Who Would Want To Listen To This? (2011/12)

Who Would Want To Listen To This? (2011/2012) Biro on paper, 130X100cm

A Nowhere Rant From a Nowhere Cafe

We can only depict the advances of the current power-structure through fictional pyshical constructions - think of the death star. Then think of the spectacular media-complex that, although everywhere, cannot be located and sourced. This makes the current power-structure much more difficult to explain, even convince others of, unlike the recent-history powers such as Nazism and Stalinism, which were far more dumb through their centralisation, and now (regardless of their horrible crimes) make for great distractions and diversions from the power-structure dominating us, which has a Anglo-American imperial history.
How many programs do you see of the crimes commited by Hitler and Stalin compatred to those commited by the British Empire/Post-1945 America on tv? We just get imperialist apologists like Nial Ferguson, skipping the horrors to focus on the westernisation of the world. It is arguable that Anglo-American Imperialism has killed more people than both these two 20th century regimes combined.

It is collective amnesia that enables us to believe that capitalism and democracy (or what we have now, which is at least a facade of democracy) go side by side, just like it is collective Amnesia that enables us to believe that George Orwell was only against a Stalinist-type threat, as if that was the only type of totalitarianism

Taking those thoughts into account I think this John Pilger Article is a must-read

http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2012/01/pilger-obama-war-britain

My naturalised habitat

The Hallam Line: Sheffield, Barnsley, wakefield, Leeds (photographs)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnledger/sets/72157628806208041/

Desperation witnessed on a Facebook wall and desperation on the railway lines, on our endless commutes - going nowhere

Desperation witnessed on a Facebook wall and desperation on the railway lines, on our endless commutes - going nowhere

"Out of my way, it's a busy day, and I've got things on my mind" Us And Them, Pink Floyd

The affect it has on us when online acquaintances make desperate cries for help, more or less saying that they are close to suicide, on their Facebook wall and the similar reaction we have when there is a suicide on the train tracks or someone is threatening to throw themselves off a motorway bridge (for example) has made me think of how the solitary way we collectively make our way around Facebook is just a virtual reflection of the way we make our way through the physical world in our 'daily races' under late capitalism.

Whilst in London in December, I was told by two different people of their witnessing/second hand witnessing of a suicide on the tube tracks or the aftermath of one (blood stains on the sides of the tunnel were visible from the windows of a tube train carriage). I would find witnessing such a thing unbelievably difficult to deal with (as I suspect they did); in the space of one week I experienced 2 delays to train journeys in the Yorkshire area due to there being 'a fatality on the line/somebody being hit by a train' (as said by the automated tannoy voice) and the mere news of this left me with such an empty and despairing feeling that I had to go for a drink to become a little more numb, to stop me thinking "there's certainly an increase on these occurrences". I find stories of suicides on train tracks more awful than suicides committed in bedrooms, alleyways or woodlands; there is something about them that states that they will happen again and again, and nothing will be done.

A couple of days ago I got a text from a Friend who lives in London, expressing discontent with commuter behaviour on the tube. He said "these rush hour commuters are like those in cars. Cars being the embodiment of Thatcherite individualism and selfishness" and that "everybody looks away if you look at them, so no eye contact with people". The way we collectively use public transport (although much more beneficial to society than using a car) reflects the Thatcherite rhetoric of there is 'no such thing as society' just in the same way as the increasing usage of the car has done in the past 30 years. This friend was one of the 2 friends who told me about a suicide they witnessed on the tube. He sent that text one day after the M1 motorway was closed near to where I live, causing traffic congestion on the nearby road, due an individual threatening to throw themselves off one of the bridges over the motorway. Also, it was on the same day that I came across a Facebook post that expressed acute desperation.

The fulfillment of the 'no such thing as society' rhetoric means that we are atomised and forced into a selfish bubble-like existence even when we are out of our cars and our sleeping/eating cells (the physical bubbles); our jobs (that creep into every aspect of our lives via email/cell phone) make for perpetual financial strain, which puts strain on relationships, and becomes all consuming, and couple this with the effect that the sheer bulk of advertising we absorb (thus, the status anxiety it causes) has on us, living in a neoliberal (free market) economy; and we (to use a quote from Mark Fishers' Capitalist Realism) "wall ourselves up against The Social" by putting our Ipod/Mp3 players on to soothe ourselves with musical sugary stimulus - we feel we need it to keep our mood levels up. But when capitalism's so-called 'accidents' actually reinforce its legitimacy, as recession pushes the pitch-fork of financial anxiety further into our backsides (thus, forcing us to be even more selfish and competitive) what can we do but become more self-orientated, perpetuating the problem?

When trying to escape The Social all the time, a suicide, or the threat of a suicide, is both too bleak to contemplate and also a massive inconvenience to us (due to the delays it brings to our 'daily races'). And the wish not to dwell on it, to just get on with focusing on our own journey through this world, engenders the inconvenience that the delays these incidents become, which engenders a selfishness in all of us, which in turn, engenders a society of more atomised people where, because this is a positive feedback loop of affect and causation, means increasing numbers of people will become alienated, depressed and will attempt/commit suicide.

I suppose the aforementioned greater bleakness of killing oneself in such a way relates to my own past experiences when I can remember feeling low enough to be contemplating committing this ultimate gesture (although not involving railway lines, personally): knowing nobody has the time to even give it a thought, and that your death will be brushed under the carpet, out of mind out of sight, like the train wheels would do to your body, because it's also too inconvenient to dwell on, being in a society where we are informed to 'forget' about these external incidents, as we should try to get on with our own lives, making sure we don't become the next person ready to throw ourselves under moving vehicles. This attitude, which we all ascribe to, or try to (because it is the most convenient attitude to have in a society where mental illness has been individualised, thus separated from its socio-political causation's) is what ensures that it will keep happening again; it ensures the perpetuation of alienation; the perpetuation of this 'no such thing as society' where we all feel that we have no choice but to look out for number 1, with the cost being that we may one day be this person jumping in front of a train/threatening to jump from a motorway bridge.

