Help! I’m being seduced by fictional women

Katie wants to be my friend. Look: she says so. Along with Roxanna, and Fatima, and Kendra. Their profile photos come complete with nubile selfies and underclad, curvy mirror shots. Lucky me eh? These girls don’t just want to be Facebook friends. They want to be Facebook friends with benefits.

It was so much simpler in the old days. Back then, a million years ago, in 2004 or 2005, all you had to do was open your email inbox and a splurge of friendly welcoming spam would coat your monitor. Warm greetings from dethroned Nigerian princes. Phishermen casting their nets. Friends who you saw a fortnight ago mysteriously emailing you from Delhi, robbed and homeless and so broke that they couldn’t even afford correct spelling. There was a… What might you call it? A gentlemanliness to the whole thing. 

The fables and fabrications were charmingly cartoonlike: an ‘emergency’ email from the bank, a noble Royal fallen on hard times. Am I the only one who misses the cosy familiarity of mak $$$$$ NOW clik,. here u! can m.a.k.e m$ney££££££ in the same way they might miss a morning wave from the postman? But a queue of sexy women wanting to be my Facebook pal – ah, it’s all so cynical. Like everything else things have changed. Internet spam just ain’t what it used to be.

Anti-social media

The web, as we all know, gives people the chance to form bonds with their fellow humans in new and revolutionary ways. More specifically, it gives people the chance to send Facebook invites to their fellow humans in new and revolutionary ways. A quick glance in my folder reveals I had 605 event invitations just over the last year, which is 605 more events than I actually bothered attending. Five minutes ago Jonathon Ifors asked me to ‘Like’ his page about his comedy night. Five minutes before that, Sarah Cable asked me to ‘Like’ her page. Gabby Stansford, someone I have no connection to whatsoever, just asked me to ‘Like’ Gabby Stansford. 

Do I like Gabby Stansford? I don’t know. I don’t dislike Gabby Stansford; I have no strong feelings about Gabby Stansford, other than a vague wish that she’d quit bothering strangers and just get on with being, well, Gabby Stansford.

Please, like me

The worst thing about Generation Spam is not that we’re victims, it’s that we all, eventually, become perpetrators. Here, for example, is the invite from a former friend of mine who despite requests to stop, repeatedly spams me about his dismal “comedy” projects:

Hi, there              Dale!!!

            What are you doing tonight? Staying in? NO!!! Tonight I'm part of a superb improv team the Googly Gumdrops A “riotously dangerous improv comedy” when two mighty teams         unleash your laughter http://www.ticketwe   of warriors take to the stage to prove!!!!!!!!! Come along and let yourself in for a crazy night of Ticket £9  http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/ fun and hilarious as £6 concessions          unleash your   ?region=gb_london&query=detail&...

Etcetera. I contemplate it in fascination, trying to work out just how much lower I’d have to sink to want to pay six pounds to watch someone almost as unfunny as I am performing to silence and embarrassed coughs in front of a nearly empty audience. Night on the streets? Evening in intensive care with a stomach pump for company? For all its claims of uniting the world there’s a dispiriting loneliness to social media sometimes: like watching 24hr teleshopping in a darkened room after you've just been dumped, it’s easy to feel you’re nothing but a spam-sponge, ready to be crop-sprayed with bits of other peoples’ ego. The personal touch has never felt so impersonal.

The CIA tried to ban this post. YOU are lucky enough to read it

People keep asking me what my favourite film is. 

I can't answer that.

I like these films. And some others.

So stop fucking asking me. 

The Contrapreneur's Top 30* 

*It might be 31 or 32, I couldn't be arsed to actually count it.*
 
(*Also there's no particular order, though the first one is pretty good)

Here's The List
(Number One, maybe) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind        
Secrets and Lies  
4 months, 3 Weeks and whatever the rest of the fucking title is 
Spirited away  
Social network  
The death of mr lazarescu  
Almost Everything ever made by Michael Haneke, even his dodgy early stuff   
The infant (or whatever it is in French) 
The class (or, "le Class") 
Exorcist  
Taxi driver 
Crimes and misdemenours, or whatever the correct spelling is  
Blade runner 
Chinatown 
Mr Turner 
Brick  
Fish tank 
American honey  
Fight club 
Team america  
Under the skin  
A serious man 
Manchurian candidate  
Annie hall, and the other one  
Goodfellas  
Reservoir dogs 
Winter’s bone  
The third man 
Bowling for columbine 
Jonny Mnemonic 
Some other bollocks
Let's face it you stopped reading by now anyway 

