03.05.2020 - Future Shock, alternate realities and Boris Johnson's nonce mentality

Quick update before we start picking at the fibres of our threadbare fabric of reality. If you want to skip to that, scroll down to where it says ‘Future Shock, alternate realities and nonce mentality'

At the moment the main thrust of my life is waiting. I’m still waiting for a start day for my job. They’ve sent me a key worker letter which means if the police stop me, I can show it and they’ll let me go about my business. Not that I’ve had any trouble so far, but theoretically they can fine you for being out doing unnecessary things. I actually emailed this –

“I've been waiting to hear since Monday, just starting to wonder if I actually have a job or if I'm just on the books?

I don't mean to be stressy, I understand how chaotic everything must be, but I was halfway through the recruitment process with another job, so if this one isn't happening, I'll move forward with that.

Again, I hope I'm not coming across as rude, and I'm not trying to give you an ultimatum, I would just like to know so I can plan accordingly.”

I’m getting a little fed up. They said I am on the rota, so I will get shifts, but I need to do some other online thing first, which they will send me a link to in the next few days. I don’t get it, just send the link!

Also got back to my course, I did some teaching over Zoom, which went better than expected. I have a bit more work to do, but I’m getting there. One of my fellow students was in hospital with coronavirus. She got sick six weeks ago and still sounds and feels terrible. She was very ill, but not on a ventilator, so no sicker than Boris Johnson. Which makes me wonder, he was in hospital three weeks ago, now he’s back at work, sprightly as ever. Was he really as ill as they’re saying? I don’t think it’s that paranoid to question, when lie after lie has been exposed.

I’ve been for a few small walks. The main difference (our lock down is a joke, by the way, there are people everywhere, and there’s this weird macho ignoring social distancing, it’s quite stressful), is the amount of graffiti. It’s beginning to cover everything. I live in a bit of a rough area, so there’s always been a fair bit, but I think now no one is out at night it’s spreading over the city like carbuncles and warts. Iain Sinclair hit the nail on the head when he wrote about how the worst things about these anonymous autographs is how they imitate the “corporate marginalia of high capitalist black magic.” It’s like people see them selves as brands and that’s somehow cool, or like my little dog's meaningless, impotent territory piss. Interesting mindset, we'll come back to it. I think there is a case for saying it’s folk art, and some of it is very witty and interesting, but I can't see the artistic merit in writing the word DONK, or SCRABZ over and over again. Even on people’s front doors. Fucking dickheads.

The last fifteen years or so of gentrification around the East End has been reversed in about five weeks. Maybe the laws of thermodynamics and entropy can be reversed after all even time itself, in markets at least. That's another thought we'll come back to. 

Is Boris a nonce? I think he is, spiritually at least. I'll show you what I mean. 

Most of the graffiti is utter shit. People have even tagged the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which I thought was really sad. I took a few photos of things I felt were slightly above the level of visual tinnitus.

I want to let you know, because I'm proud of this, I just deleted a whole waffling paragraph of pretentious nonsense here. 

I saw a good sticker but didn’t manage to get a photo, of a pound sign with “no scrap value” written under it.

I started on a new dose of methylphenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) today. I’ve gone up to 36mg, which feels like a much better for me. It actually feels less like speed, my mind is calmer, I can keep up with my thoughts, I tidied my desk without having a breakdown (it’s the tidiest it’s ever been, honestly my usual is piles of papers, rubbish, boxes everywhere). Things feel much easier to do. I still enjoy staring out the window, but I don’t have to do it, I can bring myself back to reality with much less fuss.

I’m still on the pizza place whatsapp group. I haven’t actually quit, I don’t know if they’re paying me statutory sick pay or not. The kid I liked, who got done for possession of a firearm, went from being one of the favourites, to getting fired. Apparently he questioned his pay check one too many times. They kept underpaying him, and I’m not sure if he lost his temper in the end, but either way, he’s out. The Greek’s still there, although apparently he managed to get a seat on a flight back to Greece soon. Someone gave him a £30 tip the other day.

Incredibly, about two weeks after I started, they tried to make me a manager. I am the last person who should run a pizza place. I would be so incompetent; why did they think I was delivering pizzas in the first place? It’s like that Groucho Marx quote, where he says he wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have him. You think this 32-year-old dude you hired to deliver pizzas should run the place? My guy, I don’t know if you’re on any medication, or if you’ve been drinking, but your cognition and decision making abilities seem impaired. Have you got a carbon monoxide monitor installed in this place?