"So" you think "Is this what happens? People just look the other way, put in their headphones, and occupy their mind with filling out that Job application, for a job they are unlikely to get because 100 other people have applied for that very post? And hope that they never reach such a lowly stage themselves?" You can hear us all muttering the lyrics from Us And Them by Pink Floyd again; "down and out, it can't be helped that there's a lot of it about".

You get home. Try to forget the thoughts that the bleak tannoy announcements conjured up, and if you can't you can always see if anyone wants to join you for a little bit of alcoholic anesthetizing in town. But you do that too much, and although it feels to be leading somewhere at the time, it's the same every time. The thing is it feels like an arrival, or at least the finishing off of something, a conclusion to an otherwise empty day that feels incomplete and unfulfilled. You miss the drink for today, but still need to feel secure, heard; that you're building something that will make you safe from ever being 'down and out'; pathways towards arriving. The seemingly easiest way to contact people now is via the Internet, so that's what you attempt.
But as soon as you log into the place where everybody goes (Facebook) you feel like you are going nowhere again; nobody seems to be hearing what you say; it feels like you've only just set off on a tiresome journey, after only just finishing one in the physical world; you just can't land. So you shout louder, AND LOUDER! Listen to me!!, just me!! Oh dear.

And so the attitude we share as commuters is continued in both the reason why social networking sites have become so popular, and in the way we collectively use them. One will occasionally stumble across Facebook wall posts an individual has put up, saying how desperately unhappy and lonely he/she is, worded in a way that suggests that he/she is contemplating attempting suicide. Regardless of whether the suggestion of doing so is false, or is just a cry for help (which, should be seen as just that, and not attention seeking; people don't make up depression, it is endemic in our society), how do we react to this? I'd argue in the same way as we react to the situation of a man threatening to throw himself from a bridge onto a road we desire to travel on/the same way as we'd react if a dead body was blocking our rail journey: although empathy is lacking in such a society, we still do all possess enough to feel some short burst of sadness for the person in question, but the feeling is overwhelmed by our anxieties about our own life. We are so self-orientated, so overly concerned about getting from our A to B (our intentions/goals/needs from facebook) that it becomes much more of an inconvenience. More than that, it reveals the uncomfortable truths about our fragility that we are constantly having to run from.

But can we ever arrive, in a sense, if this journey perpetually never ends, when social networking sites and cell phones extend this endless commute into our houses, the one place where we are supposed to have arrived at? We commute on the net like we commute in our endless physical races in the heat of the day; trying to push ourselves forward, but going nowhere, going nowhere
The fast lane, high speed rail, high speed broadband, but never actually arriving ("Perhaps we should resolve Britain’s railway network into a single orbital system, so that we can all remain in constant circulation. Then we’ll know we’re getting somewhere." this cutting and humorous observation about the high speed rail plans by George Monbiot in Fast Train to Nowhere, May 17 2010, seems to touch upon the whole of the eternal commute.)

"You only actually arrive when you switch it off", a friend said to me yesterday, regarding the effect of trying to find meaning through communication on Facebook. But he also acknowledged how hard it is to do so, because of how it persuades you that the opposite is true. Social networking sites are forced communication-as-self-promotion, forced Yuppiedom, passed off as choice, just as commuting longer and longer distances to work, which was forced onto us by social restructuring, and a deliberate shifting of capital, was passed off as an individuals freedom to work wherever he/she may choose; both do the opposite of what they promote; they create an environment of self-preservation at all costs and selfishness as necessity, as if we were still fighting for food in the wild. If this isn't further evidence that systemic alterations engender how technology advances, and how it is used by people, then I don't know what is.

Facebook is awful, but it is not an anomaly, or even a massive societal shift; it is a logical extension of the culture that has been created. Which is why, when you're thinking clearly enough (and not excited by the prospect of lots of little red numbers appearing in the top left corner of your profile page) it is the saddest of thoughts that tonight the only way you will attempt to talk to people is through it, because nobody will be really listening to you, because they need to be listened to. self-promotion lapses into self-preservation every time. But some people, in the physical and virtual world, cannot survive this world-made-cold.

Momentarily feeling the need to 'stand my ground'

