The Rape of Twitter.

Back in 5,000 BC the inventor of soft clay tablets for pressing hieroglyphics in with a stick was not lambasted for providing a medium by which the pharaoh could be threatened with rape. Likewise the inventor of papyrus and ink. Johannes Gutenberg was not criticised for mechanising the process of printing. The purveyors of picture postcards were not censured for what people chose to write on them, nor the Royal Mail for sending them or the postman for delivering them. There has long been a recognition that the delivery means is quite separate to what is delivered, and since the inception of language there’s always been forms of redress if you don’t like what’s been said. Twitter and other social media delivery systems are now though increasingly seen as responsible for controlling the content of what they deliver. It seems the increasing speed and breadth of distribution of the ephemeral world of language and anonymity is leaving only the messenger accountable. I’m left wondering if after thousands of years of creating and using language we are getting bored with it and turning our attention to the means by which it is transmitted. Is the medium finally becoming the message? Are we becoming increasingly transfixed by social media whilst at the same time impervious to its falling consequentiality? I have an image of a vastly reduced persona incessantly reading the same phrase, “How are you?” over and over again. Are we welcoming in dementia as a form of social interconnectedness? If you need proof read letters pre 1950. They’re not ‘quaint’ they’re thoughtfully created meaningful language. Maybe Twitter should not be condemned for delivering rape messages but for provoking us to rape our own language. 

Snowden Leaks.

Monday 9am, the Home Service (R4 if you’re a modernist) ‘Internet privacy’: 9.45am ‘Urban Gardens.’ So Facebook and Vodaphone et al, which means every corporate, governmental and no doubt criminal body in cyberdom, knows my name, location, what I look like and my every mouse move, which being a mouse is very intrusive indeed. They will know I’m married to Mothermouse, I live here, love guitars and bikes and my mobile number, a nugget of personal data even I can’t remember. In fact there’s so much personal data out there about each one of us that some enterprising auntrapanaur will soon provide a site that will tell us where we’ve  left our car keys, phone, whether we actually do like Potatoes au Gratin or where we’ve tucked our birth certificate in a safe place, and even how to spell auntrapanaur. At this point I feel so exposed I wonder if I should apologise for all the murders. As it is all this information only allows advertisers the merest glimmer of hope that by cold calling, popups, numerous emails and targeted ads they’ll induce me to buy things I’ve either just bought or already decided I don’t want. Never have I received an intrusion that’s prompted me to think, “Mmm, never thought of owning a hippo but you know I think it would be nice for the kids to play with, I’ll buy one.” All this data mining is, like oil, free at the point of extraction and, like oil only big companies can extract it and sell it on to other big players. Individuals, mere lumps of coal in the process, have no say in the matter. The result is a heavily angled playing field with a handy funnel built around the goal. At the other end our noble banks and corporation like HSBC and Shell collude with corruption to pillage the third world via shell companies of their natural resources while their lumps of coal go hungry with apparent impunity. And then there’s urban gardens. Do you realise that days after digging your new pond or planting some Campanula carpatica every local bee, newt, frog and butterfly will know what you’ve been doing? Your cat knows, obviously, everything about you and your dog, when it’s not asleep, watches you like a hawk for signs of intention. Just don’t go out there you’ll feel naked! Which isn’t a bad idea in this weather. And No Screwfix! I do not want another cordless drill!!!!!

My Big Greek Holiday.

It’s my 70^th birthday and Mouthermouse it taking me to Greece for three weeks, one week in Corfu, one touring the mainland and the last in Parga our favourite place. Hours of planning and filling in on-line forms, but it was worth it. These blogs are the memory of it.

First morning Nassaki, it’s 7.30am. The sky is a white blue wash over the bay that appears a giant’s biscuit bite north of Corfu town. Mouthermouse’s aircon forms the industrial backing to the tunes of the swifts Top Gunning the sky their wings flapping bursts of gunfire between swooping aerobatic curves. And when it stops there’s still a mist of morning noise from lorried drinks moving towards their shelf space. The olive trees with their silver sheen bend like the misshapen years of a hundred lifetimes waiting for their next pepper black crop, their wood as hard and sinewy as God’s ancient muscle. The mountain flank behind me rises rock grey marbled with dark green shrub, sparrows fluttering like animated leaves between the trees. The sun, yet to strike its warmth on me, is already powering the white of the column not three feet away. I can feel the heat off it. I watch its light levered by celestial geometry inch its way towards my foot. I sense an all-encompassing equality, where the sun can move to my foot or my foot can move to meet it. The water of the bay, as flat and smooth as the sky, would, save for a sliver of darker land, meet it in brotherly harmony. And then as if circumstance insisted on breaking this exercise in sugary pros a church bell clanks the banalest of tunes on its two bells, ‘ding dong ding dong, ding ding dong dong’ and at 8.20 for some bizarre reason. There’s no accounting for the swoop of swallows. 

Sexual Harassment at 12.

