Try Our Best

I must admit, I’ve been feeling a little doomy recently.

Like everybody else, I have no idea what is about to happen. But more importantly, I’ll admit that I have no idea what is going on either. But I do know how I feel, and in turn, I know how those feelings make me act. That has to count for something.

At the time of writing, we are about thirty hours from finding out whether the current global settlement is still to be or not. Whilst I am sleeping; the mad king of an unravelling empire will decide if he steps another rung up the escalation ladder. If he does, there’s no way back down. When I wake up on Tuesday morning, the decision will have been made. The direction of our lives; for the rest of our lives; will be set either way.

It seems strange to think that the story of my own individual, personal problems right now is wrapped up in geopolitical and world historical events. But of course they are. They always have been. It’s just that at certain moments, the seam between the two becomes a bit more visible.

I’ve written before that when things become unreadable, one must learn how to feel. Not because feeling offers certainty, but because certainty is unavailable. Feeling is not a theory of history, it’s not analysis. But it is one way of orienting oneself inside of the confusion. One way of staying human when the world becomes unreal.

The post-Covid world is still hurtling towards us along the tunnel; close enough now to make out the shape of the thing. I have been shocked by the tone and the reporting in the media here in the UK about what that thing is. As someone who was a teenager when the planes hit the towers, another time when the seam was a bit more visible. I’ve watched the current atmosphere gathering over the whole of my adult life. The most coherent story that the people who gathered those clouds are telling us about the future (and the present) has slipped away from them, and towards the stories people have been telling themselves for a while.

Global pandemics, oil wars, crack down on freedoms over terrorism, useless politicians; both national and international, institutions so ideologically captured they can no longer perceive that the story is a dream. Fires and floods, climate, drone war, smartphones, ubiquitous solar, battery storage. The list goes on. None of this is especially shocking or surprising. This is the texture of the near future I grew up with. The Cyberpunk weather forecast the culture wrote for itself.

Meanwhile, for the last decade the hologram has continued to force-feed culture stories of superheroes and exceptional individuals coming to save the day. But out here in the real world, nobody is coming. The politicians and the government; are not here for us, and are not particularly interested in being here either. No rational and pragmatic decisions are being made, and haven’t been since about 2008.

That, I think, is part of the deeper horror I feel. Not simply that things are bad, but that the inherited forms of modernity no longer seem capable of even recognising the nature of the moment they, and by extension we, are in.

The liberal nation-state is, among other things, the story it tells about itself. A social technology held together by newspapers, mass literacy, and the shared imaginary of ‘the nation’, a more or less hegemonic information environment. And has been for four hundred years, give or take. But the conditions that made that story possible have been eroded, if not blasted apart, by the information age. The interfaces have changed, and that has changed the psychic weather. The idea of “the public” has changed too. The old settlement is unwinding either way.

I’m not sure how long that unwinding is going to take. Five years, maybe? Maybe more. But it seems impossible to believe, standing where we are, that the current arrangement can meaningfully hold.

And yet, despite all this, in the main I remain optimistic about the medium term. Not because I think things will resolve cleanly, and not because I think we are on the verge of some redemptive turn, but because history does not stop. New habits, new forms of life, new ways of organising and being together always emerge. The problem is that there is an enormous amount of struggle between here and there.

Everything depends on the extent to which those in power can accept that things are unwinding. Or whether they cling on while the gyre circulates ever faster and faster. Full of velocity and friction. A system overshooting itself.

For those us born in the 1980’s and after; the so called digital natives and citizens of the internet, culture and personalities formed inside one world, are now being forced to build in another. The next ten years, for families and neighbours and towns, and whole countries, things are going to be extremely difficult. I’m not convinced much of the post 2008 condition; culturally, politically, is going to be much use.

In some ways, the last 23 days have been a catalyst for the small gestures that make a difference to me; spring cleaning and decluttering, emptying drawers, wiping down surfaces, processing accumulated stacks of paper, and tidying. Sorting and clearing out. A feathering of the nest, driven by the desire to put one’s house in order.

So what is one supposed to do? Not much, apart from tidying ones room? Nothing can really be done at the level or scale of the problem, or in any kind of register that the people still telling old stories demand.

But one can make habitat. One can clear a desk, sort the papers, wipe the surfaces, and make room. One can refuse the false drama of omniscience. One can resist being ridden by the worst moods of the machine. One can learn how to feel. One can pay attention to family, neighbours, friends, and the real texture of ordinary life.

We need to try our best.

Experience.Computer

Marco Giancotti (Aether Mug)

https://experience.computer/

IN THIS INTERVIEW

Jay Springett and guest Marco Giancotti, a thinking-tool artisan, explore aphantasia, SDAM, and spatial memory. They discuss writing as thinking, cognitive frameworks, and wonder why looking at a picture of a sour fruit (Umeboshi) doesn’t make everyone’s mouth water.

Then they discuss:

• Spatial presence without mental imagery

• The shared ontology of digital and physical objects

• Writing as a process of refactoring thoughts

• “Framing” and “virtual physics” as cognitive tools

A huge thank you to Marco for responding so enthusiastically to my Bluesky DMs after I spent an afternoon binge-reading his fantastic blog, Aether Mug — which is definitely not about science, philosophy, philosophers, languages, Japan, or picture frames, or boxes, (though you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise).

Marco had some really nice things to say about his appearance on the show, his blog is fantastic check it out.

Last week I had a lot of fun being interviewed by Jay Springett of Experience.Computer. Jay runs a truly unique podcast, focused specifically on an activity that I feel people should do and share more: “curious introspection”, or the careful examination of what your consciousness and perception are like and feel like from the inside. I care about it so much that I maintain a living list of my and others’ introspective descriptions.

The moment you start reading/listening to this kind of mental spelunking you realize how deep, varied, and mysterious it all is. We (including our scientists) have only scratched the surface in our understanding of these matters.

On The Blog

Huge week for new posts this week. Put out about 15k worth of words on the blog this week over 4 posts. It’s all indexed and linked from the post below. basically summarising the last 5 years of thinking; both independently and professionally, about software environments and tecno-social systems as worlds.

When a language model is given tools and set to work on a task, it wakes up inside a world.

These three essays are about what the shape of that world might be, and why it matters more than most people building agents currently assume.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Put out experience.computer
• Edited and posted the Worlds posts above
• Had a long and very cool call with Japan about bunraku pupperty, ai agents, hatsune miku and the state of Vtubers/virtual idols in 2026.
• Started sorting out ‘my financial affairs’ lol such a long job. Want to get my tax return done super early.

Terminal Access

This is a very good essay directly tackling the “Stochastic Parrot” framing of LLMs, and how almost all the claims in the original paper were false even at the time of writing. It’s a must read, or article to send to the people in your life who are still clinging to this understanding.

Perhaps the most influential single paper on the public perception of LLMs is On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. It is, however, a bit of a mash-up, and credibly seems like it should have been at least two papers. One of those papers raises many valid concerns about the ethical implications and impacts of AI training and use. Another makes the claim in the title, that an LLM is a “stochastic parrot” operating “without any reference to meaning.”

That core claim is either irrelevant or completely wrong in every detail, both in how it is commonly understood and in its technical assertions. It hamstrings AI ethics as a field, providing a veneer of technical justification for ignoring many problems.

Reading

I’m currently reading Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network by Jonathan D. Moreno. And when I find a good spot to and i’m feeling more sleepy, i’m switching over to The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira. It’s giving me weird dreams.

I hope to finish some of these books before Tchaikovsky’s Children of Strife drops in audiobook next week.

Funkot (Genre)

No specific track to recommend this week, as I’ve just been listening to hours and hours of the Indonesian genre: Funkot. It’s basically 190-220bpm house music thats been made with the default sound banks found on on Yamaha and Casio keyboards.

And on to of that… people… line dance to it?

Everything about this is amazing.

Remember Kids:

The post Try Our Best | Weeknotes #431 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Everything is Fine

Last week cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase launched a new marketing effort in the UK. The centre-piece of the campaign being a satirical piece of musical theatre about the state of the UK economy, called Everything Is Fine.

Alongside it is a print/visual campaign simply stating facts about the UK economy. Here is a photo a friend sent me of the back of a London cab over the weekend: the poster that simply says, “Real wages: stuck in 2008.”

I sent the person who took this photo the accompanying campaign video and they just replied, “Pure cinema.”

It’s had me thinking, what does it mean for a cryptocurrency exchange to be producing one of the best pieces of satirical media about the current state of the UK?

Keep Calm and Carry On

The advert strikes a chord I think because we live in a society where the-people-who-are-in-charge seem to think a better future is not possible—or even desired.“Everything is fine” is basically the ruling ideology/mantra of the media class in the UK.

I belive the “Everything-is-fine-ness” of the media class is the logical endpoint of the most pernicious meme to enter the British psyche in my life time: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

The original Keep Calm and Carry On poster (if you belive the lore) was discovered in a bookshop in 2000. A powerful piece of World War II-era government propaganda intended to be displayed alongside “Freedom Is in Peril / Defend It With All Your Might” for deployment in a worse case scenario if the Nazis ever directly attacked the UK beyond the Blitz. Of course, it was never deployed, because things never got bad enough for it to be used, and all copies were supposed to be destroyed, leaving only a handful remaining.

