Absurd Shards #5 - The twinning of Kalachi and Leicester

It was announced the other day that Kalachi and Leicester are to be twinned after a protracted period of courting from representatives of both towns.

Kalachi, a remote village in northern Kazakhstan, can be reached by traversing a barren steppe and is 300 miles away from the capital Astana.  Since 2013, a mysterious ailment has struck the village, a ‘sleeping sickness’ which has incurred over 150 reported cases of people literally falling asleep or at times succumbing to comatose states lasting several days.

Similarly in Leicester over recent months, the townspeople have intermittently fallen victim to states of severe mental fatigue and delusions.  They have excavated a long-dead monarch, lain him in state and paraded his casket through the streets in a fit of bizarre obeisance before consigning his earthly remains to rest again.

By succumbing to, and venerating, a figure beyond salient comprehension, they seek the museumification of the present.  By establishing possession over this symbol of the past they forge psychological connections with a history that can only ever elude them and render more tangible the notion that collective society, and their individual lives in tandem, are in some meaningful way progressing along a navigable meridian of national heritage.

When the present reaches a critical mass of disassociation and malaise, it is very common for people to swoon into a reverie of retrospective obsession, abandoning the perceived illusion of the quotidian for distracting hallucinations of the past.

In Kalachi, many have blamed the sickness on mystical forces, others as a strange symptom of mass hysteria.  Others point to carbon monoxide poisoning, or radiation from a disused Soviet-era uranium mine for more rational explanations.  In Leicester, ingrained deference and age-old memories echo through the city, refusing to be silent; who knows whether or not they will continue to emanate from beneath the concrete of a long-stay car park.  

Down and out on Pall Mall - Anarchist squatters and the failings of contemporary leftism

Pall Mall reclines like a resplendent boulevard through the province of Mayfair, a pinion between Green Park and Trafalgar Square.  Nobility and high society have sloshed back and forth along this channel for several centuries, and so it is a point of not inconsiderable perplexity to be faced with the black-and-red flags and banners of a troupe of anarchist squatters who, for almost two weeks have managed to adopt as their home the vacated Institute of Directors building at number 123.

Styling themselves as the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians (ANAL), they lost their battle for possession at a court hearing on Monday and are now faced with imminent eviction.  The occupation of residential properties was made a criminal offence by the coalition in 2012, and Tory MP Mike Weatherley has (perhaps in apoplexy at ANAL’s audacity) launched a bid to apply the same rules to commercial properties.   

Indeed, the group have been shifted from one abandoned property to another in recent months; a bedraggled circus of misfits and rebels, a virulent strain inching ever closer to the nerve centre of representative power itself.  They claimed to have taken control of the building as a means of highlighting the staggering abundance of property left deserted and unused whilst homelessness in the capital fluctuates around the figure of 6,000, almost doubling during Boris Johnson’s mayoralty.  

It is certainly a worthy obscenity to force a spotlight onto, and difficult to think of a more potent spectacle that this ragtag bunch of would-be anarchists could have alighted upon – almost equidistant between Parliament and Buckingham Palace, and a mere stroll from Carlton House Terrace that last year was delicately placed on the market at £250m, making it the most expensive property ever sold in the UK.

When I went to pay them a visit, the pale white Neoclassical facade was necklaced with a banner proclaiming ‘Anti-Capitalista!’, whilst a placard denoting Tony Blair’s inauguration of the building for the recently-departed business leaders had been drastically modified. 

Inside this period building one of the first things I spotted was a bloody tampon hung from a supporting column like a dead mouse.  I asked whether this was an attempt at a modern art installation.  “We like to express ourselves honestly...this is natural so we need to get over it”, said one of the female squatters with a self-assured, attractive face and long hair wrought into dreadlocks.  If this was meant to be a kind of transgressive trophy it fell some way short, but nonetheless it did stay with me in a symbolic sense throughout my tour of the building.

There were a few laptops and acoustic guitars lying around, an assortment of posters and placards, bin bags engorged with food salvaged from supermarket skips.  A disparate huddle of teenagers sat around cross-legged, swigging beer and generally just hanging out, although most looked as though they had families and homes to go back to at the end of the day.  My tour guides were to be two older members who had been assigned (presumably by themselves) to “deal with the media”.

