisive and yet used repeatedly by a man who claims to be frustrated by both the right and the left. I agree that left wing pundits also bandy around terms like ‘fascist’, but if you choose to use these terms you choose a partisan position and it’s clear which one he has chosen.

I find his stand in transexual pronouns particular repugnant. My disquiet stems from his standpoint that a very small minority group (0.6% of the US population) and their desire for recognition in legislation is akin to a slide into authoritarianism. This in my view is particularly disingenuous. The outrage that is fanned by pundits like Peterson and Adam Shapiro is outrage at a non issue. The fact that cisgender white men may very rarely have to address a person by the pronoun ‘they’ or ‘them’ and feel some discomfort in negotiating this space is not a righteous argument it is just getting aerated by someone else’s business. They don’t have to like it, but they should accept it because essentially this helps transgender people negotiate their day in a hostile environment 24/7, so the fact it makes a white guy uncomfortable in the few small occasions when they have to talk to a transgender person is not a breakdown of civil society it is a reordering of who is included in our democracy, in the same way that language and law was adjusted to include women, gay people, and racial and religious minorities. Just as what name I call my child and which I then expect the world to address them by, is none of anyone’s business neither is how a transgender person wishes to be addressed. There is no history of transgender people creating fascist dictatorships. This is picking a fight with an enemy that does not want to fight or be your enemy. It is the kicking of the prone body just because it’s easier than taking on the real source of power in the world. There are deep philosophical questions about the root causes of our disintegrating political institutions and the co-opting of public life by corporations, that at least an eighth of the world’s money is stored in secret offshore vehicles for the benefit of a minuscule minority and that we face an existential collapse of all living systems as a direct result of this mismanagement of our economies. That is something for conservatives as well as progressives of all stripes to be concerned about. But that requires a mind with a more expansive outlook, a mind more embracing of complexity than Peterson’s. A man who’s narrow mind is not up to the task and I feel that will come to pass. I suspect that even as I leave the cinema his influence on public discourse is fading slowly from the public imagination so that at last, he can return to the bosom of his family and friend to carry on something he is competent at, the teaching of psychology at Toronto university.

[trickypath]

Liking you, liking me

Everyone has an opinion and everyone wants your attention now. I can’t open my email without a stream of injustice and outrage that is clamouring for me to sign a petition, donate, contact my MP or join up to some new crusade. Somewhere along the line I opened the floodgates of concern and now I am deluged with the failings of the world - issue by issue: Shell drilling the Arctic, Argentinian judges letting off paedophiles because they thought a victim was gay and so deserved it, Sepp Blatters septic blather and so on. All of which are outrageous and rightly deserve my attention. But is modern networked politics defined by this atomised approach to our problems. I’m not begrudging the needs that are expressed in these call outs, but I question where it all leads. Does it give me a concrete view of the world and my place in it.

I recently finished Jon Ronson’s new book “You’ve been Shamed” and as usual it was a fantastic neurotic jaunt though the act of public shaming and more specifically the shaming that is provided by social media. There is a quote in the book from Adam Curtis the film maker:

‘they’re turning social media into a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing’

Jon goes on to say we are using feedback loops to constantly insure that people stay in line with excepted norms and that we like what others who are like us like.

That chimed with a feeling that I had been having for sometime, that we are all stuck in our various camps of thinking listening only to those who coincide broadly with our outlook. (This is probably why I am writing an article inspired by Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis because these are the people I am supposed to take inspiration from because of my tastes and politics) This led to a further thought associated with how toxic our politics had become and how true debate was almost totally absent from modern parliamentary politics. How bland our leaders had become, how stage managed and fearful of engagement they are. The image of David Cameron in an empty hangar is the one picture that still haunts me from the last election.

Are we all so frightened we have to hide away in barns where we can only hear the echo of like minded voices. To find some answers I turn to America and more specifically a phenomena I have only recently become aware of - The Culture Wars. 

It was first coined by James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, who in 1991 published the Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The idea has been around for some time but I had not come across it until now. It is a term that describes the polarisation between progressive and conservative views. Perhaps more specifically how these seem to articulate clear battle lines when it comes to key issues like climate change, abortion, feminism, homosexuality, immigration and gun laws. For instance how most peoples views on abortion are fairly equally divided between the pro life and pro choice variety, or how views about the holy land seem to divide between pro Israeli or pro Palestinian standpoints. In America we have seen this divide widen ever more with emotive rallying points tearing open the rift in American culture. On one side you have an intellectual liberal tradition that stems out of the hippies, radical student organisations, racial/gender/sexuality equality movements of the 60′s that went on to promote political correctness in the late eighties and early nineties and then on the other side a conservative lobby that is defined largely by the opposition to these views, evangelical churches, big oil, the National Rifle Association and the Tea Party movement.

In America this division is so toxic it seems to have created an unbridgeable gulf in any issue. Discussion is no longer possible and debate is largely confined to roundtable discussions or diss-off’s (I think I made that up) between like minded people on either side of the debate. Fox News and The Daily Show find comfort in discussing the issues of the day with broadly sympathetic people while targeting the opposing group with derision and scorn. It is good to be surrounded by the comfort of ‘yes’ people but it is increasingly becoming the enemy of engagement.

Russell Brand who I personally sympathise with on the whole, exposes a number of truths and attempts new ways of looking at the issues confronted by the left, especially by his belligerent love bombing of the perceived enemy. But he undermines the positive impact of this approach when he continues to give airtime to Fox News presenters like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on his YouTube channel. He knows he’s preaching to the converted when he lampoons them and gets outraged at their blinkered views. Their response to any event is predictable and un-newsworthy and just warms the cockles of the lefts comfort zone. I wish that Russell would address the more insidious nature of more mainstream news presenting. Addressing the middle rather than the edge. Presenters of the Today programme or Channel 4 news subtly emote news events to provoke desired responses. This is a much more common manifestation of media bias. But I suppose that is less funny, less open to ridicule, more mundane and workaday. The outrage that inflames Twitter, the binary default positions adopted by one side in response to the other has spread from it’s US roots to become a global phenomenon. Only yesterday Donald Trump generalised that all Mexicans were rapists. The obvious response is disgust, but people like to feel affronted by the obvious. They know that mean-spirited rightwing toupee touting ideologues will say things to offend them and on some level they want to hear it, it’s like a fix of affirmation - ‘they are everything we thought they were’. We also get a secondary high from the fist bump from our people when we shout them down and people like or retweet us. But Trump just like Hannity and O’Reilly are not where real power lies. Real power is more banal and it lurks in the centre without form or froth.

This is why we have to stop attacking the poles and focus on the equator of the arguments where decisions are made but differences can feel paper thin. We have to challenge our perceptions daily by: listening to someone with an opposing view (especially those who can articulate it in a convincing way), read against our comfort zone (not the Daily Mail, but intelligent right wing opinion), entertain thoughts that threaten the dogma of our convictions (are Israeli’s always wrong? for instance) and we should test our thinking to breaking point. It’s only by doing that can we hope to form new ideologies that can inform the choices we make about single issues on a daily basis, otherwise we just become outrage robots programmed to tweet righteous anger about polar bears while stroking our upgrade of heavy metals in smug isolation.

[trickypath]

Dear Labour Party

I felt that I had to write this now and not leave it, there’s been something on my mind it’s been bothering me, and I just wanted to share it with you now before I just walked out on you completely. I’m really sorry but it’s not me it’s you that’s changed.