The assumption that those living in more urban areas/areas more integrated into the sprawl of humanity look down on people like myself who are still seemingly embedded in much smaller settlements isn't misplaced. Towns, such as the one I still reside in, are openly mocked and belittled by society. It is thought of as being unambitious, and being intentionally backwards, always yearning for the rustic, to stay in such areas.
But, far from desiring to stay here, my own (miss)understanding of late-capitalist reality has meant that the 'get up and go' language us children of the 1980's/90's are supposed to have inbuilt (in the same way we had Alex The Kidd built into our Sega's) has somewhat left me behind, like the Motorway cutting through my village with no slip road to join, so one can only watch the other candles burning much brighter as they fly by. Likewise, I spend most of the days I have off work in the nearest and affordable-to-get-to urban sprawls (the Yorkshire cities of Leeds and Sheffield) precisely because of these reasons, and the shining lights attract me on vain like a moth, but a moth in search of meaning or love, or whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to find in a city.
However, all this is irrelevant because everybody hooked up to the Internet, cell phone networks, and subjected to matrix of images and signs that make up late-capitalism, through these devices, is a virtual urban dweller, and there is truly very few human beings these days who could be called rural dwellers, in regards to how we interact and the frequency with which we interact with the rest of the human world. Likewise, when I visit the biggest city in this country, I don't feel like it's a new experience, or an experience I rarely have, just a compression of my usual experiences and an exacerbation of them: it just feels like I'm travelling down one of the main arteries of the now endless city, instead of one of the smaller ones.
One now feels as lonely in front of a screen showing their facebook homepage, as they did traditionally in a city all by themselves. This is the feeling of a true urbanite. Yes, I am, in a sense as much an urban creature in the small ex-coal mining town of Barnsley, as somebody using the tube in central London is. The endless city has materialised in a way much unpredicted in much of the 20Th century science fiction, where the world was envisioned as becoming one big physical city; cyberspace has created this, with the added inversion of reality, where nothing seems real because nearly everything happens in a place exempt from the physical reality where we still have to get out oxygen and food from.
Obviously there is still so much more to do in the real physical city, places to go to experience culture or revel, but somehow these things don't seem of note once one is there, or at least don't have the effect one would expect them to have after all they've read about them. Walking around the British Museum, I really couldn't appreciate the historical significance of the ancient artifacts I was walking past; partly down to this and partly down to the glaring truth of the place, I took on board the 2Nd history of them; the history of their colonial appropriation; the reason why Egyptian/Greek relics are in London.
Yet, as much as this not very rosy truth needs to be acknowledged, the reason for purposefully looking at them in this way was because I really couldn't feel what I thought I was supposed to feel from seeing things which are supposed to be 'wonders', so I had to put on my critical poker face. Seeing image after image on screens of things that are far away, right through my life; talking to people through cyberspace; listening to music from far off studios on my mp3 player; walking down streets I know by clicking computer buttons; all this seems to detract from (or least tamper with) the worth of things in the physical world (especially things which are suppose to be of great cultural/historical significance). Nothing in the physical world seems more real than that in the virtual world, and nothing much surprises because it could just be from another television drama or documentary.
And When one is next to these/experiencing these things we are told are of significance, they are most likely going to be taking photos of these things/or writing on phones to people about them, sending their existences back into the endless city, rather than the concrete biggest of cities they are currently stood in. An anxiety about what to do arises, because we can't feel anymore/or don't know what we are supposed to feel. So we must document, or consume by appropriating photographic images of it, continuing the Pumping of the physical into the virtual.
The physical city has been negated and the virtual city promoted until they have blended with one another, and we are all now urban dwellers, in an endless city. But an endless city would surely be desirable? Unlike an endless village, where everybody clings to their prejudices and tribalism's. The apparatus's which reinforce a village mentality within us, rather than an acceptance of cosmopolitanism within an endless human city, would require a critique of the current system of domination and the way it uses technology, and I think the Internet is currently generating both, but one may eventually win over the other. However, the intention of writing this was that I was feeling the eyes of those physical city dwellers, and just wanted to explain how a small town resident becomes just as urbanised as someone living in the centre of London in the Internet age.

2012: Dedicated to all humans

I used to find In Rainbows the most difficult album to listen to by Radiohead. Not because I found it a worse album than the rest of the (post pablo honey) albums, just because there was something I found deeply incomfortable about it, a truth in it that I couldn't/or didn't want to acknowledge right then. I didn't know what was behind all this, until I read some essays on the album in Radiohead and philosophy. There is a truth in the album which is fought against to stop it happening in the previous albums, but ACCEPTED in In Rainbows: that of a looming mortality, an end, and not just to oneself but to our species. This truth is at its most emotionally heightened in The Reckoner and in House of Cards (the first synth entrance especially). This is why i still usually find myself listening to the 4 albums previous to this one, where the fight with bleak nihilism and against the erosion of democracy is still on going, as this is the fight that is waging in my mind most daytime periods. But In Rainbows has a fragility to it, when one can fight no longer, a coming to terms with the self also. In rainbows is about death, but coming to terms with it, like someone with a terminal disease must do. It makes it too beautiful for me to be able to listen to as I make my way through each day, and it's only when i have my days when truths about myself and the world are face to face with me that it becomes the ablum I choose to listen to.

"Dedicated to all humans...." The Reckoner

New Works For New Year

Please excuse the massive gaps between new artworks on this blog, each piece takes me on average around 3 months now; they just keep taking longer and longer to finish.

2011 artworks

Global Ghetto, 2045, Marks The Centenary Of The Defeat Of Fascism (biro on paper)

"I Want None Of This" biro and collage on paper

Ill-Equipped (Pencil Crayon on paper)

Acheiving And Getting Things Done (mixed media) used for The Globalsapiens exhibition

Audio piece made for The Globalsapiens exhibition





The Index For Child Well-being (biro and collage on paper)

In The City... (Biro on paper)

Crashing in, right on time again

It's that time of year to crash in again, almost like a rushed need to deconstruct so to rebuild again, for the socially constructed 'ends and beginnings'. A compulsion to fuck up.

So you open the door with a look
On your face, your hands in your
pockets and your family to face
And you go downstairs and you sit in
Your place...

End Of Year Haunting

"No more talking about the old days, it's time for something great.." Atoms For Peace, Thom Yorke

"Take time out from truth - it's Christmas!!!"

I'll try to be constructive with what is usually misconstrued as 'seasonal grumbling' to fend off the "if you don't like it (Christmas) - just ignore it, just stop going on about it" reactions, as if it really could be that simple.

So, the yearly suffocation of all momentum, hopes and good feeling begins (they will have to be picked up again, in my post-birthday late January restructuring). Christmas, as seasonal events go, has such an unchallenged force, that it dredges all momentum and good feeling from an individual, and turns it into energy for the hyping up of itself: one finds themselves flying full-pelt towards December 25Th and the January 1st. "But wait, something's wrong. What does all this mean? and who am I? I cannot seem to recall..."
'Be happy or else!!! Everything seems to tell you this. Christmas/New Year is like swallowing the entire back-catalogue of advertisements from the year gone: a gigantic mix of discontent and illogical excitement-cum-disappointment; "you're still single, shit - you're getting old now!! Find a special person! Kiss someone this Christmas! See old friends! See them all, now!! Have a great great time, full of facebook-photo-worthy memories!! be happy!!!!"

