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Suzy’s Space: 2010

January

13/1: A failed experiment

“Contemporary capitalism breeds a destructive society,” The Age, 13/1. As noted in previous entries, I had increasingly felt that the society I live in is increasingly sick and dysfunctional, and this excellent article clarifies why. Britain is the focus, but it could equally apply to Australia or the USA.

Britain is undergoing a period of serious self-doubt and introspection after a spate of brutal killings and increasingly common and violent anti-social behaviour by young people. Australia is engaged in its own bout of hand-wringing over youth alcohol abuse and random public violence.

Oliver James, author of The Selfish Capitalist, argues that contemporary capitalism, with its emphasis on short-term jobs, a workaholic culture, rampant consumerism and worship of celebrity and the lifestyles of the rich and famous creates a crisis of desire, with depression, anxiety and substance abuse resulting. James argues that you can clearly track the development of neo-liberal, selfish capitalism alongside the growth of mental and emotional distress, especially in Western countries, where individualism has been promoted and encouraged the most.

Both the Right (conservative) and elements of the Left (progressive/liberal) political movements take the blame. The Right promotes rampant capitalism and individualism, and the Left forgoes discipline for excessive focus on “libertarian individualism.” The collectivist social networks that sustained older types of societies (such as the hunter-gatherer ones I have mentioned in previous entries) have been abandoned, and the result is a society of frightened, isolated individuals.

This poisonous social system has spread like a virus to other countries and cultures. Russia experienced an extreme version of uncontrolled capitalism after the collapse of Communism in 1991, and for ordinary citizens it proved a nightmare, while a few greedy opportunists (the oligarches) looted the country of much of its wealth. Not surprisingly, the former Soviet republics have a high suicide rate:

The only countries with higher official suicide rates are Sri Lanka, which is mired in an unending civil war, and the former Soviet republics and their Eastern European satellites, where economic disaster and profound political changes have combined to produce the kind of social disintegration otherwise associated with catastrophic military defeat. Source

Children look to adults for guides to behavior, and many adults in this society are sorry examples for role models. These adults, such as those in advertising, corporations and popular culture, regard children merely as future consumers, and encourage greed and selfishness in promoting their products.

Is it not rather strange that the young people raised under the influence of the selfish individualism and consumerism of recent decades get roundly criticised for behaving selfishly? For what is the rash of kids behaving badly – rowdy parties, excessive alcohol consumption and public violence – if not an adolescent version of the selfish destructiveness exhibited by so many of our economic elite in recent years?

The vandalism of trains, the treatment of public space at night as a forum for intimidation and fighting are surely youthful manifestations of the same contempt shown for the public sphere, the public sector and collective endeavour by the champions of market-driven individualism who have captured and distorted our public culture in the past two decades.

Why blame kids for behaving selfishly when our whole society is based on the idea that individuals acting in their own interests produce the optimum economic and social outcomes? This strange theory about human behaviour has helped to create many of the problems we face today as a society, including economic and environmental crises, as well as high levels of social dysfunction, manifesting in suicide, crime, violence, stress, relationship breakdown, child abuse and anti-social behaviour.

This malaise is so entrenched now that it seems impossible to change; too many people profit from the way society currently is. The social experiment of “neo-liberal, selfish capitalism” has been proven a massive failure. Perhaps nothing short of a revolution will change things.

March

7/3: The asteroid did it

“Panel confirms dino crater link,” BBC News, 4/3. After much debate, various experts have decided that the culprit for making the dinosaurs extinct was an asteroid after all – the one that caused the crater at Chicxulub.

The review confirms that a unique layer of debris iridium ejected from a crater is compositionally linked to the Mexican crater and is also coincident with rocks associated at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary.

The team also says that an abundance of shocked quartz in rock layers across the world at the K-T boundary lends further weight to conclusions that a massive meteorite impact happened at the time of the mass extinction. This form of the mineral occurs when rocks have been hit very quickly by a massive force. It is only found at nuclear explosion sites and at asteroid impact sites.

“Combining all available data from different science disciplines led us to conclude that a large asteroid impact 65 million years ago in modern day Mexico was the major cause of the mass extinctions,” said author Dr. Peter Schulte, assistant professor at the University of Erlangen in Germany.

