The end of the world has been predicted for tomorrow 21st December 2012 at 11:11 GMT. Talking Bollocks has a reporter based in the world who will cover the story starting 1st thing Friday morning until midnight. If the world does end at any time Friday then our staff will record the whole story and report it to you, the public, as soon as the world become available again.
In the meantime, should you see the end of the world approaching please contact us stating where and when you saw the end of the world approaching and what colour it was. An artists rendition of the End of the World by John Martin indicates that it will be mostly black so please look out for anything very dark.
Our advice to anyone inclined to panic is to lay in a ditch with a paper bag over your head.
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On Friday night I went to a talk by Will Self at Brighton, Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College arranged by the excellent City Books on Western Road. I had taken the day off work as I had man flu. I still felt feverish while listening to Mr. Self discuss his new novel Umbrella. He read a passage and it seemed quite a dense stream of consciousness type of work written, as he said, in the continuous present. He talked before and after and took questions. He was good value. Alternately, irreverent, serious and amusing.
My mind has been slightly addled the last few days and I’m not sure where some ideas came from but I think it was he who described technology as a parasite on humanity. This tied in with the ideas of a friend who suggested that we are now so reliant on technology that we are becoming cyborgs without a physical interface.
Today, I read in The Economist that Alper Bozkurt and Tahmid Latif of North Carolina University are experimenting with cyborg parasites which can be used to help in search and rescue operations. A cockroach is fitted out with a little circuit board allowing remote control guidance. The circuit board also carries a microphone and camera.
Obviously this could be very useful in search and rescue…….or spying. I’m sure that police, intelligence services, military and the corporates will all be keeping a keen eye on this type of work. If it turns out to be practical, we will, no doubt, see these things crawling all over the walls of Embassies, foreign military installations and our own homes.
The increasing speed of technological advance is amazing but I sometimes wonder about the consequences. I think it’s generally accepted that Capitalism is better than Socialism at promoting invention and innovation. The key to this is probably the concept of limited liability which has enabled much of the western world’s success.
But the downside of this success has been the growth of massive unaccountable multinational corporations. It’s interesting that Western Multinationals are unaccountable but Chinese corporates are often owned by Sovereign Wealth Funds making them accountable to the Chinese government but I don’t want to get into a discussion on the merits of State Capitalism.
So far, we seem to have decided that the innovation and the standard of living which it has achieved is worth the rise of mega corporations but I wonder if this will always be true. More and more it seems that we get more stuff at the expense of our liberty.
We now have fantastic cars, amazing hand held computers, flat screen TVs and all the other stuff but very little time to enjoy it. I remembering reading a comment somewhere that most basements of middle class Americans have unused aqualungs or sky diving gear and Britain is heading that way.
Sure there are some great technologies on the horizon but are these future wonders worth the loss of control of our governments to corporate lobby groups? Is yet more innovation worth the steady privatisation of commercialisation or public space?
What do we value more: Bigger TV screens, the platooning of our cars, cyborg cockroaches or democracy?
I spent this week in Budapest staying at the excellent Intercontinental Hotel with a fantastic picture window overlooking the Danube and The Castle. Hot and sunny during the day and just plane hot at night. There is nothing like travelling around Europe for a few years to make you understand just how crap British weather is. Once the light faded the castle illumination came on. Gorgeous! As was the parliament building a little further along the river.
room with a view
For lunch one day we drove out to Budaörs and visited the Adler a traditional Hungarian restaurant where I ate good goulash. One evening I took a boat ride along the river. The commentary explained the architecture and mentioned that a Hungarian invented the computer. Odd, as I’d been told that it was either Allan Turing or Charles Babbage, both Englishmen. This reminded me of a Dutch friend telling me that a Dutchman had developed ideas on gravity before Newton. When I was a kid I was led to believe that Britain created the whole of the modern world. At school I was told that William Caxton invented the printing press and it was comparatively late in life that I learned about a German named Johannes Gutenberg.
A little later I ate in the excellent Sörforrás restaurant. Comfortable, good service and delicious Hungarian and international food. I think that, really, the whole of European history is one. We speak of globalisation now but centuries ago there existed a Europeanisation of scientific and artistic thought. Presumably the educated people understood this but the illiterate masses were oblivious to it. Not so different from today when the world’s elite flit around the globe paying their taxes wherever convenient but when they need our support they appeal to our nationalistic feelings with terms like “in this land” and “We British”. Remember Tony Blair banging on about being “passionate” about British this and that yet when he left politics he got a job with an American bank. Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson observed, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Hungarian Parliament Building
In truth, I don’t believe that many great discoveries come about in isolation. Ideas about relativity were simmering away amongst the world physics community before Einstein finally hit the nail on the head. Ideas and memes swirl around in our culture like the currents in a river. They ebb and flow and occasionally some bright spark gets drawn into an eddy and brings it all together. The sum of human knowledge is ratcheted up another notch. Yes, it was Einstein who made the final move but if he’d fallen under a car, someone else would probably have got there soon enough.
