Solve climate change? Just turn down the sun!

Space mirrors and sky volcanoes: the rise of "planet hacking"...

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I don’t want a Like button. I need a “Hmm” button

“Just after midnight on 19 August 2014, police received a call from a member of the public who reported concerns for the welfare of a woman who lives at a house on Wigan Road, Leigh,” the Greater Manchester Police’s Facebook page said. “On arrival, a woman was found deceased in the back garden.”

Then, at the bottom: “12 people like this.”

Alright, before you start – I get it. I know they’re not liking the murder itself. It’s a show of support for the investigation - though quite why anyone unconnected with the murder itself feels the need to go on a police Facebook page to cheer them on is quite frankly beyond me. Come to that, why the police are even on Facebook is a question well worth asking (Make new friends? Share photos? Sorry, am I the only one that feels it's somehow innapropriate for the cops to be on Facebook?)

That aside, my particular bugbear is with that “Like” button.  

“Someone Liked your post, Dale,” commented a thoughtful friend recently, one who’s been attempting to give me a bit of basic media training. “Go on their page. Like their Like.” 

“Like their Like?”

“Yes.”

I sighed wearily. “Why do I have to Like their Like?”

“It’s good for your algorithms.”

I knew he was probably right. Still, like their Like? I don’t even like my own Likes. It’s not that Likes promote relentless narcissism or turn people into approval begging machines, nor even that they’re an easy route for arse-kissing and Facebook flattery (just watch how anybody famous or successful gets five thousand clicks of approval the moment they Instagram a piece of toast). 

No. It’s just the name of it. “Like”. It’s a monosyllable. A digital grunt. Ambivalance, complexity and uncertainty: those are just some of the many things that this kind of binary language utterly fails to convey. It's like asking a pocket calculator to write a love poem.

I understand that people express all sorts of things by Liking something – support, admiration, guilt, friendship, I'd quite like to sleep with you – and that their feelings for doing so might indeed be complex and nuanced, with subtle reservations and caveats. If they’d called the Like button “express admiration in a complex and nuanced way, with subtle reservations and caveats,” then I might have liked it a bit more.

But they didn’t. They called it a Like button, and if you are attempting to express admiration in a complex and nuanced way, your subtle reservations and caveats regarding the subject are squeezed into a dumb, thumbs-up McEmotion. The Tesco Value Range of language. If supermarkets did feelings, they’d look like the Like button. In fact the purpose of the Like button is to turn feelings into a supermarket – in other words, the people really gaining from all these likes are the tech giants who are given indispensable data on their subjects in the largest project in customer data mining ever commenced on planet earth.

But I need ambivalence. I'm not good at smiling, surefire certainties. I don’t need a Like button. I need a “Hmm” button. Or a “Well... maybe,” button. Or, in other contexts, a “Oh, fuck, you're more successful than me...” button. I need lots of buttons to be honest, for expressing a whole range of emotions, and I need them combinable and re-combinable within a structured framework of signifiers that agglutinate to form semantic units - oh, hang on. That's a language isn't it.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain. Apparently several alternatives were mooted by the company prior to the button's introduction - “Cool!” and “Awesome!” among them. At least people aren't going on the Greater Manchester Police’s Facebook page to show how Totally Awesome they think they are. And perhaps I'm being snobbish to insist that language should express more than basic binary states; after all, many languages revolve around the grammar-free expression of real-time desire - most of them, as far as I know, spoken by apes. The Facebook Like is perhaps the most persuasive argument for reverse-evolution in human history. Reduce language to grunts and you help to reduce thought along with it. Baboons would really like the Facebook Like. Banana? Like! Water? Like! The Schleswig-Holstein Question? Er... 

Like. I guess.

Well, good for the baboons. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could install a few of them in the Facebook corporate lobby: on current trends, it's a model of what the human race might look like by the time he dies. Now, let me go and share that awesome murder.

Cops on Facebook

Why not use the same kind of algorithms Amazon uses to predict a killer’s life?

