Fleeting Reams

All Rabbit Holes Lead to God

2019-12-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

The brand of insanity we see growing online has its roots in the Bible, and in fundamentalists who believe its every word, without question.

Go for a leisurely stroll through the online wilderness today, and there's a good chance you'll end up falling down a rabbit hole that leads you straight to God. Countless people never seem to make it back out of that hole, or else they return from it being unable to figure out what's real and what's fake anymore. I blame Born Again Christianity (also known as Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christianity) and, by the end of this piece, you might too.

If you try to excavate the roots of the most bonkers, crazy-ass, bigoted conspiracy theories doing the rounds of the Internet right now, you will be struck by the fact that many of them are grounded in Biblical notions. The Illuminati are laying the groundwork for the Antichrist, as described in the Book of John 1. The Nephilim, described in the Genesis, are also real. Jewish Marxists are just hellbent on making promiscuity, abortion and gay sex the new normal so as to undermine the Church. These aren't my personal beliefs, but they are actual arguments that I've encountered in born again Christian discussions online.

The fingerprints of a distinctly New Testament morality are also stamped all over the Flat Earth Theory, anti-vaxxers, and New Age beliefs about angels, fairies and so-called Indigo children. And then there are the ancient astronaut theorists who are out there reaching for any notion, however far flung, to explain dinosaurs and humans interacting with each other in any context outside of a Flintstones cartoon. To my mind, all this is more indicative of how fundamentalist Christianity warps one's ability to think straight than it is of any single, cohesive world view.

Still, the grim truth is that you don't need to be full of hate or religious rivalry to engineer something like the Holocaust, you just need to be obedient and uncritical enough to support those who are. And, sadly for the Christian faith, its most ardent believers seem to fit nicely into this category, proclaiming death to gays, Wiccans, abortionists, Democrats - anyone that their right wing shepherds implore the flock to hate.

It's almost as if being told that the Earth was created in seven days; that a seven headed dragon and four horsemen are coming to kill you; that the seas can be parted; that bushes can give out advice, primes you to accept virtually any ridiculous claim whatsoever, for the rest of your life.

In order to understand modern conspiracy theorist culture, one needs to first understand that Christians literalists (esp. the born-again kind) are people who, either accidentally or on purpose, have brainwashed themselves into accepting that anything can happen at anytime, for no real reason at all apart from that It's God's plan! Or Satan's! Same difference!

In brainwashing, the victim is bombarded with irrational ideas and unpredictable behaviour that drowns out their inner dialogue - like an intellectual din - until they lose all willingness to think independently, using their own moral foundations. This leaves them susceptible to any new "logic" or belief that the brainwasher might impose.

In that state, the subject will numbly accept almost any new paradigm, however absurd. This seems to be same sort of fugue state in which many fundamentalist Christians operate 24/7. Why else would so many of them willingly gobble up wild-eyed claims about space giants, celebrity sleeper cells, reptilian shifters and more? Most conspiracy theory videos these days include as least a couple of lines from the Bible, almost like a celebrity endorsement for some totally useless new product. And for these people, that's exactly what it is: a stamp of approval from The Guy In The Sky.

And, yes, maybe it sounds funny when it's put like that, but not so much once you realise that this willingness to follow any irrational line of "reasoning" is polluting the sort of content that us non-Christians see online, too.

The social media algorithms that prompt us to check out videos and articles online, are chosen by droves of these fundamentalists. And, while the mainstream media keeps insisting that left wingers are being sorted into left wing bubbles by such algorithms, and right wingers into right ones, it's odd that I cannot watch a single video on a neutral YouTube channel like Timeline, without being prompted to watch videos about some Biblical conspiracy or other.

This may be because tens of thousands of religious viewers flock to this sort of content daily on sites like YouTube. I think they do this, not because they like to, but because they feel compelled to. It's like they have to re-indoctrinate themselves with magical thinking and leaps of bad logic on a very regular basis, or else the void inside of them where their critical thinking skills used to be starts to growl and make ominous sounds of immanent collapse. It's a flipping VOID after all, it has to be filled with something.

However illogical the Biblical "version of events" may be, it provides at least some kind of blueprint for navigating a world that demands constant input and output from them - interactions that these people clearly lack the internal resources to provide, without constant coaching.

I can only assume that reviewing their favourite YouTube video clips of the Horns of Judgement sounding over Minnesota, or Facebook posts about Millennials invoking Satan through their tattoos, helps them keep that fragmented, fever dream of a life narrative straight: because, let's face it, sound reasoning and empirical evidence aren't going to do that job.

And even as we metropolitan types might snigger at this sort of content while we're stoned or drunk and browsing Reddit, the fact is, it is slowly co-opting Internet culture. The fundamentalist Christian right is swiftly turning the 'Net into a cult-like projection of its own broken thought processes, and the society connected to it is also splintering. Worse still, many of those broken thinkers wind up voting broken politicians into power after indoctrinating one another to believe that it's somehow God's Will.

I don't think it's a coincidence that bad logic descended upon the Internet like a Biblical plague around the same time that Republicans started pushing Bible belt patrons to participate more in virtual politics, so "Trump Our Savior" (as Evangelicals knew him) could win the election. Nowadays, this fringe element is constantly bombarding the online world with madcap notions about how government, science and history works... and it gets weirder every day.

Their figureheads seem to live only to create more "evidence" for this collective insanity to keep that support base hooked on its (mis)interpretations of events. Look at Trump's twitter feed and you get a glimpse of how hard they are constantly at work to invent more improbable hypotheses as to why the truth isn't what it seems to be.

Over time, even non-believers seem to be turning numb to the surreal mental contortions that literalist Christians have to make to keep their "facts" straight. We're all slowly learning to tolerate the insanity, albeit unwillingly, like a global case of Stockholm Syndrome. We may not agree, but we lack the energy to even resist the stupidity because the constant drone drowns everything else out. And so the brainwashed have become our brainwashers.

I'm not trying to say that all spirituality is insane. There are many healthy belief systems out there that leave one's critical thinking skills intact, or promote questioning. Anarchists need to remember that the 17th Century Diggers were Christian, and they achieved more for the stateless society than Dawkins ever will. Not to mention the many scientists, astronomers, philosophers and activists who have turned out to believe in a spirit world of some kind. They were all able to maintain an evidence-based approach to reality, even as they held less tangible beliefs.

Spirituality comes from humanity and to me, that makes it as valid as any other human trait, as long as it works in relative harmony with the other traits - like logic, sexuality, self-expression, relationships. Literalist Christians are notorious for quashing any facet of human nature except the ones that their leaders tell them to like. And, for destroying real people for the sake of a completely imaginary one. There's faith, and then there's bad faith.

A common trend nowadays is that, when one finds a Facebook account or a YouTube playlist that's devoted mostly to innocuous seeming biblical conspiracies, there are inevitably some far right videos thrown in there which veer wildly off topic and taking all the lost lambs who've strayed too far down the rabbit hole, right along with them. It's quite obvious in these instances that the far right is intentionally gaming the willingness of Bible bashers to go with the Scriptural flow, to their maximum political advantage.

First comes the Antichrist; then come the refugees? Like many fundamentalist channels, this one slips far right messages in between the religious ones.

'Medieval studies scholars of my acquaintance have been noting particular far right tropes on Facebook and Twitter, pointing out how they like to design little “heraldic” crests for their organizations. They take symbols like the “fasces” of fascism and cross them like swords and paint them on shields like crusaders,' writes Josephine Livingstone, author of Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville on The New Republic.

These aren't just any old fantasies, though - they are Christian fantasies, specifically the fantasies of Christians who wish they could command and control the masses like they did "back in the day".

Once upon a time, the Church was basically a propaganda machine, designed for extracting obedience from subjects who would otherwise have been happy dancing around trees, playing music, having sex and distributing goods amongst themselves in any way that suited the whole group. This belief in the unseen was weaponised by bad actors in the Church, turned against society to make it do self destructive things out of superstitious fear. Faith doesn't have to work that way, but the wrong sorts of people have been working overtime to ensure it does, in particular since the Third New Right took shape, in 2014.

Back in the day, the medieval Church was more or less just a capitalist machine, using "God's will" to co-opt the fruits of other people's labours. The modern Church should be ashamed of that herectical past, yet it sits silently by and watches, as right wing insanity infests every corner of the internet for the profit of men with similar goals. And in so doing, it is storing up an unholy amount of bad faith for its future and for ours.

The Denisovans Kept Us As Pets

2019-11-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

So I was watching this video the other day by Andrew Collins, a colleague of Graham Hancock, just for a laugh. I mean, he has some great points to make (they always do) but I've learned to take everything that so-called 'alternative historians' say with a big pinch of salt. Some of them have, of course, made some great deductions at times but, at the end of the day, I see them as yarn spinners: not unlike a talented science fiction writer that occasionally stumbles upon a new technological breakthrough.

We should respect those accidental breakthroughs, of course. Still, one can't just absorb everything that Collins or Hancock says as a fact, the way that many people seem to do. They aren't using scientific methodology so much as their powers of deduction and speculation, and their margin of error is therefore much greater. Still, a few of their theories seem to have been dead on the money, just not in the way that they may have hoped... for instance, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and the existence of a "Planet X" that exerts a gravitational pull on our solar system. These theories are accepted almost as a fact, these days, yet at one time they were perceived as being theoretical, even fantastical.

Anyways. In his video, Andrew Collins expounded on his theory that the ancient, wise giants that we hear about in Greek, Semitic and First Nations legends, may have actually been the Denisovans. If you haven't heard of the Denisovans yet, these are relatives of the Neanderthals and a common ancestor of homo sapiens. At present, they only exist as a couple of bone fragments and a tooth that were found not all that long ago. Without a complete skeleton, we can't say how big they were, but the tooth that was found was more than 3 times the size of a modern human tooth. So it's possible they may have been just as exponentially huge, compared to us. Or, they could just have had very massive jawlines, like that bad guy in Avengers: Infinity War.

Also according to Collins, the Denisovan DNA has been sequenced and it shows a lot of crossover with our own genetic structure, including, supposedly, an increased propensity to autism. So Collins argues that Denisovans may have been extremely intelligent, just like certain autistic people are these days (though you should remember that this is based on the DNA of just one or two individuals).

We've all heard of autistic people who can recall every number they've ever seen or perform other savant feats, despite their social deficits. This has led Collins to suggest that the Denisovans may have been genii who pioneered, say, the brilliant maths that were used to create monuments like Stonehenge or the pyramids of Giza, using advanced calculations and ratios that homo sapiens would have struggled to come up with, given the soap-operas that our lives almost definitely were (even back then). He also seems to believe that Denisovans somehow shared their abilities with us humans before they went extinct, as if passing the torch to the next intelligent primate branch.

Personally, I think it's possible that we may be slightly overestimating ourselves, here. If the Denisovans were able to design and build pyramids without the aid of a calculator, they probably would have found us humans quite stupid, by comparison. So, I have an even better theory: that the Denisovans kept us as pets, and we picked up on some of their advanced knowledge while they were training us to do tricks for them, like a dachshund at a dog fair.

Think about it: if your pet cat ever evolved, she'd pass down tales of tall, benevolent giants that had looked after her, gifted her with health supplements, healed her with medicines and even showed her how to communicate differently, by waving her paws, meowing, stuff like that.

I can imagine that it might have happened like that for us: one sunny Russian summer day, a Denisovan woman was out collecting mushrooms in the woods when she found a tiny, bedraggled homo sapiens that had gotten separated from its parents. She brought it home, going, "Look what I found! Isn't it sooo cute? I'm gonna raise it alongside my sacred python, Sophia!" Only she said all this telepathically, of course, because everyone knows that giants had mad starseed skills.

Later, her little pet primate learned to talk, and she was like, "Aww, look, it made some words - isn't that clever! Just a shame that it relies on these primitive, guttural sounds that we mainly use for singing, since it could just as easily send its thoughts to me direct via my pineal gland, like Sophia does. But still: I bet I can teach it some neat tricks!" And so she persisted.

After the pet human reached adolescence, she finally succeeded and gloated about how her, "little primate" could understand basic astronomy and trigonometry. "Maybe I should show it the etheric energy field technology that we use to levitate stones! See if it understands that, too! Maybe it'll even get the hang of psychic surgery!"

Spoiler alert: it didn't. But it did pick up some mad astronomical skills along the way.

THE END.

Note: The facts I state above are based on my recollections of one talk that I saw by Andrew Collins. I haven't verified them independently because this is a super un-academic piece of speculation that I wrote for entertainment purposes (obviously).

But please, feel free to share your thoughts below!

To The Stones

2019-10-18T09:39:00.004-07:00

I see this

as evidence that all humans have felt what I feel, pursuing the gusting clouds and the setting sun, the endless horizon speckled by mysterious mountains, the slope of plains toward encroaching trees.

"Observatory." "Calendar". Metrics and mechanics? Or could it be that these stone splinters in the ground, are an attempt to chase after the next horizon, the next dream? The only horizon regularly seen by a settled farmer - the one leading skyward and up?

There is a kind of magic in standing still but letting everything else - eyes and ears, expressions and beliefs - expand indefinitely. It's that first expansion that's the most meaningful, but the archaeologists can't grasp it. Maybe because everything they take part in is temporary, permitted here and there.

If I mark the place where my family lays, drinking and eating and dancing all year round, planting seeds that germinate into renewed leaves and buds, the same may happen to the people that are made there, too. Especially if everyone makes an effort to remember each and every member, making space for them even after they've passed. If everybody aim to recognise old features in any new face... An act of memory magic.

Maybe this is why Neolithic society is so unfathomable to us: they couldn't fathom being away from their parents - specifically, their mums ¹.

In a day and age when the mantra is one of escaping, erasing, establishing new bases alone - a generational Tabula Rasa - it's a slap in the face to realise that all these stable networks, lasting thousands of years, were made by people reflexively grasping for mama, papa, grandma and grandpa. Reluctantly entering the age of iron and waging battles and keep their graves sacred, a den for the ancestors to retreat into until it was time to be born again. Reunited in new flesh.

Under these imaginative ancestors' gazes, the sky really was the limit. Making dreams happen, weaving tales and patterns, all the beauty that we get from a factory today was then a personal bequest, from deft and delving hands that taught us to Be All You Can Be. Be it, as if your life depended on it.
And it did.

No shame about living at your Ma's place, then: here it was a way of life, Ma's place spiralled out and became Maia's palace. A place to hang out and hang onto, her grave site gave you a base to chart your capabilities to the fullest, for the love of humanity.

If that memory fades, the realisation we are eternal is also lost. A relic of the magical past.

Centuries later, after technology has creaked and smoked its way through endless rejections and replacements of that stable, familiar life, it turns out these "naif" people may have been right all along. Our ancestors, calling for mama and papa, were unable to wander far from home, playing out fantasies in their parents’ backyards.

Turns out, they knew how to keep that orb of life spinning better than any machine we have ever built - rationalising our outward movements with notions of some overriding, horizon-melting goal. Conquest. War. Limitless riches or immortality. Most importantly, love: love like an infinite, spinning core that you coalesced from and cannot go home without, but can never find your way back to, now, by simply
going home.

A celestial temple to creativity. Where dreams becomes real, the way that stars sometimes fall out of the sky, landing at your feet, despite having been mere abstractions mere seconds before, lights sketching familiar shapes across the sky - lions, goats and water bearers. And then something hard and alien, as ancient and mysterious as a meteorite is just - there - steaming at your feet. Expanding into pre-terrestrial hints at the cosmos that you can never reach, but evoke just by wishing at them

in a raw and primal state.

We still haven't figured out how in Hell people even moved these stones... but we can easily imagine why. And we can feel it, if we stand there long enough to see the cycling of that orb, anchoring the centre: more seeds rising, shedding dead stalks, more children playing old games and adding new rules, growing more complex ideas, like stones rising overhead, over time. All are manifestations of a single force that we can only see one season, one face, one generation at a time. The openness inside a circle.

What it is depends on who you are, and will become...

Miss E, having a woo moment somewhere near to Stonehenge.

1. The Living Goddesses By Marija Gimbutas (p. 112)

The Generator

2018-10-26T14:01:00.003-07:00

I wrote this in 2005, when London's free party scene was reaching a dead end. The descent had started with the crackdown against Reclaim the Streets and the Carnival Against Capital in 1999 and the backlash against the anti-capitalist scene that it had spawned. Sprawling all across Europe, the States, everywhere, it was now being battered back into the scratches on the urban surface from which it had sprung.

All the outlets of community that I'd seen when I'd first arrived - the squatted hangouts, libraries, free shops et al - had been evicted. There had been a crackdown on squatting. There were no banners or backdrops painted with activist splashes of passion littering the squat rave scene, anymore; no pamphlets, no mission statements, no films or pedal operated cinemas or radical plays. No happy people just pausing here to dance before continuing, flush faced, into the future.

What used to be the playground for all subcultures now existed just for techno… because, techno… to the exclusion of all but… techno... repeating the same rhythm relentlessly as if they could hammer depth and meaning into each beat through sheer, defiant resolve. Their steadfast refusal to admit any larger ambition than techno, just a way to avoid admitting defeat.

Macho pride was scoring its first and final goals against the idealism of the scene.

2005

The dancefloor’s become a place to simply move on the spot without reaching beyond ourselves. We are a legion of walking, stumbling beats. Marching defiantly on the spot, as if to remind ourselves to use it. Or else we lose it.

Ketamine gives the people around me a complete and functioning parallel universe, right inside their heads. Secure from external threats: cut off. Unique but impossible to grasp, to pass on or replicate when a mind is lost… and a few already have been. Bodies found, hearts stopped, in the corner whilst waking up at the end of a night and a day.

