Info Bots.

I read a few years ago that one of Putin’s main advisors was a performance artist who specialised in confusion. He would do one thing then the opposite so you wouldn’t know what he’d do next. Evidence suggests Putin initially took this on board as part of his policy making. More recently it looks like he’s taken it a stage further. With the advent of multiple social media platforms confusion could be sewn directly in the minds of the west.  Bots' are automated software that send out social media messages that spawn extreme conflicting opinions. Initially false accounts place extreme opinions about for example stray dogs. Some say stray dogs are vermin to be exterminated and others that they should be homed, loved and cherished. Once seeded real people accounts favouring either extreme view are re-tweeted many times over and swamp the conversation. For the undecided it appears people are taking these two extreme views about stray dogs. They ask themselves, ‘Where do I stand?’ and choose the one that appeals to them most and join one or other of the extremes. This strategy empties the middle ground in favour of the two opposing views. The Face Book algorithm that gives you ‘what you might like’ only reinforces each side’s views. The resulting conflict gridlocks any rational progress and the factions for and against Trump and Brexit become a 50/50 split between stubborn bigots. Recent elections and interviews with supporters on both sides prove the point. So whether you’re for or against stray dogs it’s the Bots and their handlers that have won. 

17 Shot Dead.

The news said the guy was full of remorse. Why? It might seem a strange question but he wasn’t crazy, he’d just decided to do it. So how can a cognitive decision be so far from its real world consequences? In the decision process he wanted to retaliate for being expelled, for the students thinking he was a jerk, not liking him, probably like at home. Society was happy for him to buy a gun; the guy in the shop was nice to him. And no one really dies in shoot-em-ups and TV shows. They’re just acting and the blood’s CGI. Social media’s full of anger and wild conspiracies, lies and truth all mixed into a soup of confusion. He was a decent human being that didn’t deserve all this shit. So he decided. It would be a duck shoot, bam, bam, bam like Call of Duty or The Wire. Even if he got shot he’d just go back to his last saved game or use the remote. Sure in the moment he enjoyed it, all these scenarios coming together to free him from his anger. But people died, the blood was real, the cries and tears were all real. Reality impinged hard on this maze of constructs killing them like bullets. So he felt remorse. Of course he did it but his constructs are all still in the air, in the US environment, for isolated young men like him to breath in; deadly noxious fumes that can continue to cause real people to be shot dead. 

Gone in Ten Seconds.

Last night I was tasked to watch Man U v Tottenham for Mothermouse but missed the first twenty minutes. The last seventy, in fact the last eighty-nine and fifty seconds of Tottenham- glorious and Man U- pathetic would have been inexplicable without those first few seconds. Imagine a boxer vainly attempting to reassemble his brain cells after an uppercut in the first round. The fear, the confusion was palpable, the exotic spice of supremacy intoxicating: Tottenham never better, Man U, hopefully, never worse. Tottenham’s ten-second goal somehow created an instant localised zeitgeist that Jones’s glorious own goal merely confirmed. This, as with most things recently, reminded me of Brexit, the whole country v Europe, stunned by something unexpected that happened so soon after kick-off all parties never really recovered from it. May/Lukaku, lolloping round aimlessly as Kane/Barnier confidently escaped every tackle. We’re playing a shit game because neither Leave nor Remain thought we’d even be playing this fixture. Sure we’re passing and running about but somehow unsure where the goal is. And somehow like Man U we’re banking on an American Glazer special relationship buyout and hoping we can afford Thierry Henry’s transfer fee to be our new manager. So as we forgo the Premiership for League 1 remember this unholy alliance between the League of (rich white) Gentlemen and redundant Yorkshire miners may have scored from the kick off but there’s still eighty nine minutes and fifty seconds yet to play. A couple of goals and late pen should do it.