“TED Talks”? They’re like Oprah for academics and business gurus

I’m proud of how little I know. It’s taken me years to achieve it. I’ve skimmed my way through enough one line summaries, books for dummies, easy readers, infobites, factoids and hyperlinks to fuel me through an entire year’s worth of fatuous generalisations and dinner parties. I’m not widely read. I’m narrowly read. I read a bit, but mainly to avoid reading a lot. I cheat. Let’s face it, I’m obnoxious and opinionated enough at the best of times – imagine how insufferable actually knowing anything would have made me. 

So I guess I should like "TED" Talks, the Show-and-Tell sessions for wealthy business elites packed choc-a-full of every kind of McFact and ‘inspirational’ lightbulb idea you could imagine. They’re available on the web! They deal with complex subjects in less time than it takes to watch a kitten video! BUT, but...

Is it those standing ovations that remind me uncomfortably of a megachurch session? Am I the only one who finds that heavenly choir that starts and closes the videos a bit creepy? Is it just me that feels like I'm witnessing some kind of secular cult, Scientology for Smart Thinking readers? 

Doubtless it's a good thing to spread some new ideas around. But there's an agenda here. Ever seen a Ted talk that dared to criticise Twitter or Google? Or the Cult of Steve Jobs, or Apple's abusive labour practices in the far east? Or the ethics of speculative, seed-funded capitalism? 

For all its inclusive YouTube sheen the whole ‘TEDucation’ project is essentially a well-disguised auto-fellatio session for the pro-business / tech lobby, evangelical therapy for well-heeled businesspeople who like to applaud uplifting talks about using Google to reduce malaria in Lake Malawi then glide back to their hotel rooms in a haze of self-righteous tweets about really having learnt... well... something. 

Knowledge as junk food? iPod diplomacy? Worse than that. This is Oprah for academics and tech gurus.

In my opinion the best hope for democracy is stupidity

Whatever its pluses and minuses, there’s no denying that the knowledge base is flattened by the internet: humankind’s intellectual heritage becomes a sort of gigantic mental pancake – light and fluffy, but vast beyond comprehension. Buffeted by feeds and hyperlinks, the sum total of what we know starts to resemble a massively-multiplayer word association exercise. 

Take a famous name. Take Plato. Or Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. ‘Ah, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,’ I hear you say. ‘That fascinating chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia.’

Wrong! Fathers and Sons is actually: a memoir by Edmund Gosse; 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 T. & 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. You see? We know a hell of a lot less about a hell of a lot more: not so much dumbing down as dumbing around. 

If we’ve done anything as a planet, it’s to develop a kind of all-embracing, inclusive ignorance, the kind of ignorance that anybody feels they can share in. 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 our yawning cosmic ignorance is factoids, Wikipedia articles and all the other McKnowledge. And yes, alright, Ted Talks. Humanity has finally made ignorance a tool that we can all share in. What could be more democratic than that?

Forget meggings and manscara. We need more ‘meminists’

Call me finicky, but I hate losing my guybrator. Maybe it fell out of my manbag along with my guyliner when I was dancing to bro-step. Dude food in front of a dick flick tonight anyone?

Some choice selections from the “dick-tionary of portMANteau words”, a compendium of irritating prefixes for Generation X-Box and the age of the bromance. While the tedious onslaught of mangluage (hey!) has crop-sprayed a load of aftershave over the dictionary, there’s one neologism I haven’t heard anywhere. It’s not a very good word, admittedly. In fact it’s downright annoying. But it also encompasses an important concept. That’s right: I want to stake out my pitch as a meminist. 

All in a word

“That’s ridiculous,” said a friend, as I explained my idea about meminism. “Why do you need a separate word for it? It’s fine if you want to be a feminist.”

“I know, but some feminists wouldn’t take me seriously if I said I was a feminist,” I replied.

“I would,” she said.

“You don’t speak for all feminists,” I said. “I hoped if I called myself a meminist at least it would show some level of self-effacing irony.”

She just rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the steering wheel.

