SatNav for the soul®

The number one scourge of modern civilisation today is disconnectedness. As the shadow of globalisation creeps over the world like a giant hand and the multinational fingers pull the strings of control we sit in front of our screens and become more and more disengaged from everything that makes life worth living. In just a few hundred years we have overturned millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of cultural development. Technology has reached a tipping point and instead of improving the quality of life it is actually diminishing it.

And Twitter is part of the conspiracy.

Why is Twitter so popular? At first glance, it seems that everything that Twitter has to offer is already accommodated by other forms of communication – Instant Messaging, email, Skype, telephones, newspapers, content aggregators… The answer is that it distils most of these into an immediate ego rush. Imagine taking the first line of one of your diary entries and publishing it for all the world to see. What sort of ego massage is that, especially if the diary entry is also selling something of yours?

Then there’s the numbers.

Once you have made your diary entry public, you can watch it being devoured (or not) by the public. Is it being RT’d (re-tweeted)? If it is, that’s a small achievement in the popularity game. RT’ing someone else’s tweets can curry favour from those being RT’d for a while but if you persist  until it becomes arbitrary you can quickly become a sycophant. Then you can collect followers. This is the old, ‘Look at my numbers!’ game. The numbers can be views, followers, subscribers or dollars. The result is the same; competition for a part of the available market. In the case of Twitter it is competition for attention, but to the conspirators in charge, what is being competed for is irrelevant, it is the competition that is the important element because without competition, disconnectedness is harder to maintain. And pity on you if you are following more people that are following you, you might as well kill yourself now because with the values we have in today’s society that makes you of no interest whatsoever to anybody except the conspirators who see you  as a passive consumer. Such is the price we pay for attention.

So, if you are idly sitting by some device, alone or with a group of friends (if you are with friends why aren’t you interacting with them?), watching the chatter that echoes around the globe, know this, you are part of the conspiracy of disconnectedeness.

Got another one of those pre-recorded telephone messages selling me a debt cancellation service or something. It did not identify itself in any way and invited me to press 5 for a free, no obligation chat that wouldn’t cost me a penny (I will wait for my telephone statement and check for lies). This I chose to do and got a pen poised over a blank sheet of paper ready to take some details. A bored sounding girl answered the ringing tone with a ‘how can I help?’ question.

I asked for her name. Immediately, she put the telephone down on me.

These people know. They know they are working outside the law and run from anything that sounds investigative. A pox on their lives.

I am reliably informed that today is, ‘Grandparents Day’ as designated by the greetings card industry. Their quest for ever more profit is still skirting the line of moral acceptability but what with the creation of vulture funds, as a legitimate way of making money, it won’t be long before they abandon any pretence of acceptability and create occasions just to fill up the calendar.

Here are a few of my guesses as to what they might come up with but you are invited to add your own in the comments.

• 9/11 terror Day
• Amputee Day
• Suicide in the family anniversary Day
• Gender change operation Day
• Murder victim remembrance Day
• Buy a card just-for-the-hell-of-it Day

This was the entrance to an interesting garden at Alnwick castle. You had to be on a guided tour to view it as it had several prohibited plants, cannabis being one. The plant was suitably caged as well as behind the bars of the garden (a condition of them keeping it, we were told).

However, the plant that should have been caged was not. It was tobacco. The guide said it was one of the most toxic plants on the earth. Then he told a little story, a true one. Children aged eleven years old were employed by the tobacco companies in South Africa to pick the green leaf. The nicotine is so insidious it permeates through the green leaf and into the skin of the child picking it. As a result the children suffer from Green Tobacco Sickness, a syndrome that is the equivalent of smoking fifty cigarettes a day…

Feel my rage…

Whilst visiting my sister and brother-in-law in York the other day I was chatting with my nephew Anton who was also there, taking a break from his job in London. He was complaining to me about the weather predictions on the mainstream media and their lack of London references. He told me this was due to the BBC directive of not being London-centric and to include the provinces whenever possible. The argument being that the weather in the Orkneys, for example, is far more important to the peasants working in the fields there than it is to a London city slicker who spends most of their time underground, indoors, or under a table (that’s my interpretation of his words).

On reflection, I found this idea hugely entertaining and grossly patronising. The authorities in the capital have demonstrated their largesse by granting a minuscule amount of air time to the peasants in the rest of the country during the weather reports, how generous is that?

A national football stadium we didn’t get. A proportional share of arts funding we don’t get. A representative number of provincial bands being signed up by major labels we don’t get. A faithful reflection of the class structure in Britain portrayed in the mainstream media we don’t get.

But hey, we got the weather!

For some reason Lynndie England has been interviewed recently by the media. She was jailed for her part in the Abu Ghraib regime of abuse. The interview I saw on television was absolutely despicable. If I had been present I would have been tempted to slap her face. I’m talking about the female interviewer of course.

The interviewer was showing Lynndie the notorious photographs of herself published around the world and asked her why she was smiling. She also asked her if she didn’t feel any shame or moral uncertainty at the time. The interviewer clearly has no understanding of human psychology, none.

