Author: orbific

This is a blog post that got lost in my drafts. I originally wrote it in 2021 after seeing Adam Curtis’s documentary series Can’t Get You Out of My Head, which had a bleak view of modern politics.

It’s hard to believe that The Future Starts Here came out in 2019 – that seems so long ago now. I actually unpacked my copy of the book this week, and am thinking of re-reading it. The optimistic message is still plausible and even more necessary now. As difficult as the last few years have been politically, economically and emotionally, there are strong underlying reasons for hope.

I read John Higgs’ book about the future, The Future Starts Here shortly after it came out. One afternoon, I took it with me for a walk on Brighton seafront. As I sat reading on a bench, a seagull shat on me. Birdshit splashed across the pages. John Higgs never saw that coming.

Despite that omission, it’s a good book, and it’s still relevant after Covid-19. That’s not bad for any pre-pandemic book about the future, but it’s even more remarkable for a positive one. Being pessimistic is easy, but this book rallies against the sort of learned helplessness we’re taught by the media. If we cannot see a positive future, then there is little point doing anything other than having mindless fun until it ends.

At one point John Higgs briefly refers to Francis Fukyama’s book The End of History, using that as an example of being blind to the future. Most references to The End of History are negative, and it is easy to mock Fukyama now. But doing that misses how plausible and welcome that idea was in 1992.

I grew up in the 80s, where life was overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war. Even children’s comics had serials set in irradiated hellscapes. It was a grim time. Then the Berlin Wall fell. Liberal democracy had won. Sure, life wasn’t perfect, but we could move beyond the battle of superpowers. It was a period when no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants had ever been at war. In last five years, I’ve felt assaulted by history. Instead of Fukyama’s dream of a safer and blander world delivered by democracy, politics has felt confusing and threatening. I miss the idea that history could end.

Which is an obscenely long preamble to my excitement about the new Adam Curtis show, which came out in February. It was trailed by an epic interview in the New Yorker. In the interview Curtis talks about the idea that elites across the world are trying to “manage the world without transforming it”. As Curtis says:

There isn’t a big story. And that’s true in China as much as it is here. Everyone’s just trying to manage the now and desperately hold it stable, almost like in a permanent present, and not step into the future. And I don’t think that will last very long. . . . Because if you’ve got a story about where you’re going, when catastrophes like 9/11 or covid or the banking crisis hit, they allow you to put them—even though they’re frightening—to put them into a sense of proportion. If you don’t have a story about where you’re going, they seem like terrifying random acts from another universe.

One of the points Higgs made in his book which resonated most was that we don’t have many positive visions of the future. Science fiction has become haunted by totalitarism, killer robots, even fake worlds, where media lies have become absolute. But there are reasons to hope. Talking about the pandemic, Curtis says:

If science can bring out a vaccine within seven months, you can change the world—you really can… my instinct tells me that people are fed up with that feeling of helplessness. They’re beginning to realize that it doesn’t just come from inside them—that maybe they are weak for a reason, and not because of themselves.

In many ways, Can’t Get You Out of My Head felt like a missed opportunity, Curtis’s equivalent of a Vegas set, playing the hits and a few crowd-pleasing new ones. There were some interesting ideas, such as Curtis’s response to Dominic Cummings (from a recent interview: “I had time for Cummings because compared to other politicians he actually had some ideas”) and the meaning of Brexit. And, you know, it would have been more interesting to watch a film about how to get out of the current situation rather than wallow in it. The show started and ended with that great quote by David Graeber:

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.

What type of future do we want?

Over the years, I’ve read every major book published about Kurt Cobain. As time has gone on, it’s felt like there was nothing new to be said about him; but in the past year I’ve encountered two remarkable pieces of writing.

Emma Frankland’s zine, All Apologies, which is based on her stage show, claims Kurt as a trans woman. It’s audacious and thrilling, and made me excited about listening to Nirvana again.

A more conventional work is Nicholas Soulsby’s Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide. I first learned of the book from Danny Goldberg’s biography Serving the Servant. An entire book on Incesticide sounded like a waste of time – I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to the record all the way through. But I downloaded the Kindle sample, checked it out, and quickly bought the full thing.