Their amiability was cosmetically applied to conceal a pallor of suspicion, perfectly understandable considering reports of bother from police infiltrators to the building.  On being prompted though they quickly launched into their ethos and mandate – to “exist in the cracks that capitalism creates”, to provide a place of shelter for the homeless and vulnerable, and provide a programme of events, workshops, film nights, as well as a ‘people’s kitchen’.  They were keen to stress that there are no enforced rules, except an intolerance of violence and prejudice.

It is hard to be cynical about their stated aim of hitting back at the increasingly intolerable ‘rentier’ culture that has settled itself upon London; the deck stacked so that the owners of ‘buy-to-let’ properties, professional landlords and letting agencies have an unjustifiably strong advantage over the often precarious renting class.  

While the main parties begin to taxi along the runway towards the general election, they have begun going through the pre-flight routine of giving prospective house-build numbers, to be shrugged off by a general public more interested in the in-flight entertainment options (a long-dead King’s burial anyone?).  But the fact that several thousand properties stand empty and unused makes a mockery of their pledges, as all the while, from Elephant and Castle to Barnet, social cleansing under the auspices of gentrification hacks away at existent communities, and luxurious apartment complexes sprout up to fill the space, almost entirely devoid of any human agency whatsoever - built by no one, to be lived in by no one, merely to exist as monuments to capital.

“We try to remind people how close they are, whether it’s one or two paychecks, from the predicament of homelessness”, one of my guides said.  “The system is set up so that people are made to feel like they aren’t so bad off, they still get to buy a pair of fancy trainers, they still get to do some fun things.  But all the while the rich are leaving everyone well behind...”

We took the elegant staircase that winds around the central trunk of the building, the walls adorned here and there with makeshift flags and posters of the usual anarchist insignia that seemed to have been strung up rather hastily as though under a sense of obligation, like a show-house having been prepped for a viewing with all the right visual indicators.

I asked whether the fact that the Green Party are enjoying something of a renaissance is something that the left as a whole needed to get behind and support instead of maintaining division.  “The whole problem is, as soon as you’re voting for a political party you’re effectively saying that a representative can make decisions on behalf of you.  We want a more horizontal form of political organisation”, was the reply.

In essence, this is the fundamental flaw of the left, the perpetual fractiousness that Monty Python so adroitly lampooned with their ‘People’s Front of Judea’ gag; the sublimated yearning to play the role of underdog constantly at odds with a powerful society that they despise precisely because they are denied any power of their own, except to play at being the underdogs.  It is a form of narcissism that exposes the ‘hard left’ to its own inherent contradictions, that for all their theorising about socialisation and establishing comity, their defensive ideological barbs, worn proudly to combat a society they see as being embattled against them even at the risk of alienating their own sympathisers, means that they can never remain cohesively bound together as a collective to be taken seriously.

I have sat in on meetings with academic Marxists and earnest socialists and listened with growing incredulity as dogmatic shot-puts like whether it’s preferable to identify yourself as being a ‘reactionary’ or ‘revolutionary Leninist’ are tossed into the wet sand-pit of pseudo-intellectual lethargy.  For such factions as these, the ‘revolution’ takes on a mystical quality in which to invest an unquestioning faith just like evangelical Christians waiting on the Rapture.   

Rudolf Rocker, in his seminal ‘Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism’, wrote that ‘...as long as a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity within society, the state will be indispensible to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges’.  

Instinctively, Thatcher grasped this and so presided over the abandonment of the social housing project that had been built out of the municipal ‘spirit of 1945’, providing everyone with the dream of becoming property owners.  Britain, unlike Continental Europe, is still a nation in thrall to this fantasy, the vision of the ‘Englishman and his castle’, for which politicians of all stripe strive to devise policy.  As important as the anarchists’ point regarding property is, their idea that society will devolve down into communalities in which we all have equal stake shrivels under the briefest exposure to daylight when you consider the deeply engrained faith in property as a British birthright to which no realistic political entity would dare lay challenge.

