The cat photo approach to history

Who cares if it's true or not?

Share it if it's inspirational... 

My take on "media via meme" for the Baffler magazine...

Welcome to Kebabylon

Chips, booze, pubs, clubs, pills, thrills...

My take on a British institution for 3AM Magazine

Slavoj Žižek? Be honest, you don't understand him either

As Schopenhauer once said, probably, the point of knowledge isn’t expanding the consciousness of humanity. What it’s really about is impressing people at parties. As a Wikipediaphile, hooked on easy-readers, Made Simple and For Dummies and all the other forms of McKnowledge, I hold myself as something of an expert on this theme – in fact I could probably do a PhD on the subject. Except that would be beside the point. I’m insufferable enough as it is; imagine what I’d be like if I actually knew something.

What I do know is that all those years of study, learning, academia are a complete waste of time – all you really need to sound clever is to quote someone with a serious sounding name. Someone like Julia Kristeva, or Milan Kandura. Something austere, east-European. Like Slavoj Žižek. Žižek – a kind of updated Jean Paul Sartre played by an ageing David Brent – is today’s hipster philosopher of choice, someone who invites such fawning sycophancy by quasi-intellectuals and quote junkies you’d think he could epitomise the human condition just by breaking wind.

Slavoj Žižek. Go on, try it out. Roll it around your tongue. Sounds good, doesn’t it? If you’re going to quote anyone, quote Žižek. He reaches the questions other philosophers don’t reach. He’s so cool he could turn post-structuralism into a guitar solo – a “rockstar” thinker who narrates documentaries about Freud in modern cinema like he was delivering the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus instead of talking over a clip of Porkies. Never mind the Marxist theory, just being able to pronounce his name practically qualifies you as a cultural sophisticate. 

Needless to say I've never read Slavoj Žižek. How could I? His books are all ten thousand pages long and utterly incomprehensible to a carbon based life form; the prose style exists on a wavelength pitched between somewhere Sigmund Freud and the Higgs Boson and you have to be eighty times cleverer than Gary Kasparov just to make your way through the sleeve notes. 

No, let’s face it, nobody has ever read Slavoj Žižek. By all appearances even Slavoj Žižek has never read Slavoj Žižek - or he might have indulged in an arcane process known to lesser writers as “editing” and reduced his 1,300 page books into a punchy 900. But it doesn’t matter. Slavoj Žižek doesn’t exist to be read. He exists to be quoted. The important thing is to read about Slavoj Žižek: to throw Slavoj Žižek-shaped poptarts of information down your gob and roll them around in your mouth before artfully spitting them out again at the right moment.

“Žižek suggests that consciousness is opaque, citing Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat and coat,” you can casually throw into the conversation, as you get up to order a packet of nuts. Just memorising five lines from his Wikipedia page can provide enough pretentious waffling fuek to power an entire post-arthouse movie discussion.

And that's the point. To quote, not to know. As we speak, the base of human knowledge is changing. Knowledge is happening faster now. It's getting wider and lighter. Humanity's intellectual heritage is starting to resemble a sort of gigantic, fluffy pancake – a soufflé of feeds, links and listicles, an “ambient” knowledge that’s trivia rich and fuelled by social media. We know a Hell of a lot less about a Hell of a lot more. This isn’t dumbing down. It’s dumbing around.

Just consider the example of Wikipedia. Why ever read anything again when you can have it shoddily summarized by a crowd of poorly-informed amateurs? Why trust boring “encyclopedias” and “experts” when you can trust to hyperlinks, which give every high-level query the feel of a pub quiz? 

Take a book like Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. “Ah, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,” I hear you cry. “That fascinating chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia.”

Wrong! Fathers and Sons is actually: a 1970 song written and originally performed by British singer Cat Stevens; an album by Muddy Waters, released in 1969 on the Chess label, and featuring Donald "Duck" Dunn of Booker; and it’s the M.G.'s and “Paul Butterfield” of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Oh, and it’s also a chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia. Yawn.

Philosophers once said that the answer to democracy lay in educating the people. I disagree. I think the answer to democracy lies in making everybody equally stupid. In a world where we can never hope to understand a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of all there is to know out there, our only defence against info-geddon is edutainment, TED talks, Fast Facts. And quoting Slavoj Žižek. You heard the one about Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat and coat?

What do you do with striking workers? Replace them with iPads

Locals kick back against assholes, glassholes and the Silicon One Percent... 

My interview with Andrew Keen for VICE


 

Why I need a "bad newsfeed"

What’s Facebook? It’s a massively multiplayer boasting platform; it’s a planet sized town square where people stand around shouting about vaguely interesting bits of their lives; it’s a Borgesian library of carefully-curated selves. It's also the biggest exercise in narcissism in human history. Let's face it, Facebook's an ego-trip. An ego-trip with the gain set to eleven.