Shopping:
Consumerism at Christmas! Nobody likes it; "it's mental" we all say. But it's more than this. Take time, force yourself to slow down, and watch it, as if you weren't also part of it (as sadly, you are). The banality of it all! We are prisoners! And at Christmas we are encouraged by absolutely every voice and image around us to celebrate our imprisonment on a scale that isn't matched at any other times, by giving more of our wage than ever before to our corporate jailers (except maybe when there is a 'royal' occasion when we celebrate our nation state as if it was the most loving caring thing on earth, or a major sporting occasion, when we are slowly seduced into celebrating being powerless serfs by watching specially chosen serfs elevated from serfdom to kick a ball around a field. "Rule, fucking Rule Britannia, as if it were the 18Th century!!"), whilst at the same time we are told to "leave it out/cut the moaning" because "this isn't the place or time" because it's Christmas, our biggest prison duty, and you are being a 'party-pooper' for ruining that! "Take time out from truth, and help us build the prison walls even higher!".

But as well as this, I suppose, I'm wishing to reassess my own strange relationship to this period. Waking up on the day something is stirring inside, saying this is an event, the event of the year; "it's special". Yet, rationally speaking, I don't feel this way at all, and historically, Christmas times have never been high-points of my year to say the least (personal mini-breakdowns, that aren't worth explaining, but are caused by the swallowing of an abstract hype and excitement). But I think the way that my wrapping of presents has got generally worse since I was old enough to afford to buy people presents says enough: I'm slowly finding it easier to distance myself from an hype for a tradition that seems somewhat misplaced now. We are in need of hope and joy in these gloomy times, but this is moving in the wrong direction: an unthinking belief in the past as reason to go forward.

And it's not a case of 'wanting to make folk miserable', it's a case of wanting to push things forward. These events smother all critical discussion of the present tense, just as Royal Wedding events smother all worthy discontent with a nation still having a monarchy. However, I will be trying to enjoy myself throughout this period, doing what I'd have been doing anyway; having some drinks and hoping to bump into friends/or even hoping that I may bump into someone of the opposite sex who finds me attractive, or does criticism of such events instantly make me incapable of laughing and being affable to people?
Waking up in my mates' room after a very heavy night, I looked up at the union jack flag wrapped around the edges of a frame on the wall; it seemed to speak as much of the event of Christmas as it did to an allegiance to one's own nation state. This is in no way a criticism of my friend for doing so, we all have our needs, just that it gave me a brief but large feeling that all these events and allegiances were somehow linked/were part of the same need.
On the street which contains sheltered homes for the elderly and incapacitated in the area where I live, the only house to have a (this time) St George's flag outside (stuck on a pole in the garden) was also the house which had the most extravagant and showy Christmas decorations. Likewise, the residents of an house who bizarrely paint The St George's flag onto two small boulders outside their house further down the road, is also part of a collective of houses that are draped with some of most showy Christmas decorations every time the event comes around.
A massive need for meaning and belonging make for a blind allegiance to the corporate state, and all its prescribed events that convey meaning throughout the year. It's a sad sight, one you want to do something about, but how? I currently have more questions than answers....

Unlike the link with flag-draped households and poorer areas, there doesn't appear to be this link with Christmas decorations and poorer areas, but the evidence I have seen of extravagant Christmas decorations next to Union Jack/ST George flagged-draped houses, seems to certainly suggest an alienation that the corporate state feeds off twice over first through the loyalty given to it by so many in need of meaning and belonging, in a world where they are made to feel like they belong nowhere by the forces of market globalism (don't confuse with the usual word they use to make it sound more reciprocal: Globalisation) and then through the lucrativeness of the commodification of its prescribed events. To me Christmas is etched into the collusion between the corporations and the nation state, and thus that is the only meaning it has left now.

Theoretically, I don't have to partake in it (in practice I'd argue that I do have to), but what is the purpose of it, if, to stick to the theoretical, enjoyment and good will to one another shouldn't 'just be for Christmas?' What is left of Christmas after the glacier-like force of consumerism has stripped-bear its landscape, dragging every part of it along with it? And if tradition is what is left, what tradition is this, and is it not just a lumpen acceptance of a collaged-up past, especially now surely most of us (including myself) are no longer believers in the religious story from where all this tradition originally stems? Looking back at our collective past, shouldn't be a socially-compulsive unthinking duty, as this just becomes a form of forgetfulness instead, a forgetting that this lumpen vision of the past is mainly a Victorian-period onwards construction, something that allows us to forget our present national (if we want to call it that) story.

And yes, as said previously, I will be out drinking and, hopefully, having a good time, and, if I can afford it, I'd get you (possibly non-existent) reader a drink in. I've tried my hardest to be generous all year round, with what means I have, so why am I suddenly a 'Scrooge' now, because I don't particularly like the construct of Christmas?

Doing my best to settle an argument

A rather tricky situation has arisen due to a debate, that I started, on my facebook wall, spiraling into a very very heated argument between different friends. I had disagreements with the views being expressed in one camp, but disagreements with the method of criticising these views from the other camp.
The conversation turned into a slanging match, and before one starts to ask which camp was more to blame than the other, on my behalf the crucial task is to figure our a way how to avoid upsetting either friend(s) without re-stoking this fiery argument.
This blog post is an attempt to do this. The reasons for not explaining this on facebook are due to my feelings about the counterproductivity of having such debates on this platform (as explained in my previous blog post) and to stay clear of the perpetual anxiety that the platform of facebook induces, especially in this situation - thus, I have quit facebook, making sure I can never retrace my password any time I get tempted to rejoin the hell-hole.
I am in no way attempting to take the moral high-ground here, and I am in no way trying to prove "I am right, you are wrong"; I'm just trying to ease this situation, and trying to solve this argument between people I respect (because it isn't very nice to be in middle of it!), so I don't have to explain this in the likely event of bumping into one of you after a few pints of cider, when I would be far from my most articulate!!
So here goes...

(apologies for the usage of the words 'them' and 'us' in the first section by the way, I'm using them to express they way we are encouraged to see rather than the way I actually see).

