Prerogative

I think if I asked most people these days about the divine right of kings, they would tell me that the idea that the accident of someone's birth should determine whether they are allowed to rule us is an archaic nonsense. We have a royal family a bit like we don't knock down the Houses of Parliament and build a better one: because it's a nice tradition. In a modern democratic society, the idea of an enhanced set of rights and privileges being conferred on a person just because of their birth is anathema. Yet in the UK, we all benefit from the privilege of birth and we never question it. We are all allowed to live free from the threat of torture*, free from the threat of war, with comprehensive social care** and free health care**. We are allowed the expectation of one of the highest standards of living in the world**, all due to the accident of where we were born. Of course many people consider their place of birth to define who they are in some special way; we place a lot of stock in our roots. I've never really been able to understand why. On a good day, I can understand loyalty to one's family, but loyalty to a particular place? If the events that occurred to you in that place shaped who you are as a person, do you feel loyalty to the other circumstances that were key in those events? I would guess not, because they will mostly be intangible, or fleeting. Location is often the only abstract element of these events we can phsyically return to. Given that memory is so important to human identity, it is no surprise that the most solid reminder of any memory - it's originating location - becomes significant by association. It will be interesting to see whether, as the associative tags of memory are increasingly outsourced to entirely portable digital media, location retains its primacy of association. 

Of course many of our feelings about a certain location are defined by what it is not; a location is often defined in opposition to another location. In the UK, one of the greatest markers of national identity is not being another nationality: for the Scots and the Welsh, it's about not being English, for the English, it's about not being French (or German, or pretty much any other nationality really). I'm not going to get into how the Northern Irish see themselves, because i wouldn't know where to start. Increasingly though, whilst we may bicker amongst ourselves, we will define ourselves by the fact that we are all not in the environmentally ruined parts of the world. This green and pleasant land will remain relatively green if not so pleasant over the next 100 years, making it ever more attractive to those who live in the increasingly yellow or red parts of the world. Whilst we may still want to escape from the hideous weather that global warming is likely to bring to our country for a holiday, millions of others will be looking to get in to the still fertile areas of Northern Europe for a life. 

This summer, the war of words has raged across the continent about how to deal with tens of thousands of people attempting to find a better life in Europe, about whether they are refugees or economic migrants. Current consensus is that some are the former, others the latter, but you could easily argue that they are all the latter. Like anyone who does anything, peoples' motives for migrating large distances are usually complex and varied. The idea that people will migrate away from a war zone to the nearest place of safety is probably inaccurate if that place of safety is unstable, unwelcomng or poverty stricken. If people have already left their home, they have no reason to chose one destination over another other than economics. By that rationale, as soon as someone leaves their birthplace, whatever their motive for leaving, they become an economic migrant. Only someone too tired or broken is simply going to go just as far as the first place they cannot hear the sound of gunfire. If you no longer had a home, wouldn't you try to get somewhere where you might have a chance of making a decent new one? 

All of the solutions to the refugee/migrant crisis that have been suggested so far have fallen into three basic categories: welcome them with open arms; keep them out with security guards and barbed wire or try to stop them migrating in the first place. This last is the UK's stated position, and I feel that in theory at least, it has merit, indeed I think I have previously suggested just such a course of action on these very servers. Of course my suggestions were more to do with the removal of people's reason to leave than buying them more tents, so their desert refugee camp feels more luxurious. Either way, the current crisis illustrates the didfculty inherent in this strategy: our short attention span when it comes to geopolitics means that we are not willing to make the real effort required to affect change in a region, whilst allowing us to quickly forget that it was our half-arsed meddling that caused many of these problems in the first place. We are not committed enough to be interventionalist but not isolationist enough to stop us from meddling a bit. However, regardless of our level of direct current or historical intervention in any particular war torn desert, the society of plenty that we currently enjoy, that the migrants and refugees from these countries so crave, has come at the cost of a better quality of life in these very same countries. Whether it is pricing them out of the market for the food that they produce, extracting all of their natural resources regardless of cost or changing their climate irreversibly with all the driving and flying that we see as our God given right. The system that has made our country a desirable place to live is not entirely a global zero sum gain, but it is also not entirely without cost; it most definitely contributes directly to making other parts of the world less desirable places to live. We can argue endlessly about the extent of that impact (unless you're one of the knuckle-draggers who still thinks manmade climate change doesn't exist, in which case I do not have time to waste on you, go bang some rocks together), but that there is an impact is undeniable; the fact that our high standard of living causes a lower standard of living for others is a fact. So when another part of the world becomes uninhabitable due to our unwillingness to suffer any form of inconvenience, and the people living there leave to try and find somewhere habitable to live, presumably we will label them disdainfully as economic migrants and put up more barbed wire fences to keep them out. 

Not that the anti immigration lobby are wrong: we don't have space on this little island for everyone, but how we decide who gets to live here is the real challenge. We can't base it on their potential future contribution to the country as we have no idea what that will be (qualifications are no useful guide - what's the point in letting in 500 chemistry PHDs when we're desperately short of lorry drivers?). If we base it on their past contribution, there are probably hundreds of people in the 'Jungle' in Calais right now who have more claim to residency than many people currently resident here (I am thinking mainly about the ones who think that siphoning large amounts of money offshore is somehow beneficial for the rest of us). There are no easy ways to decide who gets to live here. The process is largely abitrary, but I suppose we better get used to it: this summer was not an anomaly, it was a vision of the future. As the consequences of our comforts are felt ever more keenly on the periphery of the equator, we will see increasing numbers of people seeking those comforts for themselves. We will have to get used to the discomfort of witnessing at borders the desperation that the fluke of our birth means we will never have to endure. 

*largely

**for now

Presentation

I was quite surprised by an advert on the tube the other day that claimed First Group were taking the 'unprecedented' step for a UK company of removing their name from the Great Western livery (or logo). Of course this is only truly unprecedented if you don't take into account the thousands of companies with wholly owned subsidiaries that do not bare their parent conpany's name, such as (for a few small examples) Cadbury not being called Kraft Cadbury, Jaguar Landrover not being called Tata Jaguar Landrover, or, if you want a train example, Southern and Great Northern not being called Govia Thameslink Railway Southern and Govia Thameslink Railway Great Northern. So it is only unprecedented if you completely ignore precedent. First Great Western is changing its name to Great Western Railway because the former is associated with an utterly miserable travelling experience whereas the latter is associated with the golden age of train travel. This is nothing more than a marketing exercise and claiming that it is 'unprecedented' is simply an attempt to make this rebranding exercise something special. Even if it was unprecedented (which, just in case you're not sure, it isn't), what is the merit of this act? We are clearly supposed to be astounded by the commercial bravery of this move, but apart from its (nonexistent) unprecedentedness I cannot see what is brave about it. Is the act of drawing attention to your actions (however banal) supposed to make it greater? Didn't we get over this sort of 'look at me' behaviour in childhood? 

I know it's only an advert, but this is not just advertising doublespeak anymore, this is how our world works. It is entirely possible to make entirely baseless claims and expect them to go entirely unchallenged, because no one actually thinks about what they're being told any more; we're all too busy being credulous or outraged by some other baseless assertion. This allows those fluent in the language of this new propaganda to create the empty 'realities' in which much of our world is placed. These 'realities', continually reinforced by a credulous media, rely on our relentlessly unquestioning credulity, they are credualities if you will. The modern creduality will make no secret of the duality of its created reality and the other reality based on facts because it will not need to. This was not the case with perhaps one of the earlier political credualities: Tony Blair's infamous 45 minute claim. In those early days, he had to make up nonexistent security operatives to back up his horseshit excuse for an illegal war. These days, the Tory party don't need to find any makebelieve experts to back up their fantasy that the Labour Party caused the financial crisis by borrowing too much; despite Nobel prize winning economists and the facts categorically refuting it, this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy. This has resulted in the unopposed destruction of of many of the means of wealth creation and redistribution over the last five years in the name of fiscal prudence, whilst nothing meaningful has been done to address the cycle of consumer debt led bubbles that will come back and bite 

us all again*. 

