ritalin foibles

08.01.2012

So, it’s been a over a month of almost total inactivity on here, for which there are several reasons.

Chief among them that I have been engaged in the process of acquiring a new job. Fortunately with success.

So as of the 23rd of January I shall be living and working in Amsterdam. Which is pretty exciting. I’m looking forward to going and working with some of the best people in the industry, at one of the best agencies in the industry, on some of the most interesting and engaged clients in the industry, in an entirely new country.

There are various obstacles to surmount like finding somewhere to live, figuring out how to transport the more key of my belongings to another country, opening a bank account etc but right now those seem more like fun things than irksome things. Certainly being able to stick two fingers up at the greedy fucking landlord in London was quite gratifying.

So I’ve lived in London for 12 years now. I moved down for Uni at the tender age of 18 (such a distant memory!) and have been here ever since. Pretty much the second I could I was straight out of the countryside and in some kind of maniac youthful logic simply picked the place that looked the most different and interesting and challenging – London – and I was off. Twelve years later and the time has come to do something new, something a bit different, for a challenge of a slightly different order than just wheeling across town to another agency and another set of clients.

I leave in London lots of friends, good friends, great friends, friends with benefits, and super special best friends. I will miss all of them. At the same time, Amsterdam is but an hours flight away so it’s not as if I am upping sticks to the other end of the world. Trips, I hope, will be frequent and in both directions.

So it feels like a grand adventure, a new time when anything will be possible, new friendships will be made, new experiences had, new places visited and gatherings attended. I don’t really know what will happen next but I do know that I am in motion and that that is exciting. The last few weeks have been a torrent of activity, of backwards and forwards, of up and down, who knows where it will all wash out but one thing I do know, I’m looking forward to finding out.

Having read East of Eden and finding it enthralling I recently picked up a copy of his “undisputed masterpiece” (backpage hyperbole) and gave it a bloody good reading. I have to admit my first impression post completion is that it didn’t feel quite as gargantuan as East of Eden. I have been mulling as to why and there are a couple of things that strike me.

The first is that much of the dialogue in Grapes is written phonetically (if that’s the correct term?). In other words, the characters say things like “fambly” and “somepin”. They are poor, uneducated farmers, which is not to say that they’re stupid, and the dialogue is faithful to the manner in which they would talk. Somehow to me that gave Steinbeck less room for conveying the poetry and profundity of which he is so capable. It would be in the intros and outros to chapters that he seems to consciously write what he really wanted to say, and not with the unfolding narrative story, harrowing though that was.

My second abiding impression is one of continual gradual descent. The family Joad are powerless before the force of horrible economic inevitability. They must suffer on the long march of “progress” – they no longer have a place in the overarching schema of mass ownership, efficiencies of production and the concentration of ever increasing wealth in ever decreasing hands. It is to this background that the family Joad are framed, and theirs is a harrowing story of the lengths to which people will go when they are hungry.

Steinbeck deliberately ends on a harrowing note, and I admire him for this. How much easier, and weaker, it would have been to end on a moralistic note, to damn the forces that he plainly despises and to paint a picture of human triumph in adversity.

In parts the book felt like it reached the high notes of East of Eden but I do feel that these were largely confined to the sections in which Steinbeck was narrating rather than providing prose for his characters.  Overall I’d definitely recommend the book, but if you haven’t read any Steinbeck, make sure you read East of Eden too.

Not part of the DJHistory reading project

This book rather did what it said on the tin.

A crime caper, conflicting accounts, a confusing riddle for the police, eventual resolution of the complications, lots of great dialogue and a very convincing rendition of street slang and cop chatter.

Not much more to say than that. I found it a compulsive read and finished it in about two days by virtue of being in the mounatins without any kind of electronic distraction.

Part of the DJHistory reading project

Continuing my fascination with savants

I read this in Little White Lies and thought it was wonderful so I’m keeping it here for posterity

Question:

What do you love about movies?

Answer:

“Oh my gosh….you know, I love when you go to the cinema and the lights go down and you’re with an audience, but you’re not talking to each other, and a story plays out and it enters you, and for this period of time you forget yourself. You forget the period of time you’re in, you forget all of it and you surrender yourself to someone else’s point of view.

You’re profoundly, deeply moved, and you’re connected to yourself and you’re connected to everyone else in that audience and you’re connected to all the filmmakers behind it. Something about that experience, when it’s done really well, can be intoxicating. A great movie reaches out to you in that void and grabs your hand and reassures you that you’re not alone.I guess that’s what we all want really – to feel like we’re somehow not alone. A good movie can make that happen, or make the loneliness more bearable, maybe.”

Do you think art can change the world? Why?

Yes. Art is the peoples’ politics. It gives everyone a voice: both the artist and the viewer. It provides the opportunity for a communal experience, and anytime strangers are brought together to experience something, discourse occurs and diversity of thought is encouraged. This is the definition of a true democracy. Movements and revolutions are begun by someone speaking up, whether verbally or visually. Sometimes you can’t give a public speech to protest against injustices, but you can create something that speaks even louder, moves even more people, transgresses language barriers, can’t be stopped and doesn’t need a permit to exist. People are put off by political parties, the class system, governmental alliances, religion, all of the things that separate us and differentiate us and divide us from being one race. Art asks, not dictates. All people need to unite is one person to start. That is the essence of change: unity.

From here

For the first time ever, a guest post! The wonderful piece below is penned by Flo Sharp, a planner that I work with @Weapon7

Curious Nation
I recently stumbled across this blog by Duncan Bloor, an internet researcher for the BBC, who finds out what people search for on the internet in order to produce better content for the channel. He’s turned the odds and ends of his research into enlightening data visualisations, such as this one which illustrates the most popular food searches throughout the year:

Aside from a film which visualised the spread of interest in cupcakes across the planet, I found the infographic that visualises the nation’s most popular search enquiries particularly enlightening, not to say touching. I’m not entirely sure why, but for some reason it made me feel really quite good humoured towards Britons, and humans in general. We’re so curious! We’re desperate to find out more about the world around us, about science, nature, our health, food, history and (very high up in our collective national inquisition,) gardening. We’re obsessed with horticulture. Gardening is the most highly searched genre after food, and within that, lawns and potatoes are big news. Seeing as my tangible world sadly consists mostly of screens, wires and keypads, during the week and on the weekend, I find it very refreshing that a vast number of people still care about cultivating and interacting with the beautiful botanical world around them. To this end, ‘nature’ as a genre is also high up on our list of interests as a nation. Within that Birds are extremely popular.

Within the science genre, our most burning question is ‘Why is the sky blue?’ People are watching the world and wondering…and then searching for the answer. ‘Why is this like that?’, ‘What happens when you die?’, ‘When will the world end?’, ‘How big is the Universe?’ These questions aren’t new; they’re as old as the sun, and far older than the internet itself. And yet, we are now relying on the internet to tell us the answer. The internet is our wise old owl, our local sage, the parish priest, the Philosopher in Chief.