I watched this very moving film all built from statistics and numbers, about the second world war - http://www.fallen.io/ww2. It made me think of you. It made me realise the staggering number of lives that were lost during that conflict, both civilians and soldiers, but it also highlighted how violence and conflict have been in a rapid downward trend ever since. I reflected on what made that possible, what made that come about. The trend away from violence has been attributed to environmental factors like the removal of lead from petrol or to young people spending more time in front of computers than out on the street causing trouble. All of these are possible causes or effects. However something else occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Second world war. Western countries turned to social democracy as the new guiding light and a desire to work towards a common good. To establish social institutions to guard against such a horror ever happening again. The war brought all social classes and genders together focussed on a single purpose. The power of that complete mobilisation was subsequently put to use in the building of a welfare state in the UK and similar system’s in other European countries. This was the grand scheme you hatched up. It was no easy feat what with greedy doctors and restless unions, the project was nearly still born. But you made it happen.

Also with the end of the war and the collapse of empire saw the emergence of the nation state. Imperial powers saw their colonies melt away and watched on as they embraced nationhood. In the fading of the light they had to redefine themselves too. The war had bankrupted the empires banks and Britain could no longer define itself by patriarchal deference, their citizenry demanded more and so an old empire slowly became a social democratic nation state, and you helped to pave the way.

It is easy to ignore the significance of these events in our 21st century neo-liberal mirage. Our memories of this time are disappearing in the mists of time, as the witnesses of WW2 shrink rapidly. The baby boomers - the one generation that benefited so fundamentally from the post-war consensus, are retiring and withdrawing from public life buoyed up on the favourable winds of stable jobs and good pensions. It is easy for the adult population left - the generation Xers and the millennials to loose sight of the achievements of an age largely left to be fetishised for it’s retro chic. That single act of social justice and inclusive policy making in 1945 paved the way for generations to live peaceful supported lives where that support allowed an explosion of creativity and commerce that still shapes the world we live in now, from pop music, art, architecture, science, transportation, film, tv and theatre.

The invigorated nation state saw the rise of numerous businesses off the back of new inventions. Large businesses were built in the jetstream of the social contract and the need to make “Britain Great” again. Stunning innovations in the UK like personal computing, Concorde, the mini and television were nurtured under your watch.

Yes there have been bumps along the way and we haven’t always got on. Tony was an interesting guy he had the smile and the swagger as well as some good policies, but then he did something both you and I now know was wrong the evidence is there. He also convinced you that the market was the solution to most things and he was wrong on that too. 

The problem is that the logic of market infallibility and deregulation have become so entrenched that the conservative party has just given up all pretence of maintaining state institutions, and you are trapped in a straightjacket partly of your own making. Your new leadership is so enamoured or lacking in imagination (I suspect the latter) to define social democracy around it’s founding principles of protecting and nurturing the ordinary citizen, to encourage enlightened and progressive thinking that will inspire invention, commerce and creativity. To support that process by defending the public institutions that make economies flourish and allow people the opportunity to succeed.

We must get beyond the lie and the binary logic of social democracy vs business, of public institutions being the debt creators and welfare as the enemy of aspiration.

I aspire to a country that has businesses to be proud of built on the intelligence of it’s citizens, that it doesn’t sell them off to the highest bidder which has engendered job insecurity and a culture of debt. All those UKIP voting ex-Labour supporters really want is a decent country where they can have a job with a company or an institutions that they can be proud of. I aspire to politics that can see that public institutions are no less efficient than private ones in certain spheres. Especially in cases where the public interest far outweighs the profit prerogative. But you have a blinkered view seen from the political class feed back loop. You can only see neo-liberal answers to neo-liberal problems. 

You are the party of the centre left and you should be that and be proud. It’s not a revolution I ask for it’s a return and a refocus. Remember who you are and where you come from. Don’t believe Tory lies that have invaded your psyche. Labour (as figures prove) is the party of surplus and fiscal responsibility. Labour is the party of the working and the middle classes, of prosperity and nurture. Labour is the bulwark of the state against corporate enclosure. Labour is not anti-business, it just doesn’t like embezzlers and exploiters. We must remember although Britain maybe low on the global index of corruption, it is about the entire supply chain. Powerful companies and banks are complicit in corruption even if is not happening directly in our institutions, because it’s happening wherever the profits seem to good to be true, somewhere else on this planet that’s poorer or less regulated.

I just hope we can start again. I’ll put the effort in and support you when you’re down, if you just believe in what you were and can be. Reshape yourself for a future of sustainable business innovation and social responsibility and remember the nation you serve and the values enshrined in the 70 years of peace us Europeans have enjoyed by remaining in a community that negotiates beyond state boundaries to sustain a political entity that exists nowhere else in the world.

I think we still have a chance. What do you think?

Love Matt

[trickypath]

Electronic vs Mechanical

Are there secret inefficiencies to our digital economy?

Is there a limit to our need for consumer electronics? Have we sidelined the mechanical in favour of a digital solution to everything? Does everything really need to be electronic to be a progressive innovation.

We increasingly see computer chips appearing in everything the mechanical interface is becoming obsolete and replaced with a shiny touch screen. I started to wonder if my nagging resistance is a middle aged man’s Douglas Adam’s moment:

‘Anything invented after you're thirty five is against the natural order of things.’ 

...or if it is symptomatic of a wasteful and sometimes inefficient approach to hi-tech development.

I had this thought a number times recently. The first was when I realised how much more is routinely put in fridges than used to be. We no longer consider storing foodstuff in other places. As our fridges have become bigger they have essentially become electronic food cupboards. We see this in other aspects of daily life too. Our smartphones have negated the need for a whole range of mechanical tools - maps, compasses, watches, diaries, record players, and the list goes on. This in some respects is an efficiency drive it has decluttered our lives, but is has also taken a proportion of smaller manufacturers and specialists out of the production loop.

Most of our interfaces are touch screens and they are elegant and beautiful, but the funny thing is they all still retain at least one physical button, like a vestigial tail they act as reminder of the time before, but also provide that all important emergency button for when the screen freezes. Which is a metaphor for the wider issue. More and more functions are spirited away in a shiny case that masks an inscrutable set of interoperating pieces of hardware and software. If the iWatch runs out of battery because of all the processing power it can do, it’s fundamental purpose as a watch is void. Someone also amusingly pointed out that the standby mode of the iWatch meant that a user couldn’t just glance at the time during a boring meeting, which was another key advantage to a watch over a phone, that you could be surreptitious about your clock watching. In order to awaken the iWatch you apparently have to either press the screen or shake your wrist, which certainly would not be very clandestine.

The e-cigarette, if we consider the health benefits it’s definitely better than inhaling a burning plant into your lungs, but we have replaced mostly organic substances with inorganic circuits and disposable machined parts. Requiring more production and more waste in the form of heavy metals and acids.

It may also be in how we define what is ‘technology’. A lot of the best innovations are to do with changing systems often human systems, how do we make for more effective relationships between people, maybe silicon chips have a part to play in that but they are not the be all and end all.

‘If you measure some positive benefit in the technology case, your conclusion is that technology helped. But it was always the people that we worked with, the partners that we chose and the people on the ground who interacted with the people that we wanted to support. All of those human factors were required for the technology itself to have an impact; whether the technology helped or not was really up to people.’ - Kentaro Toyama

From an interesting article about the failure of technology to provide all the solutions in india, by Brian Bergstein in MIT Technology review

In the 21st century is there ever a time when a mechanical lever is more efficient than a shiny plasma screen? Don’t get me wrong this is not a luddite call to arms to smash the machines, neither is it a retro hipster worship of analogue devices. It’s just a question about whether all of it is necessary just because we can, and whether it actually results in the streamlined efficient future that tech companies peddle, or even if that is really the future we want or need.