It’s hard to express to someone who isn’t from the UK just how much gravity the Second World War (80 years on from is resolution) still exerts on the British cultural psyche. Boomers sing wartime era songs at dinners and dances, and pretend they won the war personally on social media all the time. We dress our children up as evacuees at school and get them to pretend they were caught up in it too. And we have newspapers that considers not wearing a Remembrance poppy on television or at formal events in the month of November basically tantamount to treason.

Whilst the original poster may have been re-discovered in 2000, it took nearly a decade for it’s sentiment to diffuse out fully into public consciousness. All it took was the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession and the Coalition/Tory government’s imposition of austerity on the county.

The public sort of ‘self deployed’ the most powerful piece of World War II propaganda ever created on itself. And the British cultural psyche ate it up. A way of avoiding the effects of austerity etc.

Coinbase’s ‘Real Wages Stuck in 2008’ is a fact. The slow bleed out of the UK economy over the last 17 years. We’ve dealt with austerity, Brexit, pandemic etc. The looting the elite engaged in during the final years of the Tory rule was basically ‘stiff upper lipped’ and tollerated by the general public by keeping calm and carrying on, and buying cupcakes.

The death of possibility that this mantra had on UK culture was given a name by Tom Whyman at the time back in 2013: “Cupcake fascism.”

this constellation includes “tea-drinking, knitting, cycling, sorting out one’s recycling properly, organic food, free-range eggs and local produce, gin, real ale, Cath Kidston bags, throws on the couches, making your own chutney, and Rugby Union.”

It is rather in what these things come to symbolise. They are all ‘nice’ things and they are used as expressions of how it is nice to be nice and how life would be better, perfect indeed, if people were just a little bit nicer. The possibility of ethical life comes to be contained, for people, in these objects, which means that for people who enjoy them the possibility of the world functioning well comes to end up looking like: if everyone behaved a little bit more like, and enjoyed the same things as, me, a nice middle-class boy or girl.

Keep Calm and Carry On was a cultural mantra and delusion that, in the post 2008 world, suggested that if everyone (and in particular the middle class) just collectively ‘wished hard enough’, things might change for the better.

Of course, that didn’t happened.

2008 was of course, also the year that Bitcoin launched. Another idea based on the same stucture: the idea that if one wished upon it hard enough, it would make it true.

The difference being that our collective wishful thinking was a passive hope, while the Bitcoin bros’ was an active form.

Britain throughout the 2010’s didn’t wish hard enough, but the Bitcoin bros did.

Which is why this is relevant to the Coinable advert.

Exit Through the Casino.

I’m currently about 1/3 of the way through the final edit of a text I’ve been working on since January called SLOP MACHINES. It’s about 40,000 words focused on the post 2008 fusion of code and capitalism and the world that it has created. So I’ve been thinking about crypto and culture all year tbh.

Coinbase’s advert is, I think, effective satire because it’s true. Since 2008 everything really has gotten worse. “keep calm and carry on”, the most powerful memetic weapon the UK government ever devised has run out of juice. “Everything is fine” really feels like the only line the elites in this country seem to muster.

Yet, we all have eyes and can see that it’s really not.

The advert itself, with its melody reminiscent of Oliver Twist musical; also contains a threatening subtext—one aimed squarely at the middle and credentialed classes. Everything is fucked, and if you you don’t do something you’re going to be driving for Deliveroo.

The implied message and solution of Coinbase’s advert is basically “a brighter future through finance”.

This image from my post on playability and systems the other week sums this sentiment up:

‘Gambling it all on hyper finance’ is, in my opinion, one of the only avenues of perceived agency that people have to escape the rot economy they find themselves in.

“If you want out, you need to exit via the casino.”

The other seemingly being “Blame migrants.”

You may think that I’m being cynical, but this sort of ‘casino culture’ is everywhere in the UK.

This recent Novara interview with Dr Eliza Filby author of Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad is interesting as she talks about the cultural explosion of financial advisers, financial podcasts, and people telling you how to manage your money we have seen since the pandemic.

In fact 46% of Zoomers in the UK own financial instruments, and 28% of the 18-34 year olds own crypto.

Rachel Reeves despite being part of Starmer’s “Everything is Fine” government, definitely knows that everything isn’t fine. She also sees “exit through the casino” is a viable avenue for exploration for the popualtion. Just last month she announced plans to nudge savers into buying stocks and shares instead.

The Coinbase campaign is effective because it’s speaking to the public’s justified anger, and explicitly names the rot that we have all been told to ignore: a nation that’s been economically frozen since 2008. But it channels us away from collective political questions and towards individual financial risk.

As good as “Everything is Fine” is, the ad’s satirical despair is basically a marketing funnel for its preferred solution: “exit through the casino.” It reframes systemic failure as an opportunity for a personal gamble.

As casino culture becomes more and more mainstream, and the government validating it as a legitimate escape route, the crucial question becomes: what happens when this bet fails for the majority?

What are we going to do when the ‘exit through the casino’ proves to be a revolving door?

Start Select Reset 📑

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June 21, 2025

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️ | The Chalk ♘

If life already feels precarious on your own high street, then a city like London must be ten times worse? 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/06/21/2515-no-go-london/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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No-Go London

Over the last few months I’ve been having a conversation with someone about why, exactly, “London is over/a bleak woke dystopia” has become the big talking point on the right. For many, London in their imaginary is some kind of end-times mash-up of: Blade Runner, stabbings, TikTok teens in ramen restaurants and roads blocked permanently by Just Stop Oil.

A view that when interrogated I think, tells us far more about life outside the capital than about the city itself.

First, The biggest burst of dislocation I have felt about the decline of this country wast not on a night bus through central, but back home in Thanet. 

With it’s seaside towns full of boarded shops, chain coffee shops and disappearing bus routes.

Over Easter a family friend, retired,  muttered over a mug tea that the town had tipped into violence; no police, no manners.

Later, walking in the Old Town, two cars locked bumpers. Drivers were out, shouting, slapping bonnets; passers by spilling out and joining in. The next day through a restaurant window, I watched a BMW cut off a young couple crossing the road. One pedestrian shouted, and the driver hit the brakes and got out, forehead to forehead with a guy shouting “you want some?” 

A lorry-driver, stuck, ended up getting out and playing referee until the driver moved on. 

My parents say these flare-ups are now routine. Maybe the pandemic fried everyone’s fuse. There’s anomie in the air. 

Right now, at home, there’s a dispersal order in place after a brawl in the same street. Thrown bottles, and smashed windows. Yet flip on the news and this sort of mayhem is always somewhere else; a stabbing in Hackney followed by a clip of Sadiq Khan looking concerned. An age based dispersal curfew aimed at young people is almost unimaginable in London, but they have been normal outside the M25 for decades.

If life already feels precarious on your own high street, then London must seem ten times worse. 

“London is Over” is a narrative fault-line.  

English culture has never quite trusted the capital. Blame Hogarth; blame the Victorian penny dreadfuls; blame Dickens if you like. The metropolis plays the villain because stories need a face; and London, unlike a declining business park in Essex, is a ready-made psychic landmark. Add in its diverse population and the scene is set. A convenient Other to shoulder the nations anxieties.

Yes, London has some grim statistics; but so do Glasgow, Manchester, Nottingham. Yet overall, crime is down. 

Meanwhile, rural crime costs farmers millions, emergency response times in the sticks are way up, and deaths of despair peak in coastal towns. Plus you don’t get regular mass brawls on the beach in London.

The countryside and suburbs in my opinion just fails to film well. Distance matters, but cameras matter more. I made an episode 5 years ago about how the media and outside of London. It’s more urgent than ever. Camera crews can reach Soho in twenty minutes; but they need hours and a packed lunch to get to Eastbourne. So the capital always wins for airtime.

Older boomers, more rural with patchier broadband absorb a loop of London violence on TV. Whilst younger users in the city watch something else online.

Auntie May in the village watches the BBC at 6pm and scrolls Facebook between her soaps: and the algorithm serves her the same knife-attack clip twice.

Back in the 70s, Gerbner called this mean-world syndrome: the more TV you swallow, the nastier the world looks. In Britain 2025, the mean world is in our pockets with us all the time. The villains are migrants, eco-warriors, gender-neutral baristas. But strip those urban images away and the anxiety out in the shires, beyond the screen has nowhere obvious to land.

Projection does useful work. If your GP’s down to one doctor, the last bank replaced by a Costa, and there’s an hour’s wait for an ambulance, it’s neater to insist that things must be worse in London. 

So a loop forms: rural unease fuels anti-city talk; national media pumps London footage; Facebook pages ad YouTubers monetise the churn. The capital’s imperfections—and its migrants—become catch-all explanations.

Strangers sell stories. And London has a big cast. Racial characters are handed an old script: once it was the gin-soaked mother; today it’s second-gen teens with Caribbean or Somali roots. Same scaffold; same role.

London isn’t paradise; it’s expensive, noisy, and very unequal. But the portrayal of the capital collapsing under the weight of rainbow flags, vegan burgers is theatre. 

Meanwhile the real rot nibbles away in places where buses stop at 8pm and the mobile signal dies on the high street.