Our society and many of our institutions are founded on created realities. In many ways the legal framework is a codified created reality that has entire professions devoted to resolving the issues that arise when someone steps outside the bounds of that reality. Of course the law is an agreed reality that we arrive at through a combination of collective agreement and rigorous testing of the bounds of that reality. In a strange way the law is a reality that relies on criminals to make it whole: without a testing of the boundaries, we cannot arrive at a complete understanding of what they are. However, this does mean that it is very much a reality created by an understanding of its alternatives, of what lies outside it. It is a reality constantly under scrutiny, constantly being verified; by contrast, the modern credualities ignore even readily available evidence that significantly undermines their fundamental premise. What is the reason for this ostrich-like behaviour? Real life can be a complicated and distressing place and, as we are given the option outsourcing an increasing amount of our concerns to technology, we appear to have less concern about how those problems are dealt with. That's not surprising; technology is both increasingly complex and increasingly sophisticated, meaning that we are both less inclined to understand it and encouraged not to need to understand it. We become trained to believe that the complexities of the world will be navigated for us and we need not concern ourselves with how that happens. Some of us convince ourselves that we are still actively engaged with the 'real' world, but usually this is simply responding to fairly reductive sound bites that are spoon-fed to us in the most limited way (with the technology we use giving it the appearance of sophistication). 

It is likely that I am (as usual) being too pessimistic. It is likely that most of the people who read this will be insulted by the idea that they simply swallow any old crap as fact, but then so would the tens of millions of people who if stopped on the street and asked who caused the 2008 financial crisis would earnestly reply "Gordon Brown" and they clearly swallow a lot of old crap as fact. This is the problem: democracy is the rule of the majority, but if the majority simply believe whatever they are told by their rulers, is it really a democracy any more? It is not apathy that is the problem, it is credulity; people think they're engaged because they get angry about the stories they are fed, but their rage is misplaced. And perhaps sadder than impotent rage is misplaced rage. 

* indeed Gideon Osborne's recovery plan has been based on a property bubble in the south east and flogging our assets to the Chinese. 

Points

So I just had the 'pleasure' of a day of return short-haul air travel. If you want to take that as a humble brag, go ahead. It means I've reached the sort of mid-level of fincacal services that requires me to drag my carcass across a large enough distance and back in a day to require the burning of serous amounts of fossil fuels; the sort of situation that someone more ambitious/ruthless would have extricated themselves from a few years ago. Well done me. 

Anyway, the one thing that really caught my attention during the interminable amounts of the day that I spent traipsing round airports was the number of push-button feedback points I encountered. I think virtually every toilet, definitely every security point, possibly even an airside pub and certainly a check-in area had one of those little pads with a range of coloured faces upon which one is supposed to register one's feelings about a recent experience. I'm kind of fascinated to know what sort of data is collected from these things or what sort of data it is hoped can be collected from them. They're clearly designed to be as straightforward as possible to encourage even the most reluctant giver of feedback to have a quick stab at a button on the way past, but even so, you're not going to get anywhere near full coverage. Certainly most of the units I saw stood lonely and unpressed as people swarmed past them. Surely people only engage with these things when they are really really pissed off, or bored. Taking the airport security example, how many people are going to think "I had an exceptionally good experience being asked to get partially undressed and then having my possessions scanned in an air of constant (if friendly) suspicion and accusation"? 

Perhaps it's just me that doesn't get it, perhaps people come through airport security at a particular airport and think that it was a notably better experience  than at any other airport and that they should register that fact using a little coloured button. Presumably they are not travelling during the school holidays. And I think that is my point, because the amount of mitigating factors that would have to be added to data gathered from these little consoles must render the data virtually meaningless. 

This leads me to my second conclusion: that these consoles are not actually gathering data at all, they are merely there to pander to our impotent desire for agency in all things. A line of brightly coloured buttons means "your opinion doesn't count, but if you think it does, you'll shut up and go away." If you've had a terrible time at airport security, the chances are if you're allowed to register your displeasure instantly by punching a big red button, you'll feel your feelings have been noted and wander off to duty free with your rage sated. If that rage had no such outlet, there is a much greater likelihood that you will stew over it and then write an email to someone who has to respond when you get home. 

When I first got on Twitter, I decided it was a great place to vent my frustration at poor train services. If you included the Twitter account of the train operatior in your tweet, you often got a reply from a Media Studies graduate who would earnestly take the details of your problem and then confirm the information that you already knew from platform announcements or National Rail Enquiries. I don't blame the poor sod sat behind the rail company's Twitter handle, they are just doing a job, which is to prevent unhappy customers from becoming a problem. I've given up ranting at train companies on Twitter, as I've realised both the abject futility of the exercise* and how much of a whinge it makes me look (as if this blog wasn't enough), but many others continue to carry the torch for me, sending passive aggressively dotted tweets to rail companies so that all their friends and followers can see. I understand this - sharing your frustration can help to partially alleviate it - but really it is little different to standing there, stamping your feet and yelling incoherently (which, I can assure you, gets much more reaction). Indeed it is increasingly the case that the more we register our protest, the less effective it seems to be. I had hoped that the Internet would act as a tool for a more open democracy, but it seems that whilst it allows us to register out dissent more quickly and more easily, it also allows it to be ignored more readily. In the short life of the current parliament, the government has already ignored several petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people. These are people who feel strongly enough about something maybe to protest about it, but as there's a petition to sign, they're probably sated; they probably feel they've done their bit, registered their dissent, even though it is roundly ignored. 

I read an interview with Yvette Cooper over the weekend where she complained that she had gone on hundreds of marches in the 80s and they'd changed nothing. She was basically pointing out that without power you can't change anything. Unfortunately she was also saying that to get power you have to become so massively compromised that you probably won't really change anything when you get it**. In the darkest days since the election, I have been convinced that she is right, but I can't really hold on to that belief (otherwise I might as well just kill myself), so I have to believe that there are alternatives. If the online petition is just a new and more effective form of opium for the masses, other more effective forms of digital protest and activism must be sought. I am not advocating that we all take to DDoSing ministers who ignore the weight of public opinion (largely because that is illegal), but ways of registering dissent and following up on them must become more effective than simply adding your digital signature to the list of the ignored. 

We are told we live in a world where customer service is king, but it is all too often the case that 'customer service' is a euphemism for keeping the mugs quiet so they'll put up with whatever they get.  All too quickly we have come to accept the stifling comfort of the empty feedback loop. We just keep jabbing at the little smiley faces. 

*at least partly because in most instances  there is absolutely nothing the train operators can do. 

**or at least that is the practical example of the governments she served in.  

Prohibition

I think I've come up with the only potentially workable solution to the 'migrant' 'crisis': we need to change the name of our country. I'm thinking instead of 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' we go for something like 'The Unbearable Cesspool of Shit Britain and Eternal Dispair'. If we're working on the whole discouragement aspect of migration prevention, then we really should make sure it's the things that people actually know about our country that we use to discourage them. I'm willing to bet that in most cases that is probably little more than what it's called (and I'm not sure they'll even know all of that*). 

Clearly people don't seek asylum in a country based solely on its policy towards asylum, otherwise they would all head straight for Sweden. Britain is already a pretty rubbish place to seek asylum, due to our propensity to send failed asylum seekers to countries that the UN deems unsafe to return anybody to. If the Tories get their way it will virtually be better to have stayed in your country and be bombed/starved/tortuted to death than risk life, limb and spectacular amounts of money to get to a country where you will be deprived of your basic human rights and watch your children be treated like some sort of vermin before you're all flown back to your country of origin to be bombed/starved/tortuted to death anyway. Don't these people know this before they attempt to come here? Don't they read the Daily Mail? "We're not animals," they shout as they attempt to break through the security fences at Calais, to which the rational response is: "then stop trying to get to a country where you will be treated like animals." 