I think I will return to this topic at a later date.

[trickypath]

Secrets and All Seeing Eyes

I recently had conversation with someone about conspiracy. They had subscribed to the fact that world was run by a secret group, probably the Bilderberg group because this is one of the most visible manifestations of global puppeteers. The conversation necessarily included the CIA as the force that carries out their dirty work and which is the unseen operative of evil. The conversation started with a discussion about how global warming and the collapse of Greece was all part of the grand plan, this is what "they" wanted in order to control and run the world. In these situations I am both fascinated and appalled by the viewpoint. 

The notion of conspiracy is so seductive. It paints a simple and authoritative picture of the world and it's power structures as a pyramid (probably with a single eye on it) with a minute group overseeing the planet like James Bond villains. Organising every world event like clockwork in order to maximise their self interest. It is attractive because it allows the enemy to exist in shadows - lizard like, alien, omnipotent and immutable. I love this I really do it feeds my X-Files, Quatermass and H.P. Lovecraft fantasies. In my paranoid hours I am subsumed by the creeping sense that none of my endeavours will amount to anything because I am a cog in a wheel of a great steam punk machine with infinite cables wired into every bodies brains. All controlled by an amorphous tentacled demon from another dimension with the head of Rupert Murdoch and the bottom of Kim Kardashian of which I can never have any true comprehension.

For me as an atheist this works on my withered god-gene much as praying by my bed as a boy helped to hold back the devil in the Omen films. It works to allow me to offload my material responsibilities on a higher force. It is also a place of fantasy and imagination and I can’t get enough of it! 

But we have to do the Father Dougal ‘dreams vs reality’ test on these ideas lest they control us rather than us controlling them. Conspiracy allows for a fatalism which colludes against constructive engagement. Events have to be tackled as we receive them and sometimes we have to trust the view of the world provided by third parties to establish a way to respond. If every channel is corrupted except for other purveyors of conspiracy we get locked in a feedback loop that creates paralysis of action. Of course there is inter-connectedness and many things are the result of a series of knock on effects or influences. But inside the constellation of world events is their really a single pattern driving them all?

The commonality between conspiracy is global reach. The inspiration for conspiracy is the spread and the scale. Conspiracy is a remedy against chaos. As I mentioned before I think conspiracy is, in secular societies, the proxy for the awe previously attributed to an all knowing god. We now attach these kinds of powers to another pantheon of immortals, those who seemingly have our lives in their hands. I think for the conspiracy theorist it is actually comforting to attribute 9/11 to the ‘Secret Cabal’, to subscribe to it being a fiendishly devised grand scheme to lock us into the neo-con mission to rule planet oil. Conversely to imagine in 2001 that the people that carried it out were self activating Al Qaeda sympathisers with a couple of penknife’s (there is no evidence to prove that Bin Laden had anything to do with the planning), was like staring into the abyss. But in 2015 this kind of internet start-up terror group is common place. Disruptive neo-liberal systems like the internet have become the true training ground for random violence. A scatter gun atomised enemy makes governments and the paranoid jumpy. Fear is always safer embodied in a master plan by a master enemy.

It is easier to fear a single entity or organisation than to accept the random nature of microscopic actions rippling outwards meeting other ripples and distorting the universal mirror of truth. People behave in inconsistent ways they are always reacting unpredictably to local events on the ground. For instance take ISIS the ultimate start-up. Western interference in the Middle East for the last 100 years is the backdrop of the Islamic State, and you could conclude that it is therefore all an intentional conspiracy by the corporate west to lock us into a distraction while they reap the benefits. But other forces are at work that predate the west. The Middle East is beset by a religious schism in the form Sunni and Shia Islam, these forces have caused conflict in the region for centuries. Put in perspective it could be argued that the tail is wagging the dog in this instance. Sunni Saudi Arabia has long made use of it’s western influence to wage it’s wars by proxy, using the American military to destabilise Shia sphere’s of influence in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and now Yemen.

The conspiracist would conclude that the Saudi’s are part of the bigger Cabal of secret rulers of the Earth, but I think this negates the messy complexities of geopolitics. All powerful global stake holders are just as easily manipulated as the rest of us by smaller interest groups. Adam Curtis’s excellent recent film Bitter Lake highlights the fact that the British military was given the run around by local warlords wanting to settle scores, simply, by telling the British commanders that their regional enemies were the Taliban. The Afghani’s used the British as a free ‘hit man’ service, the reciprocal benefit it gave the UK establishment was the illusion that progress was being made in the war against terror. Even if you question the dubious logic of intervention in Afghanistan by the Bush regime, it can hardly be said that Bush (the magnet of conspiracy) knew the mind of a village elder in an isolated place in Helmand who wanted to dispatch a treacherous neighbour over a bad opium deal.

To me the idea of large-scale cover ups and secretive bodies of people all working for a global secret society seems unfeasible. If you’ve ever been on the end of call waiting service where an automated voice asks for your name and account number, only to wait 20 minutes and then be asked for your name and account number, will know that corporate systems like any other are inefficient and prone to error. The chances that global conspiracists could run so efficiently and without someone with a conscience whistleblowing that they planted the bombs in the pentagon during 9/11, seems unlikely. I can’t believe that a secret government cabal charged with carrying out such an atrocity on it’s own people would not have at least one participant that would crack under the weight of that crushing guilt. Or would we just pass that nugget from a lone individual as just another bit of misinformation by a conspiracy nut. Even speaking the truth can mask the truth.

A recent rumour suggests that Putin’s media advisor Vladislav Surkov and modern day “minister of truth”, uses a very modern method of disinformation. If a scandal relating to the Putin regime is erupting he releases multiple stories covering the issue over conventional and social media to effectively hide the truth in the haystack. Consequently it can’t be said that Putin is lying. Reality becomes slippery because an avalanche of possible truth’s are being published, undermining the ability for us to make sense of the world. Each story creates a ripple of argument and counter argument, dispersing the real facts in a sea of concoctions. It could be be said that “the truth is out there”, you just can’t see it for the twitter outrage and comment fog. 

An addition - I recently watched this video by Noam Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwZ-vIaW6Bc

It eloquently describes why 9/11 conspiracies are pointless. I think the funniest point is (paraphrased) : ‘Even if they are true. Who cares.’

[trickypath]

Exorcising Nineties Demons

I have been fighting the slow neo-liberal colonisation of my mind since approximately 1997. Ever since the rush of excitement that followed the answering of the door by a surprised dressing gown attired Chery Blair as she discovered her husband was the new prime minister. I have pushed against the tide of my natural instincts. Instincts that tend towards a deep suspicion of capital and it’s motives. The new labour era for me, ushered in a new wave of lefty entrepreneurship and cocky liberal capitalism. For a wave of middle class boys and girls suddenly all the murkiness and innate “right wingness" associated with capital generation was inverted. Tony made it possible for everyone to justify their individualism in the name of progressive democracy.

The recent anniversary of Brit Pop triggered a period of reflection on the era of my growing up.

Re-watching the louche yet knowing poses of Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker and Liam Gallagher on nostalgia shows opened a window on my youth, but more importantly on a cynical optimism. Emerging out of a rebellious punk attitude nurtured in the darkest days of Thatcherism fused with a pluralist, class blurring hedonism that had been nurtured in the clubs of Ibiza and the raving fields of England, set against the backdrop of a new digital landscape where the possibilities seemed endless, a new paradigm emerged which literally consumed a generation.