I’m not doing myself down here, I know I’m not stupid, but I would be so bad I actually have medical certification to prove it.

At the time though, a bit of a sore spot, if you don’t really understand it, ADHD can be quite embarrassing and shameful, so I didn’t want to say ‘bro, there’s no way I am capable of that lol’ so I just didn’t reply and the offer melted away. Also I was basically too depressed to speak.

Oh yeah, one last pandemic observation. While there are now very few big passenger planes over London, there’s quite a lot of these little single engine, two seater type planes flying over, which is very unusual. I’ve seen four out the window since I’ve been writing this.

Also this bizarre sycophancy of Boris Johnson and his new baby is going on and on in pretty much every newspaper, while the thousands dying, seems to sort of be ignored a bit. But I really can’t be fucked to talk about that. It’s too depressing and to be honest, I’m bored of it.

Ok great, so that’s the ‘log’ part of this blog up to date. Apparently the B is from web? Like Web-log. Who knew? I prefer E-log. I gotta drop an E-log. There’s a good story about where the word log comes from, it literally means a log like a tree trunk, because they used to throw one in the sea, and count how the distance it followed by the amount knots (denoting length) on the rope it was tied to, which told them the speed of the ship, which all went in their log book. Nice innit.

Makes me wonder about the term log-line in scripts. You can work that one out though, we haven’t got all day here, buddy. Move along.

Here we go then, another Theory of the Way Things Are™.

 

Future Shock, alternate realities and Boris Johnson's nonce mentality

You can be in my dream if I can be in yours

Bob Dylan

Future Shock, as defined by Alvin Toffler in his 70s book of the same name, describes a disoriented state caused by too much future. He describes it as ‘too much change in too short a time.” His theory is that history, and progress speed up. Think about it, how long did it take to invent the wheel? Then how long till the steam engine was invented? Then the length of time between external combustion steam engines and internal combustion petrol and diesel engines, then hydrogen propulsion, mag trains, rocket ships, solar energy. The time between all those innovations shrinks because each one is based on all the innovations of the past. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time.

He wrote this 50 years ago, since then things have only sped up. As soon as you get a new piece of technology it’s obsolete. Everything is disposable. New industries emerge and collapse over night (the rise and fall of the tech start ups, Deliveroo, Uber, We Work, which are being exposed as the Ponzi schemes they are is a good one to look into, maybe another day).

All this change, but we’re the same people who burned witches, kept slaves, treated illness by blood letting and cleaned wounds with urine. We were metal, and we haven’t moved on. If you’ve ever felt like you’re living in a science fiction novel, like things are a bit too real, which I have pretty much all my life, then chances are you’re suffering from future shock. It's temporal culture shock. 

But the idea that we actually are living in a science fiction novel isn’t actually that far fetched. Bare with me for a second…

If you’ve heard of quantum mechanics, you’ll know it describes the nature of reality for at least everything in the universe below the size of atoms (so far, no unifying theory of the universe that accounts for Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which both seem to be true but contradict each other, and no one is quite sure if quantum mechanics works on a macro, planetary level yet, because it it very hard to measure) and shows nothing is the way it is until it is observed.

It’s weird for a few reasons. One of them is called quantum entanglement. That means once two particles become entangled, whatever you do to one effects the other, no matter how far apart they are. If you join two particles together, their electrons will spin around them in two directions, one up, one down. Once you take them apart, they both have equal probability of which direction their particles are spinning (in other words they are spinning in two directions at the same time) and can ‘decide’ which way they end up when they’re observed. Which ever way one ends up spinning, the other particles electron goes opposite direction. What ever you do to one effects the other. Which brings into question our whole conception of distance and space, and implies other dimensions beyond our perception.

Where shit gets weird, is to do with particles and waves and how everything is both until it isn't. A wave is energy and a particle is mass, a physical object. An experiment called the double slit experiment proves that light works is both, but only when you’re not looking. The experiment showed light, and elections, pass through two slits in a barrier and hit the surface behind in a pattern you’d expect a wave to make, ie, sent in to multiple directions by bouncing off each other and the slits, even single elections do this, they act like waves, or as if they’re passing through both slits at the same time, maybe that they somehow split and rejoin and hit in the space between the two slits. But when you put a sensor by the slits to find out which it is going through, they act like particles and go through one point in a straight line and don’t make the wave pattern on the surface behind. 

