A WALK IN THE WOODS

WHY I LEFT FACEBOOK AND WHY YOU SHOULD TOO (Published here but still in production)

Carole Cadwallader

Last year I read an amazing piece of investigative journalism in 'The Observer' written and researched by Carole Cadwallader  (https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla)  The extensive article detailed the ways in which the billionaire Peter Thiel had funded the Brexit movement in using Cambridge Analytica to harvest millions of facebook users data to micro-target mailshots during the American Presidential election and the brexit referendum in the UK as well as possibly interfering in the Kenyan Presidential and subsequent possible interference in the election of the monstrous Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philipines.

Charmath Palihapitiya

I have long been concerned about the relationship between Facebook and it's users where the user IS the product and while recognising the social glue it allows between 'friends', I am also disturbed by its apparently cynical manipulation and  its business model.

Yet another former Facebook executive has come out and expressed his guilt and concern over the role he had in developing the hugely popular social media giant, Facebook.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the vice-president for user growth at Facebook prior to leaving the company in 2011, said, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we created are destroying how society works. . . . No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

These remarks were made at a Stanford Business School event in November, but were recently published by tech website The Verge earlier this week.

“This is not about Russian ads, this is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”

Interestingly, Palihapitiya is not the first former Facebook president to come out and expose the truth behind this corporation. Sean Parker also said in a press conference that he was “something of a conscientious objector” to using social media. These words were echoed by Palihapitiya, who says he is now hoping to use the money he made during his time at Facebook to do good in the world.

When a former president of such a massive corporation has such strong words to say about their employer, I would say it’s certainly worth considering. He is passionate about not using Facebook himself or even letting his kids use it, so there must be a good reason.  

He called on his audience to “soul-search” in regards to their own relationship to social media, saying, “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence.”

What a powerful statement. I think many of us are aware by now of how addictive Facebook can be, but the idea that, with its pernicious algorithms it can influence our voting behaviour and thoughts and actions and harvest our data for the ends of shadowy billionaires and alt right think tanks is like dark science fiction turned into reality.

All together now-Aaaah Ti-mo-thy-Mor-ton (repeat)

Slow Reading Slow Gaming

This is really slow reading-the first word of The picture of Dorian Gray!  I choose the first sentence because I am not from Hegel land.

What am I reading?  Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.  What is the first sentence of the book?
We begin with a quote from Novalis thus:

'It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely
The moment another soul will believe in it.'

The first sentence then:

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.

This slow reading is quite amazing!  Is Conrad describing a man or an Exocet missile.  Imagine such a being approaching you, getting closer and closer.  You feel that this time out in the world it appears you may be assaulted for no reason by this crazy bull of a man, when he stops suddenly and enquires of you the time of day.
This is our first immediate encounter with our flawed hero, carrying the burden of one act of cowardice.

They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say-Lord Jim.

My reason for reading Conrad presently is in order to fully absorb Maya Jasanoff's extraordinary text about issues of globalisation arising from at least three of his books- ('The Dawn Watch  Joseph Conrad in a Global World.  William Collins 2017)  These being 'Nostromo', 'Lord Jim' and, of course, 'Heart of darkness.'  Maya's thesis is that Conrad predicted the phenomenon of globalisation, terrorism and the colonial exploitation that has left enduring psychic destruction in its wake thus accurately navigating us to our present sea of dillemmas and discombobulations in the first quarter of the Twenty First Century CE.
Having just finished 'Nostromo' described as Conrad's big book,  I can vouch that it explores the issues of the poisonous creep of greed, the issues of exploitation, the mannerisms of the colonisers and the furious passionately bonkers politics of South America.  Additionally, in the character of Nostromo himself we have a studied representation of a manly hero, a true free spirit shackled only by the obsession with his own honour.  Very much in the way that, in the Illiad, Achilles takes the matter of his own warlike legend as a matter of simple fact.  Either heroic short-lived warrior or long lived and contented family man dying slowly into his eighties-an equally simple choice. 

Some words from the heart about Grenfell by Stormzy recently noted in Croydon on my morning commute

Anna Campbell Kurdish fighter from Lewes- RIP

Anna Campbell  Fearless Freedom Fighter and Lewesian from Sussex

WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE

MAN WITH WORLD'S LONGEST HAIR SHOPS AT WAITROSE!

But he's thinning a bit on top!