It crossed my mind that, like a river, human knowledge has many tributaries and side channels. Perhaps Einstein’s marvellous discovery helped us focus our attention on the material world and we’ve made great progress in this respect. Yet I wonder how it is that a civilisation which can place men on the moon and robot cars on mars can’t figure out an economic system which does not either get bogged down in authoritarianism inefficiency like Socialism or have periodic catastrophes like Capitalism.
The odd thing is that nobody seems interested in developing another system. People who don’t like Capitalism have an irrational faith in Socialism. People who mistrust Socialism think that recessions, depressions and credit crunches are just something that society has to endure along with the concomitant suffering of the poorest. If the brightest and the best could be dragged away from their Bloomberg terminals then maybe they could figure out a sustainable economic model. Ah, but that would mean change and nobody likes that.
The banks of the Daunbe
Perhaps the relevant ideas and memes are swirling around us already; climate change, the Internet, super-complex and reliable consumer products, globalisation, a common language, the creative class, additive manufacturing. Perhaps all the pieces already exist and we just need some Einstein to put it all together?
On this visit I did not board the funicular railway up to the castle but I hung around one evening near the station at the bottom and took photos as evening fell. Vast cruise boats slid by, many from Germany. The Danube rises like an enormous cake in Germany’s Black Forest and flows through Vienna, Bratislava and Belgrade not to mention Orşova, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Calafat, Bechet, Dăbuleni, Corabia, Turnu Măgurele, Zimnicea, Giurgiu, Olteniţa, Călăraşi, Feteşti, Cernavodă, Hârşova, Brăila, Galaţi, Isaccea and, of course, Tulcea.
As I crossed the bridge back to the hotel I looked down and saw one of these floating leviathans drifting by with a swimming pool on it’s deck. It has never occurred to me to cruise along a river before. What a great idea. You can stay in one place while visiting the great cities of Europe.
Kürtőskalács
The hotels are near the main entertainment area in Budapest and the night was busy with tourists and locals. I bought Kürtőskalács, or Chimney Cake, from a street seller. Spirals of pastry dipped in nuts and sugar that tasted, to me, like mince pies. One starts to eat this delicious confection and gets the idea that one will eat just one more ring before stopping. But these are not rings, this is a spiral and one munches on and on and on until one has devoured the whole thing.
A driver had been organised to take me from the hotel to the office the next morning. I emerged early and he had not yet arrived and so I stood gazing out over the river and waited. The hotel concierge approached, asked my name and said I should get in one of the taxis that always wait outside the hotel. I explained that I had a car coming but he insisted. I walked to meet him at the car and explained again that this was unnecessary. This time a second concierge joined in telling me that I should get in the car and when I tried to speak a passing young man with a rucksack said to me: “He couldn’t come”. For just the twinkling of an eye I thought I was back in The Village. Either that or some Soviet era spy thriller. It seemed that the whole of Budapest knew who I was and was conspiring to kidnap me.
Earlier this month I watched Newsnight Review on BBC2 and saw Kirsty Wark and Paul Morley discussing the recent death of Christopher Hitchens. One comment of Mr. Morley’s rankled with me. He said “5000 bloggers are not worth one Christopher Hitchens”. “Hmph!”, I grunted and tweeted “…True, neither are 5000 TV critics in black polo neck sweaters”.
It is commonplace for the mainstream media to denigrate bloggers and attention is usually drawn to the mediums very real failings: Blogs can be abusive, poorly thought through, dreadfully worded, awfully spelt and the facts are rarely checked. Many blogs have all these failings and more but professional journalists whining about bloggers are a little like aristocrats sneering at working class speech.
If we invert the failings attributed to blogs we get the strengths of the mainstream media. Like all large organisations, newspapers divide work into specialisations. They have specialist proof readers, specialists fact checkers and specialist editors. Given this production line approach it is not surprising that the BBC scores higher than most amateurs when it comes to “production values”.
Should we, then, ignore blogs? Should we limit our reading to the mainstream press? We may as well ask if we should ignore Rock and Roll. Like Hollywood the mainstream news media are very adept at the techniques of their profession but the industrial approach can produced results which seem contrived and predictable. If blogging has any advantage it is authenticity.