The act of observing the electrons seems to change their state. Which is odd, but the implications are even stranger. If we observe a photon of light from our nearest star Alpha Proxima, which is four light years away, we will change its properties depending on how we look at it, which means we are changing how it was four years ago. So the present alters the past. Which suggests time has no inherent meaning, at least not in the linear way we experience it. It implies there is some kind of metatemporal dimension, in which every moment exists eternally, and we are the thing moving through it. That time is actually nothing like how we experience it. 

Time, if it exists, is very odd. It is effected by gravity in a process called gravitational time dilation. Basically the greater the force of gravity in a location, the faster time goes by (this has actually objectively been proven, time goes a little bit slower on planes because the force of gravity is weaker at altitude). And as objects increase in velocity towards the speed of light their mass does too. The gravity of the increasing mass of the object pulls space and time toward it. As speeds up to light-speed its mass becomes infinite and time stops. According to Einstein if anything went faster than the speed of light, for it, it would have mass greater than infinity and time would go backwards, and things would happen before they did. If objective time exists it does so outside of our universe. 

The one thing that might go faster than the speed of light is neutrinos, 0.002% faster. The problem is that would mean the neutrinos given off from Supernova 1987A, a dying star 168,000 light years away, which arrived at Earth nearly five hours before the visible light were emitted before the event that created them. So the fundamental law of the universe, cause and effect, is up for review. There is debate around this, and I don't really understand any of it anyway...

But how do we know which way time is going anyway? Check this out, the second law of thermodynamics says “the entropy of an isolated system can increase but not decrease.” That’s why a cup of tea goes cold. That’s why we get old. In fact, the only thing that distinguishes the past from the future is entropy. If we could reverse it, we could reverse time, at least what we think of as time. If we found a way to invert the thermodynamic process, by tracking the trajectories and velocities of every component part of say, a rotting banana, and put them back where they were, time would go backwards, not only for that banana, but according to quantum physics you would also reverse time for every quantum entangled particle too.

This is the force of chaos I talked about the other day in the Michael Moorcock novels, why sour dough always spews out of itself into a formless writhing mess of seething nothingness, which threatens to consume reality itself. 

In fact, and I’m purposely not using past tense here, we've established it's meaningless. Maybe the big bang is a black hole in reverse, a white hole, which must exist, all the matter and energy sucked into black holes has to go somewhere. Maybe we're the back end of the death of another universe. 

Remember this next time you're late for work. 

One theory explaining quantum mechanics is that every possibility exists, and our conscience is experiencing one branch of potential space time. That your awareness is one possible out come of the probability of reality observing itself. That perhaps consciousness creates reality out of nothing but probability. Which begs the question, am I a figment of your imagination or are you a figment of mine?

So who can say, maybe when those fucks stared messing about with anti matter at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, they opened something up and we got sucked into a William Gibson novel.

Seriously, what’s more plausible. We’ve been sucked into a fictional reality where -

the American equivalent of Alan Sugar, but even more of a moron became president, I'm sure Philip K Dick wrote that. In his book Radio Free Albemuth, Ferris F. Freemont, a paranoid conspiracy theory obsessed right wing populist is president, I mean just give him syphilis and a tv show and that’s Trump.

Then we’ve recently had a right wing militia group storm a government building in Michigan, while state troops guard PPE against the federal government. Who came up with that? Cormac McCarthy, maybe in a discarded draft of the Road.

Every week we clap for our noble (underpaid, dying from lack of equipment) workers for two minutes. Who came up with that George Orwell or Margret Atwood?

We’re not allowed to leave the house so we communicate via vid-screens. What’s that a J G Ballard parody? Our digital world is more vivid and real than the world outside our windows, who’s fault is that? I blame William Gibson.  

The government has created artificial intelligences to promote support for its policies, and it’s difficult to tell what is human. Sounds like a Philip K Dick story.

Or that a nefarious government is covering up the scale of a deadly pandemic in order to not spook the markets, preferring to allow people to die than take a hit to GDP. I'm sure that's the plot of some Grant Morrison comic, or a tween dystopia film. 

Or all of those things actually happened?

A few years ago, actually around the time they first created anti matter in Large Hardon Collider I wrote and produced a fictional radio show set in 2020, that tried to carry on as normal while society crumbled. In it, I predicted Theresa May becoming prime minister, because at the time she seemed like the worst possible option, but still credible. I didn’t go as far as imagining Boris Johnson - that was too far fetched. I got weirdos off the internet to do the voice overs, they didn’t understand what they were reading or I was making, so it gave the whole thing a disorientated, otherworldly feel, a bit like the reality we find ourselves in right now. It opened like this

“Just had a message from Dave in Guildford, who says his brother’s just been killed by vigilantes. Cheer up Dave, we’ve got some great tunes coming up after this.”