UGLY FOOD

HEART OF BALANCE REVIEW-STEALING FIRE by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

REVIEW OF STEALING FIRE

I really was stimulated by this book particularly the chapter on psychedelics.  This is where I first heard of the amazing Sasha Shulgin and his incredible wife.  Why hasn't a film been made about this pair of beauties?  There were so many resources to follow up and, after all isn’t that what you want with one of these self-help books? A really accurate roadmap that gets you from geeky useless mental underling to superhuman hero-entrepreneur.  Isn’t this what life has now become about?  Inadequate pawn to ubermensch or uberfraulein in as short a timescale as possible?

Have we not arrived at the nexus where we can just ditch the spiritual nonsense and get right down to it?  And become great leaders because we are great kite-surfers?  Become super successful CEO’s because we go to Burning Man?  And not only will we be this super smart super-person but we will also be lean and ripped, tanned, speak several languages that we have learned while sleeping and be known at parties for hooking ourselves up to digital instruments that show us altering our heartbeat and brainwaves at will.  Everyone will laugh and want to be our friend.

Well-No!  Nope.  It actually does take the ten thousand hours. I’m really sorry to piss on part of this books premise.  I’m afraid my view is that it’s hard time, and hard regular practice to achieve mastery.  And part of that is that there is a thing called growing up and evolving the Self into additional capacities, physically and emotionally and spiritually and intellectually.  Then there is also the shadow-Self.  Growing up takes time-it is an inevitable equation. Highly focused personal development practice needs Time, lots of Time.  And I’m afraid it’s also no one way street-every step forward means half a step back-sometimes two steps back.  Sometimes the dark night of the Soul intervenes for a few years, or even a lifetime.  Personal development is evolution and takes not geological timescales but just a lifetime.

It's part of the bitch about being human-you just find out what's what, then you die.  It's a raw deal.  But the thought of the geeks transmuting their consciousness into newly made bodies and grabbing another ketogenic-enhanced seventy years is a definite no-no.  The problem with this futuristic tech is that the only humans able to afford extended life will be the nasty rich ones.  I'm ok with extending the Dalai Lama through a kickstarter campaign but I am not extending Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin or Goddess help us-the Trumpet in the West!

And the Silicon Valley billionaire premise also fills me with a dark premonition-something strange-maybe it’s dread.  Maybe it’s the feeling of nonsense upon stilts.  Possibly the idea that great wealth conveys narcissistic arrogance.  Possibly even the heresy that just cos you code-you are not a source of wisdom.  The billionaire geeky man-child villain who dreams up twisted digitally enhanced nightmares already walks among us.

That shady, Marvel-type villain, Peter Thiel, being put forward as a mentor fills me definitely with dread.  Let this sucker in and it could all turn to shit as if microwaved.  In a recent rather brilliant essay in The Baffler (March/April No 38) Eugene McCarraher, an associate professor at Villannova University describes him thusly,  '...PayPal co-founder and vampiric plutocrat Peter Thiel (an enthusiast of Objectivism and a recent recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Hayek Institute)...'  
Objectivism is of course the drivel dispensed by the arch rationaliser of greed and selfishness, Ayn Rand whose books continue to fly out the shelves apparently-it can't just be Paul Ryan buying them.  And here, the Ayn Randyan, Hayekian, economics-lite, neo-libertarian bullshit is inherent in the prose and it is what troubles me most about this silicon valley philosophy of can-do; as long as we are left alone to be great by the nanny state and it's huddled masses.  The fact that at root it appears so individualised, atomised an approach to living and the fantasy that these billionaires got there entirely by their own nerdy talents when they are just dipshits in the ocean of life-just like the rest of us.

And that teams should emulate American elite military units like the Navy Seals who are allegedly training their soldiers in meditation, yoga and psychedelics to become even better killers, to get into FLOW.  As if killing is about skill-Skilling?  When we all know killing is like sex-most of it happens in the head.

Because at root what is happening here is a re-referencing of what the meaning is about being alive.  Here, being alive is about performance.  It’s about what you do in the world!  But I suspect the truth is that what you do means very little and what you are means a very great deal.  

Gentle reader!  Read it!  Twice!

Rebirding the Peak District

A few weeks ago, the ecologist Alex Lees published an online poster on a topic that might strike you as recondite: the bird life of the Peak District. Half the poster showed the birds that currently exist there, the other half showed the birds he would like to see. It has so far been viewed 140,000 times.