By a coincidence, I am currently reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It describes brilliantly how the facade of civilisation is so easily stripped away. It describes the terrifying and hugely empowering leap into the unknown space of lawlessness, of crossing the line between acceptable and unacceptable.

Lynndie England had crossed the line. And it felt good. It felt good because she was reassured by the authorities around her that she wouldn’t be punished for doing it. It is the, ‘I was just following orders’ scenario. Let us explore the concept of crossing the line.

Milgram, in his famous experiment, demonstrated that most people would ‘cross the line’ of killing someone if given enough backup by a figure in authority – they were simply following instructions.

Humans are instinctively curious. If something is prohibited, we become even more curious about the that which is prohibited. The story of Adam and Eve demonstrates this. The story of capitalism demonstrates this (what is it like to be rich?). Sexual fantasies derive their power from being unlikely to happen in reality i.e. prohibited. Imagine then if you were given the opportunity to live out a fantasy in reality without anyone ever finding out. Would you take it? Would you cross the line?

Now some people are more freethinking than others. The more freethinking you are, the sooner you would stop in the Milgram experiment and I dare say that these sort of people would also object at the things being done to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But freethinkers don’t join the military. The military-industrial complex is anathema to any freethinker, ergo it is the easily manipulated, pliable personalities who join the military. Not only that, but the military processes these people to be compliant, to follow orders, even when the orders seem insane (kill these strangers – how insane can it get?).

Add to this, that the military attracts personalities which are prone to crossing the line (there are documentaries now which has ex combatants discussing frankly their joy of killing and the incredible thrill they get from combat) and the Lynndie England story becomes a tired and depressingly predictable one.

What the hell did the interviewer expect? A grovelling apology? An epiphany of moral enlightenment? Where the hell was the interviewers moral outrage? Why didn’t she object to the interview taking place and demand that the real culprits be named, not Lynndie England, but the members of the administration which condoned these methods? Why wasn’t Dick Cheney being interviewed instead? The eternal farce is still being played out; an insignificant scapegoat is made to carry the burden of public admonishment while the real villains slyly move on to other atrocities.

No, the entire interview was a farce, no better than the show trials of Stalin. And complicit in the debacle, once again, is mainstream media.

I would like to interview the interviewer and confront her, just as she did with Lynndie England, with the footage of that interview and ask her why she didn’t feel any moral outrage at what she was doing at the time. How was it good journalism?

I have sympathy for Lynndie England. What she did was wrong but the greater sin of approving authority goes unpunished.

In recent years I’ve noticed that these pre-recorded telephone messages trying to sell you something (I have to confess I never listen to any of them) are becoming more and more of a nuisance. So much so that I keep thinking I ought to go and see my MP, Ed Balls, and demand that he introduce some legislation banning all unsolicited sales calls using pre-recorded messages. I mean, they must cost virtually nothing to run – no call centres, no wages to pay, just some smarmy actor to pay for who must be down on his luck to do such a depraved job, so what’s to stop them proliferating? Imagine where it could end if nothing is done – your telephone is constantly ringing with these spam calls. It’s bad enough getting a live unsolicited call but when you can’t be rude/clever/sarcastic/angry (delete inapplicable) because you’re just talking to a machine, I get angry.

I think I will go to the surgery of my MP with a list of demands. I’ve never done anything like it before and my assumption is that it is a waste of time, but hey, maybe Ed Balls is just sitting there every month, twiddling his thumbs and wishing someone would come in and ask him to do something constructive. I’ll let you know how I get on.

If that is a waste of time my Plan B is to employ the very same people who create these calls to mount a campaign which harangues people into signing a petition which asks the government  to ban these calls. Wait a minute… that’s a YouTube sketch waiting to be done, surely? I bags it first.

It’s been interesting hearing the MP’s shift ground on the expenses issue. At first they just said ‘we’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all within the rules’. Then when the media wouldn’t let the story die and more revelations emerged which demonstrated the abuse of the current system, some of the MP’s said er, ‘we’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all within the rules’.

Hey, these are MP’s we’re talking about.

But the public indignation was such that the Prime Minister had to produce a risible YouTube video which attempted to slow down the out of control gravy train. This backfired spectacularly and the gravy train picked up some more frightening speed.

So then some independent people (Martin Bell in particular) started to complain that there was no contrition in any of these ripostes from the MP’s and slowly the whole debacle started to take on a more sinister hue. Isn’t their standard rebuttal of ‘we’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all within the rules’, exactly the same one that any participant of any evil regime that has ever existed always trots out? Yes, it is.

Suddenly the gravy train is threatening to look more like a train wreck in a very short space of time.

Now we hear admissions from all sides of the government that the system has to change and that it is no longer acceptable to maintain that, ‘we’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all within the rules’. However, I can’t help thinking that we have been here before. Didn’t something similar happen to the banks? Yes, it did.

Have we seen any legislation yet? No, we haven’t.
Oh there will be change of some kind with the MP’s expenses I’m sure but what change will there be and who will police it?

That gravy train is too valuable a cargo to simply let it run away.