Aside from showing us that British people have a rather obsessive interest in flower shows, birds and moths, these infographics also shed a lot of light on our complex, highly emotional relationship with the World Wide Web. We expect it to answer our questions, to solve our problems, to relieve our anxieties, to fill in the gaps. And whereas before, we might have given up a fruitless enquiry between two friends about some fact that neither can quite remember, now there’s no excuse not to find out. The internet will tell you, and the internet is nearly always within reach. Like a little wise man sitting on your shoulder. God, what would we do without the internet? Garden?

I’ve had this conversation a few times recently, with very different friends.

All were thinking in variations of buying some land somewhere out of the way, becoming largely self-sufficient and weathering out an indistinct but worrying future.

I’m pondering whether this is attention bias, a sign of something to come, a feeling of something deeper happening in society than we’re not quite prepared for, or whether it’s just a sign that me and my friends are getting older and starting to become disillusioned with the big city life. Or a bit of all three.

Adam Curtis does some really interesting stuff on communes in his three part series The Trap. He describes how quite quickly most communes fail because the inter-personal dynamics that appear to be embedded in humans always destroy the ideals of flat structure living, free from the constraints of mainstream society.

Still, if the implications of peak oil come to pass, if what seems to be looming over the Eurozone happens, if global capitalism continues to shudder and creak and if environmental devastation continues unabated then you have to wonder how much longer our assumed way of life will be tenable.

So we’re halfway through the IPA Excellence Diploma so I thought I’d jot down some thoughts as a note to self on the experience so far.

My desk at home looks similar.

Topline stuff – the course is a fantastic opportunity to step back, reflect, do an absolute shit-ton of reading from some of the people who actually understand how this stuff (communications) really works, and to take the time to try and work out what the hell you believe yourself about how this stuff actually works.

You also get exposed to some of the best minds in the business, and you get to meet the very brightest of your peers, which is pretty damn interesting. Unless you let them start talking about X Factor after several pints of Old Rosie down the Green Man. That’s pretty excruciating, but we’ll leave that one there.

The course is six modules spanning how brands work, covering everything from what they actually are, and are becoming, how we measure them, how they work with channels, how creativity works to build brands and so on. Thus far the reading lists have varied wildly in relevance, “interestingness” and style. But that’s subjective, one man’s muck etc.

One thing that’s caused plenty of debate is the marking structure for the essays we have to produce – 30% of the marks go to “originality”. The reason this causes plenty of debate is because originality as a concept is so subjective. One man’s original is another’s well trodden ground.

And that’s a real tension. On the one hand this course is an incredible opportunity to take some time out from the pressures of everyday working and to get to grips with how communications actually works, something that our industry betrays a real lack of knowledge of all too often. Getting to the bottom of a lot of that stuff has been a brilliant opportunity, but when it comes to putting your thoughts down on paper all too often it seems to get lost.

You can spend an age torturing yourself trying to create something that you deem “original”, something that is necessarily subjective. Depending upon your background, interests, what you do and don’t do, your concept of originality will vary wildly. A technology lead piece, for example, could seem wildly original and different to someone who knows little of technology, yet at the same time appear well trodden ground to the technology enthusiast.

The other thing a focus on “originality” brings is a tendency to abandon the nuts and bolts of how you think things work in favour of writing something that you don’t have much time for day to day but does feel original and different.

All that said, it makes sense to find a way to push us to each do something different, to find ways to force us to explore what we think, to try and think of new and different ways for how things could and should be done.

If the course were simply about being right then the examiners would get a load of identikit essays, and that wouldn’t be much fun to read, and we would not have enjoyed the opportunity to really push a piece of thinking, to really try and develop an idea from a brief thought into a fully functioning essay length piece.

So I guess taking stock at the halfway point I have to say that I’m still absolutely loving this course. Despite turning over an entire weekend every 6 weeks plus countless evenings, snatched hours and general lengthy labour, I can still safely say the course is the best thing I’ve done through work.

I’m already seeing the tangible benefits day to day. Thinking I’ve picked up from the course has seeped into a couple of pitches, strategy pieces and so on. I now have a point of view on most things, and when you work in an industry with a huge ignorance of how things actually work and plenty of people happy to pile in with an opinion and a bucketload of misplaced confidence, having a point of view that you can assert and sustain is invaluable.

I’ve also met some amazingly smart people whose careers I’m looking forward to following and whose opinions I can now count on to help with any questions I have. I’m hoping some of them leave their thoughts thus far below..

A comment at a dinner party (they’ve started happening) that bowled me over.

I’m fairly well versed in people rolling their eyes at you when discussing why you’re not on Facebook. Reactions range from you’re being a stick in the mud to not seeing the harm to the occasional murmur of agreement. But this was the first time I’d heard such a sentiment.

It’s pretty remarkable that a company can develop an idea, platform, proposition, piece of software, however you want to describe it, that can become so firmly embedded in the culture and into individual psyches that you can now be ascribed “other” for not participating.

You’re not just opting out of doing something; you’re violating some kind of psychosocial status quo.

It’s interesting that Zuckerberg’s mission of total transparency, of lives lived entirely in public that I’d always assumed was a piece of personal propaganda, a personal mission that was best treated as quaint, should find a foothold in the chattering classes. The person who said this did so without guile, without a specific sense of admonishment, more as a statement of fact.

So a program designed ostensibly to connect people has become some sort of standard, a type of default mode.

The order of things now is that to have a Facebook account is the default setting, to not have a Facebook account is now an aberration, a specific and intentioned step out of the natural order of things. If you’re interested in culture, power and how we order ourselves, that’s significant. If the greatest instrument of power ever invented is our how our own minds act over ourselves, then Facebook is more important than I already thought.

Weatherall gives a fascinating insight into his work in the video at the bottom – one comment in particular caught my attention as it echoes something I’ve long thought and it’s nice when people like him come along and remind you it’s ok to think whatever it is you think. (Or maybe I’ve just experienced some very satisfying confirmation bias)

Weatherall came to mainstream attention through his work as producer on early Primal Scream stuff, notably Screamadelica. He was well known before that as a very talented remixer, as shown by his remix of one of his own pieces of work – a million times better than the original to someone like me with a bit of a penchant for a 4/4 beat and a big bassline. (Bass drop at 3.40 is a key milestone in my journey through electronic music)

Anyway, he talks about some of his early remix work and references his interest in the mistakes on the original tapes of live recordings that he would be given to work from. It was in these mistakes that he would find the inspiration for the subsequent remix. In those pre-digital days DAT’s containing all the source recordings would be sent to him with stickers saying “do not use” on the parts containing mistakes, and it was to these sections that he would go first.

Specifically he says:

“I’ve always loved mistakes, they’re always a good way in…..the hidden beauty of things, in all art, are the little mistakes”

Which is something I’ve thought for a while – I’d become convinced of this from the time I’ve spent spannering records together in various poorly executed forms. The problem with so much electronic music these days is that it’s so formulaic, it’s music made to a template with an unconscious recognition of rules. This breakdown must go here, this intro must be this long and so on. The result for a lot of music (not all of course) is that it’s lost a lot of it’s humanity.

