THIS WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED AS A BONUS LONG FORM AUDIO ESSAY ON MY PODCAST PERMANENTLY MOVED IN MAY 2020.

JAY SPRINGETT IS A SOLARPUNK, THEORIST AND STRATEGIST FOR HYBRID ENVIRONMENTS. HIS CONCERNS ARE WITH CULTURE, HUMANS AND TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT. HE IS CURRENTLY WRITING HIS FIRST PUBLIC BOOK: LAND AS PLATFORM.

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THIS IS IT

Navigation

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Interesting Times
Introduction
Curses // Spells
The Run Out
Our Friend Lenin
We are where we are
Scales Fall
Titans Topple
Treasures On Earth
End of the Anthropocene
This Is It

When Lockdown started I started writing. Writing about all the things that are important to me. How I was thinking and feeling about the world. Some of what I wrote between March and May ended up here.

Hello, You are listening to 411 Permanently Moved an occasional audio project by me Jay Springett. Written, recorded and edited across 40 hours between the month(s) of March and April of 2020.

As Above So Below

Interstitial

Most of what follows is new material. Other parts are taken directly from my weekly podcast 301 Permanently Moved dot online. This piece is a collage. One which considers detours  necessary. Tangents to add colour, shape, and shade. Subplots as weft picked up and dropped to support the whole. Signposts stand throughout. Promises made and direction delivered.

1903 – Interesting times

“May you live in interesting times”. A phrase you have heard many many times i’m sure.

In 1966 Robert F. Kennedy delivered a speech that included it:

There is a Chinese curse which says “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY – DAY OF AFFIRMATION ADDRESS, UNIVERSITY OF CAPETOWN, CAPETOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, JUNE 6, 1966

Unfortunately this whole story is a load of old bollocks. There is no evidence of this phrase in china at all. 

The website Quote investigator found that the earliest match for the phrase appeared in “The Yorkshire Post” in March 1936

The expression was used in a speech by the influential British statesman.  Sir Austen Chamberlain – addressing the annual meeting of Birmingham Unionist Association.

He spoke of:

The “grave injury” to collective security by Germany’s violation of the Treaty of Locarno.

Sir Austen, who referred to himself as “a very old Parliamentarian,” said:—

“It is not so long ago that a member of the Diplomatic Body in London, who had spent some years of his service in China, told me that there was a Chinese curse which took the form of saying, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ There is no doubt that the curse has fallen on us.”

“We move from one crisis to another. We suffer one disturbance and shock after another.”

Austen Chamberlain – address to the annual meeting of Birmingham Unionist Association 1936

And there you have it. A very old white dude relaying a pithy expression from his mate who probably made it up but instead attached it to the wisdom of the orient.  But there’s still more to this story.

Sir Austin Chamberlain’s father Joseph Chamberlain wrote in a speech in 1898:

I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety. (Hear, hear.)

Joseph Chamberlain – speech 1898

So perhaps the phrase comes from the mind of Austin’s father, and became a foreign curse after the events of the first world war. I’d also like to note that new objects of interest / new objects for anxiety line echos the message of Paul Virilio’s Invention of the ship is the invention of the shipwreck
There is a clear implication, I think, that “uninteresting times” of peace and tranquillity are more life-enhancing than interesting ones, which, from a historical perspective, usually include disorder and conflict.

Indeed yer man Hegel wrote in the History of philosophy:

History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.

Hegel- History of philosophy

Even in 2003, Hillary Clinton released an autobiography that included an instance of the expression where she joked that Bill and I would ask each other, “Well, are you having an interesting time yet?”.

The question I have about all this is WHY? What is it about the truth of the phrase ‘May you live in interesting times’ that makes it feel like a curse. Perhaps even A truth perhaps so powerful that it becomes one – regardless of its origins. 

In 1944 D. W. Brogan of LSE wrote that interesting times are “times not to be made better by any simple formula.“

It is safe to say that we do indeed live in interesting times. But it is also essential that we ask or challenge the blank pages of history and ask ‘Interesting for whom?’.

Yes we are living through catastrophic biosphere collapse, wealth inequality last seen by eyes in heads rolling into blood soaked baskets, and of course the contemporary age of planetary scale computation. Last year I spoke a lot about living in a time like this, and strategies for living through:

Focus on your friends, family and loved ones. They actually do matter more than any of the problems I just mentioned. People in your life experience tragedy and apocalypse all the time. Sharing these with friends and helping people though is more important than worrying about the tides or times of history.  

Focus on the little things and make them better.  The smear on the mirror that needs cleaning, the fraying seam of your friends jumper that needs sewing. Hold someone weeping like you will never let go.  

Introduction

This is a product of 6 weeks of lockdown. Written in fits of mania. Each ending with a thud of the laptop lid, followed by an escape back into the rhythm of domesticity.

If to listen is to think, what then is to write? 

Anne Lamott says that

“This is the business of becoming conscious. Being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?”

Anne Lamott – Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

It turns out that (for me), most of being alive is currently about discarding the things that came before. I’ve had the time to re-read and re-visit previous things I’ve written and done. Personal journals dashed out in the depths of depression and despair, scratched out lines in notebooks, music made for no one but me. Lockdown offered me an opportunity for an archival visit.

Ideas, texts, music, work. 

Most of what I’ve ever made has been thrown out or set aside. Returning to these things reanimate old emotions and memories of the time in which they were made. Things I’d also thought discarded. I wonder what in 10 years time I will make of this? Made in the midst of a pandemic. Produced in the time of Covid-19. 

I, like many of you, have never felt this way before. I read old thoughts set down in fading pencil. Reliving old grief for the climate and the world around me, a world that I never in fact knew. I pull a book of memories off the shelf, and begin to read. An old black notebook with a tattered spine.

Tipex labeled with the year I found my way to the top of the Dark Mountain. At its summit I found (as the manifesto says). No deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What I found instead however, was my lack of surprise at just how easy it is to die.

I had been there all before.

Crohn’s Disease – they told me at 17.

‘A permanent disease. An infection of my gut and bowel’.

So that was it. That was my life now. All the dreams I had imagined for myself as a kid were changed forever. 

I joined the 70% of people with a disability in the UK who’s disability was a hidden one.

I already knew that before me was an unspooling future. Potentially full of pain, danger and uncertainty. Operations, interventions and like all people, my inevitable death. The only question now was when not if. 

From then on my life had new contours. A certainty. A fact. Or a truth that now bent the shape of spacetime in front of me. A wave that I could surf and with luck *knock on wood* A wave that I could also manage and control. 

There was a before and an after. Before the earthquake, after the landslide. A personal disaster that is still ongoing. A truth re-signaled everyday with each beat in the routine of my daily medication. 

I discarded over 15k words making this. Tangents on territorialisation and deterritorialization of Covid 19, digressions into hagel, the pre-socratics, all ideas perhaps of some use at another time. It was, and has been important to me to get them out of me and on to the page. Once written down then the thinking stops for a while. 

All that thinking however shared a single thread:

THIS IS IT. 

A collective ending of old truths and certainties. Things are not ever going back to normal. No matter how short our memories and how strong the desire to slip back into old habits might be.

It is a time, I think, to paraphrase Peter Grey:

“To offer the death rites to a culture that pretends that death can be cheated by buying the latest i-gadget or hooking ourselves up to plasma bags of young blood. These technological responses do not account for the wider environment which we do not control.” 

Peter Grey – Rewilding Witchcraft

For too long narratives have relied upon an appeal to a benevolent Gaia, the caring earth goddess. A green vision of the world suffused with golden light. Brought to life as a catalogue of facts about the world on vivid HD flat screens full of misery. Destruction of the land for rare earth minerals to the moment the worker packed it into a box stamped with a malevolent amazon grin.

The image of the earth mother will help us with our grief, our pain and awe, and teach us to pay attention. Perhaps. But once that process is done and we then have to listen to the world with open eyes and see things affresh. 

As apes in concrete caves peeping out of doors and windows in the spring of 2020. What we sense is not the green goddess of nature, but instead what Corinne Boyer calls The Wild Adversary.

An essence of and in the world that is not kind. There are forces abroad that are dark and dangerous. Dread. The wild is so named because it is beyond human comfort. 

This is A Truth of the world. We are not apart from it but embedded inside it. Civilisation is a myth brought back from given at the campfires edge.

It found fertile roots in our thinking. We have always relied upon our elders to steward or tell that story in new and interesting ways. To us to remind us of our obligations and fine print in the bargain that put us on this earth. 

To quote Peter Grey once again.

“Our elders have failed us, they have not provided leadership, they have not provided counsel, they have been silent and compliant in the face of power.”

PETER GREY – REWILDING WITCHCRAFT

Those elders that did speak, here in the UK at least did not reinforce the myths of our civilisation, but instead they said “Herd immunity”.

Daniel Baryon @apeirophobic recently wrote that:

What we are experiencing right now is the temporary death of the propaganda of consistency. What terror was once hidden (… ) now lies uncovered; a slavering, smiling systemic demon. 

The representatives of the machine, in frustration, cannot help but reveal that they would sacrifice our lives, without hesitation, as tribute to their Moloch.

Curses // Spells

I’ve had a surprising number of messages from friends, family and clients asking for advice over the last few weeks. People I’ve worked for with suddenly nothing to trade. Everyones broke, companies’ revenue pipelines have collapsed, and friends have been made redundant. Others have laid shivering in the dark dreaming of demons. 

A friend said to me the other day “the deeper into this year we get, the more I see why, may you live in interesting times is the worst of modern curses.” 

These interesting times (as we have seen), only become a curse once someone has explained it so. Curses vary in intensity and form. We each deal with it in our own way. Curses are not a punishment for sins. They do not balance any books. They are frames of reference. Of influence. A way of processing forces beyond one’s control.

There is a feeling (I think) that all the crises’ currently unfolding around us are “chickens coming home to roost” A feeling I sense that is widespread. Capitalism, Environmental Collapse, Neoliberalism, the utter lack of any self reflection after the last Financial Crisis.

An elite only interested in stasis and a media environment so invested in illiquid history they did not recognise a skirmish lost. The Iraq war protests, climate camp and the financial crisis, a lost battle along the road that brought us here.

In the last decade the consumption of news has largely been irrelevant to the forces that really matter. At its best, it was entertaining or enraging, at worst irrelevant. Suddenly the media is required to challenge power and inform the public. They failed and are still struggling with both. Trying to switch sides in a battle they didn’t realise they were in.