People don't try to come to Britain because it's a soft touch, they come because 200 years of effective colonial and post-colonial propaganda have presented the UK as a pinnacle of civilisation. Unfortunately, it seems that no matter what we do to reverse the actuality of that - repealing human rights legislation, treating our own poor like criminals, etc - it doesn't change the perception that we are much more civilised and tolerant than we actually are. Therefore I think the government needs to take decisive action, by changing the county's name to something more befitting the tinpot dictatorship that they are aiming for. They definitely need to include the word 'democratic' just to make it clear that only the rights of the elite are truly respected, maybe they can chuck in the word 'peoples' just to clarify who doesn't own it. I think the oppressed peoples of the world understand the true meanings of such words when employed in the name of a country, so the sooner we chuck a few in to the name of ours, the sooner they'll get the message that Britain really ain't that great anymore. 

*I don't mean that in a disparaging way; most people in this country don't know what it's actually called. 

Practice harder

I can't help but come back to the brain training computer games, it's like I'm morbidly fascinated by them. I noticed an advert for one on the tube today that said it would make you "better". It didn't even state what it would make you better at, just generically better. From the looks of things it was a game based around numeracy. Now I'm all for a bit of numeracy, and I'm well aware that it is believed that doing things like Sudoku helps stave off dementia, but I still can't help thinking this is all a bit Michael Gove. In case you're not sure what I mean, I'm referring to the incarnation of Michael Gove where he has been so far allowed to do the most damage to our society: Education Secretary. At that time, his belief was that having absolute answers for everything and making sure that your children give only those answers was the key to making them, well I can't believe he actually thought it would make them more well rounded, I guess he was hoping everyone would be more like him, rather than being turned off education entirely and dropping out of the bottom a system that had utterly failed them. 

Looking at these games though, it is easy to see how Gove thought that he was right to try and reduce the world to simple binaries of right and wrong. We are all happy to accept that our better selves can be achieved through a series of right answers, why not believe the same for our children. At what point will they realise they've been cheated, that knowing the answers will get them nothing if they don't know the right people; that wrote learning was just something to keep them distracted until they were old enough to earn a living for their employers? Maybe they'll never notice. Maybe they'll cling on to the belief that continuing to answer questions will pay off eventually, keeping themselves eternally distracted by continual testing whilst life passes them by. 

Our obsession with making ourselves 'better' through continual testing misses the point. Who wants to lie on their deathbed thinking 'well at least I answered a lot of questions correctly'? What are we actually learning from logic puzzles? It doesn't seem that we are applying any of that learned logic in evaluating their worth. 

Promise

In the most recent election I voted Labour for the first time. There is much to make me believe it is also the last time. I will freely admit that my vote for Labour was tactical, as the thought of another five years of Tory rule was too depressing to contemplate. Of course the reality is even more depressing. I can't imagine I'm the only person who has all but stopped listening to the news because the sound of privileged elites braying about how wrecking what's left of this country's infrastructure, the lives of an entire generation of children and the extistential future of our race is not only sensible but morally right makes me want to break things/scream/cry. Of course in order to make this tragicomedy complete, we must also listen to the official opposition decide that they lost the election because they weren't enough like the party in power and that in order to be an effective opposition, they should just rubber-stamp the policies of a government who only 24%* of the electorate voted for. Following the interim leader's request, my MP abstained from voting against a welfare bill that even Margaret Thatcher might have thought a bit extreme. I voted for my MP expressly to avoid this sort of poor-bashing filth, and whilst I understand that she and her party might not be able to stop it, they could at least represent the people that voted for them by registering their opposition in the traditional manner. 

In the midst of all this, the Labour Party seem genuinely surprised that Jeremy Corbyn is ahead in the polls in the leadership election. I mean it's a massive surprise that the one candidate who appears to be genuinely opposed to the right wing orthodoxy that is poisoning this country is popular with the people who also oppose it. 

I do not deny that the Labour Party has some serious challenges to face up to following its electoral defeat. I accept that it has to overcome the daily barrage of propaganda churned out by a right wing media hegemony, but it what is the point of it doing that by simply giving in? Democracy requires alternatives otherwise it is just a process of rubber-stamping the whims of a dictatorship. At the moment, the Labour Party is failing to meet even the most basic fundamentals of the democratic process: representing your constituents and providing at least one alternative. I voted tactically in May and it turns out that my vote didn't count, not because I didn't vote for the winning candidate or the winning party, but because I voted for a candidate and a party who turn out not to represent me at all. Next time I'll go back to voting for someone who will at least try to represent me. 

*36.9% of 66.1%

Perverse Logic

As it's the holiday season, I can only imagine an entry in a hotel guestbook that goes something like this:

I have had a lovely stay at your hotel. I have spoken to all the guests whilst here, and each and every one of them had something that they too have enjoyed about their stay here. Therefore, might I suggest that you withdraw some of your more popular activities, otherwise everyone paying to stay here will be happy about it. 

Yours hopefully

John Whittingdale

When put in another context the logic that the Secretary of Sate for Culture Media and Sport appears to be applying to the BBC is easily shown for what it is: entirely illogical. If he wants the BBC to act like a commercial company then it has to generate content that maximises viewers/listeners and therefore revenue. If he thinks it should remain a publicly funded broadcaster, then it surely has a duty to provide content to the broadest section of the population that fund it.  

The right wing like to get their way by re-framing the language of the debate so that any argument against their position is made to seem unreasonable. However this does rely on the argument for their position sounding rational. Unfortunately John Whittingdale's hatred of the BBC is irrational and so doesn't really work. 

Playa

I'm not as big a traveller as many in my generation, but I get about probably as much as my conscience/earnings/priorities allow. When I started this post, I was sat on a beach in Playa del Carmen, which it turns out is not my favourite bit of Mexico. Based on my week's worth of knowledge of Mexico, I'd probably say this is my least favourite bit. Not that it isn't lovely: our hotel is beautiful, the weather is amazing, the beach is nice and the sea...well, I'll come back to the sea. 
My problem with Playa del Carmen is that it doesn't feel as Mexican as any other place I've been; it just feels like any North American or European resort town I've ever been to (which to be fair isn't very many*), and I don't just mean in Europe or North America: these places are the same all over the world, in that they are predominantly populated by Europeans** or Americans. The local colour in these places is provided by themed restaurants and local wares customised for the lack of imagination/cultural sensitivity of the buyer (I saw Mayan carved masks with the logos of American baseball teams carved into their foreheads last night). In defence of Playa del Carmen, there are at least restaurants and businesses owned by local people here, and Mexico's laws mean that the resorts can't keep the locals off the beach. I imagine it is a sort of half-way-house between the homogenised banality of Cancun and the rest of the Yucatan peninsular, which is a beautiful, fascinating and exhilarating place. 
However, the main problem that afflicts Playa del Carmen seems to be endemic all along the Rivera Maya from Cancun in the north to Tulum in the south: seaweed. Every beach we have been to has a thick black tide line of mouldering seaweed, and here, as in many other places, much of the sea next to the beach is a dark soup of scratchy seaweed. The owner of the hotel we stayed in in Tulum said that this is a recent phenomenon. The seaweed has always been washed into the warm waters inside the reef that sits a few hundred meters out from the coast, but recent shifts in the ocean currents  due to global warming mean that it is no longer washed out again. The seaweed is here to stay. 

This is a massive problem for this part of Mexico, as almost all of its economy is based on tourism. If the sea isn't good for swimming, the Europeans and North Americans will quickly go elsewhere, leaving resorts and apartment blocks half built: the carrion of a dead industry. I would imagine that even now, the state of Quintana Roo and possibly even the Mexican government are considering ways to combat the seaweed problem without exacerbating the ecological damage already wrought on the world's second largest coral reef. For the time being, some resorts have taken to raking up the seaweed and burying it in holes in the beach, which I can't help but see as a metaphor for the way we all deal with so many of the problems we've caused in the world. So much of the tourist industry causes many of the issues from which it suffers: aeroplane emissions contribute to global warming, overdevelopment wrecks local ecosystems and simply the number of bottles of water one gets through in a country that doesn't have drinking water on tap is a massive waste problem, some of which is likely to come bobbing past you in the sea. Holidays make us massively wasteful, we want convenience and we're willing to pay for it: I am certainly much more likely to buy something that I know I won't reuse or keep whilst on holiday, because well, it's just the once isn't it. There are ways round these the things: our hotel in Playa del Carmen filled a large glass bottle with drinking water from a water cooler each day so there was no waste plastic created; many hotels these days ask if you want your towels washing every day (if not they save water and energy). This is progress, but these are small concessions: not washing a towel or two is not going to stop ocean currents changing. Yet with the economies of scale of such large resorts, these things do eventually add up to a sizeable difference and if we all consider/encourage/make use of them, we could considerably reduce the impact of our holiday. 

