Tag Archives: humanity

Humanity: Instagramming Ourselves to Death

Posted on by

This week I learned that there are people out there in the world – actual real people, mind, not robots, not actors, not reptilian imposters from hidden realms hell-bent on our destruction, but people…actual, confirmed people – who use ‘Instagrammable’ in everyday conversation. Not satirically, not in sentences such as this one: ‘When I find out who it was that said it was okay to start using the word “Instagrammable” I’m going to wrestle their head off their shoulders like a bottle-top,’ but in sickening, humanity-damning sentences like this one: ‘Look at these new £500 trainers of mine. They’re so Instagrammable.’

I’ve only recently learned what Instagram is – fire-worshipping troglodyte that I am – and now I’m being forced to accept Instagrammable as a verb. It hardly seems sporting.

We’ve been taking photographs of ourselves for a long-time, even before photography existed. Hundreds of years ago, only the very richest or most alluring could hope to have their portrait hemmed within a gilded frame and hung on the wall of some castle or stately home. In my day, you had to wait a couple of weeks between taking a photo and seeing the results, so instant gratification was never a motivation. Even with the advent of Polaroids, there was still no easy way to weaponise and disseminate your photos to a wider audience for the purposes of stock-piling serotonin.

Next, we started taking selfies – with our phones, no less. I remember how long it took for me to teach my 1920s-born grandparents how to use their VHS player. Thank Christ they died before phones became cameras, computers and shopping lists all rolled into one. It would have killed them.

With the dawn of selfies we became both trophy and target; big game hunters hunting ourselves. We snapped ourselves next to famous landmarks, influential people, gaudy palaces, plane-hijackers wearing bomb belts, and the edges of cliffs, sometimes literally dying in the pursuit of the perfect photo.

Now it seems we’re living in an age where an object’s only worth is in how it buoys our image, builds our brand, raises our social stock or makes other people feel unworthy of the gift of existence.

What cunts we are.

First there was MySpace, and Bebo, and Facebook, and Twitter, where at least some semblance of meaningful dialogue was, and is, possible among the preening and screaming, but now there’s Instagram: where pictures reign and words die. Instagram is a corporate hell-scape over which celebrities flog designer hand-bags and douche-bags, and little people wave filtered snapshots of their little lives in a desperate bid to convince themselves and others that they actually matter. Spoiler alert: they do matter, but not because of a fucking dress or a designer milkshake.

It was milkshakes that brought this nightmarish new lexicon to my attention. I heard a segment on Radio 4 about ‘activated charcoal’, the practice of adding intensely-heated (or, to put it more wankily, ‘activated’) charcoal to foods because there’s some evidence that it aids nutrient absorption, and thus improves general health. They’ve been adding activated charcoal to milkshakes, and if you’re wondering who they are, the answer is = cunts.

My apologises for having dropped two c-bombs on you thus far, but believe me I’m exercising admirable restraint. This entire article could’ve been a Jack Torrance-esque flood of that same awful word over and over, forever and ever. ALL INSTAGRAM AND NO PLAY MAKES JAMIE AN ANGRY C***T.

During the segment they interviewed a chap who was marketing active-charcoal-enhanced milkshakes – as black as tar – on account of how ‘Instagrammable’ they were. Not only were they ‘Instagrammable’, but ‘Instagrammability’ is, apparently, ‘WHAT EVERYONE WANTS.’ A part of my brain died when he said that; the part that contains the concept of hope. If that’s really what everyone wants, I thought to myself, then allow me to plough my car into the nearest petrol station. Please feel free to upload my smouldering remains to Instagram. You can even crumble my ashes into your drink first.

Where does all of this end? Are we about to enter the era of ‘Instagrammable’ funerals? Posing for selfies next to the Gucci-branded coffins of our dearly beloveds? Or worse, next to their waxy corpses, their cold skin daubed with activated-charcoal?

“Oh. My. God. Kymbyrly, you’ve got to tell me the name of your mother’s Funeral Planner.”

“Delgado de Laga. He’s terrific. Costa Rican, gay, vegan, almost prohibitively expensive. He’s the whole package.”

“I absolutely MUST have him for my mother’s funeral.”

“Oh, did your mother die, sweetie?”

“She’s absolutely fine, but I hope she goes soon.”

“Oh, me too, I do so love an occasion!”

