Capitalism

Blowing bubbles.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

(Pic from The Independent).

I’ve said many times that we – that I – live in bubbles. Largely, these are ‘curated’ for us, through our feeds. (I would argue) this happens not only by design, but through social media and media with motivations that are effectively homogenous, politically/philosophically speaking.

We may be ‘of the left’ and bathing in on-line opinions that support our egos and world-views but the guys with their paws on the algorithms are overwhelmingly from the same alt-right/arch-right/’unregulated’ school, squishing us with their inherited or accumulated advantage. It’s a massacre, in terms of their influence on the ether.

The historical record (yeh but whose?) may show not only that Those Who Control have always been in service to the staggering and disproportionate making of moolah but that this phenomenon is inextricable from prejudice. But we are in a moment where that phenomenon – the closeness of capital and racism – has risen again to the surface like some dark and viscous force.

This event has of course been curated, too: a neat example being the hoods who lumbered around English ports over the weekend, funded by an American source. (‘Danny Tommo’, foolishly perhaps, posted to that effect: 30,000 sobs to cover expenses for the bootboys in balaclavas).

If it wasn’t dangerous, it might be funny. The ‘protestors’ on the South coast were carefully protected by the Old Bill and the law because this was allegedly a ‘spontaneous protest’ (or described that way by a ver-ry carefully worded statement issued by the local police) and this exempted it from significant action. Hard to think of a more blatant expression of either institutional racism or the power of secret, ‘christian’/white supremacist/monied brotherhoods over public policy and practise. These guys – masked; in black – were obviously racist and obviously a threat to order. The cops ambled alongside.

The organisation of protests (of all sorts) and dissemination of toxicity and untruth is facilitated by the algorithmic slop. (In fact it often feels like this is *the purpose* of your twitters and your Facebooks!) Critically, the cogs are turning in a way that is deliberately unbalanced.

The role of that ugliest of humans Mr S Bannon esquire may be more central and more influential than we credit, in degrading contemporary understanding, recognition, appreciation, via the internet. He is a profoundly evil man whose profile may have dipped offstage – partly because of his ability to fall out with people (lols) – but his fascistically evangelical commitment towards showering the universe with shit and irrelevance has arguably made everyone from Trump to Farage possible. Racist to his very core, Bannon gave the unspeakably far-right a voice, re-empowering historically-present prejudice and joining-up individual and nationalist causes from all corners.

(It’s important to note that Bannon was and is a chronic bullshitter and self-publicist, with the cheapo salesman’s ability to exaggerate his access and leverage… but that relative smallness, when amplified by the likes of Musk and the other Owners of the Airwaves, made things happen and/or created the slopes for his shitty snowballs).

Musk may be the most patently white supremacist warlord of the internet but he hardly wields his sword alone – sadly. And neither does his relentless greed single him out. One day we may know – the Epstein Connections may ultimately reveal to us – how closely-knitted the seemingly distant (but somehow brotherly?) members of the Billionaires Club are or have been. We *do know* there’s a club… and that they have kinda bought governments… and made the whole neo-liberal concession to No Significant Political Change universal. That blanding-out of political discourse and possibility has not happened by accident. It’s protective.

Parties and governments have been lobbied, bought or out-gunned – quietly ambushed. This applies across into broadcast and print media. Billionaire proprietors editing what we see and experience. Maybe everything has always been about The Owners, but ma’an it feels that way now. Dangerously so, given the rise of the hard-right.

These powerful people ain’t all exactly full-on white supremacist capitalists – several are, surely? – but they are capitalists and they do own us. And they exist to make money and protect privilege. Trump and Farage and Tommy Robinson transparently feed off the unreality and untruth and prejudice that they in turn feed. They are all unthinkable with any degree of public intelligence, decency and judgement. We, meanwhile, are culpable, whilst being engineered and under-powered.

Dumb questions.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Don’t know about you but I hate feeling excluded from stuff; whether it be (literal) entry to something or exclusion through snobbery, for example. For now, if we stop to reflect on all manner of political discourse (please, do!) we may find pretty early some obstructive force, some veil through which we feel we may or should not peek.

On times this will feel just ‘right’, the presence of some justifiable and even necessary filter, through which we have to earn passage, through understanding. Because we need to feel confident of a certain level of intellectual competence in Subject A before we run with it, debate it, unconstruct it. So essentially we fore-arm ourselves, against asking dumb questions, often by turning sheepishly(?) away from those things we ‘don’t know enough about’. Though I am guilty of it, I hate that.