Friend 1 (with slight relevance to friend 3 also)

To begin with, although I don't agree with the method of criticising you that 'friend 2' [the name used for this post] used to react to what you wrote on my wall (and it is obvious that the person concerned friend 2 doesn't know you from some of the 'labelling' you received - although you did do some labeling yourself too) I do certainly have very different views points to you in regards to certain things you said and certain words you used.
And although I have no right to say you must change these views and don't wish to impose my own truths on you, in this case I think it is important to at least hear me out on why I feel it is crucial to take a second look at the way you are writing these comments, because although it is not down to you personally, the wider usage of the concerned terms, in a derogatory way, can lead to ugly and dangerous forms of discrimination in society - this also diverts our eyes from the real causations of the becoming these groups/subgroups in our society, precisely because we do not realise we are partaking in a form of discrimination.
I am of course mainly referring to the usage of the terms 'chavs' and also (but not as much) to 'youths'. I completely understand why you feel so angry and threatened when people mock you and verbally abuse you when you walk the streets, and I am in no way under the illusion that you are making this up, because, as you know, I also receive an quite of a lot of stick whilst walking the streets of our home town, and I too feel angry and intimidated because I also don't know how to react to it, or prevent it from happening. I know the avenue (Coniston) where you catch your buses from very well, and I've seen that a lot of people who seem to have nowhere else to go (something I'll return to) hang about there. And, true my own experiences too, most of the people who are dealing out this stick do match these generalisations of young people wearing the clothing style (tracksuits etc) that are associated with the label 'chav' (although, when I've grown up with people who match this description, they are usually much more pleasant to me than anything).
However, it is important to say that not all of the people who've laughed or shouted at me in streets fit this description - and some, in only an economic sense, are probably less 'chav' than I am! This should stop us short of using the generalising terms in the first plae, but the issue here isn't as simple as to leave it here. So, to stick to the important issues here, it is best to stick directly to why it might be the section of society labeled as 'chav' who would come across as more threatening and irritating to you.
NO MATTER how angry ones feels, how much the abuse makes one feel small, I think it is crucial to see the causations of why certain people in society may need be aggressive and openly mocking of people (not just behind closed doors like the rest of society does), and why people may want to make other people on a street feel small and intimidated; I think it is crucial to see things systemically (and unlike what one of our friends said, seeing things systemically has nothing to do with seeing the system as an 'evil monster'). It is crucial that one takes this into account a causation in a systemic way, rather than seeing each 'chav' case as "their choice to be like that", because this causation relates to all those below a certain income level, and also relates to our own, non-abused-on-street-caused-miseries in these, often, gloomy times.

Perhaps the best place to start looking at the causation systemically is through looking at The Summer Riots in the UK. I think it is safe to say that the lions share of those 'rioting' were 'disaffected' young people, who are either unemployed, with no hope of employment, and alienated from the aspirationalism of our culture which is mediated to us from the top downwards. Whilst aspirationalism and materialism is shoved down their throats from all angles, they also know that their lives are aimless, dead-ended, and, though many cannot articulate this knowledge (the poorest areas are statistically the poorest educated, and also the areas that are most bombarded by aspirational advertisements -watch out for all the billboards in poor communities - diverting focus to materialism instead) they do sense that all this is out of their control. The poorest sections of the society are also the areas which are being hit hardest by the welfare cuts. It's lose lose, whilst the adverts say 'win win' and those at the top say "it's your fault if you aren't winning".
The reaction, (the rioting) was (apart from, maybe, the organised opportunists who capitalised on the disorder) a violent but objectless/aimless rage; self-destructively striking out at their own communities; a pure expression of anger but with no direction, no knowledge of what caused this anger; the looting of consumer goods, which only unintentionally made comment on the rampant consumerism and selfishness of aspirationalism which has turned our culture into a culture more about 'haves and have nots' than it has been since Victorian times. They have been intentionally left in the dark about the reasons for their lowliness and poverty, and now after 30 years of this, with kids growing up knowing no different, being told to 'expect things to get even worse' the rioting really did (to quote my friend Adam Denton) "feel like the system expressing itself"

This isn't a diversion from the issue of 'Chav' because the systemic changes which have created a section of society whom we are all told scorn for their lowliness, has also been supplying the tindersticks that caused these riots. The language, and organisations which may have once united such a section of society, and given them a clear picture of their oppressor, has been crushed by the neoliberal system brought in by Thatcher.
To understand why there is this section of our society which is more-or-less an underclass, not "underclass" in the sense of the words usage in the reaction of "how can they be working class if they don't even bother working?!" (which is an oversimplification) but in a sense of a section of society that it has been politically convenient to blame them for their own poverty, lack of education etc, one has to look closely at what happened when the Thatcher's conservatives took control in 1979 (one could look much further at British history, but it would mean a massive diversion from the point of this post).

Their pre-planned series of systemic changes to jolt Britain into being a more free-market, more competitive system, undercut the traditional working class jobs, and the areas in which they were based. Now I am in no way saying that the era before this (the 1945-1979 postwar consensus era) was perfect, as it wasn't; and, in a landscape sense, things are a lot greener now the heavy industries such as the coal mines (for example) have gone. But these ethics were in no way part of the Tories agenda; they wanted to defeat workers' solidarity, so they could get rid of unions and re-gear the system into an ultra-competitive one. Thatcherism's rhetorics, such as "greed is good", "there is no such thing as a society" and "anyone who is still relying on public transport over the age of 25 can deem themselves a failure" (in aide of promoting a nation of car owners, rather than shared transport) weren't just reactionary comments spouted, they were memes ("an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" - Merriam-Webster Dictionary) injected into our culture, to change it's dynamics. Now, competition and 'the freedom of the market' may not sound such bad words on their own, but they were used against words like 'sharing, community, togetherness', and, more importantly, those who benefit from the free market and competition are nearly always those at the top of the income pile already (with only minor exceptions - as even musicians from lower income backgrounds are finding it harder and harder to 'make it' these days - read this for more on that http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/14/pulp-festivals). This meant that the rich were getting richer and richer, and the poorer were either not moving, or more likely suffering from the destruction of the old industries, and finding that they weren't getting anywhere no matter how competitive they were being in this now-named 'land of opportunity'.
So, as the illusion of opportunity for everyone was a myth (and those who already had the lions share, started to take more and more) Thatcherism's attempts at breaking worker ('class) solidarity had also won over, words such as 'working class' solidarity' 'togetherness' giving way to a new language in our culture about competition, aspiration, where "every can make it so everyone must try", with the flip-side of this being "if you don't make a good life for yourself it is your own fault, you just haven't tried hard enough" (even though it was a 'rigged race' to start with). We were conned into believing that our society had 'progressed to a stage of 'classlessness', from where those who were lowly just couldn't be arsed do well for themselves, and just didn't "appreciate" education and culture, and were deserving of scorn.
So basically, the entire society was being infiltrated with these memes of selfishness, whilst the old words to describe 'class' injustices, and capitalist exploitation were being erased.(conveniently for the ruling class, around this time the Soviet Union - the worlds example, all-be-it, an woefully bad example, of communism was collapsing, allowing the capitalist ruling class and their political advocates to pronounce that 'there is no alternative to [*insert* free market] capitalism). What this meant was that those at the bottom, who were increasingly prone to more exploitative jobs, or no hope of employment at all, was that the language there to describe their exploitation/the way they had been screwed over, had been replaced with a language of affluence, which although may sound enticing, erases the places from where one could vent their frustration, and got them basically speaking and talking words which would further exploit them and further enhance the elite.