Before, people used to bring life to the dereliction… now they aim to shed life in order to become it. To be redundant is ultra-desirable - to have outlived your usefulness in the rat race. To be dysfunctional, a self sabotaged cog in the system gumming up its works.

Yet here, there is always the promise of something creeping, just below the surface, about to explode outward. Bustling with joyous, undiluted energy. The original rising from within, emerging thru pores with hands raised. Blunted by a stubborn breakdown, frustrated. Blocked. That almost glows through our netted skin, impulsively straining for what may be….

This city is a generator, and this is its fuel source. All those different experiences rushing in to fill the void….they carry me away on their surf. That momentum, that raging momentum, like I felt it that first time in a party, stretches through every flat breakdown and every failed mix. The audience is up for it, no matter what. Faces who appear out of the woodwork are suddenly friends again, not just shapes and masks who I make a hazy association to, but gleaming eyes I recognize.

Once, when it was novel, so many people got lost. Tried to take it to its logical conclusion, concocted impossible worlds and lives. Then, money and drugs came along and harnessed all of that, routing it into the language of ups and down, of cost and profit, known variables instead of infinite possibilities of now.

While we may have this warehouse for one night, outside Theyare still closing in. Every moment we spend here, some part of our lifeblood, no matter how small, is draining into the system. Police, officials, crack dealers... all scavengers are here to increase the disaffection that feeds this scene for their profit. They circle, loom without swooping, just to increase that tension and tap it as rage.

Some are coming to parties only to be their worst selves, to express whatever senseless feral sentiment was being thrown against the riot shields and "protest-free" zones, not making it through, so why not yell it at someone standing next to you at a party instead? People screaming and groping each other just to feel… something.

A startled voice asks: "Where's the party. Have we found it yet?"

"Yeah..."

This the ultimate ultimate underground. Tapped straight out of the hearts and brows of the newly arrived as they fall through the doors of London, ready to be amazed. Cameras Ready. Dazed by a flash. Their reactions seized, preserved as a primordial reflex that hasn't yet become anything - feeling, aspiration, dream or thought.

Tapped and then re-tapped. Trapped, because we're just that pleased to be the main attraction that we allow ourselves to be bled, snapped and then shared and talked about as long as we can keep up the senseless act. Weary van unloaded, shadows playing against the wall and making racy patterns to decorate the empty space... where real transformations could have been begun, if only we'd looked inward instead of out… oh but then we'd have to abandon our creations [our selves] again. "Happens every time." Better to stage this resistance as a pantomime, for the benefit of passers-by… and their memories will preserve it best.

The skeletal bodies of K-heads beside me resist. All they have is the resolve to keep on being humble in the face of scrutiny, but the steady turnover of faces drains them just the same.

We exist only as an addendum to a system that keeps on swelling, without purpose, every year. Cars, houses people swelling, the same everything, just larger and more layered than before. Expansion it can handle, but change? Not on your life.

Everything around us made for us with the pain of real people: the Third World toiling for the First. And the tragedy is that we can feel it, that absence that makes us uneasy, doubtful of everything we touch. The emptiness makes us hungry and leaves us two choices: purchase everything faster and faster, as the luminosity of true culture burning within each product dims. And dims. And dims. Or else look inside ourselves and try to find some culture of our own, before it burns out

or burns us.

London Life: The Giant House Spider

2018-09-14T06:49:00.001-07:00

When you move to London in the nineties, you're quickly apprised of all the usual dangers: the Real IRA might resurface and bomb your Tube station; a crackhead may mug you in your lift; your flat could be broken into by your neighbours, who are under fraud investigation by the CID. Or, worst case scenario, the squat party you've been chasing all night might get closed down.

No one ever warns you about the spiders, though.

Basically, British house spiders are like tarantulas that have a wasting disease. Their legs are always wobbly, unsteady, like they can't quite walk straight. And they can barely see, so they use their two front legs to sense things in front of them... like a dismembered hand that wandered out of a nightmare, they feel their way toward you, blundering across your hand when you're reading a book. Or across your face, when you're asleep.

They're hairless, too, and as well as being clumsy and nearly blind and made of some kind of arachnoid skin, they're really fast. So, if you startle them in a dark room in the middle of the night, there's always a chance they'll end up on your face (again). Not because they wanna be there, but just because they're in a hurry and can't see.

Nightmarish. I've seen about three 'real' Tegenaria Gigantica in my life and hated ALL of them. The first flat I lived in in England was an attic flat that had about a dozen living there. Many of these weren't 'real' giant house spiders, seeing as they were smaller than the length of my hand. They were just babies - if you can picture anything with eight legs and five eyes being a 'baby' - so only about two or three inches, including the spindly wavering crazy legs, and faceless hairless torsos. But they were bold as brass.

I used to see them sitting on the kitchen sink and table top when I came in and they wouldn't move until I smacked my hand down on the counter next to them... maybe they thought it was the competition, a mama spider or just another part of the ceiling falling off? At this point, they would slightly jump and scuttle reluctantly down the drain, as if it was just going through the motions... or under my bed, where I was frankly afraid to look at any time of day.

As this flat was about the size of a Canadian bathroom, I spent a lot of the time pressed against a wall with a scrunched up Loot or a frying pan in my hand, making panicked waving gestures at these spiders to chase them away from whatever part of the flat I wanted to be in. Reorganizing the space. But aside from the babies, there were these two 'parent' spiders that were about the size of my hand each. REAL giants. Thankfully I almost never saw them except a few times, and I didn't hang around too long afterwards.

The first night I saw one of them, I came in from the Industrial night at the Devonshire Arms and flipped on the light and saw a large brown shadow racing across the carpet. Since the carpet was brown as well, I didn't register what it was - the dimensions of the thing just didn't make sense - until it pulled itself up onto the wall, and just sort of hung there, its clumsy, straggling shape starkly traced against the white paper. It was the mother of all (the other) spiders. I could have fit my hand more or less exactly over her, legs and all, if I'd been mad. Since I'm not, I spent forty minutes hyperventilating and trying to think of an object big enough to smush her without leaving any of the legs or anything hanging out. It was a frying pan, in the end.

And yes, I did feel bad about killing that spider, but it was like living in the Arachnid enclosure at the London Zoo and there just wasn't enough space there for all of us there: me, the babies, their parents and my hands. Sorry, arachnophiles, but phobias are called 'irrational' fears for a reason.

Germans usually laugh when I tell them about the challenges of UK living.
Well they would, wouldn't they? They haven't seen the spiders, yet...

The Right Way To Be "Left"

2016-05-31T08:23:00.001-07:00

One Cause, One Tribe

At Easter weekend, I went to the talk by Spiral Tribe members at Mensch Meier. Taking place in a wood paneled bar area that was full of yellow-lit smoke and boozy air, the talk had the ambiance of being at a 1920's meeting of banned radicals in some working man’s club (albeit one that was plastered in absurdist posters and satirical signs from modern Berlin).

Instead of working men, the place was bustling with a restless, flushed cluster of Generation Y techno hippies. The strikingly youthful Tribe members didn’t look much older than their audience, despite being part of a much earlier rave generation.

They were energetic and chatty and seemed up for a debate, but it wasn't forthcoming from the crowd which was awed and sitting back in typical German reverence, allowing the speakers to say their piece, and the wisdom to seep in.

One comment sticks in my mind, which was made by Debbie of Spiral Tribe. She said, “We’ve been together for 25 years and it hasn’t been smooth sailing the whole time. There are some big personalities in the collective. We haven’t always gotten along. It takes a lot of hard work to stick together.”

It resonated with an off-the-cuff comment made by Laurie Penny, two weeks later, when she was speaking at HAU. It was something to the effect of, “We should avoid perfectionism in left wing.” About a third of the people in the audience sat up and started nodding their heads in affirmation.

Maybe it's because Penny's talk was also taking place in a wood-paneled theatre with a 1920's ambience - a place where you could imagine Rosa Luxemburg giving a speech to a disgruntled crowd, back in the day - but I connected her words with what the Tribe members had said two weeks earlier. A new consensus seemed to be suffusing Berlin's linke scene about the right way to be left.

There is good reason for people on the left to have divisiveness on their minds, lately. On the news, and on social media, the leftists that we see most often are those who take a critical stance: ranting and raging at each other, calling each other out over this badly-phrased thought or that impulsive tweet, exposing one another as less liberal or tolerant than their comrades are. We're also regularly force fed images of 'activists' who are dressed identically in black and who are attacking cops that seem to be dressed for a round on Robot Wars.

There is a common theme underlying both kinds of coverage: in it, we only ever see the left wing in a state of conformism, a state of attack against whatever doesn't fit neatly into its narrow parameters of 'ideal'. At a subconscious level, this preconditions us to view activism as a rejection, rather than an affirmation, of certain ideals. As a result fear, not hope, becomes the public's only motivation for living up to the Left's demands.

Perhaps this unbalanced view of how activism works is the only one that the media is capable of giving us. The media is a mirror which only reflects what it knows how to see, and conformist execs who live in fear of being rejected by their peers will tend to identify with activists who behave in the same way. So the kind of activists and left-wingers depicted in the media are necessarily a reflection of the media industry's own biases.

Unfortunately, these same biases can also be found nearly everywhere in Berlin's left wing scene.

Instead of fighting back against the prevailing status quo, many activists here seem happy to mirror its habit of excluding or rejecting anyone who doesn't fit into their ideal of what an 'ethical' person is. Even looks are ground for exclusion, it seems: for example, I recently heard about a certain queer collective in Berlin that is refusing to admit anyone who wears dreadlocks or ear plugs, on the grounds that such styles amount to 'cultural appropriation'.

Leaving aside the question of what culture can even claim to the be the true originator of dreads or plugs, is that even a practical model of how the left can achieve meaningful social change... via a dress code? Or is it just a case of leftists slotting their ideals into a pre-existing social construct, limiting their efforts to negation, because that's what the superficial mainstream tells them to do?

Corporate Collectivism vs. Left Wing Isolationism

It dawned me the other day that, in order for any activist movement to properly challenge the neoliberal, corporate status quo, it would have to become exactly as integrated as the corporate conglomerates that it is fighting against.

Look at how the big companies - Apple, General Electric, McDonalds etc. - act. Even as they try to sell us on “the power of the individual”, urging us to customize everything from our burgers to our shoelaces to our life insurance plans, their own power is grounded in the all-inclusive collective: the corporation. It’s a collective that only cares about getting rich, but a collective nonetheless.

Now look at the way that such corporations tell us to behave: "Vote on your own. Stand on your own. Express yourself. Rely on yourself. Be your own boss. Stand out from the crowd." Even as they're saying it, these corporate entities speak as a unified collective. It's a stark an illustration of the dictum “Do as I say, not as I do” as can be found.

Perhaps they push the masses to stand alone and unsupported because that's the easiest way to keep us in our place. If the Berlin left were to stick together like the big corporations do, it might suddenly become a force to be reckoned with. But for the most part it's too fragmented and exclusive to reach out to the newcomers that are making up an increasingly large part of the city's demographic.

A few years ago when I was organizing my first Berlin party with some people from the London free party scene, I took them to the Köpi to ask the collective there if we could rent their cellar. When a punked-out resident of the Köpi eventually appeared in the doorway (covered from head to toe in band names, political slogans, tattoos and pins) and we told him that we were interested in renting the cellar for a party, he snapped, "We don’t do commercial party here, sorry," and a few seconds later he was shutting the door in our faces. We barely had time to sputter out a whole sentence, let alone describe what kind of party we were planning to do. Both the DJs and the crowd that we were representing are firmly rooted in the UK squatting / direct action community and would have been a perfect fit for the ideals of the Kopi. But apparently all that mattered was that they weren't a perfect fit for its look.

And hey: why listen to a stranger for long enough to recognize that you might have something in common beyond the superficial details, right? Who has time for that, these days - we're all too busy fighting the capitalist system? Ironically, the fastest way out of that system might be to simply stop treating other people like an afterthought... or an inconvenience... or a threat... to the aims of the Left. That's something that any one of us can do at any time if we really want to throw a spanner in the works.

Similar scenarios have played out at many of the Left political events and meetings that I've attended, here: people refuse to speak to the obvious stranger in the group, even as they bang on about inclusivity and breaking down barriers of gender, race, sexuality etc. The inclusivity mantra itself has become another reason to reject anyone who hasn't read, memorized and recited it in the right way. Maybe I've just been unlucky but many of the activists that I've encountered here seem like they're only interested in preaching to the converted - in being reassured that they are 'right' instead of taking on the kinds of risks that are associated with the Left.

The corporate world, meanwhile, succeeds because it has learned the truest lessons of the Left. Even as it sends out divisive messages to the public, it understands that solidarity is the fastest route to success. It prioritizes togetherness and mutual support in the face of all criticisms, no matter how valid they may be. And, okay, it also takes that support to a frankly obscene level by overlooking sexual harassment, for example, or criminality within its ranks. But in every situation, the corporate world's first impulse in the face of adversity is to support its peers. Perhaps the left would get as far as McDonalds in its bid to change the face of the planet if it would adopt (or rather, reclaim) that same approach.

Being More Than Just "Against"

Stories like the one above make me want to put my head in my hands. In my own activist lifespan, I’ve witnessed materialist anarchists bashing pagan anarchists; first-wave feminists being trashed by third-wave feminists; queers trashing trans people; vegans getting trashed by vegetarians. For a while, all this griping and sniping nearly put me off politics altogether.

Eventually I realized that, for many people, rejection is the first step on a long road that leads to reform. But while recognizing a thing as 'bad' is the first step, dealing with it is the essential second step toward enacting that reform. And rejection and avoidance are just ways of postponing that second step from ever happening. After all, it takes a whole of society to create a biased or consumerist (or whatever) person. By logical extension, it takes a whole society to reform them, too. Shutting out individuals who are less enlightened - or enlightened in a different way - is kind of passing the buck for society's problems on to them and them alone, instead of dealing with it as a collective. I can hardly think of a worse way to express "solidarity".

In an age where people socialize alone, through the medium of a computer screen, the habit of unfriending and blocking people who one disagrees with has become an almost unthinking first resort for dealing with disagreement. But these tools of rejection are just another corporate product that the likes of Facebook have forced upon us, to further isolate us from our communities. And each time that we employ them, we further those corporate aims rather than the autonomous ones we seek to create in the Left. The prospect of true unity - which takes effort, as Spiral Tribe so effortlessly explained - grows dimmer.

So what's the solution? Well, perhaps Berlin's left scene could try organizing meetings where the only goal is to meet new people and share everyday experiences and backstories... without judgement. Safe and non-defensive spaces for leftists to meet and mingle have been in short supply, as far back as I can remember. But activists are people too, and they need the same freedom to explore, enjoy and even (gasp) make mistakes without judgement that all people have. Currently, capitalism has the market cornered on all those kinds of mindless and fun activities.

Activists still need that kind of a space where they can just be together; where the ever-present pressure to be the "best" or the "most egalitarian" person is gone. They need a place where they can create a balanced scene by being a balanced person, who is allowed to have strengths and weaknesses, ups and downs. And they need space to experiment, too, instead of expecting to hammer out the perfect rhetoric and then go about fixing the world without any doubts or hesitations whatsoever. Rhetoric has a dangerous tendency to narrow the world down to blacks and whites, when it's mostly made up of grey areas. Doing this would make it easier for activists to see each other as people, works in progress rather than just symbols of a cause.

Eventually, you just run out of things to stop, reject and be against and after that, you’re left with whatever you are and the strange, discomfiting fact that it is all that you will ever have to work with. That's when the real work starts to happen.

Breaking up is easy, but sticking together? That's the real test of one's ideals.

The above map from Muckety.com shows some of the business interests and politicians that are linked to Monsanto.
Unfortunately, Muckety shut down in 2018 amid pretty damn suspicious circumstances. Were they a victim of the biggest collective of all? Guess we'll never know...

"The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power."

George Orwell, 'England Your England', 1941

Terrorism follows a scary logic. The system's logic is scarier.

2015-11-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

Not long after moving to London in 1997, I went to the tube station one night to take the train to my boyfriend's place, only to find out it had been closed due to a "bomb alert". I got the bus and met him anyway, telling him the story of my close encounter with terrorism with wide-open eyes.

"Oh no," my boyfriend said and clapped his hands to his face, parodying the look on my face. "Not a bomb threat... we're all gonna dieee!"

As he fell about laughing I asked him, earnestly, why he thought that someone putting a bomb on the train was so funny.

"They have those threats every week," he said, composing himself. "Nothing ever happens. Well, maybe there is a bomb but so what? There's nothing they can actually do to stop some nutter getting on the train and blowing it up."

It made a cool, rational kind of sense that I couldn't argue with. There was no way to neutralize the threat of a bombing, even though the panic alarm of fear ringing in my head made me want to race around trying to find a way to deal with it.

That's the same alarm that people are hearing now, in the wake of the latest terror attacks on Paris and Brussels, etc. But it's an irrational alarm.

Ever since 9/11 the media has been acting as if there's something that can be done about terrorism, but they're wrong and they know it. Terrorism is not new, and it's not the preserve of any one group. It endures because it's so extreme. It's also rare because it's so extreme.

In 1999, I was still living in London when, one day, a customer in my pub told me that his boyfriend had been blinded in the nail-bombing attack on a gay bar in Soho. Another friend of his was walking with a crutch after losing his leg in the same attack. In 2005, I got up late for work one day, only to discover that the train I was meant to board for work had been blown up by a group of radical, Islamic Britons with bombs in their backpacks.