Prior to the printing press most people would have been unable to read and public discourse would have been dependent on numerous personal interactions. A discerning individual would have given less credence to the boor and more to the wit but the onus on differentiating would be down to the individual.
With the arrival of newspapers in the 17th century the news began to coalesce around a standard version of the truth. In the 19th century wire services such as Reuters further accelerated standardisation by providing identical information to its customers. The style or opinions became what differentiated one publication from another.
For as long as I can remember The News Of The World had been full of gossip to be taken with a pinch of salt while broadsheets cultivated a reputation for more accurate reporting. As readers we learned the difference but though the style varied the agenda remained broadly the same.
As with much of our corporate 21st Century, the mainstream news media has come to resemble a cartel. If we visit the web sites of the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, BBC News we see that the agenda is very similar. While they report different viewpoints, they still represent a bottleneck for ideas and information and are effectively setting a standard news agenda at least at a national level.
The Internet is challenging this status quo as was shown dramatically with The Arab Spring and the Occupy Protests. Ordinary people are setting their own agenda and even have their own news wire in the form of twitter. As events unfold in real time the mainstream media are forced to play catch up. It’s messy and difficult but there are as many opinions as there are individuals and the blogosphere merely reflects this reality.
An article in The Economist (December 31st 2011) stated “..it is hard to argue that the internet has cheapened the global conversation about economics. On the contrary, it has improved it.” and went on to say “…blogs have brought experts … out of the shadows.”
The mainstream news media have become a vested interest and, as with lawyers or gas fitters, they scorn the idea that anybody else could do their job. They do this by raising themselves up as gurus and denigrating those who threaten to replace them as incompetent. The mainstream media still provide better standards of quality control but, if all they do is package news and disseminate it through web sites and apps then they are not much different from a blog. The difference is further burred by sites such as The Huffington Post or the Guardian’s Comment Is Free which feed articles written by bloggers into a more professional looking framework.
Certainly the writings of Christpher Hitchens were superior to most amateur blogs but then Mr. Hitchens did not have the encumbrance of earning a living in a different field. One reason that mainstream journalists are competent is that they have spent their professional lives honing their competence. Some, like Mr. Hitchens, may rise further by dint of personal attributes such as individualism, iconoclasm and determination. Others cling to the technical paraphernalia of their profession to distinguish themselves from the amateur. As the mediocre artist relies on dressing in black and a well groomed 5 O’clock shadow so the mediocre journalist relies on grammatical pedantry.
Like any other profession the real threat to journalists lies, not with amateurs, but with industrialisation. Companies are now emerging such as Wordsofworth and Vivatic which outsource article writing and proof reading to individuals via The Internet. Their business model is to source articles from competent but cheap writers and flog them on to multiple sites which use them to pad out advertising. These sites are not looking for inspiration or controversy, they are looking for “content” and they effectively reduce the value of articles to that of filler.
The hope is that new media will provide greater access to public debate and challenge entrenched opinions though this is by no means certain. As some bloggers gain credibility, some journalists will find themselves paid peanuts to write 500 words on cup cakes. Sean Parker, founder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president has said “What we don’t have are good organising tools so that institutions, which have hierarchy which have management, can actually leverage the power of social media to get things done in a consistent and sustainable way”. Presumably Mr. Parker is now developing tools to enable power to be leveraged by consistent and hierarchical management.
We may be living through an interregnum. The Internet is a disruptive technology but its long term effect on public discourse may be to just shake out the chaff. If the mainstream media want to remain relevant they need to focus on nurturing thoughtful journalists who produce pungent and insightful articles. In this respect the blogosphere may be a much needed kick up the arse.
Last Sunday (11th December 2011) I watched the second program in the series Black Mirror on Channel 4. I’d seen a bit of a buzz about Black Mirror on Twitter but refused to get lured in. Partly this may have been because it was created by Charlie Brooker and I have ambivalent opinions of Mr. Brooker. Yes, he is funny and can be quite sharp but I’ve sometimes thought his antics a bit contrived.
Sunday’s episode was entitled 15 Million Merits and portrayed a society where people are doomed to spend their lives either sitting in cubicles playing dumb video games, watching dumb TV and cycling on treadmills to produce electricity to run the videos and TV.
In this world, nothing is physical. The screens cover entire walls, floors and ceilings. People who are overweight occupy a lower class and wander around cleaning up after the game players. Each player gains credits and may use these to dismiss advertisements or collect their credits for a chance to audition for a X-factor style show and potentiality become famous and escape the treadmill. One guy decides to try and make a difference and, by threatening suicide at an audition, is allowed to rage against the machine on prime time TV. The inevitable result is that he impresses the panel with his passion and is employed to rage away twice a week on a video channel.