Are we going to see our holiday habits changing as the environmental degradation they cause makes the currently desirable destinations increasingly undesirable? Most likely we will just change destination to somewhere as yet untouched or newly tropical. What will that leave for the people of the Mayan Rivera? Will they attempt large scale agriculture, deforesting much larger areas of the peninsular than the relatively small coastal strip of the resorts? Maybe they'll go for large scale livestock farming and really help accelerate the production of greenhouse gasses. Who knows, perhaps a spate of Lido building will save the tourist industry and life can go on as normal, hopefully with more and more hotels and resorts making a greater effort to reduce their environmental impact. Maybe the wonderful people of the Yucatan peninsula will be able to continue to earn a decent living from an increasingly ecologically sustainable industry. Perhaps. But given everyone will still fly to get there I think the likelihood of their environment remaining sustainable for long is pretty slim. Most likely we will all move our problems somewhere else until that too is wrecked. There's no evidence that in our holidaying we will stray far from our everyday habits. We simply magnify the worst ones. 

* my parents were a certain kind of aspiring middle class that meant that I've seen a healthy portion of the world's museums and cathedrals. 
** I'm including white Australians in this particular generalisation, just so we've got all the South East Asian resorts covered too.

Posterior

The After returning from Reading '93, I wore the wristband for a couple of weeks until one of my friends noticed it and took the piss out of me for wearing a dirty piece of plastic on my wrist. In those days continuing to wear the wristband for a festival after it had finished was even more unusual than going to a festival in the first place. I guess I wore it because I have always been quite sentimental (and never more so than as a teenager) and in those days I didn't have a million Instagram photos to remember the festival by, just a grubby piece of plastic and my actual memories. I also think that in my adolescent brain I hoped it would act as a sort of visual key, as my way in to a secret society; that other people who had been to Reading that year would recognise me as one of them. Of course someone who had been to Reading that year did recognise it, unfortunately their response was "that was weeks ago, that must be really grubby by now. Why are you still wearing it you scummer?" 

Of course the youth of today can generate an almost unlimited amount of web based images with which to document their seemingly ubiquitous festival attendances, so why do so many of them seem to insist on continuing to wear the wristbands long after the music has stopped? I think that it's entirely possible that digital natives are even more sentimental than I was as a teenager, I think it's an inevitable consequence of the way in which they document every event of their lives. Similarly the manner of this documentation and the manner of its recollection - the act of social remembering - is entirely externalised, as if events, thoughts or emotions are not valid unless they are recorded and made publicly available*. It is a version of experience entirely anterior to the subject; it does not require an actual self, simply a complete set of the visual and cultural identifiers of self. It is compelling, as it allows us to simplify human experience by reducing it to a set of recorded data and images rather than attempting to grapple with the complex and inconsistent thing that it actually is. That is why, to some extent we have all come under the thrall of the digital externalisation of our lives. 

I am not saying that when I was a teenager, no one tried to externalise their thoughts, opinions or feelings for the validation or otherwise of their peers; part of teenage identity has always been about displaying the signs and signifiers of the internal process, finding your place in the world by presenting as much of yourself as possible to it in order to gauge its reaction. In many ways, the digital society simply allows us to continue to do this long after an age when our ancestors would have well and truly put away childish things. I can think of no other reason why grown men chug down litres of joyless milkshakes just in order to pump up their muscles: this is not a fitness thing, it is all about how they look. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with it, I just think we delude ourselves with a fiction that there is greater substance to so many of our gestures, that we are doing things for any reason other than how they look. 

In the days before I went to festivals I was always baffled by the people I saw on holiday spending seemingly their whole time behind a bloody great video camera. I always thought "why don't you get on with your holiday rather than worrying how it will look on a video you'll probably never watch?" When I went to festivals, no one took a video camera. I think if someone had, it would have felt odd, recording our transgressions. We would have spent the whole time worrying about the camera getting nicked, or what was being filmed (and whether we'd want our parents/the authorities** seeing it) to have all the fun we did have. What happened at a festival, happened at a festival. Over time, through the process of a collective remembering unencumbered by fact, certain events were allowed to take on the legendary status of the narrative elements that weave together to form our teenage identities and friendships. 

On the train back from Newcastle the other week I sat opposite a well built, tanned man possibly about 30, who spent most of the journey watching footage of his drunken antics from the night before. He appeared to be proud of it all. Beyond being drunk I have no idea why he had done any of the things he did. I wonder if he enjoyed them at the time. I suppose that doesn't matter if they subsequently entertain him. Except to me I think it does matter. I am not a religious person, so I believe strongly in making sure I enjoy all my experiences in life as much as possible. Indeed one of the things I find most depressing about religion is the fact that it has the potential to take up so much of the short time available in life that could otherwise be spent actually doing something fun, interesting or useful. Of course it's quite easy to see digital culture as a replacement for religion; a much more effective, much more easily accessible, much more distracting form of opium for the masses. We are offered salvation through documentation and randomly numbered sets of commandments, if we can create icons that others want to worship. We become tied in to it, we adhere to its conventions and a lot of the time we are not sure how it is supposed to make us feel, but we certainly wouldn't ask because then we'd be shown up as lacking faith. 

It's easy to see digital culture as the new religion, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's right. I am simply making the comparison to point out that we seem compelled towards some form of structure that tells us how we should live, regardless of whether it makes us happy or not. In the same way that protein shakes and plastic surgery do for our bodies, digital culture allows us to fully control our memories and mould them towards our target self-image: once we have collected the full set of life events, we will be perfect. I can't help but feel that we have taken the last thing left that was truly ours - our experience - and commodified it. In doing so we have made it something that others can make us feel bad about. 

*yes I am aware of the irony of blogging this. 

**I think when there was much less surveillance we were much more paranoid about it. 

Protection

I was talking to a friend recently about the ECB (the England and Wales Cricket Board rather than the European Central Bank) and its increasingly erratic behaviour since selling the TV rights for domestic Test matches to Sky. In case anyone doesn't remember, the domestic Tests were considered to be among the 'crown jewels' of sport that were supposed to always be available on free-to-air terrestrial television, most of which were (and still are) 'protected' by law. The domestic Tests were left out of the legislation because the government at the time believed it had an 'understanding' with the ECB that they would not simply flog the crown jewels to the highest bidder at the first opportunity. Needless to say, as soon as Rupert Murdoch came along and waved a fat cheque under their noses the ECB had trouble remembering the exact terms of their 'understanding' with government lock, stock and proverbial. In the ECB's defence, it is difficult to know the exact terms of an unwritten (and probably largely unspoken) agreement and so difficult to comply with them*. This is perhaps a prime illustration of why we have legislation in the first place: it allows people to know exactly the terms upon which they may conduct their affairs. After all, when someone offers to increase your income tenfold, as long as it's legal, you'd be an idiot to say no. 

Of course for a domestic sports governing body, it's easy to define what is legal and what is not. For a extra-national sports governing body it is so much harder. The UK press have been unusually coherent lately in their response to the allegations of corruption at FIFA, unanimously calling for the resignation of Sepp Blatter because he can't have been in charge of the world governing body of football for so long and not have noticed that it was rotten to the core. In Mr Blatter's defence, I would ask by whose measure was he supposed to judge? FIFA is in a fairly unique situation: initially by consensus and now just because, it has a monopoly over the money gained from the world's most lucrative international sporting competition, whilst also being the sole body responsible for regulating that same sport. In the world of football it has immense power and access to immense wealth. The people in charge of the organisation exist in a world where they make the laws, so "as long as it's legal..." takes on a whole new meaning. The lifestyles that they lead disassociate them entirely from what most of us would call reality, so is it any wonder they assume that they are outside of the laws of mere countries. As far as they were concerned, no one had set out the terms upon which they should conduct their affairs. 