By then, I had realized that what that first boyfriend had told me was true: no amount of planning in the world can prevent a terrorist attack. That's why it's a very successful strategy for scaring the hell out of people. A terrorist is malevolent, determined, and can go unnoticed when he's living in a massive, faceless urban centre. That helpless realization makes our fear explode with more force than a dozen suicide bombs.

Because, how do you protect everyone in a dense urban sprawl, when a network of disguised madmen are running amok, armed and dangerous? The answer is you don't. You can't. The threat is always there whether you are aware of it or not. Dense urban sprawls contain plenty of murderers and rapists, serial killers and child molesters, power mad cops, corrupt politicians, gay bashers, neo-Nazis and gangsters.

The last time that there was a serial rapist on the loose in London, though, I don't recall the government issuing a code red alert. I don't recall them telling every man in the city that he should stay indoors and not approach women or else he would be considered as a suspect, beaten and possibly shot.

Why, then, is this deemed an acceptable response when there is a terror threat on the go? Why suspend all civil liberties or treat peace activists like they're a threat, without provocation or explanation?

Because we tolerate it, and we don't stop and think about how little sense it makes.

Terrorism plays on our worst fears about what can go wrong someone throws a spanner in the works in a sprawling urban centre. But then, so do escalator fires, train crashes and mall roof collapses. The thing is, escalator fires and train crashes are usually caused by political and corporate wrongdoing, whereas terrorism is a usually caused by an individual, ideological wrongdoing. When individuals and idealists are to blame, our leaders are only too happy to pull out all the stops and stamp the problem out. But for some strange reason, ordinary citizens are forbidden from taking the same hardline approach toward their leaders when they fuck up. (See: Guantanomo Bay, Jean Charles de Menezes etc). The blame only ever flows in one direction, which speaks volumes about another kind of tyranny.

Besides, history shows us that peace only actually comes out of listening to terrorist factions and taking their demands seriously. Stomping them out does not work. George W. Bush infamously said that the American government wouldn't negotiate with terrorists, but the US utterly failed to kick the Taliban's ass and actually hastened the spread of radical Islamic factions in the Middle East. The UK government, on the other hand, finally tried to negotiate with the IRA after almost a century of bloody skirmishes and, lo and behold, peace was established within a few years. Lesson learned.

Except it wasn't. Every terror attack that has happened since 9/11 has resulted in ham-fisted overreactions that seem intended to inflame the situation. Could it be that that is exactly what they are designed to do?

'Fighting' terror doesn't work, yet many policy makers and media shakers embrace it. Why? The fact is, going into military overdrive has huge financial benefits for the well-connected rich. If you dont believe me, take a look at what happened to the share prices between March 22-March 30th for BAE Systems and Rheinmetall , two huge weapons manufacturers. They both jumped by about a dozen points. Why? Because the Brussels bombings happened on March 23, silly. BAE Systems shares some of the same directors as Barclays Bank, JP Morgan, Reuters, and the New York Federal Reserve do. They are typical of arms manufacturers, in that respect.

So the hardline approach to terrorism also boils down to money. 'Fighting' terror with weapons, surveillance and armed police is sexy for us because it's sexy for the people who print our news, who are able to buy that much more cocaine, prostitutes and flashy cars thanks to it.

After all these years of living next door to terrorism, I'm still not really sure what the bad guys look like. One year they're neo-Nazis, the next they're Muslim. Quite often, they're guys in suits. I can, however, imagine that acting paranoid, detached and avoiding authority figures are the standard characteristics of someone who is carrying a home made bomb. So scaring peple off of the streets with armed police and randomly searching them creates the perfect environment for terrorists to blend in to. It puts us all on the same level as them, thereby adding fuel to the flames.

My boyfriend was right. You can't ever be sure that the person standing next to you isn't a crazed maniac. You can't be sure that they're not carrying a bomb, or a gun, or a knife. But you can make sure that they never have a reason to use it. Standing up for freedom, peace and equality is the only surefire way to do that.

For more background, read this piece about 9/11 and the anti-WTO protests

Magpies

2015-09-25T11:41:00.003-07:00

There was a family of magpies bouncing around in the tree outside of my window today, shaking its feather boa branches, bustling with leaves. They squawked and squeaked and pecked playfully at each other.

Gradually, one started to trill. A gentle drilling noise that slowly changed into something like trilling. A few seconds later, I hear an answering trill from the car park next to the tree. A mobile phone ring was answering the magpie call. Or - no, it was the other way around: the magpie was mimicking the phone's ring, just for a lark (pun intended). That ancient bird habit of echoing and relaying sounds, transmitters and receivers for their awareness of other voices in the trees. Sending out a signal to see if one comes back, sentiences broadcasting to one another.

I heard the human in the car park answered his phone, but funnily enough he didn't return the magpie's call'. All this technology that we have has be bent so far in one direction that it's broken: designed to send but never receive.

Later I had to take a train and read a magazine I'd found from 1999. It seems that back then people were looking out much more: at each other, at everything, using all their evolving awareness to make sense of, see patterns in, everything.

It's hard to describe how that's vanished but it's just the general feeling of an absence. Around me, where everyone was staring downward, as one, at small black rectangular cases in their hands. Each case eradicates the content of all that’s not a uniform and digital, that’s not black and white. The possibility of seeing patterns is gone because there’s only one pattern there, and its forced everything on its screen to fit within its lines.

Smart phones are a visualization, concretization, of dogma, of the dogmatic mind-set itself. Turning a lens on the world that’s designed to omit everything not in it. (Or occlude. I like this word, even though I'm not sure what it means).

These days we’ve all got the same blinders on as them, the dogmatic in charge, but we’re not them; so the understanding that there’s more than just them out there is theoretically true... but only theoretically, because it's not reflected in our lens. In the meantime, we inhabit that tangible world like ghosts ourselves, unable to relocate anything gleaned from theory to demonstrable form. We can only report, repost, relay, recommend, re-tweet and re-blog. Echoes of one another’s voices don’t fill the void of change but only make it bigger, more engulfing than before.

However imminent the crises our eyes remain resolutely downturned, muttering vacantly that, ‘There's a button for this, but when I press it nothing happens’ searching for a solution online as if this tool can somehow be reprogrammed to do what we shouldn’t have to, don’t have time to, rendering ourselves obsolete to prove their value, waiting for the final update will justify this reality beta-test, and we can live the unimpeded lives that are 'made' possible by technology.

Meanwhile, nature keeps calling and calling us on a frequency that we're not receiving. It's all around us, but we can't hear it - unable to answer because we're already on the phone.

Underground for e.V.er!

2015-09-10T10:01:00.003-07:00

"London's not the center of techno anymore. It's definitely in Berlin!"

...said my friend, Mel. This was not your usual hyperbole coming from a tourism board PR rep whose never been clubbing in his or her life. This was coming from a 20-year veteran of London's deepest, darkest underground parties and a kickass artist, to boot. She was shouting the words in my ear in the warehouse techno room at Sisyphos, in Rummelsburg.

Back when I first moved to Berlin, the clubs here were kinda boring but those days are hard to remember now. You would never have found proper banging techno or house playing in places like Sisyphos. It was all slow, drugged-out and commercial; the sound of someone limply writhing in Ketamine and glitter (not as cool as it sounds). There weren't any techno openairs like those that Sounds For Berlin, Reclaim the Gorli and so on have been doing. The temple of bass called Gretchen did not exist and Stattbad hadn't yet started up its Boiler Room sessions. Even the F*ck Parade used to have half a dozen boring floats. The shunkel music sound was as inescapable and annoying as that loud ringing noise it left in your ears the next day.

But that's all changed. These past few years have been like that boiling-frog analogy, in reverse. Berlin has gradually crept toward a richer convergence of its various dance music styles, but it's done so in such tiny increments that we didn't even realize it was happening. It was only when I brought my friend Sisyphos that I suddenly felt the heat. Finally, Berlin is living up to its hype: this scene is in a full-on boil. Not just in Sisyphos, either. But it's a good example of a club that has come into its own, blending the surreal elements of Renate with the atmospheric warehouse techno of Berghain and the house music intensity of Wall of Sound into some sort of perfect Berlin all-in-one experience. They even have a massage parlour and a sweet shop. And a lake. (The chickens aren't there anymore, though, unfortunately).

It wasn't hard to see why my mate was blown away.

I was relieved that it's not just me who thinks things are improving, here. Most Berlin promoters used to seem like were only interested in finding a misguided shortcut to glamour and fame. Now, they're doing parties for a purpose, as a concept, as a protest. They're doing them to change things now, and more importantly, for a good time. And they seem less inclined to use the industry's coke-covered credit line to judge how good the night is, instead going by mood on the dancefloor.

My friend and I went outside and stood under the lampshade trees by the lake and she said, "Yeah, I reckon this is what would happen if one of the squat parties in London kept on going on for years. Why don't they do something like this in London, in fact?'

The answer is always the same: the authorities don't let it. At the slightest sign that some group is putting down roots, the government goes into overdrive trying to uproot them, or (if they go legal) forcing a profiteering mindset on them. It bogs their ideals down with licensing fees and absurd health and safety regulations. This way, it constantly seals up those untapped veins of creativity in red tape, so only the most obsessive bean-counters can succeed at a game that was created by and for an autonomous and anarchistic elements of society.

"They always have to kill the golden goose, don't they?" Mel lamented.

"Yep, that's England for you." Insist on the impossible. Slash and burn all your potential for an immediate return on your investment. Expect more potential to simply arise from the ashes, fully-grown, somewhere down the road without any investment or support. Write off as worthless anything that takes time. Kill off as a pest anything that is slowly growing toward a more promising future. You have to wonder how these people raise kids. You have to wonder how they even raise gardens. (Or are those all covered in concrete, in anticipation of becoming a fourth runway for Heathrow...?)

How does Berlin avoid this same fate? In part, it's the history - no one knows what to do with a vast, underpopulated city, so people here get a lot of slack from the officials. But mostly, it's because the government here concedes the German people's right to direct their own cultural evolution, vis-a-vis the Eingetragener Verein (or e.V. for short). Germany's Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or civil code enshrines the right for its people to create community-interest groups which bring people together in some way. Any way at all that you can imagine. If more than seven people with a shared set of ideals and goals get together, they can legally run almost any kind of venue as a non-profit organization - along with all the attendant tax deductions and exemptions that that entails. Just as long as it brings people together and profit isn't its primary aim. That's why it's rare to find anything grassroots going on in this city without that mysterious suffix e.V. at the end of its name. (Schokoladen, Megaspree, RAW Tempel, Supamolly... even Holzmarkt and Kater Blau have an e.V. underlying their existence). The majority of Berlin's 'squatty' venues rely upon their e.V. status to survive without too much interference from the officials.

Virtually all of the smaller venues and organizations that fight for Berlin's right (including the right to party) are categorized as e.V.... and one day, any one of them could rise up to be the next counter-cultural complex. Someone in government seems to know that there are limits to what bureaucracy and capitalism can achieve on their own. And a large segment of Berlin's population is constantly reminding them of that fact!

Art Doesn't Help People - People Help People.

2015-09-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

"Art Doesn't Help People - People Help People" by Herakut.

In Berlin, the art scene's fate always hangs in the balance. Since the fall of the Wall, artistic outcasts have come here seeking a cheap place to work and live while they find their feet; yet the scene still retains a precarious feeling to this day. The best art here is to be found on the streets, exposed to the elements, having been left out in the cold by the conventional art gallery scene. Yet the precarious balance that enables a DIY scene to flourish here is bound to change.

Berlin is a prime destination on the bargain flight trail for now, and so its art scene is booming... for now. But that boom obviously can't last forever. The forces that attract the world to Berlin - cheap oil, low wages, and the low prices they create - are unsustainable. But so is the alternative: turning Berlin into a relentlessly gentrified enclave for the world's wealthy, where the prices are too high for artists and other people on low incomes to survive. The city needs a new model if it's going to hang onto what it has here, and with so many creative minds present, there is a brief window of opportunity for the art scene to help create that. Is the scene making the most of it? Or is it merely standing on the sidelines, painting pretty pictures to distract itself from the harsh realities that it faces?

Works by artists like Blu and Roa (above right) seem to reflect the uneasy balance that exists in cities like Berlin. Each artist employs stark imagery to expose the cruelty and absurdity underlying the Western economic machine. They seem to speak from inside and outside of the system simultaneously... like a cog that's suddenly become self-aware.

Vermibus (right) has taken that self-awareness a step further by actively sabotaging the messages sent by the advertising industry. He specifically targets beauty ads, sabotaging models who've been airbrushed to the point of artifice. You've probably seen his work and wondered if it was just another cynical ad campaign (or if those mushrooms were finally working). It's not (but they might be).

Another Berlin-based artist who speaks to that tendency to treat people as soulless commodities is Berlin-based Hito Steyerl. In her video, "How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational" she makes a funny yet scarily-apt statement about the sense of invisibility underlying urban life. ("Be a woman over 50" she suggests in her video, as a way of achieving invisibility).

Many of Berlin's artists use art as a way of having a say in a social discourse that would otherwise limit their options to various forms of consumption. Their choice 'speak' in a different way leaves them out in the cold; in Berlin, many are surviving by the skin of their teeth, getting by on a mixture of self-employment contracts, Minijobs and the dole. This puts them at the mercy of city's employers, investors and bureaucrats. The only power that they really have is people power, and the power of expression, yet many seem content to merely sit back and wait for a patron to come along and offer them a chance to be heard and seen in a commercial gallery patronized by the elite. At events like the upcoming Berlin Art Week, "Attracting investment is one of [the] key aims" as if money is the only possible solution for an artist's woes. But maybe what they really need is for the system to 'spare them some social change', instead.

As Noam Chomsky says in Manufacturing Consent, "A decent society should maximize the possibilities for the fundamental human characteristic [of creativity] to be realized." We seem to be headed for a mostly-automated future, in which the majority jobs will necessarily be in creative and theoretical fields. There simply won't be much in the way of work that is productive, in the industrial sense of the word. Isn't it better to find a way to sustain people in those fields now, instead of crushing them in poverty to preserve an outdated paradigm for another day?

Berlin seems to offer a preview of how that future could look: superficially it functions, despite having a small productive sectors. It's intellectually rich, despite being physically poor. It is saturated with artists and idealists: street artists, installation artists, tattoo artists, interior designers and video artists. Many of the students here are studying in theoretical fields, and research and development is one of the city's key sectors. Together, these groups have renovated the city, rebuilding it from the ashes to fit the mould of their progressive imaginations. But that vision has yet to trickle up.

Over the past few years, Berlin's visionary residents have led popular movements against development projects (Mediaspree, Tempelhof) that would have fenced off vast areas of public land for the use of private investors. They have also agitated against rising rents and forced a rent cap to be put in place. The locals tend to vote the same way that they think too: the universal basic income, sustainable development, equality and privacy rights have all been championed by two of Berlin's most influential left-wing parties: the Greens (who are dominant in Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg) and the Pirate Party (which took 8.9% of the vote in Berlin, compared to 1.4% nationally).

'Drone Shadow' by James Bridle at 'Fire & Forget', KW Gallery

Meanwhile, the Senate that actually runs this gaff seems stuck in a 1980s Thatcherian mode: it takes a repressive stance on refugees, is engaging in its own miniature version of the War on Drugs, and has been so thoroughly bankrupted by official corruption that it licks the boots of every investor who comes to town, however contemptuous their vision for the city is (e.g. luxury condos in the former Death Strip). The Senate may be good with investors because it guarantees them obscene profits, but those same profits ensure that the cash always disappears before it trickles down to ordinary residents, denying them the means to take charge of the city.

But what if, instead of waiting for one of those investment windfalls to bypass the Senate and land in their studios, Berlin's art scene got together and tried to solve their collective problem through action? One group of people who have done this in Berlin is Mein Grundeinkommen. In addition to petitioning for the implementation of a universal basic income in Germany, Mein Grundeinkommen has crowd-funded the money to give one person a basic income for a year in order to show what life could be like, if the government spread its profits around more evenly.

Center For Political Beauty's Wall-Sabotage Diagram

Of course, the creative reality that Chomsky speaks of is out of reach for millions of other well-educated people in countries that have been torn apart by petty rivalries. Many of the refugees arriving in this city have been displaced from good jobs and homes by an over-zealous, Western arms trade that promotes war by making lethal weapons easily accessible. That arms trade was the subject of a recent exhibition at KW Gallery, called 'Fire and Forget'. It was named after the newer brand of war technologies that allow the user to kill without witnessing the deaths of the people he is lashing out at.

What future can the refugees/victims of these technologies hope for when they have no home base to go back to, much less ply their trades from? Artsy Berlin dissidents at the Center for Political Beauty regularly stage actions aimed at answering that question. Their stunts have included tearing down sections of the European anti-immigration barrier and exhuming bodies of drowned refugees for re-burial in Berlin, during meticulously staged (one could almost say "curated") actions that are engineered for maximum shock impact. Is it life imitating art or the other way around? They don't want you to know - just to act. More info about the group can be found on the group's website.

Center for Political Beauty' attempts to auction off Chancellor Merkel

In times like these, can any artist really afford to view reality with a sidelong glance, when they could be facing it head-on? It seems that merely hinting at the existence of larger pressures and struggles is no longer enough. Instead of staging another tasteful exhibition, maybe it's time that Berlin's arts community stages an assault on the outdated system that keeps them begging for change... be it financial, political, or social.

Narrow Bandwidth: Life Inside the Walled Garden

2015-03-21T02:58:00.001-07:00

When You're Busy Making Other Plans...