We felt liberated from the dereliction of Conservative rule, even if we were suspicious of a New Labour, that had “blue washed” the left to get elected. I still remember a drunken conversation in a pub shortly after the election, about whether the Labour party was just using this approach as a trojan horse, and once in power would they revert to form. I remember thinking at the time that although we hoped that this would be the case, we knew that something had been set in motion, the zeal in Tony Blair’s rictus grin hinted at a different way of doing business. What had been uprooted by Thatcher would not be easily replanted in freshly invigorated socialist soil.

The first landing boats to row on to the shores of my pinko mindset came in the form of the internet. This new frontier seduced me and lured me into it’s potential. I had been a graduate, an artist, a doley, a sometime postal worker, a live for the weekend generation Xer. A man with idealistic creative dreams that struggled to find the right medium for the things I wanted to express. The internet seemed like somewhere I could try things out, share with people, encourage creativity in others, open up to a whole world of online potential. It was also a place where it seemed from the outset that fortunes could be forged, in fact the widely held belief was that if you worked online you must be raking it in. Even if you explained that you were using the web to create art or open up digital access to wider audiences you were still regarded as someone who had the touchpad (not invented yet) of Midas. 

The belief amongst the uninitiated of the pregnant potency of the net persisted and so everything that we built was somehow directly or indirectly expected to make money. In the naivety of the time, I figured that I could be both a principled designer and a digital artist. We could run a company that made great artistic statements that was partly funded by working for “the man”. We sought out work and built a company that had reasonable success and supported four people. I figured that we had managed to achieve a modicum of what the new sophisticated leftie should be. I had bought into the illusion that we could have it both ways, we could walk the third way. We could weave the emperors new silk spun from both public money and private enterprise. 

I like most of my peers experienced the “live now, worry later” mantra that blasted out of every media channel and advertising medium. Our generation unlike our baby boomer parents could have it all now. My parents enjoyed little of the supposed hedonism of the sixties as we had been led to believe. Most people in the first era of freedom could afford only to gaze on as the elite section of society dropped out. They instead worked hard, enjoyed the reflected benefits of music, culture and societal change when they could afford it. Our generation on the other hand, with the deregulation of banking and credit was handed the option to do it all now. We could live the lives of the rockstars - air travel, champagne, drugs, home ownership, decadent parties - all the endless opportunities that a line of credit opens up. It all seemed possible. I conflated all this limitless excess with freedom. With building a bright new future alongside a government (if not completely to my liking) at least it was Labour and it was essentially on my side.

We had fun, I lost my way and waking into another millennia, there was a sense that things weren’t right. Maybe it’s the suspicion of indulgence (a legacy of a protestant upbringing). It felt that somehow we had missed something, that the heart of compassion had been carved out of our lives. All this borrowing had left us anxiously individual. Islands of financial bondage. Our social interests were diminishing as the responsibilities of our personal debt took hold. 

Political optimism gave way to a new conservatism largely formed in the wake of 9/11, and the mild irritation I had felt about Tony Blair in the nineties became something closer to anger and awe. A feeling you reserve for despots and superhero villains. His grin taking on a maniacal zeal belying dreams of world domination.

I awoke from a drug addled past into an anxious present where the battlements of my left wing consciousness had been breached while I slept. Suddenly the horizons of political debate had shrunk. All argument was hemmed in by the pragmatic logic of the market. Sweeping ideological or romantic rhetoric aside in favour of granular debates on policy tweaks and budgetary requirements. The macro reflected the micro. Our personal need to find financial solutions to our own money issues was reflected in the language of the government. Politicians were managers, Parties were PR companies and Estate agents were TV stars.

Even under a Labour government it no longer became possible to see the dividing lines of political partisanship. This was the era when Maggies parting gift at the dawn of the nineties became a reality. She made it so political debate was stuck in a cul de sac where there was only one class and that is middle, where there is only one economic model and that is private, and only one sector and that is financial. This newspeak of the early noughties frames the world we live in today.

It made it impossible for the public to rebel and question the actions of the powerful, they had hoodwinked us into believing that we could share in the riches of neo-liberalism. Every urge to revolt is subsumed in a consumer orgy. The riots of 2011 epitomise an angry youth taking futile revenge against the products and services that have reduced them into compulsive spend bots.

The roots of this started with my generation. We loved the brand we absorbed it into ourselves, we allowed products to weave themselves into our counter culture. We were riding an exuberant wave of rebellion and entrepreneurship, so seamlessly blended as to be indistinguishable.

A decade and a half later with a different business I still continue trying to define my purpose and my goals as director of a company, I am seduced by the “make it big" promise of capitalism, meanwhile I endeavour to make this small unit of 8 people, accountable, responsible and as equal as possible. I continue to move the company towards employee ownership as I see this as the balance between building business and sharing the wealth.

By 2050 the long hangover of the ‘fin de siecle’ rave generation will be seen by our children as either the moment when we took our eye of the boil and let the gains of the great 20th century experiment regress into the default feudalism that defined everything before 1900, or the moment where the last embers of consumer excess were exorcised in an almighty party at the end of time that heralded a brave ecologically responsible new word. Time will tell.

[trickypath]

Make Room

Boys Own Guide to being a Feminist

Feminism is not going away despite many men’s wish that it would. Many assume that women have got what they need and that they should stop complaining. But as I have often thought feminism is as much a revolution inside men’s minds as it is about the activism of women themselves. Sheryl Sandberg in her book says “Lean In” to women which is a call for woman to be pragmatic and push themselves into the sphere of male preserve. But in the longterm this seems noble but futile. Like pushing yourself into the throng on a packed tube train when you know the train will never stop at another station.

Men need to find peace with the notion that they will have to share this planet with the other half of homo sapiens, and not just in the sucking oxygen sense either. We will have to give up many of the things that we have taken for granted for millennia (at least in western societies) - Woman as object, women as possessions, women as decoration, women as less intelligent, women as less funny, women as available, women as lesser and lower then men, women as wicked and women as an unknowable power that has to be contained.

Now all of these things to the intellectual liberal male may appear resolved, but they are as prevalent in Islington wine bars as they are in Sudanese mosques. But I am not here to make this a left/right thing or conservative/progressive debate. I am here to try to understand why we as a gender have a mountain to climb. Globally the tide has turned despite many incidents that seem to contradict this viewpoint - child brides, honour killing, slut shaming, FGM, the list is endless. But believe me brothers, despite all this, women are coming and they are your lovers, sisters, mothers and friends.

Feminism in the male mind has long been difficult territory. Men tend to see it as either something that is exclusively a female issue or as a fringe female activity populated by the kind of ball breaking woman that they should basically steer clear of - stick to the feminine docile ones. Supporting feminism amongst men also has a checkered history. Women have throughout feminism’s history been in equal parts - supportive, ambivalent and outright hostile to male support of the cause. This has often left a supportive partner feeling confused or negated. Men have also long associated supporting the tenets of woman’s rights as emasculating or weak. As if supporting the issues of the other gender somehow conferred some of the qualities of femininity. From sandal wearing bearded 60’s revolutionaries to 90’s new man, the image of the female friendly man has always sat uneasily with a mainstream masculine view.

This is the heart of the matter. Men know either consciously or otherwise that women are changing - in their expectations, in their opportunities and in their attitude towards men. But men have no tools to deal with it - and men so dearly love tools. Woman have been fighting the battle for equality for over 100 years now, but most of us men have little or no involvement in it and as such one half of the population is evolving and the other is at an impasse. 100 years on it is men who are struggling to define their place. We are having to adapt to an identity crisis that has seemingly come out of nowhere. Even though we were given plenty of warning lads, we have been sleep walking into this one.