“For the present we just want to try and make peoples’ lives fairer and better”, the female member replied to my attempts at playing devil’s advocate, with earnestness that was certainly commendable.  “They need to get more females here...” I overheard a teenage member saying at one point; revealing in one off-hand comment an awful lot, not least of all implicitly ascribing a hierarchy of power within the group that their elders might have been happier to gloss over.

I couldn’t help but feel that the laudable aim expressed by the female member, of wanting to provide temporary shelter and help to London’s many down-and-outs, should be sufficient to justify their cause (even granting them the powerful statement of their Pall Mall appropriation), without the threadbare baggage of anarchism to which they cling, and regardless of whether or not Russell Brand were to turn up and in some way legitimise the proceedings with a sprinkling of celebrity dust.

Aside from coining a classic slogan in ‘we are the 99%’, the failure of the left to invigorate hearts and minds throughout the deepest recession in living memory remains utterly bewildering.  The problem as I see it is reflected across the whole of society, in its deference to established forms of expression, and an endless reverence of the past.  This terminal nostalgia acts as a tourniquet stemming any new flow of ideas, of movements, of artistic endeavour; rendering everything a simulation of something else, an endless copy.  These anarchists themselves, by setting themselves in opposition to society, are both a symptom of its ills and a reflection of its constant repetition of prescribed orthodoxies.

Classical anarchist theory by the likes of Pierre Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, though antiquated, still has a great deal to say and offer contemporary society.  And yet the 21^st century anarchists – with the stereotypically grungy appearance, staid iconography, and rhetoric recycled from the failed ‘counter culture’ movement – hobble themselves by their predictable conformity to a Sex Pistols aesthetic that demands simple categorisation and easy identification.

The bloody tampon hung as a greeting seemed to me to exemplify this: an inexplicable lust for outrage, for sensation, for rebellion that could not fail to hide the sad deficit of ideas at its core.

In the end, they make it all too easy for their opponents to counter with sneering derision, as an IoD spokesperson did, saying “there are probably still some Adam Smith or Hayek books left in there...maybe they could learn something.”

No matter how worthy the cause being promoted, and there is no doubt that it is, the shame is that the superfluous packaging it comes wrapped in will inevitably render it all too easily discarded.

Absurd Shards #4 - Nigel Farage's tortured dream

It has been a spring of discontent as more of my loyal kinsmen succumb to scrutiny at the scalpels of the vile media.  My power has never been as solidified as it is now, my profile never higher, and yet paradoxically I have never felt so ill at ease.  Already within the party there are veiled references, jokes tinged with just a shade too much sarcasm, and those sideways glances over the rims of pint glasses that are meant to go unnoticed yet are anything but.  (Or maybe they aren’t meant to go unnoticed...)  I have fought long and hard but still I know my kingdom of UKIP may soon be about to crumble back into obscurity after being hoisted up and teased by the mainstream.

I am running away, I’ve had to flee my family, I am being pursued by a disgraceful carnival of delinquents.  I am the wily yet quickly tiring fox being run to ground by a pack of hounds dressed as flamboyant homosexuals, breastfeeding mothers and migrant workers.  No matter how hard I run, still they remain in pursuit, tooting their horns, waving their placards, shouting their obscene slogans.  Where are my cohorts, I begin to ask myself?  Why have they deserted me in my time of desperate need?  Where is Paul Nuttall?!  Where is Godfrey Bloom?!  Where are the others that I cannot for the life of me remember the names of, just a menagerie of braying and burping manikins with purple-and-yellow rosettes for faces.  (Maybe none of them ever existed in the first place.)

At last, when I feel like the lactic liquor will intoxicate me at last, I spy a generic gastropub The King’s Horse and stagger up to the front door.  Inside, the aroma of stale beer and hot food is so revitalising that I am able to compose myself rather quickly, straighten my dishevelled tweed jacket, fix a pneumatic smile and approach the bar.  Already the sounds of the braying masses begin to fade under the sounds of a fruit machine and general banter.

“A pint!  A pint!  My kingdom for a pint!” I declare.

“Sorry Nige”, says the barkeep, “just called last orders.  Licensing laws and all that, bloody red tape from Brussels.”

“Damn and blast!”, I profane, storming towards the exit and into the beer garden, where smokers suck in their cheeks and wedge empty crisp packets into the cracks of wooden tables.  I am at my wits end, the sound of the revelling scum is mounting, and I stagger into the car park gazing frantically around for any sign of a reprieve.

