My Manifesto
m
d erne c n o c ety By a of soci r embe
n
Introductio
My dear reader, I write this not for money, nor for fame. I’m writing out of fear. Fear of what you ask? Well, as self obsessed as it may sound, the one thing I fear above all else is not being remembered when I’m gone. I don’t like the idea that no one will know who am in the years to come. Hell I don’t even mind death. As strange as it sounds, I’m strangely looking forward to it. From what I hear, there’s still six to twelve minutes of brain activity after everything else has shutdown and a good second of dream consciousness. If you do the maths, and I have, that’s infinitely longer than a waking second. So the way I figure it, six to twelve minutes of
brain activity is enough time to re-live your whole life. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I take comfort in the fact that I have a little time to mull things over before I die. No dear reader, I’m writing this because I fear that the written word, the hand written word that is, had become a dead medium. A medium that has become far removed from society. Thou with the demand for printed works on the rise after the digital book slump has lead to a shortage of paper and the price has sky rocketed. So ive been saving these few sheets for something special. I used to write as a way to wind down after a long day or to keep myself entertained, but now I’m addicted to it. Plus its far more personal than a video postcard! So I write this, both as a reminder and a final record as we pass from Pre to Post. While I agree, all this sounds like
complete, nonsensical bull shit now. I can only assure you that in the days to come, this seemingly whimsical document will be drawn into stern focus and you will see as clearly as I do now. I hope that this will become a historical document of sorts for our children and our children’s children and do on, and so on. A document that will provide a frank look at how our society. A society run by insane people for insane objectives and a society that has surrendered its independence to the digital age. A document that will also show our dependence on all the marvels we have created will be our un-doing.
am I? o h W I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together. To be honest, I’m not sure who I am anymore. Like many of you in their late 20’s and early 30’s, I was born into fear. But then again, what generation of human existence hasn’t right? For our parents, it was the so called War on Terror. The jury is still out to if that war actually accomplished anything. But let’s be right, bombing for peace was like fucking for virginity. But I digest... For our generation as you all well know was the virus, though many people still call it a plague. 7-10% of the male population wiped out in London alone. With intruders seen as a source of
disease as well as crime, the middle classes seized on the new menace of a plague as a pretext for protecting their estates against the apparent infected underclass. Thus I grew up in the closed estates that many of the middle classes of our generation grew up in. I grew up in the country, a landscape of casual perfection: little churches, sandstone villages, valleys, hills, slabs of incandescent colour in summer. However, the underclass, including anyone convicted of a serious offence, where obliged to live in the so-called `free’ or `unrestricted’ zones, where crime and poverty were rife, and public services where, shall we say, not exactly bustling supermarkets. While that segregation has eased with no reported cases in 10 years, the fear still exists. But I enjoy
fear, fear is what moves people. Politics is built on it. So who am I? I’m part of the unwanted afterbirth of the 21st century. I’m a true product of the system. A system that strips you of any kind of privacy or individuality. So I must re-create myself each day to cope with the chaotic flow of our modern urban life. I like to think of my self as kind of cultural mascot for the 21st century. Sworn enemy of the monoculture that tries to govern over us. London’s Calling I hate to hate London. I really do. It’s a city that I used to see so much potential in everyday. It made me sick. Not anymore though. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve lived two different lives and seen two different sides of the same city, or because I’ve seen how one side seems to look down upon the other. I’ve been ostracized by the same people that I used to call friends and reviled by
those that now surround me. She is a fickle temptress London. “Such a black, shrill city,” I believe dickens wrote, “combining the qualities of a smoking home and a scolding wife; such a gritty city; such a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” The city has no identity of its own anymore. In the 50s the only colour on the streets came from smears of passing red buses, and the face of London was scarred and pitted from wartime bomb damage. Terraces with missing houses looked like mouthfuls of absent teeth, and weed-infested wastelands spread over the city like a cancer. That’s character! That’s a city! That’s the London I would choose any day of the week! Well yes ok, so she still has history, but her unique identity has long drowned in a proverbial sea of computer code and
media as information has flooded the urban landscape. Every street I walk down tries to sell me something and every pavement I walk upon tries to get me to follow it to god knows where! Life in the city has become constant bombardment of information. Many people have become dependent on the oral stimulations and perceptions displayed all around them. Popular music is omnipresent in the streets, shops, restaurants and bars and the urban landscape has becoming dominated by all types of media for both cultural expression and cultural consumption. I have to say I do love those new add hackers! They crack me up, they really do! All the advertising and media giants, sat up in their corporate towers, claim to have not anticipated such malicious attacks upon the new media infrastructure, or the Ad-work as it’s commonly known. How dumb can you be? Honestly! If you’re going to rely on