"Predictive policing": Read my latest piece for the Baffler here

Who says literature’s dead when masterpieces like “Penis Pokey” are still being published?

“Books: like a movie, but happening inside your head,” runs the staff note in Waterstones – a motto for a media-hungry post-literate world that's just too busy for books. Look around you and the writing’s on the iWall: buses swipewashed with faces lost in screens; the Äppärät-touting teens of “Super Sad True Love Story”; novels sold for a quid in Tesco’s. I got my nephew a book for Christmas, but he couldn’t work out where to plug it in… Don’t laugh: the first generation is now being born that will grow up with formative memories of the iPotty.  

But who says the book’s dead? True, the bottom’s falling out of the fiction market, and true, writers earn less than they ever did – which is a bit like saying that street beggars have taken a painful hit in their incomes – and yes, those of us who still care will no doubt be stepping over the rubble of Waterstones and Blackwells before long, grasping for fire-sale trophies like hungry survivors of the Fall. But from these ashes a new phoenix is rising. We’re on the threshold of a new age for fiction. Bit by bit, illustrious new homes are appearing for books.

Take my local PoundStretcher for example, keeping literature alive with celebrated titles like “100% Unofficial Jedward” and “Shoot! The Ultimate Football Activity Book”. Take the arena-sized supermarket near me, whose bargain bin throws up gems such as “Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku DVD Game”; “The Crossword Puzzle Flip Pad (Find the answers on the flip side!)”, or my favourite, the cryptic, gnomically titled “Pasta”.

Or take that bastion of artistic standards, Urban Outfitters. Today, such an August institution (it may soon be the most prestigious physical bookshop left standing) exudes the musty fumes of literary excellence. From the erudite “Slam Kicks: Basketball sneakers that changed the game” to the richly textured “How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity”; from the ribald “Penis Pokey” (a book with a hole to poke your penis through in a variety of amusing positions) to the robustly formalist “101 Places to Get Fucked Up Before You Die”, Urban Outfitters caters for all tastes.

There’s “Mini Babybel: the Best Recipes”, the companion piece to the original masterpiece, “Nutella: 101 Great Recipes” which set the literary world alight on its publication as a landmark in the emergent chocolate spread recipe genre. There’s a probing exploration into the depths of the human soul from the acclaimed memoirist Alexa Chung and a treatise on philosophy from that thinker of world renown, Karl Lagerfeld. Why, it’s not just books you can find in the books section – I accidentally stumbled upon a bit of bunting bearing the colourful injunction to “Party with my Bitches”, something that truly livens up any book pile – and highbrow tastes are catered for too with a pristine deluxe edition coffee table sized book bearing the title “Fuck You”. Who said literature was dead?

Were Woolf, Fitzgerald or Hemingway alive today, they’d be up at night trying to come up with masterpieces like “Photocrafty: 75 Creative Projects For You And Your Digital SLR” or “Understand Rap: Explanations of Confusing Lyrics for White People”. Joyce himself would feel humbled by the experimentalism of a work like “Why You’re So Awesome (Fill in the Blanks)” with its daring deconstruction of the relationship between writer and reader.

Of course, some might question whether replacing Lolita, Catch 22 or Tender is the Night with a book centered around sticking one's penis through a cut-out hole is a healthy substitution for literature. As bookshops die and hipster craft stores become the last place in the city to actually make a profit from paper pages, can we really rejoice at the fact that "Peek-a-Boo Cakes" is the first thing people are splashing out a tenner on?
But to take that approach is to ignore the fertility of these dazzling new literary forms. “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary,” Boris Pasternak once said. Who could take a book like "Nutella: 101 Great Recipes" and not agree? 
Contemporary classics like “52 Things to Do While You Poo” promise fascinating new journeys for the reader that not even the author of Zhivago was daring enough to envisage - something that storied literary publishers like Jeff Bezos are helping to reinforce. Perhaps writers who want to keep literature alive just need to get off their pedestals and back on the toilet - after all, that might be the last place anyone has a chance of being read.