My suspicion is that much of this self-denial of the cerebral joust (that might on reflection be regarded as a life-enhancing or defining stimulus) is more coerced than personally screened. We are made to feel inadequate. Pressures emerge from all levels of the sky-scraping beast that morphs into (or rises from?) say, the body politic/the fiscal gherkin/the evolved system. Us normal folks are lost or spun or misled by something in the constricting ether; something on the one hand rather rundown and bad-breathlike and on the other awesomely pervasive; powerful.

My instinct is to fight that stuff; to defy and to undermine it. This may mean pushing out beyond the ledge of my core subject expertise – that would be er… sport maybe? – and blowing a raspberry at the notion of received wisdoms elsewhere. Received wisdom often perpetuates myth, right? Is often grounded in smugness; may need the faux-oxygen of privilege or the cover of opaqueness. Perhaps mystery itself may be an outlier in this matrix of conformist gunk? And perhaps, therefore we need an occasional, demystifying blast of… punk?

Punk was wonderful for its moral zeal-with-a-mohican. Punk said – if you were listening – stop preening and start speaking from the heart. Stop twiddling those solo’s and tell me something real. It was magnificently articulate and magnificently necessary in that respect. Punk began unpeeling the facades of the worlds of art/music/politics because it seared angrily through; it was a focused mischief blaring wildly out for betterstuff. It may not have paused too long in consideration of the need for nuanced arguments but maybe that counts for urgency rather than in some cool deficiency column. Great punk(s) had no respect, other than that which was earned. Great punks did not understand, so they demanded answers.

John Lydon may have been the only great punk. ‘Metal Box’ from Public Image Limited remains a staggeringly discomfiting but articulate noise, an appropriate racket from which to launch an onslaught against (capitalist(?) drudgery—witness the “shallow spread of ordered lawns”. Something is being punctured or exposed or better revealed; a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of normalcy; a sad, bad intellectual thinness. There is poetry in these dumb questions. These questions might not have been asked… if we’d have just… behaved.

So though I do despair at how we still fawn before the current gods – for ‘growth’/some careering stability/the normalcy of sheepishness – those rib-progglers, those UnCutters, those Occupiers give me hope.

An inflammation

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

LET THE MAD AND MAGNIFICENT ENERGY OF THE FUTURISTS and their ludicrously wonderful manifesto be an inspiration at this cusp of deathly inertia and foaming revelation.

Let the staccato totems and the tents and the firefly proclamations of the Occupiers and the rebellious jukeboxes and the childlike believers pitchfork those who bank on banking and this dead god of economic growth.

Let the obscenity that is market force be seen for the cheap fraud it is.

Let the conversation begin again, led by dancer-poets not lobbyists.

After Marinetti, we purr like coiled cats over the paralytic mouse that is The Market. We do not accept the pre-eminence of privilege or masculine entrepreneurship.We pogo through the doors in the lifeless boardrooms of the spineless business of truculent cash.

We, with our pumping hearts revolt against the black death of normalcy; with honour, with real sense, with a hearty handshake.

Let the good incendiaries come. We have our eleven; we count with our innumerate hearts and choose to throw coins in the fountain.

We are rising with the colours of ecstatic belief. We deny the cynicism, the ineptitude and the unambition of the normal. You the normal must change; we are changing.

So we say

1. The people have been lied to and will undo the lies… so lie no more.

2. Democracy is a fraud where privilege is bought – at private schools; by sponsorship; by ‘influence’.

3. We will usurp the machismo-heads, the infertile parliamentary fools – those who feel not our great debates, the goodness of our humour, the freedom of our thoughts.

4. We will teach them that ‘growth’ is not necessary, planning is necessary…

5. That the aim of business is not to maximise profit, it is to make enough…

6. That the aim of life is not to idly stockpile money – it is to express the fullness of the human heart…

7. And that the business of government is not to fawn before business, it is to lead, magnificently.

8. Creativity must rule because only generosity sustains; dancers and poets must therefore lead us! ( Not Sarkozy/Merkel/Cameron! They are working for Barclays! They are yesterday’s men!)

9. Women will let us talk.

10. We will learn again that work can be good; work can be good for all of us.

11. And we must learn again… to engage with the need to transform.

Standing on the world’s summit, we launch our aspiration to the stars.