computers and networks to advertise to the masses on the streets, it was only going to be a matter of time before some bright spark had the idea of hacking into them to display their own crap to the masses. My hands down favourite one was the one last week when some blokes in Germany hacked London’s ad-work and replace all the ads in a three square mile area of the east end with some quite hardcore German porn. I honestly don’t know what was funnier, the parents running to shield their children’s eyes, the elderly obviously looking appalled but trying to act like they hadn’t noticed, and the girl friends and wives slapping their other half’s who stood staring at this happy turn of events. The annoying thing is that these stunts get attention. A lot of it. And the one thing that the media and advertisers especial crave is attention. So I’ve noticed over the past few months that advertisers are now spoiling out adds that
mimic these attacks but are actually nothing more than publicity stunts to sell something. Because every street you seem to walk down has a coating of the same media bullshit, every street looks the same! Not just in London, but in Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Paris, New York, Tokyo, they all look the same. I swear to god, if I go into a bar right now, get completely fucked off my face and pass out. When I woke up, and someone told me I was in New York, I would believe them. Certainly for a few minutes anyway! Just until my Morph told me what was what. Obviously though, one thing that will always make London unique and distinguishable from all others are the events of 2014. The city has never fully recovered. Like many of you, I watched as that wall of water overwhelmed the Thames barrier and poured into the
Thames valley and much of the low lying areas of London. We watched as the authorities and military struggled to save the lives of thousands of people who lived and worked in the affected areas. We watched as the water destroyed our history before reseeding back to the sea. We watched as the government poured billions into the regeneration, and then watched as they delivered failed promises. Oh yes, so they restored the historical areas, the financial areas etc but there are still parts of the city untouched by that restoration fund. So the city has developed two distinct sides. The relatively new and highly developed areas of the city that sprung up post flood financial infusion which compliment the still developed and undamaged parts of the city, and the flood hit areas, forget about, or still awaiting planning permission. Many have subsequently been abandoned and walled off as part of government
initiative to mothball the areas of the city deemed “Economically Dead”. And it is those forgotten parts of our fair city I now call home. You can detect the change in the people as you walk into the area. It’s not so much an air of disillusion or down trodden luck, because many of these people had no luck to begin with. Shunned by a society that no longer wants or has a use for them, a whole generation of children are being brought up to believe that they are not fit for society because their parents aren’t. Parents whose addiction to Ambivalence (the recreational underground drug of choice since 2012) has been passed down to their children who must now bear the burden of their parent’s addiction. The burden comes in various forms; attention deficit hypersensitivity disorder, partial paralysis, a form of paranoid schizophrenia and physical and genetic mutations are probably the most common.
The end result however often takes the form of something closely resembling Klßver-Bucy syndrome. a behavioral disorder that occurs when both the right and left medial temporal lobes of the brain malfunction. The result? Many seem to display oral or tactile exploratory behavior which can often lead to socially inappropriate gestures or actions towards other people. Many also seem to have a strong degree of placidity, which i find tough to see. An emotionless child can be haunting. Many also have an inability to recognize objects or inability to recognize faces. I talk to some of the kids occasionally, they hang out next to one of the cities old high-rise mausoleums, built as a reaction to the growing lack of suitable space of which to bury the dead. Despite what the media will have you believe, some of these kids are as smart as any genome kid I’ve talked to. I teach them
about history, the stars and the planets, but for the most parts, my efforts remain futile, as many simply can’t retain the memories. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad! Despite everything, the government has made sure London retained its role as Europe’s top financial centre. It has also become the most important locations for many European and international companies. Socially, many parts of the city seem to strut with self-confidence, and the streets are spruce and as vividly coloured as kaleidoscope. Especially in the summer, since our summers have been steadily getting warmer since 2000, we have adopted a Mediterranean lifestyle. We spill out of cafés and pubs and bars onto the pavements and whatever small piece of grass we can find, which only empty late at night, leaving the big white terraces and squares as quiet as hotel corridors. Before my downfall from
civilised society, I lived in a modest and handsome mid-Victorian terraced flat, sandwiched between a series of ugly looking early 21st century apartment blocks which almost seem to frown down at the neighbourhood while the inhabitants (my self included) frowned up at their our ugly and none complimentary neighbours.