This, over the past 30 years, has created a viscous exacerbating cycle, where scorn aimed at this bottom section of society, who no longer have the available language to retaliate, and have only the language of the selfishness which has shit on them already, has made this section of society feel constantly under attack. They, in turn, have acted out with more hostility to the rest of society, thus heightening the scorn, and so forth. And because it has been politically essential (to not upset neoliberalism, and the power it wields over the political class) not to see problems in society as having a political causation, all the government could do was to turn to reactionary measures when there was disorder amongst the 'disaffected', such as ASBO'S and High-Pitched noises outside bus stations. "Naughty people! Start behaving, or else!" So, thus, in this depoliticised culture, the alienation and frustration of this section of society could only grow.
I think you can tell how under-threat a person is feeling, by the manner in which he/she walks, interacts: there is a need to constantly be on the self-defence for those from a discriminated section of society and this is noticeable in macho walking styles and 'cocky' body gestures, and it is interesting to notice this in all discriminated sections of societies all over the world, from the British 'underclass' to the poorer, and even more discriminated, black communities in the USA.

In relation to the discriminated-against black communities of the USA, it seems that those sections of society most exploited and left vulnerable by the system, seem to be the ones that drape themselves in the most materialistically brash, and most heavily branded clothing and jewellery. The poorest communities tend to be the ones with least access to an education which might help them become critical of the materialism of capitalism, and poor areas are generally the areas were the big brands can stain the walls with their product adverts until there is no room left - basically, rampant materialism becomes the only language really available at all. When one thinks of 'bling' they usually also think the word 'chav' or they associate it with the music from those US ghettos - RNB/HIP-HOP, which might explain why this is the music which is usually associated with 'chavs' here in the UK. The heavily branded, 'blingy' clothing/jewellery etc, also seems to act as an act of self-defence by those who feel most threatened and powerless - with the language of class politics hidden from view, all one can when the are right down at the bottom is to use the only given, the aspirationalist materialism, to the max.
And I think all these things sum-up what as a society we now class as a 'chav'.

Now where do we come into this, being, traditionally speaking, working class too? Well, I find this passage from the essay 'outline of a beginning' by the philosopher Alain Badiou (written in 1968, but used in a 201o publication due the persistent relevance of it) very appropriate, as it deals with the task of 'bringing about political and practical unity between disparate groups', which, in relation to the predicament in our nation at the moment, the disparate groups would be us - who it may be appropriate here to label as 'the educated working class - and the 'chav's - who it may be appropriate to label as 'the uneducated working class.
"The bourgeoisie [the historical name for the capitalist class] to some extent relies for its politico-social defence upon the ideology of a gap between the middle strata [who, in our terms should be seen as us; the educated and so-called 'cultured' working class'] (employees, cadres, supervisors, civil servants) and the proletariat [who, in our terms should be seen as the 'uneducated working class']. If these two groups united in any practical sense, it would pose a deadly threat to the employers' class power."
"Now, awareness of the gap is conveyed by 'culture' and supported by the cornerstone of academic edifice: the distinction between the intellectual labour and manual labour. It is therefore essential to educate the 'middle strata' on a mass but differentiated basis: giving them a taste of secondary, or even higher, education marks in indelible terms their sense of distance and their fear of being proletarianized".

Although the lines of separation that distance may be at a different threshold between us 'the educated working class' and those who society called 'the chavs', the terms are still the same: "If these two groups united in any practical sense, it would pose a deadly threat to the employers' class power". what I am saying is that discriminating against 'chavs' (or even going as far as to use the label in the first place) we perpetuate that gap which stops us seeing the bigger picture of our subordination of both groups by the capitalist class.
It is generally 'the educated working class' who are fearful, thus discriminatory, of 'chavs' because we are the closest to them, and we are more fearful of becoming 'down and out' like them. This, in turn, heightens the already present resentment those from the 'chav'-labeled section of society have for us, because, in the 'alternative' clothes/music, the books we read, the 'good job's we search for, we reek of the systemic 'scumification' of them, because we are draped in the language forced on us by the capitalist class, that blames the 'chavs' and calls them poor due to their own choice to be lazy and stupid.
This is the reason why when hatred and resentment is expressed at students in society, it isn't aimed at the likes who occupy the Bullingdon Club, but at the students who come from lower middle/educated working class backgrounds. Without knowing it, through intentional systemic meddling, they are scorning the bottom section of society for problems which in reality are out their control, in a culture which is all about 'haves and have nots'.

So, it's in our interests, if we want to see a better future, to see the section of society labeled as 'chav' in this context, and no as our enemies. I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't go to university, dress differently, or stop going to art galleries, but just that we should be careful not to be driven by the aspirationalist memes to do these things, as this is how the gap is created, to neither sections' benefit. The abuse may not stop on the streets we walk, but try to remember that that abuse is not really meant for you, and if we know this, there may be hope that they will too.