We live at a time when intersectionality – the idea that feminism should speak across different groups – has never been more at the forefront of debate. Caitlin Moran’s “couldn’t give a shit” tweet about the lack of black people in Girls sparked off robust debate about how far populist feminism can be inclusive towards women marginalised for other reasons. Half a century on from the time these kinds of identity politics first surfaced, the questions seem no closer to being answered: how can a single movement successfully speak for everybody? How far should a mainstream audience be courted when that mainstream audience is part of the problem? And is Caitlin Moran allowed to be funny?

Vagina envy

I can’t answer any of these questions, but I do know one group who could make valuable contributions to feminism despite their gender: men. While the world’s still an overwhelmingly sexist place, move in certain circles and one might be surprised at the number of men whose opinions are, in everything but name perhaps, feminist. Believe in absolute equality? Check. Happy to have a female boss? Check. Furious about harrassment, rape and trafficking? Check. Think that chicklit’s better than dicklit if it’s Caitlin Moran doing it rather than Tony Parsons? Well, I do at any rate.

Just because men are not ourselves the object of misogyny, why wouldn’t misogyny anger them? Why wouldn’t they be enraged that friends of theirs have been groped at work, leered at or turned into a three dimensional porn fantasy by wankers they went to bed with? That 130 million girls are estimated to have been genitally mutilated across Africa and Yemen alone? Or that female students don’t dare catch a night bus home, or that women are slutshamed online in the supposedly liberal west, or that only 7% of governments across the world are headed by women? Are men supposed to be indifferent about all this simply because they pee standing up? 

The emergence of campaign groups such as Men Against Trafficking – nailing their colours to the mast as men standing up to misogyny – is a welcome sign of overt support for womens’ causes, but it’s at the everyday level where it’s down to us all to spread the cause of meminism further. And we do that by challenging attitudes on a daily basis. Teasing out old prejudices, sexist assumptions. It means sending men virals like Majorité Opprimée that show them how the world looks from the other side. It means getting them to think twice before they dismiss a writer as ‘chick lit’ simply because it’s written by a woman, and to challenge the publishers who insisted on putting the high heel on the front cover. It means getting them to recognise the girl in the Sun or the stripper in the club as the MBA student she might well be (female students account for 44 percent of the ‘sugar babies’ on favours-for-money website SeekingArrangement, who apparently receive $3,000 a month from their ‘sugar daddies’). It means getting HBO-hooked progressives to refrain from dismissing Girls as Cosmo fluff simply because it’s about girls, or dismissing a website like Jezebel as pink trivia and instead awarding it the same status as male-dominated new media startups like Vox or 538.

           

So let’s work together to create a world where people – female ones, male ones, black ones, gay ones, young ones, disabled ones – are treated as people, rather than as the sum of their preceding adjectives. When we don’t need to invent ‘man’ words for universal concepts and when we dig a grave for neologisms like ‘dude food’ and ‘guybrator’.  And when a word such as ‘meminism’ doesn’t need to exist, because the idea of feminism is assumed to be universal as language itself. That’s my magenda.

Sorry. Just couldn’t resist.

"Staycation"? Possibly the most outrageous rebranding exercise since Auschwitz held a "bring your child into work" day

Britain does a lot of things well. It does trenchant irony, video game design and cupcakes well. Better than Spain in fact. Weather, however, is not one of our talents. Most of our skies resemble God in a bad mood; just looking up is like being hit in the face by the opening scene of an Ingmar Bergman film. Now that the British "summer" is upon us and we can look forward to long, light days full of gusting wind and drizzle, we can also expect a sea of Sunday supplements trumpeting funky "staycation" suggestions for anyone struggling to stump up the twenty quid for a Ryanair ticket. Take the brochure for the Great Orme 'Ancient Mine' in coastal Wales – essentially a large hole with ambitions. ‘Stonehenge is certainly a world class monument,’ it generously allows, ‘but now it is joined by the Ancient Mines on the Great Orme.’ Elsewhere the King Edward Mine’s buildings are Listed ‘Grade 11’, meaning they are of ‘national importance’. On this kind of scale I think our bathroom lime scale probably ranks at Grade 15.

Holiday of a lifetime: 
the Bournemouth Sewage Treatment Tour

Scrape the barrel and what you find there half makes you sad, and half makes you shake your head in disbelief. ‘Enjoy a 30 minute tunnel trip,’ said one I’d found for Standedge Tunnel in Yorkshire, ‘while one of our entertaining guides explains all about the geology and history of the tunnel, as well as thrilling you with tales of the folks who designed, built and worked in the tunnel.’ Alternatively you could just drive beneath the Thames at Blackwell for free. This isn't tourism. It's tour-isn’t.  
If these are the minimum standards, it occurred to me, there would be nothing to stop an enterprising fellow like myself from setting up my own ‘Garden Shed Experience’.  