As I have mentioned ‘Chickens coming home to roost’ is not about the sins of the individual or a society coming back to bite or haunt the individual. It is a phrase about understanding forces beyond one’s control.

Curses are like “a bird that returns again to his own nest” , wrote Chaucer in The Parson’s Tale (~1390). 

Curses returning to the nest should not be seen as blowback. There is no Three-fold Law or Law of Return. Only forces that keep influencing a person as they fail to take flight. The nest is a place of safety. Not a place of haunting.

I think deep down, people know that the chickens coming home is actually about curses and not about deeds. Pestilence has always been one of the original curses upon ‘the people’. 

Curses work in a narrative universe. But so do spells.

 2012 – The Run Out

When a landslide occurs. The severity of the event is measured by the distance of its ‘run out’. IE The distance and depth that the landslide travels.

The snow, mud or rubble follows the topology of the landscape. Following the route of least resistance landslides plough down the slope. 

The global banking landslide that was the 2008 financial crash never actually came to rest. Its run out headed into civil society, culture, politics, and other parts of the economy manifesting as zero hours contracts and austerity and extreme edge continues to creep along. The events of 9/11 were nearly 20 years ago but its effects also continue to run out. Surveillance structures and Snowden.

Globally, with Covid-19 the mud is still only just beginning to pour from the top of the mountain. How long and deep the run out will be is anyone’s guess. 

Lego Grad Student went viral last week with the following tweet. 

If 20 formative years of your life involve a major terrorist attack, two recessions, exorbitantly expensive and unnecessary wars, tangibly worsening inequality, climate emergencies, and incompetence during a global pandemic, it might make you think things aren’t good.

The topology of the landscape that Covid-19 has begun to run into is a grand valley with very few obstacles. Already a graveyard with rising waters at the mouth of the river . A denuded ecological landscape that this event is ploughing into and over.  

The effects of Corvid-19 have only begun. This run out doesn’t end when we all re-emerge blinking in the early summer sunlight, the ground will continue to shift under our feet, soft and prone to collapse.

It will be years even decades until the earth has settled. Our descendants will live with the final effects of the current situation. The world might be a very different place and the maps will need to be redrawn.

I use the landslide as a metaphor for two reasons:

1. The long run out is a term with a lot of utility when thinking about events like these. 

2. Exponential laws are used in the study of them – as in epidemiology. 

A lot has been written about the exponential nature of pandemics. I won’t repeat them here. However, it is important to understand the nature and ‘feeling’ of an exponential Event.

Writing in Nautilus magazine Aubrey Clayton wrote the following:

Nearly everything that has happened in the COVID-19 crisis has happened in the last week. But everything is happening faster every day—so guess what? A week from now, the same will be true: Nearly everything that has happened will have happened in the last week. Everything will accelerate, and we’ll struggle to adapt. If we continue reacting too late, as we have, it will only slow down when the virus starts to run out of new people to infect.

Aubrey Clayton – To Beat COVID-19, Think Like a Fighter Pilot

The feeling of speed is one that we are all experiencing, and have been experiencing for a long time. Whilst it is dangerous to directly link or blame the outbreak on global capitalism I have some sympathy with the point of view – They both elicit the same feeling.

Our friend Lenin of course was entirely correct when he said

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.  

LENIN – (citation needed)

There is of course a strain of ontology, or philosophy that has been talking about the nature of this condition for a while. Accelerationism. 

Accelerationism isn’t a political project per-say, but more of a philosophical exploration of the condition we are all experiencing. It was born from the polis, not the ivory towers of academia.  Matt (@Xenogothic) wrote on his blog last week:

There’s no such thing as “being an accelerationist” because there’s nothing I can do to impact the process of acceleration. It is something that is happening to us already (and has been for centuries) rather than something I can do. It’s naive to think any of us have our foot on the throttle of global capitalism. In that sense, “accelerationism” is a bad name. 

MATT COLQUHOuN – YOU ARE NOT AN ACCELERATIONIST

He goes on to quote someone else that Accelerology might be a better term. 

Responding to the same essay, Paul Graham Raven noted:

I’m tempted to see accelerationism as Colquhoun sees it — which, I concede, may not be a universal conception of that term — as being a condition rather than a creed, in the same sense that postmodernity was a condition rather than a creed; in both cases, the conditionality may suggest certain stances in response, but that’s a very different thing to waving a flag that says “postmodernity, yay!”

(I wonder, then, if accelerationism might be the term to replace the awkward placeholder terms of “post-postmodernity”, “altermodernity” etc. Given Colquhoun’s closeness to the thought of Mark Fisher, it might also be seen as the dialectical successor to capitalist realism… which, one might argue, is what the coronavirus pandemic is currently killing off.)

What it is not, is a term synonymous with ethnonationalism. Or the idea that violence should be used to push Western countries into becoming failed states. It’s appearance in the long rambling manifestos of the far right I believe is an acknowledgement of the experience of the condition or sensation.

So today From my isolated cave in south west london I can feel the landslide, peering over the cliff at the old world that is falling away. Trying to project and see where tits long run out will flow.

At some point we will all need to precariously pick our way down the slopes. As we encounter more fellow travellers with whom we’ll need to decide which route we intend to go.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

Our Friend Lenin

6 Weeks into this pandemic it is clear that won’t be over for a long time. All the current talk of The Vaccine is at this point a media McGuffin. One assuring us that we can beat back the wild adversary. 

We were for a time told “three more weeks of lockdown”. This of course masked the reality.  

Understating the likely “18 months of extraordinary measures”. 

Our political opposition here in the UK were calling for an Exit strategy as the deaths were still mounting. A naive and short sighted position. Doing no one any favours, with many flaws.

It is a line of thinking, or a demand that implies returning to business as usual — and thinking that we could be back to normal any time soon just … deluded. As a society we will be caught in the rhythm of the hammers and the dances well into the future. Put your left foot in, take the right foot out. The question we must ask is, where exactly do we shake it all about? 

I think our elders know that reopening the economy won’t save it. It can’t be saved. It’s not the economy that they even want to save. It’s an act that will save capitalism. The awesome redistribution of resources has shown us that things could be a different way. To reopen is to simulate normality.

But things just aren’t going back to normal.

We are all inside, In the liminal. The threshold that is our doors are both physical and metaphysical. Once that marks the boundary between two phases. There was a before, and now there is an after.

I lost a load of followers right at the beginning of all this when I tweeted ‘All the most interesting periods in history begin with a good pandemic’ I deleted it because I was getting shit for it. But I didn’t mean it in a flippant sence, I was serious. 

To repeat myself from Episode 20-10:

 “The Plague of Athens during the second year of the Peloponnesian War literally created philosophy. The people of ancient Greece experienced a crisis of meaning very similar to the one we are living through today and they began to think their way out of the void. “

Jay Springett – Living In A Time Of History

The plague of Athens revealed to the people of the ancient world the old ways were no longer viable. Old narratives were no longer true. There was a widespread feeling that the Gods had abandoned them. In a time of war too. We too are stuck in endless wars. Against terror, Drugs, Want. They are all war of story. The culture war is by and large a war about who gets to tell and shape the stories that get to call themselves a war. For example: we are not in a war against this virus, it is not a mugger or a curse we must endure. It is a rescue mission. The imagery is misplaced and should be rejected for another form of story. 

The reconstruction of the Byzantine empire began after the Plague of Justinian, Afterwards he enacted reforms to increase accountability and reduce corruption. Their result was to lay the starting conditions for a 1000 years of future history. Where can we find the signs of these foundations today? In the UK we recently rejected the idea of not bailing out companies that avoid tax and pay dividends. The Bank of England is buying McDonalds debt without asking for influence over their day to day. Extra-ordinary times.

I think the stories we tell ourselves about our recent history largely focus upon the wrong things too. We value re-telling ourselves the trauma of short wars over the everyday trumas of humanity.

The entirety of 20th century history is shaped by the pandemics of the 19th. These are of course largely glossed over amid the historical in and outs of the first and second world wars. The heave and swell of forces that act in and upon the world are set aside to place humanity at its centre. 

Whilst of course the opium wars and the famines in India are well known. “Third Plague Pandemic” is less so. Which led to more than 12 million deaths in India and China, with about 10 million killed in India alone. It began in 1855 and the WHO estimates that it ended around 1960. 

You can read about the British Colonial Administration’s response to the Pandemic on wikipedia. If you do, let me know if you think it reminds you of anything. 

There are many things I could talk/write about.

History is important, but the short version is that there is nothing new about our current situation except the page number and the chapter of the story that we find ourselves in.

The future of course will be like the past, only more so.

We are where we are (starting from)

The reason I brought up historical plagues is that Pandemics always rewrite the rulebook and change the landscape. Events such as these cast long shadows and shape our future stories.

Countries around the world have already thrown away the supposed rulebook. Cash payments directly to citizens, huge injections of cash into the ‘real’ economy. The ECB has demanded tight fiscal rules but now they affect Germany that’s going out the window. Even the jupitarian technocrat Macron acknowledges that it’s the states responsibility to step up swiftly when needed and put its citizens first. 

All this won’t be enough. 

Things are being poorly handled in the US and UK because the Austrian school has so many tap roots dug deep into the cores of our institutions. For all the Right wing yelling about the Frankfurt School’s influence in the academy, we now see that the capture of the political and economic class by neoliberalism and its modern interpretations of the Austrian school has been a disaster.

I don’t need to talk at length about the effect austerity has had on our resilience. The lack of action following Exercise Cygnus in 2016 is just one of many ongoing scandals. Brexit consumed the state, and inshallah we have more of that to come. 

To talk of any kind of exit is infact to talk about an exit from our current narratives. To do so we should look towards one of its main storytellers. Thatcher. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the quote “there’s no such thing as society“. But let’s put that quote back into context:

“They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.” 

Margaret Thatcher – Interview for Woman’s Own (“no such thing as society”) 1987

At its root, the Austrian school that captured our institutions believed that there are interdependent social systems and institutions that bring a sense of order to human affairs. Society is the sum total of all these systems. Including common law, Our practice of ritual and customs handed down through the generations. It believes that this evolving order allows individuals to give expression to their personal choices; and, by those choices, systems and institutions are shaped through continuous adaptation.

This view of society of course itself was still new at the time of the creation of their philosophical framework. Society as it is viewed through this lens, only emerged though the industrialisation of the 19th Century. 

