Remembering Tommy.

1969, I was twenty six sharing a flat with Sam Wanamaker’s daughter in Highgate, babysitting little sister Zoe and dating their Swiss au pair Anne Marie. And The Who released Tommy. Later at the famous London folk club, Les Cousins, the guy singing was wailing about his ex, Cherry, who was, well sitting next to me. Looking back it was verging on the exotic but at the time it was just life. And I listened to Tommy. And that line, “See me,    feel me,    touch me,    heal me” reverberated in my emotional space like the tingle of a feather touching my own deaf, dumb and blind kid. Not of course in the usual sense but somewhere I knew life was at arms length even though I was in the midst of it. I was immersed but not getting wet. I’ve recognised that distance time and time again from some fear, some impinging belief, some involving abstraction, always knowing a closer connection was possible. And listening to Tommy somehow summed this all up and gave a lift to the possibility, that is until some toe rag broke into my flat and stole it. This is The Who playing it live in Los Angeles in 1989, one amazing hour of musicianship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0fOyoyOlE Art is always elusive and the narrative of Tommy is no exception. It’s confusing because to the deaf, dumb and blind their processes of understanding cannot reach it. It exists as a flavour, a taste, a blurred emotion, as conflicting images that in seeing resolve themselves, in hearing make sense without understanding. Much later in therapist training we tried to unravel the processes of damage, of help, of resolution and sure there are endless books on the subtle mechanics of it all but for me at least in the end it comes down to art and the reckless rock and roll energy of Tommy, “See me,    feel me,    touch me,    heal me”.

Artificial Progress.

It can’t have been lost on future entrepreneurs that with the advent of robots, AI etc the market for their new gizmos will be for ever diminishing because there’ll be fewer and fewer people employed and able to pay for them, and computers and robots have no need of products aimed at human beings only an adequate supply of electricity. Already a growing proportion of society is influencing the market to make cheaper and cheaper products because they can’t afford quality on account of being unemployed or on minimum wage. At times it seems our best efforts are aimed at designing ourselves out of the loop. No need for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker when you can buy six Mr Kipling apple pies for 80p made by the thousand in a massive machine a kilometre long with two operatives on a zero hours contract. When AI can design the machines, CAD can machine them, computers can control them and big data can find the one remaining person with enough money to buy one one begins to see the fault in the logic. It’s rather like the new self guided personal drone transporters that look a great idea when viewing the grid locked traffic from above but forward twenty years and the aerial chaos will be horrendous. And it’s the same with AI itself. Anyone who’s every used a computer will attest to the absolute and total arrogance of anything digital. Miss out a nondescript semicolon or forward slash and no amount of swearing and threats will cause it to change its mind. Turning the bloody things off and on again may work in binary but for humans it’s tantamount to a near death experience. So for any AI experts out there remember if you finally reach you goal of true human intelligence all you’ll achieve is, well true human intelligence and consider where that’s got us. And remember unintended consequences only occur when you’re operating at the level of a ten-year-old boy who thinks playing cricket in a greenhouse is a brilliant idea. It’s not a brilliant idea. 

Neoliberalism and Guns.

Just read a squillion words about Hayek and neoliberalism. I’ll simplify using firearms. Once guns were the province of kings and governments for use in wars. In the UK at least society at large didn’t have them, being too expensive or restricted by law, moral values and common sense concluding they were harmful to social well-being. Hayek argued that this arbitrary restriction was unnecessary in that every individual would of his own volition regulate the marketplace in firearms. When morality held sway his ideas were laughed at but as pseudo economics gained prominence moral values, being not numerically quantifiable, could be dismissed as mere opinion. The marketplace, as the product of all minds, would more perfectly reflect human activity and aspirations than any government. Thatcher and other political leaders commenced deregulation. The market place in firearms grew as people took advantage of their newfound freedom, the economy prospered and explosives manufacturers made healthy profits. People wishing to better themselves exchanged their handguns for automatic weapons and grenades and the wealthy for tanks and rocket launchers etc. Manufacturers promoted their use to settle neighbourly disputes and resolve differences of opinion. Comparethemarket.com showed tables of firepower, accuracy and speed. This economic boom created a new wealthy set that was armed to the teeth and unassailable. Even the government couldn’t control them. The poor soon found guns didn’t solve anything and reverted to moral values but were dismissed as irrelevant losers, though they still secretly hankered for a guided missile of their own. There ensued a great divide in wealth, firepower and morality.

Hayek’s grand plan had a basic fault. He failed to account for a variance in integrity. Some would approach the marketplace honourably and some with various amounts of self-interest and duplicity. The latter would gain sway due to their lack of honesty and distort the market towards the baser traits of human nature in effect forming a negative feedback loop. Good will would equate to failure. Given time an unregulated marketplace will inevitably support and empower the most morally corrupt. It will corrode human interactions and thus harm the common good. Who knows what will happen when I get my AK47 off ebay. 

Not Watching Phantasmagoria.