The same thing has bled into the DJ mix.

Any cursory trip around Soundcloud will throw up tons and tons of mixes – all perfectly beat-matched, all completely metronomic, all fairly soulless. Now that computers can do the heavy lifting of beat matching (getting two tracks to play at the same speed) what I see as an essential part of the joy of a DJ mix, I.E. the humanity of it, has gone.

I’ve banged on about this before, ironically enough in a post which featured Weatherall again so perhaps that there is indeed a good bit of confirmation bias.

So what we end up with are a load of identikit mixes that proceed unerringly from one track to the other with no correction, no adjustment, no tangible physical interaction and, of course, no mistakes.

Another thing he says:

“When things are too perfect they can be a little off putting…. the art I like whether it’s painting or books always have a weird little thing in there that shouldn’t be happening”

There’s something important in here but I’ve had such a big weekend I can’t quite get to it. I’m sure of it because I keep coming back to this subject and keep thinking the same things. It’s not so much about being against technology per se, which I’m palpably not, but I think it’s something along the lines of the stuff Jaron Lanier says about making ourselves stupid to accommodate our stupid machines. Maybe here we’re making ourselves a bit more soulless to accommodate our soulless machines.

Anyway here’s the full talk:

Lecture: Andrew Weatherall (Madrid 2011) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

SCRIBD version below, for the blog post version just keep scrolling

Towards a Humanistic Technology – Adam Curtis on Storytelling, Power and Naivety

“The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.”

- Camus

INTRO

Adam Curtis, who I’m faintly obsessed with, gave a talk at the Storythings event in London a couple of months ago. That talk is now available for all and sundry to download and listen to here (check out the rest of the blog, lots of fascinating stuff on there).

The talk is, true to form, eviscerating, thought provoking, spiky and pretty much a massive kick up the arse and call to arms.

As usual he weaves together several themes, his key message being that the stories we’ve told on and about the internet have been hopelessly naive. We’ve collectively fallen for the fallacy that the internet is a “utopian paradise where we are all neutral nodes in an impartial network, free to express ourselves to our heart’s content”, and our stories have suffered for it.

Curtis’s other main theme is the collapse of the grand narrative or, as he puts it, “we no longer trust the stories that the mainstream media are telling us…they don’t quite add up” and in turning away from the official versions of events we’re casting around for alternative ways of telling the stories of our time and as a result “The only thing we can latch onto and feel is real is the raw data of our own experience.”

In other words we’re indulging in an orgiastic individualism, something Curtis calls “The true realism of our time – emotional realism”

I’m interested in wondering about how we join these things up – what’s the interplay between dominant ideologies of our time such as emotional realism, the showcasing of the phenomenon online and how this ties in to the inter-relation of power and technology?

This piece of writing from an enthusiastic amateur has spiralled out of control somewhat but broadly this piece deals with the politics of technology as I understand them. I’m interested, like Curtis, in the interplay between us, the culture we generate and the technology that intertwines itself with that process.

Where Curtis becomes brilliantly prescient is in his analysis of the interplay between power writ large and power writ little. Or, in other words, power that works at the level we’re familiar with – guns, missiles, infrastructure, trading agreements and so on, and power that exists at the daily level: how we think of ourselves, what our personal ideologies look like, how we construct the stories of our lives.

Edit – I’ve split the whole thing I originally wrote in two – this piece is about technology, power and culture (in two parts). The second piece (coming soon) will be on the internet, power and storytelling.

PART ONE – POWER WRIT LARGE

In his talk Curtis attacks the naivety with which we have thought about the web, piling scorn on the utopianists of 1990’s Silicon Valley who “took us up the wrong road when they thought this was a new world.” As elaborated in his documentaries such as all watched over by machines of loving grace Curtis points to a cabal of Utopians who envision in our new networking technologies a revolutionary potential that will transform our society.

Their thinking is that with a hitherto unprecedented level of connectivity must come deepened understanding and thus empathy, collectivism and a new way of organising and living. A utopia. This is a philosophy writ little and large – as individuals we will be forever connected – a connection which can’t help but foment a transformed society.

Still today we see this philosophy put forward in various different guises by big people, important people, people that we trust to tell us what is going on with this nexus of technology and humanity. People like Jeff Jarvis who, for those that like to follow these things (me), has recently become embroiled in a huge bitch off with Evgeny Morozov who has had the temerity to take Jarvis to task and attempt to pretty much dismantle the thesis in his new book.

This is a massive simplification and if you want to see for yourself then go here or here. Jarvis sees technology as a motivation-free set of tools – it is up to us to decide how to use them, whether to bend them toward good or, less good. And the possibilities that he sees when we bend them to the good, are very good indeed – so good that they can change the way we live, behave and think, (for the better).

Kevin Kelly is another person that sees the revolutionary potential of our technology.

An immensely gifted writer and someone whose views on technology I consider essential reading, Kelly has written pieces such as this (that Curtis is referencing when he talks of “hopeless naivety”).

In such writing Kelly sees in the machine network the beginning of vast and deep social change. The collectivism of the web, Kelly argues, cannot fail to bleed into life offline. For him it is an obvious and inevitable step from sharing, storytelling, myth-making in an egalitarian online polity, to that modality of politics and economics subsuming or evolving the political and economic structures of the offline world.

As Kelly puts it “While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state”. And this: “The new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.”

Curtis cuts, fairly brutally, through this kind of thinking (and I’m guilty of thinking like this myself, even in writing the paragraph above it occurred to me how easily it all tripped off the keyboard, as if you’re rehearsing or repeating a well trodden mantra, a mantra that feels comforting and familiar). For Curtis this is little short of fantasy.

He argues the internet is absolutely embedded into a pre-existing power structure, to ignore or not recognise this is to delude ourselves.

In other words the mistake I think people like Kelly make is to de-contextualise technology. They see a linear connection between the development of technology and the progressive development of society.  By doing so the revolutionary potential of network technology comes to be “baked in” and starts being taken as read. Thus we can arrive at a situation whereby technology inevitably equals progress, more technology becomes an obviously good thing, a supposition that is to my mind rather dangerous. Dangerous in that we have left the people part of the equation somewhat behind.

So Curtis is finally articulating the rising anger I inexplicably feel when reading social media gurus like Brian Solis banging on about social media revolutions and that nothing will ever be the same again, history has basically ended and consumer conversations are everything and on and on and on.

But what is changing in the real world? Are these gurus guilty of talking up a revolution that exists in a goldfish bowl? Are the power structures that exist, from military industrial complexes right down to how we feel about ourselves, changing?

It seems to me that if anything power is becoming more embedded with elites (see this Economist report), the disparity between the rich and the poor is becoming more stark (see this LSE report on Britain’s declining social mobility) and individually we are less and less happy (see this piece of BBC research).