Politicians also know this. And “Take back our streets” polls well with the over-55s, but the problem is, they only ever visit the shopping centre out of town. 

If we insist on villains, let us at least try to choose systemic ones; under-funded services, hollowed out local economies, first past the post in local government. Blaming London (or the people who give it its colour) is as empty as shouting at the sea. 

It fills airtime, gets clicks, but changes nothing on the ground.

I’m not sure what to do about it, I have no advice. But I do know that if you start looking around at your own high street, instead of across at the city’s dark and ominous skyline, the fear will fade. Because the real work, as ever, lies at home.

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June 14, 2025

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Culture 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed only on television and in toy boxes. A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2020/10/09/301-2040-abstract-objects/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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More Distant Than Ever

Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed only on television and in toy boxes. A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien.

America was the source of things: cartoons, comics, the music I listened to, and along with Japan, the computer games I played. And then there was Phoebe on TV, playing guitar again, in a coffee shop, in a city I thought I’d never visit. All these cultural products felt like they arrived from nowhere, created by no one. They simply just were. I had no notion that their creators—authors or the musicians in bands—were real people. US Presidents were characters on The Simpsons; Bill Clinton was a man who did not have sexual relations with a woman, and played the saxophone.

Even my young understanding of US politics felt like a fiction. The first Iraq War played out in grainy green night vision on the evening news, a conflict conducted by a faraway country in another faraway land. Later, a teacher told my class that democracy in America was dead, because a man in Florida had ruled on an election and given it to his brother. Far away news from another planet. And yet its cultural empire was present in the action figures on my floor, but the country itself was a distant myth.

Then the towers fell and everything changed. America didn’t just lose its mind; it exported its crisis. Its abstract anxieties became our domestic policy too: mass surveillance, invasive security, and a creeping authoritarianism under Blair, justified by an American war. The conflict was no longer a grainy TV show. Friend’s older brothers from school went off to fight, and as the war on terror ground on, my own friends went too, and some of them died. The American Empire arrived in the 2000’s, and it was / no longer an abstraction.

At the same time, a different kind of proximity was collapsing distance. On MySpace, I exchanged DMs with a member of one of my favourite American emo bands. For the first time, I realised, Americans were real people, living real lives, in a real place.

And thus began a decade’s long tension: it’s empire crept closer impersonally, while its people came closer too.

For me, the early 2010s were the years of convergence. Occupy emerged shortly after our own student protests, and it felt like we were all part of the same conversation. The same struggle happening in London, New York, Egypt, Spain, and Turkey etc. Everyday Americans felt closer than ever. The Web 2.0 internet and the iPhone erasing the final feelings of distance.

American voices became a constant presence in my life, strangers on screen, literally inches from my face. Their thoughts and arguments unfolding right alongside messages from my family and friends.

During the last decade, American culture, politics, and thinking seeped into the global consciousness. Looking back, 2016 feels like the high watermark. In the UK, the national trauma of Brexit blurred into the American spectacle of Trump 1. Online, it felt like the same psychic battle waged on two fronts. The media narratives, the populist anger, the cultural divisions—they were all / reflections in a mirror. Proximity was total.

The empire wasn’t just influencing us; its platforms had become the code spaces in which we lived our lives. Every movement in the American cultural sphere moved us in the UK too. We were all, captured in totality by its Empire.

I started checking out, but the pandemic sealed it. 2020 was a truly shared global experience, perhaps for the first time in history. But it revealed just how differently everyone processed it. No longer a distant myth, but an alienating alternate reality and beginning to drift away.

That summer, when protests erupted across Britain following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, America. The shared info-sphere caused Brits to adopt the language and framework of American struggle in our own policing protests. I could only understand it as events in the Imperial core had spurring unrest out in the colonies.

Today, to me, the United States as a country feels more distant than ever. I look in on social media and see American’s still posting. A disconcerting culture, hysterical, and strange. They speak English, but they aren’t like me. And yet, America’s material empire is closer than ever. I walk down the high street and there’s a Starbucks, a Wendy’s, a Five Guys. I use American platforms to host my blog, check my email, and watch cat videos.

This is all a paradox / to me. I am surrounded by the material and digital infrastructure of the American empire, yet its state of mind is half a world away. Middle-class Brits who fixate on American politics believe they are being international, but really it’s a symptom of being provincial—living so deep inside the imperial bubble you can’t see anything else.

I resent the last fifteen years of cultural exhaust. UK newspapers report blow-by-blow accounts of drama 5,000 miles away, yet because of the colonisation and its destruction of my info-environment, I have no idea why three ambulances, two fire engines, and the police were at the train station the other night.

There is trouble here too in Air Strip One. But many eyes still look elsewhere, across the pond, at an empire that is everywhere, but still very far away.

I struggle with America as state of mind, versus America as… state.

Start Select Reset 📑

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July 2, 2023

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport doesn’t know anything about culture, media or sport

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/07/02/301-2322-the-delamination-of-the-elite/

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The Delamination of the Elite

Last week the UK’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lucy Frazer, was interviewed by Jimmy McLoughlin on ‘Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future’. Apparently it’s a popular business podcast. Anyways, as of the time of this recording the video only has 529 views, 2 of them are mine. If you are in the UK and work in a creative industry, you should watch it too. Preferably from between fingers or behind the sofa. For those of you who can’t bring themselves to suffer though it. 

Here’s Popbitch newsletter’s review of the interview:

Watching the interview play out is such a crazy experience I had to watch it twice. The fact that this person is in charge of our culture and media industry is insane. It does make me wonder what kind of a life she leads. 

Here’s the thing: creative industries are fast moving and dynamic. Fractallinier in detail and their speed of change. Even if you follow things closely you can still be surprised.

Given that Frazer hasn’t played a video game since pong. Perhaps she would like to know the two things I learnt this week that surprised me.

First due to poorly redacted documents submitted as part of the FTC Activation Microsoft antitrust hearings, it comes to light that during 2021 – 1 million Playstation owners played Call Of Duty… And Nothing Else. 6 million PlayStation owners also spent more than 70% of their gaming time just playing Call of Duty.

I made an episode (21-08) about the release of Call of Duty Black Ops. Wondering why some of the issues surrounding its release weren’t in the proper news. I also observed that the Call of Duty franchise has generated more revenue than the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the box office. Double that of the cumulative box office for Star Wars. 

Yet the Marvel franchise is way more visible in mainstream media than Call of Duty. I direct your to a similar sentiment expressed recently on 301 in Episode 23-18 with the release of the new Zelda game.

The same legal documents also provide us with another figure from Sony. The average Call of Duty player spends over 100 hours a year playing the game. 100 hours a year or, given the player numbers and averages, 68,493 years of collective playtime in one game in 2021.

The other surprising statistic I learnt this week was that hotly anticipated RPG Baldur’s Gate III, has more dialogue than three times the word count of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. AND has 174 hours of animated cinematic. Which is more than twice the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined.

Or to put it another way. There’s more cinematic in Baldur’s Gate than the entire Marvel cinematic universe including all the Disney+ TV shows put together. All made and created with a budget of less than a single Marvel movie. With an expected minimum of 100 hours of game play, all this can be yours for just 60 quid, or 60p an hour. What a bargain. 

Both of these stats surprised me, and I would hope, be a surprise Frazer too. But I’m not sure they would. Like Frazer, the mainstream media doesn’t care for videogames either. They seem adamant to maintain the delusion that they are marginal cultural objects. As a result, ignoring a massive force that is shaping our cultural grammars and media environment.

The fact that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport doesn’t know anything about culture, media or sport is symptomatic –  better – an illustration of a much wider sickness afflicting the UK. The elite in this country – defined by a set of shared interests that cut across class, status, and occupation – have undergone a total delamination from the rest of society and reality.

It’s obvious and not very controversial to say that rich people live in a bubble, but it’s the wrong metaphor. Delamination is better. The peeling away or detachment of layers from a whole. You just have to look at the UK’s elite during the Corbyn era, or Brexit to see this delamination in action. I said back in episode 23-09 that our politicians are haunting an empty idea of empire, but the problem is much wider. Rishi Sunak, our prime minister is worth 730 million pounds and is probably the UK’s most delamniated man. A vast swath of the media and political class (you know, the people who actually run the country) are totally unmoored from reality. Social society is crumbling and as a class they are floating off, sliding around, over and across the tumbling rubble. 

The biggest problem facing our society is that the elite aren’t even aware that they have no idea what they are talking about. Or what the hell is going on.

Watch

The post The Delamination of the Elite | 2322 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 11, 2023

|

Permanently Moved 🔊, Politics ⚖️

The anti-refugee legislation proposed by the UK government is dangerous, and the suspension of Gary Lineker by the BBC for speaking out is ridiculous. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/03/11/301-2309-left-right-capital-and-the-fash/

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Sunset on an Empire: Left, Right, Capital, and the Fash

I was on holiday last week. I’d intended to make an episode before I left, but ran out of time. It’s all written and edited, I just need to record it. Rather than knock it out today, I’ve saved it as emergency content.

My holiday was great. I read a bunch of books, drank a lot of negroni and sat in the sun. The best bit was zero social media. The last time we went away the whole slow motion fall of Liz Truss as prime minister unfolded. This time, the new prime minister stood in front of a lectern with ‘Stop the Boats’ on it and announced a fascist piece of anti-refugee legislation.