(both clap hands together and squeal)

The most depressing thing about the whole look-at-me ethos behind Instagram is that it works. We’re big fans of the veneer, the slick surface. We love a bit of flashy, flashy, shiny, shiny. If we weren’t so superficial as a species, so susceptible to flim-flam and illusion, then psychopaths would never be able to ply their trade, and Donald Trump would still be a virgin.

It works – it shouldn’t, but it does – as much as oldies like me who are teetering on the brink of total irrelevance hate to admit it. We’re peacocks, that’s what we are: preeners, strutters, rutters and nutters. Our big, beautiful brains are in thrall to the whip-hands of our bodies, and the broth of chemicals surging through our blood-stream. We’re horny skin-bags full of hot, angry soup. Everything we do these days seems to spring from a misfiring of the perfectly reasonable impulses to love, couple, copulate and procreate. We’re corrupted and corrupting.

The problem is that our technological innovations are taking us places that our Amstrad-ian bodies and brains aren’t ready to go; our inventions are evolving faster than we are, and it’s making us take pictures of cars and clothes and milk-shakes in a misguided attempt to fuck – and fuck with – each other. No species in the galaxy can beat us when it comes to taking something simple, and making it hideously over-complicated and painful.

We’re Vulcans trapped inside the bodies of Klingons at the mercy of evil supercomputers. Things are probably only going to get worse.

One day we’ll either be dead, or better.

Get the picture?

Read my scathing piece on greed and capitalism here: ‘To the Emperor, all but the Emperor belong in the gutter.’

To the Emperor, all but the Emperor belong in the gutter

Posted on by

Major, Theodore; Man in Bleak Landscape; Wigan Arts and Heritage Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/man-in-bleak-landscape-162632

Modern life is awe-inspiring and hyper-stimulating, but deeply confusing, and to a maddening degree; made even more so by the myriad ways the rich and powerful have devised to deploy that confusion for tactical gain; lobbing fireworks and flash-bangs of panic and distraction at us to keep us moving, always moving: never stopping, never thinking. We don’t need much of a shove in the direction of distraction: our eyes are already blinded by the gadgets we clutch in our claws; our thoughts over-run by the endorphins they release into our brains, like we’re trained rats pushing buttons for treats.

We’re made to run the Orwellian gauntlet down every street, along every junction of the information superhighway, as we’re assailed on all sides by Facebook feeds filled with fakery and fury; the weaponised worthiness of a hundred-million keyboard warriors; and incendiary headlines that boom out their daily beat of hatred from beneath war-like, blood-red banners.  At any given moment we’re being accused of, or being pushed to commit, thought-crimes, hate-crimes, and crimes – to both body and soul – of every stripe imaginable.

We spend our days spitting out words as though they were bullets, rat-a-tat-tatting at people about values, identity, sovereignty, tolerance, intelligence, and truth (whatever that is). We wax lyrical about the good old days, the never-was golden ages of peace and prosperity.

Human societies have become so intricate and complex that we tend, more often than not, to ascribe commensurately complex motivations to the people who comprise them. This muddles and over-complicates the often very simple impulses behind the things that we do, or are done to us.

Take Brexit. We frame it as an ideological schism being fought at street-level among the ordinary folk, with the forces of progressive change, shared humanity and multiculturalism on one side, and the forces of culturally-conservative, insular and isolationist protectionism on the other: but what if we’re all just pawns being moved around to satisfy the unslakeable thirst of the rich and powerful for yet more money and power? Spoiler alert: we definitely are. (see the Private Eye article at the foot of this piece of writing for a flavour of the sort of behaviour that’s driving and helping to maintain the country’s current political and economic condition)

Some degree of fight is inevitable, even healthy, in a society. It’s the engine of change: the sword that breaks the chains of oppression, the fire that burns the old ways to dust. But what happens when those who rule over our lives – the oligarchs, the corporate heads, the media barons, the greedy dictators and the billionaires – turn the apparatuses of our freedoms against us? When they use smoke, lies and mirrors to set us at each other’s throats as they smile and sneer from the shadows?

We, the masses, the 99 per cent, are often to be found hacking at and goring each other in the gladiatorial arena, as the 1 per cent watch dispassionately from the high seats, occasionally deigning to flick a wrist to seal our earthly fates.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the 1 per cent have won, and have done so without ever having to fire a shot (not in this country, at least; and not recently). They convinced us that they were just like us, and we were just like them. They re-made us in their own image, minus the power. Made us ants who think we’re Gods; slaves who think we’re emperors, gazing up at the high seats of the Coliseum  and seeing our own face reflected. The belief that we have more in common with the greedy, the royal and the tyrannical than we do with our own brethren in the gutter is as ubiquitous and dangerous as it is sad and delusional.