Suddenly, a man in period costume approaches me from a nearby car.  At first I think he is taking the opportunity to grab a selfie and I get ready to politely decline, but then I see the gleaming dagger held in his firm grip.  He reaches me and announces that he is a member of the Romanian Shakespeare Theatre Company, before puncturing my guts with the blade.  And so I sink to my knees, the hard concrete of the pub car park greeting me like a warm bed of endless sleep.

And then I wake up....

(Author note:  This was inspired in part by the strange and fascinating parallel between Shakespeare's 'Richard III' and President Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln was a huge admirer of the Bard's work, and was compared to his eponymous anti-hero during his administration.  The bittersweet irony is exemplified by the fact that Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre by John Wilkes Booth - a Shakespearean actor.)

Absurd Shards #3 - Voice Message to the Ministry

Transcript of a 1987 answering machine message recorded for the press secretary’s office of the Ministry of Undercover Child Abuse – Sexual (MUCAS). 

(For the purposes of confidentiality all names have been concealed.)

“Oh, hi [BLANK], it’s [BLANK].  I know it’s Friday afternoon and you’ve already left the office but I just thought I’d leave this anyway as a heads-up for Monday morning.  Obviously you’ll have heard the reports going round about [BLANK] being up to his usual dalliances – well, he’s getting a bit over-excited frankly and we need to rail him in a bit, get him to lie low and inconspicuous for a while... I know that’ll be nigh-on impossible for such a fat fuck [LAUGHTER], but er anyway, we need to have the conversation.

The PM isn’t best pleased about it, let’s put it that way.  There’s concern that if the Ministry’s work were to go public it might be quite embarrassing for all concerned, what with Joe Taxpayer scrutinising everything.  Not to mention landing an avalanche of shite on your desk! [LAUGHTER]

Oh, and to make matters worse, we’ve got a handful of nutters bigging up all that Ninth Circle stuff again, banging on about how the [BLANK] and Prince [BLANK] are tied up with some missing First Nation children over in Canada.  Goes back to the ‘60s apparently which is frankly before my time and I don’t want to know about it.  But the nutters claim they have a witness who says he saw them with the disappeared children, and word is the Palace are keen to smother this whole wretched thing like a toad on a fly.  I’m sure we can find something to discredit the witness at the very least...

Anyway, as to fatty [BLANK], [BLANK], [BLANK], [BLANK], oh, and most likely [BLANK] as well I’d have thought – we need to call a crisis meeting at the Ministry office and smooth a few things over.

Okay, well that’s all for now then, hope you had a nice weekend.  Hope [BLANK]’s birthday party went well, and [BLANK]’s horse contest was a success.  Bye for now, bye, bye....”

Absurd Shards #2 - Grant Green Michael Shapps

But I’m stinking rich... he reminded himself as he shaved in front of the en suite bathroom mirror, the soft whirring of the shaver buffering against the weight of silence that otherwise threatened to bear down. Outside, and even inside on the roaring TV breakfast news, he was the headline – ‘Grant Shapps’ double life’, ‘Tory Chairman lies about second job’...

The full extent of his doppelganger Michael Green had been exposed at last, and while he had known the inevitability of this, the hopeless frustration of it all was beginning to approach a critical mass at which point he would have to sink back into a cocoon of shadows and re-emerge anew. Just look at the despicable duplicity below me in the news, he vented to himself; the paedophilic sex gang of MPs, the police chiefs who covered it all up. His only offence was to get fucking rich, anyone would think that was a shameful sin in this rotten county these days.

He couldn’t help but chortle at the serendipity of it all though, his double exposed on the same day as Tony Blair’s doppelganger announced his stepping down from the role of Middle East peace envoy; all the while the real Blair remained, a horrifying grinch withered with disease, stalking the long-forgotten annexes and passageways of the Palace of Westminster.

For Shapps though, his deception was rooted in more than just a sense of tortured morality, his was a continuous carousel of personalities, a pack of greyhounds chasing the rabbit of truth round and round the racetrack that had become his life. Tonight, he decided, Ant would pay a visit, who would expunge the day’s squirming excuse-making with a reckless cocktail of whores, champagne and coke. For after all, he was stinking rich, and everyone knows that a boy’s best friend is his money...