This ultra conservative backlash which we are seeing across much of the muslim and christian world  - where women are being repressed in ever more shameful ways is matched by a subtler and more insidious anti-feminist force within liberal consumer societies. Male social isolation and the growth of online communication tools has allowed one regrettable aspect of masculinity to take centre stage - injured pride. It is a factor that all men face in one form or another. Pride is one of the pillars of the male personality. Like it or not men throughout the ages have been judged, tested, attacked physically and mentally on issues of pride. Men from the playground onwards are involved in a gladiatorial battle with other men about their status and self worth. Traditionally much of this status has been bound up with how women perceive them. This insecurity is something that has been largely mitigated through male domination which formed the notion of entitlement, the demand to be acknowledged as attractive, strong, funny and sexually potent. Men seek approval from woman because that approval is a sign to other men that their pride is intact, that they are resilient and successful.

Vengeful misogynists like Elliot Rodger are an extreme expression of male pride as a dehumanising force, as a symptom of male weakness. The weakness that presumes that the reason that they are spurned must be externalised and must be directed at the object of desire. In my teenage years one of my first relationships left me rejected, my unrequited love burned with a hot passion that made me have feelings of anger and violence towards my ex-girlfriend. I never acted on these thoughts. But I felt my pride was hurt. I couldn’t understand the reasons or the motivations. I was suspicious of friends who continued to talk to her and I wanted to some sort of recompense, acknowledgment of my existence. In later years I have understood that all human relations are messy and often end with many loose ends. But back then I wanted something concrete to end my pain. In Rodgers case I see that same sense of entitlement that same youthful bile gone wrong. I am in no way justifying his actions, but men have to acknowledge the underlying forces that drive them. We see this weakness played out on a societal scale where men force women into marriage at an early age, or deny them an education. Gender revenge is thinly veiled as divine law or hereditary tradition.

Men are scared of female power because they feel that it will undermine their pride. Where they are not provided the tools to provide for their own self worth men scare women into submissive roles, where they can falsely claim to have the respect of their sisters.

To overcome our crisis of self we must imagine a world where we share the world equally with women and this is no easy task. Imagine a world where there is no cultural boundary between you and the opposite sex. Where women are generals in the army, where they are world cup winning footballers in mixed teams, where every other dirty joke has a cackling woman directing the punchline at men. Where women dress how they want and view your gaze with ambivalence and even disdain. Where legislation is passed which may restrict the activities of men on gender grounds. Where nuanced communication tools seem beyond our comprehension and we may have to defer to the other sex for explanation. Where certain situations you may feel belittled by groups of women, they may make comments on the size of your manhood and you will have to fall back on your inner reserves and self belief to walk past them. 

A place where every aspect of our public and private lives are shared with the female of the species. In some aspects this is already the case. As intimate binary units that share living and loving together, the raising of children, we have times when the raw ends of our souls are carried as equally by another of the opposite sex as by ourselves. We cannot deny that we share and are interdependent in many instances. But still as men we are suffused with expectations and limitations that subtly re-enforce our presumed superiority. One classic example of this from my own experience. My mum a child of the sixties taught me that feminism was to be respected, that it was an inevitable fact of life, and yet as the oldest of three boys, I have experience of taking her toil for granted, of expecting our mum to tidy up, to cook our food, to wash our clothes.

This is probably the experience of most men and we all probably put it down to a mothers love for her boys. But many girl friends describe a much different experience in the family home. One where they are valued differently, even with enlightened intellectual parents.

Many of these responses are hard wired in the male mind and are stubborn stains to shift. Will we brothers continue to push back against the tectonic plates of change causing untold misery to our sisters in an intractable conflict that harms us ultimately more then at does women? It’s difficult to tell where it’s going at the moment.

I think one of the solutions is that men have to entertain the idea of talking more to each other about what issues they face and why they face them. This is difficult territory and the history of men’s encounter groups is littered with tales of men round campfires primal screaming and weeping over the black holes of their emotions. But I think there are more pragmatic steps we can make we just need to start the conversations they don’t have to be therapy. Men’s issues are many and varied, but one I see reflected equally in both middle/late age and young men is a sense of being on the scrap heap or of being unable to meet the work expectations of the 21st century. This is making men angry and angry men are dangerous. Women have learnt from hard experience to be flexible in the workplace to juggle work and family to except part-time and low paid work. Women have flourished because they can except these situations as temporary, they can take an opportunity and use it to their advantage. Men on the other hand have inherited from their fathers the expectation of career or permanent employment. They have focussed their energies on the mastery of individual skills and dug their heels in with regard to their entitlement in the workplace. Maybe this is actually the beginning of men making room for women, our loss is their gain and our impotent posturing is all part of an evolutionary sea change.

But for our societies to work, to adapt to become more feminine, but not un-masculine, us men have to change our values. We have to stand down and man up.

There is a contradiction at the heart of both men’s failings and woman’s expectations of men. Women want men to be both more sensitive, more open with their feelings and conversely they want us to be strong and endure. This is what makes men lock the Walter the Softy inside them away. We can’t reconcile emotional openness with not being weak.

This is a list of male traits that are positive and which don’t have to conflict with equality of the sexes: (I suspect some of this may play to generalisation, even prejudice, but i am trying to sound this out, and I am happy to be challenged)

Strength - Men are physically stronger on the whole than women this has conferred enormous power on men that we have abused. But no longer. We are strong yes and we know that women admire and are attracted to male strength. But this strength is not a fist.

Separation - compartmentalising emotion to deal with challenges within and without.

Decisiveness - A tendency to cut through things to arrive at a decision. 

Singularity - the ability to look at one thing and dedicate the time to solving it, building it, finding it.

Romance - men have a strong compulsion to fantasy and romanticising situations, we project emotional meaning through objects, we disseminate our feelings through grand gestures.

I know that these traits are not common to all and just as much as they can positive, they have a negative flip side. Women also possess these traits. But from my own experience and from those of others - women tend to admire and expect these things.

Men just have to find ways to make these things function in a world where they also have to feel and expect their feelings to be counted. We need to be emotional but not wet, strong but not dominating. We just need to keep thinking of that place in the not too distant future where we are proudly different but at one with our sisters.

30/09/14 - Since writing this article I have watched Emma Watson's impassioned speech to the UN to encourage men to enter into the fight for gender equality. It has made me realise that some of my thoughts about male pride may be letting us off the hook and we need to be more ambitious. Towards the end of the speech she says this: "It is time that we saw gender on a spectrum rather than as two sets of opposing ideals". She is right we need break the duality of sex as a social construct to find our shared freedoms.

[trickypath]

Loom Bandits

It's strange that children are so enamoured by taking these rubber loops and turning them into bags and decorations. They never had such status when we were young, they were used by postmen to group letters and by kids to flick at each other across classrooms. My favourite childhood memory of rubber bands is discovering that if you peeled the outer skin of a golf ball the inside was essentially a ball of them. It seems with the demise of posting letters, so the rubber band was on it's way out too. So some genius at Acme Rubber Inc. had the idea of recasting the humble rubber band in day-glo colours and turning them into a religious cult. This cult requires that it's adherents be under 12, must revert to an agrarian idyll where they weave all their belongings by hand. The only concession to modern technology is the use of youtube where they can watch the elders of the cult (normally between 11-14) post expert demonstration of their weaving mastery. In order that the novices may learn the wisdom of the ages through the construction of smart phone bags made from the wondrous loom.