That’s not hyperbole on my part unlike so many other deployments of that word. Removing human rights and peoples protections under modern day slavery laws is straight up fascism. The announcement was designed to appeal to about 100,000 demented old people who are drifting towards Nigel Farage’s new Reform Party – because they don’t think the current Conservative Party is racist enough.

I don’t talk about politics very often on 301. Not because I don’t care, but because I only have so much political energy. And believe it best spent elsewhere – on other activities. Plus I did the whole screaming and shouting about stuff on social media for many years. In fact, much to my chagrin, that behaviour made me a complicit partner to the creation of the socio-techno-media environment we now inhabit.

As I record this however, headlines across all the major newspapers in the UK aren’t about the refugee legislation at all. They aren’t about the UN’s Commissioner for refugees expressing her concern about the policies. Nor are they about the lives and stories of the Refugees themselves. Instead they are about the UK’s highest paid Television presenter and ex-footballer Gary Lineker. He criticised the government’s policy on Twitter. 

The resultant outcry from bigots on social media, and people who run the right wing newspapers was so fierce that Linker was suspended by the BBC. For breaking impartiality rules he isn’t even subject to.

His crime in the eyes of the demented mob? Not being enough of a cunt about refugees.

The shitstorm has of course been seen through the lens of culture war.

But this hides more serious events. By suspending Liniker the BBC has exposed itself not as a Public Broadcast insitution but a State Broadcaster. The BBC has been Cucked. Its chairman organised a 800k personal loan for Boris Johnson whilst he was PM. And its director general once ran as a conservative politician and has donated 400k to the Tory Party. 

Before I drift away into a larger point I want to say, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, that I support of human rights. The rights of trans people, the rights of refugees fleeing war, the rights of everyone. It’s not just refugees arriving to our shores after a perilous journey that this government wants to take rights away from – but everyone. Their intention to scrap the human rights act was in their last manifesto yet millions of people voted for it. So we are all all in this together. 

After the 2019 general election I said on 301 that “we now have to act and feel in a world where the country is run by the racist hard right”. The reality I’ve been in since then may or may not have been the same one as yours.

The thing about this shitshow is that everything going on in the UK, and further afield, war in Europe, American sabre rattling etc is that we are living though the End of Empires.

For the UK, the Suez Crisis of 1956 though the transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was a long sunset on an Empire that never considered the prospect of night. The British cultural psyche has never processed it. We have neither been honest with ourselves nor the rest of the world. The Empire ended, the Queen’s dead, yet all the same people are still in charge. 

Many members of Britan’s elite have spent every single day of their lives – from public school to parliament – amid the decaying ruins of a former Empire. As a result of haunting this empty idea, they are delusional.

This country has seen nearly 1000 years of the same ruling class. Most of whom now reduced to squabbling over the last of their ancestors silver. This is the main cause of the degenerate state of our society. Brexit was a symptom.

Another kind of elite are the post war boomer bourgeoisie who closed ranks in the future years ago. They bought houses in the 80’s and cheered on Austerity in the 2010s. They stood by as words lost all meaning. Ed miliband was branded a marxist. Jerrmy Corbyn – a man whose first act upon being elected as leader of the opposition was to attend a refugees welcome rally in Westminster – was recast as a racist. The last set of elite are the billionaires and the bankers.

Then there’s the rest of us. Encouraged to squabble amongst ourselves by algorithms for advertising engagement.

Culture war is a bad name for a real phenomenon. Below the trothing, swivel eyed bleating of social media and the narrative fantasies of mainstream media a reconfiguration is occurring. 

Left and right no longer has any meaning:

It’s just us, capital and the fash. 

Pick one, pick two, there is no centre ground.

Watch

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the episode in the edit.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post Sunset on an Empire: Left, Right, Capital, and the Fash | 2309 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I wrote about how I feel about the crisis in my podcast yesterday. But I do have a small narrative to offer, in addition to other narratives trying to make sense of the situation.

It’s been remarkable to see how quickly the ‘worst people’ have pivoted from 2 years of feeding the machine as dress-up epidemiologists to experts in Eastern European international relations and/or War Correspondents. The transparent switch and grift *should* be enough to choke on and cause scales to fall from eyes. But brainworms find their home between credulous ears.

It’s also bonkers the way people speak so confidently about the situation. How they project their own area of interest/side of whatever culture war they are engaged in on to the situation. One such egregious example has been covered at length by Huw Lemmey in his newsletter this week.

I really recommend you check it out. Huw writes “We all have our lenses through which we read the world, and it’s natural that when something new occurs that sits outside our frames of reference, we try to apply our ideological frames to understand it – usually unsuccessfully.”

Now, I have absolutely no fucking idea whats going on.

The situation is hugely complex and cannot be reduced down to one simple narrative or cause. Nato, Putin is hitler, blah, blah, blrainworms. Instead we have to try and complexify outwards. Understand the world in all its myriad contexts and relations (via ‘all the lenses’) to one another. ‘All the things’, the events ‘contain’.

One of the lenses that ‘the worst people’ look out upon the world though is via a European/liberal secular lens. Which means they restrict their view of multi-faceted events down to one myopic viewing angle. (see Huw’s newsletter again). They also seem to think tweeting about shit will stop an invasion or something, perhaps magical thinking does exist somewhere in their universe… anyways.

I’d like to briefly look though another lens. One that I have been seeing the invasion though but haven’t seen mentioned anywhere. else. I checked in with a friend in War Studies yesterday and they sent me this link as the only other example they had seen.

Narrative Hearts

This tweet from US Embassy Kyiv – Posted 22nd of Feb provides the window though which we can see another layer of complexity.

This tweet isn’t just ‘a troll’ as most of the English speaking press reported it. It references an ongoing and very real crisis – see below.

Reconstitution

A 2018 survey found that 71.7% of Ukrainians declared themselves believers. About 67.3% of the population declared adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity. In Russia 66% are believers. With 41.1% indicating adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity.

Since 1991 a great deal of the emergent post-Soviet Russian national identity has been reconstituted around an embrace and return to Russian Orthodoxy. In many respects Russia is one of the first ‘post secular states’ dealing with 100 years of spiritual whiplash. (Think about what it must have been like living though England during Edward VI/Jane/Mary/Elisabeth 1 or something). I also think the post secular state is coming for the rest of Europe this century too. So hold on to your hats.

It’s hard to describe to a secular person – in a Catholic rooted/post-reformation Protestant society – what it means to experience the world as an Orthodox Christian. A return to Orthodoxy means the return of the literal reality of symbols and signs. I don’t use the word Belive here, I purposely use Experience.

As the tweet from the US Embassy indicates: The narrative heart of Russia, ‘Mother Russia’ as a story has her roots in Kyiv and the history of the Kievan Rus’. The ‘Historical Russia and the mistakes of Lenin’ that Putin was rambling on about earlier this week is connected to this longer 1000 year religious and spiritual history.

Before we can go any further we must pivot to talk about ongoing events that I am pretty sure not a single one of ‘the worst people’ knows anything about at all….

UKRAINIAN CHURCH CRISIS

Since 2018 there has been an ongoing schism in the Orthodox Church. I’ve been following it all ambiently via orthochristian.com in my RSS reader for years.

On September 7, 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople sent two exarchs, one from the U.S. and another from Canada, to Kiev in order to initiate the process of “legitimatizing” a schismatic “autocephalous” church in the Ukraine, breaking its former promises not to do any such thing, and without any consultation with the existing canonical Church, which constitutes the vast majority of practicing Orthodox Christians in Ukraine.

It really is a crisis. The TLDR is nationalist sentiments in Ukraine are urging the appointment and creation of a ‘Ukrainian Church’. This schismatic unfolding also concerns the Greek Church equally.

A Ukrainian Church would cut the Russian Church adrift from its 1000 years of history and living narrative back to Kiev and its birthplace. Again it’s important to remember that Orthodoxy situates people in a living universe – the literal reality of symbols and signs.

To cut the Russian Church adrift ‘symbolically’ by the creation of a Ukrainian Church is also to do so ‘literally’. Resulting in an unmooring of the national story, a broken heart.

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Russia’s Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was consecrated in May 2020. Delayed due to the pandemic. The 3rd largest cathedral in the orthodox world.

Watch the speech given by the patriarch during the blessing:

It’s also worth noting that Euro News was incorrect, mosaics of Putin and Stalin were installed in the cathedral. Despite the public outcry.

I’m not going to go into the reality of image in Orthodoxy, but it gesturing toward.

So: we have the gathering together of a new and living national story post 1991, the threat of religious schism at its foundations, the consecration of a huge temple to the armed forces, and a war…. A war unfolding at the location of the beginning of the story.

Given the schismatic nature of the Russian/Ukrainian church and its consequences for the literal experience of reality for the people involved. It is worth considering the European wars of religion as a historical current for the ongoings in the world. (History of the European wars of religion of course acknowledge that is more complicated than the easy narrative of reformation for their cause)

Anyways. This is just a snippet of the ongoing present that complicates what’s happening. This lens extends the context of these events backward 1000 years. To what extent Putin himself feels like he is inside this current, given his formative years were spent rooting out the religious folks in the country he controls – we’ll probably never know – and I don’t really care. Regardless, his face is upon the temple wall. And this is a symbolic universe.