Due to the effects of 40 years of neoliberalism many of the interdependent social systems that early members of the Austrian school observed in the world around them have fallen away. Dissolved.

Curtis Yarvin. technologist and extremely controversial blogger who literally coined the ‘Red Pill’ metaphor amongst the online right, recently diagnosed something similar in his long read ‘Plan A For The Coronavirus’

The terrible truth the virus has revealed is that the US and UK — as opposed to post-Communist Asia and post-Napoleonic Europe — are not even countries. They are free-trade zones. Our governments are not governments. They are bureaucratic anarchies with ceremonial elected monarchs. Pitting them against this ruthlessly objective virus is sending Don Quixote to Vietnam.

The Austrian schools successors Blair, Cameron, Obama etc shrugged at the situation they had inherited and didn’t care, the next quarterly growth reports and stock market numbers were due in at any moment.

The interdependent social systems that have made up our society for centuries have been hollowed out. Many of these groups were also dues paying. To pick names off the top of my head from the post war period : Rotary club, Round table, WI, Working Mens Clubs, Amature dramatic socieites, parish church groups. All are struggling for membership in 2020. 

However, as we’ll discuss in part 2. There are already signs of change, the rapid formation of mutual aid groups in the early days of the crisis here in the UK are already inteched in the daily lives of 100,000’s of thousands of people. Even by the Austrian Schools own terms, these are newly formed interdependent social systems based on solidarity. 

After any pandemic, the evolving order that the people ‘who would run the world’ call society will have adapted and reformed without their supervision. And they are scared.

Scales Fall

We are now at the end of the long 20th Century. What James Kunstler called ‘The Long Emergency’. A far more apt and poetic name. And Yuk Hui recently highlighted as the One Hundred Years of Crisis.

Populations of many countries have seen in the last week just how quickly the awesome power of the state (let’s be clear it is awesome power. Daunting. given to it by the people). An entity that can reorder society if it so wishes. 

Reality can be reshaped in a week, a day, or as we’ve seen hour by hour. Our institutions have always just lacked the will. Alongside the lockdowns and the remarkable financial measures being instituted. The magic money tree is a perennial arboreal metaphor that is planted in the UK with regularity. The problem our media and political class see with money trees is that it will change the view from their gilded towers. Of course the roots of any money tree can be used to attempt to bind the soil and maintain its stability.

It is illustrative that the first money trees were planted to bind the markets before more were planted again to bind the people. They will continue to be planted for a short time to maintain legitimacy. But the whole mountain is sliding into the valley. Perhaps some strong trees will weather the tumult  but many will be swept away by the wave of destruction.

High Street chains that colonised our highstreats in the 80’s and 90’s are collapsing. Even Cath Kidston cannot Keep Calm and Carry On. Other well known brands are rent striking. I say well known brands rather than well loved. Who will shed tears over the Arcadia Group or Debenhams? I care for its employee’s and fear for many shop stewards’ futures. But we’ll come back to fashion.

During and the run out the new soil will not be fertile topsoil. Governments will not continue to plant large money trees but will try to sow a cover crop of fast grasses and ruderal species. A mix of seeds that attempt to trick people into rebuilding the world exactly as it was before everything fell down the mountain. This can’t be allowed to happen.

As we shall see. We need to have our own sacks of cover crop ready to sow. It is up to us to save and store this seed, and sprout some seedlings now. Not later.

Seeds are not just a metaphor here. I also mean literal seeds.  The politics of seeds and crops is one fraught with colonialism and arrogance of power. Rowen White, Seed Keeper from the Mohawk community says that seeds carry much more than the blueprint of the plant that they can become. Encoded in seeds are ceremonies, the songs, and stories and lineages, and migration stories of the people who harvested and sowed them before us.

There are many of course who prefer to forget or ignore the stories of the seeds that make up the cover crop of reality. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have Tory acquaintances. They too have begun to express outrage. That the cruel callous government they voted for is now doing nothing to help them – personally. Some of this comes from the weak self-employment bailout. Some of it came from the empty supermarkets. Some of it disbelief at the handling of the whole situation in general. Londoners previously untouched by run out of austerity are finally experiencing the ground beginning to shift below their feet. There is the observation that the rates of mortality we have been seeing could have been and should have been much lower. These figures have nothing to do with the virus itself, but rather the systems in place to deal with such an eventuality. 

I believe that encrusted scales will continue to fall from peoples eyes as the landslip becomes a landslide. I wonder what folks will make of Brexit as this current crisis continues to unfold regardless of previous political affiliation.

In the UK, the government and media’s response to the current crisis has been led by the public. It turns out that the hipster analysts were correct and the science we were led by wasn’t really science at all. It was a position bound by the limits of political opinion. 

Boris’ Churchillian is routine wearing thin. Shaking hands with everyone all the way into the ICU no doubt. The problem of the media class being so close to power and the administration that became so evident during the election last year is even more exacerbated in this time of crisis. There is a revolving door, you don’t even need to squint to see it.

My local council is sending out more useful and practicable information. Yet I would never have known this or been informed if I hadn’t made an effort at the beginning of this year to be more informed about local politics. I doubt my neighbours are aware of the daily updates going out.

I hope that this event will solidify the message that the market does not, or should not have primacy over people. The state has enormous powers that can be used usefully and subtly. Going forward anyone who is worried about the impact of 0.2% of GDP growth for ecological restoration and climate change measures or even housing the homeless can absolutely go – do one.

We should not accept any attempt to return to business as usual after this event. The other day the price of oil went negative. CLO’s are also being downgraded, pension funds, neoliberal further education, and other core institutional elements of the global and local financial economy are creaking at the seams. The runout may have only just begun to pick up steam.

Titans Topple

So many things once thought permanent now look precarious, even dangerous. Airlines, the oil industry, cars, and parts of the electronics industry. The landslip has swept industries from their feet and they had nothing to hold on to.

Many of them are complex financial instruments as much as they are elements of industry providing any real value. Over the past five years, American Airlines spent $11.9 billion on stock buybacks and paid out over $1 billion of dividends. As we speak Virgin Australian planes are impounded on the runway in Perth. Solid yellow JCBs demanding it pay its debts reaching $6.8 billion dollars. 

On April 3rd the CEO of Wizz Air said that “Most European airlines have badly mismanaged their liquidity. Now they’re all begging for state support.”

By April 21, Wizz Air had announced they were taking a £300 million bailout from the UK govt, despite holding £1.5 billion in reserves.

The global meat industry after cutting down our forests and jungles is now euthanising its cattle. Tourism, freight, transport, wholesale goods, construction and agriculture. All wrapped up in the global landslip. 

You become a financialised industry when you believe yourself immortal. Just as states become economies, titans become casinos.

Yet some still prefer stasis and denial. Ryanair said it won’t fly if they have to introduce wider spacing with its seats. Heaven forbid that the health and comfort of the public be protected and improved. BA and Easyjet are just not refunding anyone. Instead offering theoretical vouchers for theoretical travel.

In the greek myths the titans came first, masters of the globe. Like many of the industries in trouble in this moment they once believed themselves indispensable and eternal.

But then the news Gods came and banished the Titans to Tartarus forever. How do we in 2020 begin to undermine and overwhelm these figures? Let us zoom in.

Treasures On Earth

We’ve been inside for some time. No one I know has bought any new clothes. Obviously people still are though, but I wonder if everyone who has actually needed them? Does the impulse to consume impressed upon us by nearly a century of advertising do anything to validate one’s sense of self in the middle of a pandemic? I’m not sure, perhaps there is a hangover. Shop online to alleviate boredom.

The Asos warehouse has been called a ‘Cradle of disease‘. Yet another industry built on chains of human misery and environmental destruction.

I will not shed any tears for the collapse of fast fashion, the industry, or any of its owners, or even its loss on the high street. Solidarity with its workers though, wash your hands, join a union, fight together for a better world. 

I was 14 when Naomi Klein’s No Logo came out. All my older friends in the hardcore punk scene were instantly jazzed about it. I didn’t actually end up reading it until much later. At some point during university. By then we were already in a different world. WTO protests against globalism quieted by the war on terror. 

The title was alone enough for me at the time. It told me everything teenaged me needed to know. At once an instruction and a command. As a difficult teenager I refused to wear anything with a logo – much to my mother’s chagrin. Trawling round shops trying to find blank hoodies, coats and jumpers. Knock of two stripe sports jackets from the market or Matalan. The same jackets that I only recently replaced after over 15 years with some much quality vintage Adidas ones. One of them that I parted with had a paperclip for a zip and the pockets were more holy than The Scala Sancta.

When asked by her colleagues about me recently, my girlfriend said “well .. he does wear his dead grandparents clothes”. I think that’s one of the only things they need to know about me. In many respects that’s all you need to know.

I fear that I may be falling into a familiar rant. But anyways. We must continue. 

It is clear that fast fashion is and should be over. Low-priced clothing of Mediocre quality, sold rapidly by mass-market retailers that follow the latest manufactured trends. The whole idea of it is bananas. 

In 2015:

(In 2015) ‘the fashion industry consumed nearly 80 billion cubic meters of fresh water, emitted over a million tonnes of CO2 and produced 92 million tonnes of waste’. 

Copenhagen Fashion Summit: How NOT to make the fashion industry more sustainable

It uses about the same amount of freshwater as Mexico. This is just completely unacceptable. 

I sometimes walk around shops with people tutting at things with unfinished seams, loose threads etc. All there hanging on the rack. This is not to besmirch the people that made them of course. I’m sure they would like to have finished them too. But the fastness of the fashion doesn’t care. It wants to sell something that should be 50 quid if everyone was paid equitably and treated fairly including the environment. But instead fast fashion wants to sell it for 5 pounds. 

Even pre pandemic the tide of bullshit was beginning to turn, highstreet brands everywhere were looking shaky. The brands that seem still confident (to me) seem to be those of higher quality and have slower turnover of styles. Our friend Saint Kondo has also contributed bigly to this changing view. The piles of clothes on one’s bed is one of the images of our times.

It is truly wild that our grandparents and great grandparents wore clothes that were of much much higher quality than the ones we wear today. True they didn’t own nearly as many items, and Sunday best was / is a literal thing. They were expensive and so they should be, but they were also made by someone down the road or someone from your church.

As the run out continues we need to collectively decide what are the things that need saving. Zara has flagged a 24.1 percent decrease in sales in the first two weeks of March; H&M says it saw a 46 percent drop the same month. There’s other Panicked retailers like C&A, Gap, Primark, Topshop, and Debenhams. And whilst it’s not anything to do with fashion, Unilever is crying over the fact the people have abandoned deodorant.