Noam Chomski observed that our politician’s call for us to support our brave fighting boys somehow automatically moves the debate away from reason to agreeable fuzziness. We stop thinking about their role in the rights and wrongs of the conflict and see them as purveyors of warm sliced agreeable bread. It’s a trick as old as organised conflict itself. On our part it requires nothing more than sentiment. One’s moral, ethical and logical senses are bypassed by some cheap undelineated emotion. If one refuses the agreeable bread those caught in its cheap emotion say, “so you don’t support our boys?!” or “you’re saying they’re dieing for nothing, their lives are worthless!” On the plane yesterday a puffy pink shapeless foulmouthed slag abused her four-year-old son into a three hour tantrum. Two hundred passengers knew there could be no reasoning with her; we just had to sit and hear a child’s life being ruined by her shapeless emotions. Recently I’ve read several horror accounts of casual sexual abuse by boys in school from teachers powerless to do anything. Their tactics are a carbon copy of the above. ‘It’s all just a game, a bit of fun’ and who whoever is against fun must surely be a miserable narrow-minded hypocrite. And the girls if they allow it are slags or if they don’t they’re frigid bitches. The illogic of their thinking is impervious to change by this same trick of moving any debate away from ‘what are you doing in the rights and wrongs of the situation?’ It becomes a sort of cognitive immunisation against the processes of rational thought. It’s truly frightening to see the moral, ethical and logical disciplines built up over centuries so easily and quickly corroded by cheap cognitive trickery. And now Egypt is falling beneath the same spell with fifty deaths, probably the first of many more. Who next will fight for their right to not listen, to die for the right to not think?

Monsanto Cats.

They strap fifty cats with GPS and cameras to see what they get up to. They find they have territories, fight for them, hunt and sleep. Cats are part domesticated and part instinctual merciless hunters. OK we know that but what about humans? Today Juliemouse posted articles about aspertame and Lasso. Aspertame is an artificial sweetener used in Diet Coke etc widely accepted as causing a host of illnesses, and Lasso is Monsanto’s weed killer so toxic a whiff of the stuff will cause similar illnesses and a higher dose, death. So what merciless instincts do we have? For sure we once had the daily choice between killing and starvation and its concomitant thrill; and there’s nothing more thrilling than survival. But now like cats our daily bread and cat food requires nothing more thrilling than a walk around Tesco. Our murky world of instinct goes unsatisfied. So we find it in dangerous sports, the apprehension of performance and the combat of rhetoric. And some of us find it in the wheeler dealing cut and thrust of commerce. They are all ways to satisfy our merciless hunter instinct. Bankers, financiers, politicians and corporations producing spertame, Lasso, deep sea oil and now shale gas are all simply new ways to create the thrill of survival, and however we dress it up by our domesticated side as somehow a profit and loss account benefit to society that’s not the basic motivation. And as if to prove it their actions are truly merciless. They produce harmful chemicals, create wastelands and economic collapses that cause great harm to many people with zero active empathy for their plight and defend ruthlessly their right to continue doing it. This is not a theoretical debate, a matter of morality or an intellectual problem it’s the instinctual thrill of survival misplaced. We all need to satisfy that instinct, it’s life affirming, but in productive ways. So what’s it to be Monsanto, life by much good or life by much bad? Your choice.

Gove's Call Centres.

In ‘The Call Centre’ Nev runs one of Wale’s 300 call centres like a fun factory. He’s realised it’s such a death inducing job the only path to long term survival is to spend every moment offline clowning in his own version of a Big Top Circus. Who’d have thought your serious conversation about the virtues of free cavity wall insulation in your area was with a young woman standing and gyrating Gangnam style? Nev has found there are only two things transmitted down a phone line, audio and fun. And the fun helps sales. With 700 in his second largest of 300 call centres in Wales he’s a big fish in an industry employing between one and two hundred thousand people, and that’s just in Wales, and a millionaire from supplying a product NOBODY likes. And all by allowing mayhem to happen. Yes mayhem is that good. It unleashes such connection and creativity in the most blood curdling near-death 9 to 5 environments that they become fun and provide results. I know I worked in one such drawing office. Watching the program I oscillate between the life and death of the human race, between Albert Einstein and Michael Gove. Gove’s call centres, namely the nations schools, are a richly drab affair. Nervous shift leaders prowl the slurried ranks of surly disinterested phone operatives poking them into reluctant life with a humane tasar stick set to ‘you must learn to love rejection because you are a nobody in my telesales empire.’ So who’s it to be, Nev or Gove? My money’s on Nev, mayhem is that good. In fact Nev for Secretary of State for Education. Yeh!

Ale House Emergence.

Our first Open mic night at the Ale House was a success, apparently. Thanks to our whipping up of loyal friends we had an audience and thanks to everyone’s talents we had a good time. It was mayhem from the start. One speaker cable went down and I would have punched it in the face if it had one. But Mothermouse and I make a good combination. She winds up the energy and I provoke the chaos. Actually it’s all very Person Centred when I think about it. It’s something to do with emergence, that in emergence something greater will happen. I’ve noticed that when people try to impress they somehow die a little and when they let go they live a little more. And that’s infectious. Sure practice and talent are important but the delivery is about living a little more. So Tom played blues, a Dutch theatre group did theatre, another lad played and Tara sang unaccompanied. I thrust Mike into the mix on his double bass knowing he could cope with anything. He joined me for a couple and then Mothermouse joined us and got people going, and then Tara joined as well for a couple of verses. Tara wanted to do a Jessie J song that I knew so we did that. By this time thanks to Mothermouse and Tara there was so much energy bouncing around we all, well we all emerged. Brilliant. And to finish it off a woman who, granted she was pissed by then, had previously told me she didn’t like live music because it made her feel awkward and had always stayed in the other bar when it was on, was at the back dancing and telling us she had a brilliant evening. And all thanks to emergence. It’s just a case of allowing it to happen.