At this point you have to stop and wonder why? Why are all the major indices of power writ large still so badly imbalanced, so negative when we have these powerful technological forces at our disposal that were meant to emancipate, to transform society? That is a question I feel unqualified to answer, but here’s my guess. I think the answer is because our technology exists in a context. A context that is riven with deep and historical relationships of power. The mistake we made was to assume linearity, to assume a deterministic relationship between technology, progress and and societal change. We have conflated progression and development for the better. It is only us that can change society for the better, and the technology at our disposal to help do so does not come to us with a pre-embedded trajectory toward a better or more just or gentler society. I think.

So that’s a (very) brief look at how power is working on a grander scale, the grand narrative of a technology-fuelled revolution in societal structures looks a little hollow. But what of power on a more atomised and individual level? What has happened between people and technology?

PART TWO – POWER WRIT LITTLE 

I’m not going to talk about mobile phone leg twitch or contact lenses or other artefacts of technology that have dramatically affected our lives, because so much has been written about that already. I am interested, however, in how the internet is shaping how we think, behave and feel, and how we are shaping the form and content of the internet in return.

Douglas Rushkoff is currently talking about how we should program or we will be programmed.

He has spotted and started talking about the fact that all these digital tools that we’re using come with inbuilt biases embedded in the code of their software, and that if we don’t understand these biases (program), at least on some basic level, then those biases will begin to shape the way in which we think and behave (we will be programmed).

To say that “we will be programmed” is not necessarily meant in an authoritarian and deterministic manner, but in a much more subtle way. To take a glib example:

Facebook is a platform that you might not say is good or bad; it is just a tool that we use. But think how it’s programming biases affect the way in which information is organised and relayed to you the user (although really you’re the product on Facebook, not the user).

For example, the button for the promotion and sharing of content to your network is called a “like”. As Eli Pariser has pointed out, you are going to be hard pressed to “like” a news-story about, say, an Iranian woman being stoned to death, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

The dominant form of online expression in the developed West, if the decline in the number of people maintaining the blogs I have in my RSS reader is anything to go by, comes in a template.

The form of that template is something that, some argue, will seep into our representation and understanding of ourselves. This is something that Jaron Lanier talks about at length in “You are not a gadget”. It’s important, I think, to recognise that this is a form of power, a modality of power. Not in the top-down guns and police form of power that we’re familiar with, but a form of power nonetheless. Power that we inadvertently impose upon ourselves.

Mark Zuckerberg said when unveiling the new “timeline” in his last speech at F8 that “Facebook is now the perfect place to express who you are” whereas I would argue that he would have been more accurate to have said that “Facebook is now the perfect place to show people who you want to be”. Thus the narrative that is handed down to us about what we are, and what we are within – a culture, a society, a global planet, starts to be translated through the tools and templates we are given to establish that narrative – and that is a form of power.

So what Rushkoff has figured out (probably knew from the start) is really the very same thing Curtis is talking about, that our technologies are embedded in, reflective of and constituted by radii of power. If we do not understand or, at the very least, recognise these radii of power then we are doing ourselves a disservice.

Summary

I’ve tried to figure out what I’m trying to say here. I started typing simply because I was so excited by Curtis’s talk. I think that broadly I’m trying to say that our technologies are not neutral, they must become what we want and need them to be, and they will not do that of their own accord. A conception of a humanistic technology is vital and should be pursued. Technology for technology’s sake is not an a priori good or useful idea.

Secondly, power operates at all sorts of levels, from the most abstract and impersonal to the most local and personal. At the personal and emotional level technology has infiltrated our lives, and this is not a neutral process. We need to be aware and of and think about how technology operates with the radii of power that we allow into our most personal moments, our ways of thinking, our ideologies and our feelings.

I’m not saying it’s bad, just that we need to be conscious of what’s happening, and think about how we want to mediate that relationship so that technology is something beneficial for us as sentient and feeling people and not, as Lanier says, “make ourselves stupid to accommodate our stupid machines.”

You made it to the end! Amazing! I would love comments, thoughts, suggestions for further reading and so on..

This was a stunning, muscular book. Written with wonderfully economic prose, the whole thing feels massive, titanic, properly expansive in ambition and execution.

The story is, broadly speaking, a chronicle of a country and its people (specifically the generations of two families) living through profound change, but keeping their values and family bonds intact.

I think this is my new “favourite book I’ve ever read“. Strangely I started and put down the book several times, seemingly unable to make it past the first chapter. The rewards for doing so were, however, immense. Something about Steinbeck’s perfect prose, the emotional and psychogeographical scope of the book and his occasional wide-ranging observational pieces add up to a monumental achievement.

There’s been reams of stuff written on the book so I’ll leave it at that, suffice to say this is an awe inspiring achievement, perhaps one of the few things that, along with sunsets and mountains properly deserves the word epic. I’ve already badgered at least three people into buying this book, you should too.

Part of the DJ History reading project

Part of the brilliance of the film Inception is that it bears many possible interpretations.

There’s space in the narrative for we the viewers to insert our own interpretations. There are enough gaps that we may all construct similar-but-different arguments to explain what is happening, to explain what it’s all about.

The film ostensibly opens into reality aboard a Japanese train, but we really have no way of distinguishing whether this is actually another dream within a dream – is the whole film one big dream Cobb is having? We don’t know. What the film does give us, is a signifier of a personal reality – a totem.

Cobb’s is his wife’s spinning top, Ariadne’s a perfectly weighted chess piece.

That provokes the thought – what’s your totem?

What makes you think, as Leibniz asked,  that there is something rather than nothing?

How do we all know that we’re not dreaming? What signifier do we use to call into existence that which surrounds us and that we take for granted?

Perhaps it is our objective reality – that which we can see and observe and measure? Perhaps it is in other people? I exist because you exist? Perhaps it is our own inner voice? Our existence bequeathed to us by Descartes? Perhaps it is in our emotions and our feelings, I feel alive, therefore it is reasonable to assume that I am? maybe it is from without ourselves – we are part of something bigger and it is that structure of society, the universe, whatever, that calls into existence and affirms that which is all around us, and therefore my self?

Perhaps what is being stumbled around here is the process through which we find both existence then meaning in our lives.

This is a question I’m finding increasing baffling and increasingly interesting. Adam Curtis is talking a lot about this kind of thing at the moment. In online discourse he sees a startling naivety as to how we construct these stories of existence and meaning. For him such questions are intimately bound up with the question of power. By not acknowledging this or, perhaps even more worryingly, not even realising this, we are retreating into a particular type of individualism. Something he sees as being exemplified by how we currently talk about and use the internet. Everything becomes about how “I” feel, how “I” interpret the world, about how happy “I” am.

So, for Curtis, our society and ourselves have slid into a state of excessive individualism, our totems are our own feelings. But we forget that what has become our totem – our very own feelings – are bound up in a wider framework. How “I” define myself is highly mediated in our mass media technologised society. How I think I feel must be altered by such a 24/7 mass media world of rolling news, overnight celebrity and obsessive individualism (You can be famous! You deserve to be happy! You are unique and special! The explosion of the helpbook industry, the popularity of healing retreats where you can be pampered like the infantile inner you deserves and so on and on). What it means to be happy is changing, how we attain that happiness too is a process that we seem have changed.