IN contrast this coincides with the rise of (the artist previously called) ISIS now (so called) IS. The thing about these Jihadi groups is they employ the same logic. They take a simple repeatable and adjustable raw material like an extreme interpretation of Islam and then use the internet to seed the idea with slick videos and websites, Use the media language of a globalised youth with it’s sense of online community that diminishes distance. Create viral video building blocks of propaganda, that the advocate can re-assemble to share with other potential conscripts. Like a rubber band, Islam can have potential beyond it’s original purpose or meaning. ISIS can self start anywhere, it just needs the base materials of disenfranchised youthful minds and access to the internet

[trickypath]

Lucky F**ckers

Can chance play a part in societies decision making

When I was 30 I was selected at random to join a group of similarly chosen individuals. We were detained against our will in a special building designed for the purpose in the centre of Nottingham. Denied the ability to talk about our experience or to earn a living, we spent our time cooped up drinking tea and sharing battered copies of the Metro. Boredom formed a good part of the early part of our detention. Some of the group audibly aired their disquiet in grumbles and mild huffs, while others simply seethed and dreamt of the world outside. The 2nd part of this seemingly pointless denial of liberty was suddenly more exciting and rewarding. 12 people were selected myself included to sit in a courtroom and pass judgement on a youth who had been accused of both possessing and discharging a firearm.

I am of course talking about jury service, an experience which left an indelible mark on me. An experience that restored my belief in the power of collective human decision making. Despite the disparate nature of my cohort - in age, background and gender, a certain spirit was conjured amongst those people in the room. A belief that we as a group had to rise to a challenge and do our best to work with the evidence in front of us. Although the actual debating only lasted for about 30 minutes, it was clear that everyone in the room, despite an ocean between our individual viewpoints and experiences, was going to give the moment the seriousness it deserved. The chance union of strangers stuck in a room, was a powerful motivator. The decision we made although not unanimous on every point of detail, was fair and agreed universally.

In a talk by Kevin Slavin (co-founder of a game company called Area Code), he discusses luck and it’s role in society. He talks about how corporations and banks are increasingly opposed to luck, building ever more clever computer algorithms to combat risk and chance outcome. Systems now predict market behaviour and model future environments to exclude risky or unpredictable outcomes from all aspect of business and finance. 

We know of course that this is never totally possible. Human systems are by their very nature unpredictable and erratic. The crash of 2007 can be largely attributed to the hubristic reliance on computer modelling and automation in the banking system.

“. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.” 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Black Swan, suggests, The problem we have is that there is no way of knowing what we don't know. So we prepare for the unknown using what we know. As they often say of army generals: they are always preparing to fight the last war. The fact that people are buying badly written erotic novels in their droves, doesn't mean that everyone should start writing badly written erotic novels if they want to get rich. These things occur through the chance meeting of luck and opportunity.

Luck is an incredibly powerful factor in our lives that we tend to ignore, because it is something we can’t engineer or insure. At birth luck plays the principle role in defining our opportunities in life. What family are we born into, in what country, and at what time. We have no control of this. It is the lottery of life. We then spend the rest of our lives trying to push against luck. In our individualist societies we self-help our way into understanding our compulsions and behaviours to dampen the bad ones and highlight the good. To change or improve our luck.

At the top of our societies luck is key to determining power structures. In relation to modern political institutions it seems the cards are stacked against us (to use a phrase borrowed from games of chance).

Do we ever get a candidate who comes close to representing our values?The electoral system favours those with power, money or both (in the form of a party machine) as campaigning is expensive. The cabinet of the current UK regime is largely composed of those who have all of the above by the lucky coincidence of their birth. Another factor that always loads the dice is best illustrated by a phrase my Dad often uses:

“The problem with politics is the people you really want to be politicians would never dream of becoming one.”

This in recent years has been increasingly highlighted by the rise of the political class. A small section of society who it seems see themselves as the gatekeepers of political thinking. The current assumption is that politics is something you can train for like accountancy or teaching. As a consequence it tends to attract those who see politics as a career path. Most of todays politicians have no experience of life outside of political lore. They assume politics is not really about people but about managing the expectations of voting units through think tanks and focus groups. 

One of the problems of the modern electoral process is that luck is fastidiously excoriated from the political landscape. Where once a politician might take a chance on an ideological standpoint and believe in their personal vision, now politicians look to sample the popular mood and tailor their policies to that mood. Once they have understood it they then try to influence it. We are stuck in a paralysis loop between what politicians think we feel, what the media wants us to feel, and what we actually feel about any given subject. Politics is a game of analytics and predicting public attitudes. The advent of social media has made public opinion ever easier to sample and tailor too. As a result we tend to get a politics that is populist not expert, knee-jerk not measured.

I would suggest that some of this comes from the very basis of meritocracy that dominates most capitalist democracies. We have built our societies around the notion that the people attain positions of influence through merit. That their qualities and abilities are what opens doors for them. But as we have already established this is not the case. The luck of birth and location play a much more significant role in defining our opportunities for influence in a society. The notion of meritocracy is a false one, when the equality of opportunity is so skewed towards a small minority.

The ancient Athenians selected their magistrates through a lottery, in fact a number of aspects of classical Greek politics employed a mix of election and sortition (random selection). Can luck play a part in modern societies institutions. It would certainly help on a number of levels. Firstly random selection means that there can be no bias because of existing opportunity. There is a level playing field. Anyone from any background, gender or race can be appointed. Secondly It would bypass the party political machine, personal responsibility/vision would trump party allegiance, and minority views  that are rarely heard in a two party hegemony could have a place. Thirdly it would also put a nail in the coffin of those who believe politics is a career rather than a calling or a duty, and lastly it would put political power into the hands of a wider cross-section. Improving peoples engagement with government, and a more horizontal exercise of power.

I am not saying that the roll of the dice is applicable in all instances. Some outcomes would be necessarily bad, but the current system can hardly be said to produce only good politicians. It could be introduced alongside elections.

The idea of a chance outcome is disturbing to most people because by it's very nature it tends to imply a lack of control and the strong chance of losing.  Also if you introduce chance, how is that randomness engineered. People will always want to game the system, in order to push the odds in their favour, tamper with the tools. But with the current model of democracy we see regular examples of election rigging and intimidation or bribery of voters. Every system will always have it's weakness.

Accidental politics could be an opportunity for everyone to be in it to win it. Could we harness the chaos that is so feared by the powerful to invoke something more equal and representative. Like the jury members maybe it's not experience or training that is essential, rather it is the opportunity and the responsibility that is required in order to shine a light on our creaking political structures.

Since writing the draft of this. I discovered a number of other useful links to sortition and randomness in politics:

Randomness in Politics by Lyn Carson, Brian Martin

Would democracies work better if politicians were selected at random? from iO9 by Lauren Davis (includes a link to a very mathematical paper on the benefits of sortition)

Improbable research: why random selection of MPs may be best  Marc Jacobs - The Guardian

[trickypath]

Comrade Facebook

A friend recently lost their mum to cancer. They posted this sad news on Facebook and people commented and sent condolences. The remarkable thing is that many people also "liked" this post. The Orwellian newspeak of Facebook allowed someone to like another person's death but for it to still carry the correct sentiment. The double plus good of social networking where nothing can exist outside of the positive projection of self.

This started a train of thought which has continued over the last few months with regard to the way our digital landscape is designed and the values that are inherent in the very tools we use everyday.

I make no bones about the fact that I am essentially a socialist in my outlook and I favour state intervention and involvement in the institutions that guarantee our liberties and promote equality. I believe strongly that societies are better and more productive when wages and opportunity are more fairly distributed amongst the population. Publicly accountable bodies are the bulwark against the privatisation of our very souls. I don't hold with the notion that socialism cannot be compatible with innovation in the digital age. After all the smartphone would not exist without state funded research- see the touch screen and GPS for details.