More than any other city that I've lived in, the people in Berlin seem to spend much of their spare time watching online news, reading articles, searching for videos on YouTube, posting blogs, uploading pictures, listening to mixes on Soundcloud.

These twenty, thirty and forty-somethings seem to have great social skills; a sense of humour; an eagerness to chat about world events and street smarts. To me, that is what sets them apart from the earlier generations of computer nerds, who were stereotyped as chubby, inert gamers that never left their darkened basements.

Yet the people I meet in Berlin also seem to have a greater sense of apathy than the techno nerds of yesteryear ever did.

‘Well... what can I do?’ they are wont to whinge whenever someone (usually me) tries to channel their complaints about the world's injustices - unfair pay or climate change, say - into some sort of real life action.

I find this question ironic. It's ironic because the modern online world has such sophisticated platforms, existing only for achieving social change, yet the people who use the internet the most seem to be the least inclined to act on what they believe in.

How can that be? After all, hackers can trace their roots back to the earliest, most primitive version of the internet, and anti-globalisation activists were among the earliest adopters of the web as a tool of direct actions, organizing events like the anti-WTO protests online. Neither group had access to sites like Change.org or Fakebook to help them achieve their goals. It wasn't technology so much as willpower that helped them to find a way.

Yet some sort of new, unspoken consensus seems to have emerged among, well, nearly everybody online, that taking action is just plain foolish or impossible. That we are all utterly incapable of doing anything that makes a real difference, anyway. Yet everyday, people are changing the world beyond recognition. Climate change is one screaming example of this. Even in the fact of its reality, though, many people are struggling to come to terms with it. Their belief in their own impotence is so much stronger than the hard evidence that they are making things worse, and therefore can make things better as well.

There seems to be a secondary consensus that, in order for change to matter, it has to be massive, decisive and final. In reality though, change never happens like that. A person who expects climate change to end, or employers to suddenly start paying more fairly, just because they did one big spectacular thing right, is setting unrealistically high expectations for themselves.
There's no need to go extra large and take Herculean action to change the world. Small changes do make a huge difference everyday, actually - it's just an unfortunate fact that they are mostly unconscious, negative changes instead of conscious, positive ones.   You, me, the beggar on the train, the head of the IMF... we all add up to the bigger picture that we share and live in, and usually without even realizing that we're doing it. Usually we're too preoccupied by our thoughts about the changes that we wish we could make, to reflect on the unwanted changes that we actually are making.

The disposable coffee cup that we drink and then toss as we're rushing to a big interview. The flight that we take to attend a career-changing conference. The tuna that we eat for our health. The Made In China product that we buy to save money for something 'more important'. These are all negative changes that people make every day, all in the name of pursuing something 'better' that hasn't even happened yet and maybe never will. Thus does the snowball of unethical behaviour keep growing bigger as it rolls down the hill, gathering momentum from millions upon millions of bad snap decisions people made because they were too busy worrying about the long-term, potentially good ones. If 'life is what happens when you're busy making other plans' then this modern world - a world of landfills, extreme weather and food shortages - is what all of us have made while we were busy making other plans. And we're still 'busy' making them, and it.

Many people would tell you for certain that their hands are tied when it comes to making the world a better place. In reality, simply not doing the things that make it a worse place would be more than enough. Yet apathy stops them from even trying. The sad fact is that what many people call 'doing nothing' usually means 'doing something really bad, without realizing it'. Very rarely does inaction turn out to be a neutral act in a world like ours, where the worst kind of people hold a monopoly on the cheapest, most ubiquitous products.

A One-Dimensional Domain.

Apathy has typicallybeen the preserve of the defeated, the aging, the under-educated and the ignored... Somehow today, it is the preserve of the young, the well-off, the well-educated and widely-televised. How come? Even the activists that I meet these days seem to be motivated by bloody-minded stubbornness, rather than any sense that they are making a change for the better. How is that?

Perhaps it's no coincidence that apathy is growing almost as quickly as our ability to connect to the world via smartphones and laptops and tablets is. Maybe, just maybe, the apathy that people feel about changing the world has something to do with the medium through which they receive the most information about the world.

A huge proportion of the news reports, studies, photos, statistics and sound bites that people get all come through the same basic channel of little portable screens held in their hands. Could it be that there's something inherently disempowering about using them? Marshall Mcluhan, author of The Medium is the Message, would probably say so.

"Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users. As A. J. Liebling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there. For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups."

The groups that are being clobbered with the online media are three dimensional ones. Online, people can read about an endless variety of radical new ideas, events and news. They can memorize endless facts about new and different styles of music, dress, speech, writing, and ideologies. But they cannot realize what they've learned. Long ago, the internet was a giant corkboard for posting meetups and events on but these days, websites are increasingly signposts that point toward other websites and social media platforms, in an endless one-dimensional loop. They don't point us towards anything outside of the internet, anymore. The internet can provide us with an alternative to almost anything... except itself.

The obvious exception to this rule is the commercial side of the internet, sites like Amazon, Wanadoo and Ebay that have flooded the internet with ways to buy clothes, foods, books, etc. We can buy stuff to make what we've learned online seem more real to our senses but, even then, it's a completely passive interaction. Buying stuff doesn't give us any way of altering the finished product, except perhaps by becoming a manufacturer ourselves. Little wonder that startups, popups and craft markets are the most popular offline social meeting points, these days.

In the past, media was less consumption oriented, with public broadcasts and free events being covered as well as commercial ones. It was also literally more hands-on. A person could only access such a kaleidoscopic range of new information by accessing an equally kaleidoscopic range of media: radio, television, books, fanzines, newspapers. They were all things that you could touch, crumple, write on, call up and complain to. Even gigs, raves and festivals played a role in disseminating information, through people that one could meet and speak to, get instant feedback from.

Also in the past, information was embodied in an array of physical shapes that encouraged people to react to it in a very physical, personalized way and today, it's more disembodied than its ever been. Information has slipped beyond our bodies' reach, even as we digest it with our eyes and absorb it into our brains. This has turned us into passive receivers, rather than active participants.

It seems like it's expected that people will only interact with new information in an internal, intangible way these days. That we will think about it and maybe push some buttons, and that's all, folks. The whole world of information only exists on an intangible plane, now... but it's a plane that we can't physically reach no matter how fast we walk or run. No wonder people feel so helpless to change it.

The effects of this ethereal medium on society are already becoming noticeable. Members of Generation X, the last pre-internet generation, are fond of complaining about how glassy eyed and unresponsive members of Generation Y are. How Generation Y people supposedly fail to exhibit any sense of urgency when they're at work or school. I don't know how true that is, but the younger people that I've met do seem less conscious of the fact that the real world can also be an effective medium for their ideas.

Given how many ideas are now only found online, floating in a disembodied ether, their distant attitude is kind of understandable. But maybe over time, future generations will start coming to the conclusion that the real world is incompatible with information altogether. That reality is just so much slower, more cumbersome, and just plain gets in the way of the pure informational exchanges. Maybe reality will start to fall between the cracks. In a way, it already has: how much does anyone know about their real neighbours and streets, as compared to their virtual friends and online 'hangouts'?

The thing is, you can't smell, taste and touch the online world, and disused senses are usually depressed, frustrated ones. People are naturally designed so that their thoughts flow into words and feelings flow into action, via their bodies, without interruption. But the authorities are always putting more and more barriers to stop that from happening: crowding people into packed urban centers, restricting protests and urban sports, rewarding conformist 'safe' behaviour while making spontaneous action seem like a dangerous choice.

That may be why so many people feel that the internet is a freer space, with greater possibilities than the real world. It's a space where they are unburdened by any sense of being physically hemmed in, at all.

All of this gives new meaning to the rhetorical, defeatist question that most apathetic people seem to ask: "What do you think I can do about it?"

Maybe what they really mean is, "What do you think I'm allowed to do about it?" And maybe the internet is their answer to that.

But what is so liberating about the internet is also what makes it a prison. In a way, people who spend too much time online are acting like a bullied kid who stays indoors all day to avoid a bully. By doing this, she is turning herself into what the bully wants her to be - what he'll allow her to be - instead of who she really is.

Online, minds are free but bodies are physically paralyzed. There isn't even a sheet of newsprint to clench in one's fist when one reads an infuriating news item. One can’t even turn to the person next to them and say, ‘You won’t believe what I just saw’ because that other person will be glued to their own screen, their own private information flow, designed to circumvent all external connections to reality... even to the voices of friends, family and partners.

Faint New World?

The physical world is quickly becoming a mere afterthought or antidote to the information-dense internet. An alien, super-tactile landscape of funky streetfood, neon fashions and blaring soundbites that only exists to drown out the thoughts in our overtaxed brains. This seems like evidence that very few people are using the material world as a venue for information-sharing, anymore. Why bother when they can do it all online?

Yet, to engage with other people online, we are expected to detach our ideas and feelings from ourselves, post them somewhere and leave them sitting there, in suspended animation, for hours, days, weeks or months before they get a response. Getting nothing back at all is considered an acceptable outcome to having an idea or an opinion, these days. Unlike a real-life social gathering, where people react to you just for being there, no one can guarantee that they'll get a response even to the best-thought-out insight that they have, online. Intelligence has been demoted to an ignore-able theory. Meanwhile, in the real world dumb, brute force has been elevated to levels of influence that it has never held before - or, not in such well-educated societies, in such well-connected times it hasn't.

Perhaps that's why it's becoming more common for people to say that nothing that they 'do' matters these days. The two spheres of body and mind have been so fully disconnected that never shall the twain meet. All of the things that people these days feel really define them and that really matter to them, are happening outside of the world of 'matter' and 'things'. Identities have become so detached from everyday material reality that doing something matters less than merely intending to do it does.

Maybe it's because people cannot actually see the limitations of the internet - whose confines they live in all day long - that they have started to confuse those limitations with their own personal limitations.

"Leonard Doob, in his report Communication in Africa, tells of one African who took great pains to listen each evening to the BBC news, even though he could understand nothing of it. Just to be in the presence of those sounds at 7 P.M. each day was important for him. His attitude to speech was like ours to melody— the resonant intonation was meaning enough."*

For all of its sound and fury, the only song that the internet seems to be singing to us is the lulling drone of inaction. If we really want to change the world now, we have to change the tune, as well as the media that transmits it.

*From The Medium is The Message by Marshall Mcluhan

Protest is a process, not a product

2015-01-23T11:44:00.001-08:00

Last spring, I had a dream that there was a new craze sweeping Berlin: people would dress up like trees and stand in a field near the Bundestag every month, holding a vigil for all the natural spaces being destroyed by mankind. I went down to check it out so I could write about it for this blog (yes: even in my dreams, I write a blog). And of course I wanted to take part... but not the same way that everyone else was doing.

Everybody at the vigil was dressed as evergreen trees. To save time, a lot of them had cut down actual pine trees to wear. I thought that was a bit wasteful... but then I saw the sincere looks on their faces and thought, “Well, at least they’re using the trees to say something that they care about… that’s more than you can say for a lot of the waste that people create.” I held back my criticism, tried to appreciate the fact that they were spreading a message that I believed in, and watched from the sidelines.

A few weeks ago, this dream popped into my mind again as I was stepping around another massive pile of discarded Christmas trees in Berlin. An entire forest of baby evergreens seems to get cut down each year to supply the people in my kiez with the right mood for their holy nights. But this year there seem to be so many more. People were casting away symbols of eternity to make space for their manmade presents. How paradoxical is that? It almost seemed like a symbolic sacrifice of the idea of permanence and regeneration - a bizarre leap of faith into a mechanized, manmade future.

My annoyance about the annual tree cull primed me to go to the ‘Wir Haben Es Satt’ demo a few days later, a protest against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP) and for sustainable agricultural practices in Germany. The pine trees had been cleared from most of the kerbs by then, but at the demo, I saw people dressed up like trees standing outside the Bundestag, wearing branches and leaves, just like they had been in my dream. The difference was that the branches they were wearing looked like they’d fallen off a tree during a recent windstorm. The people wearing them didn’t seem the type to go and wantonly hack down pine forests, either, so the similarity to my dream ended there… so I thought.

My friends and I delved into the crowd of people wearing fun-fur onesies, rabbit suits, bee costumes, beekeeping suits - there were even a few caricatured farmers with big straw hats. It was a bit like being at a Fasching party, except with lots of angry signs about battery farming and dystopian Monsanto products penned in red, slashing ink. Drums were playing here and there, smoke was rising from the beekeepers’ metal censers, pink and green, mass-produced banners fluttered along with a few handmade ones. Bright, industrial swathes of fabric in manmade colours flapped at us from every angle. The message of the event had been painted in synthetic hues, mocking the plastic appeal of a TV advertisement. Either that, or they were mimicking it, in hope of having a similar, mass-market appeal.

With so many prefab options at the demo, all we had to do was look around, ask ourselves, ‘agree or disagree?’ and if we agreed, we could just grab a banner or a pin and become another carrier for the message. For the cause - the brand - ‘Stop the TTIP’. I was tempted...

... but then I pictured the people wearing those outfits going home, hanging up their rabbit suits, laughing about them. Putting their banners out on the balcony and not talking about Monsanto or TTIP again until the next protest came around. But maybe that's the point. After all, dressing up as a furry animal isn’t about representing what you really are, is it? it’s about putting a playful façade between you and the world, feigning naive simplicity. Maybe the point of these outfits is to try and impart some of that simplicity into the environmentalist message, making a daunting prospect seem accessible.

In the commercial world, animal costumes are used to draw shoppers into computer stores and car dealerships but never into grocery stores or bars... maybe that's the same reason why they're used to draw people to demonstrations about the environment.

Plus, it is easier to jump in to a demonstration when there are ready-made banners and placards waiting there, ready-made, in the hands of your furry environmental mascot. But buying into one protest on the basis of a costume or a banner does not rope you into continuing with it. It’s not like buying a pair of shoes. With activism, that commitment comes from seeing the issue as part of an ongoing theme in your life. It's got to be personal.Successful movements are able to engage with people on an every day level, to make them return for every action. That may be why the three-ring circus known as the International Socialists (or whatever they’re called now) has thousands of dedicated members. They have an answer for everything... literally. If you belch in the middle of one of their meetings, they can provide you with a Socialist Perspective as to why you did it.

Getting back to the TTIP demo in Berlin, though: my friends and I really should have come there more prepared. We should have come with our own props... or dressed up... or organized a little direct action to do while we were there... but a few of us had hangovers (well, all of us did). Which may be why I started trying to find some way of blaming the demo for our lack of enthusiasm. ;-)

It was hard to fault the organization of the protest though. They did an amazing job of bringing a huge number of people together. Nothing was done wrong, compared to any of the other mass demos I've been to. But, like almost all of the mass protests that I've been to, I felt like I had to be prepared to give any input. It couldn't be a spontaneous thing. If I was just jumping on board at the last minute, my options were limited to something prefab - a banner, a chant - all arranged by the organizers. This format can certainly attract a certain type of protester - the consumerist type, or those in NGOs - but it leaves out the passers-by who may expect more out of their activism than a souvenir or a photo op. Creating a free space for people to express their personal reaction to the issues at hand would probably give them a stronger impression to take away, anyway... a sense of input, which is what protest is all about. That's just an observation from someone who has been to dozens of similar one-off events. A friendly suggestion for next time, if any of those organizers happen to read this.

A phrase from 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman came to mind: "The medium excludes the content." And I thought about how a new medium of protest was needed to take activism to the level where it changed people's lives, and not just the way they looked, or the headlines, for a few hours...

Monsanto is a tad more evil than this installation suggests

Dazzled by bright colours, smoke from beekeepers’ torches and drumming, we walked and walked. People were staring up ahead, not left or right or behind. Where were we going? I asked. My friends shrugged. But being coaxed along like this, it gave the impression of some sort of a big finale up ahead. No one was stopping and, the few times we tried to, we were nudged along by the slow-motion tide of people. Toward the end we were herded past a ‘slow food’ stall. Then we looked around and realized that we had been siphoned in an open space in front of a stage. This was the critical role we’d been given: playing the part of an audience.

On the other side of the stage, a tide of people was now moving out, over the footbridge towards the Hauptbahnhof. To join them and go home seemed like a cop-out after all this build-up so we stuck it out there, in the cold. Just stopping for the sake of stopping, the same way that we had been moving for the sake of moving during the rest of the demo. Where else to go until someone listens, but around and around in circles?

No choppers were wheeling overhead but a sense of having our movements coordinated from above was strong. Being channeled through a pre-arranged pattern laid out on the ground. The pattern of the city; the pattern of a route; the pattern of activism that is inactive in its execution; all we need to do is turn up and fill in blanks designated to us, a paint-by-numbers march. All that we can do is turn up and fill in the blanks, if that's how it's designed.

It’s not as if social change is a point that we can reach by walking towards it, anyway. Even if we ran, it would still elude us. In a time of constant, robotic movement toward ‘growth’, ‘profit’ and ‘progress’ it seems the most powerful thing anyone could do would be to stand still, rethink everything from scratch instead of flowing along the same old lines. Stop confusing motion with production and size with progress. Those lines once led outward, but now they have joined up and lead back in on themselves, an endless loop that gets a little more ground down with each cycle around the planet, searching for another source of untapped potential. But the last, real untapped source of potential exists in our minds. And, as long as we keep moving forward without stopping, finding bigger and bigger outlines to fill with more and more identical, oversimplified goals, then we’ll never figure out how to exploit the power of the individual.