It’s the worst kind of Stockholm Syndrome; the worst kind of twisted vanity. “They’re taking your jobs!” say the corporatocracy. “You’re paying for these people!” jeer the politicians. “They’re laughing at you!” cry the newspapers. “We, the people, shouldn’t have to accept this!” say the multi-billionaires.

So the people with their hands pressed around the throat of the body politic make a proposal. “Let’s make this country great again/take back control/drain the swamp/return to the old values/delete as applicable!”

“YES!” the people scream. “YES, YES, YES!”

And so freedoms are rolled back, liberties are re-claimed and vital provisions are shut down or torn apart: all in our name, of course.

And all the while, we, the people, scream at the poor souls on the rungs and decks below us, so loudly that we can’t hear the whips being cracked at our own backs. We cheer as the poor and disadvantaged are punished for the sin of being born unlucky, forgetting or ignoring the role of chance in our own fates.

When the policies rolled out by the hyper-rich hurt us, too – as they always do – we cry out in anger and pain: “This isn’t fair! Why would you do this to me? I’m worthy. I’m good! I supported you! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM, not me. This wasn’t the plan! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM.”

But you ARE them. The prisoners, the drug addicts, the jobless, the struggling, the single mother, the single father, the immigrant, the outcast. You’re as much them as you are the doctor, the lawyer, the electrician, the musician and the nurse. WE are in this together.

Never forget: to the emperor, all but the emperor belong in the gutter.

The way we’ve chosen to cover and govern our planet is absurd. We all crawled from the same primordial soup. For millennia after we were nothing more than scattered bands of cold and frightened proto-people, huddled together in caves and forests trying to fend off the darkness and protect ourselves from the savage indifference of Mother Earth. Always striving; barely surviving.

And then one day – we can suppose – a man looked down at his fists, or perhaps surveyed the pile of shiny stones and animal furs he’d amassed in his cave, and felt emboldened to declare to his tribe: ‘I am your King.’ And those four little words were powerful enough to bring forth a future world of crowns and slaves and jets and castles and guns and flags and great golden skyscrapers towering into the clouds as children, in countries not so very far away, choked and died in blackened, smog-filled pits.

Still, many of us think, It’s not so bad here in Scotland, or here in the UK. Sure, some people are unlucky, far unluckier than me, and life for all of us could certainly be better, but I’ve got free health-care, a relatively high life expectancy, a car, a TV, a house, and holidays. Things can only get better, right?

The dark ages may have stalled our species’ scientific and technological advancement for a millennia or so, but we’re in a post-enlightenment age now. Everything is illuminated, even the darkest corners of the farthest reaches of our galaxy. We can split atoms, land robots on asteroids and make the hearts of dead men beat in the chests of the once-dying. We’re moving forwards, right? Always forwards. Nothing can happen to drag us back, right?

It’s foolish to believe that the changes we make, and are made to us in turn, are irreversible; that progress is inevitable and unstoppable. History is cyclical, not vertical. World War I, World War II, Korea, Darfur, Vietnam, Iraq. The lessons we learn day-by-day die by the billion-load, year upon year; and like children, our species has to learn how to crawl, walk, talk and remake the world anew, every century, every generation, every blessed day. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong, but throughout it all our development is guided, stilted, thwarted and dictated by the rich and the powerful and the decadent, a set of parents whose cruelty, corruption and indifference leaves a stain on the souls of all the children of the earth.

How can you fight a group with the power to destroy the world? How can you vanquish a group who owns the tech giants, the media companies, and the banks? How can you vote down a group with tentacles that reach into and around every government and politician?

You can’t.

The only weapon you have is time. That, and an unwavering belief in our shared humanity; the resolution to keep hoping and trying for a better world, no matter how futile or unrealistic the outcome may seem.

Maybe with enough time we can remake the world in our image; force a new cycle of history into rotation: a perfect squared-circle.

We are the tide.

Some of us roar from the sea in crashing waves, some of us rise and fall gently at the shore-line, but day after day, year after year, together… we’re the ones who wear down the mountains, and turn the rocks to sand.

 

 

EXCERPT FROM PRIVATE EYE

“There may be rules against rigging the financial markets, but not if the move is big, brazen and political enough.