I really don’t know what the fuck is going on, nor am I pretending to know. The completeness of crisis is too big to understand. Too awful to try and comprehend. Nevertheless it’s important that we acknowledge that it’s way more complicated than any of the explanations the worst people are offering.

In a narrative war, a cultural war, one has to call out uncomplicated stories wherever we encounter them.

To be quite honest, the sensible thing to do is log off.

Photo 365

One of the things about taking a photo everyday, is that its made me realise *just* how much time I spend around/by the Old Man. “He never seems to worry Doesn’t care for fortune’s fame He never seems to hurry But he gets there just the same”

Say.Act.Feel

A recognition that not one of us knows what the fuck is going on. The past 2 years should have made this abundantly clear.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Been working on my Strelka talk every day – cancelled now obviously
• Working on an application for a thing with Andrew Dana Hudson
• Looking long and hard at a *very* nearly finished piece of creative work
• Learning more about Unity shaders
• Interviewed by Timo Peach on Unseethefuturepod
• Spreadsheeting

Dipping the Stacks

Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson’s Friendship of Happenstance | Fords Theatre

Anderson and Einstein met backstage after the concert and Einstein offered to escort Anderson to the Nassau Inn where she had a reservation. When she arrived with Einstein, the hotel manager denied her accommodations because of the inn’s stated “whites only” policy. Einstein invited Anderson to stay at his nearby home with his daughter for the night.

Chinese Scientists Discover How to Grow ‘Seawater’ Rice – Bloomberg

Chinese scientists have developed salt-tolerant strains of rice in a bid to ensure food security as sea levels rise from climate change.

Spotify playlists are being taken over by bot accounts

Multiple users have complained that their public, collaborative playlists — designed to allow Spotify users and their friends to curate songs in real time together — have been commandeered by bots masquerading as normal users, primarily one account simply named “Ashley.”

Headbangers’ Bangladesh: discussing the state of play with Dhaka’s hard rockers, Crunch

I first met Shahed in the trenches of retail, selling and shifting furniture for the well-healed and oft ill-mannered denizens of the King’s Road area of London while he was studying for an MBA. I knew he was a metalhead right away, with a serious fondness for the classics. 

What’s Their Game? – Outland

The NFT market has spawned a new cultural form that has elements of games but not their rules. Blitmap and Forgotten Runes are two examples.

Reading

I’ve been reading Gordon White’s Ani.Mysitc all week. Nothing else.

Taking it slow to absorb it. Gonna sling the ebook my on kindle and re-read over the next few months and take copious notes.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Wovenhand – Silver Sash

Silver Sash is Wovenhand’s first new album since 2016’s Star Treatment. An album I played to death. Wovenhand is of course, the long time musical project of American poet and songwriter David Eugene Edwards – the driving force behind hugely influential band 16 horsepower.

Silver Sash isn’t quite Edwards first material in years since Star treatment however. There’s been the 2018 collab album with Alexandrer Hacke Risha, and his surprise 2020 collaboration with one of my favourite synth wave artist’s Carpenter Brut – Which is brain melting good (See below)

Silver Sash is also a collaboration of sorts. Chuck French – guitarist of the now disbanded (sadly) aggressive Emocore band Plans Mistaken For Stars appears as co-writer. I wrote about the death of Gared O’Donnell, and the influence PMFS had on my life last year.

Silver Sash is a fucking fantastic album. Firmly rooted in Edwards religious gothic country, but Silver Sash takes on a more psych rock feel in 2022, with synths and lots of electronics. I wonder if the Brut collaboration moved the dial more in this direction? Then again I also think this may also be the influence of French too.

The albums 3rd track Duat Hawk has desert western vibes,

and contrasts nicely with the noisy (almost) industrial country song ‘The Lash’ which appears late on the LP

This album is so good, pretty much everything you might want from a gothic country band. The albums liner notes say that it was recored and mixed across the groups homes during the pandemic, I wonder if this also contributes towards its psych feel?

Two artists from two of my favourite bands have made an album together. What’s not to love?

By the way. If you have made it this far and NO IDEA who David Eugene Edwards is, I highly recommend The Preacher a documentary about him from the year 2000.

I also urge you all to watch Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (trailer below) a road trip documentary about musicians in the white American south. Its one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

yeule – Glitch Princess

I wrote last Jan that I was “looking forward to this release and hearing more ” after blogging about the opening track My Name is Nat Ćmiel.

The album doesn’t disappoint. Glitch Princess is an album of glitchy ambient pop, hazel vocals and bold imagery float over synths and pulses. Only for the lyrical content to explode into distorted screams.

The subject matter addressed on this album is at times quite difficult, anxieties, relationships, morbid imagery, depression, hyperbole. It is a in many ways a complete psychological character study of ‘yeule’. The album ends with a 4 hour 44 minute long ambient drone track (which I listened to whilst organising my bookshelf last Sunday) – 444 is also of course an angel number. I wondered if this album is an exercise in world building for the ‘character’ of album to live inside. The presence of Danny from PC music as producer and co-writer on some tracks seems to suggest this might be the case.

Friendly Machine is (I think) my favourite track:

Remember Kids:

The post Reconstitution appeared first on thejaymo.net.

July 31, 2021

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️ | The Chalk ♘

S04E28

The Lifeboat Service is one of the only institutions in the UK that embodies the notion of the Moral Good. I talk about Margate’s Great Storm of 1897, the culture war, and a statues influence on my life.

Donate to the RNLI: https://rnli.org/support-us/give-money/donate

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2021/07/31/2128-friend-to-all-nations/

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Website: https://thejaymo.net/

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TO THE CREW OF THE MARGATE SURF-BOAT,
“FRIEND TO ALL NATIONS.”

ALL night the pitiless blast had swept 
Out of the North-East blind as hell; 
Ere dawn, the sudden signal leapt, 
Death’s meteor-signal leapt and fell. 

Then, as the cry for rescue rang, 
With quick farewell to child and wife,
Into the roaring surf they sprang,
To yield their lives for the stranger’s life. 

Friend to all Nations ! Friend at need, 
Where danger sets the task to do ! 
Not ill they chose a name to speed,
The gallant craft of a gallant crew.

Stout hearts of Kent, that heard the call 
Of man to man in the face of death! 
Is this, is this the end of all 
These bodies dank with the salt sea’s breath? 

Nay, but their names shall stand in gold.
When the opened books of God are read, 
With deeds remembered and deeds untold 
That wait till the sea gives up its dead! 

Text: In Cap and bells, by Sir Owen Seaman. First publication: 1900 London Lane. 
Image: The Great Gale – Scene at Margate during the height of the storm – The Daily Graphic December 1 1897 – Via Margate Local History

Friend to All Nations

The Great Storm of 1897 is described in Kent Shipwrecks by Alan Bignell as ‘the worst storm‘.

For four days from 28th November though 2nd December, cyclonic winds blew at hurricane forces. Leaving the coastline strewn with the wrecks of small craft torn from their moorings. Debris from destroyed buildings littered the sands.

In the National Archives there are photos showing the devastation. One shows part of the destroyed Marine Palace and Switchback Railway.
The Victorian era roller coaster that ran along the cliffside. On what is now the site of the Turner Contemporary Gallery.

The wind and rain didn’t allow the tide to ebb from the harbour. Resulting in a tidal surge nine ft above the previous highest recorded level. Flooding most of what is now Margate old town.

In the early hours of the 2nd of December, the ship Persian Empire collided with the steamship Carlisle City. Both desperate to make it round the headland. The Persian Empire subsequently ran aground on the far side of Margate bay, dashed against the Nayland Rock. The crew fired their flares at 5a.m. But further tragedy was yet to come.

Within 30mins the surfboat Friend to All Nations was in the water alongside the RNLI lifeboat, Quiver.

The Friend to All Nations was a double-headed whale boat built in the local style. 32 feet long and 5ft 3 inches wide at its beam. Powered by oar and sail, 12 men plus – the superintendent of the Margate ambulance association – Charles Troughton heaved into the maelstrom to attempt rescue. In the 21 years since the boat had come on station, it had saved 395 lives. But none would be added to that tally today.

In the dark amidst the tempest, and the driving rain A tremendous sea struck the boat a quarter mile from shore. She capsized in about twelve feet of water, all aboard were thrown into the water.

Nine lifeboatmen lost their lives. Including the coxswain and the good doctor.

I have read the details of the inquest held the next day, but what’s more remarkable is that over 3,000 people, dressed in black, came out for the funeral. They are said to have lined the entire route from Margate Parade to the Cemetery. Shops were closed from noon till 4. 

Blinds were drawn in houses and church bells tolled.

Today as you leave Margate train station you’ll still see the memorial statue to the crew who lost their lives. A young man in a cork life vest looking out to sea. 

My understanding of the role of the RNLI is completely shaped by this story.

I first heard it as a child, growing up on the chalk by the sea. As an adult I’ve done loads of research about it. My WIP Solarpunk novel Smugglers Leap was, at one point, even named ‘Friend to all Nations‘.

Today, the lifeboat service in Margate is still bringing desperate people ashore. The RNLI are all volunteers who risk their lives to save others – and have been since the time of King George IV. 10 years longer I will add than the Conservative party has been in existence.