The notion that the technological success of a society is driven solely by market forces is a mis-representation of the truth. However this fallacy now governs the way we think about everything. The tools we use to communicate with others are defined by rules of the marketable self. The neo-liberal individualism is woven into the fabric of social networking. It promotes personal validation through the creation of a self image that we can market to others. Essentially it describes the individual as a business that has to promote itself to and negotiate with other selves/businesses. it also denies expression of other forms of societal thinking by breaking political discussion into outrage pieces and single issue rants, that become further means to define the values of the individual over the group. I can show how much I care about the rainforest or drilling in the arctic by showing my commitment to sign a petition. Genuine debate is subsumed by the status value of confirming a particular position on an issue.

Inevitability and political realism are the props that maintain the status quo even after the crash of 2007 neo-liberalism remains the only political paradigm available. Facebook in particular confirms the inevitability of neo-liberalism. A constant stream of call and response where the momentary validation of existence is the fleeting reward. We are locked into an algorithmically pre-defined way of expressing our relationship to each other and the world.

I won't deny that I use Facebook and so do most of my friends and family and I am a sucker for it's various ways of transfixing me, connecting me to people and providing endless reasons for task avoidance. I just feel that we all deserve a social network and infrastructure that is better and allows for us to count our friends on the basis of what they can do as group as much as individuals. I want to think of a digital landscape that is built with frameworks that engender cooperation and anonymity as much as self exposure. Over the coming weeks and months I hope to explore what this might look like. Join me sisters and brothers in project Comrade Facebook.

[trickypath]

Pity the Prophet

You voice an opinion a good and valid opinion. That opinion is noticed, some people share it and comment favourably. You always thought you were intelligent, people had said it to you before, friends and family, but a lack of success in recent years has made you reticent to air your thoughts. A new found confidence makes you draft a proposal that draws on key points of that original opinion. You think this proposal is crystal clear and incisive. You are fired up by the convictions you have laid out. you share it widely and people listen. You seduce others with words and the force of your charismatic self belief. Once you have the undivided attention of a set of twitter followers you feel uplifted enough to face a room of people who laugh at the funny bits and scrawl notes during the salient ones. Now you have created a pact with them, you have the gift to provide insight and inspiration.

As this following grows it is then beholden on you to continue to provide the goods. More people are buying into this concept and it starts to get attention from the outside world. Pressure is put upon you the creator to verify your beliefs and to prove that you are not misleading the people with false claims. 

Meanwhile you - "the leader" (you have now been given this title by your followers) is feeling the stress. You have doubts about your original findings and belief system, but now you have recruited a lot of followers some of which will be totally sold on the idea because it has provided the answer to their: divorce, bereavement, low self-esteem, illness, boredom and any number of other existential traumas that seem to be resolved by the simple clarity of your idea. Now they are committed with both their body and their soul.

You are 10 months in, you have turned your beliefs into products that you are now selling to some success. After all you need an income stream, the demands of your followers require that you do this full time now. As a consequence many of the followers will now have a financial stake in the values of the movement. This provides added pressure as these thoughts now have material value, they need a support line, frequent upgrades, new editions and product lines so you are now under the yolk of your creation. 

The "body and soul" element of the group are emotionally fragile, they are sensitive and vulnerable and will look to you as a parent figure or a lover to guide them in all aspects of life, way beyond the original simple message that you established at the outset. They want answers and they want them now. You have a number of misjudged relationships with the most attractive members of this group. They always leave you feeling empty and hollow because they don’t really want you. These frantic acts of intimacy leave the feeling they are consuming you to get to what you represent.

This elite subgroup contains a percentage of people who are psychologically disturbed. These people prey on the vulnerable and they know exactly what organisations are likely to contain vulnerable and suggestible people - your kind of organisation. These people rise through the ranks because they are cunning and they know how to influence and curry favour. Some just appear overnight, create chaos and friction, and leave as quickly as they came, But one morning you wake up and discover your right hand man is a psychopath but at this point you find it almost impossible to distance yourself from them because they have built the whole hierarchy of the movement around you and them. You sit at the head of the table at a board meeting but you know it’s only for show.

Your movement now has many followers, customers and advocates, numbering in the thousands. This has awakened the interest of the national media and government institutions. They start to cut right into the heart of your movement questioning the legality/effectiveness of the services you provide, casting doubt over the reputation of many of your members, especially the highest ranking ones.

You prey to the old god for some guidance, the one you abandoned all those years ago. In your heart of hearts you suspect that what was a seductive idea a few years ago has now given birth to a lot of half-baked even potentially dangerous children. In the form of over priced products, dubious methods, seminars and books. But even if you aired these opinions no one would be interested, because the highest echelons of your organisation are all in the employ of the idea, and as a consequence too much is at stake. They have large houses now, big cars, second houses in exotic places. Whereas they were once marginalised for their unusual beliefs now they are enjoying the lifestyles of CEO's and at the heart of something amazing. Your right hand man has ruthlessly re-structured your movement into a highly lucrative business, where all the inner circle have new found feelings of self worth as organisers and influencers. 

A team of scientists/journalists/security service agents discover that most of the precepts of your movement are founded on a lie and as a consequence you are running an illegal operation. You know it is make or break time, and you think perhaps this is the time to come clean, and pay your dues. Perhaps you could set a precedent as the first leader of a controversial organisation to break with its founding principles and admit that it was a good idea to begin with but it's gone sour, regardless of the personal cost to yourself. But the ruling elite's ears are closed, they think this is just part of your creative flow and soon you will come to your senses perhaps these ramblings are the kernel of another profitable notion. They indulge you to your face but in back rooms they are hiring an army of high priced lawyers, bogus scientists, dodgy accountants, private detectives and yes men to counter the growing evidence that threatens the very foundations of the organisation you founded. 

Your right hand man unlike the rest of the inner circle is worried, he thinks your wavering suggests that this could be something systemic to the whole movement and he introduces a secret cabal dedicated to rooting out the rot within. 

You are increasingly distancing yourself from the whole thing. You spend most of your time alone in your rural retreat, you feel emasculated and helpless. Rumours of members and employees going missing is beginning to eat at you. What shred of humanity that is left in you is put to the task of finding the next breakthrough, something that will bring the organisation back to it's guiding principles. This is the only power left to you. Weeks pass and you spend your time looking through binoculars at binoculars watching you from the trees. You suspect the government or the major newspapers are involved. Some of the inner circle visit you, mainly to get you to sign contracts and orders. You are confused by the complexities surrounding the need for your signature but you sign anyway. They all seem to quote your maxims back at you to justify the necessary steps they are about to take. They use your words in ways that are beyond your original intention, but they are, nonetheless persuasive in their new use, so you acquiesce.

You are close to the edge now, you know it. This isolation is making you paranoid and more than anything else, lonely. You want some normality as you know your behaviour is getting more and more bizarre. You phone trusted showbiz friends late at night rambling about your new ideas. Unflattering pictures appear in a magazine and subsequently across the web - you are captured wandering in the middle if the night through the forest behind your home, naked and shouting, holding strange home made objects up to the stars.

You fear for your sanity but your followers interpret this as your breakthrough moment and the inner circle publicise this widely to the membership as a way to re-energise sales and ensure continued loyalty. Your behaviour acts as a magnate both to the media, who can't resist a story of an imploding figurehead - the once mentor of celebrities and the creator of a hit TV show. On the other side your followers see this as a sign, this is your rebirth signalled in this outpouring of odd rituals following a long bout of isolation. If it can happen to you then surely their chance of salvation is also at hand.