As international cricket begins to get a taste of the financial success that football has enjoyed for some time, it appears to be heading in the same direction. I am not for a minute suggesting that the ECB is in any way corrupt (the ICC has got that one covered), but their detachment from what the rest of us call reality - more interest in the pomp and circumstance than the tedious drudgery of organising a coherent domestic schedule or even a coherent national team strategy - has become increasingly apparent as the television money has poured in. I'm not convinced the correlation is entirely coincidental. FIFA should stand as a warning of what happens when you make no distinction between regulation and revenue. 

Of course those in the positions of power in such organisations always say that it is simply sour grapes that makes the rest of us cry foul. This is not entirely unlike those who say that placing restrictions on the power of giant multinational corporations to pollute our lands or exploit the poor is simply the politics of envy. I find it striking that the right wing press that has been calling for Sepp Blatter's head so vociferously over the last few days will now turn their attention back to making sure the 'anti-business' lobby is not allowed to do anything that might stop the banks from wrecking our economy all over again. There is a certain type of business that reasoned, sensible regulation is anti: it is the business of cronyism and lining your pockets, the business of creating a little bubble of obscene wealth around yourself, regardless of the number of peoples' pension savings you trash or how many die building your stadia. People who call for greater deregulation are almost always those who stand to profit from it, and they are rarely the majority. It's easy to call for less red tape and bureaucracy as no one actually likes them, but checks an balances exist for a reason and we should be wary of the motives of those who call for their removal. After all, the list of things covered by "as long as it's legal..." gets longer and longer to less law you have. 

*although seriously, how hard is it to remember "don't sell the Tests"? 

Practice

I've just spent a very distracting few minutes on the tube watching someone play a game where two pill things race along two pairs of parallel tracks avoiding squares and collecting circles. As I haven't played a computer game for a number of years, this strikes me a startlingly basic. However, I do understand its place in a very popular new genre of mobile games; I also understand the promoted attraction of such games. You see people playing them all the time on public transport: barely branded minichrome* games that are supposedly designed to train your brain. In the case of the example I just witnessed, the key skill appears to be a kind of high speed multitasking, because you have to guide the two little pill things simultaneously. I have no doubt whatsoever that the game in question was very good at improving one's ability to guide two fast moving sprites (now there's a word you don't hear any more**) simultaneously along two tracks of obstacles/rewards, but I am not sure when this particular skill will come in handy in the real world. I'm not sure anyone will ever need to drive two cars simultaneously. I don't know, maybe it helps with piano playing. 

Generally with these 'brain training' games I struggle understand the higher purpose of what they're training your brain to do. Hand-eye coordination is a skill that is often supposed to be improved by such games, but how much hand-eye coordinaton do we need beyond the not dropping things on the floor by missing the table or stabbing ourselves in the eye with a spoon that most of us learn by the age of three? Surely high functioning hand-eye coordinaton is useful for one thing: playing more computer games. 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, people are only too willing to spend time and money on any old crap if they are told that it is good for them: look at the amount of nutritionally redundant chia seed that is now flogged to the 'health' food obsessed. Sure if you think it tastes nice, then buy it, but if you're buying it because you think it's good for you, I strongly encourage you to find any scientific evidence that it is in any way beneficial for you. There is plenty of evidence that chia seeds contain all sorts of nutrients and proteins, but there is none that shows that humans can ingest any of them. Equally with computer games: by all means play computer games, just don't pretend they turning you into some sort of superhuman. They are not, if you're lucky they're turning you into someone who is better at computer games. 

*i.e. of limited palette 

**it's possible that you never heard/read it if you weren't into computer games in the 80s 

Phar distant past

Whilst trading insults about each other's mother in the outro of their 1992 masterpiece 'Ya Mamma', one of the Pharcyde eventually cracks and blurts out "you're a sellout," to which of course the response is "your mamma's a sellout." These days, this strikes me as wonderfully evocative of its time: the idea that being a sellout could be an insult now seems endearingly archaic. Indeed pretty much everything about the Pharcyde's debut album 'Bizzare Ride II' seems to speak of an entirely different world: one where a hip-hop album could be about more than how much money and women one has, or how much everyone should be waving their hands/drinks/bottoms in the air. 

I've talked about the lack of disconnected subcultures before and hip-hop is an entire genre that has moved from a subculture to become a dominant part of the mainstream. In the process it has become a business more than a culture. Hip-hop (in its broadest sense) is still one of the most creative forces in popular culture, but one of its core traditional narratives - with rap as a means of wealth creation to pull the performer out of poverty - has become distorted and the means have become confused with the ends. Hip-hop is almost entirely about money these days and has been for many years, as DJ Shadow observed in 'Why Hop-hop sucks in 96'. I don't think this is exclusive to hip-hop: the single minded banality equating conspicuous consumption with achievement is ubiquitous across mainstream culture and thought. It goes hand in hand with the total commodification of subculture. 

I have reached an age where my youth is being re-appropriated by the young; there are DMs, chunky-heeled boots and ripped jeans all over the place. I realise that as an older person, I am now totally outside the world of the teenage and cannot really understand all its special codes and signifiers (and nor frankly, would I want to), but it seems like these days you can just buy your identity off a shelf in Topshop. Certainly the ripped jeans all seem to be neatly slashed at the knee and the DMs come in any style or colour to suit your quirky personality. Maybe I'm excessively romanticising my own teenage years, but there was a sense of real idividuality to the modifications you could make with a bottle of tippex and some coloured laces. You did it yourself, so you couldn't be confused with the drones who just bought what their parents wanted them to wear; so you could not be mistaken for a part of the system. I'm sure plenty of young people still feel that need to define themselves as apart from the compromised world of adults, to show that they are pure of intention, unsullied by the lazy compromise of their parents' world, it's just that the adults own all the means of them doing so. Their righteous dissent and frustration is neatly packaged and sold back to them or given continual outlet online. In such a world, you can't sell out; you've already bought into everything. When there is a place for everything and your every whim (no matter how angst-ridden) is catered for, you're never really outside the system. Without ever being able to see form the outside, how can you even know the bounds of your world? You learn to love your prison, as it provides everything you think you need, even the impression of alternatives. As you are given an outlet for dissent, you believe that you have agency in the running of the prison; because you get to peep though the panopticon from time to time you think you're included in the administration. It's like an entire society with Stockholm Syndrome. 

I'm not really sure why we would desire to try and break out either, when the outside is likely to be worse, or at least we have no way of knowing it won't. Our prison costs a lot to run and outside those costs are mounting up. So we stay here, we pay lip service to dissent. The youths buy perfectly ripped jeans and Nirvana t-shirts so they can look dissatisfied for a few years whilst working towards a good vocational qualification. They can strop about a bit and rage at the world, but that's just normal teenage behaviour, they'll soon get it out of their system, or the system will work it out of them. 

In the UK at the end of the twentieth century, the last of the discernible music movements were virtually defined by commercialism. Dance music was at least subversive to start with: giving birth to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. But even before the full weight of the law was applied to stop people having fun, the ravers were being herded out of the fields and into the superclubs where they could be fully exploited by promoters and organised criminals. Britpop on the other hand was simply a commercial manifestation of the indie that had existed in the musical underground for decades. It was defined simply by being commercial indie music. The underground was the mainstream and we all rushed to embrace our new found popularity, happy in a world where anyone can have a beard or long hair or ripped jeans and it will mean precisely nothing. And you know why?

You're a sellout. 

Pronouncements

I have been reading 'Madame Bovary' recently, which, if you haven't read it, I can thoroughly recommend. There are a few passages in there which are particularly striking (I assume this is also the case in the original French) for the succinct ease with which they deal with profound concepts. I think the passage about language being "a cracked kettle" is fairly famous, but I think the passage that struck me most is as follows: "the denigration of those we love always severs us from them a little. Idols must not be touched; the gilt comes off in our hands." 

I suppose it is possible for this to be seen as an endorsement of unrequited love as the only form of love able to endure, but I'm fairly sure that in its context, Flaubert meant it to apply more broadly to relationships. 

