Winston Smith would be spinning in his grave were he not fictional.

I remember way back in the late 80s/early 90s or whenever it was I read it, my young outrage at the awful world Winston Smith had to endure in 1984. Oh, I read Brave New World as well, but to be fair, Huxley's view of a world where babies all get brought up in factories, and sex is a mandatory recreational activity rather appealed to a teenage lad, still does a bit. As an impossibly earnest and principled 12/13 year old however, the very idea of having one's every move watched and scrutinised by a totalitarian regime horrified me. How ironic that since then, Big Brother has become somebody that we all want to be watched by, and we broadcast every single thing we do to the entire world with no mind for the consequences.

Well, not all of us. Most of us do though, admit it.

In the near quarter century since I read that book for the first time, the world I inhabit has slowly drifted closer and closer towards Winston's.

I remember being particularly shocked by the hidden cameras and microphones that he encountered on his little trip out to the countryside, the idea of this all pervading spy network went against every idea of personal freedom I had ever believed in. And then within 3 or 4 years of my first reading of 1984, they put cameras up in all the little places we used to go and hide out in to do the things you don't want to get caught doing when you're a teenager (or an adult in fact). After a while, we got used to that and moved on. There are always more places to hide if you want them, and your home is always a sanctuary (hopefully, but who knows what's coming down the track).

Then the world wide web appeared, and hope rose in us all. A place where the underground could meet, and speak frankly without fear. We could hide behind screen names and be whoever we wanted. Those of us who were particularly paranoid could hide behind as many fake IP addresses as we could generate. A lawless outland where freedom of speech could finally be achieved properly. And then the normal people came. And we sat on the usenet forums and laughed at them, they couldn't even flush their own DNS caches. They had no idea what LOL meant, they used Internet Explorer (they still do).

The normal people began to take offence at this happy outland, and demanded legislation, and we've all seen where this has finally led, ridiculous lawsuits over jokes on twitter, and a society too paranoid to even type the word “child” into google in case the thought police come and break down your door. Then they demanded easier ways to connect with the people they already knew, and along came facebook. Then they demanded easier ways to connect with people they didn't know, but had read about in the papers, and Twitter was born. The internet had now become a copy of hello magazine, crossed with the queue at tescos. Gossipy and annoying. Luckily the web is big enough for all of us, and if you don't want to join in you can tell facebook et al to go fuck itself and stay on 4chan, b3ta or the old usenet forums are still there I believe.

Thing is though, facebook and twitter are fun, you can talk to people you do know, you can have a good old rant and know that people are reading. You can show them your lunch, and at least one of them will “like” it. Occasionally somebody you have read about in the papers will grudgiingly reply to your tweet, or even retweet you. I have no idea why, but now we have to “share and enjoy” every last little thing. The party have won. Welcome to INGSOC. We are deliberately delivering them all the information they need to hang us all. I am well aware that this is an exaggeration.

If the teenage lad who was so horrified by the information networks of Orwell's nightmare could see the stuff I share with the entire world, I like to think he'd punch me in the face and make me stop. I'm not going to though, because I'm 35 now, and I'm well aware that the mythical “they” could find out all this trivial crap all by themselves. As my friends/family would be plastering it all over the web for me. Or because they can read our minds (not mine, I've got a special hat).

Winston Smith deliberately hid from the telescreen in his apartment, so that he could have a moment of privacy, and hated it's noisy intrusions into his life. I and, in fact, most of us now have telescreens in every room in the house, and we're now paying extra so we can get ones with cameras in to watch us, just like Winston's did for him. The tiniest most insignificant details of our lives are now writ large upon the universe for all to see, thanks to the miracle of social networking, encouraging us all to believe in our own self-importance.

Scrolling down a twitter feed, I am often reminded of a 3 year old who continually feels the need to inform his parents of his every move. You know the ones, “Mummy, I'm going for a wee now”, “Mummy, I'm walking down the stairs” etc. etc. the equivalent of posting a picture of your lunch on twitter/facebook. Except that sadly the internet will not eventually snap like an overworked mother and tell it's errant children to shut the fuck up. Are the social networking generation the children who's mother's never snapped? The overindulged ones (you remember them from school, they got to come in in trainers, or wearing a bucket on their heads in extreme cases) who can do no wrong, and will always be mummy's little angel? Nope, cos I know people who do this, and I know their mothers, and this is not the root cause at all.

I have no idea why it happens, just that it does, and I am unable to stop, even though I know I should. Must be like the fags then, can't seem to give those up either. Although I did prefer it when people were too scared to put pictures of their kids up on the internet for fear of old men wanking over them (is that a joke too far?)

Sorry.

Hate, is it a waste of good adrenaline?

Hate is a strong word. Very strong, supposedly the opposite of love, which is a pretty strong thing on it's own. Sticking the two together has always been a bad thing. But this is not what I was going to say. I was worried that hate might be losing it's sting by being applied to the mundane and crappy, rather than things more deserving of it's wrath.