Making a living I worked for a large advertising agency that will remain nameless as I’m not giving those sanctimonious fucks the satisfaction of free publicity. It wasn’t my first choice to become a corporate whore, and by no means was it my first job offer. I received more data packets from companies and businesses the first summer after university I’m still sure I have a few in my inbox I haven’t even read! All from Profit hungry industries,
eager to rape the young and talented of any discernible skills and talent that they could use to bump of the old profit margin. Shit man, when will this world take off its fucking “profit” glasses that taint your perception of reality so much nowadays and wake the fuck up!? But back to the topic at hand! Anyway yeah, so it probably wasn’t the best time to be going through myself titled “I’ve got to stop taking Ambivalence so I’m just going to smoke a shit load of weed” phase. Needless to say, I don’t remember much from that summer as one can imagine. I do remember paying this kid who lived down the street £10 a week to fill up 5 or 6 cups of his piss for me so my toilet would give me a clean bill of health so I could keep my premium health insurance. But I’ll come back to that! I still don’t understand why
weed is STILL illegal. I mean most of our politicians have probably done it! But i guess after 100 years of bad press, the conventions of the evils of Cannabis are here to stay! Hell, It was only made illegal because the oil, cotton and paper industries in the 1930s realised how much it would affect their fucking profit margins if its global usage were allowed to continue! Yes, its those dammed profit margins again! Governments don’t run the world, competitive profit margins do! So yeah, I worked for a big advertising agency for a while. Just to pay the bills of course. I worked on those big invasive holograms in shop windows, you’ve seen them, you know the ones I’m talking about! The ones that when you stand on the circle you suddenly see yourself in that latest dress and new suit, and you are surrounded by beautiful people and look 10 years younger! I wrote the code for most of that. That’s what I do, I write code. Code is the only creative thing
left in this day and age. People use these “industry standard” programs and computer systems to be “creative” But they are limited to what the program can do. These are the same people who spout out lines like “think outside the box!” I can’t tell you how much I hate, “think outside the box!” , I really can’t. The way I figure it is, that “the box” is a metaphor for conventional imagination, and to think outside it is somehow seen as creative and innovative. Bullshit! I don’t like the idea of the whole scope of human imagination, from stone tools to a Hawking, nicely packaged in a nice neat box. The human imagination has no rules, borders or boundaries. It’s infinite, so thus it can’t be contained and it certainly can’t be thought outside of or packaged. If it could, I can guarantee you someone somewhere will endeavour to make a profit from it! And if I had to put money on it, it will be someone from the Genome
generation. Unlike the Internet, MTV and Baby Boom generations that came before them, society KNOWS that the genome generation is going to do better than the previous. I remember growing up with the term “designer baby” all over the news. While this colloquial term is no longer used by many in the scientific community, I still use it on occasion. Many of the middle and upper classes of the past 10 years have all re-designed the hereditary makeup of their children. The result I fear is a new the birth of a new social class, the origins of which are already taking place in our schools. School kids have always had their own social groups; the girls and the boys, the cool kids and the un-cool kids etc. But with all the designer baby’s now designer pre-pubescent’s, many schools now have the genetically superior and the genetically inferior. I’ve heard some people in the media comparing this to the old argument of natural fruit and
vegetables over genetically modified ones. All the genome kids hang out in their own little social groups. Lording their genetically superior makeup over everyone else. This is one trend that we will have to wait out, will they simply grow out of it? Or will they start producing their own genetically superior children? How long before a small group in the corner of a playground becomes a whole social super class and start lording them self’s over the rights of man? But I digest. My fall from paradise My fall from advertising inevitably lead to the person or persons I am today. Some would say that simply fell in the wrong crowd. Me, I like to think of it as finding a group of people that opened my eyes. To tell the truth, I honestly can’t remember how or when I met them, but after the shit I’ve put my brain through over the years I find it hardly
surprising. As an underground group, they didn’t get out much so the fact I met them at all was surprising. I remember attending a few random meetings, all of which came with a proverbial buffet of sex, drink and drugs. Their views on society, government and the pervasiveness of technology mirrored my own. But they had no real malicious intent, not really. They distributed flyers, posters, a weekly e-paper which I wrote a few columns for on occasion but nothing major. Until my birthday anyway. I was jacket up on some fucked up cocktail of drink and drugs and decided to show off my computer skills. One thing lead to another and then it all went a bit hazy. It wasn’t until two days later when I came to from an epic hangover when I found from one of the news networks that someone had hacked into the system that controls a particular
