Category: Things That Happened

Last weekend, I watched all six episodes of the new Adam Curtis show, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, which comes in at about eight hours. I’m still thinking about the show, but my initial thoughts are somewhat critical.

• First off, I loved that the first mention of Discordianism was approximately 23 minutes in. Beautiful attention to detail.
• In many ways, this felt like a direct continuation of Curtis’s other documentaries, with the same mix of B-roll footage, out of context archive shots and tasteful music.
• In a show that talks about power and narrative, Curtis’s use of his voice as a patrician BBC voiceover is suspect. This should be parodic, but he seems to be playing it straight.
• Many of the ideas Curtis uses are quite simple, and thrown out of linear order just to create patterns and juxtapositions.
• Some of these juxtapositions begin to seem trite. ‘Saudi Arabia is a fairyland, just like Tupac Shakur’s version of LA!’ ‘The KKK are like Isis, who are just like English folk dances before world war two!’
• There is a loss of context to the images, which is sometimes problematic. We’re lulled into not questioning the origin of footage and ideas. At one point, shocking footage is shown of what looks like preparations for a mass execution, the victim’s faces blurred. Were they blurred by the BBC or by the people who shot and edited the original footage?
• Curtis often talks about how the world had gone “badly wrong” for the middle classes, sometimes supporting this by proximity to appalling outrages on less-privileged groups. I think that someone like Curtis could always show the middle classes being unhappy and unsettled with whatever the mainstream ideology was.
• Towards the end, Curtis talks about use of neural networks on the web, and how patterns in the data are analysed without context or meaning. The implicit self-critique is palpable.
• But, at the same time, there is a fascinating twist, which comes too late to be followed up. Having spoken about manipulation through social media, Curtis questions the idea of this through the replication crisis.
• After talking for hours about the growth in bureaucratic power, Curtis briefly moves to discussing Brexit. He questions the idea that Brexit was a manipulation of Leavers by outside forces, implying that Brexit might even be a positive way of reclaiming the collective power has been undermined over years. It’s a disturbing and fascinating moment.
• It feels like the next Curtis documentary could be very interesting.

What fascinates me about this show, and makes it worth discussing, is that Curtis seems to be making a provocative, inspiring narrative, but one that is almost drowned by his tropes. That positive story is about the limits of individuality, and the need for collective stories to change the world. Rather than focus on the anxiety and confusion, he could have focussed on people gathering together. It’s that show that has excited me, rather than the one discussed above.

Curtis deals in hidden narratives, but the film begins and ends with David Graeber’s inspiring quote: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make different”.

Google has an automated memory, which occasionally notifies me of things that happened. Five years ago yesterday, I was at a Furry Convention. It seems like another world.

Earlier yesterday, I had been reading a Kelly Link story. It was set at a large hotel which was simultaneously hosting a dentist’s convention and a gathering of superheroes. The Furry Convention in 2016 shared the hotel space with a girls volleyball tournament, and the teams would pose for photos with the furries.

Even without the pandemic, it will be a long time before I make a trip like this again. I spent new year in Goa, then flew east to California, with a stopover in Tokyo. I was there for a few hours and didn’t leave the airport. I have no idea why I didn’t arrange a longer stay and a stopover visa. I would have had enough time to have seen Shibuya crossing, to get lost in the city and find myself again.

I’ve heard so many great things about Tokyo. In 2008, the artist Momus gave a tour of ‘London as Tokyo’, imagining the South Bank was actually Japan and making up outrageous stories. Or, in Retromania, Simon Reynolds talks about bars which contain their own obscure cultural micro-scenes; now the web has made that universal.

An old friend of mine once visited Tokyo. She described the city as having no obvious ground level. I have not seen her in years. I heard she became a scything champion, and is now living in the countryside with two children. In 2008, this friend was engaged in an incredible project, only eating food produced within 100 miles of home. She struggled at it, but learned so much about the area she lived in.

All these stories about the past: I need to make sure that there are also good stories in my future.

In 1997, Michael Haneke released a dark and intentionally unpleasant home invasion movie, Funny Games, then remade it with a larger budget in 2007. Both films are grim, and were intended by Haneke as lessons about media violence. He said that “anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film, and anybody who stays does.”

The Last of Us Part II has been widely acclaimed as the best game of 2020, and praised as innovative and emotionally resonant. It was one of the reasons I bought a PS4, but I only made it through about ten hours before deciding that it had nothing to say to me and stopped playing. As beautiful as the game is, there is an ugliness below the surface that repulses me. The game’s morality is broken.