Then we had the pollution report “If you want to go outside at all today and don’t want your lungs to dissolve, don’t forget to use a breathing sock. Just soak a sock in urine and hold it over your mouth and nose when you breath.”

I also sort of talked about the insane relentless, nearly fascist government communications, “we’ve just had a report come in that a video appearing to who Ant beheading Dec in an Al Shebab training camp is genuine. The prime minister Theresa May described Ant as a “despicable race traitor whose existence can not and will not be tolerated.” A minutes silence will be held tomorrow at 11am and every day after.”

And the other day I saw a new innovation, a funeral ambulance. Ever heard of one of them? I got close with this, “If you need to dispose of the body of a loved one, just leave them out for the weekly bio-refuse collection.”

The creation of an imaginary radio show implies the creation of an imaginary listener. So is it so far fetched to wonder if I am experience a potential time line, created by my own imagination, and that maybe there is a small probability of a version of me, a more competent writer who is writing the reality we find ourselves in. If that is the case, sorry.  But just because you're conscious and aware doesn't mean someone isn't imagining you.

Or it's more plausible our collective psychosis, paranoia and fear have manifested themselves in reality. Or maybe we've somehow shifted in to a realm of collective fiction, or in fact, our universe is fundamentally indistinguishable from fiction, which I think is perhaps closest to the truth. 

Does it make a difference to how we live our lives? Does it mean we have free will? Maybe these are topics for another day. (the answer to both questions IMO is no, but it doesn't let us off the hook). 

There is a conspiracy theory that covers this stuff called the Mandela effect. In short, people misremember nugget of pop culture (like whether or not C-3PO has one silver leg or not) and put it down to the possibility they have slipped into a parallel universe. It’s quite a solipsistic theory, so no surprises it attracts a lot of narcissists. People who attempt to explain the fact their daughter won’t talk to them any more by them having slipped into an alternative reality rather than accept they might just be an arsehole. Understandable really.

Sculpture by the Chapman Brothers

The Large Hadron Collider and something called the Gotthard Pass are implicated in this, because science and stuff. People think the true purpose of the LHC is to open up a gate with hell, or other dimensions. I went deep down a rabbit hole about this last night. Look up the opening ceremony for the Gotthard Pass, and stick with it, skip through if you need to, but watch it. It’s basically an 8 million euro satanic mass, or an excellent piece of trolling. It’s got people getting naked, swirling around in ecstatic trances like the bloody witch’s black Sabbath ritual scene in the horror film Susperia (both the 70s Italian version and the recent remake are excellent), before long a man in a goat costume, like an invocation of Baphomet, appears on stage and screams curses in tongues. It’s like the Chapman Brothers teamed up with H P Lovecraft to do the Olympics opening ceremony. It’s fucking great. 

But there’s a thought I wanted to tie all this together with, about conspiracy theories, what they tell us about how we think and feel and how that thinking creates the conditions we’re in now. How a particular thought process and view of the world lead us into this crises and limits our ability to deal with it. 

I like to keep on top of conspiracy theories, but recently, they’ve got really dark. There’s a video, I’m sure is a hoax, of scientists practicing human sacrifice in front of a statue of Shiva at CERN. That’s quite a fun one, I get why people would make that.

In the 90s, it was all about aliens, the idea was the government was preventing us from making contact with black ops and psy war techniques. Which is dark, but fundamentally optimistic, the idea is there’s something good out there. It just often manifested in bad ways, like the Heavens Gate cult, which committed mass suicide in the hope of meeting aliens. or they were just kind of fun, like Paul McCartney was replaced by an actor. Also check out Zacharia Sitchin, he's great, he claims we're all descended from the Anunaki from planet Nibiru who mated with the slaves the created to mine gold on Earth. 

Then it got darker with stuff about the Sandy Hook school shooting being faked, the prison industrial complex is modern slavery (actually true), Pokemon Go is a government spying device (plausible), 9/11 truth, the Clinton body count (the Clintons have allegedly had over 50 people killed), FEMA concentration camps in America,  

But now, the conspiracy theories are all worryingly cynical, one is called Frazledrip, which apparently, is a snuff video featuring Hilary Clinton and an advisor. Apparently they mutilate and kill a little girl and wear her face. Then there’s the QAnon theories, about the deep state trying to hold back Trump, all the pizzagate stuff, VIP paedophile rings. And anti-vaxxers who think the government want to inject everyone with some kind of control device, or that coronavirus is some kind of eco fascist bio weapon that wants to wipe people out to save the planet, or end the use of cash, or it's a bio weapon China created to upset American financial hegemony, a lot of these ideas are very right wing. 