You often hear couples who have been together for many decades say that they never go to bed angry at each other, which is sensible, as the passing of a night by its very nature can make a disagreement seem more entrenched, giving the impression that it is more intractable than perhaps it is. It also means that you spend more time in disagreement with each other - even if for most of that time you are asleep - increasing the overall perception that you spend a lot of time in disagreement. And perception is important, because you have to perceive that something is worth the effort to want to make an effort for it. I'm a firm believer that life's what you make it and I don't mean that in a Tory 'the only reason you haven't succeeded is because you're lazy' way, I mean that much of our perception of our life is defined by how we chose to perceive it. Yeah, I know, but I'm talking about the things that we do to define the opinions that become entrenched in our subconscious. If you constantly refer to your partner as 'the ball and chain', you are going to automatically associate them with being a drag; everything they do or say will appear to inconvenience you and you will resent their presence for no reason other than you have predetermined your resentment. Even without continually applying a degrading epithet to your partner, it is easy to build up negative connotations in a relationship just by thinking "they always..." Everyone has disagreements, it would be weird if people didn't: they are different after all. However, we don't have to conflate our lack of agreement with undesirable traits in our partner. Our partners are not perfect; if we chose to represent that imperfection to ourselves as undesirable, then we are probably destined to be alone. Unfortunately I cannot express that as neatly or succinctly as Flaubert. 

Propaganda

I've avoided the various leader 'debates' on this election campaign, as indeed I have found myself listening to the radio less. I can't really deal with the amount of energy that is wasted making empty promises about a few marginal issues that will not affect the long term economic and existential viability of our country. However I can't avoid the news entirely and was pleased to hear that Ed Milliband finally tackled head-on the view (presented as fact for the last five years) that the last Labour government bankrupted the country through financial profligacy. He apologised for the lack of regulation that helped cause the global financial crisis (rightly) but refused to apologise for borrowing against an (apparently) strong economy. Of course the audience member who had asked the question was incredulous, blurting out his own variation on the received wisdom that he has to balance his household budget from week to week, so a government should do as well. Leaving aside the fact that a national economy is nothing like a household economy for the moment, what Ed and chums should really point out is that is exactly what they did. When a household is doing well and you're both earning a decent salary and you've paid off your student debts and you've got a bit of savings, what do most people do? Borrow four times their annual income to buy a house, based on the received wisdom that as we get older our salaries increase and we will not lose our jobs. Once we have factored in the repayments for this debt into our household budget (i.e. balanced it), we think about borrowing more, maybe to buy a car or a conservatory. None of these things unbalance our household budget, because the repayments are within our means, we can pay our mortgage, our car finance etc and still afford a pint at the end of the week (the measure I believe the audience member used). Of course if the company we worked for suddenly went bankrupt, what would we do then? How would we pay for the mortgage and car? Well, we could probably give the car back, but what about the mortgage? We still need a house to live in. If we were confident we might try and get some sort of bridging loan until we got another job or maybe borrow some money to start a business, so we were able to pay the mortgage. We could try to make some savings, maybe by not feeding or clothing our children; after all, what's the point in them having full bellies or clothes if they don't have a house to live in. I guess if we take no action, we'll be out on the street, where we would have to rely on state benefits (assuming this household is in a country that has state benefits). 

Anyone who is not a total idiot will be able to see the crude analogy I am attempting to draw above, but it is less crude than the analogy with household budgets that the current right wing orthodoxy wants us to understand. Of course a national economy is infinitely more complex than a household budget, but even a household budget is more complex than whether you have enough cash in your pocket for a pint at the end of the week. However, as far governments treating the economy like a household budget go, I would say the last labour government did a pretty good impression: borrow against your income whilst your income is good. Interestingly it was households borrowing not against their income, but against the possible future price of their house that caused the last financial crisis. Is that the kind of household budget we want? Given that the current 'recovery' is based almost entirely on a property bubble, the current government's household budget does feel rather subprime. But that's not the narrative; there is only one way to balance this household budget and that is sell the family silver and clothe the children in rags. 

These analogies are crass to the point of being useless, but then so is most of the rest of the 'debate' in this election. 

Port

Even at a time when politicians desperate for your vote will say pretty much any old shit, James Brokenshire's comments on migrants* risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea in leaky boats were pretty special. In case you missed it, he asserted that tighter UK immigration policy would put people off attempting this perilous crossing. I was instantly intrigued to know how many people scrutinise UK migration policy before fleeing war and poverty in their own country to attempt a journey of thousands of miles. I guess they probably go online and check the immigration or asylum policies of all the countries in which they may attempt to seek refuge before starting their journey, see the UK policy and think "that place looks really easy to get into, which is good because otherwise I don't know why I'd leave this war torn hellhole." 

A few days later a survivor of a sunken ship off the coast of Greece - a refugee from the conflict in Syria - offered her own way of stopping the flow of people attempting to get into Europe: "stop the war in Syria". This may come as a surprise to the James Brokenshires of this world, but what actually motivates most people to flee their country of birth and come to Europe is not the promise of endless free benefits (many of them probably have no concept of a welfare state) but the desire not to die. 

So when we ask ourselves what would stop people from other countries trying to come here, the clear answer is: making life bearable in their home country. So next time a politician claims they're going to reduce immigration in this country, you can check that they're talking about increasing the overseas aid budget. 

Of course they won't mean that, they'll mean wasting more of your taxes on the process of shipping people back to their ravaged countries, so they can try and make the journey all over again. For some reason the rhetoric of wasting massive amounts of resources not solving a problem at all plays well with a certain type of voter. Presumably the same sort of voter who likes their mechanic to fix their car's engine by repeatedly changing the tires. So you can look forward to much more tough sounding and utterly ineffectual rhetoric from the likes of James Brokenshire over the coming weeks, because it's apparently what you want. Enjoy. 

* I notice we've stopped even calling them 'asylum seekers', which was the term adopted when it was decided that 'refugee' made them sound too justified in attempting to come to our country. 'Migrant' sounds much better, as implies choice rather than compulsion based on survival. 

Preparation

Someone put a flyer through our door the other day for what was essentially a cramming centre. Their advertised achievement was a boy getting a 'C' in maths in year 5. I don't know what year that is in old money, but I'm guessing it's earlier than one normally gets a GCSE. My instant question is why do it? What do you hope to gain? I did my GCSE maths a year early, which simply allowed me to take three years to do my A-level maths. Obviously that wasn't what my teachers had in mind, but they clearly hadn't reckoned on my exceptional capacity for laziness. Ultimately though, the only reason one would ever do an exam early is to be able to say you did it early (see, even 20 years on, I can't resist), but at what cost? At the cost of actually enjoying the only childhood you'll ever have? I'm not saying that happened to me because it was just one exam one year early and I didn't do any extra classes. However if you're going to extra school after school all the time just to pass exams earlier, just to get through education faster, what then? You get to join the workforce earlier whilst you're younger and more malleable; whilst it's easier to indoctrinate you into the corporate mindset. Of course as an employer in such a situation, most of the heavy lifting has already been done for you. 

There seems to be a bit of a craze at the moment for emulating the success of Chinese education, which has generated hundreds of millions of citizens willing to be locked into the special version of capitalism that their masters have created for them. We may look east pityingly, sorry for all the freedoms that they don't enjoy, but the culture we think of as oppressing the Chinese is simply a vaguely reorganised version of the corporate structure that every modern multinational aspires to: one where the citizens/workers put the good of the country/company above their own personal wellbeing. Of course we all think we're too smart for that, we have a contract with our company, and we can walk away whenever we want, but how would we pay the mortgage if we just quit our jobs, how would we reach that perfect life that sits just beyond our grasp if we don't work for it? It's not just compulsion and coercion though, most companies work very hard at getting their employees to buy into their collective message, an idea that (they hope) goes beyond the basic premise that the company's continued profitability ensures continued employment. Companies want their employees to think of them as an organisation with a higher purpose, one for which it is worth going the extra mile. Ideally this sense of higher purpose should be coupled with a general sense of the generosity of the employer. 

