White Album

White Rabbit In The Snow Filed At Midnight : Grafik Farm 2013

Staring at the future is a bit like looking for a white rabbit in a blizzard. Staring into the future is somewhere we all stand in a blizzard, usually at the bottom of a mountain beneath a burgeoning avalanche and no one can really see a thing above or below!

But our world is changing fast and I find it fascinating to take the figures, stats or data and try to second guess where we are headed. No, I don't like to use the word 'futurologist', that, to me, sounds a bit too much like clairvoyant, I would prefer to call myself a second guesser or researcher/writer - rewriter or, perhaps, a re-evolutionary - I quite like that actually - yes, re-evolutionary.

I also believe that it would be useful for us all to realise that we, as human beings, play some small part in our political, social and economic arenas, how they are structured and operated.

I had a chat with a few people this week about pensions and how and why they felt they were being ripped off. Three of these guys told me they had been made redundant, one of them after 37 years. These three would receive no unemployment benefit of any kind, despite paying into the pot for a combined 82 years!

Because they had a small pension all three had to make do with that. I asked if any of them had gone along to any of the marches against austerity, listened to any of the speakers, contacted their elected representatives, tried to change the system in any way.

They all shook their head.

Those marches were well attended, maybe in the thousands, five, six and in London it may have moved into double figures. But I can't help but thinking they all paled into insignificance when compared to the millions who took to the streets all over Brazil and actually joined together to force their elected leadership's hand.

Personally, I often write to my MP or member of the government, if I am lucky, once in while a nice Editor will have me write something that will be really meaningful and will resonate with the wider society, as for example, the Twitter article I wrote for the Mail On Sunday ( retold in the blog Zero History of the World).

When I speak to people, it seems as if the political arena and, especially capitalism, is, somehow, a great MACHINE that is operated by some kind of 'God-like' supernatural and untouchable being, who flies the contraption way above their heads. In short they feel totally powerless in the face of it all, and of those people I spoke with this week - all of them to a person - told me that 'it doesn't matter who you vote for'.

Hardly scientific I know but it makes you think when maybe eight or nine people tell you this.

I don't quite agree with that, of course, there are differences, even within parties (witness the run-of-the-mill Republican and their Tea Party counterparts) but often these structures seem so distant and removed for the ordinary day to day of most of us it can appear that way.

In an era when the UK political parties ( save UKIP - United Kingdom Independence Party) are experiencing plummeting membership, UK trade union membership is less than half what it was in 1979 and UK church attendance is declining, people are feeling increasingly isolated and impotent.

There are reasons, of course, why we are not joing political parties anymore, or going to church in such great numbers and deserting trade unions. There are reasons why people have become, atomised, and do feel increasingly powerless, and yet we all have it in our hands, in a small way, to try and make that difference.

One of the experiences from Brazil is illuminating. Many Brazillians, especially among their middle-class, considered protestors were often 'fanatical reds', 'violent individuals' and 'trouble-makers'. Inspired by social media,Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, however, where many could see that the protestors were people like themselves they took to the streets in their millions and changed their country.

I am not saying for a moment that we should all get out on the streets at every opportunity, but simply suggesting that people might actually be more powerful than they actually think, especially when they come together! Worth thinking about?
　
Question of the week : Andrew Marr (BBC Television Ocotober 12, 2013) 'Are the energy companies ripping us off?' - What do you think?
　

VIRTUAL

Please see author's note at end....


Virtual : Makeshift Studios 2013

You wake,stretch and open your eyes and then...imagine this...

At breakfast you quickly complete some banking chores using an app on your 4th generation smart phone. You pay the rent on the apartment, a few bills, check your dwindling savings. You change, interchange your apps, buy an Oyster card, check the times of underground trains. After that you have a look at your work schedule on your calendar, change to your laptop and finish that report you were writing, and leave for work.

Your Oyster card - an electronic card that allows you to travel multi-journeys on the London public transport network - is now recorded on your smartphone so there is no need to visit or speak with anyone at your local station.

You travel into the city, and as you journey you distribute your report by email to those who will attend the meeting you have scheduled.

Arriving in the city centre, you find you have some time on your hands. You visit a local Caffe Nero, order an Americano at the speech recognition point and pay for it with your smartphone using near field communications technology. This allows Caffe Nero to access your bank account and remove the cost of the coffee.

The music is always cool in Caffe Nero, but, of course, there is no longer anyone to ask who is singing or how you can download, so instead you order a new ebook for your Kindle and use your paypal account to purchase a birthday present for a loved one.

Paypal was founded in March 2000 and acquired by Ebay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, it allows payments and money transfers to be made across cyberspace and already has over 200 million accounts.

You arrive at the meeting. Your report has already been downloaded and read by your colleagues from around the world. They also attend the meeting using the very latest in 3D transporter technology. They appear courtesy of flat screen plasmas hung on the wall around the room.

"I r-r-r-read your re...port on the way over, it's g-g-g-good." A colleague from Hong Kong appearing courtesy 3D TT (transporter technology) reassures, the time delay giving him an apparent stutter.

       "Yes" says the girl from New York, whose picture immediately breaks up, before being re-assembled to catch her accidently spilling coffee on her blouse - "Oh sh..." she says, then all you can see is the top of her head as she fusses over the spilt drink.

"It was excellent" chimes your London counterpart, the only other physical presence in the huge 40 seater board room.