Notes towards an essay on Biophilia

Notes towards an ESSAY ON BIOPHILIA

CORROSIVE IMPACT OF MODERN SOCIETY

ORGANISATION IMPLACABLY DRIVES TOWARDS PLUTOCRACY/ KLEPTOCRACY AND BIOCIDE

GREED

CORRUPTION

MASSES ARE NEUTRALISED BY DRUGS/ALCOHOL/REALITY TV/ CELEBRITY/ SOCIAL MEDIA/ INTERNET/ THE VISUAL IMAGE AS TYRANT/ THE CORPORATE CANCER/ THE RISE OF FUNDAMENTALISM AND NATIONAL INFERIORITY COMPLEXES/ 

THE REPLACEMENT OF SPIRITUAL BELIEF SYSTEMS BY BELIEF IN MATERIALISM

THE RELENTLESS RISE OF NARCISSISM

THE SEPARATION BETWEEN SELF AND BIOSPHERE

THE SEPARATION BETWEEN HUMAN SOCIETY AND OTHER LIVING BEINGS

THE RISE OF SCIENTISM (LINKED TO MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTIONS OF REALITY)

THE RISE OF IRRATIONALITY IN BELIEF SYSTEMS AND THE ECONOMY

THE LACK OF AN OPPOSITIONAL BOUNDARY TO CAPITALISM

THE RISE OF FASCIST BODY IMAGE SENSIBILITY-THE CONCEPT OF PHYSICAL PERFECTIONISM

THE OBSESSION WITH CRUELTY, CRIMINALITY, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN CINEMA

THE HOLLYWOOD DEATH CULT

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE FEMININE

THE EMASCULATION OF THE MALE

THE EASY AVAILABILITY OF HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY

THE SHIFTING PLEASURE TRIGGERS OF THE PERVERT EVOLVING TO EVER GREATER DEGREES OF STIMULATION TO TRIGGER A RESPONSE-DE SADE

OBSESSIONS WITH LIFE EXTENSION SCIENCE

OBSESSION WITH BIO DESIGN VIA THE GENOME

FOOD AS FETISH

THE RISE OF A MIND CONTROLLING PRESS

THE EVER DEVELOPING PSEUDO SOPHISTICATED COMPLEXITY OF THE ARTS

THE RISE OF A SELF ABSORBED AND INDIVIDUALLY IMMATURE MIDDLE CLASS

OBSESSION WITH TRIVIA

CELEBRITY BECOMES A MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE

THE SEXUALISATION OF CHILDREN

MASS IMMIGRATION LEADING TO VIOLENCE

ASSASSINATION AT ARMS LENGTH BY DRONE

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Goodbye 2017, hello 2018!

Well here we are at the year end once more.  It is significant because it is the last day.  2018 starts tomorrow so we have a point from which to look both reviewingly backwards and anticipatingly forwards.

This blog has been a tad more intermittent than I hoped.  But I am avoiding resolutions to be more of a hardcore blogger or anything else.  I'll look back and see what was good about events and people who offered generosity, wisdom and kindness, and try and get more of that and them and less of what was not so good or just plain horrible.  I'm going to try and keep it simple.

And for me I will try to be generous and kind and grateful for what I have.  I will try to be a better father, friend and life partner.  I will try to be a better person.

This year, personally, a business plan crashed and burned through insufficient planning and awareness or recognition of complexity. It was a chronic failure to recognise marketing, partnerships and networks as absolutely key to success.  A huge disappointment but also a massive learning.

Someone once said those who never fail never succeed at anything either.  We have to keep trying.  We have to bounce back.  Fail once, fail better next time.

Looking back on the three dimensions of this blog; the cultural, the political and the developmental, 2017 was something of a mixed bag.  Politics remains a horrorshow of dark farce due to two elements.  One is quite localised to the UK which is the vote to leave the European Community whose unbelievably complex unfolding has occupied the British Government almost to the exclusion of everything else.  It remains one of the most disastrous events in recent British history and one of the most glaring political blunders of anytime, anywhere.