See the graph, ponder its implications.

Let’s treat it at a superficial level – we’re reporting that we’re more lonely than ever before. Why might this be?

Presumably some degree of mobility has contributed – we’re more able to move to cities in pursuit of new opportunity and new lives. But maybe this new found proximity to so many of our fellow human beings can be terribly isolating? We’re working harder for longer, delaying starting families, so many people getting a late night tube home clutching a microwave meal for one and an expensive bottle of wine – we’ve earned it.

Our technology? Sherry Turkle has said that our technology leaves us “always connected, forever alone”. The plethora of weak connections replaces the small but deep network of localised relationships. Is the result that we have more friends than ever before but we’re actually less happy?

Our overall narrative? All around us systems that we placed our faith in appear to be breaking. The people that we put our faith in to try and deliver the best society for the most people are shown time and time again to be unworthy of that faith.

On that note perhaps we have changed how we define what it is to be happy? Something I’ve thought about before – the overall narrative arc of our society has become Americanised, has taken on the shape of the narrative of hyper-consumption. We have gone from being citizens to being consumers and in the process neglected our obligations to participate in the state and focused instead on our obligation to consume. All around us we have the really very nice baubles of this move, but perhaps it has come at the cost of our happiness?

Perhaps ultimately our totem always was and always must be our love.

Our ability to love and be loved.

Perhaps that is the one way in which we can transcend some of the forces that swirl around us. Certainly the way everything can seem so complex, so powerful, so uncontrollable, these are things that make us feel powerless and useless, disenfranchised. Curtis argues that things aren’t that way, that life is simply an accumulation of individual decisions that layer up to a complexity that we can find daunting, but that ultimately that is all they are.

So maybe, just maybe, all we need is love. Perhaps the Beatles were right. Maybe that’s our totem, that which calls into reality our existence, that which will see us through all the oncoming disasters, that will ultimately help us create the society we want, to have the relationships we need, to live a life we like.

PS. This rambling thing inspired by this interesting piece about Inception

(Note – this whole post is based off watching the documentary collapse. If you’ve seen it then you will know all this stuff, if you haven’t then definitely watch it, powerful film that will scare the living daylights out of you).

So, here’s an incredibly short list of a tiny fraction of the things that are made from oil:

Ammonia, Anaesthetics, Antihistamines, Artificial limbs, Artificial Turf, Antiseptics, Aspirin, Auto Parts, Awnings, Balloons, Ballpoint pens, Bandages, Beach Umbrellas, Boats, Cameras, Candles, Car Battery Cases, Carpets, Caulking, Combs, Cortisones, Cosmetics, Crayons, Credit Cards, Curtains, Deodorants, Detergents, Dice, Disposable Diapers, Dolls, Dyes, Eye Glasses, Electrical Wiring Insulation, Faucet Washers, Fishing Rods, Fishing Line, Fishing Lures, Food Preservatives, Food Packaging, Garden Hose, Glue, Hair Colouring, Hair Curlers, Hand Lotion, Hearing Aids, Heart Valves, Ink, Insect Repellant, Insecticides, Linoleum, Lip Stick, Milk Jugs, Nail Polish, Oil Filters, Panty Hose, Perfume, Petroleum Jelly, Rubber Cement, Rubbing Alcohol,  Shampoo, Shaving Cream, Shoes, Toothpaste, Trash Bags, Upholstery, Vitamin Capsules, Water Pipes, Yarn, Petrol for cars, Diesel for cars, lorries and ships, Aviation fuel for planes, Credit cards, Plastic bags, Hair brushes, Anti-freeze, Motorcycle Helmets, Carpets, Telephones, Brake fluid, Boats, Glue, Toilet Seats, Shampoo, Household paint, Detergent, Bowls, Fertiliser, Explosives, Car tyres, Artificial turf, Football boots, Lipstick, Weed killer, Parachutes, Umbrellas, Food wrappers, Shower curtains, Waterproof coats, Artifical limbs, Roads, Bubble wrap, Drinks bottles, Toothbrushes, Life jackets, Fishing line, Tennis rackets, Roller blades, Eye glasses, Lunch boxes, Flower pots, Toys, Car seats, Insulation, Nail polish, Hair spray, Medicines, Insect repellent, Golf balls

Now lets do a simple thought experiment – how do we get our food? What’s the process for something simple like a sweetcorn?

To get that sweetcorn into your mouth there’s a fairly specific process.

Under agribusiness a field is ploughed by a machine that runs on oil and is made using oil. Then another machine made from oil running on oil plants corns. Then another machine built using oil running on oil comes over and sprays the crops with pesticides (made from oil). When ready a whole host of made-from-oil-powered-by-oil combine harvesters reap the crop that is then placed into a packaging system built on oil based products and powered by oil based electricity sorts and wraps the corn with oil based plastic.

The wrapped and ready corn is then placed in an oil powered and made from oil truck and taken to a distribution warehouse that is fabricated from oil based components and maintained by oil based oil powered machines. From this distribution centre the corn goes on another oil based oil powered lorry and is taken to a supermarket built from oil based components and you push a trolley with an oil based plastic handle and oil based rubber wheels around the supermarket having arrived in your oil based and oil powered car and…

You get the picture.

The point is that oil is not an asbtract fossil fuel energy source that sooner or later we will need to wean ourselves off to ensure we can still generate power – oil is everything.

Oil literally is the consumerist society in which we live.

Mass production, the astonishingly powerful force that has furnished our developed Western society with such a material abundance of objects is simply a story of oil. Without oil it does not exist.

So it’s beholden on us to ponder, how much oil are we using? And how much is left?

Here’s a graph:

….Pretty impressive that one country consumes roughly the same amount of oil as an entire continent in a day….

So, we’re consuming, as a planet, just over 80 million barrels of oil per day. (stats valid as of 2006, which in itself is worrying as we will come to see).

It’s an obvious but pertinent observation to make that as countries develop their consumption of oil increases in tandem. The EIA is now predicting that the global consumption of oil will increase by 1,600,000 barrels per day.

To switch focus slightly and briefly, here’s another graph, this time world population over time:

And here’s a table – check out the growth rate percentages

Rank	Country	Population (thousands) 2010	Population (thousands) 1990	Growth (%) 1990-2010
	World	6 895 889	5 306 425	30.0%
1	China	1 341 335	1 145 195	17.1%
2	India	1 224 614	873 785	40.2%
3	United States	310 384	253 339	22.5%
4	Indonesia	239 871	184 346	30.1%
5	Brazil	194 946	149 650	30.3%
6	Pakistan	173 593	111 845	55.2%
7	Nigeria	158 423	97 552	62.4%
8	Bangladesh	148 692	105 256	41.3%
9	Russia	142 958	148 244	-3.6%
10	Japan	126 536	122 251	3.5%

This post is about peak oil – peak oil is the point at which we reach halfway in terms of the planet’s oil reserves. Once we reach peak oil we are only ever going to have less and less oil that will be harder and harder to get.