There have been 5 major extinction events to date; the most extensive one was earlier than the K-T, the Permian–Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago which killed off most Earth life (the cause of this is unknown). I suspect the next major event will involve humanity (human-caused extinction of other life forms is already happening). If that eventuates, I wonder what will evolve to replace us. I doubt they would have the same type of intelligence as us, so they may not develop anything we recognize as technology or a civilization, and so no archaeologists to dig up our artifacts. In that case humans will just be another forgotten footnote in Earth’s long history.

If time travel were possible, I would (like many) love to go back and see the dinosaurs (though preferably not get eaten!). Earth then would be like an alien planet – the atmosphere (more oxygen), the sun (younger and hotter), different plants and creatures. The Moon would appear larger in the sky as it was closer (it is moving away about 3.8 cm per year, so 75 million years ago it would be 2850 km closer, if my calculation is correct). The days would be a little shorter (a day was 21.9 hours long 620 million years ago). So things would be familiar yet strange.

If an asteroid or comet were to approach Earth on an impact trajectory, there would be nothing we could do with current technologies, even if it were detected in time. Stephen Baxter’s novel Titan (possibly the gloomiest novel ever written!) has such a scenario, though this asteroid is a human-induced impact. The extract below describes the nightmarish moment of impact:

It came in at an angle, far to the east, a blindingly white line scrawled across the sky. It was a crack in the Aristotelian dome, Fahy thought, allowing in the monsters.

Asteroid 2002OA had arrived.

She had to turn away, it was so bright.

It was going to be an ocean strike, then. Just as NORAD predicted. A few hundred miles off the coast, she guessed.

The dazzling light had faded now.

So it was true. She thought she’d imagined, with some soft unscientific part of her, until this moment, that it might be just some fantastic hypothesis.

Well, Earth hadn’t suffered a strike like this for millions of years. Human written culture went back maybe five thousand years. There was no institutional memory of such an event as this. No wonder it was hard to comprehend, even to plan for. It should be.

Clouds were boiling, scudding across the sky. The spectacle was playing out in an eerie silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stilled.

The atmosphere would have provided no effective shield against the strike; the asteroid must have reached the ocean with no significant loss of mass or velocity: a mountainous mass of rock, moving at orbital speeds, through the delicate atmosphere of Earth. There was essentially an immense cylindrical explosion going on right now, its effects scouring outwards over the surface of the planet.

From orbit, she thought, it would be a hell of a sight: the crater still visible, a glowing red puncture miles across, keeping the sea at bay with its raw heat; an immense column of dust and pulverized rock and vapor rising up above it, its lip extending tens of miles into the atmosphere; the clouds bubbling outwards in ranks, like the concentric rings around a bull’s eye target.

A breeze, warm and heavy, pushed against her face, pressing from the east. There were flecks of moisture on the wind. She licked her lips. Salt: ocean water, scooped up and hurled across hundreds of miles.

Maybe there would be tsunamis. But the geometry was dicey; it depended precisely where the impact was, the topography of the ocean bed. Gradual slopes could reflect the wave energy back to the Atlantic …

There was noise now, at last, a deep bass rumble like remote thunder. The light continued to fade.

The ground shifted, the solid marble of the Memorial’s vast plinth shuddering like a live thing.

For the first time, she was scared. The ground wasn’t supposed to move under you, damn it. It was as if some deep superstitious part of her had woken, an animal peering up at a violent sky in terror.

Dark, thick storm clouds streamed over the sky above Fahy, obscuring the sun. Rain started to fall, big droplets, pelting against the marble surfaces, her clothes and hair, heavy and warm and salty.

She permitted herself a fragment of hope. After all she wasn’t dead yet. The strike itself was over. The world was going to be a piece of shit after this, war or not; but maybe, just maybe, she might live through this to see it.

Maybe NORAD and the rest had miscalculated, she thought. Maybe 2002OA just wasn’t a big enough punch to –

But there was something on the horizon, now: a grey wall, perhaps a bank of cloud.

Oh.

The secondary effects need not concern her any more, she thought.