The meeting goes well and your report attracts new investors. To celebrate, you book a table for two at your favourite London restaurant - Little Venice over in Kilburn? - on, yes you guessed correct, an app. But, you don't have a girlfriend/boyfriend at the moment so you use an app to arrange a 'cyber...fr...iend'...no wait...this is getting just a little too weird.... move on...

Later, standing on the platform of the underground station you watch the sensor-driven, driverless train, enter the station, slow down and stop at the platform. 'No driver?' you mutter out loud, bathed in the nostalgia of a time when people manned the underground.

You climb aboard, squeeze past other passengers and easily find a seat. You realise the carriages are not as packed as they once were. Fewer and fewer people come into town, no need to visit the office or physically shop when it can all be done from home, and you have the added bonus of never missing an episode of Jeremy Kyle!

As you travel beneath London's streets, you recall a different time, consider how fast the world has changed and feel, really quite lonely.

Where, you think, are all the REAL people!



*Author's note : You will notice that 'Virtual' is - unusually - written in the second person. Most things are written in the first person 'I', which is the more usual for a blog, or the third person 'he/she'. It struck me early on that I wanted this to sound quite clinical and impersonal - and you will understand why now that you have read it. We are living through a very human experiment and while we can make educated guesstimates about where we are headed, life always seems to throw up that curved ball that takes us all by surprise. Virtual, for me, is a kind of experiment to chime with the times we live in. Remember our 'interconnectedness' please feel free to interact and comment, I kind of feel that rather than this just being MY blog, it kind of belongs to all who read it.
** The Jeremy Kyle reference was, of course, a joke, I hope you all realised that!



No Sleep Till FUTURE






No Sleep Till Future : Makeshift Studios 2013

Five minutes into the future. Packed like angry bears in a barrel of wasps, we are on a subway train from King's Cross St Pancras to Vauxhall, London. Between a forest of bodies, I see a woman on a seat at the other side of the carriage locked into her own technological bubble.

The scene is pure cyberpunk. In a crowded carriage hurtling along beneath the streets of London she has her netbook open on her lap, her earphones clamped to the side of her head, watching and listening to the webinar of a work colleague from New York. In the palm of her hand she has her 4th generation smartphone face up, periodically receiving and replying to texts. The subway carriage her popped-up temporary office space.

Before we met her she had enjoyed a coffee at Starbucks on St Pancras International concourse, paying for her latte, and by default, her momentary office cubicle, with her smartphone via near field communications technology.

I call her Worker 'A' - sounds like a vaguely sinister and dark portrayal of a character from a Franz Kafka story, or an obscure track from a Daft Punk album (for the record Daft Punk are Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo and Thomas Bangalter).

As she interacts, immediately and efficiently, with the world, I am deep in thought about how we are evolving and how this evolution, economically, socially and politically is driven by technological progress.

What I want to understand is how these evolutionary forces gathering speed will develop into 'the future' rushing toward us.

Travelling at high speed through the long dark tunnels toward our destinations is, I think, a pretty neat metaphor for looking ahead.

"Authority is questioned routinely" Bruce Tulgan, founder and chairman of Rainmaker Thinking inc, explains. "Research is quick and easy. Anyone can get published. We try to filter through the endless tidal wave of information coming at us from an infinite number of sources all day, everyday. Nothing remains cutting edge for very long. Meanwhile the pace of everything continues to accelerate. A year is long term, and five years is just a hallucination."

I love the irony in Tulgan's retro poke at the 1960's drug culture while charting the mind-blowing speed of our contemporaneous evolution.

Technology, in fact, has created, and is creating, a new working universe which is obliterating boundaries between work and leisure, changing where, when, how we work and the very nature of the jobs we will do or not do in the future.

Our world is altering, changing and morphing into something we cannot 100% predict, but already, as we know, the old certainties, traditional jobs and industries are being jettisoned. A new employment cosmos is beginning to take shape where pension rights, hours of work, and other benefits like holiday and sick pay are no longer a given.

The internet and the way we interconnect, consume and spend has underpinned decline in some quarters as demand has shifted. The music industry is a good example - who would have thought that HMV would have been brought to its knees by the humble laptop. People no longer browse the aisles of records stores checking out the latest vinyl albums and singles, but sit at home and download music for pennies as if their frontal lobotomies depended on it.

High street shops have similarly been deserted by consumers as they check out dress sizes in the cyber corridors of digital superstores.

"A few writers, such as Robert Reich and Jeremy Rifkin, have addressed the change, but the media and Wall Street and government agencies still look for 'recovery'", Dr Jan Hively tells me perplexed by the inability of the ruling set to keep up. "It's like the story of 'The Emperor without Clothes,' those who have been laid off by dying industries or lost business because of dwindling consumer capacity know that the canary has stopped singing*, but systems shaped by a jobs-based economy, such as education, have not yet acknowledged the change.  As a result, adjunct professors live in poverty while the union protects high paid university profs from having to teach evenings or weekends, when adult students are available for classes.  How can we encourage broad recognition about the need for managing the societal transition away from jobs?"


*Reference to 'the canary has stopped singing' relates to the one time practice of miners taking these birds into the mine with them.  If dangerous gases like methane or carbon monoxide were present, the canary would die - hence stop singing - and this would warn the miners they were in danger.