Given everything just covered – steady increases in global demand for oil as populations explode coupled with the understanding that our entire industrial and agricultural systems – our way of life in other words – is totally dependent upon oil for it’s continued existence means peak oil is something of paramount importance.

Running out of oil is not going to be good.

This is the Hubbert Peak Oil distribution graph – it was used to correctly predict the advent of peak oil between 1965 and 1970 in the US domestic reserves (I.E. When was it that the US would use up half the oil available in their territory). Although it looks like one this is not a Bell Curve - note the longer rate of decline.

So have we hit peak oil?

Some people say yes, we have.

The International Energy Agency says production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2006 (there are various other types of non pure oil that can, at great production expense, be refined into the right stuff).

The US Joint Forces Command has predicted we will reach peak oil in 2012.

Not only have we probably reached peak oil in terms of proven and predicted reserves, we actually reached peak oil per capita in 1975!

Of course the only time we will know for sure when we hit peak oil will be in retrospect, but it seems clear that it is a “my lifetime” issue.

That bears repeating as it’s such a terrifying fact – there is a reasonably broad consensus that we are right now straddling peak oil. The fundamental material that our transport, agricultural and industrial systems are wholesale reliant upon is now an only diminishing resource. Oil is set to become rarer and rarer, harder and harder to extract, more and more fought over.

From Wikipedia: “Of the largest 21 fields, at least 9 are in decline. In April 2006, a Saudi Aramco spokesman admitted that its mature fields are now declining at a rate of 8% per year (with a national composite decline of about 2%). This information has been used to argue that Ghawar, which is the largest oil field in the world and responsible for approximately half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production over the last 50 years, has peaked. The world’s second largest oil field, the Burgan field in Kuwait, entered decline in November 2005.

Here’s another graph charting all the predictions of world oil production from all the major global authorities:

So what happens when you transpose a graph showing an unprecedented global population explosion over a graph of predicted oil reserves and future production?

You get one pretty spectacular pinch-point.

When a planet obese with people of rapacious appetites runs dry of the fuel that has enabled that obesity, what will happen?

Well, we will lose a lot of weight.

The entire system of, well, just about everything, will grind to a halt.

Although it won’t  be a shuddering, jarring, halt – it will be a gradual disintegration.

One day bananas will simply stop appearing in supermarkets. Flights will diminish then stop altogether. The post will stop being delivered. Everything that you see around you will for all intents and purposes evaporate. Society as we know it will cease to exist.

It won’t look, however, like this (I don’t think)

Society will have to transform itself, but I don’t believe that means it has to degenerate into an everyman for himself race to the bottom.

Community will become even more important. Becoming sustainable will no longer be an ideal, it will be a pre-condition of existence.

Maybe we will have to make our own food “a return to the Earth”. Having almost finished East of Eden I’m feeling slightly romanticised toward that idyll of living on the land, becoming attuned to the seasons, to how nature works and what she provides. Although overly romanticising such a thing would be foolish – the rapid diminishing of oil has already led to one unnecessary war, how many more are in store?

There is always the viewpoint that peak oil is ultimately a good thing – it is one less way in which we can destroy our planet.

Certainly a lot of the things that we take for granted will suddenly become rare and precious and will be fought and died for.

I don’t know about you but my naive preconception was that fossil fuels were predominantly a concern of power generation and that as a species we would need to gradually wean ourselves off of them and gradually replace oil with alternative sources of power generation. It had not struck me how incredibly important oil is to what I suppose we should now call the artifice of developed industrial societies.

Oil is in everything, it powers everything, it constitutes everything. Everything that we see around us and take for granted is going to go. The world that we look around and see is an edifice. It feels a bit like the inevitability that the Earth will one day be consumed by the sun, except this will happen in our lifetimes, and certainly in our children’s lifetimes. The greatest re-adjustment/collapse of our society and we will bear witness. Like Caribou populations that grow too rapidly, our society is going to crash and re-adjust.

Should be interesting.

Dieter Rams

In one sentence captures why AR is so frequently annoying and so infrequently useful.

In one of those classic filter adjustment moments I suddenly found myself coming across lots of design related goodness.

Firstly I watched objectified ( thanks @simonacarr ), a fascinating documentary from which the title of this post is drawn.

Then just yesterday into my reader jumped this interview with Charles Eames (via @brainpickings ) that contains some wonderful insights.

I like:

Interviewer:        ”What are the boundaries of design”

Eames:                  ”What are the boundaries of problems?”

This is such a great way of looking at the world. A way of viewing that forces you to solve problems, to sketch them out and to find a strategic answer and, importantly, not to answer the question you want to answer, but to answer the real problem.

If Tesco listened to more Eames perhaps they wouldn’t do this:

On a similar note:

Interviewer:    ”Does design address itself to the greatest number? To the specialists or the enlightened amateur? To a privileged social class?”

Eames:             “Design addresses itself to the need”

The latest IPA Excellence Diploma module is on brands and channel thinking and I can’t help but feel there’s a lot to be learned from the world of design. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves to address the needs not the novelty, to focus on the audience and what will be entertaining or useful for them, not just what we think is exciting or different. Perhaps we need to scrutinise ourselves more and focus on the boundaries of the problem in order that we design the best solutions.

A lovely sentiment. Sums up a lot of what I’ve been thinking about recently.

Visit their site here.

“Supermechanical makes products and experiences that mate the successful interfaces between human and object, with the efficiency of digital media.

I’ve just steamed through Bruce Sterling’s little book/manifesto called “Shaping Things” and am currently wallowing in the delicious feeling of having encountered something genuinely different and exciting. I’ve pulled out various quotes for posterity. You can buy the book from all reputable booksellers or read a pdf here

One part in particular caught my attention – when Sterling discusses how every society “composts” the previous. So he sketches out the history of our relationships (as societies) with our objects. Describing an initial society in which we had artefacts (simple objects and tools), that is ultimately subsumed by a society of machines, itself subsequently enabling a society of endless products. Next comes the paradigm of gizmos, objects that communicate with us, that require maintenance and updates (the phone in your pocket). Culminating in a wonderful neologism – the SPIME.

In Sterling’s words:

“SPIMES are the intersection of two vectors of techno-social development. They have the capacity to change the human relationship to time and material processes, by making those processes blatant and achievable. Every SPIME is a little metahistory generator.”

Now that is a pretty interesting idea. It feels like that exciting locus between the fantastical and the possible. A vision of the future that feels exciting and weird and different but that predicates itself on sensible assumptions about technological progress. And doesn’t involve Facebook. Hallelujah!

You do have to concentrate quite hard to follow Sterling, he’s pretty short on illustrative example and pretty heavy on abstracted theoretical language but persevering is hugely worthwhile. Continuing on the topic of SPIMES:

“SPIMES are information melded with sustainability. Without sustainability, information is top-heavy, energy-hungry and heading for a crash; while sustainability is impractical without precise, comprehensive information about flows of energy and materials. A SPIME is a class of objects with the capacity to attend to both.