Faster, happier, more productive

Life hacking, smart cups, a surveillance state in a smartphone: is this the age of the "time-motion human"?

Read my piece for the Baffler magazine here

Yes vote? No vote? How about a “Don’t Really Know” vote

Astonishingly nobody’s solicited my opinion on the Scottish referendum. Everybody else in the UK has been consulted: economists, journalists, MPs, people on the street, the Prime Minister, your local chemist, politicians from Scotland, politicians from England, politicians from Canada, the guy in the bagging aisle at Sainsbury’s, Sean Connery – but not me. What gives?

“Maybe it’s because you’re an English person with nothing whatsoever to do with Scotland, Dale,” I hear you cry. Well, okay, but when has that ever stopped anyone writing an article about something? Or simply crop-spraying social media with badly-spelled bluster? Google #scottishindependence and you’ll see an army of gobtrepreneurs howling out factoid-fuelled opinion until they go blue in the mouse pad. Google anything remotely controversial and you’ll see an army of gobtrepreneurs howling out factoid-fuelled opinion, in fact: all over the press people are paid to have an opinion about something, because, in an age where digital developments are gathering to demolish the last standing pay wall, what used to be known as “journalism” is becoming harder and harder to fund.

The answer is an ocean of provocative click-bait that’s cheap to produce and draws in the eyeballs: grazing grounds for the commentariat, who can then howl out more factoid-fuelled opinion in the comments sections. And someone can respond to them, with more factoid-fuelled opinion. And so on.

Here’s my take on Scottish independence: I don’t have one. Or to put it another way, I think the question of a referendum is a phenomenally complex bag of socio-political thorns that probably needs unpacking by an intelligently chosen army of technocrats, planners and economists. Neither Yes or No campaigns used that one for some reason. But I feel strongly about being ambivalent. Ambivalence isn’t indifference – it’s ignorance. And the proud admission of ignorance is the bedrock of scientific enquiry. How can empirical investigation proceed without first doubting absolutely everything you’ve assumed? A world that admits its ignorance is a world better poised to actually know something. So yes: I’m passionate about being ambivalent. Forget Yes and No. What the independence debate is missing is the “Don’t Really Know” vote.

This is partly because either alternative is kind of dismal. Support Yes and you align yourself with Cameron and an army of swivel-eyed nationalists, bullying corporations and the kind of people who buy dollhouses for their children with Union Jacks hanging out the windows. Support No and you let the warnings of high profile economists get swallowed in arguments tinged by patriotic sentiment; more sinisterly, you’re complicit in perhaps the smiliest positivity-based marketing campaign this side of the Scientology AGM. 

An extra terrestrial visitor stopping off on planet Earth for the weekend might assume from all the YES signs everywhere that Scotland was a sophisticated emotional dictatorship engineered by an unelected ruler called Alex Salmond. Indeed there’s been so much positivity that even I briefly wanted to become independent from England, and I live there. These are the limits of political for or against: you’re caught between a rock and hard place – or rather you’re stuck on a rock that wants to become two rocks.

Democracy is a demanding beast. The politics of “not really any of my business” has little currency in the modern world, where in the course of little more than a century we’ve gone from only being allowed to vote if you owned a castle and the wives of half a dozen peasants to one where your opinion is a sharable commodity and must be exercised at maximum volume on a minute-to-minute basis. Or else nobody will click Like. Of course not everybody’s that enthusiastic about expressing their democratic right in determining the fate of the not-entirely-united Kingdom – as we saw last time with the plebiscite on the alternative vote, when millions passionately stayed at home to ignore the future of a breathtakingly boring electoral change which you’d have had to be a qualified political scientist to understand how it affected you.

And good for them, I say. Our ambivalence is something worth fighting for. If we should feel strongly about anything, it’s the right not to feel strongly about anything. I wish the Scots all the best in deciding their future, but I’m not going to pretend to have an opinion about it. On that one I’ll put my foot down.