As the saying goes “A cry for help is the same in any language”. Whatever the weather. No questions asked.

The phrase Friend to All Nations for me is not just the name of a boat. It’s a phrase deeply embedded in my psyche and my politics.

The Lifeboat Service is one of the only institutions in the UK that embodies the notion of the Moral Good. Human beings who will launch to another rescue without judgement.

Heroes in other words.

This week, right wing reactionary fog horn Nigel Farage called the RNLI a Migrant Taxi Service. For rescuing desperate people at risk of drowning in the Channel. And budget British Shapiro trollalike Darren Grimes did a “British Lifeboats for British People” routine.

This latest move in culture war is backdropped by the Government’s Nationality and Borders bill. Which will see rescues at sea criminalised for “knowingly” assisting people to arrive in the UK without permission.

People like Farage and Grimes are a cancer in our culture.

What we are seeing is an attack on the very idea of compassion.
A disregard for human kindness, life, fellow feeling and humility.

Fuck That. 

I’m clearly not alone. Donations to the RNLI are up 3,000% after Farage’s migrant criticism.

This is not what we are about as a society. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted and forgiving. 

I’ve donated and so should you.

Watch

Big thanks to Huw Lemmey for feedback on the script for this episode.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the audio due to time constraints.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post Friend to All Nations | 2128 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

February 5, 2021

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

The incident reveals an important element of the British or more specially – the English – psyche.

The Political Voice.

Full show notes: https://thejaymo.net/2021/02/05/2105-the-political-voice-councillors-of-handforth

Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/
Webshow: http://comeinternetwith.me
Website: https://thejaymo.net/

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

The Political Voice as Demonstrated by the Councillors of Handforth

Overnight Handforth Parish Council has become the most famous parish council in Britain. A zoom call from a meeting in December 2020 has gone viral.

I’m going to assume that like me, you are extremely online and have already seen the full 18 minutes.

The video is so compelling because it surfaces the full spectrum of issues facing contemporary Britain. The lockdown and the phenomenon of the Zoom Room. Boomers. The moribund nature of public discourse. The banality and absurdity of little England and its political life. 

Let’s consider the opening 8 seconds. Which encapsulates the nature of Brexit Britain.

Voice 1: When do we plan to start? 

Voice 2: Fuck Off

Voice 3: I think we could start at any moment chairman

“When do we plan to start?”
IE: When should we begin thinking about the activities required to achieve our desired goal.

“Fuck off.”
The disregard for both the activities and the process needed to achieve the desired goal.

“I think we could start at any moment chairman”.
The word chairman signals to those in attendance that politics has begun.

The video is surreal. Which is where the comedy is found.
Participants LARPing how they believe politics should be conducted.

If you follow local politics. You’ll know that this video is only one or two notches above what is considered ‘normal behaviour’ across the country. 

Handforth Parish Council represents a population of about 7000 people. 

Barry Burkill, one of the figures kicked out the call, was elected with 316 votes in 2019 on a turnout of 42.6%.

Local politics is not the abstracted comings and goings of Westminster. The people involved are likely to bump into each other in the street, or in the carpark at Sainsbury’s. and yet they speak to each other like like they are anon trolls on Twitter.

Local politics is the mechanism by which people can shape their environs and day to day reality.

Here’s some examples of things a Parish Council has power over.

Local community assets like village halls and community centres. Local parks and swimming pools.

The bins in the highstreet. They can set rates in the car park (as the call goes on to discuss) and are the guardians of our common land.

They are also one of the only entities in British political life with a mandate for long term thinking. In the form of the local plan.

Under the Localism Act 2011. Parish councils are granted a “general power of competence”. In principle parish councils can set up their own companies or co-operatives. They can lend or invest money locally, run a shop, a post office or even an energy company. 

They don’t however. Because Brexit Britain is more concerned with titles, personal power and the petty procedure of standing orders. Bullying, bad behaviour and a British silent contempt for one’s neighbours.

The zoom room reveals an important element of the British – or more specially – the English – psyche. A spell that is well known, but little understood and almost never acknowledged. 

And that is the power in the invocation of the Political Voice.

Through the magic of the political voice it is possible to imbue any situation with the weight and inertia of the British State.

Try it yourselves. On your first visit to the pub after lockdown appoint a chairman for the evening and role play it from there. 

Everyone will immediately adopt the same Political Voice as demonstrated by the councillors of Handforth.

“I propose to you chairman, after a careful review of the evidence before me I put it to the table that it is time for another round”.

“The honourable lady to my left is suggesting table crips. I’d like to second that motion.”

“Please do excuse me for a moment table members. I must adjourn to the wet room.”

Non English listeners may be skeptical – but Trust me. We can produce this formal bullshit all evening . We can all talk like this for hours with no break at all. 

The Political Voice draws from the imaginary of the upper class. A role play that gives any situation more power. In invocation of the British state. By aping its mannerisms. 

The political voice is a phenomenon found at all levels of society.  From the beginning of a team meeting with an agenda, to every appraisal, and every covering letter.

All the way up to the grifters currently in charge of the UK. Think about Boris Johnson, Rees Mogg, Priti Patel. All spout this formal bullshit all the time. They sound competent but in reality are far from it.

One of the main reasons the media backed Sir Keir Starmer during his election campaign for Labour leader was that he is apparently “what a effective opposition leader should look and sound like”. 

The bullshit formalism of the political voice is like the Force. It surrounds us, penetrates us and binds Brexit Britain together. Paradoxically it is also the cause of it. British society would collapse without it.

Watching the Handforth Parish Council video reveals how we got to where we are. I don’t know what we can do about it to be honest. Other than speaking plainly in the public sphere.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post The Political Voice as Demonstrated by the Councillors of Handforth | 2105 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 27, 2020

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

S03E12

Landslides and Avalanches, The Run Out, Accelerationism, Post Post Modernity. 

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

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
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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 Covid-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.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post The Run Out | 2012 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 13, 2020

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

S3E10

The longue durée, paying taxes after pestilence, boomers, ancient greeks, make art when the time ghost is at the door.

—

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

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

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Living In A Time Of History

Today’s episode is a little weird. I couldn’t focus my thoughts this morning.

The Flu I’ve been afraid of since an epidemiologist scared me shitless about a decade ago is coming.

What you are about to hear is some sort of free writing essay that seems to be more dream logic than coherent argument. I’m away next week, but Huw Lemmey will be in the 301 hot seat with a coherent episode on the peasant crusaders of the middle ages.

It’s funny isn’t it. As the days pass to slowly become aware that you are alive in a time of capital H History. That the collective narrative has reached you personally and woven you into its plot. Everyone is potentially now a main character. The zeitgeist is here lads, get it a beer. The time ghost has come to haunt you.

Last year in episode 1921 – Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit I talked about my suspicion that Big media, an industry that rides and exploits the zeitgeist have gotten stuck in a Fukuyamian fugue state. Unable to break out of remixing the past. History however never stops. Much to the chagrin of people who run our economy and political parties.

Things continue to unfold, the sun comes up and the sun goes down. 

In The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage they write

Regardless of age or security of income, we are all in the business of making sense of a changing world. In all cases, understanding the nexus of past and future is crucial to acting upon what comes next. But who writes about these changes as long-term developments? Who nourishes those looking for brighter futures with the material from our collective past? Centuries and epochs are often mysteries too deep and wide for journalists to concern themselves with. Only in rare conversations does anyone notice that there are continuities that are relevant and possible to see.

Who is trained to wait steadily upon these vibrations of deeper time and then translate them for others?

Jo Guldi and David Armitage – The History Manifesto

I sometimes wonder about the Boomers. Brought up on a diet of cold war propaganda and in a childhood psychic environment of the threat of nuclear conflagration that could begin at any moment. I wonder if this explains many of their generational quirks. I also sometimes think that the children of 68, not only won. And continue to win. At the expense of everyone else. The way a steeplejack carries the ladder up behind them. Their revolution is still ongoing and they continue to fight hard for it. I don’t like generational politics as I think that way leads to 21st Century fascism. 

Jo and David’s book calls for a return of grand narratives of history. Long term thinking both backwards and forwards. I agree with them and really support their point of view. But when the time ghost is at the door you don’t need to stray far into any history book and see yourself in its pages.

When pestilence swept through the whole known world in 541 AD wiping out most of the farming community and of necessity leaving a trail of desolation in its wake, the then byzantine emperor Justinian showed no mercy towards the ruined freeholders. Even then, he did not refrain from demanding the annual tax, not only the amount at which he assessed each individual, but also the amount for which his deceased neighbours were liable.

During that time in Constantinople 1500 years ago. 10k people were supposed to have been dying a day. And yet the power structure still demanded its thite. Could you imagine it back then? Having to pay your dead neighbours taxes as well as your own, in the midst of all that trauma?

Boomers were the first generation in history to get fully vaccinated: Deadly influenza, measles, mumps, smallpox, polio, cholera and many more are words that when you speak their name out loud should carry the full weight of their historical trauma. We are here because others aren’t. 

The grandfather of #stacktivism John Snow drew his map in 1854. Creating the discipline of epidemiology, a science that most people hadn’t even heard of until perhaps a week ago. But despite its acclaim and influence every dot on his map is a local and very human trauma. An event that killed 616 people.