I am in no way wanting you to become as politicised as me, but please take all into consideration.

See you on Wednesday evening anyway!!


Friend 2
First of all, by meeting you in person I realise you have a massively larger pool of intellectual resource to take from than I have, and, although it is not a competition, I know I cannot match this. It was indeed very enlightening to meet you - you said you learnt a lot from your trip to Sheffield, well, so did I!
However, in regards to this strange (for me) situation, I do think you have built up a very wrong picture of 'friend 1' (and 'friend 3') from the argument you had with him on facebook. As I have explained in the previous section, I certainly don't agree with friend 1's usage of terms such as 'chav also, but the way you criticised him seem to take for granted an image of him being quite a self-assured, arrogant person - but this is not the case at all. And I think that this leads to an important point: I think both of you may have come across as very very different people to whom you really are in the non-facebooked world. I think you miss-judged him as someone far more self-assured when you told him to 'go kill himself'. If he was cock-sure of himself, he would have laughed this off, but not being so, I don't think he did.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not sure if the make-up of facebook can actually make room for democratic debate, but instead just encourages one to bolster the image of themselves that they have projected onto the site, at all costs. Thus, I think that a difference of views on facebook can only lead to online hostilities. I sometimes think that challenging views on facebook can only serve to harden the already expressed views concerned, in an act of self-preservation. Basically I just don't think it's possible to make anyone change their minds, or reconsider their views on facebook. And the angrier we get, the more one loses people.
You are right that your challenges on people on facebook can 'unmask' their bigotry and racism from behind their supposedly 'liberal' mask, but, regarding friend 1 and 3, if you met them I'm pretty sure they would not strike you as being this sort of person, and I think you'd actually find yourselves listening to each other, and they'd probably be interested in your many thoughts you share!! I think that sometimes, due to this incessant anxiety for self-preservation, spread by the facebook memes, anger can be caused by a lack of self-esteem and self-assurance rather than a fear of an unmasking of supposedly 'liberal' views to find that somebody isn't all so tolerant after all.
Of course I think this is often the case! So much of my thinking is taken up by the fact that many people make up lies about how liberal they are in order to cover up very uncomfortable realities. However, although, as you said "nostalgia, and familiarity stand for nothing with friendship', what I suppose has kept me and friend 1 in close contact for so long is maybe down to a shared sensitivity to things (all be it, sometimes sensitive about different things) and I know that friend 1 is more likely to react out of anxiety about him feeling that he is being attacked in general, or being made a fool of, than rather what in particular he is being criticised for. We aren't just people who went to school with each other so feel compelled to appropriate our friendships on facebook, we are friends in the physical world also.
He certainly does feel intimidated by these people who are present where he catches his bus. It's a difficult one, because I understand that feeling like this makes him angry, but I don't agree with the labelling of people of course. To ask him to see thing systemically is my only advice I could give. But I must admit, I suffer from low self-esteem when anyone mocks me also, no matter what knowledge I have that informs me to rise above this feeling. But, to me now, it is essential to see it systemically, even if this drains me of massive amounts of energy whilst actually experience the physical world.

The initial reason why I didn't join the argument before it truly escalated was because I didn't know how to put "I didn't agree with friend 1's views but I didn't agree with your initial method of criticism" in a way which would calm the situation. And this wasn't the only reason I had for quitting facebook, but it certainly was the instigator of something Ive been trying to do for a long time. So, maybe some good has come out of all this? But I hope to have more 'face to face discussions with you soon, that'd be great. Maybe one day you could meet friend 1 face to face? - mind you, it might just be best letting it go now.


I'm sure I'll see you in London at some point this weekend anyway!!

Echo Chambers: why facebook conversations always seem to end in farce, stress or out and out slanging matches

What is my objective?
Do I want to challenge and debate aspects of the world that trouble/puzzle me, or do I merely want to just be perceived by others as being an intellectual/a smart arse?
If the former is what you want then you're wasting your time being on facebook.

. The title of this blog (Echo Chambers) is taken from an interview in the Sheffield Magazine Now Then, with documentary-maker Adam Curtis; when asked about whether the internet is as democratic and open as it first seemed he said: "It’s an echo chamber of other people like you, which simplifies the world. It doesn’t change it." After experiences on facebook (which is now not far from being the internet due to its size) this past week, here's my own understanding of why this seems so true.

Facebook on face value seems a great place to have challenging discussions and to learn new things. And when one starts attempting to lap up the constant stream of links to current affairs issues, which are rarely, or insufficiently covered by the rolling news channels on the television set (as long as the intensity of such amounts of information being thrown ones way doesn't make them give up altogether), this is a positive. However, it is beginning to be made strikingly clear to me that whatever positives, and democratic distributions of information, social-networking (to date, that is) allows, this will always be subservient to the main dynamic driving facebook: a place to promote oneself; to project the most desirable image of oneself one would want others to see.

Neoliberalism has engendered what I would call a dictatorship of individualism where one feels compelled, reluctantly/compulsively, to use all communication as self-promotion, as if our life depends on it - as it often does under such a market-driven system. But prescribed individualism is a con. As with the trick mass consumerism plays on the populace, it creates the cutting irony of everybody being herded in the same direction like sheep, to the call of "be an individual" or "be someone special". Of course, it's not as simple as this image of us all being led like sheep conveys, and we aren't so easily blinded to what is happening around as such an image would suggest. But a system geared towards harnessing then exploiting individualism necessitates it's so-called freedom enabling products, so they become an un-freedom, acting as enclosures taking from us our freedom to be without them, by making it almost impossible to have any kind decent life without them (and this is the argument that reluctant cell phone users and car users use, when they tell their tale of how they capitulated to the product).