At a recent company evening event, a colleague ponted out that 15 years ago, such an event would have started at lunchtime and taken up the afternoon, to which I responded that in those days he probably wasn't allowed to wear his own clothes every Friday. To my mild astonishment he accepted this as an entirely reasonable exchange, which is interesting given that it's not even true: he can't wear his own clothes on a Friday, not if they're shorts or a football top, or the sleeves are too short, etc, etc. Yet this colleague and so many others like him are seemingly happy to accept that a real terms wage cut is OK if they are allowed to wear a clearly defined set of slightly different clothes one day a week. My issues with 'dress down' days are well known and, I think, entirely justified. 'Dress down' days are the thin end of the corporate bullshit wedge; it is your employer playing make believe at meeting you halfway, whilst still actually dictating every aspect of your working life. They wheel out hundreds of similar ways to 'improve' your happiness at work in the hope that you will ignore the two most obvious ways of acheieving this goal: make you work less and pay you more. The make believe is that there is some higher purpose to your work; that in some way, by continually increasing the profits you make for your employer, the company will reach some never entirely defined corporate nirvana. Of course there can be no actual end point, just an unsustainable ever increasing margin. Regimes such as the one that controls China have an equally nebulous higher purpose. For better or for worse the government that we have ended up with in the western democracies exists largely to administer the state broadly in the interests of the population. In China the government administers the country in the interest of some increasingly I'll-defined ideal, disseminating power through the corporations that it owns. In the west governments have largely ceded power over people's lives to the large corporations, who lack merely their own entirely compliant justice system (and to be fair, when they need one, they just hire it off the nearest government) to fully emulate the politburo of the Chinese communist party. 

The mantra of modern politicians is that they don't want to do anything that could be bad for business, but what if what is good for business is bad for your citizens? What if educating children to be 'fit for the workplace' means grinding away at their souls until they'll accept any old corporate bullshit unquestioningly? 

Education is important, far too important to be left in the hands of those who think it is just a way of churning out compliant worker drones. When you push your children because you want them to have a better life, maybe take a moment to think about what would constitute a better life. Everyone wants the best for their children, but we really need to consider whether a system of education so favoured by corporate vested interests can be best for any individual. Next time you hear someone extolling the virtues of a Chinese-style education system, think about how having everything else Chinese-style has worked out for you. 

Paucity

In my first junior school, we had a succession of Swedish cooks. Each day they would come to our little village school (usually by motorbike) and prepare all of our meals from scratch, fresh each day. Naturally we all hated our school dinners. When, at the age of nine, I moved to North Tyneside, where the school meals were largely mass 'cooked' on an almost industrial scale across the whole county I quickly came to appreciate the culinary delights that I had left behind. It's an old cliché that you don't know what you've got till it's gone, but it might be helpful if we could find a way. A lack of appreciation of our current situation leads to a desire for another. As we are constantly sold the idea that the accumulation of wealth and possessions is the key to our happiness, we continue to accumulate and consume. It is like some sort of compulsion and no one is going persuade us to stop, as our whole economic model is built on the assumption that we will continue to accumulate and consume more and more. No alternative is offered or even considered; it is a one-way process that cannot be reversed or re-routed. We stick so religiously to this orthodoxy that even when the super rich run out of things to spend their obscene wealth on, they search relentlessly for more, still convinced that what they have is not enough or good enough. I recently heard that to fill up the Octopus - Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen's super yacht - with a month's worth of fuel costs $600,000.  And that is just fuel. A 'yacht' like that has no practical use, it's just a way of disposising with excess wealth. If you have enough money to spend $600,000 a month on boat fuel, you have too much money. That is not the politics of envy, it is the politics of basic rationality. 

That kind of example Is probably unhelpful in that it simply presents an extreme so ridiculous that we fail completely to associate with it. We can't see that we are locked into the same cycle of endless dissatisfaction as Paul Allen; we cannot equate our desire to buy the latest iPhone with his desire to posess a ridiculously large boat. Indeed that is part of the problem: we see that Paul Allen has so much more than us and subsequently feel justified in our dissatisfaction that we don't have a little (or a lot) more. So we push ourselves to greater consumption, because if they can have more, so can we. This is the only way that the wealth of the super-rich trickles down - the effect that the right wing is always so keen to accredit to their mates; this is the real politics of envy, it drives our economy on to greater and greater consumption, with the excuse against the consequences that we are not consuming as much as the next person. Constantly comforted that we are not the biggest contributors to the problems of relentless consumption and constantly dissatisfied that we are nowhere near the biggest contributors to the problem, we are happy to drive the the accumulation further and further, not by much, by just enough that we make it to the other side. Where the grass is greener surely. 

Persecution

The recent BBC documentary on the life and death of Aaron Swartz was as fascinating as it was moving. For me the key moment in the programme is the one of realisation that centres on a part of the interview with Quinn Norton where she describes her treatment at the hands of the U.S. District Attorney, in which she asserts that she is "still angry" that "we are OK with a system that tries to game people". My simple paraphrasing does little to emphasise the raw emotion and power of that video clip; I have watched it a number of times in order just to get the quote and I have been on the brink of tears every time. It might seem massively clichéd, but it feels like the moment the Internet grew up. The Aaron Swartzs of this world thought that they would be able to take on the injustices that they saw in the world with impunity because they were not doing anything anyone could really take seriously as wrong. The establishment media had been quietly demonising hacker culture for years, but that was largely on the back of a few silly childish pranks and even more media sensationalism, no one took that seriously did they, really? Turns out they did. Of course they did. Anything that threatens the status quo is automatically presented by the mainstream media and politicians as either ridiculous and disproportionate (feminism) or dangerous and subversive (direct democracy) or anti-business (socialism). These associations are made continuously at a low level so that they are pretty much second nature when it comes to dismissing the validity of the arguments of any of these groups. If this attitude had been engendered by a state or institution then it would be propaganda, but the people who espouse these views genuinely believe them because if any such movement was successful in achieving its goals, it would probably be to the detriment of these people. So they have genuine self interest in working against any such movement. Unfortunately, as they also have access to much of the world's wealth, power and influence they manage to make their opinion count much more than that of the average person. Indeed over much of human history (and certainly no less now than ever before), they have managed to convince everyone else that the service of their best interest is merely common sense. They have done an equally good job of convincing us that the contemplation of any alternative is dangerous or a sign of mental instability. It's easy for them to believe these things because from their point of view anything that threatens their position is dangerous madness, I'm just not sure why the rest of us go along with it so willingly. I guess partly because it requires not inconsiderable effort to think against an accepted wisdom that is reinforced daily through its public representation and the laws that subscribe it. 

Swartz came up against a problem that many very intelligent people encounter: the fundamental lack of logic in the systems, laws and interpretations of those laws that bound our world. He believed that if he pushed at the illogical points in the law or society, he would be able to bend them to a more logical position. Unfortunately it appears as if you are only allowed to bend the law once you own it. As many people on the documentary pointed out, whilst the U.S. State was attempting to prosecute Swartz - piling on as many charges as it could - the most heinous financial crimes in decades were going entirely unpunished. The view held by western governments of course being that the financial system is far too important to meddle with regardless of the detrimental impact it has on the lives of their citizens, whereas even potentially marginally disruptive political movements need to be snuffed out using the full weight of the law (or disproportionate amounts of legal action at least). If any stronger indication that the balance of power within our democracies is thoroughly unbalanced exists, I'm not entirely sure where. 

Swartz's 'mistake' was that he failed to make himself part of the 'indispensable' economic landscape before he started flouting the strictest interpretation of the law (and more importantly threatening the political and economic status quo). If he had taken any one of the companies that he was involved in founding on to be a Twitter or Facebook (maybe made a few party donations) and then used the corporation to steal information from another company, he'd have been fine. Sure the company would have been fined, but that would just have been an adjustment in its share price; as an indispensable captain of industry, it would have been unthinkable to prosecute the man himself. Unfortunately for Swartz, he wasn't really interested in the corporate world, indeed he could all too easily see the negative impact of so many of its failings and certainly of its dominance of modern politics. It would perhaps be a fitting legacy for him if more of us were more willing to do something about it. 