The wall was water, a bank of it that had to be a mile high. Already it was marching inland. Even from this distance she could see debris embedded in its curving, steel-grey flank: rocks, fragments of ships, pieces of smashed-up buildings. It was the debris that would do the damage, she knew; with its help that wave could scour the ground clean of any sign this capital city had ever existed.

We don’t deserve this, she thought. Although maybe it looks different if you sit in Beijing. And there are those who say something like this, some terrible conclusion, was inevitable, that the huge technological project we’ve been following was bound to end in grief and destruction.

But I know we don’t deserve to have this done to us. Sure, we got things wrong. And we’re guilty of being the only nation in history to have dropped an atomic weapon on an opponent. But didn’t we beat back the Nazis and the Japs? Wasn’t it a good thing that we won the Cold War, and not the other side? Was it really such a terrible thing, to aspire to walk on the moons of Saturn …?

I will, she thought, never see the sun again.

She felt a wrench, a deep sorrow.

The clouds thickened, and moist air buffeted her face, driven ahead of that horizon-spanning piston of water.

14/3: Freedom vs. security

“The Singapore Solution,” National Geographic, 1/2010. On the success of Singapore, which has come at some costs. There are elements of the society that appeal to me, and others that don’t.

Achieving all this has required a delicate balancing act, an often paradoxical interplay between what some Singaporeans refer to as “the big stick and the big carrot.” What strikes you first is the carrot: giddy financial growth fueling never ending construction and consumerism. Against this is the stick, most often symbolized by the infamous ban on chewing gum and the caning of people for spray-painting cars. Disruptive things like racial and religious disharmony? They’re simply not allowed, and no one steals anyone else’s wallet.

Singapore, maybe more than anywhere else, crystallizes an elemental question: What price prosperity and security? Are they worth living in a place that many contend is a socially engineered, nose-to-the-grindstone, workaholic rat race, where the self-perpetuating ruling party enforces draconian laws (your airport entry card informs you, in red letters, that the penalty for drug trafficking is “DEATH”), squashes press freedom, and offers a debatable level of financial transparency?

The aspect of that society I don’t like, as described in the article, is its intensely obsessive competitiveness and capitalism, which makes life stressful and uncertain.

And so bloggers, like the satirist Mr. Brown and the urbanely pugnacious Yawning Bread, are free to broadcast opinions unlikely to be found in the pages of the government-linked Straits Times. As a result, more and more young people are questioning the trade-off between freedom and security–and even calling for freer politics and fewer social controls. […]

I returned to what the MM had said about Confucius’s belief “that man could be perfected.” This was, the MM said with a sigh, “an optimistic way of looking at life.” People abuse freedom. That is his beef with America: The rights of individuals to do their own thing allow them to misbehave at the expense of an orderly society. As they say in Singapore: What good are all those rights if you’re afraid to go out at night?

Melbourne is a sorry example of abuse of freedom: it is not safe to go in the city (or around the suburbs) at night due to the drunken violence and stabbings that have become prevalent in recent years. Australian society is in general undisciplined (perhaps a legacy of its convict settlement origins), and I find myself wishing that some aspects of the “Singapore Solution” could be implemented! (Such as the banning of chewing gum and caning for graffiti vandals.)

For myself, I would trade off some freedom for security: for good (affordable) health care, for a stable job, for a place where I could walk around without fear of assault. But I would wish to live in a slower-paced society than what Singapore is.

April

23/4: Disrespecting the dead

“Jealous keepers of the sacred bones,” The Age, 13/3. A group of Australian Aboriginal people, the Ngarrindjeri, want the bones of their ancestors repatriated from various museums overseas to be reburied in their homelands. Such treatment of indigenous human remains (here and those of other countries) has been a common practice.

These remains were collected by explorers and anthropologists between 1788 and 1948, in what most Aborigines consider a glorified grave-robbing campaign, when bodies and parts were plucked from trees and ripped from riverbanks, dug up from burial sites and stolen from hospitals, asylums and prisons. Zoologist Eric Mjoberg, who led the first Swedish expedition into the Kimberley in 1910, followed Aborigines on ceremonies, only to later raid their sites, smuggling the remains out of Australia as “kangaroo bones.” Publication of Mjoberg’s diaries, in which he describes “skeleton hunting” and depicts Aborigines as cannibals, outraged Swedes, and led, in 2004, to the voluntary return of 18 boxes of bones by Stockholm’s Museum of Ethnography.