Although far less of us are rampant, self-seeking individuals as the mainstream media would like to have us believe, it doesn't prevent the memes ("an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" - Merriam-Webster Dictionary) of individualism seeping into our thought processes and actions. These memes haven't just allowed facebook to exist as it does (as a yuppified-prison-ship), but have allowed for the facebookisation of our lives, as it grows into an 800 million-user site. And one mustn't forget that with so many people on facebook, a good deal of the planet's entire communication must occur with the confines of this networking site.
An often spoken of problem with both social networking and text messaging is that the context that a sentence or two have been written in cannot be deciphered; one cannot tell whether the individual in question is being sarcastic, angry, warm and friendly, or cold and dismissive. This can cause a large amount of paranoia and stress. This is Problematic to begin with, but facebook wall discussions aren't even normal in terms of electronic communication, even very different from, what now must be seen as, 'traditional' SMS text messaging. What this means for communication is that it is always channeled, memetically, through the profile-projections of the individuals concerned. On the transient virtual non-space of facebook, where nothing seems solid and countless other self-promotions create a waterfall-like effect of shouts showering down on you, one feels like their own existence is fading away. Thus, self-promotion becomes self-preservation. This means that whatever information is shared around on facebook, whatever socially progressive conversations are had, the prevailing memes are conservative ones. This conservatism makes all conversations, not conversations at all, but just lots of vested interests (for the preservation of their own self) firing their truths at each other - leading to stress and arguments, and even slanging matches.
And when one enters into these debates, despite ones best intentions and attempts to thoroughly explain the reasons for their truths, the entrenched self-preservation directing the flow always personalises any critical commentary, taking control over one's own intentions, and, soon enough, one's own self-preservation requires that they directly aim their criticisms at the other individuals concerned, instead of attempting to source them as systemic/institutional causations. Before one knows it they have found themselves offending others, for having contrary views, forgetting the importance of seeing the contrary views (no matter how disagreeable) through a systemic lens rather than an individual one. Although, when one of my friends said to me in reply to the dilemmas leading to this blog needing to be written that "there is an absence that is forgotten about during the heat of virtual argument", he was probably thinking more on the lines of the lack of context involved, perhaps it is also true that the isolation involved in this context-lacking mode of communication makes us forget about the systemic, as we beg for attention from our lonely rooms. I am finding that opinions that I would easily be able to talk to people about in real life, are taken as an assault on others' personalities whilst on facebook. One of these spiraled into something which ended up being a virtual battleground. I'd tried explaining my reasons as best as I could, but a full blown argument arose between different sections of my friends which (by the time I had the chance to have my say) has blown well out of control. I didn't share the views (expressed) by one side, but I didn't agree with the method of argument used by the other. I wanted to upset neither, but the conservatism of self-preservation when under strain had kicked in, and I could do nothing, and (after walking Kafkaesque virtual tunnels in order to ensure that I couldn't rejoin) I quit the site, after a stressful weekend, trying not to lose friends on either side of the argument. And I'd say to those who I share views with that whilst, obviously I don't think you're conservative, I do think that facebook encourages the conservatism is all of us.

Does this mean that I disregard the Internet as something that could be a benefactor in changing the human race's current route to disaster? NO, but I think that social networking sites are disastrous: they are a tool to intentionally bolster conservative attitudes in the many, for the few with vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo.
Faces from the establishment are much more condescending and mocking of those who share their thoughts on blog pages than they are of those who do the same, but on their facebook wall. This is because they have nothing to fear from what goes on inside facebook's gates, precisely because its memes urge a far stronger self-centeredness and passiveness over the togetherness and activism.

The creators of these sites knew what they were creating. It would be very naive to think that these Harvard-taught geniuses accumulated a personal wealth of $17.5 billion (for example) through sheer pot luck - they knew they were discreetly enclosing the commons, and they knew people would be sucked in, willfully then later reluctantly. They gave us the exciting taster of our own vanity, and have now caught us in a virtual opium den where we survive on fixes of self-preservation and self-confirmation, whether we like it or not. They have got more and more people to join in; exacerbating the need to be on there too, because it seems to have appropriated everything that is going off around you, and one feels that they have been rendered non-existent by abstaining from joining. They have allowed advertisers to capitalise on this surely lucrative huge buzzing of status anxiety, and unlike in our email boxes, we can't get rid of these adverts - get rid of one and they ask you what was it about this particular/atomised advert that you didn't like "wanna try another? we've got lots more!"

Facebook is like a giant holding pen, where we are enslaved to self-preservation/self-centeredness. This is certainly no democratic set up, and it's appropriation of many fits well with the fears expressed by many that we are entering a period of neo-feudalism, as the virtual begins to complement the real world. And it is unreasonably difficult to cancel your stay in the holding pen. Trust me, I should know - Ive tried to quit enough times! But this time, I actually want to escape as quickly as possible, and I've done my best to make sure I cannot get back on there.

And so this finally boils down to whether human nature will always react to technological advances in the same way, or whether technological advances can be used in different ways, engendered by systemic changes. I prefer the latter, because it's not a case of being a 'Luddite' (a fashionable discriminatory term for anyone who doesn't like the way things are moving in), I believe we cannot get out of our mess without technology's aid, and I do not buy the argument that 'human nature is human nature, you can't change it' (which is fittingly the beginning bits of what started the aforementioned messy argument - all be it with different participants in the debate) because this form of acceptance is dangerous because it can only function, and not making us all want to kill ourselves, with an heavy of dosage of denial to what's happening in the world, and of course an disavowing of the effects of our own actions. But there again this may be just my opinion caused by the inability to cope with the idea that the future may not be worth living in...?
Perhaps this view held about how human nature will never change, thus systemic change won't make a difference is true, but I'd rather we at least try. And, with this in mind, I firmly believe the word progress shouldn't be used in relation to networking sites/cell phones/and other privatisations under the guise of modernistions, that passify and enclose us, because this is actually signs of regression; using technology to return us to powerless serfs.

I hope my friends on both sides read this and understand why I had to abstain from the debate.

In The City..... (2011, Biro on paper)

In The City..... (2011, Biro on paper)

standing next to the next piece to get working on 'Who would want to listen to this?'