A technosociety skilled with SPIMES can maintain itself indefinitely through a machine-mediated exploitation of the patterns of movement of people and things through time.”

Nice. (NB. for a brilliant and much more insightful discussion of SPIMES have a look at Matt Jones’ piece here)

As an aside Sterling has some interesting things to say about metahistory. I’ve been writing recently about metanarratives and the following excerpts are very nice:

“Every culture has a metahistory. This is not the same as their actual history, an account of places and events. A metahistory is a cultural thesis on the subject of time itself. Metahistory is about what’s gone by, what comes next, and what all that is supposed to mean to sensible people.”

This is important stuff because it’s about the stories we tell each other within our societies, whether as individuals, as groups, or as mass media, that then become myth and part of the fabric of our culture and society. Taking control of those stories that will form our metahistory is vital – something we all do every day.

The other huge part of the book for me was Sterling’s discussions of fabricators. Fabricators are things like this (scroll down). Think printers that can print 3D objects. And not just any objects, but maybe all objects. If we can print a human kidney, then why not??

What if we reached a time when every house had a fabricator. Every house suddenly has access to the means of production. You cease to own objects and you simply curate them. Despite technically still being a hugely problematic technology Sterling see’s no other alternative to the profound problem facing industrial society – it is not sustainable.

The thought of every home having a fabricator connected to a network of SPIMES is about the single most exciting idea I’ve heard in a long time, the kind of thing that makes it difficult to sit still and that you feel a compulsion to try and tell to bemused randoms in pubs (that was me last night and I can confirm that these are difficult concepts to explain. Or maybe I’m not a very good explainer).

I’m now busy trying to dream up ways to shoehorn this stuff into the IPA Excellence Diploma Essay on brands and channels that I’m meant to be working on..all thoughts welcome!

If you’re not a reading type there’s a great Google talk that covers the key themes in the book:

Mr Wittgenstein

From Bertrand Russell’s account of the man he seemed something of a troubled genius – sometimes raving, sometimes lucid, always interesting.

The quote is interesting as it instantly puts you into widescreen, as it were.

In other words, how is it that we come to define what our world is, to where it extends and perhaps even why it extends anywhere at all?

A nice bit of context perhaps in the current climate of techno-fetishism.

“In an attempt to create more privacy inside his workshop the artist, Niklas Roy, installed a small curtain in his window.

The curtain, however, is smaller than the window opening. An additional surveillance camera and a laptop provide it with intelligence. The computer senses pedestrians as they pass by and locates them. Using a motor, the computer positions the curtain directly in front of the pedestrian’s face.”

Today Facebook announced a new feature called timeline - they want you to fill out your entire life history and then to continue sharing everything about your life through the platform. As Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to be the “perfect place to express who you are”. Of course there’s a subtlety here in that Facebook is not the place where people express who they are, it is the place where people express how they want people to perceive them. The museum of me as @disapia succinctly put it.

The life people display on digital networks is not their true life – there is no messyness, no inconsistency, no trauma, no failure. Everything is carefully curated for the audience.

That might sound quite hyperbolic, and to a certain extent it is, but ask yourself if you’ve ever untagged an embarrassing photo, ever deleted a drunken or angry status update. We all have. Extend that to a more theoretical level and it’s easy to see the difference between “expressing” who you are and “curating” who you are.

There’s something very sinister about this concept of putting your entire life on Facebook, from birth to the present. Facebook own everything we put on there and use it to monetise their relationships with advertisers – selling them improved targeting at a higher premium – based on the fact that we are sleepwalking into divulging our entire online lives to them. We are the product not the customer on there.

I wonder what a digital curtain following us around would look like?

Anyway.

Now that’s a grammatical nightmare – should it be programme or be programmed or the one I ended up plumping for? No idea. Anyway, this Douglas Rushkoff talk is inspirational stuff. Incredibly lucid, challenging, provocative and plain old useful, the man has inspired me to actually pick up the how to do CSS tome that I bought a while ago with noble ambitions of personalising this place and actually learning something about the nuts and bolts of how all this stuff works. Progress so far I’m sad to report has been pretty minimal but I do now understand some of the basics of HTML and I know what tags are. This stuff is important because, as Rushkoff points out, if you don’t understand the basics of the programme then you don’t understand all the inherent biases that will exist within that particular programme. If you don’t understand that then you don’t understand something fundamental about the mediated world that we’re rushing headlong into.

In the heady 45 minutes Rushkoff touches on all sorts of things – economic systems, corporatism, capitalism, exchange culture, programming, software, mediation and on and on.

Highly recommended – you don’t need to know anything about software programming to enjoy the talk (my knowledge being exactly nil).

He covers off some of the key themes of his book, program or be programmed, available here

Included Bertrand Russell, G E Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gottlob Frege.

From Wikipedia:

A general philosophical tradition characterized by an emphasis on clarity and argument (often achieved via modern formal logic and analysis of language) and a respect for the natural sciences.

One of their tenets was logical positivism

“the logical positivist principle that there are not any specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. This may be contrasted with the traditional foundationalism which considers philosophy as a special, elite science which investigates the fundamental reasons and principles of everything. As a result, many analytic philosophers have considered their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences.^“

That appears a delightfully humble way of thinking about philosophy. “The logical clarification of thoughts” as an aspiration seems quintessentially British. It’s like the red and white polka dot pinafore of philosophical inquiry. No need to get hugely carried away chaps, you can almost hear them saying, stroking an extremely well-kept moustache, lets simply logically clarify our thoughts and see what we can uncover, no need to make a big song and dance about it.

Bertrand Russell, who must be one the Greatest Men to have ever lived sums up the approach thusly:

“Modern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, as compared with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble.”

“This is the essence of postmodernism: the idea that there is no essence, that we’re moving through a world of signs and wonders, where everything has been done before and is just lying around as cultural wreckage, waiting to be reused, combined in new and unusual ways. Nothing is direct, nothing is new. Everything is already mediated. The real, whatever that might be, is unavailable. It’s an exhilarating world, but uncanny too. You look around at your beautiful house and your beautiful wife and you ask yourself, like the narrator of the Talking Heads song: ‘Well, how did I get here?” After that, it’s only a short step to deciding that this is not your beautiful house and your beautiful wife at all. The world of signs is fast, liquid, delirious, disposable. Clever people approach it with scepticism. Sincerity is out. Irony is in. And style. If modernism was about substance, about serious design solving serious problems, postmodernism was all manner and swagger and stance”

By Hari Kunzru

Looked better today.

There was a bit more colour in the cheeks; not a lot, but more than I have seen recently.

The smiling watchfulness in the eyes was back.

I can see the love between the pauses and the cracks.

The guilt at the behaviour that causes things to go unsaid, to be locked away and not dredged up.

Easier like that; better for everybody.