Absurd Shards #1 - Jeremy Clarkson's face

A general election nears and already the hottest and most urgent issues of the day are ramping up the settings on the public imagination exercise machine. The precise specifications of the Miliband family kitchen; the forelorn dead-eyed gaze of Clegg; and the scope and format of the TV debates, about which an inquiry chaired by Margaret Hodge has been established and squadrons of campaigners from all parties have been dispatched to go from door-to-door accumulating signatures for petitions to the broadcasters.

But it is at the Court of Clarkson to which politics and other matters must concede legitimacy and influence. This feudal lord rules over his serfs with a mostly benign but nonetheless autocratic grip. His court is bawdy and lewd, crude stereotyping and crass generalisations are made in gruff and assertive voices; women with heaving chests scurry around loading banquet tables with the finest meats and cheeses that his subjects can muster; his jesting minstrels James May and Richard Hammond are in constant attendance, the latter providing bountiful amusement with his rodent impressions (which multitudes travel from every corner of the land to observe).

But despite Clarkson’s many allies in the highest of places, the court is not without strife, for he has strained his relations with the broadcasting church to its final breaking point, with him threatening to abolish the state institution, thereby freeing him to produce another grossly expensive and intellectually insulting factual car show. Such an architect is he of the serfs’ hearts and minds who willingly submit to him, that the political class will cleave to his every whim. Which is why, regardless of whatever else might happen between now and the May election, one of the key battlegrounds to be bitterly contested will be in the very folds and crevices of Jeremy Clarkson’s haggard yet smirking face.

Flagposts in the sand

For some reason my blog seems to be receiving a fair amount of traffic at the moment which is very encouraging.  I thought, for those who may find themselves here and don't have much idea of what I've written about in the past, I would post a smattering of recent pieces for you to peruse at will.  Sort of like a 'Greatest Hits' collection, one of those clever marketing ploys to repeat-sell old material.  Only you've paid for none of this so it matters not a bit...


My 2013 novel 'Digital' is available to purchase on Kindle here.  (Alternatively if you would like a physical copy just send me an email and I can arrange that for you.)


Primarily I write fiction.  Here are a few of my recent short stories:

'The Room and the Code'
'The Silent Treatment'
'The Library of Bill'


Psychogeographic writings on different places:

'The story of John Rae reimagined as a charting of London's Northwest Passage'
'One Day in Kiev'
'Chernobyl - a Pompeii for the 20th century'
'Moscow to the end of the line (before giving up)'
'Manchester, so much to answer for...'


I also write about films:

'Irreversible'
'Inland Empire'
'CitizenFour'


And occasionally music:
'The year 1994 - The Twin Peaks of Nihilism'


Profiles and interviews:

'In Conversation with Will Self'
'John Pilger'


Current affairs:

'The profound 'brain fade' of the Green Party's Natalie Bennett'
'The Interview' story - American hypocrisy towards North Korea'
'Oil Exhibition - the ecstasy of black gold'


Random thought pieces:

'The strange yet persistent allure of Battersea Power Station'
'How to disappear completely'

‘Smart’ thinking? Future cities and the Internet of Energy

As anyone with the slightest interest in futurology will know, the predictive terrain is rigged with innumerable tripwires waiting to sabotage the deftest projection. Moon colonies and flying cars aside however, one fairly assured certainty is that an ever-increasing number of people are going to be living in ever-expanding cities; rippling out exponentially like the precession principle of a stone dropped in water.

A megacity is commonly defined as an urban area with over 10mn inhabitants. According to a 2014 UN report on urbanisation, the number of global megacities has nearly tripled in the last 24 years, soaring from 10 in 1990 to 28 in 2014. Rapid urbanisation has consigned over half the world’s population to cities, which ultimately consume 75% of the world’s energy and produce 80% of the emissions.

There is much currently being made of the development of ‘smart cities’. In December 2014, an Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) ‘Future Cities’ conference swept experts together to share ideas and discuss the potential for cities to interweave digital technologies and smart energy systems in a revolutionary new helix of urban living. A means by which the sprawling, polluted and congested cities of the 20th century can be alchemised into the clean, free-flowing, low carbon megacities of the 21st century.