When you’re playing videogames, the worlds are designed to look real, but represent a less complicated logical universe. Like how some stones on the ground can be picked up as weapons, but others are decoration. Or how wooden doors in games sometimes require a key and are impervious to bazooka fire. Or you can open drawers to find hidden items, but only some drawers.

The Last of Us pretends to be an open world, but not all the windows can be levered open. Sometimes, I found myself wandering an area, looking for the gap I should squeeze through to enter the next area. Sometimes I could see that area through a chainlink face, but not all the fences are climbable, only the ones where an icon appears. Rather than simply exist in this virtual world, I had to learn to interpret it. What was implied to be an open world was actually a series of controlled corridors.

This same forced path happens in the game’s morality. The revenge plot relies on the main character feeling remorse for the people they have slaughtered. But these murders are not chosen by the character. Sometimes the only way to progress is to fight your way past ‘enemies’. The game attempts to humanise these guards through their companions call their names as they die. Forcing the player to kill to progress, then blaming them for it, is some sort of Skinnerian experiment in misplaced empathy.

Having given up on the game, it’s sad to learn that this problematic morality is by design, with director Neil Druckman saying in an interview:

“we can make you experience this thirst for revenge. This thirst for retribution and having you actually, like, commit the acts of finding it and then showing you the other side to make you regret it. To make you feel dirty for everything you’ve done in the game, making you realise ‘I’m actually the villain of the story.’”

Vice magazines’s review described TLOUP2 as a game about revenge that “digs two graves, fills them with blood, and then just fucking wallows in them”. As much as I loved the post-apocalypse setting, I wasn’t up for the wallowing.

The game has produced some interesting critical responses. Some have pointed out that the game’s plot is implicitly Conservative, with a selfishness at its heart. One of the best pieces I read was about the treatment of one of the Black characters (an incident I did not progress far enough to see): “The torture and death of Nora is considered in the game only in the effect that it has on Ellie, as if the decision to torture someone is something that happens to you instead of a choice.” On top of this there is the abuse of staff who made this game through the use of crunch time, so I guess things have not improved since the days of EA Spouse.

There were far better stories that could have been told using the setting and technology than one that forces the player into murder and then blames them for it. The only choice, like in Funny Games is whether to play or not.

I can’t remember exactly when I left Facebook. I’ve been off it for a few years now, and I don’t miss it – but it sometimes feels strange, knowing there is a whole social world that I’m not part of. But, even while I’m social-distancing I am not going back.

• Social media breaks my concentration – even if I’m not actively engaging with it. I’m not disciplined enough to resist an engine designed to distract and addict me.
• There are severe ethical problems with social media. Facebook’s convenience is at the cost of allowing dangerous and divisive misinformation to be transmitted. While this has been bad in the UK and US, it has proved lethal in some countries.
• Large social media companies end up enforcing ‘community standards’ in terms of art, acceptable speech, identity and anonymity. These are sometimes patrolled by machine learning which is a rather blunt tool.
• Some social media uses algorithmically-ordered timelines, which sort posts according to various metrics, including their ‘engagement’. In practise, this means commercial goals can override social needs, with some friends and updates being hidden for being insufficiently enticing. It’s the Situationist nightmare, with the spectacle taking over social relations (“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images“).
• While Facebook makes it easy to stay in contact with hundreds of people, I think this is at the cost of short-circuiting deeper, direct interactions. Facebook is convenient but it does not offer proper human contact.

It feels a little strange to cut myself off from something that is important to so many people. I do feel that my quality of life is better without being on Facebook. Many of my views here were inspired by Cal Newport’s recent books on social media, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

I do occasionally miss events and announcements, and it’s certainly harder to promote things when few people seem to stray outside of walled gardens like Facebook. Overall, though, I am far happier not being on Facebook.

Back in 1998, I lived in Norwich for six months. I was there for work, but I liked the town. I met some good people and even moved into a shared house for the length of my placement.

After leaving Norwich, I never got round to returning. It’s not an easy place to reach, tucked away in a corner of the coastline, at the end of a dreary A-road. I had no reason to go back rather than exploring new places. When Rosy announced she was moving there I was excited – it would be a chance to return.

Arriving in Norwich, I was surprised how little I remembered. I felt like I recalled the train station’s platforms, and the Unthank Road seemed familiar, but I couldn’t remember much more. Maybe the streets around the castle? I visited the Festival House pub, which has changed hands and names in the years since. It looks very different, but I remembered the layout, if not the area nearby.