I say Fuck ’em.

We should all demand more from the items we bring into our lives. Demand more of the titans that influence our lives. When the shops do finally re-open. Just don’t go. Don’t buy anything. Fuck fast fashion. Offer them no lifelines. Let the entire industry fall away down the mountain and let us only salvage the things of quality and longevity. 

Everything you own is already fine. As this period has shown there are more important things in life than trying to make yourself feel better by buying a new top, or a new pair of trainers. Learn to sew, fix and mend. 

End of the Anthropocene

I hate the psyop Anthropocene. 

The sheer peak arrogance of it. The period we tell ourselves in which ‘human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment’. That it was originally suggested by geologists to denote the visibility of humanities impact in the geological record has already been surpassed and forgotten. 

The arts and cultural industries took this word up as a banner. Marched it forward believing that they were doing their bit for the environment. Institutions pretended their city slicker bougie concerns were relevant. Rather than actually making anything happen – at all.

Instead that period last decade became a parade of horrors in art galleries, museums and undergraduate essays. “Look what we’ve done, they said”. In an attempt to somehow shame others into perceiving the problem. But during many of the events I watched and attended last decade, to my ears I did not detect any shame. Instead there was some kind of human pride, look what ever done to the world. We’ve named this new historical era after ourselves!

I’m sorry if I’m offending some of you friends. But in general I genuinely believe the period that I’m referring to is a dark one for the arts and cultural complex. We might as well have all just queued up for more quaint sightseeing tours and boarded the anthropo-scenic railway and sung its a small world after all.

It’s not to say that the art and work produced was bad, some of it was very very good. Vital even. But much of it for me fell flat. I had already grieved for the world. The glamour of the Anthropocene also denied a history of humanity. We burnt so much effort in discussing this new human epoch. That we collectively ignored and failed to offer thanks to our ancestors that lived through the real human epoch. The Holocene. 

A short era in anyone’s estimation against the grand drama of humanities total history. All of what we call quote un quote civilisation has happened during the Holocene. All the preceding history that led to our current moment and set of crisis. Our ancestors lived through it all. They dealt with plagues, coughs, fevers, famines, droughts, floods, wildfires and more. All of it is just 10,000 years long. 350 generations. And right at the very beginning of that chain stands Gobekli Tepe. As Gordon White says in the book star.ships

Before we knew how to farm, before we lived in villages, before we even knew how to make pots.
We built a star temple on a hill

Gordon White – Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

A temple built in the middle of a landscape that would have been as much of a nowhere than as it is today. They brewed beer, it might even have been hallucinogenic, without doubt they would have dance, cried, and sang, loved, laughed and lost loved ones. And 30,000 years even before that, 40,000 years before today a world completely different from our own, people were laughing, chatting and dancing whilst carving sculptures like The Lion Man. 

The experience of being human is just the same today as it was back then. The entire period of time since we reached collectively what anthropologists glibly call cultural modernity.

The anthropocene is an arrogant word. It is almost as arrogant as the word Nature. I have, I hope you will note, being careful with my language so far, the only time I’ve used it was in relation to Gaia, the great mother.  

When you interrogate the word nature, it disintegrates like a moth’s wing under any kind of inspection. The process of its dissolution highlights so many of the problems we have when trying to talk about the world around us. The pandemic like a flood or a fire is an important reminder that humanity is not apart from the world, we are deeply embedded in it. There are even some species that require the way humans disturb the landscape to reproduce.

When did nature start? Or more excitingly when does it end? What is natural? All these questions are bound up in confidence of empire and western empirical science. Endless rows of bugs under glass labeled with names written in a dead language all pinned to a wall. Collected, classified and categorised. 

David George Haskell wrote in The Forest Unseen

We live in the empiricist’s nightmare: there is a reality far beyond our perception. Our senses have failed us for millennia. Only when we mastered glass and were able to produce clear, polished lenses were we able to gaze through a microscope and finally realize the enormity of our former ignorance.

David George Haskell – The Forest Unseen. A YEAR’S WATCH IN NATURE

We are still so ignorant today, Saint Ingram only uncovered how the soil food web worked in 1999, and Monica Gagliano is currently upending everything we know about cognition, and memory in plants. Doing so with the plants not as subjects but partners.

We lack clear and precise language to describe the world around us. 

The term native species is just as racist as mustachioed men in imperial uniforms sipping tea and discussing “The Natives”. 

Invasie, exotic, endemic, naturalised. 

One of the greatest projects our society needs to embark on here in the west is to shed our language and our thinking of these terms. We don’t and shouldn’t ever use them when we talk about people, and we shouldn’t use them when we talk about plants either.

Decolonisation is one of the most important projects of our generation. The decolonisation of science doubly so. Why do we say that ‘only plants and trees that were here in this area when some white dude saw them and wrote it down 200 years ago’ are what is natural in this place at this time. Our ancestors and perhaps even Neanderthals filled Europe with hazel. Polynesian seafarers brought at least 23 different types of plants and trees with them to Hawaii. As partners in their endeavour. Not just plants, but people. The question you must ask yourself is whether the plants have agency in this too. What exactly is it about lawn grass that convinced humans to cultivate it across vast areas of the earth?

I could continue to look in amongst the shifted topsoil of the landslip to find the mushrooms and mycelia. But that is a discussion for another time.

Covid-19 has been an important reminder to us all, I think. That we are not the masters of this earth. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that it has ever been any other way. We need to urgently change our language and our thinking. There is no war against the virus. It is no enemy, it just… is.

The capitol T Truth is that we are both of the world and inside the world. Active participants in its creation, yes, partner to some and antagonist to others, but we are all at the mercy of  the Wild Adversary.

This Is It

This is it. 

Back in 2015 Saint Atwood wrote a long read on medium called ‘It’s not climate change, it’s everything change” and said the following:

Like every other species on the planet, we’re conservative: we don’t change our ways unless necessity forces us. The early lungfish didn’t develop lungs because it wanted to be a land animal, but because it wanted to remain a fish even as the dry season drew down the water around it.

Margaret E. Atwood – it’s not climate change, it’s everything change

Perhaps now, during the first major pandemic of the 21C we can break out of some of our conservatism. It is a crisis that should bookend the long emergency that began with the pandemics of the 19th. 

Everything Change. 

Role the worlds around in your head, say them out loud if you have to. Try them out, see how they feel in the mouth. How do they make you feel?

Abracadabra. “I create as I speak”

Now say:

This is it. 

All that we have known to be solid and stable has slipped away below our feet. The time ghost is at the door. Like the ancient Greeks of Athens the great green goddess of mother earth has seemingly abandoned us. If we stray too far from the campfire we might meet Rona.

The run out has begun. 

One of my most read blog posts last year I tried to summarise what the most important thinkers (to me) seem to have in common. I wrote the following:

You do not know what the fuck is going on.
Your job is to be absolutely certain that you have no idea what the fuck is going on.
And from that raw chaos, that raw uncertainty.. as a default state of being.
Learn how to feel.
How to move forward and act in the world.
Witness, Comprehend, Inhabit

This whole piece has been an attempt to articulate the above. Perhaps I should have just said it right at the beginning. We have absolutely no idea at all what is going to happen. Clouded the future is. The only thing that we can be certain of, is that there is no certainty at all.

Let us return for a moment to the other metaphor. The state planting trees to bind the soil on the slopes. What kinds of things have they planted beyond the paltry crumbs thrown at the table of human welfare so far?

The massive bailouts, into an economy that they can’t even be sure that can be saved. Negative oil prices. Alarming and swift push for total bio surveillance, a crackdown on civil liberties and our freedoms of assembly. Microsoft has a Patent application for a cryptocurrency system tied to human implantable chips. And google and apple are building the tracking system to save us from ourselves. Palantir of course is already on the job. 

And the always grinning giant Amazon is making 11,000 dollars a second. An institution that some people estimate powers up to 50% of the entire internet. A technology along with the retailer that powers it that have shown themselves to be public utilities. 

Today as I write this script the UN released a report concerned at the authoritarian responses, surveillance, closed borders and other rights abuses that are taking place under the fog of the so called viral war. A health crisis that is fast becoming one of human rights too. 

We face Infinite Quantitative Easing. Years of rolling lockdowns. And the surveillance industry either moving in or merely just dropping its disguise. 

This time, is being used by those with well laid plans to put them into action. I don’t think it’s conspiracy to say that this interregnum is an effective vector for them to advance a specific set of plays.

And yet there’s more,

As we sit in concrete caves: there’s a ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US that might be worse than any in 1,200 years. The ongoing and alarming plague of locusts in East Africa. A disaster so serious that it is being prioritized over efforts to prepare for the virus.

Why? 

Because locusts like us prefer carbohydrates. There’s also been serious crop failures in India, China and Middle America. And the impact of the many devastating recent wildfires across the globe is only just coming to light. Kelp forests, coral reefs, and deep sea food chains are all collapsing.

This is not a drill.

What we could be facing this year. Around the world is a famine that the World Food Programme has described as biblical proportions. They estimate that 36 countries are facing unimaginable horror. Ten of those 36 countries already have more than 1 million people on the verge of starvation in addition to the 135 million people already facing crisis levels of hunger. 2020 when counted amongst the 821 million people already chronically hungry, could be the year when we see more than 1 billion people pushed into dire situations.

That’s 1 in seven people.

With memories fresh of empty shelves in supermarkets, perhaps we are now all a little more aware of the fragility of our food supply systems. Built on global supply chains and just in time fulfillment. It is only now a small short jump from countries hoarding their own PPE and medical supplies to hoarding food. The Eurasian Economic Union just banned Staple Food Exports Until 30 June. And the largest US meat company just warned that the food supply chain is breaking down. With slaughterhouses and processing plants forced to shut there are too many animals waiting to be fed into a global machine that has stopped grinding.

The global system of interconnected supply chains that was slowly built around us in the name of consumer choice cannot operate in a world of balkanisation and hard national borders. Things need to be re-thought. Urgently. 

There are already bread tailbacks at food banks in the US. In the UK, 1 in 14 people have used a food bank at some point since the financial crisis. Last year The Trussell Trust found that 94% of its users were ‘facing real destitution,’ unable to buy essentials to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. 