Can you imagine it? Whenever I read a history book I try to put my mind towards these people’s everyday experiences. What it must have been like to live or exist in a world that seemed so random, so cruel. 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 there way out of the void. 

Yesterday’s market crash, the worst since 1987 alone would be the front page news under any other narrative framing. But it’s not. The 1.5 trillion in treasuries loans announced yesterday isn’t really either.  We could be witnessing a wholesale breakdown of our institutions in real time: the social contract associated with democratic rule, the media, the healthcare and higher ed industrial complexes.

There have been many people calling online for artists and musicians to make their best art, perhaps like the Ancient Greeks all these events will compound and accelerate the meaning crisis towards a conclusion. The time ghost has been on hiatus since 2008, it’s now 2020 and borrowed time is now due.

There’s no money for healthcare but there’s 1.5 trillion for liquidity in the treasuries markets. No money for free schooling, but there’s money for the endless war on terror. Perhaps from this moment new epistemologies will arise. It is not a time to scoff and be reactionary about others emerging understandings of the nature of the world. We’ve had over 100 years of pure ideology alone, and the parts of society we are proud of have atrophied.

Make some art or some music and tell me how you feel about the ghost whos at the door. 

Almost all notable bits of European history beginning with a good plague.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Living In A Time Of History | 2010 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This week has been one big distracting side show. I’ve done nothing except make my self depressed and anxious by looking at the mainstream media environment is entirely a world of Ash and Limelight.

Speaking to my US friends about the Iowa Caucus they all seem to agree too.

I mean. It IS all a side show though isn’t it?

I really am not sure what sort of Democracy drip feeds the results from an internal party vote out over an entire 5 days. Perhaps it’s a Democracy with a total party system that wants to manage and maximise its media cycles. To distract its member from their massive failure. You know… the president being acquitted.. something which we all knew was going to happen the moment they announced the impeachment in the first place. It might be that sort of Democracy, but it certainly isn’t a healthy one.

Elsewhere a journalist and well known blogger who has been ‘very good’ as a lowkey propaganda organ for the EFF and good things like for my entire online life. Now has a sad case of terminal Russia Brain and is saying things like “these X journalists and whistleblowers should die in prison”. “enemies of America” on twitter. Madness.

Meanwhile in the UK you have conservative broadcaster/gammons walking off morning television for spurious reasons, to try and ‘own the libs’. The week also began with journalists boycotting a briefing at #10 because the government was trying to restrict outfits at the briefing to their preferred organs.

Also the scale of the mobilisations in Paris and France against Macron right now are also mind boggling. It’s been going on for over a year and they are only getting larger and larger.

I saw a ‘sensible’ guardianista using this photo saying something like “confident Macron and bumbling Boris” this week too. WTF? Macron is the most disliked premier of France ever and there are riots against him on the streets every week. The 2010’s have turned so so many peoples brains to mush.

Speaking of rotted brains I tried to understand Love Island over coffee earlier this week but failed. I’ve never seen a single second of it. Even the premise is lost on me. Which means I basically don’t understand (or get) something that 14% of the UK population is obsessed with.

What a disaster. It’s all spectacle. I know I should ignore it. But I’ve been glued to the horror this week. I’ve been looking deeply at it and tbqh the rest of my life has suffered. I’ve been grouchy and cantankerous towards loved ones this week and I feel horrible for doing so. I’ve also found it very hard to settle to get anything done even though I have a bunch of urgent and time sensitive things on my plate. I feel awful about that too.

I know this probably all sounds very rich and hypocritical from the person who wrote the words and insists that “Your attention is sovereign”. But I think this relapse into the eldritch horror that is the media environment has made me appreciate my own position even more. I’ve been at sea all week because I’ve been paying attention to the wrong things.

Its also remarkable how quick engaging with the outside world in as a media binge can effect your mental health.

With the release of the new Chrome browser on android apparently you can turn off the ‘Discover’ cards that appear on the google search/fresh tab page. Which is the main culprit for sucking me in to the mainstream media world.

Perhaps the only right thing I’ve paid attention to this week was band practice. I said that I’d joined a band. I can’t really say much about it right now but here’s a picture from practice. Our violin player has put down his bow and put a lap steel on his lap instead. Sounds great!

Permanently Moved

Sounds Like It’s Synthwave

S3E05

A veiled moan about procrastination and introducing the shows new theme for 2020! 

Links:

Bullet Journal Video

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

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

As you can probably tell from this blog and the episode it’s been a weird week for me. I did really enjoy working on the new theme tune tho.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Signed and sent an NDA woop woop

Gotta have an endoscopy up my nose on Tuesday. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.

Dipping the Stacks

BuyMeOnce | Selling Products That Are Built To Last | BuyMeOnce UK

Running a Paid Membership Program — by Craig Mod

The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred – BBC Future

A Third Of Londoners Admit To Seeing Ghosts While Driving | Mysterious Universe

Reading

I almost wrote that I haven’t read anything this week. But I did start Blood of Iax a warhammer 40k book. But then I looked in my Goodreads and lo I actually finished Ringworld Engineers this week. The fact I don’t remember reading the book either says a lot about my state of mind this week, or take it as my review of the book.

Music

I’m in the mood today to share one of my favourite songs of all time. Stars In the Streetlight by former hardXcore band, turned Americana giants Chamberlain.

I mean the lyrics are super cheesy but I have loved these opening lines since I was a teenager. They just open up the song as a narrative in such a great way.

You’re laid out like a landscape on the frontier of my floor.
In the next room the girls are singing, they must be wondering where you are.

Stars In the Streetlight

Remember Kids:

LOL love Gordon so much.

The post Ash and Limelight appeared first on thejaymo.net.

February 7, 2020

|

Attention 🎯 | Music 🎶 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

S3E05

A veiled moan about procrastination and introducing the shows new theme for 2020! 

Links:

Bullet Journal Video

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Sounds Like It’s Synthwave

So Brexit is done which means the noisy Brexit anthem that I made for Season Two is also now retired. It’s just a statistical fact that most of you listening to this weird little podcast of mine joined sometime in 2019, so unless you did the deep dive when you first subscribed you may not have even heard season one’s chip tune theme song. I would totally encourage you to go back and listen to some of the episodes from 2018 tho. Not just because i’m hungry for downloads but because there are some real gems in there that I really enjoyed making. But they have like a fifth of the total listens that more recent episodes get.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn however, that I got quite a bit of stick from friends who had been listening since season one when i changed over to the Brexit Anthem for season 2.

Tbh I actually thought it was MORE representative of me and my personality than a catchy chiptune track, but apparently I’m wrong about that. 

Anyway. I was really struggling with what to do for the new theme for season three. The need to write a new theme was looming as much as Brexit day itself was.

I could have just nicked something from the unfinished music pile I have here on my Hard Drive. But I recently made some background music for the bullet journal walkthrough video I posted on my youtube channel last month. It was cool to just make something and then push it out. 

As I always work much better with a list of things to do that is in front of me or when I have a clear brief. So I asked on twitter what kind of new theme music I should make. The results came back: ZERO % votes for chiptune, More noise at 10%, A Jingle came in at 30% but the overall winner was 80’s synth wave storming home with 60% of the votes.

So, Synthwave it is then. I sat down for one hour last night with renoise. I must admit I didn’t make any of the instruments from scratch yesterday, but they have all been made by me at some point in the past. So without any more fanfare let’s see how far I got:

This is Episode 20-05 of 301 – Permanently Moved, a personal podcast 301 seconds in length. Written, recorded and edited in one hour by me @thejaymo 

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Well there you go. The new theme for 2020. I don’t think it sounds too bad after an hour of work. I also don’t think it sounds ‘amazing ’ either. There’s a laundry list of things that i still want to work on:

The little drum kick intro needs to be humanised. The last snare is actually way early on the beat which I already tweaked, but it all still sounds too robotic. I want that to be the main moment after I finish the normal episode introduction. So it really stands out after I’ve said my name. 

I’m also unhappy with where the kick and snares sit in the mix, they’re way too loud at the moment. 

I also want to change the arpeggiated pattern on that main pluck saw sound as it’s a bit boring for now. 

I still need to add hats and some symbols on the drums. I need to also go back in and tweak the envelopes on the pads and perhaps most importantly of all – write a melody. 

But for today that’s as far as i got inside an hour. I’m going to continue to work on it, so you should hear how the intro changes and evolves over the coming weeks until it’s done. 

I really tend to only write or make sketches of things when I’m making music on my laptop. I  spend so long working on something and then step away from it to do something else. I always intend to go back to but never do. So many discarded tunes projects.

I have a whole synth wave EP I was working on last summer but never finished. Even though I enjoyed working on it a lot. You might remember the track I posted at the end of one of the episodes last year.

I also have a 3 part Tim Hecker Ravedeath inspired SLASH RIPOFF thing. A triptych to Saint Patrick, St Anthony and St Christopher which I sunk a lot of hours into but then stepped away from as it was sounding a little too much like it was nearly finished and I started to question if it was any good or not. 

Sometimes I think the only person that thinks having so many unfinished things on my laptop is acceptable is probably myself. Things just keep piling up and I just can only get like 10%  of them over the wall and on to the net. 