In the end, I couldn’t silence the inner voice that kept insisting that this protest had left the flawed behaviours that got us here, untouched. Like in that dream that I had, about activists cutting down trees in order to save nature - it was just harnessing the wrong impulse for the right purpose.

Misandry: It's a Big Deal. Not.

2014-10-29T03:17:00.000-07:00

Spot the victim: almost all of the above images are from mundane, every day ads on magazines, billboards and news sites. Some are indistinguishable from images of true violence against women (bottom, center). Ads like this tap into the misogynist's fantasy life and whether we share that fantasy or not, we have to admit it's riddled with violence and hate... which means that society is, too

I've been reading about the recent Gamergate debate(s) on Twitter - which I've still not got my head around, and am unlikely to, now that the number of tweet accusations flying around has reached critical mass. But one thing that stuck with me after reading a few threads was the shocking blitheness with which guys on these threads bandy the word 'misandry' about. They seem to have decided that the word 'misandrist' can be used to refer to any woman who says or thinks negative things about men.

Is being negative about sexist men such an innately wrong behaviour that is somehow amounts to a real, actual prejudice, though? And are men such super special beings that they never make mistakes or bad judgements that need to be criticised? I don't think so. Any man who would suggest such a thing probably needs to get over himself.

When feminists criticise a man's behaviour as sexist, it's like when a colleague says to him at work , 'Just because you're good at your job doesn't mean that you can ask me to make coffee for you.' The man in question may be doing well in every other respect, but if his behaviour is unconsciously and unfairly burdening another person, then that other person is entitled to criticise. This also applies to misogynist women, by the way.

But even if there are women out there who are just saying unfair, nasty things about men for the hell of it, I don't see how that is in any way as bad as beating up on men; yelling at them in the streets because they're not paying enough attention to us; rubbing up against them on crowded trains; raping them; tailgating them because we assume that their entire gender doesn't know how to drive; paying them too little or no money for their work; trafficking them; renting or buying them like commodities; refusing to treat their illnesses because it's 'all in their head'; and otherwise preventing their ability to live full, equal and safe lives, using the power that an unfair system has granted us over them.

Let's face it: misandry simply lacks the same opportunities to manifest that misogyny has manufactured for itself, over the last dozen or so centuries. If misandry exists on a large scale, then it mostly exists in the heads of females who hate men. Misogyny, on the other hand, exists right out in the open where everyone can see it, where its random targets cannot avoid it, and where bystanders are desensitised by their exposure to it. It even exists in the system. That's why women cannot expect protection from misogyny, ironically enough... it's too ubiquitous.

The restrictions misogyny places on us changes from country to country but they're ever-present, the deadening weight of prejudice embodied in flesh, steel and stone. Sometimes, it just seems safer just to stay home, quit our jobs and squish ourselves into whatever tiny role the misogynists condone for us. Indeed, it takes a force of will not to do that, even nowadays. Any man who'd equate such immediate, physical oppression with the effect of some poorly-chosen words, is only showing how out-of-touch with women's reality he really is. He would do better to stop and think about what the reality behind a woman's words is actually like to live in, before flinging the word 'misandry' out there as a defense against his wounded pride. Misogyny is not just another virtual debate in which words are the only component; plenty of actions are involved in it too. But maybe this point is lost on people who spend more time online than they do in the real world.

If feminists don't want to fight for the man who feels he isn't getting all the respect he deserves from every woman on the planet, it's just because they're already embattled on that front and many others. They might feel that man's pain, sure, but their own pain is a bigger threat to their immediate existence. All feminists, and the vast majority of women, do know how it feels to be shamed and snubbed and condescended to... but they also know how it feels to be threatened, groped, injured, shouted down and ridiculed by men who have too much power over their lives.

So if you think that you're a good guy who doesn't deserve to be tarred with the same brush as all the other sexist guys out there, then that's great. But it doesn't mean that you have the right to ask feminists to make sure your feelings aren't getting hurt. We have our own work to do too, you know.

A cause with 100,00 faces

2014-09-23T02:51:00.001-07:00

With the Flood Wall Street protests filling the news and Twitter feeds today it seems like a timely moment to reflect on climate movements through time. Reclaim the Streets, Climate Camp and Occupy were the three big ones that happened in my lifetime. I suspect that these urban invasions of green-painted, animistic protestors dancing to drums all owe their existence to London's Stop the City protests (1980s) and before that, the Reclaiming movement (1970s) and possibly even the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

All were omnibus movements that brought together countless small, grassroots groups and individual activists from the countryside and suburbs, and took to the big city streets to confront the real sources of pollution and corruption head-on, in its faceless inner-city fortresses.

In the extract below, you can read what the scene was like at one such demonstration in London in June 1999. Called J18 it was part of an international day of action aimed at ending environmental, financial and social breakdown, similar to the international day of protest last Sunday that aimed to send a message to the UN Climate Conference happening in New York City today.

But first, here are some great images taken from famous pavement-stomping marches around the world...

Climate Camp staged a never-ending sit-in in. London 2009

Reclaim the Streets 1995: demonstrators bought this car & trashed it

Idle No More (above/below) marched on Canadian capitals in 2013

Solstice demonstration by Reclaiming movement in San Francisco

Seattle's N30 protest against the WTO in 1999

Stop the City in London 1983.

Occupy protestor in NYC in 2011

Berlin's Urban Monsters - A Virtual Tour

2014-09-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

You may not realize this, but the human residents of Berlin don't just share the city with rats, wasps, sparrows and dogs. They also share it with a raft of fantastic and frightening creatures; quasi-mythical beings that lurk on secluded walls throughout the city. Born out of the primordial soup of artistic imagination, they silently broadcast sinister visions to the world without any input from it. Though they're made of the same stuff as other street art, they creep up on the viewer or shock him in a way that ordinary grafitti does not. They are the city's urban monsters.

Berlin's most famous urban monster, Molecule Man, is a metallic colossus that juts out of the Spree near An den Treptowers bridge, like a knife pinpointing the spot where art breaches the mundane surface of the city.

Yesterday, I found out that the area around An den Treptowers is a veritable wildlife sanctuary for other forms of urban monster too. While walking along the water below it, I spotted several deformed creations creeping along the abandoned shell of an old park WC.

Next to it, a small shed was wrapped in Gothic line drawings:

As I kept walking I came across a red-faced troll waiting under An den Treptowers bridge ...

...and a two-headed troll guarding the rail bridge.

It wasn't long before I realized there were urban monsters all around me. If you were just passing through, you would never know that there are monsters living on the flipside of the bridge's blank facade. They have to hide from their natural predators: grafitti removers, builders and city planners.

I have come across other manifestations of Berlin's subconscious since coming here. There was the abstract crane in Landsberger Allee...

...plus this complex mural in Friedrichshain...

...neither of which still exists today. The area around An den Treptowers seems to have been a safe haven for urban monsters for some time, if the age and complexity of its works is anything to go by. But that time may almost be up. When I was there yesterday, the air was full of the clanging and crashing of construction work which was taking place all around these buildings. If you look closely at the building below...

...which has had most of its facade stripped away for demolition / renovation purposes, you can see the sad remains of yet another painting in the centre.

This maimed urban monster is a stark example of what happens to art that finds itself in the path of people with more money than imagination.

It's possible that new urban monsters will be born and flourish on the new buildings but once the old works are destroyed, the gene pool of the previous art generation will be lost forever. A city which wipes out the old to make way for the new without connecting the two things can't hope to evolve. It can change but it can't evolve. I think that city planners the world over confuse the meanings of those two words.

Any act of creation deserves respect. If the city is a mechanical entity - like a body - then street art is the voice of the spirit at its helm. The phrase 'soulless metropolis' isn't just a figure of speech, it's a distinct possibility in any culture that doesn't treat its art with proper respect. A city without creative outlets is one where people only exist to serve the city's needs: efficiency, development and profit. Ironically, urban monsters are one of the things that can save a city from becoming a nightmare to live in.

It looks like those urban monsters are here for a limited time only, so if you want to view them in their natural habitat, do it soon!

No Future (or, How To Succeed in A Dystopian Workplace)

2014-08-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

This isn't the cover for my book... it's an artwork by David Holtek of creativedisease.com

The story below is taken from my new book 'Vote Tekno Party'. And yes, that is the same book that I spent the last seven months working on instead of blogging!

Vote Tekno Party is a collection of stories written from the point of view of Selene, a 24 year-old expat living in late-nineties London. She is pushing herself to live what she considers to be a totally independent, DIY lifestyle. Throughout the book (which mostly takes place in squats, underground clubs, illegal parties and riots) she keeps on running into unexpected obstacles to that goal.

In this chapter, Selene gets fired for drawing and daydreaming while at her desk job instead of "pretending" to work, like all of her colleagues seem to be doing. I wrote it to show the reader how out of touch Selene's expectations are with what's going on around her. While I was writing it, though, I started to think about the difference between what people 'expect' to happen and what they think is 'meant to be'. Good example: almost all of the artists, musicians and writers that I know 'expect' to make very little money, even though they mostly believe that's not the way that things are 'meant to be'. Where does expectation become acceptance?

Read on to find out how Selene's answers that question, and feel free to share your own experiences and viewpoints after reading it!

Paying the Troll Toll

2014-01-08T10:10:00.003-08:00

Hidden behind the virtual curtain of your computer screen, that single Oz-like wizard who's pulling the strings of a thousand-headed troll army can seem as big, and as scary, as your imagination wants it to be...

Corporate Puppets - from Eurekastreet

Maybe it's just because Saturn is transiting Scorpio (or something) but I've been feeling increasingly uneasy about using the internet lately. I have all these nagging suspicions in the back of my mind that it might not be as benevolent as it makes itself out to be. This is partly because I've met many people who spend lots of time online, and many of them seem to develop problems like depression, apathy, pessimism and agoraphobia.

Then, a while back I stumbled upon some research indicating that Facebook can be physiologically addictive, and that its creators are intentionally using that addictive potential to their advantage, as well as manipulating users' emotions for unknown reasons, regardless of the psychological problems that may cause. And then, right after that, the NSA scandal broke.

More recently, there has been a deluge of threatening comments sent to female writers and politicians in the UK. While some of the people who were most recently charged with threatening to rape and murder these women were individuals tweeting on their own private time, I couldn't help thinking that they felt encouraged by the fact that there is so much right-wing trolling going on, these days.

Most of you will be familiar with trolls: especially dense, crude right wing voices that continuously spout their strident and illogical 'views' online. Until recently, I half-assumed that these people were all isolated backwoods yahoos with limited access to human society. Many people probably still think the same thing.

After all, their comments are usually riddled with spelling mistakes, bad grammar and profanity. Their arguments are based upon un-sourced and unproven 'facts', when they are based on anything at all. Very little of the information posted by trolls on the net would stand up to the scrutiny of a drunken pub debate, let alone a court of law... yet they seem to be everywhere in society. But where can they actually be found in real life? I struggle with that one because, let's face it, the majority of jobs out there require a higher level of intelligence than these guys display.

So who are they? And more importantly, why are they always online? How is it that they can immediately respond to any comment, at almost any time of day or night? They paint themselves as middle class, educated white people who are 'speaking for Joe Public' and yet, unlike Joe (and Josephine) Public, they seem to have zero responsibilities apart from trolling the web. It's almost like being a troll is their full-time job.

Which, in many cases, it is.

In 2011, the Guardian's George Monbiot wrote that he'd been contacted by a whistle-blower who said he was, "part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them." Sound familiar? It will do if you've ever posted a comment that was left-wing, moderate or even just overly sympathetic on a popular news item at The Guardian's website. Try it now (go on, you know you want to) and you'll see what he is on about.

This particular whistle-blower told Monbiot that he posed as up to 70 different individuals at a time... which probably helps to explain why different trolls' posts are often nearly identical in tone and content. What's truly scary here is that this whistle-blower was just one employee from a single company that is providing 'social media management' services to corporate clients. A small dig around online will show you that there are many, many more companies who are providing this 'service' privately... mainly to the very rich. Well, who else can afford them? And who else is more likely to earn the public's contempt?

The government doesn't hire trolls, though - they don't need to, because they already have their own, in-house "cyber influence" teams who are trolling Joe Public on their payroll.

Rotten to the (Grass)Roots

The practice of paying people to post supportive comments for a specific interest group online is said to have originated in China in 2004, where such posters are known as the '50 cent army'. As the name suggests, these posters are paid 50 Chinese cents for every pro-government or counter-dissident post that they write. In 2009, Datamation.com wrote that: "China’s 50 Cent Army is everybody's business. With 300,000 people, you can see how this 'army' could easily determine what makes it onto the front page of Digg, and what gets shouted down. They could use Wikipedia, YouTube and Slashdot as their most powerful tools of global propaganda."

This would certainly be true even if China was the only country whose government was posting right wing comments... but it isn't. The U.S.A., Russia, the UK, Canada and Australia are a few of the countries besides China, whose governments have hired online cheerleaders for their 'cause'.

"Hang on," you say, "shouldn't their cause be the same as whatever the peoples' cause is?" Um, apparently not!

Governments that have been exposed as having troll units are quick to claim that these units 'increase support' for their 'democratic' policies, which sounds kind of innocent until you remember that, actually, the public should be able to voluntarily decide whether it agrees with its government's actions, or not. If the public needs to be pressured and bullied by make-belief 'peers' into accepting the government's line on democracy, it's because its policies don't reflect what people actually want. It's because, in essence, they aren't democratic enough.

Taking a shortcut to forge the appearance of popular support for war, cuts to spending, restriction of refugee rights, or a pro-business agenda - that may win elections for otherwise marginal hardliners, but it does nothing to win the hearts and minds of real people. If anything, it only widens the divide between power and the people, increasing the chances of real social unrest. The myriad street battles that have taken place in American lately, between the public and the police, show what the outcome is of faking support for your policies... which many of the American presidential candidates have been caught doing, both in this election and in previous ones.

The above sections of a leaked document from the UK's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) suggests ways that the internet could be used to profile users and manipulate their behaviour, using what it calls its 'cyber influence expertise.'

The full document can be read here

In 2011 it was revealed that the U.S. military's Central Command, or Centcom, had signed a contract with the company NTrepid to 'manage online personas' for its staff. NTrepid's software would enable every serviceman and woman to create and use up to 10 fake online aliases worldwide. The obvious conclusion to draw from this program is that the US military's views are now hugely over-represented in the 'Joe Public' views that we find online.

According to The Guardian, "The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations 'without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.'"

Since the phrase 'sophisticated adversaries' is left undefined, it could just as easily refer to someone who possesses an intelligent argument against an existing military policy, as it does to someone who wants to lob a grenade at passing US Army truck. All ends of the spectrum of dissent are sort of lumped together as a seamless whole under this and other terms that litter the existing anti-terrorism and counter-extremist laws of... well, basically, every country that has them.

That vagueness is the reason why countless peaceful people - from college union activists to environmentalist leafletters to journalists - have been arrested or investigated in the name of "fighting extremism". So, to see the government's cyber-operatives talking about persuading those same 'targets' to 'conform', as they do in a classified document from the UK's Joint Threat Intelligence Research Group, is hardly reassuring.

What is more worrying about the tone of these operations, though, is that their mandates seem to be based on an underlying presumption that the government's policies are peachy-keen as they are, and that all they need is to be defended from change. Seen from that standpoint, even voting could sort of be seen as a threat to the system; after all, it allows the public a fleeting chance to alter the status quo... the same status quo that believes itself to so flawless and beyond reproach.

Centcom, predictably, has stated that it cannot reveal what its fake online personas are being used for. They say that it's classified and that, since they're only allowed to use their technology overseas, we shouldn't be too worried. But in these post-NSA times, 'classified' is not a word that inspires much confidence. And, what's to say that governments overseas aren't targeting us with the right wing trolls that are just as determined as they are to change our views? Not to mention the fact that the internet is a border-free zone, where anything that is written over there naturally ends up over here (and vice versa).

NTrepid has also run surveillance to keep tabs on anarchist organizations in the past and, as the PrivacySos website points, out that, "The DoD is therefore paying a company that monitors the internet use of anarchists and radicals in the United States to actively inject pro-military propaganda into online conversations." In other words, it's doing what China's 50 cent party does.

In 2010, Canada's CBC News reported that the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade had hired a Toronto-based company called Social Media Group, "to help counter some information put forward by the anti-sealing movement." There doesn't appear to be any record of what that counter-information actually was, though. Presumably, it was too inflammatory to print.

Downvoted trolling responses to a discussion about seal hunting on Reddit.com. Are these posters on the government's payroll, too?

Meanwhile, Newfloundland locals who are against the seal hunt say they feel so intimidated that they are afraid to speak up. I have to wonder how much of a role the government's trolling 'counter arguments' have played in supporting and encouraging this climate of fear.

Last year, the British government's online propaganda unit, JTRIG, was embroiled in a minor scandal after a classified document describing its online activities was leaked. Among other things, the document talks about achieving "conformity" by "stressing the importance of social validation" and "highlighting that others have also complied." In plain English, that means that they want to make people agree with whatever they say because 'Everybody else is doing it, and so should you'.

The document also explains how JTRIG could take down their enemies' arguments by “deceiving”, “disrupting”, “delaying”, “denigrating/degrading” their information. They go on to explain that this could mean creating hoax websites with inaccurate facts, or intentionally confusing online discussions about controversial issues. It's not hard to see these sorts of tactics in everyday use now; hard not to come to the conclusion that the suggestions given back in 2011 document are already being implemented far and wide.