We too here in the west could be looking at the year where we leave our homes and find the supermarket just as empty as they have been recently. A great deal of alarm has already been raised around Uk food security. Speaking of hard national borders. Much of it flagged and surfaced by Brexit planning but ignored. Just like our preparedness for a pandemic. Combining the two we are falling short by 80,000 agricultural workers.

Brexit now seems like a quaint storm in a tea cup compared to what we could all be facing. But it is not quaint and it is not fear mongering to say that we could be facing some very severe issues.

THIS.IS.IT

So what, to quote our friend Vlad once again – What Is to be done?

END

Well well well, that was nearly 40 hours of work to make. I hope you liked it or at least found some of it interesting anyway. It feels good to put some of the cards you’ve been holding in the burn pile.

Addendum

I would also like to thank Gordon White for his friendship and support over the years. The rescue mission, the salvage mission, the campfires edge, star temples on hills in deep time. Many ideas and influences on my work and in this essay stem from him. If you are hearing this thank you to Gordon White then it is because you are listening to a re-uploaded version of this essay. In the original version I used and referenced his ideas without credit and without thanks.

That was unacceptable behavior on my part. 

One of my most long held and firm beliefs is that in order to foster mutual flourishing with benefits to all who participate in a community of thought or action: one must give judicious and generous credit wherever possible. I deeply regret my error in judgement and wish to apologise to him directly here. 

“I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it” is a sentence that should be said from the heart and then acted upon. This is part of my action. It would be an understatement to say that his work and thought has been a huge influence on my life and so to our friendship.

This familiarity however is no excuse to become blind or uncaring towards one’s influences. Sometimes lessons learned can come with great costs. One must be as quick to act on those learnings as possible. This is a lesson that I will not need to be taught a second time. 

It won’t ever happen again.

Thank you Gordon.

If you regularly enjoy my writing or podcasts please consider supporting my work with a membership here.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post THIS IS IT | 411 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I read a really interesting post over on io9 this week by Editor James Whitbrook: Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

As the pop culture we love becomes increasingly dominated by vast franchises of interconnected worlds and stories, so does it become dominated by one, singular question from diehard fans: Is the thing we’re about to consume canon to everything else we’ve consumed before? It’s an attitude that’s turning our love of stories into some bizarre, archival competition.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

The piece is a short sharp blast of very fresh air. Whitbrook covers a lot of great points in quick succession which I would like to explore in some more detail. I’m also writing this to distract a little from you know *gestures at everything*.

Whitbrook addresses how some franchise fans use the concept of ‘canon’ to assess if a piece of media Matters or Not. How the concerns around canon influence media commentary and the media ecosystem. How concerns around ‘canon’ breed a toxic attitude amongst fans that ‘leads to things like “filler episode” becoming a derogatory term for stories that don’t advance the larger ongoing plot of a narrative’. It also brings up ‘fandom’ gate keeping by overvaluing facts and information (lore) rather than narratives and emotional responses.

It’s brilliant and a must read if you are interested in story worlds and media.

You’ll notice that if you visit the article the original title of the article was ‘Craving Canon’ and is still visible in the page metadata.

It’s an interesting turn of phrase, given the subject matter. I can see why it was changed in the main headline. There certainly ARE people who crave canon, and use it as a yardstick to measure media produced in/about a story world.

Canon of course is a Biblical term. A set of texts (or “books”) which a religious community regards as authoritative scripture. Western culture however secular it may think itself is deeply influenced by its millennia of Christianity. As we’ll come to later appealing to Authority is a human behaviour that drives much of the obsession with canon.

Canon as a term in literature originates with Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock canon consists of the 56 short stories and four novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In this context, the term “canon” is an attempt to distinguish between Doyle’s original works and subsequent works by other authors using the same characters.

Canon of Sherlock Holmes (Wikipedia)

If you have been following along for a while, I’ve written (well I say written, they were actually scripts) on fandom, narrative, and problems with where we are with story worlds in 2020 quite a bit.

I’m going to repost links to the full podcast episodes incase anyone wants to take 10/15 mins to get up to speed. If not, then I’ve quoted myself here and there quite self indulgently.

[Media property name] Isn’t Your Friend

People feel so strongly about what happens to characters in fiction worlds owned by gigantic mega corporations because they identity with them. But unlike humanity’s entire history of storytelling, characters that capture the collective imagination in 2020 are owned and controlled by corporate interests. Which means they have no _agency_ within the mythos. In a literal sense people who consume the stories have no ownership over them.

“Deep engagement with mythos should give people agency within those realms. But when our entire cultures narrative is privatised – what can people do apart from fold it into the culture war? We should really start to think about antitrust laws for culture.”

Media property name] Isn’t Your Friend

There has been a sanitising effect on stories. Copyright, the ownership of stories, and the desire for profit has had a disastrous effect on our collective mythos. Whilst I pick on Disney in the episode, the same is true all across the board. Disney profited from the conversion of powerful and dangerous folk tales in to children’s stories.

The meat of this episode however is an attempt to explain why I do not like any of the new Star Wars movies.

“I tapped out the day they announced they were going to blow up the canon.

I’d been suckered.

It was all a waste of time, energy and money. That a corporation can blow up a huge fictional universe in order to sell a new one to other people was gualling. I thought it would all be there forever and suddenly it wasn’t. I’d been betrayed by a corporation and I decided never again.”

Media property name] Isn’t Your Friend

One of the things that really interested me in Star Wars as a kid in the early 90’s was that Star Wars was the fact it was one big coherent world. I used to pour over the Dorling Kindersley Visual Dictionaries. Basically I loved the canon.

I remember reading with fascination in the Star Wars monthly magazine about the guy who worked in the Lucas film archives. It was hard to believe that there was a job solely devoted to knowing everything there is to know about Star Wars. Advising on the history, lore and viability of licensees ideas and deals.

I learnt about the various levels of canon.

• The word of God (Lucas + the movies) or G-canon.
• C-canon or Continuity canon: Material from the Expanded Universe including books, comics, and video games
• S-canon was Secondary canon (stuff that wan’t very good like the infamous holiday special

There were more types, but you get the point. Canonicity in the Star Wars story world was officially nuanced with various levels of ‘truthiness’. Nuance seemingly being something that has dropped off the map now most discussion has moved online.

Check out this 2008 interview with Leland Chee. The ‘Holocron keeper’

To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics.

Keepin’ it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that’s consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology.

As I explain in the Episode. I felt Disney’s decision to ‘Blow up the canon’ and restructure it to better suit their corporate intentions was an insult to people who had stuck with, and had obsessed over the franchise during the wilderness years. By people I mean me, personally. ‘Facts’ about the universe was one of the things that drove the franchise forwards for decades between the original trilogy and the prequels. The stormtrooper banging his head, other bloopers, the Wilhelm scream. Even the total nerd world of what different length light sabres came with which model of Obi Wan on which card variant with what stickers.

Product knowledge aside. Disney blew up a world I had read about, obsessed over and cared about deeply. All that effort, all the time (and money) was worthless – so I tapped out. [Media property name] wan’t my friend.

I’ve seen the new films obviously, but I have no emotional attachment to them, or in fact the older movies.
As I’ve grown older I don’t even like films as a medium any more, or TV for that matter. The Dark Knight ruined contemporary cinema in 2008. Speed Racer was the much much better movie that year.

Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit

In the Spiderman Webxit episode: I re-articulated some of my thoughts from the episode above, talked about toxic fan wars and for the first time explored the idea ‘Cultural Fracking’ .

A term which funnily enough makes an appearance in this months Lightspeed magazine by way of Andrew Dana Hudson. He is interviewed about his Voice of Their Generation short story that involves the movie titled ‘Detective Pikachu vs. Predator’

In the interview Hudson sums up cultural fracking succinctly:

“Cultural Fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past.

ADH – Lightspeed Magazine (Issue 119)

I explored Cultural Fracking in more detail during my talk at Unsound Festival 2019 in Poland. I’m dropping an edit of my transcript below as I’m also trying to write about Cultural Fracking for Holum Press. This blog post seems like an excuse to construct a first draft.

Today everyone knows or gets Simpsons quotes. Even if they haven’t seen the episode that they come from. Or people get that “I’ll be back” is a reference to the Terminator even if they wen’t born at the time of the movies release. Meaning from a time Pre-internet. When there was a high chance that everyone was exposed to the same media. And so society/culture shared memetic grammars.

One of the challenges that a company like Disney faces in the age of the internet is that is becoming harder and harder to make money from them. The reason being; Franchises were created in a media environment where everyone would have been exposed to them and would therefore have shared the cultural grammar.

What’s happening today is that companies sell narrative/stories as a commodity. To extract value from them media organisations have to continually return to or frack the sedimentary layers of meaning. These elements of shared grammar in mass culture in order to continue to make money.

Their business model relies on selling to mass culture. So any new product has to continually reference something from a time when everyone shared the same mass culture still existed. In order for a mass cultural product to be attractive, it is required to meet the shared expectations of the audience.

It’s not that all the reboots, remakes and nostalgic mashups like Ready Player One are unoriginal. It’s that under the logic of a capitalist cultural monopoly, commodity owners have to continually frack the past from a time when a collective cultural grammer still existed to still make money.

SOLARPUNK – Life in the Future Beyond the Rusted Chrome of Yestermorrow

What I’ve just spent the last x mins talking about is people feeling emotionally invested in multinational conglomerates business deals about whether one character gets to appear in someone else’s story. neither of which the folks that consume those stories own.
…
Perhaps Marcuse was right, class consciousness IS all about aesthetics.

Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit

At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man Marcuse writes, “The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,” meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society) humans become extensions of the commodities that they buy, thus making commodities extensions of people’s minds and bodies.

Perhaps I have belaboured the point about story ownership. But its something I feel strongly about, and also the only thing missing from Whitbrook’s piece. As the points it raises dovetail so well with thinking about copyright and ownership of cultural property.

I think the reason people value content set in a story world as ‘canon’ is precisely because it is owned and controlled by one entity.

The owner of a media franchise represents a single sovereign source of truth for that story world. And we know that if there is an entity that gets to claim ‘truth’ of a story world or reality, then it will be appealed to. Again we bring up ‘people of the book’ Christianity, The Bible, and its different relationships to the apocrypha and the gnostic gospels etc.

But the Idea that a single entity gets to say what stories are and aren’t True/Canon in a story world (aside from the church) is a relatively new one.