And it's also hard work on the soul. The company was accused a while back of a manipulative "emotional contagion" experiment whereby it gave some 600,000 people a downer by showing them negative newsfeeds for a while. Not to play devil's advocate, but I disagree with the almost the whole of humanity on this one. You see, I'm pretty sure I've been the lone subject of a contagion experiment specially adapted towards me, whereby powerful algorithms are trained to clutter my newsfeed with the happiness, triumphs and achievements of everyone I know in an incessant reminder of my miserable failure as a human being. 

“Have you noticed how pretty Victor’s girlfriend is, Dale?” it’ll nudge me. 

“Heard about Rachel’s award from the Arts Council?” it’ll trill innocently.

“Jen’s just been made editor-in-chief of the Independent,” it’ll hum innocuously. “She's younger than you, isn't she?”

That’s on top of the spew of status updates broadcasting the parties, weddings, orgies and awards ceremonies everyone’s just attended, photographed, had sex at, selfied, shared, boasted about, and now wants to spray in my face like a demented sociopath wielding a can of Smug. 

Open Facebook and you plug yourself into a giant, bipolar RSS feed beamed direct from Planet Self Doubt, one where your emotional stability can be instantly shattered by a stray algorithm informing you that your childhood sweetheart has just married, or that your friends are all being promoted, or that the girl who used to borrow your pencil sharpener at school has just been made editor-in-chief of the Independent. It’s an existential crisis taking place in status updates; a self-esteemicide.

And herein lies the biggest irony. 

The “emotional contagion” experiment may have been unethical, but it was a Hell of a lot less depressing than the usual Facebook. As someone who despises humanity, I’m actually extremely keen for everybody else to be unhappy. I like seeing unhappy status updates. They make me happy. They’re a confirmation that my own drizzly, depressive, spaghetti-stained existence isn’t quite as unique as I thought it was, that I’m not the only one whose most meaningful human connection is being frisked in the airport queue, not the only one who contemplates ecological Armageddon with a vague sense that it might not be an entirely bad idea. 

For this reason I propose a reverse Facebook, an anti-social network - with a “Bad Newsfeed” where powerful algorithms are trained to filter out anything except the misery and misfortune of everyone you know. Emotional contagion tweaked for misanthropes. Anybody want to get infected?  

Cash in on a dying planet!

What do charred deserts, dessicated forests and climate refugees mean to you?

That's right - economic opportunity!

Disaster capitalism goes "eco": read my article for the Baffler here

The 9th most exciting city in the world

If you're in charge of a crumbling post-industrial city, what do you do to add a bit of "vibrancy", "energy" and "creativity"? 

Here are some of the options!

•    build a new Leisure centre;

•    build something that looks a bit like a new Leisure centre, but is actually a Sports centre;

•    build something that isn’t a Leisure centre or a Sports centre, but which might just be an Arts centre; 

•    build something made out of glass;
 
•    organise a free ‘street party’ in summer, featuring a) bongos; b) a rock band who got into the top 40 in 2001; c) a radio presenter ‘celebrity’ who you’d quietly assumed had died; d) a nineteen year old girl with a poem and a drum; e) a stall handing out free styrofoam cups of orange squash; f) a dawning yet profound sense of the pointlessness of your existence on earth that gnaws at your soul like a nail-file applied to the spinal column; g) hot dogs; h) funny men on stilts dressed to look like the police; i) the police.
 
•    build a bridge; (you need to make sure there's some water there first)
 
•    commission a piece of “public art” that looks like a cube being assaulted by a beach ball;
 
•    build another Leisure centre;
 
•    encourage the large-scale privatisation of public space by handing over to a load of coffee chains and shadowy PFI financiers; 
 
•    build a “Cultural Quarter”;
 
•    commission another piece of “public art” that has everyone confused, but probably means something about diversity; 
 
•    if none of the above work, invest in local services like decent housing, education and public services. (Note: try everything else first). 

I mention this because this week Birmingham's just been announced by the Rough Guide as the ninth most exciting city on the planet - for “embracing its industrial heritage”. 

I once embraced Birmingham's industrial heritage, too, for a day, and I have to say the adjective that sprung to mind wasn't "exciting". It was quite a long way from "exciting", in fact. Among the must-see attractions like the "College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies", the "Academy of Birmingham Cosmetic Dentristy" as well as other enticing hotspots like the "Gas Street Basin" - which frankly sounded more like an industrial accident than a tourist attraction - I actually ended up spending most of my day in Birmingham in a Wetherspoons that seemed to have been hollowed out of a multi-storey car park. It was named Paradise. It wasn't.   

But so what? Cities shouldn't have to be exciting. They're supposed to be places for living in. The problem with branding a whole city with estate-agent propaganda ("creative", "vibrant", "dynamic") is that it promotes a twatscape of moneyed gentrifiers and buy-to-lets. Trying to market Birmingham as a tourist hotspot makes about as much sense as relocating the next Sundance Film Festival to Slough. Let Birmingham be itself. It comes first in that contest any day.