Government trolls get paid to write online comments all day (with full benefits and holidays) whereas you and I can, at best, comment a few times per day or per week. The outcome of this is a no-brainer: the internet becomes flooded with voices urging / threatening us to think more conservatively and mutely accept the status quo, instead of making our pesky demands of the people up top, and pushing them to evolve.

The combined potential that all these trolls have to skew public perceptions is potentially overwhelming. Left unchecked, such a concerted effort to dumb down the world of online debate, which is where most debate happens these days, could totally re-engineer society's perception of itself. And well, if the rise and rise of regressive, right-wing movements in many Western countries is anything to go by, these trolls are having that exact effect.

Afraid to Speak Up.

To me, the more insidious side of all this propaganda is in its subtle emotional impact on users of the internet. When faced by a tide of self-righteous chauvinism from from their hostile 'peers', people's feelings about society must change for the worse, as well.

When talking about trolls with my friends, I often ask them, 'Have you ever actually met anyone who thinks or talks like a troll, or holds their exact views?' If I get a vehemently affirmative reply from the other person, I will dig a little deeper and usually, I find out that the 'person' they 'met' was on just a screen name on a forum or social media site. Or that it was a view reposted by a friend. The trolls we meet online are all too often strangers or 'a friend of a friend of a friend'*. Believing in their actual physical existence so readily, sight unseen, is perhaps the biggest mistake that many internet users make.

This brings me back to my first question: who are all these millions of right wing extremists with screen names like Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek? Where are they, and what do they look like? I think many internet users fill in those blanks for themselves by drawing on their own worst fears and/or past traumas. They say, "It's the anonymity of the Internet that brings out the worst in us. People lash out if they think they'll get away with it." They feel that trolls are simply mirroring an inherent vindictiveness that lurks hidden in society when, all too often, trolls are 'revealing' something that isn't actually there - be it support for tax evasion, contempt for environmental protection laws, resentment of women's rights, or anything else that requires the privileged and the powerful to change their ways.

People are fond of calling trolls "bullies". I disagree with that view. The people who hire them are the real bullies. They tend to be members of society who already have a huge say in how we live: the rich and the powerful - CEO's and government leaders. In this feature by ABC Radio Australia, several confirmed cases of for-hire trolls are discussed; virtually all of them involve private corporations or politicians that were acting to promote their own capitalist and conservative values in the face of public criticism of it. In the rare cases of left-wing trolling, the people who hired the trolls were also in a positions of power, and their values were considerably less left-wing than those of activists on the street.

So, it's mainly people who already have a high degree of influence who hire astroturfers to give them even more influence. This brings up the question of how much influence the people who hire trolls really deserve. Shouldn't they just earn their popularity like the rest of us do, instead of paying for imaginary support? And if they're going to pay for it, shouldn't they be forced to disclose how much and what kind of 'support' they've bought?

"I really have to wonder how the f*ck you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning. You are a bloody hypocrite of epic proportions. You are a man who masquerades around acting like a do-gooder, when in reality you are just scum."

Comments including the one above were anonymously posted by staff at Solaris, an Australian paper manufacturer whose activities are linked to accelerating deforestation in Indonesia, after Greenpeace exposed them. Makes you wonder what they would pay trolls to write for them, given the chance.

Basically, astroturfing is a case of the wealthy using their advantages to change the way that people think and feel about them, instead of responding to what those people say they actually want and need. It is social engineering, pure and simple - a form of soft despotism.

Regular internet users know how to recognize and avoid trolls, but for the casual users who go online every now and then, the mass of vitriol can be unsettling. I wonder how many of these users come away from their computer feeling that intolerance is the new norm. It isn't. In reality, many of the trolls out there represent a well-financed version of the old, toxic norms that the rest of us are trying to outgrow.

Want to know more? Stories about trolls, sock puppets, astroturfing and bots are found on Storify, Techdirt and George Monbiot's blog.

Trolls embolden the bigoted, intimidate the liberal, and desensitize middle-of-the-road members of society to their expressions of rank hatred. What impact is this having on us? Look at the headlines and you'll see.

*This just reinforces why you should never add a Facebook 'friend' who you don't personally know. Even if you do know them, you should ask them in person if they sent you a request. Trolls steal real people's names - this has happened at least twice in a left-leaning Facebook group that I was part of.

195 Mare Street: Un-gentrifying Hackney

2013-10-06T02:45:00.001-07:00

The days of Hackney being the 'most squatted borough in London' may be in the past now, but that doesn't mean that the odd occupation can't still be carried off when needed. In the case of 195 Mare Street, the 'need' they are responding to is that of offering a community meeting space, with services that locals whose presence predates the gentrification, can actually afford. Since the government is currently refusing to keep up its end of the "public taxes=public services" equation, centers like 195 Mare Street really need your support and probably your hands-on help too. Why not drop in and see what they can offer you & vice versa?

The centers blurb (from Indymedia):

"A new squatted social space has been created in Hackney - 195 Mare St. The space aims to be an active and inspiring hub for local individuals and community groups.

The current projects being are working on are a language school, bicycle workshop, library, free shop, screenings, hack lab and a vegan cafe. There will also be workshops and info nights. Everything will be either free or for donations.
However, there is scope for so much more. If you have any ideas or projects that would suit the space please get in touch.

There are many ways to get involved, and people are very welcome to contribute.

If you are able to donate materials, the following would be very useful:

building / decorating tools and equipment
kitchen equipment (especially cookers and large pots)
computer parts
bike parts
clothing for the free shop
heaters
books for library
art equipment

Please email us of feel free to drop by between the hours of 3-6pm on Sun - Tues and Thurs.

The 11th October will be our official opening night, with live music and other entertainment. Well worth a visit!

http://195marestreet.wordpress.com/

An Alienated Generation?

2013-09-09T16:05:00.002-07:00

The press has a lot to say about Generation Y's lack of workplace and social skills. But the real question is: do they have what it takes to deal with an alien invasion? Read on to find out...

Image courtesy of the Nuclear Hipster App page

Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Helicopter parents. Delusions of grandeur. Hyper-materialism. What do all these phrases have in common? Apparently, they are all features of "Generation Y" - which is what the generation that was born between 1980 and 2000 A.D. is now being called. Previously it was known as "Generation X" and "The Millenial Generation". (No wonder these kids can't stay focused on anything for very long... the people that named them aren't exactly setting an example.)

Anyways, the business world seems to be taking issue with this generation of well-bred, too-poised miscreants; specifically, with its unrealistically-high expectations. Generation Y is said to take criticism badly and to expect great rewards (e.g. positive feedback and annual raises) for its average work performance. It's hard to blame them - Generation Y, that is, not the managers that are lining up to run them down in surveys. Generation Y has grown up in a society which shamelessly forks over 99% of its profits to the 1% that least deserves it. So when Generation Y-ers don't get the same treatment as ~~those wasters in~~ upper management from Day 1, it's no wonder they tend to move on to a different job in a hurry. Again, how is this unlike an industrial magnate who walks away from the countries he's ruined and runs for government?

A few social commentators are wringing their hands and asking what Gen Y's fickle tendencies bode for the future of our society. That may be a scarier prospect. When you extrapolate this generation's high expectations, perfectionism and non-committal tendencies into purely social realms (e.g. those where there is no possibility of world domination and/or obscene wealth accumulation) then the desire to snicker sadistically at their managers fades a little. Imagine what life might be like in the year 2040, when these "narcissistic gadget-junkies" are running the show. What would their reaction be to a calamitous emergency? How would they react, say, if aliens invaded the Earth and started eating people alive?

I can just imagine how the diary of a Gen Y prime minister facing such a crisis would read....

Day 1: Just got back from a meeting with the alien invaders. They are saying they will only give us peace if we allow them to consume 1 million of our healthiest young citizens per year. WTF. If we lose that many teens and twenty-somethings per year we'll run out of pop musicians, reality TV stars and models in, what, five to ten years? This invasion has got to stop!

Day 2: The aliens have ignored our parents' efforts to make them leave us alone (WTF). So we have been forced to launch a Facebook campaign against them (Facebook/Causes/Stop Invading Us You Awful Aliens).

One of those old-timer MPs protested our course of action, saying, 'What will we do if the aliens aren't on Facebook?' He was so smug about it! So we all blocked him and formed a Facebook group to make jokes about his hair. That'll show him. EVERYBODY is on Facebook!

Day 4: Alien invaders have responded to our Facebook campaign by blasting Facebook's headquarters with a laser and devouring Mark Zuckerberg's flambeed remains. We have all gone home early today to mourn the loss of our friends... friend LISTS, I mean (same difference, I guess).

I really hope my entire Cabinet doesn't resign in the face of this setback, like it did when we received that rude email last year...

Day 5: Great news - half my Cabinet is still on board! And we've struck back at the aliens! We posted like, a DOZEN links to videos of the alien-Facebook attack on Twitter. Now the people can see what is happening, they can rise against up the enemy!

Day 6: Good news: the Twitter videos went viral. Not-so-good news: the people have risen up against each other! Not the aliens! (Major WTF) They're looting each others shops, stealing each other's necessities and beating and maiming each other to secure the remaining shelters. Like, can't they just go and live with their parents if they need food and shelter? And aren't they embarrassed to be caught on camera acting all... desperate?

Day 7: After this stressful week, I think we were all in need of a retreat... but we soldiered through. After an exhausting five-and-a-half-minute emergency session, we finally came up with a solution for the uprising. We will send some celebs out in the streets to plead with the angry mobs. If someone really fit and popular tells them they're ruining the city's image, the mob will back down. I know it.

By the time we'd hatched the plan it had already gone four p.m., though, so we all had to go home for the weekend. We'll be sending those celebs out first thing Monday morning, though. Aliens, watch out!

Day 10: The celebs went out this morning and only one made it back (so far). I watched the carnage on the CCTV live feed and kept waiting for the credits to roll; it was so realistic, like something on TV.

The celeb spokespeople tried every means of reconciliation they knew: offering the mob autographs, guest slots on Big Brother, even hugs! Then things got a bit heated and a couple of celebs told the mob that they were a bunch of haters, and said that blood-spattered hair and torn clothes was not a good look (so last year, too). Well, I guess they paid the ultimate price for losing their cool: they won't look much better than the mob when the air-limousine brings them back.

Day 17: After taking a week off from the civil unrest/alien invasion situation for mental trauma, we are back in session. Our first order of business was putting a 24-hour curfew in place. Next, we tried to contact the military so it could enforce the curfew. We couldn't reach anybody at the military H.Q. at first but then I sent Mum round in her car to scout the place out. She learned from the janitor that the Military personnel had all left - they decided to switch careers because keeping the peace is just way too stressful now. I can't really blame them.

Gotta go... I've got to email this group referral-letter out to our ex-military personnel before the end of the day.

Day 22: The alien invader's army has stepped in and is now keeping peace for us. They say they don't want all their prey killing each other off. I guess I can't blame them but it still kind of hurts my feelings (they were so rude about it).

Day 25: The aliens do seem to be much better at this keeping-the-peace stuff than we are. I think we should leave them to it. It's the sort of work that is best left to ugly people... or whatever they are. We don't have to see them under all the visors and armour.

Day 27: Some people are saying that the aliens are so good at keeping the peace, they should be put in charge of the planet. WTF. And who is leading them, but that cranky MP we blocked?! (I can't remember his name anymore, without Facebook to remind me... SO annoying). We passed a bill denying the aliens a right to stand for election though, so, problem solved. We also designed an ad campaign warning people not to vote for any aliens. Take that! Now we just have to wait for the eleccy to come back on so we can run it (I sent all the power station staff on a paid retreat this week to thank them for their hard work.)

Day 30: The aliens have shut down the Parliament and are converting it into an abattoir. I've really had enough of this job now - a whole 30 days and no word of promotion from anyone. So first thing tomorrow, Mum's going to get us a spaceship to outer space and look for another planet to live on. I don't know who ever asked NASA to send out all those stupid satellite signals and tip off the aliens to our existence but it wasn't ME. Why should I clean up the mess?

Day 31: Bad news. Turns out that the richest 1% people on the planet flew all the spaceships away about four weeks ago. They've gone to find a new planet... without us! SO not fair. But I guess it's my fault for not aiming high enough in my career. I should never have settled for being a lowly Prime Minister.

Day 39: We have resumed negotiating with the aliens now. Our proposals are as follows: They can eat 1 million of us BUT ONLY IF they keep the streets clean, the eleccy running, the shops, pubs, bars, clubs and galleries and gourmet fast food joints open. Government and military would be nice too, but not essential.

Day 40: The aliens totally rejected our terms so now we've gone underground to the sewage system. Gross, right? But we discovered the aliens can't reach us here. While we were watching videos of them on Youtube (and posting insults about their clothes, lol) we noticed that they seemed scared of manholes. Actually it was that cranky MP who noticed it, but I'm still not friending him cause Facebook's gone (that's an upside). After some trial and error, he and I discovered that the aliens don't like the sewers because they have super sensitive noses. I have a sensitive nose too though, so that needs to be taken into consideration, no matter what the cranky MP says about our 'odds of survival'. I happen to think surviving in a sewer is very odd, thank you very much!

Day 73: The aliens are all starving. But there's some good news! They have turned the eleccy back on so we have Internet now!

Day 74: Better news! The aliens sent us a Tweet today - they have agreed to ALL our proposals. They'll only take 1 million peeps a year and they'll keep all the shops and stuff open. We've won!

Day 75: We are back above ground again. Everything is almost back to normal except for the part where we are being eaten alive. But nothing good ever comes without a price - that's what my business management teacher used to say. He taught us skills for life, that man.

Day 77: The shops haven't reopened though because the aliens are renovating them. And the net's gone down again. I was a bit worried when I found out that the aliens had started filling in the sewer tunnels, too, but apparently they are just trying to save us some money on the maintenance budget. How nice!

It's easy enough to mock people 10 or 20 years younger than oneself as being inexperienced and naive. Too easy. When they reach the same age as the people dissing them, though, they will probably be a lot harder to make fun of because they won't be young and naive anymore. Older people have just had more time to realize that the rules they learned as kids are not all "hard n' fast" rules.

Ironically, the rule that 'Generation Y' seems to have all learned best is that all rewards can be bought for the right price, and that image is everything - which probably explains the rise in materialistic, narcissistic tendencies among them. They didn't learn that rule from Mum and Dad's confidence-instilling parenting strategies, though. They learned it from the ad campaigns designed by the very same companies that are whining about their poor work ethic, today.

Poetic justice?

Benefit cap Q&A in London, June 24

2013-06-10T04:07:00.001-07:00

I just received this email vi
Haringey Solidarity Group's anti-benefit cap campaign:

"we are holding a street training session on monday 24th june between 7 and 9pm, at the Phoenix Millenium Centre, about the benefit cap.

The training session is for hsg members in general who might be asked about the benefit cap while they are out being active on any issues. You will not be asked to get involved with the anti-benefit cap campaign itself.

Questions to be amswered: where does the cap fit in with welfare changes ?, is it the same as the bedroom tax ?, will i have my benefits capped ?, how can i stop it happening ?, haringey say i have to move/get a job but i don't want to move and can't find work what can i do ?, is it my fault ?, is it just another tax ? why aren't my friends in Brent aren't being capped ? what's it all about..... ?

Come and explore the answers to these and any other questions there may be...."

Although it is "for members" they are an open & helpful group that has been working with benefits claimants for years so, if you are on benefits and want to inform & empower yourself, you will surely be welcomed.

Please don't 'like' this post.

2013-06-04T02:34:00.004-07:00

Facebook is a ubiquitous tool, which means it has the power to manufacture ubiquitous consent. All of the evidence to date suggests that it's using this power for the worst possible motive: profit.

Slaves to the Mind

What is it about Facebook that turns seemingly-sane people into juvenile delinquents, sociopaths, cheese balls and pet-fetishists? People who you once thought were intellectual suddenly develop a thing for YouTube videos of cats talking. People who you once thought of as politically correct develop a penchant for 'liking' sexist crap dredged up from the bowels of the 'net. People who you once found deep and mysterious reveal a tragic affinity for games that were clearly designed for a three year old.

Watching the people that we know interacting on Facebook can be reminiscent of watching one's colleagues at an office Christmas party that's about to close its doors; the way that they all suddenly seem willing to chat up the bartender, tell stupid jokes to get the boss's attention and show naked photos of their lovers (or their dogs and cats) to the waiter... all in the hope of getting another round of free drinks and food. Bu,t it's not mince pies and beer that drive Facebook user to share and bare their most shocking, hilarious, pathetic (or just plain annoying) facets of daily life: it's the free dopamine and serotonin boost you get. And Facebook's reward is a harvest of personal details from us all.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that rewards seeking behaviour with a sense of exhileration. It's an inbuilt learning mechanism that precedes emotion and supersedes thought, ensuring that we learn what we need to do to survive no matter what. As one writer at The Cerebral Cortex blog puts it:

"[When] the person first realizes that a specific reward occurs after an event, his [dopamine] neurons fire based on their forecast of when the reward will be given. These neurons are crucial in learning new processes because they fire as they practice their prediction skills and as the learning is acquired."

In the same article, the author describes an experiment which helped establish the link between dopaminergic surges and unexpected 'rewards', carried out by Dr. Wolfram Schultz at the University of Cambridge, 1997:

"In the experiment a light was flashed, several moments passed, and then drips of apple juice were fed to the monkey. Schultz observed the monkey’s neuronal response during the period of time in between the flash of light and the apple juice treat. Schultz discovered the dopamine response [occurred] in the monkeys immediately after he flashed the light. In this case, the monkeys’ dopaminergic neurons were predicting when the treat would be received."