Last weekend Mayfair-based hedge fund boss Crispin Odey told the Mail on Sunday he would support Boris Johnson in the event Theresa May is forced to resign. The purpose would be to see through a hard Brexit. “If we walked away from Europe, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” said Odey. Not for him it wouldn’t. He admits to shorting the pound and would make millions from the currency’s inevitable fall even as it wreaks havoc on the UK economy.

While backing the man who calls leaving the EU ‘liberation’, Odey isn’t averse to the EU’s fiscal and regulatory charms. Eight of the 14 funds in his Odey Asset Management stable are domiciled in, er, Dublin, while just four are UK-registered (the other two are in the Caymans). What Johnson called the ‘over-regulatory instincts that have held the EU back for so long’ in his recent Tory party conference speech don’t seem to have stood in Odey’s funds’ way. Nor does it seem that, when it comes to the most important aspect of handling Brexit – making serious money from it – the billionaire hedgie thinks too much of his great political hope’s rallying cry to ‘believe in Britain’.”

 

Drag me to IKEA: The seventh circle of Scandinavian Hell

Posted on by

My partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

I know, right?

IKEA.

No doubt as that acronym-disguised-as-a-word starts to settle into your consciousness you’ll feel first a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, followed by a wave of dread whooshing down your spine, and finally the taste of your own frantic, frenzied heart leaping and thumping in your mouth. You might even let loose a brown torpedo of terror down the back of your trousers. Who could blame you?

Next, the lightning, the thunder, the very earth shaking beneath your feet, as the sun turns black, the sky turns white, birds fly backwards, mice become accountants, clouds come alive and start eating people, monkeys marry elephants, custard invades Norway, all sounds on earth become the sound of Rolf Harris crying, petrol stations declare war on delicatessens, old people start exploding, and Theresa May’s head turns into a sandcastle of jelly that’s swiftly leapt upon by a suddenly tiny Jeremy Corbyn, who bounces up and down on it whilst dressed as a lion and playing the hits of Bruno Mars on the kazoo – which of course all sound like Rolf crying.

IKEA. We don’t say I.K.E.A. We say IKEA. There’s very little precedent for this. We don’t say banqyoo. We don’t say himv, bihhs, tisbi or hisbic. But we say IKEA. Not I.K.E.A, and not Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. But IKEA. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE WE’RE SCARED.

IKEA!

Say its name five times into the mirror and a Swedish demon arrives, splits you into 600 different sections and hides the Allen key. IKEA doesn’t sell furniture: it sells brimstone-studded time-bombs. It sells cursed artefacts. It sells evil.

The whole process from getting your new furniture home to having a massive mental breakdown to eventually filing for divorce is so vein-poppingly predictable that you could turn it into a gameshow. “OK, so Jamie’s opened the box and started unpacking his new wardrobe; he’s dropped a few heavy slats onto his fingers, some mild swearing there, but otherwise he’s doing okay. They’re off to a good start. He’s only growled malevolently at his partner, Chelsea, once, and she’s only imitated his speech but in the process changed his voice so he sounds disabled twice, so that’s all very encouraging. Jamie hasn’t started accusing the instruction manual of being part of a global Jewish conspiracy yet, and Chelsea hasn’t suggested that his incompetence at DIY might be connected with his small penis, so there’s still all to play for. OK, round one. How long before Chelsea chides him for being just like his mother, leading to Jamie smashing the wardrobe into pieces with the heel of his shoe while screaming racist abuse about the Swedes? Shall we start the bid at 15 seconds?”

The horror; the horror.

IKEA: those hallowed halls in which relationships come to die; that vast maze of uncertainty that herds its terrified consumers through endless iterations of eerie facsimiles of happy homes until their sanity starts scraping at the edge of their perceptions with sharpened claws, and causes their souls to bleed out through their eyes.

Nothing there is ever as it seems. It’s the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but every last bit of it is room 237. It’s the labyrinth from Hellraiser 2, but with scented candles. It’s the labyrinth from Labyrinth, but with more goblins. You’ll find yourself falling to your knees and screaming things like: ‘A TOTTVIRSK SKAR-KOLSHEN FRIGIN?! WHY DON’T THEY JUST CALL IT A FUCKING PILLOW?’ and ‘WHY ARE THERE OVER 8000 EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LOOKING BED FRAMES THAT SHARE THEIR NAMES WITH THE CHARACTERS FROM THE TV SHOW VIKINGS?’