I suspect this was justified by the perpetrators because the indigenous populations were seen as sub-human, and thus not worthy of respect.

Sometimes the conservatism goes deeper. “A lot of these people look at Aborigines as biologically inferior,” Bob Weatherall says. “To them we are just tools of the trade.”

I envy those who have such deep ancestral ties to their homeland. Though I was born in Australia, I still do not feel truly a part of the land – yet I would feel equally alienated should I go to the U.K. where my ancestors come from, as the culture there is strange to me. My family are scattered over Australia and some are in the U.K., so there is no common ancestral graveyard. The prospect of being buried or cremated in some random cemetery is depressing; being buried near my ancestors would provide some comfort. Update 22/12/2012: the closest my family have to such a graveyard is Clarendon cemetery, where my maternal grandmother’s ashes were scattered, and her own parents are buried.

Another example is that of the ancient Egyptian pharoahs, whose mummies have been removed from their tombs and put on display around the world – something the kings would likely be very displeased about had they forseen it. Perhaps it would be preferable to return them to their tombs after studying them as they are better-preserved there (though they would need guarding from tomb robbers). I liked this comment (that stood out from the usual inane ones) at a MetaFilter post from 2007 on King Tutankhamun:

[…] When I saw Ramses II’s mummy in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, I mean, you stare right down at the guy and you can see his hair and fingernails and everything. And I started thinking about all of the things he did in his ninety some-odd years of life and 67-year reign of Egypt … and that probably the last thing he ever imagined was to end up as a shriveled Halloween corpse under glass for gum-chewing tourists to gawk at, I’d imagine.

And when I walked through the Tut exhibit, there were kids running in circles and screaming and one super rude guy chatting loudly on his cel phone (despite the no-phones signs) and all in all just being disrespectful, I thought. And it just seemed kinda wrong in a way. I mean, this isn’t IKEA, you’re walking through the artifacts of someone’s TOMB, people.

I didn’t go into King Tut’s tomb (costs extra and it was too crowded) but I went into three others at Valley of the Kings. Those tombs were a lot easier to deal with claustrophobia-wise than going under the pyramids (couldn’t deal with that). I really did wish they had left the artifacts in there, though, and put the walkways and glass encasements around them. The wall decorations are cool, but it would’ve been fascinating to see things closer to how they were found. It just seems more respectful, too. I know they took artifacts out to preserve them, but with all of the touring they’ve done I can’t imagine that world travel is so great for them either.

How Egyptian relics travel the world is very political, though. My understanding is that most of the archaeology done in Egypt is done by other countries … they have far more money to spend on it. So then it’s kind of implied that the countries that do the work also get dibs on having exhibitions in their home countries. It’s a really competitive battle that’s been going on forever. Kinda sucks for Egyptians in a way, because a lot of people would rather their artifacts stay on Egyptian soil and weren’t sitting in Vienna or Manhattan or wherever.

– posted by miss lynnster

23/4: Stupidity of the masses

The banal swill of anonymous postings oozing down the commentary sections of politically or celebrity oriented blogs and news sites worldwide is often crude and obscene enough to make one give up on civilization entirely.

– Roland Kelts, “Private Worlds”

“Banal swill” sums up how I often feel when browsing the Internet. There is so much mundane and stupid crap on it that I sometimes feel like withdrawing altogether. If there is one thing many news sites and blogs should do, it is disable reader comments. Cynicism and snark are endemic, and one cannot risk trying to initiate a serious discussion without some immature jerk butting in with what they think are witty comments, or being mocked and derided. While occasional sarcasm can be humorous, a constant barrage of people trying to outdo each other in what they think are clever remarks rapidly becomes wearisome. Examples of such can be found at the community site MetaFilter and a science fiction news site called io9 (the comments section of io9 can be particularly exasperating). I continue to visit these sites because they sometimes have links to interesting articles, but more often than not, such sites make me want to eviscerate their participants.

I honestly think that reading too much Internet snark is bad for one’s mental health – the cynicism has certainly subtly affected me (to the point of wishing for the catastrophic collapse of this inane civilization I live in), and genuine sincerity is regarded with suspicion.