That seems pretty self-evident: getting an enjoyable reward = happy feelings. But because dopamine is a learning chemical, rewarding us for any new, meaningful habits we adopt, its effects tend to fade after a while, if the pattern stays the same. That's our brain telling us that there's nothing new to learn here, anymore. Writes Schultz, "Over time, this dopamine response decreased. But when the monkeys found apple juice that was not preceded by a flash of light, their dopaminergic neurons were excited again."

How excited, you ask?

"The unpredictability and surprise of the reward accounted for a dopamine response that was three to four times greater than the response that occurred during the [initial] learning period. The monkeys thus experienced far more pleasure when the apple juice reward arrived at an unpredicted [sic] time than when it arrived on schedule right after the flash of light."

Strangely, that reminds this writer of a certain, small red box that she can see in the top left hand corner of her screen every time she checks Facebook, and its ever-changing tally of 'notifications'. And I'm not the only one that's made the connection:

"Facebook’s notification system may be synonymous to the randomly occurring apple juice reward," the author of The Cerebral Cortex writes. "As Facebook users, we log onto the site to check for notifications. Often times, our guesses are just as inaccurate as the monkey’s random predictions for the apple juice reward. It is an exciting feeling to check for Facebook notifications, but the gratification from actually receiving a notification is always greatest."

And this reaction kicks into overdrive when a greater array of learning possibilities are available. "It is possible for the dopamine system to keep saying 'more more more', seeking even when we have found the [original] information," writes Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D, a contributor at Psychology Today. "Research also shows that the dopamine system doesn’t have satiety built in," she adds. Basically, when there's an unlimited supply of new stuff to be learned, it goes kinda crazy - and therefore, by extension, so can we.

Dopamine itself has had all sorts of mud slung at it by neuro-experts who blame the neurotransmitter for nearly all addictions. But, it isn't all the dopamine's fault: the drug dealers and Facebook designers who exploit it for personal profit also share the blame.

When E.B Boyd of the Fast Company met with the Facebook design team last year, she summed up their current design strategy this way: "Facebook doesn't just want to catalyze interactions. It wants to catalyze emotions." Boyd went on to describe how, "A sticky note with the word ['serotonin'] scrawled on it is tacked on the wall of a design meeting". Design team manager, Julie Zhuo, explained why it was there, "[Serotonin is] our term for those little moments of delight you get on Facebook". According to Chris Cox, the Vice President of Product at Facebook, "It's the science of things you can't reason about, that you just feel." Anyone looking for evidence that emotional manipulation is the endgame of Facebook's interface design need look no farther than the designers themselves.

"It wants you to have the same feelings--the positive ones at least--that you have when you cuddle up to friends and family in person," summarizes Boyd. And if the fact that people are having those feelings for an automated interface, rather than for the people themselves, has led to addiction and alienation from real friends & family, then who really cares? All that matters is that it sells.

Yet while serotonin may be responsible for the feeling of happiness a person gets when they've found what they want, what motivates them to seek it out is dopamine itself. The only way to harness the 'cuddly' feelings that serotonin allegedly brings, is by enslaving that sense of anticipation - the dopamine - as well. And Facebook is actively trying to achieve that enslavement via technology.

Hating the 'Likes' of Facebook

The 'like' button and the 'adds friend' button are the vehicle to achieve this enslavement. For a start, they both limit the range of interactive options to a narrow & relentlessly upbeat spectrum, that's all but guaranteed to trigger an excited emotional response. To the receiver, 'friend' and 'like' sound extremely positive whereas, to the sender, they may sound more neutral. Each party can see whatever they want in the others' response. While the words 'Like' and 'Friend' are nearly neutral enough to entice reticent people to bandy them about, they contain enough positive associations to spread serotonogenic joy through subconscious mechanisms, in most people.

Yet people that are responding to each others' posts really don't have any choice in what terms they use when they want to reach out to a fellow Facebook user. A 'like' may just be a casual "Hey, I'm just letting you know I read this". An 'add friend' may be a casual, "Hi, I remember you from that house party and wanted to share some pics I took before you slipped into the recesses of my social consciousness". Yet they are magically transformed by the buzz-generating terms of 'liking' and 'befriending' into something much more reassuring than that. The user is participating in the delivery of excessive neuro chemicals, whether they want to or not, every time they act.

In the real world, when someone is registering a response to a face-to-face update, or handing us a photo they took at that house party, it rarely arouses such strong feelings as it does when we receive a 'like' or a 'friend' on Facebook. Real-life interactions are far more nuanced than that. Ergo, nearly all people, or that have feelings, anyway, will naturally tend to prefer relating via Facebook, where their actions are more likely to result in a reassuring - but artificial - sense of acceptance. Feeling good about your actions is far easier and more straightforward there, than it is in the frequently detached & perplexing world of real relationships.

At this point, some would say, "Well, what's the matter with feeling better about yourself? Who wouldn't like to feel that everyone approves of them?" Erm, well, most honest people wouldn't, for a start. People who want their relationships to reflect the real strength of feeling or attachment that they actually have for one another. Yet the mass-scale of Facebook has ensured that such self-deception has become the new status quo, leaving people dangerously lax about engaging in such petty self-delusions. The danger is that the essentials lessons that help people create a better future aren't being learned in the present; their mutual haste to reassure takes precedence over level-headed analysis that may avoid real tragedies. That many people have vanished, gone mad, died or committed suicide while their hundreds of Facebook 'friends' watched &amp assumed that all was well - reflects the dangers that can arise from putting a relentlessly upbeat sheen on every act. It lulls us into a false sense of security.

That may be why, when a Facebook user meets one of her Facebook 'friends' in person, the meeting sometimes feels anticlimactic and the rapport less positive than it did on Facebook... unless they happen to be good friends in real life, that is. Without the super-positive filter of Facebook people seem less nice, less supportive, and less ideal. The only way to interact with the ego-stroking version of them is to stay on Facebook... forever. Isn't that creepy? I think so.

By triggering a dopaminergic and serotinergic response in nearly every interaction, Facebook is not only instilling a false sense of acceptance: it is silencing the societal alarms that tell people when an attitude adjustment is necessary to survive. At the same time, it is also deadening them to less pleasing realities. Take a Facebook addict's computer away and witness how apathetic they can become, how detached and anxious without the constant reinforcement of the 'like' button. It's an acceptable addiction, but it still keeps us attached to the platform, and detached from life's harder realities, the same way any drug can.

Selling Us All Short

The middle man in all of this is the Facebook interface, and it acts like a desperate salesman; it wants us to 'like' its product so badly that it never stops fishing for new chances to flatter us and ensure our dependence upon it. Aside from being manipulative, this is also narcissistic. The creators have passed on their defects to us, by design.

Some Facebook users that are reading this may be thinking, "Well, I already know about that. (In fact, I posted that same article on my timeline three days ago and 21 friends liked it, so I know they know about it, too)." Yet, acknowledging an effect consciously is a secondary response and an abstract one; at best, it can take four or five times to kick in than the dopamine and serotonin does. By contrast, these chemical changes can happen almost immediately, on a subconscious level. They also happen at the organic level of matter, that is less easy to adjust than an abstract belief. Basically, the brain has already changed, physically, by the time its owner recognizes what has happened. Maybe it's possible to undo the effect with greater mental control, but that takes time. And anyway, is learning to deny dopamine's effects even desirable, when that response exists to help us learn things that genuinely are necessary to our survival?

As the author of the Cerebral Cortex blog writes, "With mental control over neuronal firing, Facebook would no longer be so addictive. This is the plus side. But what about other enjoyments? Would they still be as pleasurable if we could personally control how much pleasure we felt?" Never mind about pleasure - if we could control dopamine's action, would we even still be able to learn? To survive? In an experiment in which rats had their dopamine exhausted through chronic overs-timulation, they simply died of starvation. They had food but no desire to eat, since it gave them no pleasure.

If manipulating dopamine and serotonin the way that Facebook does, is preventing our species from dealing with its immediate survival concerns - whether they be environmental, political or personal - then Facebook has a lot more to answer for than the behaviour of its most extreme addicts. Humanity's survival is poised on a cliff's edge, and Facebook is numbing our awareness of that fact, in part thanks to is excess of feel-good vibes. It is truly an opiate of the masses, yet is treated as a must-have accessory. I find it hard to imagine cocaine ever being treated the same way - probably because cocaine addicts are compelled to engage in real life, for better or for worse, whereas Facebook compels addicts to stay at home, in front of the screen, where advertisers feel they 'belong'.

Until the invention of Facebook, the only way to get a perpetual sense of stimulation and enjoyment via artificial means was to engage in antisocial, self-destructive behaviours: compulsive shopping, drug abuse, gambling, etc. Yet, because Facebook cleverly disguises its non-stop dopamine buzz as actual feedback from real people - acquaintances, colleagues, family and friends - its manipulation flies unnoticed, under the radar. It detaches us from the same people that would have traditionally helped each other to stay balanced, in the past, whilst telling us that we are in better touch with them than ever. As anyone who's lost a friend to Facebook addiction knows, spending hours on it per day can be every bit as self-destructive and isolating as any other bad habit. It's taken less seriously though, and the masses of people whose addictions are lower level are almost never recognized, at all.

Yet, without any hard public scrutinty on sites like Facebook, many people will probably continue to believe the negative effects described above are not that big of a deal, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe those same people would change their tune, though, if they considered the effect that the site has had on reinforcing the attitudes of woman-haters, queer-haters, neo Nazis and other haters connected to the site.

The Rapebook scandal offers an insight into even uglier, negative consequences of Facebook's excessively positive reinforcement: dozens of Facebook 'fan pages' have been discovered where men post violent, misogynistic images and share back-slapping comments about raping women. Nearly every "she-was-asking-for-it" rant or dead prostitute pic gleans a flood of 'likes' on these pages. This is obviously raising the danger level for women everywhere yet, because Facebook is mainly 'just' a private networking site, anyone who wants to challenge such hate has to put their private accounts in the firing line to do so.

It seems to have never crossed Facebook's mind that THIS is why handing out free digital serotonin to anyone that signs up for an account, unconditionally, is a really bad idea. What if the user happens to be a rapist, psychopath, neo-fascist or other wrong 'un? Most users are thinking about their balanced friends and family when they conclude that there's nothing wrong with giving Facebook users an unwarranted, feel-good boost. But what about someone who is typing updates like: “Hitler was right” and posting pieces about “How to kill a batty boy”? Amplifying positive responses to posts like these isn't just harmful, it's reckless. It's enabling haters to feel more validated and accepted than they may really be.

Maybe it's more than just a coincidence that people holding right-wing and extreme attitudes are becoming stupider, louder and brasher by the day. Or maybe it's Facebook's fault for offering hate groups a wraparound illusion of support. The Rapebook scandal exposed just one of the prejudices that has flourished in Facebooks' hothouse of almost-unconditional support, but thousands more could eventually grow out of it. Watch out, minorities.

Unfriend Fakebook

While psychologists and activists have been sounding the alarm over Facebook, the business community has been singing its praises, loudly, as it reaps the profits gleaned from selling targetted ads to a captive audience, full of addicts. Yet the sneaky techniques that Facebook employs to tap these funds is about as tasteful as bile tapped from a live bear. And it reduces our personal relationships and feelings to the same, shallow & degraded level as prepackaged bile, as well.

So, why then should we be rewarding such people by granting them access to sensitive data such as our 'Friends, Likes, Location and Interests', all free of charge? Quite simply, because we are being compelled to do so by the site itself. It rewards us for every new share, like or update with a reward from nature's biggest buzz: serotonin and dopamine.

All of the above evidence strongly suggests that Facebook is keepsing users hooked and viewing ads via a form of social engineering. And that this a reckless experiment is affecting real people and real life, in a bad way. Should such a huge and risky experiment be carried out by a mindless, self-promoting commercial interface that's run purely for profit? If your answer to this question is 'no' then it might be time for you to un-friend Facebook altogether.

We are all hipsters... unfortunately.

2013-04-28T02:09:00.002-07:00

Overconsumption: not pretty sight unless you're hipster, right?

I've just read that 21 Types of Hipster article that recently went viral in Berlin's English communities. It's uncanny how, pretty much everyone I see in the streets seems to fall into one of the hipster 'types' listed in it... whether they are the streets of London, Barcelona or Berlin.

The retro fake trucker caps, the designer plaid shirts, the oversize H & M shades that cost ten times what they look like they're worth; the Diesel skinny jeans; the pre-stretched American Apparel sweaters; the sloppy, overlaced, big brand name trainers. Embracing elements of 80s glam, punk, metal, biker, disco, hippy and goth, I guess you could say that the hipster trend is 'diverse', and that's why its sucked so many people into it from many a remote corner of the fashion spectrum, like some sort of supermassive black hole for trends. Peripheral hipsters are many, but the diehard adherents are few.

They are a breed that seems to inhabit exposed brick loft flats, where I picture them weaving between teetering piles of zany, mismatched accessories and clothes, draped over Mac stations and unvarnished, handmade mugs half filled with stale, cold-filtered coffee. It must be taxing trying to put all those 21 styles together in new & original ensembles each day! Maybe that's why the defining quality of the hipster look is how blase and uncoordinated it all looks, after all, there are only so many ways you can tastefully mix and match all that crap.

'Hipster' seems to be another word for having so much money, so much stuff, and so little time to wear it all that even just putting clothes on each day is an exhausting chore. Hence their world-weary faces, the premature cynicism, that meta hipsters seem to wear as if it's an accessory in itself. (All those wardrobe doors and drawers to open... man, what a workout!) If you could sum up what all those 21 variants of hipster in one sentence, it would probably be something like this: too many clothes, not enough time. Boo fucking hoo.

Clive Martin of Vice Magazine (piss-taking handbook for/against all things hipster) recently wrote that hipsters are now so normalized that they can't be ridiculed anymore. I totally agree with that... but I don't agree with his inference that it's too difficult to "wage war on a subculture that defines itself through constant revision."

Subculture? Ex-squeeze me? 'Hipsters' cannot be a subculture, by definition, because they are doing, and being exactly what all good Westerners are instructed to do and be: voracious, short sighted, nonstop consumers of everything. Hipsters have spent so much time shopping since their 'subculture' was born, that they've managed to cycle through literally every fashion trend ever created. Lope along in a wife beater, with an e-cigarette in one hand and a wry smile on your face as you to try and stay ahead of the curve, and you may set yourself apart from the vast majority of shopaholics, but that's where the differences end. The only thing unusual about hipsters is not their perverse attachment to stuff, but their perverse refusal to be anything but a consumer.

Their subculture is one that's entirely bound up in objects, so much so that it even astounds the most capitalist observers. This speaks to an unresolved identity crisis born of an eye that's too constantly straying towards the newest item to pop up for sale, on their Facebook feeds. It speaks to a life full of cast-off clothes, prefab shells for a self that's never going to find its perfect fit on a shop floor.

But my god will they try. And how.

However, it may be true that there is no point in insulting hipsters anymore (and it's interesting that hardly anyone ever uses the word to describe themselves, only someone else). Yes, they may be looking in the wrong place for their identity, but no one can say that they are any different from any other person shopper in the west, in that respect.

I don't want to sound like an old person, suggesting that we are all consumption junkies simply because people have more stuff nowadays, so I will let the facts and figures say it for me. Check out the consumer spending per capita charts below and you'll see what I mean. Everyone is overspending as much as the average hipster on something right now, regardless of what subculture they belong to.

Consumer spending growth is the Holy Grail of the Western economy but what we never hear about in the news is how much it has already grown, to date. Apparently, their campaign by our elected and unelected leaders in government and business to keep us all spending has worked a little bit too well. And yet they still claim it's not good enough...

These graphs show the consumer spending growth from Germany, the U.S., the U.K. and Spain from 1995 till 2012/2013. The dramatic rise in spending is reflected in every Western nation. Source: TradingEconomics.com

On some level, we are all guilty of literally buying into the vague idea that somehow, a new purchase is going to fulfill us. That's the capitalist dream... the hipster dream... the western dream ah, whatever. They're all the same thing! And we are all a part of it. The only real solution is to stop pointing fingers and laughing (admittedly, a hard thing to do when eyeing a hipster) and start cutting back.

Nearly everyone I know who has a job is decadent in some way, and I've done all the things on this list myself at some point, as well: going to the pub every night or a restaurant every week, buying movies we don't need, buying new smartphones when the unused ones are still fine, taking half a dozen holiday by plane each year....

And yet when I started working, back in 1996, when consumer spending was nearly half of what it is today, I would never have spent on any of these things. At that time, DIY clothing, free parties, pot lucks, protests and fanzines were the coolest things around. Even if I wouldn't have had a strong left wing outlook, I'd have had to go to non-profit, non-consumerist events to be where all the best people were at. Okay, so now I definitely sound like an old person... but I'm actually fine with that, in this case!

I think many people would be as shocked as me if they looked back and see how high consumption, and production, have become thanks to the Western nations. This is because the universal trend of nonstop consumption growth is rarely noted in the mass media, except in glowing annual growth reports. Overall the constant message is, 'buy more'. Maybe now is a good time to realize that for the people saying this, more will never be enough.

Society has also started to notice - with no help from its leaders - that there is a very real down side to over consumption.... aside from causing credit crunches and recessions, it's changing our weather patterns and eroding our health. On top of that, it has a soulless side effect. I think that society has demonized the so-called 'hipster subculture', not just because they are just so damned conspicuous about their consumption, but because they look and act like they're so fed up with their shallow way of life, even as they chase after it. It's like they really can't think of anything better to do with themselves. It's like they're the crackheads of the fashion world.