But to an extent you can understand where they come from. We live in a very cynical world, and a lot of these conspiracy theories turn out to be true (Turkey giving ISIS clandestine support, and the US abandonment of the Kurds, leading to hundreds of ISIS fighters escaping jail was intentional, and Pakistan was publicly at war with the Taliban, but were actually strategically useful covert allies). It’s a world in which people like Prince Andrew and Donald Trump hold power, who see human life as commodity, something to serve them. A world where the biggest democracies in the world are effectively one party states because the opposition and government are essentially the same, or that the US establishment would prefer a fascist or a senile rapist, who hovers between life and death in power than a socialist, either that or Joe Biden's nomination is driven by some form of national collective platonic necrophelia. 

Prince Andrew was a ‘British trade ambassador” (arms dealer), and is a paedophile. To me, those things go hand in hand, you’re willing to sell things that destroy human life for personal gain, and rape very young, vulnerable women. It shows what you think of the human race. Trump is the same, he’s a rapist, you hear how he talks about women, he locks up children in cages because they’re from another country. The way these people see humanity is fundamentally as cynical as our most prevalent conspiracy theories. They also run the economy, they think it’s fine to fuck people over for personal gain because they think that's how the world works, (it’s worth looking into the business practices of companies like We Work and Deliveroo to see what I mean). That kind of thinking is what created the conditions which made this pandemic much worse than it needed to be.

That same thinking motivates conspiracy theorists, and preppers, American morons with huge guns. People are fundamentally bad, so they arm themselves, in preparation for a time like now. They thought we’d all be looting, and grabbing for ourselves, so they’d need to protect their lot with guns. That is pure projection. They were basing human nature on themselves. They must be disappointed to find out people aren't like that at all. 

We want to help each other if we can. We want to co-operate. We are fundamentally kind. On the whole anyway. It turns out that that greed is human nature defence of capitalism is pure bullshit, which ever universe we’re in, capitalism isn’t just the natural order of things, it is the dominant force in the world, but only because it has been forced on us. We don't want to be like that at all. 

Which brings me back to all those shit tags everywhere, It’s the same rapist mind set as Prince Andrew. The people who do them see the world as theirs to consume, use up and fuck and piss over. It's same attitude that allows you to ruin all of a girl’s future relationships and condemn her to a life time of mental and spiritual illness, shame, depression and despair, without a second thought because you want to fuck her and it makes no difference whether she wants to or not, as it does to write a tag on someone’s front door. You want to do it, who cares who lives there. It's like spitting in the street, putting your feet on the seats on the train, the world is yours to do what ever the fuck you want with. Nothing matters, nobody cares. That is the defining attitude of modern capitalism. 

It is why people stock pile weapons for their own imagined apocalypses and what fuels the systems that create the hunger of the people they expect to use them on, why people sell weapons for profit, why pay day loans exist, why Ladbrooks exists, why ad agencies still sell fags to people in poor countries, that makes rapists feel like they have a right to abuse victims, what makes Boris Johnson carry on subsidising fossil fuels, what makes him lie constantly, what makes bosses exploit workers because if they don’t they’re scared they might end up one and they would exploit themselves because they are exploiting others in that position, so they need to exploit them further, get more out of them for less, so their competitors don't go further and put them out of business and relegate them to the level of the exploited, why people hate the poor, why people scrawl inane aliases on a strangers front doors, that makes Donald Trump grab pussies and boast about it, it’s why hedge fund managers can sleep at night. It’s a fundamental belief that people are bad and we should be scared of them. That you need to get them before they get you. That if you didn't do it someone else would. That it's just business. Nice guys finish last. The people who believe it are the ones most comfortable fucking everyone else over and grabbing power. It’s also why people like Rupert Murdoch and Domminic Cummings would be happy to see an few pensioners die’ in order to preserve asset prices.

I sincerely hope that type of thinking is now being exposed for the fraud it is.

That’s what BP is, and Goldman Sachs, and anyone who thinks that’s a good way to run things must have The same nihilistic paedophile mind set as Prince Andrew. So actually, maybe that poster up there is more accurate than it realised, maybe Boris Johnson, while not literally a nonce, has the mind of one.