The potential for achieving this is not only possible but increasingly paramount. Research conducted for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate in the lead-up to the recent Lima climate change summit, stated that the adoption of low carbon technologies across 30 megacities ‘could create more than 2mn jobs while avoiding 3bn tonnes of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions’.


Data and the Internet of Energy

One thing that is absolutely clear according to those at the IET conference and the wider community is that the march of cities towards an energy efficient future will be in firm lockstep with the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ‘Big Data’.

Put simply, IoT is a network of interconnected devices – from your boiler to your fridge, even your toaster – all of which have the sensory capacity to intelligently collect and share data via a ‘cloud-based’ interface. One corporate driver of the IoT movement is Cisco Systems, which has estimated that 50bn machines/devices could be linked by as early as 2020, equating to a market worth $1tn. An equally keen champion is Siemens AG, working towards autonomous systems that will act ‘on perfect knowledge of residents’ habits, behaviours and energy consumption.’

This ‘better living through data’ is touted as a central component in cities being able to achieve energy efficiency goals, encapsulating what has been dubbed the ‘Internet of Energy’ (IoE). The expectation is that IoE devices will be integrated into a sophisticated dynamic ecosystem capable of communicating to ‘smart grids’ which will bind together power generation, supply and consumption. This is already being trialled with smart meters and time-of-use tariffs that, via financial incentives, try to ‘nudge’ consumers towards certain behavioural patterns.

IoT is also leading the way forwards for integrated low carbon transport systems through V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) automation, allowing vehicles to respond and react to data provided by ‘smart’ street furniture (eg traffic lights, lampposts, dustbins), as well as surrounding vehicles, which could render congestion obsolete.

Hybrid and pure electric vehicles (EVs) are being developed at an accelerating rate, with consistent gains made on performance and affordability. Of course, EVs being only as clean as the electricity they use, vast sums are being invested into lithium-based research and nanotechnology to improve power output and charging times, all with an aim of driving gas-guzzling vehicles up the slip road to history.


Early examples

If these ‘intelligent future cities’ seem reminiscent of a fictive Wellsian hinterland, it’s worth considering that prototypes are already flourishing, most notably Songdo in South Korea. Songdo’s buildings have automated climate control whilst road, water, waste and electricity systems are all fertile with electronic sensors that track and respond to residents’ actions. Similarly, the uninspiringly named PlanIT Valley in Portugal is fitted with 100mn sensors to optimise energy efficiency through adjustable flows.

Surprisingly enough, these modern manifestations follow the legacy of the British ‘garden city’. Adopting the aesthetic centrifugal principle of ripples on water, Ebenezer Howard in 1902 published his seminal study, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, in which the optimal elements of city and country life were synergised and promoted as a new form of eco-urbanism; eventually to be implemented across both the UK and the US. Sure enough, in the government’s Autumn Statement, plans for a new garden city Bicester in the Home Counties were announced, and the way paved for more, given the dual political prongs they represent in terms of affordable low carbon housing and environmental targets.

But it is in China, a country that by 2012 estimates had 363 proposed coal-fired power projects waiting on the construction assembly line, that the holistic eco-friendly principle of the garden city has begun to be imported.

As Victorian England’s urban squalor demanded the respite of Howard’s proposals, so China’s rampant industrialisation has given rise to cities like Chengdu. Home to 14mn people, Chengdu is China’s fourth-biggest city and, on the outskirts, has begun applying the low-rise, low-density planning schemes together with zones of green open space, personal allotments and leisure areas that both meet the needs of the community and support the drive for low carbon development; concurrently helping to alleviate traffic congestion and improve air quality.

While the notorious smog of Beijing tends to cloud our impressions of Chinese urbanism, the government has begun investing billions in sustainable developments that aim to serve as global models for the future. One such example is the Tianjin Eco-City Project, a collaboration between China and Singapore that incorporates initiatives such as free electric bus networks, a 60% recycling rate and a minimum of 12 m2 of public green space per capita.