The book sets out a case for taking Incesticide seriously – incredibly seriously, in fact – and not just as a filler designed to attract the 1992 Christmas market. Soulsby has thought very carefully about Nirvana. He has tables and maps to track the evidence. Very early in the book he had made some points that I’d missed:

• “Incesticide was the only Nirvana album that didn’t come stamped with Kurt Cobain’s seal of disapproval”. – Soulsby quotes Cobain dismissing Bleach (“too boring”), Nevermind (“sell-out”) and In Utero (“I wasn’t really interested in listening to it). The idea of Incesticide as a ‘true version of Nirvana’ is an interesting one.
• Soulsby emphasises the scale of Nirvana’s success as a punk band – none of the bands that inspired Nirvana came close to their sales. – “Even Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols took a decade to reach Gold and didn’t hit Platinum until 1992”
• In a fascinating piece of research, Soulsby shows that, in the last two and a half years of his life, ”Cobain’s… productivity amounted to just fourteen songs wholly written after the release of Nevermind”. Indeed, “80-90% of Kurt’s known songs were written by September 1991”. It’s interesting to see how long the gestation period for some of the later songs was; and tragic to see how creatively exhausted Cobain was compared to his earlier work-rate.

The most important thing in Soulsby’s book is his analysis of the contradiction between Cobain’s punk ethics and his commercial drives. Cobain spoke frequently about punk ethics in his interviews while some of the decisions he made undermined this (examples being signing to Geffen, his relationship with MTV, and the handling of the band’s publishing royalties).

Soulsby argues that Cobain was most interested in being left alone, and that his compromises with the mainstream were about finding security for himself, and later for his family. He provides examples from early in Cobain’s career where he struggled to be undisturbed while working on his art and music. Soulsby suggests that the impossibility of finding peace was what drove Cobain to his tragic ending. There is a lot of subtlety to Soulsby’s arguments, but he’s the first writer who has explained Cobain’s contradictions without undermining his commitment to punk ethics.

I still can’t really get into Incesticide. For me, Nirvana’s great album was In Utero. But by looking into what I always saw as a marginal work, Soulsby has produced some amazing insights into Nirvana’s career.

In my early 20s, I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The book describes a complete system for organising your life, and I soon felt more in control. I stopped being late and – mostly – remembered things. It did me a lot of good.

The problem with GTD is that it works by capturing everything. Every possible project was in the system somewhere. I had whole lifetimes-worth of things I might do, research or make. GTD captured all my fleeting thoughts, even the ones I should let go of.

Now, twenty years later, I’ve dropped most aspects of GTD, but the principles are there. Fleeting thoughts go into colourfully-covered moleskines, and are written up into a huge scrivener file. For a long time, I used a Google Keep note as a calendar. It worked. Moving to Yorkshire has helped, as for a time I had fewer things competing for attention than I did in Brighton. I adapted GTD into something that works for me, but I’ve never found a good answer to that question of choosing what to let go.

Four Thousand Weeks, the recent book from Oliver Burkeman, is the antidote to other productivity books. The title refers to the length of a British lifetime. Expressed as 4000 weeks, it sounds a lot shorter than eighty years. Life is too short to do everything we might want to, so productivity is better approached as a choice of what to pay attention to rather than trying to do as much as we can.

With this acceptance of incompleteness, Burkeman turns the usual productivity advice on its head by admitting that there will never be enough time, and we will never feel on top of all our workloads. “Productivity is a trap,” Burkeman writes. “Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”

Burkeman uses this idea of conscious choice to recontextualise some familiar ideas. He sees trying to do more than one thing at once is a way of avoiding dealing with the choice. Distraction needs to be managed. Hard choices about what we focus on need to be made consciously. “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

Burkemann also writes interestingly on the idea of distraction from social media. Most people writing on this topic focus on the idea of Silicon Valley stealing our attention, whereas Burkemann looks at this as a choice in what we pay attention to.

Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: it’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief. We’re told that there’s a ‘war for our attention’, with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that’s true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy.

Burkeman is also particularly good when he talks about the need for community, and how we should not be optimising these things out of existence. He points out how easy this is to do in an efficient world, with deliveries and no-contact airbnbs. Some friction is good where it brings us into contact with other people.

For me, the most powerful thing is this acceptance that clearing the decks will never succeed, and will only make things worse. Trying to ‘make time’ for the things we care about by clearing away other tasks means we never get around to what matters.

The big test of whether a book like this works is what changes it produces in the reader. I am letting go of a lot of things – better to succeed at a small number. To stop trying to do too much. “The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.”