In a fog of despair you seek the guidance of one member of the organisation you trust. You once had a brief relationship with them in the early years and you both still value that time you had, they were the muse to much of your initial concepts. You tell them that you need to stop, that the organisation can run itself without you. You just want to go somewhere quietly, you don't want to make a fuss or to start anything new you just want to retire.

Your confidente after a week or so says they have spoken to others sympathetic to your plight and that they have agreed to help you to disappear.

They book a flight and arrange a new identity in a suitable country where it might be possible to hide a person wanted for possible tax evasion and embezzlement, not to mention a troubling sexual harassment case that feels as if it's been concocted to disgrace you. 

Your closest ally meets you at the airport to give you your tickets, you have a tearful farewell where they reaffirm their belief in you and the ideas you built your dreams on. But somehow you feel that someone may have got to them because the embrace is too long and the confessional too sincere to be true.

On the plane you recognise two men sat a few seats away. It takes most of the journey for their faces to dawn on you. You had seen your right hand man on a few occasion with a small group of glassy eyed youths. Sometimes driving his car or talking with him in his office. You know this could be a coincidence but somehow you doubt it.

You arrive at the house your friends have arranged for you in your adopted country. It's a little small and not what you have become accustomed to, you dwell on the feelings of loss and how you can possibly emerge from this.

But a few months pass and you settle into your new home. You make friends with neighbours and colleagues at a college where you are teaching English. You like the rapt attention you get in classrooms. All of this despite dizzy spells and occasional stomach pains which you put down to the change of lifestyle and effects of the move. 

It is only when these pains become so bad one night you fall in the hall and grab your mobile to call a friend. It is while waiting for them to arrive you receive a text message.

You open it between excruciating waves of pain, the number is unfamiliar but you recognise the tone of the words. Your right hand man writes:

"No person is bigger than the idea, you are only the vehicle for the idea. Your absence only confirms this. Your leaving has only served to make the idea stronger. But for many you are still the initiator, the font of everything. We realise this and only one thing will make it possible for the membership to move on. You need to vacate your material self and move on to where legends are born. We know you would want to make the sacrifice but the flesh is often weak and so we have helped you along that path. People will suspect foul play and we expected this. People will assume your death is part of a plot and so your martyrdom will be assured. The idea will be intact, you died in the wilderness your second great notion undisclosed. People will wonder forever what it was you were devising, what you had discovered and so the original idea will live on immortalised by a new idea that will never see the light of day. People will quest to enter your mind to follow your path to enlightenment and so it will live on forever a mystery, but I am here to guide them onwards. Your trust in me was well placed. We love you. Goodbye old friend."

You struggle to find the energy to be astounded but even if you weren't on your mortal last, you are unsurprised by this treachery. You are despite all the violent chemical reactions happening in your body, totally accepting and now at last there is no more weight of responsibility, and it is only now that you have your final vision a small and inconsequential one and you are glad beyond terrestrial knowing that you will never share it with another human being.

[trickypath]

Monster Santo

Monsanto is the devil in waiting. A giant multinational behemoth pulling the strings of nature and commerce behind our backs. For eco activists, anti-capitalists and an increasing number of farmers it represents the beginning of the end for the freedom to grow/breed and distribute our own produce and livestock. Monsanto it seems is hellbent on re-packaging the very building blocks of life on this planet, copyrighting it and selling it back to us. It is chilling that this can continue without recourse to some form of larger public platform to debate the ethics, don't we all need to engage with the future of Nature a little bit more before someone puts it behind the barbed wire fence of law and out of our reach.

Monsanto have recently won a court case against an Indiana farmer who could not use patented genetically modified soybeans to create new seeds without paying the company. 

"In an unanimous ruling written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court ruled that the farmer, Vernon Bowman, had infringed on Monsanto's patent for its GM soybeans when he bought some of those seeds from a local grain elevator and planted them for a second, late-season crop. Monsanto sued, arguing that Bowman had signed a contract when he initially bought the Roundup Ready soybeans in the spring, agreeing not to save any of the harvest for replanting. The seeds are genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup Ready weedkiller." from the Guardian

What seems to be the most alarming is not that a company would sue a customer who infringed their copyright, this is standard practice when applied to business law (I can't dispute the right to protect an invention from exploitation by a third party) but that the very thing that Monsanto want copyright of is something that has been cast into the wind. Can Monsanto honestly claim to own every future generation of crop that emerges from the plants their seeds were the germ for? This precedent starts the economic colonisation of every living entity on the planet. You can start to imagine a situation similar to the one in Bladerunner where the smallest part of a snake is identified by the stamp of it's maker.

This may not yet exist as a means for companies to copyright stamp all their biotech products, but the technology to make it happen does.

If every biological entity is then stamped with the genetic corporation that applied some adaption to it then you start to wonder how long before we get charged for terrestrial oxygen.

What these companies want to do is deny the power of natural selection and evolution. Nature causes natural mutations with each generation. Every time a seed is germinated or gestated the new outcome will have differences and, is therefore, not an exact replica of the parent. It becomes very difficult, in my mind, to see how a company like Monsanto can lay claim to all the future generations of the seed after nature has already started mutating it in the ground. The infinitely complex interactions that happen with the process of life cannot be ring fenced into zones of individual ownership. It is the arrogance of agri-business to think that it can control and harness these forces and therefore exclude others from adapting nature themselves.

Corporate justification for crushing others businesses and individuals is often stated as simply "survival of the fittest". As if their domination of a market is somehow synonymous with the processes of evolution. This chest beating misses the key factor of evolution - it is about change and adaptation. The lion appears at the head of the food chain, the fittest and the strongest. However this position is the most precarious, any change in the bigger system has a massive effect on the likelihood of the lions survival. The lion like everything else including it's prey and the plants they feed on, has to change to survive. Monsanto by being the creator of the biggest pesticide product "Round Up" and being the modifier of strains of seeds that are pesticide resistant thinks that is can close that loop. Create a nature that is completely within it's copyright jurisdiction - a self replicating virtuous circle where all the profits are theirs. Essentially these companies want to deny competitiveness and like all big business create "monopolies by another name" and impose trade protectionism on biological diversity. 

This cannot be permitted whether you are an eco warrior or a capitalist entrepreneur. Big GM business must be made to ride the rough seas of the real market. Having spent most of my adult life in the creative industries where the business landscape is in continuous flux. Musicians can't make sales from individual records anymore, films suffer a similar fate with unregulated internet downloads and gamers demand computer games for free. In this environment people are learning to find new ways to attract people to their offering and make a living. This state of affairs is coming to every business near you. If the Monsanto's of this world can't make good enough products in the first place that they expect returns on every re-sale of it, then they are missing the point. Car manufacturer's don't demand a share of the profits every time a second hand car is sold, and a rock singer is lucky to make a living from a live gig, because they will see little back from those who possess their music.

However much as I am disturbed by the readiness of American courts to rule in favour of Monsanto. I cannot completely rule out the benefits that bio-engineering may bring us in the future. Just because you don't like your doctor does that make all medicine suspect? I feel that there are many potentials that will and are being explored, most with a view to a profit but some with wider societal benefits too. A new company has engineered bacteria that produce diesel as a byproduct. The only additional ingredient is sunlight. Doesn't this offer a potential to take pressure of land and sea for fuel production? I think food production is the most controversial of these areas of exploration as it seems that companies like Monsanto are over engineering the solution when the problem is more straight forward but less dazzling. Up to 40% of our food is wasted in production, storage and retail. We need to focus our attentions on the way food is delivered from the field to the plate. But as is the way with much governmental decision making, wealthy soothsayers of the new technocracy shout louder than the bin men.