A pretty obvious reflection of western society as it is today. Overdone for effect but nonetheless fairly literal. Even the rebel who is absorbed into the system is a well understood phenomena and we’ve seen this again and again from Mick Jagger’s knighthood to Bryan Ferry’s adverts for Marks and Spencer.
However, I was impressed with Black Mirror, not so much for it’s originality, but because it restated the ideas in stark and contemporary terms. It’s storyline was tight and without needless decoration. It is all too easy in consumerist society to be drawn in by the hype. We consider we are being ironic but slowly slowly we start to believe the hype. Slowly we think we really NEED a 4 by 4. Slowly we start to doubt our ideals. Perhaps we’re just out of touch. Perhaps the winners of X-Factor are real artists? Perhaps Deal or No Deal is an engaging game show.
The prediction of Science Fiction are never true but what good Science Fiction does is to hold up a mirror to our civilisation and show us the absurdity of our lives. The world of Black Mirror is not in our immediate future yet it is close enough in many respects to remind us that we are all being duped. Mr. Brooker has produced a fantastic piece of television, in this episode at least, and I look froward to next Sunday’s program.
A front page article in the Financial Times (FT) on the 21st November reported that a bunch of “leading economists” had written a letter to the British Chancellor, George Osbourne, urging him to rethink his plans to curb immigration. Mr. Osbourne is planning to limit economic migrants entering the UK from outside the EU and the economists believe that this would be “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
The UK had 13 years of New Labour during which immigration was used to provide cheap skilled workers to business mitigating the need to properly educate the indigenous workforce. This is obviously not a sustainable policy and will merely store up trouble for the future as British people sit on their arses and let Johnny Foreigner do all the work.
The restrictions to be brought in are for non-EU citizens so British business would still have the entire population of the EU from which to draw its workers. That means the economists believe that the educated percentage of a total population of around 500 million people is not sufficient for the British economy!
What utter tosh!
If 500 million are not enough then why should we believe that a world of 7 billion people is? Perhaps, if we looked hard, we could find an even dafter set of economists who believe that UK business needs the educated population of 10 Earth size planets.
The truth is that large corporations are driven by the need for profit and this means limiting costs. Land and labour are major costs and so it is most efficient for corporations to build mega office complexes and have the entire planet as a pool of potential employees. It’s even more profitable if the workforce are educated at someone else’s expense.
I’m sure the economists are all clever gentlemen but my experience is that bean counters only count beans. By this I mean they only count that which can be counted. However, some resources cannot be quantified and the top of my list is housing. House prices in London have more than tripled in 14 years and are still way over priced as discussed in an article in The Economist in 26th November.
Since a basic tenet of capitalism is that increased demand and fixed supply drives up the price of an asset. The deliberate importing of people into the UK may support corporate profits but it will also provide upward pressure on housing.
Corporations push the idea that capitalism creates wealth for the population and this can sometimes be true. At the moment, in China, capitalism is helping raise many people out of poverty. But read a book like The People Of The Abyss by Jack London and you realise that, at the height of the British Empire, which was powered by capitalism, the lives of the people living in the east end of London were worse than Australian aboriginals on the other side of the world living as hunter-gatherers.
The People Of The Abys shows capitalism at its rawest, un-tempered by socialism or the fears of socialism. It shows that the welfare of a population is not directly related to the profits of business.
Over the past decade or so, while businesses earned fat profits, ordinary people had to endure costs which did not appear on the balance sheets of any businessmen or politician. Unaffordable housing is just one example but the ordinary worker must also endure standing like tinned sardines on Bakerloo Line trains from London Bridge on a Saturday evening. We must sit in traffic jams. We must stand in rush hour queues, not to get on the train, not to get on the platform, not to get on to the escalator but to get into the bloody station!
All this boils down to supply of land and it is possible to argue that the UK should release more land for building to ease congestion and prices. This would be fine were the UK the size of the United States. It isn’t. Open up Google Earth and have a fly over the UK. Most of the land is either farm land or already built upon. There are very few patches of wilderness. Scotland is more thinly populated and we could just shrug and decide that we will give over the entire UK to human needs. The UK could become the first concrete country.
In 1951 Isaac Asimov published the first of his Foundation series of Science Fiction novels which portrayed a world known as Trantor which was completely covered in metal. The whole planet had been taken up by humans for homes or factories or offices. Food and raw materials were shipped in from other worlds.
I don’t want to live in a country without wilderness. I do not want to live on Trantor!
The pro-immigration lobby scoff and say that it will be centuries before we even approach a situation resembling the planet Trantor. True but then can they give us an indication of when we are going to stop building?