I found an old computer file, a letter to the landlord, objecting to his seizure of our deposit, and it included the address of the flat. It was about a hundred meters from where Rosy was living. I recalled nothing of these streets. When I went to look at the house I felt no connection. It was as if I’d never lived there.

As I child, I once had a dream about having a particular toy, a Star Wars ‘Hoth Imperial Base Playset’. It’s not something I particularly longed for, but the dream felt so real that I was disappointed to wake and realise I didn’t own the toy. In Norwich, in a church converted to an antiques market, I found that very toy. The old dream seemed more real than Norwich itself.

I sometimes worry that life will have seemed so short. But here is a six-month period of my own life that has few memories attached. The events have been composted into a sort of general impression. How much more of my life will I forget before I am done?

On Saturday afternoon, I went to a poetry workshop in Hastings. Over a three hour period we read and discussed six poems by the writers Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Doty.

Obviously, I attended workshops and seminars as part of my MA, but those sessions were shorter, and we would get through a lot of material; we were also dissecting the poems, seeing how they worked, rather than considering their effect. Sitting with six poems over ninety minutes, sometimes in silence, was a powerful experience.

The poems themselves were incredibly moving, but new depths emerged as I sat and reconsidered them. It made me think about how rare it is to make so much time for art, to sit with it rather than liking it and scrolling on. To allow the space for ‘eternity in an hour’. And that led me to thinking about how novelty overwhelms me in terms of culture: the new-but-mediocre takes space that could be used up for revisiting things I already love. Consumption drives out contemplation.

There is a great quote in the film ‘About Schmidt’ about losing sections of your life just through not thinking about them – are there memories and experiences I would benefit from thinking back to?

There’s a lovely blog post by Cal Newport, summarising Robert Hassan’s book Uncontained. Hassan travelled on a ship from Melbourne to Singapore with no digital media, few books and a different language to most of the crew. Faced with “endless hours with nothing concrete to do”, Hassan says

I began to think about my own history and my life and things that have happened and to begin to explore those memories [and] think about what was around them, what was behind them, and I began to make discoveries. It is amazing to think that [these details are in] there, in all of us, mostly undisturbed unless we devote the time to concentrate and go looking.

The descriptions of how Hassan spends his time are powerful, falling naturally into a pattern of bipshasl sleep, and taking a chair apart and putting it back together. Rather than being bored, Hassan concluded that he would do it again. A similar story was told in the guardian recently, when Mark O’Connel spent 24 hours sitting in a forest clearing as part of a “wilderness solo”.

Finding such space in normal life is not easy when there are so many finely-tuned distractions; but attending that workshop was a good reminder of the depths of engagement that are possible when we give things enough space. The question is how to do it.

I’ve not been on Twitter since around Christmas, and I don’t miss it that much. I’ve had time away before but this time I don’t think I’m going back. There was a time when this would have seemed unimaginable.

Back in October 2010, I wrote about why I loved twitter. This was a tool that had “introduced me to some amazing people, found me work, and helped me discover events and books that I might otherwise have missed.” It was a place for friendly small talk, a little like very slow IRC.

But even then, I pointed out that Twitter was an interesting mix between protocol, platform and people; and it needed all three for success. For a long time, the platform was a problem, with constant outages proving frustrating.

Once the platform became stable, Twitter started pushing for growth, which meant bringing in more users and having them look at the platform more often. They soon discovered that controversy provided a more energetic site, with better engagement metrics. That growth has come at the cost of the site’s friendliness. Buzzfeed’s piece on How the Retweet ruined the Internet is worth a read on this.

Even with lots of keywords on mute (including ‘Trump’ and ‘Corbyn’) Twitter just felt angry lately. A lot of the problems could have been easily fixed – the bots are hardly well disguised; and it would be easy to filter out people sending agressive statements to strangers (if you’re using the c-word to a stranger, you’re probably not a nice person).

I’m not sure what comes next. I’ve been enjoying newsletters, particularly some small ones aimed at a couple of dozen people; and I feel heartened by the slow return to blogging. Promoting things is perhaps harder, but that might not be a bad thing. But I’ll miss the friendly strangers popping up on my computer.

PS – There’s a lovely piece by Robin Sloan, platforms.fyi (“Social media platforms should run small, and slow, and cool to the touch.“)