This is apparently far from the limit of China’s green ambitions. In terms of the spectacular, surpassing the proposed designs for ‘Cloud Citizen’ (winner of the Shenzhen Super City Competition) would be a considerable challenge for the imagination, reminiscent as it is of something from a Philip K Dick novel.

Touted as an ‘urban utopia’, the plans depict layers of almost organic cactus-like skyscrapers coagulating into one another, designed so as to ‘give back more to the environment than they cost’. Built-in mechanisms would harvest rain water, luscious gardens would serve as ‘green lungs’, whilst the city infrastructure would be powered with solar, wind and algae-based energy. The self-contained nature of the construction would enable localised food production to exert a much reduced demand on infrastructure; all helping to create what the designers anticipate will be a hyper-dense complex that the inhabitants have no need or desire to ever leave.

The potential of this technological utopia to manifest itself as a human dystopia scarcely demands a potent imagination. Of course, city planning has a rich history of architects from Charles Fourier to Robert Owen to Le Corbusier, designing ‘utopian urbanity’ in which humans will be free to live prosperously, harmoniously and free from strife. Yet for all their vaulting ambition, they remain chiefly that: utopian.


Is technology the solution?

A primary concern for the near future is that tech firms operating principally in accordance with corporate interests will succeed in harnessing the essential utilities on which we all rely to the extent that they cannot subsequently be wrested back; in the process becoming more opaque as the citizenry become more transparent. But it’s worth pondering just how vociferous the complaints may be if the principle agent causing privacy to dissipate is the reduction in the amount we are charged for energy?

What is strikingly clear from attending the Future Cities conference, and reading the vast expanse of available commentary, is that there is an unshakable, zealous faith in technology as a means of solving any conceivable problems that might afflict humankind. This is the prevailing consensus in human thinking, resembling almost a religious faith, that only an ever-increasing dependency on further technological development will ensure positive progress.

Readily available, low technology, green options are within our grasp currently; from retrofitting of buildings; to the digestion of organic materials as a method of biomass energy production; increased investment in urban public transport networks and encouraging incentives like bike schemes; and the recent resurgence in urban agriculture such as community gardens, agroforestry and even beekeeping.

It is interesting to note the profligacy with which developments such as IoE and ‘Big Data’ are labelled ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’. Undoubtedly there is much – if it can be harnessed for societal good rather than corporate insouciance – which we can feasibly benefit from. Yet the fact remains that until we start applying the same demands for ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ thinking to impose upon the whole spectrum of energy policy, particularly in the run-up to the Paris climate change summit later this year, the possible ramifications of continued myopia and obfuscation on the part of global powers looks increasingly severe.

Ask yourself; is it ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ thinking to divert vital financial, time and intellectual resources away from renewable technologies and into the pursuit of yet more extractive fossil fuel processes in the face of climate change? Is it ‘smart’ for developed nations to fail to engage in negotiations with developing nations such as Ecuador as a means of preventing them from having to exploit their abundant oil resources? Is it ‘smart’ to allow oil companies to sit on vast ‘sunken asset’ reserves, fully intended to be extracted despite the combined total being many times over what the broad consensus of climate scientists have stated can be burned whilst remaining below ‘safe’ levels of warming?

If these are uncomfortable or contentious questions, then that is precisely the intention. Technological development of the kind currently shaping the energy infrastructure of future cities are necessary and welcome, if used positively, but should not be treated as a kind of elixir vitae that, if we bask in the slipstream of its accelerating momentum, will inevitably transform our and future generation’s lives ineluctably for the better. For the energy industry not to question, challenge and hold to account such developments as they continue to achieve prominence would be very far from smart thinking indeed.


Published in Energy World Magazine

The profound 'brain fade' of the Green Party's Natalie Bennett

Much has been made of the Green Party leader Natalie Bennett's 'excruciating' interview with LBC last week, where she was dragged underwater by illness and a woeful lack of policy understanding, and in struggling to regain the surface suffered the bends of a 'brain fade'.  It was dubbed by gleeful corners of the media and Twittersphere as 'the worst political interview ever', and yet in actual fact it can be seen as the complete opposite.  For somewhere within the canyon of breathy silence gaping between stutter and stammer was a very real statement concerning the true nature of modern politics.