You’ll find yourself pushing against a mewling herd of zombies as they coo and stare and drool and moan at configurations of furniture so bizarre it’s like their piles and patterns have been precisely arranged and interlocked to open a portal to Hell itself. If pain and despair suddenly became currency, you’d be a multi-millionaire. The worst is yet to come. You’ll catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors placed strategically around the store, and you’ll see yourself looking longingly at a set of brackets on a pine bunk-bed – an enraptured look in your eyes that should only really be directed at other humans, and only then during foreplay – and you’ll realise, with horror and helplessness, that you too are a zombie, no better than the wretches shuffling by your side, perhaps even worse, because you’re the one that’s nursing a boner over a hinge bracket.

And a little part of you will die, right there in that store, a little part of you that’s lost forever in the anti-septic graveyard of Scandinavian lifestyle consumerism. And you’ll cry. You’ll cry for your mummy and your daddy, for God and Jesus and Santa and Satan, and angels and demons, and lawyers and doctors, and even aliens from the planet Quanabongo Fattafafaloop. But it’ll do no good. A series of tiny little words will fall softly from your mouth, gliding to the ground as if carried there on the wind by parachutes. “I…want…to….go….

Home.”

But you can’t go home.

You can’t go home ever again…

Never.

Ever.

Never ever.

Yes, my partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

And do you know what?

We loved it! It was fucking great! Seriously. I’m not messing with you here. It’s one of the best few hours we’ve spent together in recent memory.

How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how: because we didn’t bring the boys.

That’s what we realised in IKEA that morning – that blissful, peaceful, wonderful morning – that IKEA itself wasn’t the culprit; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about IKEA. OK, the furniture itself is still demonic, and expertly designed to throw the hearts of men into anguish and chaos, I won’t be swayed on that, but the place itself – the building, the people, the displays – all of that is absolutely, one-hundred per cent fine.

To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future: ‘It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.’

Our trip was like a million great dates rolled into one. We strolled hand in hand, turning to smile at each other every ten seconds or so like we couldn’t quite believe what was happening. No little hands were reaching up to bat our fingers apart; we weren’t running through fake kitchens shouting ‘COME BACK! THE BAD MAN IS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC IN SWEDISH KITCHENS!’ and ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT SMASHING YOUR BROTHER IN THE FACE WITH AN OUMBÄRLIG FRYING PAN?!’; we weren’t standing prostrate with frustration and helplessness, our faces growing redder and deader by the second as the kids devised a million ways to test our patience and diminishing sense of human decency; we weren’t apologising to a succession of half-crippled old ladies rendered ever-so-slightly more crippled by our children ramming tiny trolleys into their ancient limbs.

We were free.

We cracked jokes, we talked, we laughed, we lay next to each other on a hundred beds in a hundred different softly-lit little stage-rooms. We even disappeared up the back of an aisle in the warehouse section to do something a bit naughty, so overtaken were we with the freedom of the moment. We ate those disgusting hot-dogs that everyone convinces themselves are the best thing they’ve ever eaten because they’re really cheap, and we ate them in happy, contented silence, still looking up to smile at each other every ten seconds or so, this time through globs of onions and dead pig (and turkey, and horse, probably); her wearing a ketchup moustache, and my beard so enriched with ketchup and mustard it looked like an English soldier from 1745.

At one point I started missing the kids terribly. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. They would’ve been giggling and laughing and playing make-believe in the little pretend houses, and asking things like, ‘What language do the polar bears speak in Sweden, daddy?’ and ‘Do there really have to be this many fucking different types of coffee table?’ Maybe it would’ve been great.

Then we spied a mother standing in the kids’ section, rooted to the spot on IKEA’s Hell-o Brick Road with a look of horror, fear, defeat and anguish scrawled across her features. Her kids were rampaging through the section like solid poltergeists, rattling toys, hurling teddy bears and bursting in and out of tents, an orchestra of high-pitched screams accompanying their chaos. Chelsea and I squeezed each other’s hands together all the tighter, and walked up to this poor, tragic woman, smiling beatifically at her like we were monks.

“We understand what you’re going through,” we said.

She smiled weakly at us.

“We left the kids with their aunty.”

I feel we were rubbing it in, ever so slightly. But do you know what? It felt good. We were winners. For once, we were the winners. That woman was like the Jesus of IKEA, suffering so that we didn’t have to. Reminding us that although we loved the ever-loving shit out of our kids, and couldn’t face the thought of an existence without them, we shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying three blissful hours away from their weaponised enthusiasm.

We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.

Thank you, IKEA.

It was heavenly.