This is not how stories have worked throughout the rest of human history

Tell me a tale

Here’s ol buddy ol pal Huw Lemmey writing in his newsletter Utopian Drivel on Storytelling last year ($) on Arthurian Legend and Robin Hood:

As an aside, I’m really looking forward to Dev Patel in A24’s Green Knight. I also look forward to (dread) the angry online nerds ranting about it for presumably racist and ill informed reasons. Also I will seek-out folks trying to apply canon rules to the mythos.
I also wonder how folks are going to handle Dev Patel as Sir Gawain launching into the MRA style rant he has in the castle about how he should “attack of all women for their deceptiveness and treachery” (W.Neilson Trans. 1999).

Ursula Le Guin writing in her forward for Tales from Earthsea in 2001 also says something similar to Huw Lemmey in 2019. Of particular note is the argument that characters have to be made safe (sanitised) due to corporate ownership, and how they are treated as commodities.

There are however some story worlds in 2020 that don’t operate with arbitrators of truth. I would be interesting to draw up a 2×2 of worlds in the popular imagine and classify them by the amount of agency fans of the series are perceived to have. This might be fun, but it is an exercise for another day.

In the meantime I’ve picked two off the top of my head that still operates as a story world open to audience agency.

The Canon-thulhu Mythos.

It seems you can’t shake a stick at anything on kickstarter made by fans right now without a bit of Tentacle or Eldritch horror falling out. Creeping horror our environment and collective psyche aside

There are two reasons for this:

1. Lovecraft was extremely generous with his own works and actively encouraged others to borrow ideas from his stories, particularly with regard to his Cthulhu mythos. By “wide citation” he hoped to give his works an “air of verisimilitude”, and actively encouraged other writers to reference his creations, such as the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. After his death, many writers have contributed stories and enriched the shared mythology of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as making numerous references to his work. 
2. Lovecraft’s work/mythos is out of copyright. Most of Lovecraft’s works that were published in the amateur press are most likely now in the public domain.

The Lovecraft story world IS a collective property. A world in which stories are collectively told. The same characters can come round and round again in different formations, with different emphasis. Without fear of corporate reprisal.

It also (to my mind) seems to be treated differently from the canon craving world of Sherlock Holmes. There IS a list of lovecrafts work, but as a fandom (eugh I really hate that word) they prefer to focus on the ‘Greater Cthulhu Mythos’. A poster on reddit a few years ago craving canon asked the following question.

Q: New to the Cthulu Mythos, how do you decide what’s canon or not?
Isn’t anything not written by Lovecraft technically just fanfiction, no matter how well known? What distinguishes the accepted books from something on fanfiction.net?

This line of thinking was quickly disabused and diffused wonderfully:

A: The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared universe. While Lovecraft’s work is indisputably at the center of it, he was constantly sharing ideas with other writers and encouraging them to join in. It grew from there, and continues to grow.

I personally don’t concern myself with what’s “canon” or not at all. What’s important is how entertained I am by what I’m reading.

I personally don’t particularly like Lovecraft (I know I know) and its world, I’ve never really seen the attraction. But I have always liked seeing the world re-conjured and remade with every person that plays in that world. whether it be RPGs, short collections, film, art, or whatever.

The Cthulhu Mythos’ popularity in 2020 (in my mind) however has nothing to do with the enduring themes of the world itself, and can instead be almost solely be attributed to the lack of copyright in the later part of the 20th Century. And most importantly the lack of permission needed to explore/play in its story world/mythos.

Grimdark

In my estimation, since the D-day explosion of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The story world of Warhammer 40k owned by Games Workshop is possibly the biggest coherent story world of any franchise in the world.

It is of course owned by a single entity, but as a company they have a very laissez faire attitude towards canon. They approach things with an eye toward what is true ‘In Universe’. Given that in the world of 40k there’s 10k years of history, most of it lost. Means that its ALL myth, rumour, and unreliable narrators. As fans, who read the books, and rulebooks etc. We know more about the universe of 40k than its inhabitants.

Whitbrook again:

It’s an attitude that has become predominant not just within fandom circles itself, but in the media commentary that has developed around these fandoms and the blockbuster franchises that dominate our popular culture. Critics and fans alike are now less interested in actually interpreting a piece of media thematically or to engage with why they liked or disliked it, but instead to pick it apart and break it down to the base components of what are, essentially, its pure, unflinching facts. Google Star Wars or the Marvel movies and you will likely see as many articles and videos with headlines like “X Confirms Y is Canon,” “X Questions Answered By [New Media],” or “X Things We Learned About Character Z in This New Book/Movie/TV Show” as you will critical essays about these stories, if not more.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

The concern with canon of course is present in the Warhammer 40k community online too. So when you read a 40k novel or whatever there’s plenty of published material that contradicts other material. This definitely winds up a certain segment of the fanbase no end. As they expect the world to operate like the MCU or something. You only need to search ‘canon’ in the 40k lore subreddit to see how obsessed some elements of the quote unquote ‘fandom’ are.

One of the most important points in the io9 essay I think is the following:

But this craving for it above all else is a toxic attitude, not just to the way we talk about pieces of media from a critical perspective, but in fan circles as well. The hunger for facts above all else leads to things like “filler episode” becoming a derogatory term for stories that don’t advance the larger ongoing plot of a narrative or don’t include some shocking new revelation that someone can add to a list. It predicates the gatekeeping act of being a fan that is built on how much you know about a thing over whether you actually enjoy that thing or not.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

Games Workshops world of warhammer 40k isn’t supposed to have a canon. It grew out of a RPG and is a story world primarily concerned with allowing people to play their own games, and tell their own stories inside their world.

As far as I’m concerned: All fan fiction for Warhammer is basically unverified canon. It’s just as valid as the official stuff tbh. All the deaths of main characters on the table top due to poor dice roles is canon. Roboute Guilliman the Primarch of the Ultramarines has died a 1000 times across 1000 tabletops. And he will continue to die over and over again. My Ork Nob from Gorkamorka ‘Ardy Ed Nutter’ was brutally cut down in glorious chaos multiple times, and he was alive again the next week to try again.

There is something horrible awful about folks that like to think their knowledge of a story world is proportional to their love of it. I get/appreciate the tendency. But you don’t need to be a fanatical twitcher to love birds.

People craving canon IS really toxic. In addition to being a tool for gatekeeping, it also prevents people from speculating on, or reflecting on the material. Themes, Cultural Critique or even pointing out that a characters arc is very similar to another archetype or borrowed greek myth is frowned upon by those who crave canon. When you read online posts, or watch commentary on youtube of films etc, it seems that the motivations of characters in a story world are only allowed to exist within their own closed story ecosystem, blind to the context of culture at large.

You are not allowed to say “I think Batman installing illegal and hidden surveillance software on everyones phones in Gotham is extremely bad” without being shouted down. And believe me when I say I have been on the receiving end of the shouting.

I agree wholeheartedly with Whitbrook again when he points out:

It’s an attitude that in turn feeds the equally unruly and constantly growing spoiler culture because a fandom that values pure details above all else puts weight in the knowledge of those details. The need robs discussions about the stories we get of nuance and interpretation, because who cares what you think happened when there’s an answer from the Word of God to that question you might have had? And more sinisterly, beyond the way it shapes our discourse, it’s a craving that further enmeshes our love of a world not to the world itself, but to the masters behind that world.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

I could double the length of this already bloated post by really getting into spoiler culture and spoilers. Instead I’ll point you towards Whitbrook again. and just say.

Spoiler culture is insane.

I really don’t care about spoilers at all. Why does anyone care about them? or not knowing whats going to happen? This 2014 article by Hestia Peppe on spoilers is really great:

It recently occurred to me that the whole thing about spoilers is that they pretty much constitute a gag on critical discussion of narrative in public. This happened at an academic conference panel on ‘sitting with uncomfortable ideas’ in which a popular Netflix series was raised as a point of intersection between two complex ideas and was met with literal screams of “No Spoilers! Please!” and the discussion instantly and by consensus ceased entirely. As someone who’d seen the series in question and was mourning the lost opportunity to triangulate a rather disjointed conversation, I turned to my friend and said, “can you imagine that happening in a discussion of English Literature?”

The Shimmering Go-Between – Lee Klein

I was talking about the plot of the previously mentioned Green Knight movie in the pub (back when we were still allowed outside) and several friends at the table got cross about spoilers. I’m really not sure that you can shout “Spoilers” or spoil about a 14th-century Arthurian poem that has a deep ongoing influence on European culture. I would even go as far to say (IMO) that any hard boiled crime or cyberpunk hero has a bit of Sir Gawain in them. In the poem he has no inward, moral, emotional, and spiritual qualities and there is little evidence in the story that any inward qualities matter much to him at all. Just like ‘DOOM guy’ tbh.

The same also happened to me with Dune. It’s a 55 year old book??? But apparently because it’s going to be a movie this/next year I’m not allowed to talk about one of my favourite books.

In almost all cases, (I believe) narrative and the types of worlds those narratives are situated in are enriched by foreknowledge and pre critique. throughout all of history it would have been the same stories re-spun by someone with a good imagination and loud voice over and over again. Everyone round the campfire or in the pub would have been familiar with stories being told. And in the more recent past it would have been the stories and parables of the Bible. It blows my mind that people don’t immediately see the story of the Nativity In Children of Men, or the Christ Allegory in Robocop. Anyways…

Spoiler culture and the associated ‘post eventum’ craving for facts do indeed rob discussion of stories of nuance and interpretation.

For example going into the new Dune films knowing that the whole damn thing is a critique of power, and the savour narrative would benefit everyone. Especially the hot take discourse that has already even started before the movie has come out about saviour narratives. The author told us explicitly what this story was about.

It’s only possible to consume media like this if you thinking in a post modern mode. Spoiler Culture, and Craving of Canon are in many ways children of Derrida. There is ‘Nothing Outside the Text’. And yet, the ownership of culture as a commodity is still in a Modernist mode.

The rise and rise of Table Top and DnD role play I think is one of the first green shoots in this regard. It is/was a return to collective story telling that grew up alongside Drama’s deletion of the performer spectator divide in the 1970’s to create something that was in fact premodern.

So What Do?

The ownership of culture by corporations and the lack of agency that the people who love and consume that culture in the modern world is a problem that needs solving with some urgency. How do we do that? What does it even mean to have agency in a story world?

I’m obviously going to bang a Solarpunk drum in the closing paragraphs of this #GNDN blogpost. Perhaps fortuitously timed as a small/short response to Paul Graham Ravens recent and extremely thoughtful post on solarpunk.