I read this book in two sittings; it was strangely compelling.

I can’t quite explain why I enjoyed the book – I think being placed within the narration of someone that was clearly unhinged was interesting as at no juncture do you particularly feel like you’re forced to judge him or even condemn him.

It was disorienting but somehow familiar to me the way in which you were drawn into the intricate world that he created for himself. S0 many of his rituals seem distantly familiar to the small boy within.

All the signifiers of displaced anxiety are really interesting and the coping mechanisms that the boy elaborates around his hermetically sealed world seem both grotesque and realistic.

Maybe it’s just how possible the whole thing seems.

Not part of the DJ History reading project, which I am going to have to get focused on if it’s ever to be finished.

Is a lyric from a track I love – the emphasis being on “with delight” rather than with “with fists”

Anyway, made a new mix and had a bit of spare time and knocked up a (very) brief description of where I came across each track. As usual the mix is unplanned and all vinyl.

Ned Doheny – Get it up for love

A track I first heard a DJ called Harvey play as what I imagine was one of his last tracks at a gig in LA. He looked suitably refreshed, the sun was rising and the track made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Barefoot Jerry – Barefootin

Something that was on my last mix. A beautiful piece of Americana, As soon as they start singing you think beards, checked shirts, probably all perched on stools at Woodstock. Lovely stuff

Josephine Oniyama – No Fiction

I think this was a momentof Youtube serendipity. I don’t know much about her, I think she’s from Manchester but she sounds like she’s from Tennessee circa 1963.

Tony Joe White – Polk Salad Annie

This is another one I found just poking around Youtube and then sniffing around discogs. Part of a brilliant Soul Jazz compilation called Delta Swamp Rock – check it out if you like this one.

Nappy Brown – Coal Miner

On Savoy Records released 1961. Found on a mix by the amazing basement soul who is a massive massive influence on me.

Peggy Lee – Sunshine of your love

Cover of the Cream classic. A fantastic cover that works really nicely I think. Played this at the Hackney Wick flea market and caused about the most enthusiastic display of head bobbing I’d seen that day

Deacon John – Haven’t I Been Good To You

Someone I don’t know posted it on twitter and I tracked it down. Absolute smasher, cannot physically sit still when this is on.

Pharcyde – Drop

Jay Dilla produced brilliance from the Pharcyde. A classic of my skating stoner days and one of my favourite Spike Jonze videos (the one where everything goes backwards).

Wagon Christ – I’m so tired

Another one I can’t stop listening to at the moment, a Luke Vibert production. Another basement soul recommend.

Jay Dilla – Lightworks

Heard this on Jarvis’s 6music show, brilliant mad wonky stuff from Jay Dilla.

Q Tip – Barely in love

An unearthed gem from one his albums, fantastic groovy percussion and amazing production on this one.

Stereotyp – Keeping me (Haaksmen and Haaksmen mix)

Heard this being played by Soulclap. Wicked sleazy bass to it. There’s a few mixes of this knocking around, this is my favourite.

Junior Boys – Work

Off an earlier album and recently discovered thanks to a DJ History recommend. Excellent vocals from the Junior Boys and some dark synth action.

Ray Mang – I’m for pleasure (glimmers mix)

Groovy. Probably best suited to a big rig rather than headphones but hey, I had it up loud at home – you should too.

Alice Smith – Love Endeavour (Maurice Fulton mix)

Stone cold classic. House music doesn’t get much better than this.

“I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel, “I think this is the best known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now – don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can know is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt – and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself that there would not be many jails. It is all there – the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world – and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal.

“A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. Then the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development – to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptation to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.”

I’m reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I’m halfway through and already convinced it’s one of the most important books I’ve read. I’m pulling out and preserving some of the many parts that have really made me think.

“A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, could have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – nso that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outwards, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all the creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don’t know how it will be in years to come . There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing are all born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits of destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing that by inspection can destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, then we are lost.”

Difficult to get angry these days – not the done thing.

Much better to make nice, to compromise. Gloss over the unpalatable (out of sight out of mind).

But something has been bugging the shit out of me recently – a word.

And that’s tough if you happen to be a big fan of words.

Skittering across screens and pages, trying to corral words into meaningful and interesting patterns, such a thing is quite the investment, and as such it makes sense to have as many at your disposal as possible. The more words you can use, the more flexibility you have, the greater opportunity for the creation of something beautiful, something delightful. Or maybe you’ll end up with a load of overly verbose twaddle, either way, it seems to me more words is desirous to less.

Nonetheless I think we should kill a word.

Expunge, tear from the lexicon, discard to the recycling bin of the anachronistic and the unnecessary.

The word I want to kill is consumer.

Consumer.

Where to even start?

The first thing that annoys me about this word is how firmly lodged it appears to be in everyone’s lexicon. I even came across it in a film review today – we’re no longer cinema goers or film fans, no no no, we are now simply consumers of film.

I like the analogy of the cinema goer as it illustrates perfectly one of the things that I find most offensive about this word – how reductionist it is.

“Consumer” strips people of their depths, of their complexity and idiosyncrasies, their individuality.

Where once we were citizens and had an obligation to participate in the state (voting) and we ceded certain powers to the state in return for a rule of law and our protection, now we are all consumers with no other obligation other than to consume.

We no longer need be fans of anything or passionate or ardent or geeky or angry or difficult, we just need consume the film, slide it all in in one long greasy sticky developed, produced and edited based on lowest common denominator algorithms action shit fest.

I hate the use of the word consumer in my job, in which it is omnipresent.

By treating people with all their complexities, fears, beliefs, passions, aversions and perversions as a simple economic unit of consumption we do away with the depth that you find in humanity. This dramatic reductionism leads to powerpoint slides that say things like “internet” arrow “purchase”.

When we think of people as consumers before people we start to assume they will consume our product (because that is what we do, right?). All too easily we forget whether our products are relevant to people’s lives, whether they fulfil a need, whether they are decision making mechanisms or decision-avoiding mechanisms.

When we think of people as consumers before people we start to craft media strategies that talk about reach and awareness as valid metrics. To paraphrase Rob Campbell, just because I’m aware of Hitler doesn’t mean I’m a Nazi. “If we can just reach the consumers and make them aware of how truly amazing and life affirming having an extra blade on their razor is then surely they will consume this mighty new innovation like all other rational, sensible consumers.”

Would you think of the person sat opposite you as a consumer? Your Mum, your Dad? Of course not, you think of them as people, with all the hopes, fears, inadequacies, complexities that go with that – all the things that make us human.

When we internalise a vocabulary, a way of speaking, it follows that we internalise a way of thinking.

By using the word consumer in our everyday lives, we enable ourselves to think of others as nothing more than the consumers of the products and services of production. By talking of the consumer society we enable its existence. By referring to consumers in our work we define each other as rational economic units instead of people, and this seeps into how we think, how we view our society, how we define what it is to progress and grow and learn, to achieve happiness and achievement.

So why do we do it?

Let’s kill a word, lets kill the consumer.