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.