Whenever I go into the store to buy anything these days - a pair of shades, let's say - they're invariably bright, silly hipster shades. The trousers are always skinny. The shoes are always trainers or some sort of plastic 1990s platform replica. The bright, oversized, cynical self mockery of the whole genre seems custom made to distract us from what all this crap represents: an excuse to keep on buying. Buying cheap, disposable, random shit as often as you can, just because you can. To get something non-hipster, I'd probably have to go to a designer store and spend even more money I don't have.

It seems that being a hipster is less of a conscious choice, and more of an unavoidable by-product of being a shopper. That's because hipsters are the fruition of a decades-long campaign to make us believe that buying is the same thing as being. That campaign has fought a tit-for-tat battle against actual countercultures as far back as I can remember. It's hunted down punk, indy, Goth, rave, hippy, etc., and as it's captured each scene, it's gutted them of their radical ethos and hung their styles up on clothing racks to sell, like exotic animal skins. Hipsters are perhaps gung-ho about taking part in that cultural safari hunt. But as long as we choose to buy our own identities rather than enacting them, we're not that much better off.

Whenever I want to buy some new clothes, I can't avoid coming face to face with the hipster trend and buying into it a little bit. But I also can't avoid the sneaking suspicion that I'm buying into it, not just it's ubiquitous and cheap but because, on some level, I'm trying to be as conspicuous about my consumption as those f%$ing hipsters are. I am pretty sure that isn't the case but I wonder how long that state of affairs will last, when the largest 'subculture' in the West around revolves entirely around buying shit.

Thoughts?

The Ectasy and Agony of Doing Our First Party

2013-04-28T02:07:00.000-07:00

The  experience of putting on my first party in Berlin lived up to its name -  it left my mind feeling pretty smeared.  Anyone who's thinking of  'making party' for the first time should do themselves a favour and read  on, to find out and what I learned:

1) There are no norms or standards in Berlin's party venue market.

I  received venue rental quotes ranging from 120 to 2000 Euros per party,  and the venues ranged in size anything from a 20 sq. meter cellars with  leaks, to sprawling, hypermodern spaces that rivalled the Tate Modern.  Unless your bestie owns a cool space, expect to spend up to half of your  organizing time finding one &  making it just right for the guests.  

Also  specific to Berlin: there seemed to be no universal method of getting  in touch with these venues.  Some club managers are contactable by  telephone, others by email, Facebook, SMS, YouTube video, telepathy,  interpretive dance...??  A couple of clubs were so difficult to  get in touch with that I seriously considered spray painting my name and  phone number on their front door and hoping for the best.   

2) Be honest.

It's  a Berlin cliche: every second person in the city is a 'designer' an  'entrepreneur' a 'producer' or 'business manager'.  You rarely hear them  admit that, 'I'm an underemployed tour guide and amateur, wannabe  promoter'.  Many people working in the Berlin club scene are just as  opaque about their qualifications as the hipster fantasists who describe  themselves in the above flowery terms.  As I quickly learned, it's  because some of them don't have real qualifications and the  results of working with them can be disastrous.  In the course of  organizing this party, I met 'graphic designers' who couldn't recognize  layout errors, 'club managers' who hated techno, and 'promoters' who  struggle to communicate with their own group of friends, let alone the  city of Berlin.

Sticking  myself with the less-glamourous, truthful label of 'amateur wannabe  promoter' was much more useful in the end; whenever I met people who  genuinely were qualified to help me, they were more willing to  give me a hand.  (Thank-you Katja, Rachel, Dylan, James, Katie, Dave,  Alenee, Zoe and the DJs!)

3) It's the end of the world as we know it (I feel fine)

When  Northern Europe was abruptly plunged into a mini-ice age in the middle  of March, this did not seem to bode well for our semi-outdoors, April  party.  Ditto when I had to rush to hospital for an urgent operation, in  the midst of the epic search for a party venue. Still, it was something  of a relief to realize that, hey, at least climate change is something I  am not personally responsible for sorting out by April 20th. Goddess  grant me the strength to change what I can and the wisdom to accept what  I cannot etc.  The post-operative strength codeine pills might have  helped me to foster that sense of acceptance, too.

4) Printing the flyers is the last thing you should do. Period.

An oversight in the 'quality control'
of our first batch of 

5000  flyers resulted in them being misprinted.  After painstaking efforts  were made to ensure that the second flyer batch was correct (this time, I  consulted a professional designer with, like, a degree to prove  it) I sent off our new, improved flyer to the printer.  The next day, I  found out that we had to change the venue.  D'oh!  I was then duly  informed by another promoter that flyers only need to be handed out in  the final week or two before the party, so there was never any rush to  get them done. That brings me to my final point: 

5) Delegate the responsibility, delegate the stress.

As this was my first party, I made a fair few mistakes. I was prepared for this.  What I wasn't prepared for was the wall-punching frustration of being given 'helpful' advice by nearly everyone after the fact.  

Like  those people, I also posess 20/20 vision in hindsight and,  retrospectively, I can see now that it would have been a good idea to  find someone with the foresight to avoid mistakes and hand off a  few jobs to those people.  It's much less painful than punching walls,  and cheaper than buying a time machine as well.

The  one thing that this party organizing experience didn't teach me was  that having a good party makes everything better again... I already  knew that!   Finding time to dance for a whole hour to a set by one of  my favourite DJs, and catching glimpses of friends having a great time  all throughout the night, made all the stress evaporate faster than a  sheen of dancefloor sweat on a cool April night.  

 Would  I do it again?  YES.  If it's true that you learn how to avoid mistakes  by making them, and how to avoid pitfalls by stumbling into them, then  the next Mind Smear party should be utterly mistake & pitfall-free!

Join Mind Smear on Facebook or check back on the party website for the details of the next one!

*Thanks very much to Katie for taking the above photos of the party.

Brrrlin's long winter puts global warming on ice

2013-03-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Brrrlin! Last year at this time, the trees were budding, the flowers blooming and the birds singing. Now everybody has the same questions on the tip of their tongue: why's it so cold? When will it end?? And whatever happened to global warming???

It's still here. In fact, this is probably how it should look... for those of us in northwestern Europe it should, anyway. We can blame the Gulf Stream for that. Or rather, we can blame the humans, since it is humans that are messing it up.

It’s a common misconception that spring arrives in Europe, Canada and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere because that is when the days start getting longer and the earth starts getting nearer to the sun. Actually, the arrival of summer has nada to do with the length of the days and the earth’s distance from the sun. If there was any relationship between those things then it would be impossible for Australia to experience scorching summers at the same time of year when Europe and Canada are freezing cold.

To understand Berlin's cool summer in 2012 and its extended edition of winter 2013, one first has to understand that its summer comes here largely courtesy of the Gulf Stream. If it wasn't for the Gulf Stream, northwestern Europe, Britain and North America would be damn cold all year round.

The Gulf Stream is part of a massive, circular current that runs through the oceans, bringing warm water and air up from the equator, to the Atlantic ocean. As the equatorial waters heat up in spring and summer, so does the Gulf Stream; in turn, it shares its warm wealth with Atlantic areas of Europe and North America. How much wealth? The warm air and water carried by the Gulf Stream is “comparable to the power generation of a million nuclear power plants” according to NASA. Without the Gulf Stream, “Europe's average temperature would likely drop 5 to 10°C (9 to 18°F).” In Europe, winter doesn’t ever really end... the Gulf Stream just pushes its 'pause' button each year, with a gust of imported heat from below.

In 2005, however, the Gulf Stream was reported to be slowing dramatically. The slowing of the Gulf Stream is "intimately linked with dramatic regional cooling" according to Bill McGuire, Benfield Professor of Geophysical Hazards & Director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, University College London (try saying that five times fast).

"Just 10,000 years ago, during a climatic cold snap known as the Younger Dryas," he continues, "the current was severely weakened, causing northern European temperatures to fall by as much as 10 degrees. Ten thousand years before that [...] when most of the UK was reduced to a frozen wasteland, the Gulf Stream had just two-thirds of the strength it has now."

"It is the Gulf Stream, and associated currents, that allow strawberries to thrive along the Norwegian coast, while at comparable latitudes in Greenland glaciers wind their way right down to sea level."

But the melt-off of Arctic ice, caused (or at the very least, aggravated) by man made warming, has poured "huge volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic" and thrown the Gulf Stream out of whack. It is now returning much more cooled water from the North Pole, and moving northward more slowly than before. As a double whammy, melting Arctic ice is allowing any heat that is trapped in the water to disperse into the cold air. The warm waters of the Gulf Stream are being attacked by cold water from below, and cold air from above, resulting in a paradoxical Atlantic cooling caused by, well, warming.

Many people I meet in Berlin seem mildly alarmed about melting glaciers, reserving the larger part of their anxiety for the polar bears and whales that are becoming extinct because of it. ‘But hey,' I've heard many of these same people saying, 'warmer weather won’t be such a bad thing for me - I hatewinter.’ Actually, the melting glaciers should scare the crap out of anybody who hates winter. In a country where summer only comes courtesy of warm water, the melting glaciers could spell the end of warm seasons altogether.

Climate prediction involves far too many variables for even the cleverest human scientist to calculate, so no one can say whether another ice age is definitely on the way, or whether we should instead be expecting heatwaves and drought. What climatologists do agree on is that the seasons will not return to normal as long as the Earth keeps warming up. As McGuire says, man made global warming is “nothing more nor less than a great planetary experiment, many of the outcomes of which we cannot predict.” By adding to it - by driving cars, wasting electricity and cutting down trees - we are playing with fire and ice.

Lucky Number 2013!

2013-01-31T03:41:00.000-08:00

Winter is the season when Berlin gets that famous post-apocalyptic look to it: the streets are empty, the wrecked buildings that people used to work in loom visibly over the more discreet, tidy ones they now live in; everywhere you look, the city's mottled grey shell is exposed by bare branches. In the streets, nothing seems to move except a few furtive pedestrians, camouflaged in dark clothes that blend in with the post-industrial grime. The crows and sparrows are silent, saving their energy to keep warm; the pigeons sip spilled beer and peck fallen drugs outside of clubs to blot out their existential despair. Even the trains seem to have a touch of winter blues as they sluggishly creak their way between stations. It's a bit bleak, if you get my drift. These weather conditions are perfect for checking out an exhibition like X Lab’s solo show of Ken Plotbot's work, this Saturday the 26th. The show's “dark nuclear graphic and post industrial atmosphere” and elektro-dubstep DJ sounds will no doubt complete the Apocalyptic Berlin™ experience. Starts 6:30 p.m.

Because nothing in the outside world seems to be changing very much, I've been reviewing the past two years of blogging about the seedy underbelly of Berlin nightlife. I understand now why many people reflect and resolve to change their habits in January: it is one of the only ways of getting a sense of transformation when everything else is standing still. Another way is by dancing to innovative new tunes, which Liquid Sky has helped me to do many times in the past year. Talented, anarchic, unpretentious and refusing to play by any established party rules, they are a must for fans of adventurous sounds, obscure locations, and finding a space where boundaries end and creativity begins. In 2013 they'll be hooking up with fellow avant gardists Michael Rother, FM Einheit, Mijk van Dijk while keeping up the great work with an ensemble of self-determined producers, helmed by Ingmar Koch. Next big date on the Liquid Sky calendar will be Easter weekend... I'll be keeping my ear to the ground!

Back when I wrote my first entry for this blog, in 2010, there were still a number of active anti-squats around the city: Landsberger 54 and RAW in the east, and a bevy of derelict sensations in the central Mitte area, like Tacheles and Schokoladen. They had been moulded by bombs and bad weather into shapes that might as well have been hallucinated by Gaudy. In 2013 more than half are empty shells, covered in now-ironic messages about the right to housing and free spaces. Brashly radical on the outside but dark and cold on the inside, these deserted relics are a poignant metaphor for Berlin's radical dream, which has left its stamp on city's surface despite the fact that very few people these days are actually, you know, living it.

The radical community has survived but it is being pushed ever further behind the scenes; for instance, the shrinking anti-squat scene is being replaced by a growing wagon-community scene in less residential areas. Whenever radicals get moved on from a neighbourhood to make way for gentrification, though, all the relevant questions they raise about gentrification, and the feral capitalism that creates it, get moved on with them, swept under the plush carpet of unsustainable luxury. Mindpirates is one collective that is still using its base in gentrified Kreuzberg to raise, and then answer, those questions. The collective describes itself simply as an “artist group that works on aspects and issues of contemporary culture, sociology and ecology”. No fancy imagery in the description - instead, they let their space provide that via an incandescent tapestry of backdrops, sculpture, and animated lights playing on exposed brick. Their events explore activist themes from a kaleidescopic array of artistic angles, fusing the new aesthetic Berlin with the old, radical one. Tonight Gegen's finissage at Mindpirates will be "questioning history and rewriting the past" via an exhibition of work by Erik Mittasch.

Aw shucks, seeing Mindpirates and Gegen working together gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling I get when two well-liked friends start dating! Gegen is one of the few party teams I can think of whose strong visual element comes from deep inside, at the cellular level of personality, beliefs and most importantly, action. Week after week, I read event write-ups by imitators that seem aimed at making their superficial extremes sound as 'radical' as possible. Could that be because the majority of these events are detached from any deeper cultural radicalism that would otherwise pull in the crowds? Or am I just imagining that? Anyway, Gegen stands apart from them because, when they say they’re doing a night of “human, animal and alien languages expressed through poetry, spoken word, reading and collage,” I know I'll get a genuinely mutative experience and not just some freak show for passers-by to gawp from behind a velvet rope. Gegen does freak shows for the freaks, where every artistic, psychological, philosophical permutation of the word 'queer' is realised and moved to the center. They started off doing parties that blended style, counterculture, art and rhetoric but, as mentioned above, they've moved out into readings, exhibitions, and the streets. That's where counterculture belongs! I look forward to another year in which they'll loudly and proudly throw the mainstream into doubt.

This weekend Gegen return to their party roots with the huge, theatrical event Homopatik, a special, 22-hour Orgy-Mystery-Theater "hosted by the kingdom of electronic music TRESOR.” They say that you have to go there to find out what it's all about, which is about right - the melting pot atmosphere depends entirely on who turns up.

Speaking of freaky style, 2012 saw some of the city's designers reclaim Berlin's radical chic from the Mitte fashion magpies. Many of the hallmarks of Berlin’s creative, radical spirit have become the hallmarks of a vacuous 'gutter glamour' style over the years. The punk hairstyles, the shredded gamine clothes, the tattoos and the anarchy symbols are still around, but they're increasingly detached from any meaningful, radical counter-culture. Hence, real squats sit empty while Berlin Fashion Week's Opening Party is called 'Squat House' and features fashionistas dressing up as anarcho-punks and posing against bare, graffitied walls, with Veltins and Red Bull sponsoring the event.

Mitte venue Food/ZMF, run by activist Penny Rafferty, is bucking the slacktivist, gutter-glamour trend. The unpretentious, back-alley venue hosted an anti-fashion "show" at the end of 2012. It seemed tailor-made to showcase moody, frustrated models and designer diatribes against consumerism, rather than to sell clothing. This was very much intentional. Shouting, ranting and storming off the catwalk, Penny's crew embodied an energy that has been pent up in the shallow confines of fashion for far too long. "Starting 20 years after the first waves of subcultures started on the Streets surrounding Rosenthaler Platz, Food/ZMF now seeks to redirect, reverse and recreate," reads the Food/ZMF blurb. And not a moment too soon!

The "Berlin style" seems to have been reduced to a bunch of micro-brands that have the same goal as the macro brands: to earn money and make someone famous. And, okay, I too have watched 'The Sky Over Berlin" and fully grasp that a strong visual element has always been part of this city's appeal (in fact, styles haven't changed all that much since the film was made). The difference between then and now lies in the willingness of radical-looking people to change a system that clearly isn't working for them, the city, or the world. The current incarnation of that style is escapist because it has no ties any effort one could make to actually change things.

Ironically, the radical style that Berlin's fashionistas are falling all over themselves to acquire only became popular because it was once associated with real escape: escape from repression via rebellion; escape from the housing market via squatting; escape from the system via anarchy; escape from bigotry via egalitarianism; escape from capitalism via DIY living; escape from fashion via absurdity. The escape lay in what the people wearing the clothes did to free themselves. If their style is associated with this city, it's only because Berlin was cheap enough that they could do that here. But prices are rising now, probably because there a growing proportion of Berlin's population that thinks that, by buying up the city's buildings, styles and 'underground' clubs, they will get liberty included with their purchase, like a free set of batteries. I reckon that, if the act of handing over money could achieve radical change, it probably wouldn't be legal!

Sounds For Berlinseem to get this. Their openly-defiant but utterly inclusive free parties put people before profit every time. They say: "We want to hold the Berlin Senate to the obligation to decriminalize subcultural events. We think it's fundamentally a good thing that there are commercially-operated venues, because tourists have to celebrate, too. But there are plenty of partiers who can’t or don’t want to pay the sometimes-exorbitant drinks and entry prices.”
SFB started off last summer with a series of lively outdoor parties in East Berlin that got everyone dancing... except, maybe, the Senate! And they have consistently brought together quality examples of every kind of music that makes you dance, fashion be damned. Minimal is kept to a minimum while banging techno, tough house and breaky-psytrance also feature in their selective line-up. Sounds good to me!

One final tip: London's radical party scene is probably going to be making some waves in this city in 2013.

Check back here, or check out Club Alien's Facebook and Twitter pages, for updates about these events and more!

"If time doesn't change you, you're doing something wrong."