For example, I found myself the other day walking past a radio and thinking to myself “I hate coldplay”. Now, while I find the music of coldplay to be whiny, dirgey and awful to listen to, I'm not sure it deserves a dose of the power of hate (hey Huey Lewis, there's a dark side to you too). It would be more accurate to say that I am not fond of the music of coldplay, and would rather not hear it.

On the other hand, I rarely hear people use the word hate for things properly deserving of it. We are saddened and shocked by genocide, and human rights abuses, murders, assaults, etc. etc. yet we rarely use such a simple guttural, and primeval emotion as hate to describe how we feel about these things. We intellectualise about such things in an attempt to alleviate the effect it has upon us, and reach for the thesaurus in order to be disgusted, revolted and appalled by the actions of madmen throughout history. You never hear anybody say “I hate Hitler”, for it seems too mild for the job. Though “I hate the Beatles” seems thoroughly appropriate.

In fairness, Love has the same degree of use, many of us will exclaim our love of cups of tea, chocolate hob-nobs, and the music of AC/DC. But I suspect it is not the same as the love we feel for our spouses and children, much the same as the hate we feel for wasps is on a different level from that we would have for anyone who deliberately harmed our spouses and children.

But, surely with most equals and opposites, you need a decent amount of both to maintain a balanced life and personality. Interestingly in this case, I think not. I have not yet seen anyone take hate and use it constructively to better their lives, in fact generally it twists you up inside and stops you thinking properly until you let it go. Now, I hear myself say, love also twists you up and stops you thinking properly and can truly and properly fuck you up sometimes. So surely it is best to avoid both. Interestingly I wrote a fairly shit song on this subject called Love, Hate, Corrosion when I was 18. It was shit, though for some reason I also had it written on my guitar for years....

Nice logical argument, I am clearly a vulcan. I must avoid emotion. But...

Without love, where would you be now? As the Doobie Brothers said. Pretty lonely and miserable for most of us I think. Even if it is just the love you get from your parents, even if it is just the love of a dog, or a cat, it makes us happier people, we feel wanted. Can you say the same for hate? Certainly you can get a rush of adrenaline from it like any strong emotion, but is it a good thing?

To be honest, I gave up on proper hate so long ago I can't remember. I decided it was no use to me as an emotion, and have spent the last 20 or so years trying to understand the things I might hate, and why others might love them, or just like them even. Now to many this makes me incredibly annoying, as I switch sides mid-argument, and don't really do shouty angry about stuff. But fine, if they want to waste good adrenaline on being annoyed let them. I'll keep mine for AC/DC and the Wife.

Descent of Man?

While I was watching the excellent Andrew Marr series History of the World, or whatever it's called, it occurred to me that he is possibly trying to make a worrying point. There is a vague possibility that he is trying to tell us that the more “civilised” we become, the more bloodthirsty, power-crazed and generally unpleasant to each other we end up. I will level with you here, I was a long way into a bottle of red wine by this point, so the crazy in the back of my head was fully engaged. However, I recall in the first episode that he spoke of the first towns, which appear to have been mostly without leaders or government of any kind, which seem to have lasted for several thousand years in an anarcho-communist style of living, with absolutely no problems. I realise I am putting this simplistically. He also shows you happy nomadic tribes people that potter about and work together to be happier. This all seems lovely.

And then he gets to Rome, and Egypt and the other great early empires, and Alexander the Great, who mostly like to throw their weight around and enslave/kill/rape the happy nomads and little anarchist communes. In fact he has largely shown most great rulers from history as being, if you will pardon the phrase, massive dicks. To the extent that Alexander the Great seems to have murdered his best friend in a drunken argument, and then had a bit of a cry over it. This is just my take on it however, I could be wrong. And as usual have little evidence to back up my claim, as I tend to watch the show while drinking, so am left with just a basic foggy memory of what he said, and my own knowledge of history to guide me.

I do recall being highly impressed with human ingenuity for the first few episodes, and then more and more disappointed as the love of money and power slowly take over. This week we discovered America, not a happy point in history, I sat hugely depressed as I saw the conquistadors wiping out the Incas and the Aztecs and the Olmecs so they could take the gold. Which ironically the Incas and Aztecs and Olmecs weren't so bothered about keeping anyway it seems (the way Mr Marr puts it anyway). There seem to be brief golden ages and places where the financial imperative seems to be forgotten, and a rush of new discoveries and beautiful art unfold. And then something else becomes terribly valuable.

We also got the story of the Dutch “Tulip Bubble” the first boom and bust in the futures market, in fact probably the first futures market. After a thing like that (google it, I have no intention of explaining it now) you would think everybody would have learned and decided not to bother with futures again. However, clearly there were enough people who got incredibly rich out of it before the bubble burst, that it was worth doing again. And the myth was perpetuated, and the bubbles still continue to boom and burst and ruin ordinary people's lives right up to today. Also very depressing.