Just bumped into Jackson Oz an Americanzoologist, Abraham his Kenyan safari friend, a Los Angeles reporter, a quirky veterinary pathologist and a French intelligence agent in ‘Zoo’, a CBS drama about an army of genetically modified kids taking on animal powers, imagine teeth, claws and super senses, and attacking us generic humans. What will they do? I’ll never know, I turned it off. There seems a lot of this high quality phantasmagoria around, weeks of the stuff going direct to TV from Netflicks, Sky etc. I turned it off because it was virtually indistinguishable from news footage and factual documentaries. It began to worry me that my donkey brain might at some future moment conflate this ‘Zoo’ with a News at Ten report about Nigerian immigrants and conclude AlQuida are actually a genetically modified sub race created by Mosad to enlarge Israel to include North Africa, India and most of New York state. In other words I will begin to believe everything and nothing is or isn’t true. And in other other word lose all sense of what I know and either become malleable to the propaganda of the loudest voice or not trust my own senses to do anything about it even if I don’t believe it. Is Netflicks an arm of the KGB, is Donald Trump an Umpalumpa? See what I mean, you don’t really know do you? So I’m not going to watch any of it. I recon when the shit hits the fan they’ll need people like me who can still glimpse the real world. (and put up guttering)

E=mC2

E=mC²

It’s always, well not always but for many years now, struck me this should be one of a trio of equations. I think because it links energy, mass and velocity. Well not velocity exactly because its mix of time and distance as in miles per hour. In the equation C, the speed of light, appears a constant, a simple multiplying factor, but viewing time and distance, as variables like E and m the equation links energy, mass, time and distance, which is the constituent of space as space is measured by distance in all its three dimensions. Thus energy is not simply derived from mass times a constant but also from time and space. Are you with me so far? OK it’s easy to imagine from the equation more mass produces more energy but what if energy also relates to amounts of space and time? Or the converse space and time are variables related to energy? Like increasing pressure in a balloon (energy) increases the space inside it. Could our units of length only appear constant because we appear to be in a constant energy situation? In other words at the big bang, at super high energy, a meter might in our terms measure the smallest fraction of a millimetre and as energy disperses length and thus space increases. For example our unit of currency, a Pound, £, has been fixed for centuries but its value has decreased massively. We are so used to space being dimensional in terms of our fixed understanding and measurement of dimension it’s hard to imagine that space is a variable and doesn’t exist in something larger as a chair might exist in a room. It simply exists within the limits of itself much like the chair. Likewise time might in the larger scheme of things also be a variable. In both instances we’re fooled by our dimensional understanding of time and space from our own particular standpoint believing them to be constants. For example we believe time at the big bang was in the units as we perceive them. How can so much occur in a few milliseconds? But if time and space at that point were hugely different to our perception of them now and have continually changed in the intervening period how long ago was it and how big was it? Entropy suggest energy and matter degrade to a state of inert uniformity and recent science suggests a rise in dark matter which seems an inert sub-matter material. Maybe the conclusion of the whole process is a huge amount of time and energy spent creating a very large amount of totally empty space, somehow reminiscent of Donald Trump’s ego. 

Pride.

Funny how watching ‘Pride’, the film about lesbians and gays supporting the miners’ strike in the mid 80’s, boosts your metabolism. It’s like adding a dose of mycorrhizal fungi to your root system. It caused Mothermouse to reminisce a march where High Gate Girls School sang, “Maggy Thatcher walks on water; everybody knows that dog shit floats”, and happy days teaching in London. Much has changed since then. And before that watching the Passchendaele Ceremony that followed a similar if more dreadful change. But something has been laid to waste in those thirty years since the miners strike. Could it be Thatcher’s small town shopkeeper’s distorted grasp on the economics of happiness? ‘We don’t make anything here, we just make a profit.’ Or our ‘special relationship’ with America that, as experienced by various European psychologists and me personally, is a fear filled place, where underneath its confident exterior it’s a high wire act needing protection by guns, greed and a host of prudish insecurities. Or more lately by the all consuming binary connectivity of computers? It’s frightening when pointed out that all the connectivity industry demands of us to fuel its own profitability is our endless attention. It doesn’t care if it’s life enhancing only that we keep clicking. And as a result a reduction in skills and creativity, values replaced by sales, pleasure reduced to panic and intent dissipated in abstraction. It may be comfortably soporific but it’s not what the Tommys died for. They had Pride.

Death by Complexity.

I often think back to 2001 and Grandpa  Croucho finding his first tool. He loved that bone. Never happier than having a good whack he was. And Uncle Erectus inventing round, that was a game changer alright. Ah simpler days. And now we’ve got Screwfix. I mean there’s a lot to be said for being able to get a five kilogram hammer drill for under a hundred quid but do I do click and collect, drive there or have it delivered when I’m out? B&Q do a 5% off on Wednesdays for the over sixties though Wickes are cheaper and Homebase are nearer, but you can’t get out of there without buying a 3ft electric barbeque set that’ll go rusty before you’ve used it twice. It’s all got a bit more complicated. I mean how come my pensions guy turns up for his yearly chat about his football knees in an Audi when I’m still driving a Renault Scenic? And don’t talk to me about discounts. How come in a 50% sale with an extra 10% discount for being born on a Tuesday comes out the same price as what it was last week? By that reckoning my storm proof Everglaze windows would have originally cost the same as a moderately sized maisonette. So how about you supply all the walls and roof etc for free and I’ll provide the windows myself? And all this is nothing compared with high finance. How is it a space big enough for a PC conveniently placed 50 meters from some internet node costs  $1,000,000 pa to rent? Because you can make $2,000,000 pa profit from being a millisecond faster than the other guys. Some guy’s created a trading floor with a ‘bump in the road’ that introduces a 2 millisecond delay that does something, I forget what. So that’s really really complicated. Basically it’s smart people make the most money. Human evolution has come down to dealing with complexity. Remember the super long necked giraffe that could reach the tallest branches but died out because it kept falling over? Well OK probably not because I just made it up but it illustrates the point. Our capacity for creating the ever more complex might just make us all fall over.