Solarpunk is a collective ‘memetic engine’. A cultural construct or media tool to power and provide the ‘re-futuring’ of our collective imaginations.

This is narrative as a battleground. Guerrilla war against those who get to tell stories of the future, what kinds, and who gets to own them. Solarpunk as genre (or mode) is an Memetic Engine to spin out new futures int he minds of people who encounter the genre. Designed to self-replicate.

(…)

Solarpunk as a collective is ‘worlds’ first. Possible worlds, desirable worlds, or worlds in which humanity works feverishly to avoid other ones. These are all worlds that we can step into for a moment at any time. It is a set of narratives and stories / books second. The only canon is the tale of the tree you planted, or the cover crop you sowed.

One of the key words in the Solarpunk community is Polyphony. Above all one cannot speak for other Solarpunks, only be in dialogue and occasional chorus with them. Dissonance brings texture to this world.

The solarpunk community as I see it talks about the worlds it creates as being concerned with the “struggles en route to a better world”. It does not reduce climate change to a singular event but understands it as an unfolding process or crisis and opportunity..

Within Solarpunk you will find a diversity of opinion on what ‘better’ even means. It isn’t one total future or world. Its many many local ones.

This frustrates many of its critics. But thats ok. Living with indeterminacy is the biggest feature of all our futures real or imagined. It is not a bug. 

Solarpunk as Memetic Engine – Jay Springett – Unpublished 🙁

I’m not entirely sure that I personally have any concrete proposals other than encouraging others to write, tell and create their own stories. Build worlds with friends and colleagues. Play in them, test them, and discard them if they don’t work for you.

But pick a story world you would like to spend some time in and walk backwards facing it until you reach today. This also includes your street, window sill and community etc.

Or pick multiple futures and worlds that could be possible. Find fellow travellers who likes the destination and and set off together.

Craving Canon (Redux)

Update!

Following a brief DM thread with Matt from xenogothic.com regarding the several off hand allusions to the influence of Christianity on the craving for canon. I explored it a little bit more during this weeks podcast:

The post Craving Canon appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Wednesday 17 July 2019 – Sonar+D – Barcelona

On the 30th anniversary of the www, Sónar+D 2019 looked forward to what the next three decades might hold. In this talk, hosted by We Are Europe, journalist Marta Peirano,, researcher and activist Xenia Ermoshina,“solarpunk” theorist Jay Springett, discussed how decentralisation, privacy and ecology will re-configure the use and the potential of the internet. Moderated by Ash Sarkar.

My talk was quoted by The Long Now Foundation in their report from Sonar+D.

If you regularly enjoy my writing or podcasts please consider supporting my work here.

Tales of the Next Internet

Introduction

My name is Jay Springett and I am a Writer, Theorist and Strategist and I write online at twitter, website, medium etc under the handle @thejaymo. 

I grew up in a small Brexity seaside town on the south east coast of England, close enough to see the lights of the french coast on a moonless night. At 18 I escaped for London but left the pro LGBT, anti-racist and anti-fascist DIY Hardcore Punk scene I was involved in throughout my Teen aged years behind. A formative community experience which still influences my politics to this day. 

At university I equally split my time between philosophy and music coming away with a degree with the title ‘Philosophy of the Arts’. As a consequence I still identity as a musician to my core and that informs a lot of how I think creatively.

After university as many do. I feel into an accidental career in HR tech and consulting firms lately shifting to working in tech startups doing Business Operations.

I now have a weekly podcast, write, and work freelance with firms that need to scale fast. I tend to focus on the company’s future culture, tools and processes strategy. 

Alongside this CV stuff. Outside of work I have always been adjacent to art, tech and theory worlds. 

I am (or was) perhaps best known for coining the term Stacktivism earlier this decade – a term that attempted to give form to both a critical conversation and a line of enquiry around infrastructure & the relationship we have to it. 

Drawn from a portmanteau of “The Stack” . The horizontally independent but vertically integrated set of technologies that keep us alive – combined with a critical activism towards infrastructure. This period of my life forced both myself and many others to confront the question

“Who owns the means of not dying”. 

I am also an Admin on solarpunks.net . A tumblr founded in 2012 by the American researcher-at-large and artistic troublemaker Adam Flynn after hearing of the first Anthology: Solarpunk ecological and fantastical stories in a sustainable world published in Brazilian Portuguese the same year.

Solarpunks.net is a tumblog dedicated to Solarpunk. A movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable Civilization look like, and how can we get there?” Since 2012, Solarpunk has created a multitude of spaces for indigenous sovereignties, reproductive justice, and radical queer politics. Contrasting the popular grim futures of cyberpunk with a bright green optimism.

With both these topics front of mind. For the last year or so I have been working on a project called Land As Platform. A book that combines both: platforms and the road to utopia. As well as my long standing interest in environmentalism and regenerative agriculture. 

The project seeks to explore what Platforms are in the age of planetary scale computation and what can be learned from the existence and deployment of such large scale techno social projects whilst explaining the principles of permaculture and ecological systems to a wide audience as possible.

So this is where my mind is today. The brief for this panel was to talk a bit about our work, followed by our ideas, dreams and challenges of the future internet. I’d like to talk briefly on three subjects which are quite different, but I hope will prompt some interesting discussions.

The Long View 

One of the things I’ve internalised whilst working on Land as Platform is that Humanity is extremely old. 

We are blinded as a culture by our use of the Anno Domini dating system. In 1993 Cesare Emiliani proposed a dating system that begins with the Holocene era. The geological epoch that also coincides with the earliest human experiments in infrastructure and agriculture . If we use this system then today’s date is July 17 12,019. 

It also I feel goes quite a long way to contextualising the so called quote unquote ‘Anthropocene era’ that we entering today. 

But we can go further back than 12 Thousand years. A date that would place us amongst the stones of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a ritual site situated 20 miles from the current Syrian border 

The sculpture of The Lion Man found in a German cave in 1939 is between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. 

And as Troy Conrad Therrien points out in his 2017 essay ‘Social Soup’ 

Neanderthals were identified as the architects of a 177,000-year-old magic circle found deep inside a cave in France. No older ritual architecture is known. 

The base layer of our civilizational stack may have been inherited.”

Social Soup – Troy Conrad Therrien

It may seem strange in a talk on the next internet to bring up objects that live at such vast time depths. But it is important as there is a deficiency of long term thinking in western culture. It will be vital that we think at multigenerational time depths about everything from internet technologies, to tree planting given the challenges that humanity faces. 

Our modern world seeks to focus us towards the short term and praises quarterly growth. But in the real world, away from high frequency ledger entries and global capital flows. It takes 100-120 years for an oak tree to grow from seed to full canopy height. It takes three human generations to grow a tree.

This is real growth. And I’d like to propose that everything that occurs in the duration between the decision to plant an acorn to the trees full grown crown is short term thinking. Which places 12,150 is the medium term.

Indeed the Oak tree King of Limbs, in Britain is over 1,000 years old. It has been growing quietly in place since before the Norman Conquest. The King doesn’t much care about one iPhone model to the next. 

Millennia long scales of engagement with the world around us are almost unimaginable when contrasted with the 2 week long Agile sprints popular in the tech development world. 

And this is why I bring it up today given we are talking about the future of the internet. Given average age of an S&P 500 company is now under 20 years, down from 60 years in the 11,950s I worry that technology under capitalist logics just cannot respond to the challenges we face. 

As both the internet and open-source has gotten older, the earth has gotten more unbearable as time went by. Software engineers feel a sense of urgency to move much quicker than they should be.

It is relatively easy to talk about the short term, imagining and extrapolating the next 30 years of technological development out to 12,050, its possibilities, its dangers and the dark places that it could all lead. 

But what about the 500 year or 1000 year internet? Who ever heard of the 100 year website. This I struggle to imagine. And I imagine you do too.

I do sometimes think that perhaps all the chimes, bleeps and bloops on the starship enterprise are all still driven by MIDI. And Geordi La Forge being just as frustrated by how bad it is as musicians are today. A protocol today only at the grand old age of 38.

Zooming in from 1000 year internet view to the the media term I come to my second point.

How Does Software Make Us Feel?

It’s my belif that in the near future a much larger focus will be placed on how software makes us feel. 

A question first sparked in me a few years ago after I developed intense bouts of synesthesia as a consequence of my meditation practice. 

A trend in surveillance technologies today is to make claims about how it can measure or extrapolate human personality data. perhaps best seen in the mess around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. In addition I recently saw a company claiming to be able to measure emotional states in people based on wifi signal data. All of this of course is relative nonsense based on incorrect assumptions in psychology and statistics, anyway I digress. Because it really should be studying the problem the other way around. 

What do I mean by ‘how software makes us feel’? People sink hundreds of hours into mobile games like Candy Crush and clash of clans, as whilst playing it it makes them feel a certain way, separating temporarily from their commute or whatever else is going on in their lives. 

Some other examples are:

• Chat apps like whats app or telegram feel to me like complicated emotional tennis volleys.
• For me Music Software highlights the sweeping inevitability of the passing of time. Broken and divided artificially by bar numbers, time signatures and bpm. 
• Or the machine like algorithmic coldness of complicated resource management strategy games like Civilization or Age of Empires. 

A great deal has been written already on the gamification of metrics inside web apps like Twitter. Yes this world is full of terrible people but the software design itself makes them worse.

In the medium term future systems should adapt to us, not the other way around.

The first glimmer of hope for me can be seen in the Jobs to be done framework gaining traction in the software development world. As a framework for UX it is quite interesting as it focuses on the desires of the user. “How will using this software better my life”. 

Because at the end of the day software and the internet is a tool. You wouldn’t keep a hammer or a kettle around in your house for long if it actively made your life miserable. We shouldn’t tolerate it with software, or the internet. A technology that is increasingly more and more deeply enmeshed in our day to day lives.

More sympathetic emotional software is vital in very short term which brings me to my last point.

Enmeshment

Moore’s law seems to have slowed with further advances in silicon production bumping up against the edges of material science and physics. Unless you have the money and the space for a warehouse full of coolant systems and physicists, quantum computing isn’t coming to you any time soon.

However miniaturisation of existing technologies continue apace. In the last 10 years we have seen a revolution in this regard. Military grade technologies and now be found in all out phones.