We are living, I believe, in a 'post-political age', whereby the scales on which are placed issues of significance are becoming ever more mis-balanced by those in which politics can play little or no effectual part.

This has served to create a vast stageshow across which politicians attempt to 'tread the boards' in a performance of credibility, control and confident poise.  Whereas once they could feasibly be said to be mere marionettes, hoisted and dangled by the hidden hands of power - global finance, scientific think tanks, policy institutes or business leaders - now the curtain has fallen over the audience's eyes who have long since found their attention caught and held by alternative stimuli.

Because nothing much appears to make very much sense in this modern political age - stated facts are batted back and forth over the net like a dreary shuttlecock by players who seem diluted of all personality or credentials by the very act itself (rather like a non-sexual pornography) - conventional narratives have been abandoned to exposed as myths, and in their absence all we have is diffracted confusion, piled up steadily like layers of sediment.

Is the deficit rising or falling?  Is national debt being cut or added to?  Is climate change as severe as is purported and if so why aren't power figures more concerned to action?  If our foreign interventions really are successful then why are fundamentalist movements gaining terrible traction?  And why, if we have fostered a tolerant and inclusive society with our 'British values', does one such Jihadi turn out to have been a promising London-based student?

Not only this, but we are told that Quantitative Easing will ease austerity when actually, if examined a little closer, it turns out to be a scandalous wealth transfer to the unpunished perpetrators of the economic meltdown.  Is there another viable solution to the globalised free market system we are told we must cleave to like a sacred doctrine, or have all alternative structures of ideas been irredeemably punctured by the pin of ideological dogma or short-termist thinking?

Is immigration a credible concern, or just the price to pay for free movement of people through the EU (and anyway, reports show net gains for the UK economy as a result of foreign migrants, and British migrants claiming more from Europe...)?  Are Iran and Russia nations of aggressive volatility, led by tyrannical despots who threaten our long-term well-being, or are these mere illusory diversions created by powerful players in intelligence, military and defense institutions to justify their ongoing existence and status?

There is a very real psychological divide now between the governed and those elected to govern.  Through the mediarised spectacle of power we enable the artifice to be sustained.  As long as the lips are moving and words are spilling forth, however deaf we may now be to them, at least it reassures us that a regular equilibrium is being maintained.  Nothing is being said but we can at least hear them saying it.

A meaningless word-sludge of false promises, vague rhetoric and quasi-intellectual theorizing that has been diluted of any tangible ideology or influence on society-at-large.  All we can cling to are the slips of tongue, the lapses in nuance, the contradictions exposed; but we cling to them because they permit us to hate them, paint them with the same brush, gives succor to our political ambivalence.  It makes us feel better about the fact we do and believe in nothing because they fail to wrest us from our warm shallows of apathy to inspire a semblance of that one thing that could offer a compass through the turbulence of this irrational world - hope.

And so, with the mantle of ambiguity, disillusionment and disaffection continuing to seal itself around the country in this post-political 21st century age, we need to look again at an event like Natalie Bennett's on-air meltdown, where words dissolved in her mouth like candy-floss, and realise that this symbolises the parlous psychological health of our current political neurology, where the only rational, honest or believable response is her failure of articulation.

In a sense, it was perhaps the most profound statement by any political figure in modern times.  

Culture - February

Read:

Nicholas Carr - 'The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember' (non-fiction)
Victor Verge - 'The Coming Age of Singularity' (essay)
Evelyn Waugh - 'The Loved One'
Ray Kurzweil - 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' (non-fiction)
Alan Turing - 'Computing machinery and intelligence'  (essay)
Jean Baudrillard - 'Simulation and Simulacra' (non-fiction)


Watched:

'Lost Highway' (David Lynch)
'Bitter Lake' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)


Listened:

AFX - 'Chosen Lords'
The Beatles - 'The White Album'
Swans - 'Young God/Cop'
Trent Reznor - 'Lost Highway' (OST)
Buena Vista Social Club - 'Buena Vista Social Club'
Claude Debussy - 'Images'
Joy Division - 'Still'
Transglobal Underground - 'The Best Of'
Van Morrison - 'Astral Weeks'


Theatre:

'Closer' (at Donmar Warehouse, London)
'The Nether' (at Duke of York Theatre, London)