network of satellites, accessed one owed by the Paparazzi and slammed it in to an American Spy satellite. Oops. Lucky, I covered by tracks well. But if the owners of either satellite are reading this....my bad.. Unfortunately I wasn’t so lucky or carful the next time. A year or so after the satellite incident, i began to notice a change. Remember when I said that one of the side effects of Ambivalence was a form of paranoid schizophrenia? Well guess what... I don’t notice it so much now, but at the time it was noticeable not just to me but to everyone around me. When I started my advertising job I was a reasonably up standing member of society. Oh hell so I drank from time to time, and did the odd bit drug every now and again, many people did. It was almost socially acceptable as long as you kept a lid on it, which I
did. While I was a person who liked to point out the many flaws in society and vent my anger about the world in which I lived. I was content to sit on the side lines and do nothing. But that anger and hatred began to ferment in my subconscious. It boiled away in the back of my brain, fuelled by regular doses of Ambivalence. Ironic in a way, many people use drugs as a way to escape their physiological problems, and yet my drug abuse has CAUSED a quite serious physiological problem. It wasn’t long before two personalities began to emerge. One a doer, the other a thinker. The later was the one content on the side lines; the doer.. well the doer crashes satellites into other satellites. While this personality is the pro active person I’ve always secretly wanted to be, he lacks some of the careful attention I tend to take. So when he, or should
I say we, or is that I? Oh to hell if I know! But yeah, so I decided in another drug educed state that I would hack my way into the main network of satellites responsible for broadcasts made to most Europe. While yes, I admit that it was funny that I interrupted most of Europe’s evening entertainment with a video of me singing the old classic “Baby got back” while shaking my naked backside in front of the camera for all the world to see on every channel for the entire duration of the song. I neglected to hide the fact that I gained access to the network via the main server at my advertising office using my username and password. While they couldn’t prove it was me, as I never showed my face, and I covered by tracks well enough so there was no direct evidence one way or another, I was still dismissed from the company, and banned from using any network or networked device
that I could use to repeat such an offence, which is more or less anything! After that I don’t remember much again. I fell into a black hole of depression, drink, drugs and sex for what was apparently two years. When I came to, I found my self with not a penny to my name, and living on the street. An experience that I found both degrading overwhelmingly depressing but one that allowed me a unique perspective on just how much society and their social interactions have changed.
Social Life As I said before, I wondered how long it will be before a small group of genetically superior kids in the corner of a playground become a whole social super class. Lucky however, for now we only have to contend with our normal social classes, if normal is the right word? To be honest I believe we are seeing the first generation of people who have a serious social disability. Terms like “small talk”, “getting to know you” and “pulling” are terms which will probably die out with our parent’s generation. Many moons ago, our young ancestors would sit next to a girl on the underground and have thoughts like; “I wonder what her name is”, “what stop she’s going to”, “if she is single” etc. But within 30 seconds of sitting down in a girls “digital or social shadow” today, I can access all that information and more.
Hell we don’t even have to even think about it, all the information and variables are gathered for us, cross referenced, calculated and manifested as a tell tale vibration in our pockets, on our wrists or our ears. So within 30 seconds of getting on the underground I know that I have only a 24% compatibility rating with the girl sat next to me, but a 89% rating with the girl two sits down on the right. And for the record, I did, and she was wild and in to all kinds of kinky shit. Which you wouldn’t expect from a member of parliament! Who knew!? Most of us go blindly into new relationships not REALLY knowing the person, only what statistical variables we have most in common. Our modern day social lives have long lacked a sense of adventure which was once common place. I often sit on the streets watching the
masses go about their daily lives, seemingly absorbed in their inconsequential domestic pursuits. And I’ve noticed that society and especially the youth of today reflect the towns and cities in which they live. They too have lost their sense of identity and individuality. All victims to the Monoculture in which we now find our self’s. We are all subjected to the same Monoculture music, Monoculture movies, Monoculture art and Monoculture design. We are told what to wear, what to do, what to think and what to say. We hold ideals and beliefs about society that media and governments want us to. This is a dangerous way run have a society. As you can see, I tried various ways of positioning the text on the page. I also tried to add various images and make them appear to be hand drawn doodles / observations made by the writer.