• Proximity sensors.
• Ambient light sensors.
• Infrared.
• Blood flow and heart rate sensors.
• Camera sensors and their lenses.
• Accelerometers.
• Gyroscopes.
• And compasses. 

To name a few. 

Many of us walk around with biometric sensors that were science fiction only 15 years ago.

All these combined with looming ‘Print to chip’ technologies that remove the need to compile code signal the end of general purpose computation as we’ve known it to date. The logical end point of all this is sensors…. sensors everywhere. 

Print to chip custom silicone will increase power efficiency and reduce costs of these passive sensors immeasurably perhaps even to the point that they can be run like a victorian coper and zinc earth battery. Coinciding (I hope) with humanities grandest project. 

The regreening of the world. 

These sensors will be in every field, in every tree,and listening from every bush and canopy for sounds of returning insects and a resurgent biosphere. This however, if shepherded by evil and malicious souls, may very well produce a nightmare world 

So we are faced with a choice. Total surveillance for short term financial gain and political domination, resulting in a sort of “free range” totalitarianism for the population of the world.

Or we could think along longer and grander timescales. And if you would all permit me, I’d like to read what I consider to be the UR poem of solarpunk texts”

 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan:

{Watch the video to see me read it. I won’t reproduce it here}

I was invited to Sonar+D as one of We Are Europes 64 Faces of Europe . If you would like to to speak at your event etc – please get in touch.

The post Tales of the Next Internet @ Sonar+D appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Jump to the Essay

This week has been a week of difference influences swelling and receding like overlapping waves on the beach.

I’ve had on many hats for a few hours at a time this week.

I had a skype call with a narrative director of a large MMO about doing some work with them, which devolved into a conversation about Games Workshop finally listening to 40 years of customer complaints before we could really talk about the nature of the work.

I was supposed to meet up for drinks with a ‘eerie ecology/film/geography/nonhuman art&research filmaker’. But had to move it to next week.

I also spoke to a VC briefly about maybe doing some strategy work with them, we’ll see how that goes too.

I also went to the Proms on Tuesday as the parents unfortunately couldn’t go themselves. Pretty standard week.

As I mentioned last week I’ve started making music again. This week I spent 2 evenings refreshing my memory on how to build synths from scratch. I was using the principles of subtractive synthesis in Renoise

Permanently Moved

301 – 1920 – Episode 50 (Sprint Review)

S2E20

A nice round number seemed like a good time to review where I am at.

I discuss how the show has evolved, workflow, stats, “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor” and that making this weekly has done wonders for my psychological health.

—

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Can’t believe I’ve made 50 of these so far. Big thanks to Warren for the idle morning.computer thought which became the catalyst for me last year to start making it.

Dipping the Stacks

Electric Boats Could Be Floating Batteries For Island Microgrids – IEEE Spectrum

Workers Seize the Shipyard That Built the Titanic, Plan to Make Renewable Energy There – VICE

As a shepherd, I know we have not ‘sheepwrecked’ Britain’s landscape
This whole article is basically “as a lumberjack, I know we haven’t over cut” 

German Peasants’ Song – Die Gedanken Sind Frei | Three Acres And A Cow

The Ministry

I started writing the half sketched bones of an essay to clarify my own thoughts that wasn’t going anywhere. As per this weeks podcast about pushing more stuff out I thought I’d flesh it out a bit and post it here

On Compasses and Quadrants

This week feels like the week that the weird Accelerationist political 4×4 compass levelled up out of cave twitter and went into wider consciousness.

The first in the genre I ever saw was on a friends computer at the workspace for “blockchain and utopian conspiracy Trust Support when I was speaking at P2P Web Berlin early last year.

This ACCompass came from Insta about a month ago

And this recent one is the one that has punched though.

I made a kinda-unhinged political compass of acceleration-assemblages. None of these are really mutually exclusive, but pick your preference! pic.twitter.com/4KG2QbTt78— Lilypatchwork (@Lilypatchwork) August 13, 2019

I should note that Lilypatchwork is a “post left is the most left” internet figure. They themselves pointed out the pipeline to this sort of worldview in a recent tweet

post/ultra-left ==> left-leaning u/acc ==> problematic g/acc

Note: G/acc BTW for the un-initiated stands for Gender Accelerationsist (IE: using gender’s own process of decay to destroy the gender class system) It’s like xenofems black goo mirror universe form. Anyway I’m pretty deep in these circles quite a few people have read my conspiracy essay and stacktivism stuff but its not relevant or where I was going – Back to the compasses:

I know many in the Milieu love the 2×2 for reasons that Venkat neatly summed up way back in 2009

The quadrant diagram has achieved the status of an intellectual farce. If you, as a presenter, do not make an ironic joke when you throw one on the screen, you will automatically lose a lot of credibility.

How to Draw and Judge Quadrant Diagrams

I have my own contribution to the genre as part of the Cross-quadrant Working Group when I was writing about Conspiracy Theories, the value of entertaining them, and why everyone needs a bootstrapped postmodern hermeneutics of their own back in 2016

Anyways, the good Ahmet A. Sabancı (in my head I always add the A. to his name) wrote the following in his most recent newsletter

Give Me More Compasses

Jay’s Twitter thread got me thinking about how we’re thinking about the future itself and how most of the mainstream conversation is stuck. Compasses over there names many different possibilities we might face or some of us even facing —maybe not as extreme as a sci-fi novel. I think one powerful side of compasses is the fact that it gives all options/possibilities at once, overloading the mind and forcing you to think about it.

I think that’s something we need more. Not always compasses but ways to push people to think about the futures we might face and start working on it. Although it might seem that all of those futures are far away but when you start thinking about it, you also understand that most of those possibilities are already here and rest is just 5 minutes bus ride away.

Compasses —especially the ones like the one here— with their design and the information density is something perfect for our current social media madness. It interrupts the clickbait and will-be-forgotten-tomorrow news and never-ending outrages with its weirdness and pulls people out of it. Of course one needs to take another step after seeing this but if we’re stuck with the current situation for now, I think best we can do is to make it as weird as possible. So that we can lure people to blogs, newsletters and other dark sides of the internet where real conversation happens. To at least try to break that banality of the future.

The bold points are my own, but also key here and I think speak for them selves.

It is exactly the “all options/possibilities at once” which makes them such fascinating memetic objects. Far more so than the tired pedestrian chaotic alignment charts you see floating around. #ACCompasses are an uplifted version of the 2×2 grid that have ascended beyond intellectual farce into the world of illusion and imagination.

In my opinion, one of the interesting judo moves that the X/Acc scene has been developing the last few years is to use weirdness as a bait/hook for the real praxis (even if the praxis is further speculation for now).

In the Acc world things aren’t weird for weirdness sake. But weird because the weirdness interrupts the clickbait attention feed. FWIW I think Haraway’s “Cthulhuscene” attempted this move in the academic world but largely fell before finished. “Tentacular Thinking” however…. influenced this information/meme dynamic deeply.

I’m inclined to see these compasses as one of the first direct examples of “Accelerationsist Anti-praxis” propaganda.

Anti-praxis consists of two basic principles: making political action as impersonal as possible and intensifying the actually existing processes of liberation and emancipation, without situating our actions within/against capitalism, but following those political vectors which point directly towards a possible exit.

Applying Applied Ballardianism

Mr Bloggy himself AKA Mat of xenogothic.com wrote a good piece late last year on anti praxis

One of the things I think is clear about this form of compass media object is that they rapidly open up new cognitive territory. But they also seize and claim the new territory the moment that you realise that it has formed in your brain. Like laying tarot cards of a kind you have never seen before on the table, and before you can read the spread shouting SNAP and pulling them back.

In the meme theory back channels I frequent this is known as “Ralphing”

Each and every box in those x/Acc political compasses is Ralphing cognitive territory. If just for a moment.

Again some more Xenogoth on anti-praxis this time quoting Land

Here we find the anti-praxis of U/Acc emerging into view. As space-time disintegrates, you have to make yourself worthy of the process. Land concludes:

Any perspective that can actually be realized has already been localized by serial breakages. Nothing begins with the whole, unless as illusion. Today, we know this both empirically and transcendentally. Anything not done in pieces is not done in profound accordance with reality.

I’m running the risk of putting woke words into Land’s mouth here but I think the implications are far clearer here than they have ever been. Expect frequent referrals back to this post in the future.

DISINTEGRATIVE COSMIC ACCELERATIONISM

The ACCompass Meme is an illusion. A whole Ralph memetic object of weirdness that is the summation of its individual Ralphs. One so powerful as to pull you, even just for a moment from the day to day algorymic media madness.

Note for readers who feel they are hallucinating. I highly recommend Xenogoths U/ACC primer

UPDATE: I made my own

Reading

I started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear this week.

It’s not very good at all. I wouldn’t bother with it if you have ever thought about wanting to read it. The whole books reads like an advert for his blog which itself is a vehicle advertising James Clear.

I have of course been inhaling more warhammer 40k books. I read the BobbyG Primark series book, and started Spear of the Emperor but I’m only like 12% of the way in.

Music

I’ve been enjoying Pharmakon’s new track Spit It Out this week. It’s a claustrophobic noise hammer of epic proportions.

Pharmakon is the solo experimental music project of Margaret Chardiet. Her 2017 album Contact was fantastic.

I’ve also been listning to the new Album Collab Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back by Uniform & The Body ITS FANTASTIC

Remember kids:

The post Half formed thoughts On ‘Ralphing’ and Compass Memes appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I completely forgot to blog about this when it went up:

I wrote a piece last year for the 5 Viridian Years collection curated by Tim Maly over on Medium. ‘Viridian Design was an avant-garde bright green design movement engineered by Bruce Sterling and intended to address climate change. It ran from 1998-2008. Five years later, we reflect’

The piece was called the ‘The Coming Asperity‘. Asperity is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and it was great to finally write down/out. A definition is below:

Asperity

1. A policy of cutting resource use and consumption via a reduction in carbon dioxide (or equivalent emissions) and resources that are available/provided to a population. Asperity policies are often used by governments to try to reduce the emissions of a defined population, system or activity.

In the piece i put forward #asperity as a possible political reaction to climate change, similar to the way austerity was deployed by governments after the financial crisis.

Dougald Hine was kind enough to mention the concept in his talk ‘Making Ourselves Scarce’ at FSCONS 13 he also referenced Charlie Stross and Kevin Carson in the same breath – so I feel the idea is in good company.

You can read the whole piece at https://medium.com/5-viridian-years/5bf9407bd010

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