BREXIT

The 2016 vote to leave the EU marked a watershed moment in the history of the United Kingdom. When all votes had been counted 52% of the electorate had opted to leave the EU, a figure that increased to almost 54% in England. The figures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland varied, at 38, 52.5 and 44%, respectively. Across 393 local authorities, support for leave surpassed 70% in eight authorities, 60% in 102 and 50% in 263. In England the share of the vote for leaving ranged from nearly 76% in Boston, Lincolnshire to 21% in Lambeth, London.  (The Brexit Vote Explained:  Poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities  (Goodwin, Heath. 2016)  Joseph Rowntree Foundation)

I found myself in Scunthorpe for a period of time from 2016 into early 2017.  North Lincolnshire was a clear brexit area and at dinner one evening with my local hosts I queried where they stood on the question of Brexit.  They remarked, quite vociferously, how they despised the EU and all that it stood for.  I asked for some detail and they remarked upon two aspects that they held to be the responsibility of the EU.  One was immigration which they described as  a major disgrace .  ‘The immigrants are swamping us.  They’re taking our housing, our jobs, they’re destroying our schools.  They don’t want to be part of this country, in fact they hate us.’  I asked if they were referring specifically to Muslims but they argued that they were sick of being described as racist and felt as strongly about the influx from Eastern Europe.

‘So what else prompted you to vote to leave?’  I asked.

’Sovereignty’ they replied.

Chambers Dictionary of Etymology refers to Sovereignty as ‘Great, superior, mighty.’  We might say the Power in the land.  I was interested though in what they meant and pressed them for an insight into what they understood by the term and they said ‘the right to make our own laws’.  I referred to Parliament as our law making institution and asked if they meant that-they somewhat reluctantly agreed they did.

My response was to ask if they seriously thought that the ruling party in Westminster gave so much as a shit about the folk in North Lincs.  Then in an act of frustration I produced my laptop and downloaded the last five years investment in North Lincs by the EU.  Everything from repairing Church roofs to creating bypasses to children’s play areas to community spaces.  There was an uncomfortable silence and I realised I had crossed a boundary of courtesy.

The point is that the Brexit vote arises out of a negative perception of being ignored, disinvested in, having no say, feeling left behind.  It emerges also out of a fractured nation and out of growing inequality of both wealth and opportunity.

It was also some kind of dishonest scam, for reasons that escape me.

To be clear I consider that the Conservative Coalition Government that succeeded Gordon Brown’s Labour was, and remains in its present incarnation under Theresa May, as the most blunderingly incompetent of any I have known.  David Cameron agreed the EU referendum for no other reason than to throw a scrap for the right wing of his party, never imagining that a leave vote would be the result.  And that ludicrously incompetent decision is what he will always be remembered for-the most deliciously incompetent Tory PM in history.  An old Etonian, a Bullingham member, an upper class twit, an idiot.  And with his Etonian mates, Johnson and Osborne he has left a legacy of potential disaster.  Doesn't seem to stop them getting jobs though!  The insipid Osborne's meteoric rise appears almost mythic, as if Count Dracula had been welcomed at the harbour by Whitby Council and given the freedom of the town.  Regarding Johnson the less said the better.

THE MANCHILD IN THE WHITEHOUSE

The second matter is the manchild currently residing at the American White House.  I have attempted both a half hearted defense of him against what I thought were the sexist and brutal attacks on him due to his physical appearance (the hair and the small hands etc) by some very well known feminists and an analysis of his first hundred days which I doubted he would long survive.  How wrong I was!  Almost daily Trump commits some fresh outrage against basic decency, morality, and common sense.  Far from barely surviving he thrives.  The Good Old Party is revealed as a hotbed of moral idiots.  And American democracy is revealed as a thin disguise for what seems to be the most cruel capitalist system in the World as seen in its treatment of the poor, of young men of colour and its jails full to bursting with the disenfranchised poor.
When I look at Trump and his bombastic, greedy, self serving behaviour I am reminded of another manchild from history-Kaiser Wilhelm the Second of Germany.  And look where that led!
Right now it feels like anything can happen and it feels unsafe.

However it is when the chips are down and backs against the wall that humans can dig deep into almost superhuman reserves of courage and generosity.  I see no evidence that the human spirit is down and out and much evidence that it is very much here.  I hope so because when leadership is so inept it comes down to all of us to take responsibility.

May I wish you and your families, peace and tranquility through the Yule period and beyond.  And may you find the courage and generosity to do all that needs to be done.

HAPPY NEW YEAR AND BEST WISHES FOR 2018!

Abraxas