A
Dangerous Time
The term Monoculture finds its origins in agriculture. It was once a farming practice that saw the production or growth of one single crop over a wide area and for many years. But as history has shown, a dependence on monoculture can lead to catastrophic crop failures if the single crop becomes susceptible to pathogens or changes in the weather. The same dangers exist with societal monoculture. As I’ve said monoculture is everywhere from the media and entertainment to absorb to the food we eat and the clothes we wear. But for monoculture to affect so many aspects of our lives there must be one thing common to all. Something which all our lives revolve around or interact with in some way. Think of it like a plague, it all starts with just one person, the carrier. The
carrier infects two, two infect four, and so on and so on. The original carrier for our societal monoculture is our technology. Ironic in a way, computers have long been susceptible to people, now it seems the roles have been reversed. Monoculture has existed in computers since the late 80’s. Of course like any good plague it had a name. Microsoft. Microsoft was to the best of my knowledge, the first truly digital monoculture. Its Windows operating system ran the majority of the computers connected to the internet at the turn of the 21st century. Universally used, Microsoft’s operating systems inevitably become universally attacked by people & viruses alike. And like crops of old, once a virus or pathogen infected the monoculture it would become completely destabilised and inevitably fail. Society, and more over our computers and computer networks that rule our lives
need to change. Monocultures inevitably fail, and are wide open to attack. We need to adopt a more permacultural existence. We need to redefine our society by encouraging a far greater diversity. Diversity that will avoid the susceptibility of today’s monoculture society. We must endeavour to mimic the same structures and interrelationships we find in naturally accruing ecologies because nature is built upon diversity. And nature is living prove that it works. After all it has been around for long before we came into existence and it will be here long after our existence has faded into a dim memory. THE FIRST 30 years of the 21st century saw major environmental pressures shake world leaders into implementing a series of radical solutions to global problems. But as we are now starting to see it was too little too late.
We are already seeing signs of global instability. We had that security guard a few years back who was charged with murdering over 50 people because he saw them as “social vermin” that needed eradicating. Or that Doctor who secretly castrated god knows how many baby’s of lower class teenage mums arguing in her defence that she was; doing society a favour by breeding their kind out of the system.” And despite the controversy i know many people, myself included, who actually thought it was quite an innovative idea. Serious cases of malnutrition is are on a sharp rise as catastrophic droughts take their toll on the Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. In the news just yesterday we saw that in some parts of Africa, life expectancy is at a 39 year low as the number of refugees now number 160m. Northern Europe is struggling to cope with the fast numbers of people travelling north in search of cooler climates. We
are seeing the start of a mass migration of humans the likes of which the earth hasn’t witnessed. And with the world’s population heading for eight billion, with an estimated two billion of the world’s population now living in poverty many western countries are struggling to cope as their infrastructures where just not designed to cope. I estimate that the richest fifth of the world controls somewhere between 82% & 84% of global wealth, but despite the rising standards of living, country’s and their populace are becoming increasingly insecure. So yet more public money is being poured into defences against war, poverty, disease and famine in a futile effort to maintain borders and territorial stability. Things need to change!
The speed of science and technology will always be faster than governments, and getting governments to change can take years, hell even generations to implement. But as I’ve tried to explain to you dear reader, the government is still just built upon a monocultural foundation. A foundation venerable to attack. It is just one monocultural system built atop another, and another and another. Take out the one that holds them all up and the rest will come crashing down. And it is my hope that a phoenix will rise from the monocultural ashes, giving birth to a new age. It is this hope of rebirth which forms the basis of what I must now do. As I said in the beginning, i do not write this for fame, I write it out of fear. Fear of not being remembered. However because of the weight of what I must do, and
the consequences that it will bring, I now fear I will be remembered for the wrong reasons. Because as modern history has shows, it seemingly always takes a disaster to occur before people stand up and address a problem, am I right? So my dear reader, I ask of you only this. That you wait. Wait until your death bed before passing judgment, because while there are to be some dark days ahead, I can guarantee you that there is light at the end of the tunnel. And from that proverbial light you will look back into the darkness, and you will remember this document and the person who wrote it and you will think to your self. “He was right....� Because dear reader.. .
...hindsight is a wonderful thing...