On a related topic, popular culture – namely the entertainment, related consumerism and advertising that permenates Western civilization – is a particularly odious example of mass stupidity. It is designed to be superficially appealing (particularly to younger people who are especially seduced by its manufactured message of rebellion) and any other culture infested by it is guaranteed to have its collective IQ drop.

Bhutan is one country that has managed to resist much of such stupidity because of a policy of isolation, but the introduction of TV and the Internet is already changing this. I read an article a few years ago about how its children were becoming negatively affected because of the permeation of Western media. North Korea is another country that is determindly isolationist. In 2007 there was a Foreign Correspondent report on North Korea, aptly titled a “Parallel Universe.” I wrote in a journal entry:

A curious and somewhat unsettling place, like a hermit that is determined to shut out the world. I wonder how the people will cope when reality forces its way in (as it invariably will – what are their plans after Kim Jong Il dies?). The capital city seemed clean and tidy, but glimpses of the countryside showed people toiling in rather barren-looking fields without farm machinery. I have to admit it was a nice change to see a quiet city without advertising, rubbish, overcrowding, traffic, etc. (corporate advertising is just as much propaganda in its own way as the more traditional government sort). Also, it was nice to see children who had not been infected and warped by consumer greed and popular culture – but that will undoubtedly change if and when the regime falls.

May

6/5: Fanfiction furore

A post by an author who was criticizing fanfiction on the Internet has caused something of an online furore, inciting much indignation on the part of fanfiction writers and the Internet lynch mob. For myself, I am astonished at the entitled attitudes of such fanfiction writers. They are not writing original fiction, but stories based on an author’s own original characters and world, which arguably belong to her and no one else. I have never felt any urge to write fanfiction (it would not have even occurred to me before I started using the Internet) – in fact, I would feel rather strange doing so as I have my own original story and characters. A lot of fanfiction is quite bad (not to mention perverted – a description of humans I recently thought of is that they are “oversexed primates”).

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter characters have been appropriated by fanfiction writers, and this extract shows her ambivalent feelings about it:

But it’s also one more example of how she will never really be in control of Harry again. She knows he’s bigger than she is now and not always in ways she likes. Parents may need to let go of their children, but artists want eternal ownership, and you can feel her ambivalence – or even something more fierce and protective – at the prospect of legions of writers who want to take up Harry’s story as their own. One declared at last summer’s biggest Potterfest that, as Rowling had left the sandbox, it was open for all to play in. But this is no game to her. She can tell you exactly which character she was sketching on New Year’s Eve 1990 at the moment her mother died. (It was Professor Sprout, McGonagall’s “pragmatic foil,” she says. “I was six months in, and I was finalizing the composition of the head table.”) Knowing where you were when you first read Harry Potter, she says, is not the same as knowing where you were when you created him. If you can solve the puzzles and break the codes on her website, you can see her earliest drawings and edited manuscript pages and glimpse just how deep her devotion goes. “He’s still mine,” she says. “Many people may feel that they own him. But he’s a very real character to me, and no one’s thought about him more than I have.” (TIME magazine)

Some have said that the author’s opinion is baseless as some of her characters were based on those from other works, but there is a difference between being inspired by others, and actually copying the characters. You can draw inspiration from many sources, mix them together, and come up with your own original work (I do).

Posting fiction or writing on the Internet is a form of publishing, even if it is not for profit. Writing fanfiction for oneself privately is one thing, but an author has every right to be mightily peeved when she sees her characters – who can be quite real and personal to her – being warped by others on the Internet. People would be better to put their creative efforts into original work.

Another blog post on the topic, by George R.R. Martin.

June

3/6: Escapism

The latest shiny pretty gadget called the iPad was released this week to much near-hysteria. But it too will be replaced by something even prettier in a few years and end up in landfill, thus continuing the wasteful and pointless cycle of consumerism. Humans have evolved to be attracted to shiny pretty things, and consumerism exploits this cunningly.

