A Joyous Summer in Neoliberal Britain

here we have to wait years to assess the "impact" of no-brand cigarette packets in Australia, but can't wait at all to see whether fracking for shale gas in the United States pollutes the water table.

Just to stress: that's CIGARETTES, about which everyone has personal choice anyway, and THE WATER TABLE, which, if screwed, will be screw a sizeable part of the population with it, whether or not they chose to go the way of fracking. Ideas about where the water will come from if the water table is polluted? Here, the wizened captains of industry are silent.[1]

Of course, they'll be dead, the short-term profits from fracking having been salted away offshore in their family accounts, and why would they care anyway about the children of the lumpen consumerati, the milch cows of trickle-up capitalism, of whom they know little and care less?

 For guidance in this weird logic, follow the money.[2]

The inventor of fracking, George Mitchell died at 94 in July 2013. According to his granddaughter, and others interviewed for BBC Radio 4's 'Last Word'  he was very concerned about the roll-out of possibly imperfect extraction technologies. [3]

In the UK, we've had a decade or two of whinging about wind turbines, often from folk who happen to be used to having a nice view, whose electricity and gas nevertheless originates in places where other people live with the filthy air and the shitty view resulting from energy production. That whinging has affected the complexion of debate; limited what's deemed possible. Perhaps communities who prefer their nice view (so to speak) should propose means of meeting their energy needs which don't impact on other communities... or initiate a wider move towards a post-industrial living, whatever that may mean.

Personally, I love the "natural" environment, to the extent that I find needless despoilment quite painful, but I also think that we're now in a balance-of-evils situation. If it's a choice between having wind farms in my favourite places and possibly damaging a basic resource (clean water), I'll go for the wind farms; thousands of them, please.

Fracking obviously seems easy to politicians habituated to short-termism, and an easy way to create  a bit of capital churn. This explains why other arguments for it - officially at least - are so weakly made.

[1] http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used 

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-fracking-industry-bosses-at-heart-of-coalition-8707589.html


[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lastword (Friday, 9 August 2013)
 

As Good as Gods: Progress Dreamed as Shitstorm

o (to borrow the scientists' favourite opener) we'd barely got past avoiding being eaten and building shelters before we got into all the shamanistic, mystical and religious shit. Then, before we were really done with that (although probably because we were done with it) we started with the rational scientific shit. We let that become really quite complicated and detailed, so that quite soon, as with God and all the rest, we were no longer running it but it was running us. And we seemed to like it that way. But simultaneously, after barely a moment engaging with the wonders of nature (within us and without us), we were beguiled by all kinds of industrial and if-you-like-it-you-can-own-it shit, and rolled over by the socio-economic bamboozlement that came with it.

Notice that we were never fully done with any particular kind of shit before our gaze wandered on to the next kind, and so it's not surprising that after barely a few centuries we reinvent it all – even though it's all still there in its original form – so that we can enjoy all the same shit all over again in digital form, along with all the new shit that's happening. Forget that shit, look at this shit. No, don't forget it, but access it this way now. Please complete your profile, enter a mobile phone number, state your date of birth, log on to online banking. Please contribute to the knowledge base whilst clicking on the brightly coloured ads in the sidebar. And shit.

Meanwhile, back in the dreaming mind of the concerned citizen: stop worrying about clean drinking water and social inequality and ripping the guts out of the planet for short-term gratification. Please, everyone, cooperate as a species so that one day we can terraform Mars and everyone can go into space and live to be a thousand years old, enjoying all the shit we did and can do whether or not we've settled the existence of any god or the rightness of bioengineering creatures that are all meat and no motion so that we can keep eating some shit that we got used to and can't give up because we're still big babies even though some of us think we are as good as gods.

Careless about Culture

istorian David Starkey has told BBC's Newsnight ''the whites have become black'' in a discussion on the England riots with author and broadcaster Dreda Say Mitchell and the author of Chavs, Owen Jones. He also hit out at what he called the ''destructive, nihilistic gangster culture'' which he said ''has become the fashion.'' [1] Here's my two-penneth:

Corporatised culture of all kinds (whether 'Hollywood' or 'Street') restricts participation to the sanctioned route of possessing (buying) its marketised iconic objects. Rappers, movie stars, footballers (for eg) may perform messages of inclusion, but they also constantly show how they differ from their followers, especially economically. The 'culture' they promulgate is exclusionary, especially to the poor, because it is economistic.

If 'culture' is the concern, let's question the habit which equates the possession of proxy objects (either by purchase or theft) with a kind of cultural inclusion. Starkey does not differentiate between affnities, attitudes and objects, and thus reinforces a reactionary idea of a person's agency inside and outside "their" culture.

All cultures of identification can become false consciousness, can't they, especially when monetised?

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517