Porky Pies

From what I believe is a fairly common childhood viewpoint, as a child I was convinced of the idea of universal truth being something that adults had access to and full knowledge of. I think more than that, I believed on some unconscious level that adults had some sort of innate moral compass that allowed them to know the right decisions to make. In my childish mind these two things went hand in hand: knowing all the answers and deploying them in a morally responsible manner. I think there may be some way in which we all expect to wake up on our 21st (or 25th or 30th) birthday in full possession of all the facts; essentially grown up. I think the lack of this knowledge is one of the things most responsible for adults saying "I don't feel grown up". Of course part of becoming a grown up is coming to terms with the fact that you'll never have access to universal truth, with the accompanying comfort that no one else will either. In an ideal world we would all strive to reach as close to a universal truth as possible and negotiate our way through the world accordingly, so that to any observing child it would appear as if we were indeed in possession of universal truth and an unimpeachable moral code. Unfortunately the 'child' test is a long way from foolproof, given that it is not difficult to fool a child. It's not even that difficult to fool an adult; the Internet seems to have given us a desire to treat almost everything with credulity. It's as if we've taken the David St.Hubbins maxim to heart: "I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that makes me a more discerning individual than someone who doesn't believe anything." Perhaps even more problematic than our willingness to believe any old crap is the desire to feed any old crap to us that appears to drive so many of those we, in our childish state, believe ought to know better. 

The banner under the headline in the Metro on 14th January 2015 included the phrase "inflation hits an all-time low". I was surprised at this fact and so decided to do a little bit of research to find out if 0.5% really was the lowest rate of inflation ever. It didn't take me more than a couple of minutes to confirm that the rate of change in RPI had actually been negative for a time in 1959 and 1960, which is definitely lower than 0.5%. I'm sure if I were to present this fact to the Metro (assuming they didn't ignore me completely), they would point out that the index they were referring to as a measure of inflation was the CPI, not the RPI. The CPI didn't exist in the late 50s and early 60s, so in that sense, the Metro is entirely correct: a current measure of inflation is at an all time low, but only because 'all time' in this instance is less than 10 years. I don't think the Metro had anything more devious than a spot of sensationalism in mind when they came up with that banner, but it is indicative of the way people often use data selectively to make a point that the same data in its correct context would not illustrate quite so well (if at all). The fact that an entire radio series exists simply to look at the (mis)use of statistics in the news indicates the amount of liberty that is taken with data in politics and the media. Of course I don't think any of us is innocent of telling an incomplete story to make our point some time in our lives, but in certain quarters it appears to be almost an industry in itself. Certainly it seems almost impossible for a politician to quote any statistical data without poorly contextualising the crap out of it, even if the correctly contextualised data would have supported their point (albeit possibly less decisively or sensationally). It's almost as if being able to find data that corroborates your views is insufficient, and all data must eliminate the possibility of any other viewpoint. 

Given the amounts of data at our disposal these days, we are increasingly dependent on others to interpret it for us and it appears that an awareness of that fact has made many less, rather than more responsible in that respect. Climate change denial lobbyists seize on any inconsistency in a single piece of research to illustrate a point that flies in the face of almost all the other evidence. This is the sort blinkered logic that we call belief and associate with faith. We accept the application of such logic when it is associated with the supernatural beliefs of religion, but it seems altogether more difficult to accept when applied to more worldly topics. 

There has been much debate recently about the differences between fundamentalism and religion, with mainstream Muslims feeling compelled to distance themselves from the actions of a minority of fundamentalists who profess the same religion. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo killings, this was complicated by the fact that a number of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were clearly offensive to almost all Muslims. Now many western observers (and indeed pretty much everyone in France) would say 'tough luck, offence is the price you pay for free speech', and I would agree with this: witness the amount of not killing Nigel Farage I do. However, making a point about free speech simply by finding the thing that most offends someone and doing it to the greatest extreme again and again is also a fundamentalist position. Just as Muslims find themeves having to apologise for some of those who profess the same religion, I find myself wanting to apologise for some of those who profess the same secularism as me. Unfortunately it seems that the Charlie Hebdo approach to making a point is the only one we can understand these days: as if we must all be absolutist or we are not genuine. Again, I can't help thinking this comes back to the dearth of real debate in 21st century society. As we no longer understand how to talk to those who disagree with us, we select evidence to satisfy those we agree with and to deny any alternative completely. We have all become fundamentalist in our outlook even if we don't express that outlook through violence. The intransigence and extremity of our position doesn't persuade anyone of the validity of our argument and the mis-contextualisation of the data we use as our proof simply undermines our argument. In our desire to win the argument we lose the debate and sacrifice any moral highground to a kind of vanity of rectitude. Surely it is better to tell the whole truth and be accepted as fallible than only tell a half truth and be rejected as a liar.  

Prizes

I won the raffle. I never win raffles. Indeed, that is what I said when I won the raffle, which seems self-evidently incorrect with hindsight. It occurs to me that it is one of the most platitudinous inaccuracies in modern speech (and that's saying something), being statistically provable as incorrect. Of course, now that I have actually won a raffle, the statistics are much more provable, and I may be bound to say that I win raffles with a frequency that is roughly consistent with the aggregate probability of all the raffles I have taken part in. This is clearly nowhere near as neat as saying you never win raffles and is probably a cast iron conversation killer. So I guess next time I'm short of things to say in a raffle situation I'll just have to remain mute, or possibly relay the story of how I used to believe myself incapable of winning raffles until I won one. Yep, being stood next to me at a raffle is going to continue to be a conversational goldmine. 

I think I might have viewed the statement about never winning a raffle as a bit of a family heirloom, as it is a favourite of my mum's, deployed most inaccurately on the occasion she won a trip to New York in a free raffle. I think for me there was a sense of familial entitlement to the downtrodden enoblement of being an eternal loser. But this outlook itself is all about a sense of entitlement: the idea that the fact of our 'never' having won is somehow a universal injustice, that raffle upon raffle has been weighted against us, denying us our rightful prize. This is only an extension of the mindset that allows successful entrepreneurs to believe that their success is entirely due to their hard work and genius, whilst it allows everyone else to feel resentful that their hard work is not similarly rewarded. It is common knowledge that we have to hold an opinion of ourselves as in some way special so that we may avoid the crushing depression that will inevitably come from realising that we are just one of 7 billion idiots bumbling about the planet with no real idea what we're doing or why we're doing it. However, this opinion must also be one of humanity's greatest stumbling blocks: if we're so clever, why would we need to listen to others? Time after time we collectively suffer the consequences of this surfeit of hubris, "never again" we all say before getting straight back to thinking we can shit gold and giving ourselves chronic constipation. 

Would changing our attitudes to raffles, the lottery or any other games of chance change any of these things? There is a chapter of the excellent '10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10' that deals with our relationship to the random, looking briefly at its transition from a cause of fear throughout the majority of human history (largely because the unknown generally brought death and/or destruction) to a source of entertainment and stimulation in the modern era through games of chance. Whilst the chapter is not explicit on the point, it seems as if taking the danger out of the random has somehow convinced us we have control over it. We are probably no more superstitious than our ancestors but in all likelihood we have a stronger belief in our ability to influence random chance than them. We have more agency over our lives than ever before, although possibly not as much as we think we do. So much of what we think we know about the world we live in is based on assumptions about how much technology, government or corporations impact on our lives and we have little, if any, evidence to support these assumptions. Our understanding of the world seems as informed by James Bind as Edward Snowden, and it is through this agglomeration of fact and fiction that we arrive at our understanding of our control over our destiny. Given our propensity to overestimate our own abilities and agency, is it any surprise we believe that we can tame chance and, when we fail to, we feel cheated? I'm fairly certain that much of the frustration underlying the social media rages that wash across our age is due to this misconception of the limits of our possible agency in fate. 

In my defence, I'd like to think that my surprise at winning the raffle was a genuine surprise that random chance had resulted in my favour despite the logic of the odds telling me that it was unlikely. I genuinely don't think that my raffle winnings are reparations that the world should pay me for all the statistical wrongs it has influcted on me thus far in my life; I just think it was a nice surprise. I guess if we can view as many as possible of the good things in life like that, then we're probably doing OK. Certainly if we view less of the setbacks as personal sleights, we'll be less angry.