Reasons you’d want to visit Dale’s ‘Garden Shed Experience’

-           Full self service buffet, with hot drinks available 

-           New themed ‘history’ feature with a couple of photos blu-tacked to the wall to explain the story of the creation of the garden shed

-           Guided tour down the garden path to the shed, and back up again

-           Unparalleled views of other neighboring garden sheds

-           Interactive ‘media hub’, involving a TV screen, radio, and a couple of old magazines placed in a pile

-           Additional, free access to the shitty clump of weeds in the corner that nobody can be arsed to uproot

-           Fuck all

Any takers? Ah, come on. At least you'll save twenty quid on a Ryanair ticket.

Screaming in a vacuum

There’s a thought experiment philosophers have posed called the Free Speech Booth. The hypothesis is this: to quell international concerns that it’s suppressing the right to free expression, a fascist dictatorship establishes small, sound-proof cubicles where citizens can rant as much seditious material as they like – provided that nobody ever hears them. Screaming in a vacuum, if you like. 

I don’t know the consequences of this particular thought experiment, but I do know that ‘screaming in a vacuum’ sounds remarkably similar to my experience of setting up this “blog” a few years ago to promote myself as a writer. ‘You have to leave it for a while,’ a friend recommended. ‘You’ve got to sort of work at building up traffic.’

I did. I held my breath and counted to fifty. Then I sneaked back to see if anybody had looked at it.

You know that bit in The Blair Witch Project where the helpless kids finally stagger upon a hellish concrete bunker, hidden in a hillside a million miles from anywhere? Well, my blog page felt a bit like that: virtual door hanging off by its hinges; broken windows creaking in the wind; the occasional hyena calling out across the darkening plain.

Number of new visitors: zero.

And yet people still ask.

‘Have you got a blog?’

‘Sort of,’ I reply.

‘You need to have a blog, Dale,’ they’ll tell me, cheerfully, as if to suggest that Dostoyevsky might have made a half decent writer if only he’d had a blog.


It doesn’t take a genius to point out that the web is prone to oversaturation, that the problem with a medium where anyone can broadcast their thoughts to the entire planet is that you get, effectively, an entire planet attempting to broadcast their thoughts to the entire planet. It doesn’t take a genius to point out that this effectively is a form of censorship. Once upon a time dissident thought was buried beneath political repression. Now it’s buried away beneath three thousand other search results. It’s not the Gulag Archipelago, it’s the Google Archipelago. I know all about the Free Speech Booth. In fact these days I pretty much am the Free Speech Booth: a human sized quarantine zone. If political philosophers really want to establish a sound-proof bubble for people to scream out their thoughts while utterly ignored by everybody else, they don’t need to cast around for an underground Samizdat – they just need to start a blog on Wordpress. And then email a link to it to all their friends. There’s so much Free Speech around nobody’ll ever even notice they’re there.

The Vietcong with flip-flops

You head down into the cellars beneath the flicker of prison-issue bulbs. On the wall of a bar/disco hangs a punishing activity schedule for new inmates: Happy Hour, Cops & Robbers, Salsa Night. A gang of young Italian prisoners pass you in Abercrombie uniforms, sipping Cokes, chatting into mobiles. Your footsteps echo behind you. It feels less like a backpacker hostel and more like the headquarters of a faded military dictatorship; the Vietcong with flip-flops.

You pass a room marked “Marketing Chamber”, then another calling itself “Social Area”. You open the door: thirty young people stare silently at their laptops. “Smile,” says a poster, “you’re on CCTV.” It feels like getting a dirty wink from Chairman Mao.
Euro-techno pulses through the complex, machine-guns your ears. It follows you into the cafeteria, where you sit for a while, crunching crisps from the machine. Two French guys near you chat over a formica table. You wonder at what exact point you became too old for this. Somehow, it reminds you of a moment in your early teens: realising with genuine sadness that you’d never play Pass the Parcel again. A security guard wanders around, gently and quietly checking that Everything’s Okay, like an aggressive dad patrolling a birthday party. Overhead strip lights glare into your eyes...

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