A post at the Naviblue.com forums linked to an interview with a writer called Derrick Jensen (I reproduced it as the original link has disappeared). He has a lot to say on how dysfunctional modern technological civilization is. Pre-agricultural societies are referred to as “primitive,” a word that has derisive overtones, but in many respects they are more wise than ours.

Another post at Avatar-Forums.com mentioned a book called Original Wisdom by Robert Wolff, which seems to have received positive reviews; it is also about traditional people’s ways of seeing and living.

An extraordinary amount of effort is put into creating imaginary worlds, though mediums such as gaming, movies and novels (and this also is tied to consumerism, in that people pay to view such efforts). Perhaps this is indicative of our society being so mundane and unpleasant that people seek to escape it virtually. Real life for many people is a dreary routine of trudging off to some irrelevant job every day in order to try to make enough money to survive – as the interview notes.

You were talking about how tribal people have a lot of leisure time. Most people in this civilization work for a whole year and maybe get 7 days of vacation time. That’s all the vacation time you get in 365 days until you’re 65 years old. A vast segment of your life has been sucked up by this vacuum which we call civilization. And that’s a crazy way to live. When I was in college I remember a lot of my friends were already looking forward to their retirement. They’re looking for retirement when they haven’t even started their life yet.

I certainly seek escapism myself, as I find my reality to be a dreary grey place (literally in urban areas, where Nature is smothered by concrete and asphalt). The Avatar movie resonated with so many people because it seemed such a magical and unspoilt place in contrast.

I suspect that those few people still living as hunter-gatherers in tribal societies would find such manufactured escapism bizarre. I find this so, when I look at it objectively, as if I were an alien studying such a culture.

The Australian Aborigines had (and still have) their Dreaming, in which the inner and outer worlds are merged, and time is circular. It’s a difficult concept for a Westerner to grasp, having been brought up in a society that emphasizes logic and has a strictly linear view of time and thus of progress.

There’s been a lot of dreary fuss and bother about a tax on resources mining in Australia. This mainly takes place in the vast Western Australia outback. When I see media footage of the red land being scoured and dug up by giant machines, I think of a quote from Avatar: “See the world we come from: there’s no green there. They’ve killed their mother, and they’re going to do the same thing here.” (A National Geographic article from 2007: “New Australia Mining Boom Taking Toll on Outback Life”)

July

24/7: Mindless consumption

There have been toy sales at various department stores recently. While wandering through them I saw swarms of mothers with grumpy kids in tow, piling boxes of toys into trolleys in a frantic rush to buy them before they sold out. I could only ponder, what a pointless exercise it all is – the toys are mostly overpriced junk made by cheap exploited labour in far-away countries; the children will soon lose interest in their new possessions, and yet more non-biodegradable plastic will eventually be discarded and end up in landfill. The whole cycle is so typical of consumerism; the huge amount of resources required to sustain it is shockingly wasteful and environmentally devastating. The plastics themselves are toxic and their effects on the human body are a long-term uncontrolled experiment.

Via a negative comment [1] in an entry at writer Charlie Stross’s blog (more on that shortly) I came across The Dark Mountain Project, a movement that aims

to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to reflect clearly and honestly on our place in the world. We call this process Uncivilisation.

They question the idea of progress and technology always creating a better world; much evidence now demonstrates exactly the opposite. Many engineeering projects, for example, are guilty of hubris, believing they can control Nature – as in the case of dams such as the Three Gorges Dam – but Nature will always ultimately triumph, often to the detriment of humanity.

That commenter has the typical view that technology will triumph over everything and those doubting this are just Luddites. I am not anti-technology, but the way it is used now is simply unsustainable. The capitalist consumer society based on endless growth is simply not sustainable long-term and is environmentally destructive. And, no, we’re not likely to start mining asteroids or colonizing other worlds anytime soon. We must learn to live sustainably on this world. A few random ideas:

This is effectively the downsizing of civilization, and it doesn’t necessarily involve abandoning the comforts of civilization such as medicine and heating in winter! The vision I have is of high-tech and simple, environmentally-friendly living combined, such as a house and garden with its own water supply and solar power, part of a small community connected to others physically by rail and virtually by high-speed Internet. If nanotech could be developed, this would be a great asset – nanobots could manufacture virtually all a household’s needs (though specialists would still be needed to do their programming).