A couple of hundred years ago England was covered in forest and someone argued that we should chop down just this little bit more wilderness and give it over to some landowner to farm. They probably said “…but England is covered in forest, it will be centuries before it is all chopped down….”. They were right; it did take centuries.
But HELLO! here we are centuries later and the forests are gone.
On the 24 November 2011 the BBC reported that annual net migration to the UK hit a record high in 2010 at 252,000 though the figure may have now fallen to something more like 245,000. Growth is often expressed as a percentage but a more enlightening indicator of growth is “doubling period”. i.e. The time it takes for a population to double in size? The UK’s current population stands at about 62 million. If the current population carried on at replacement level and if the population only grew by the current immigration rate then the population would double in about 255 years.
That’s about nine generations if we take a generation as 28 years. By 2265 the UK would have a population of 124,500,000 and our descendants (that’s the grandchildren of our grandchildren’s grandchildren) will look back and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.
One by one the trees are cut down. Little by little our forests were destroyed. Little by little forest becomes farm. Little by little farms become houses and offices. Little by little we accept smaller seats on buses and no leg room on trains. Little by little we trade space for gadgets. Little by little we are squeezed into chickens runs and little by little the UK becomes grossly overpopulated.
I’m sure that it’s true that adding 10% more workers to London and letting them live like factory hens would make London’s corporations more profitable. Londoners may even acquire more tablet computers and smart phones. Yet our lives would be worse! Already the definition of a kitchen in a flat in Hackney is a line of cupboards down the side of the living room. Just how many times can they divide up these beautiful old houses into smaller and smaller boxes?
The mistake that these economists make is to become totally business centric. Their analysis stops at the profits of business and they fail to follow the process through to ensure that it benefits the population as a whole.
It is notable that the venerable economists who wrote the letter to Mr. Osbourne uttered not a squeak about the corporate profits which are being filched away overseas to avoid paying tax as was reported in the same edition of the FT. Surely that too is “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
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Will Self, Cyborg Cockroaches and Democracy
Tags: Capitalism, CIty Books, cockroach, corporate power, cyborg, democracy, innovation, limited liability, umbrella, Will Self
Will Self
On Friday night I went to a talk by Will Self at Brighton, Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College arranged by the excellent City Books on Western Road. I had taken the day off work as I had man flu. I still felt feverish while listening to Mr. Self discuss his new novel Umbrella. He read a passage and it seemed quite a dense stream of consciousness type of work written, as he said, in the continuous present. He talked before and after and took questions. He was good value. Alternately, irreverent, serious and amusing.
My mind has been slightly addled the last few days and I’m not sure where some ideas came from but I think it was he who described technology as a parasite on humanity. This tied in with the ideas of a friend who suggested that we are now so reliant on technology that we are becoming cyborgs without a physical interface.
Today, I read in The Economist that Alper Bozkurt and Tahmid Latif of North Carolina University are experimenting with cyborg parasites which can be used to help in search and rescue operations. A cockroach is fitted out with a little circuit board allowing remote control guidance. The circuit board also carries a microphone and camera.
Obviously this could be very useful in search and rescue…….or spying. I’m sure that police, intelligence services, military and the corporates will all be keeping a keen eye on this type of work. If it turns out to be practical, we will, no doubt, see these things crawling all over the walls of Embassies, foreign military installations and our own homes.
The increasing speed of technological advance is amazing but I sometimes wonder about the consequences. I think it’s generally accepted that Capitalism is better than Socialism at promoting invention and innovation. The key to this is probably the concept of limited liability which has enabled much of the western world’s success.
But the downside of this success has been the growth of massive unaccountable multinational corporations. It’s interesting that Western Multinationals are unaccountable but Chinese corporates are often owned by Sovereign Wealth Funds making them accountable to the Chinese government but I don’t want to get into a discussion on the merits of State Capitalism.
So far, we seem to have decided that the innovation and the standard of living which it has achieved is worth the rise of mega corporations but I wonder if this will always be true. More and more it seems that we get more stuff at the expense of our liberty.
We now have fantastic cars, amazing hand held computers, flat screen TVs and all the other stuff but very little time to enjoy it. I remembering reading a comment somewhere that most basements of middle class Americans have unused aqualungs or sky diving gear and Britain is heading that way.
Sure there are some great technologies on the horizon but are these future wonders worth the loss of control of our governments to corporate lobby groups? Is yet more innovation worth the steady privatisation of commercialisation or public space?
What do we value more: Bigger TV screens, the platooning of our cars, cyborg cockroaches or democracy?
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