I’ve recently joined a genuine IRL band for the first time in a long long time and I’m really enjoying it. It’s because I’m working with others. Sketches HAVE to get turned into fully formed songs with a start middle and end. You have to iterate internally within the piece to mould it and shape it. Plus every time you play it though you get tighter as a group and play it better.

We’ve only had 2 practices so far but it’s been really interesting to me just how inspired I am by the whole thing. I have never really been a solo creator or musician. I’ve always been about collaboration and building boats for rising tides. It’s actually a little surprising to me how much of my identity is tied up in being a musician at heart. How good it feels to have weekly band practice in the diary.  To go to it. Make music as a group, be pleased with what you did and where something was three hours before and where it is now.  

But as I say here every six months or so.

Execute. ‘Finish what I start’ are two goals I have at the top of my goals list for 2020 in my notebook. I’m really struggling this year to fall into the regular rhythm and routine of working for myself and at home. I have things to do. And they arn’t getting done fast enough or at all.

I work in sprints. the pomodoro technique but for my entire life.

So i’m going to put out the theme song for this year as a track on youtube when its quote unquote ‘finished’. I hope you continue to listen and see how it evolves over the coming weeks.

Start Select Reset 📑

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The post Sounds Like It’s Synthwave | 2005 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

January 10, 2020

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

S3E01

The event horizon that is the M25 means that people in London confuse national political news for local news.

Happy New Year!

—

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

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

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Outside Of London

Last year I was all about Your Attention Is Sovereign. This is still true. It always is and has been. You alone are responsible for where you put your attention. To day as we begin the new decade I want to talk a little about one of the places I think we should be putting it in 2020.

This episode is directed at the portion of the audience that lives specifically in London. But I assume the general shape of the idea is applicable to other folks in other cities. 

London is a curious city, a city like no other. The flower of cities all.

A city with an enormous Gravity. Unlike other cities London is a total city. It is not only the capital, it is also the financial centre AND the creative centre, AND the political centre, AND the seat of the Sovereign. Other countries have these sources of power and influence distributed. In the US its Washington, New York, Los Angles etc.

London is a Gravity hole. One that swallows investment, money, infrastructure, influence and even souls. It’s great if you live here, but it means it is almost impossible to see over the event horizon and peep ‘outside’.

Being back home over Christmas made me realise that ‘London’ for the vast majority population is really far away. Not just a place but the Idea of it. For many people in the UK it might as well be on a different planet. Even if it’s only 100 miles or 1h20 on a train. 

Last year we went to Bridport in Dorset for a wedding.. The thatcher man who was repairing the roof of the Airbnb we stayed in knew were from London, as the entire economy of the village is now built around two weddings a week at the barn on the estate. He said something to my and my friend Jen that continues to stick with me. He said, “I went to London once”. He said he liked it, a bit busy, but once was enough. What a hero. 

Even I remember what London was like as a teenager growing up on the chalk in the late 90’s early naughty’s. Seeing all the gigs every week in the back of metal hammer, imagining what wonders Camden Market actually contained. Imagine living there!

The UK is now fully entrenched in peripherally vs core political dynamics, it is ironic that as we leave Europe our domestic political arrangement has finally caught up with wider global trends. In 1950, the population living in UK cities was 79% – already a large figure – but one which is set to rise to 92.2% by 2030. Unfortunately unless we see any radical electoral reform (which we won’t) the way our political system is designed means the peripherally, potentially just 8% of the population has more power than the core – the same dynamics also play out in the united states and most of Europe.

By 2030 the 8% of people living outside of cities in the UK are going to continue to think that London specifically, is an alien place on another planet. That’s only going to continue to get worse.

The never ending live blogs on major news sites of the minute by minute political developments that are going on in Westminster are completely irrelevant to them. From the outside it seems like the media have lost their minds. Which they have. And so have you.

The event horizon that is the M25 means that people in London confuse national political news for local news – I am just as guilty of this personally as the media are. And my friends are too.

I can’t name my local mayor. I know the head of the local council, but she’s the ward over from me, i have no idea who my councillor is. Whilst I am happy that there’s a whole section of the local park that’s being re-wild including lots of new trees. I had no idea that it was happening until I saw it and went home and looked it up. 

Local news is the most important news. 

2020 for me is about engaging with the local sphere. I want to know about road closures, speed limits, the local housing plan, the bike lanes, the bins. I’m going to try and submit my thoughts to all local consultations as the opportunities arise. 

I’ve already gone deep and found a blogger who attends local council meetings and writes it up. They’re a tory but It’s only the second week in Jan and I already feel more informed about the world directly around me. Far far more informed than if I’d continued to follow the national news and deluded myself that it was local news.

Just because it is happening here, doesn’t mean that it’s happening here. If you know what I mean. There is a reason politicians on the right always bring up the bins or potholes. 

It’s because local news is the most important news.  

The most important thing is people. Follow more blogs this year and get an RSS reader.
If you don’t have one you can now subscribe to my blog thejaymo.net via email.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Outside Of London | 2001 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 13, 2019

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

S2E37

The day after.

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

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Show Supporter 📻

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Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

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We Are Just At That Point In The Timeline

I was sitting at a desk at the Novara Media office last night the moment they announced the poll numbers.

It was like a psychic grenade had DETONATED in the centre of the room.

A Zero-G explosion from a sci fi movie followed by a moment of pin drop silence. Only the sound of the equipment fans and the pouring rain from the open window.

I have now idea how long that silence lasted. 1 second? 1 hour? A Lifetime? 

It reached its limit and was followed by the implosion. Not as someone being disingenuous might take the meaning. But a real psychic Implosion. A roaring of psychic force that concentrated matter and energy. It filled the hearts and minds of every single person in the room and the building. And continued to build throughout the night.

A redoubled effort. A Drive, New Purpose. Forged in that moment of silence in the room.

We are just at the point in the timeline. 

Zooming way way out. Away from the day to day court gossip and intrigue that passes for political reporting in this country. The UK has finally fallen to centrifugal forces of polarisation and collapse.

No matter what the centrists will attempt to splutter at you. Whilst clinging to the jetsam of their political project in the coming weeks. This did not begin with Brexit, nor the financial collapse, and it had absolutely nothing to do a lack of charisma. The outcome of yesterday’s election was the last gasp of an empire that is ending. 

The end of the cold war unipolar world as it begins its half century long turn toward a multi polar one. That the actual poles are melting is inherent in this rearrangement. 

The pasokification of the UK is now complete. Defined by the collapse of the technocratic centre ground. With the simultaneous rise of nationalist, left-wing and right wing populist alternatives.

This election was fought on unprecedented, but not unexpected societal terrain. 

The 2019 Hansard Audit of political engagement found that:

72% say the system of governing needs ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of improvement..

47% feel they have no influence at all over national decision-making. a new high for the Audit series which has been running since 2004

And more worryingly. Britons have more confidence in the military and judges than in politicians to act in the public interest.

Combined with trust in Politicians across the western world at an all time low and trust in Journalists not fairing much better.

In August 2018 I wrote the following on my blog and it seemed to strike a nerve: I’m going to repeat them now.

The question that we all face as a society this morning is what kind of world are we going to act in.

We are partly, still in the same world as yesterday. Britain is going to leave the EU. We now know when. January the 31st 2020. Just 49 days to reorient. 

Despite the loud bleating of remainers and the centrist press. Britain. Was always going to be leaving the EU. Despite the technocratic centers half successful attempt at rapidly constructing a European Identity.

It is now vital that you help all friends and family who have been wearing this as a cloak of protection come to terms with reality as quickly as possible. It is important to act in the world in full knowledge that there is also absolutely no way that the UK is ever going to rejoin the European project. 

On the one hand. To do so would require us to make a whole host of constitutional reforms like an elected second house that are basically never going to happen.  Nore would the global economy or the City of London countenance the required adoption of the Euro. 

On the other.

Given that we ARE at that point in the timeline. By the time any argument around re-joining Europe could be won – there may not even be a ‘European Union’ to rejoin. Many of the countries in the union are facing the same historical forces as we are. And the Euro as a monetary mechanism is absolutely Donald Ducked. 

We have to act and feel in a world where the country run by the racist hard right. There are a laundry list of things that are going to get worse before it gets better. Most immediately today I mourn for the fate of NHS, and friends including myself who are disabled or suffer chronic or life threatening illnesses. I stand in solidarity with my friends and comrades of colour and other monitories who are now afraid for their lives. 

This world we are going to now act in. The rules have changed and will continue to do so until the early 2030s.

However. Yesterday.

The Labour Party won 203 seats on the back of one of the most radical manifesto it has ever presented to the country. We have to own that win as much as we do the defeat. Seats lost were due to the ongoing unspooling of historical forces, around meaning, globalisation and identity. The tories won them over with a simple narrative and simple messaging.

We have simple messages too. 

As the UK’s ultra-left propaganda machine Deterritorial Support Group precisely diagnosed back in 2012:

It’s just Us, Capital and the Fash.

You may have noticed that I have been avoiding talking about politics. On this podcast, on my blog or on the socials. It’s not to say that I haven’t had lots of long detailed conversations about politics in meat space. I haven’t felt it necessary to contribute to the outrage machine. 

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

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