This would require a radical social change; too much for governments now to contemplate. I was disappointed at the response to the recent global financial crisis (2007-2008) – the so-called “solution” was to merely give billions to those who had created the problem, and get back to business as usual! It could have been a catalyst for change, but no one had the courage to try.

JulesLt | July 23, 2010 18:36

I’ve been having a similar frustration with the whole Dark Mountain / uncivilisation crowd prevalent with The Idler set (yet more metropolitan broadsheet wealthy retirees), Alan Moore and Copey.

One particular thing that annoyed – the vision of someone playing Street Fighter on a solar or bicycle powered (I forget which) Super Nintendo, because it epitomized so much that was ill thought out – for starters, a SNES requires vastly more energy to run than any of today’s low power miracles.

Arguably, the total energy required by the infrastructure industries to create a product like a modern smartphone is probably a lot more than was required to produce the NES, or early 8-bit garage computers, but there is no denying that in a post-civilized state you’d be a lot better off with a low-power portable system.

Secondly – it was the implication of ‘no new software’ that is expressed in that thought. Not ‘some kid showing a game he’d written on his bicycle powered computer’. We will perform plays and sit around campfires singing songs and listening to stories, in a world that seems, in an endless festival organised by the Mutoid Waste Company.

Where, I suspect, the storytellers and singers currently charging people to go to their Dark Mountain festival, etc, will somehow expect themselves to be exempt from spending 70% of their time farming enough food to stay alive, because they’re doing something useful.

There’s also something a bit Pol Pot about it all.

Although I love the Guardian article I linked having done a search on them.

September

9/9: Urban madness

“Is life in the city driving you mad?” I read this Daily Mail article and realized that is exactly how I feel, though I live in the suburbs rather than the city itself.

City residents are more likely to develop mental illnesses such as schizophrenia than those who live in rural areas, a study has found. Researchers from Cardiff University examined the lifestyles of more 200,000 people in Sweden and found that those who lived in urban areas were more at risk from psychosis than people who lived in villages. The experts don’t know exactly why this is but they suggest that town and city residents are more likely to be ostracised by those around them. They are more likely to experience discrimination if they do not fit in, which can lead to them feeling anxious and even developing mental illnesses. […] Dr Stanley Zammit also added that people living in towns and cities were more likely to develop other mental illnesses that result in personality changes – a condition known as non-affective psychosis. It is not the first time statistics have shown that country life is healthier.

I would add to that overcrowding, traffic noise and detachment from Nature as more triggers for mental illness, and are unhealthy places for children to grow up in. A similar article from last year, “How the city hurts your brain,” Boston Globe, 2/1/2009, vindicates why I find cities such disagreeable places.

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we’re crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it’s become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.

That is just one reason why population reduction – and the “downsizing of civilization” as mentioned in my previous ( 24/7/2010) entry – is a necessity for our long-term survival; it is good for mental health.

29/9: Crap art

Literally in this case … Article from a local newspaper:

Student’s controversial body of work

An exhibition featuring an artist’s own faeces is set to divide patrons at a Moorabbin gallery. Student artist Georgie Mattingley’s works, some of which feature brightly coloured excrement, will go on display at the Kingston Arts Centre next month. But art experts rejected suggestions the exhibition, Life is Delicious, was a grab for notoriety.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is a series of resin spheres containing Mattingley’s faeces, along with flowers, leaves and crystals. The Monash University student, 21, said she became fascinated with altering the colour of her excrement when she was 13, and the exhibition was an exploration of the “beauty in the mundane process of eating and consuming in our everyday lives.”

“I’ve done everything I can to turn something so vulgar and repulsive into something so beautiful and spiritual,” she said.

RMIT associate professor Linda Williams said there was merit to Mattingley’s work. “She is, I think, trying to reclaim the idea that bodily processes are not something to be ashamed of,” Ms Williams said.

Life is Delicious is at Kingston Arts Centre, Moorabbin, from October 7-19. Entry is free.

Words fail me … surely this must be a joke? Calling this exhibition “art” is another sign that the collapse of this decadent civilization is not far away! And artists wonder why the general public can be reluctant to increase elite arts funding?

I’m just trying not to think too much about how she got samples!