I was reminded of the Terry Pratchett joke that if Darwin had called his book the Ascent of man, he may have had an easier ride of it. I then began to think he may have been right about the descent. We start out happy and eager, ready to take over the world. No ingrained hate of anything, leaping down from the trees and across continents ready to adapt and survive. Within the blink of an eye we are murdering the Neanderthals for being in the way. This seems to set a precedent, until we end up slumped in front of 42" LED TV screens moaning that the gays and jews have taken over the TV and it's all rubbish, and we can't get a job cos of all the bloody immigrants. As I say, depressing, and inevitable. Largely because of my ridiculously simplistic and naive view right back there in the middle of the paragraph.

What finally really hit me though, is that I like to blame the television for the lack of inventively brilliant new art and ideas today, always have done, always will do. Despite the fact that I watch so much of it (although probably because of that, it steals my time away from doing useful things). And the fact that I was watching the slow decline of the incredible human spirit on a TV show, seemed, in my wine-soaked haze, to be a rather poignant and ironic joke. So much so I seem to have left myself a voice note on my phone about it. Unfortunately, it makes no sense to me now whatsoever, so I have written this rather than the undoubtedly beautiful missive that the drunken idiot who left me a note on my phone on sunday night would have.

Addendum – I found another voice note on my phone slightly later, in which I tell myself that TV does also inspire you to do things, such as write this piece. I then go on to tell myself that the spark of inspiration struck me about 10 minutes into the program, and unfortunately the next 50 minutes drove everything I wanted to say out of my head. Thus making TV the ultimate bastard, with it's ability to inspire one to create things, while simultaneously driving them out of one's head while one tries to finish watching the show. Cruel mistress indeed.

Empathy and understanding, both tangly and wangly

At some point over the last month I was having the usual drunken conversations in the pub, and the subject of heartache came up, as in your first big horrible break up. I was chuckling at this being the usual point when a teenager at the inevitably painful end of their first real relationship will tell you that you don't understand, and you've never been through this etc, etc. And I assumed that absolutely everyone on the planet had been through this rite of passage routinely, it's right up there with sneaking your first drinks and cigarettes, and feeling like you are the first and most rebellious human ever to have lived, as something we have all done.

I shall name no names, but I was speaking to somebody who claimed never to have genuinely suffered from this. I was trying to explain the feeling, you know the one, the sheer awfulness of wanting and needing to be with somebody who has simply decided that they really don't want to be with you anymore. And the awful pleading phone calls or conversations, or letters etc that you inevitably end up sending. He assured me that he has never felt that, he just gets angry. Angry that he's put so much time and effort into a relationship that has gone wrong, and thus wasted his time. I suggested this might be displacement, and was soundly put in my place. Interestingly I know for a fact that he has never actually done the dumping in any relationship, and has always been the dumpee, which is why I assumed my attempt to find a shared experience in the ridiculous teenage style heartache so beloved of songwriters everywhere would be a no-brainer. I then told him that he couldn't possibly understand 99% of every song ever written, which was a slight exaggeration.

This then led me to think about how much you really need to have lived through to empathise with other people and what they are going through. Given that I have always felt a bit put out and narked off by parents incessantly telling me that I don't have kids so I can't understand, it occurred to me that no, I don't have kids of my own, but I do understand. To put this more clearly, I have stepchildren now, and have done for the last 10 years or so, and while this has obviously clarified a few of the points, I think I understood most of this stuff before I had them. Equally, I am clearly more qualified and able to understand these things than say, somebody who has just had their first kid a week ago. Sorry if that sounds patronising, but surely no more than the brand new mummy telling me I can't possibly understand how much they worry about their shiny new baby.

Obviously we all see awful things every day on the news, and nobody tells us to wind our necks in and stop being upset about it because we've never been in the middle of a genocide/lost our entire family in an earthquake/abused by a track-suited northern DJ. Thus my ill-founded statement to my friend in the pub that he genuinely wouldn't understand when his future child told him that he didn't was clearly twattishness of the highest order. He might not have experienced it first hand, but that doesn't mean he doesn't understand the situation. I've never seen my mother mown down and killed by a white van, but that hasn't stopped me feeling for those poor kids in Cardiff this week. I've had a pretty decent time of life, but that doesn't stop me feeling for all those made homeless in natural disasters.

Of course equally, it is difficult to put yourself in different positions to your own, say you are on a lovely 150k salary, and you are reading of the difficulties of the average family on a combined income of maybe 20-30k, you think back to when you were earning that sort of money, and think to yourself, well I was fine, why can't they cope? Or look at your kid earning over 100 pounds a week, and thinking how much less you earned at his age, and wondering why he can't make it go as far.

This works both ways though, as when you're a kid looking at your parents, they appear to have money coming out of their ears, and you look forward to when this will happen to you, and all the things you will get with it. And then it never happens, because your kids think you are made of money and are spending it all for you.

This is all part of the current wage envy/income gap debate of the moment of course, and a wild tangent from where I started, but every income group has different pressures on it, and it is difficult to make assumptions about the filthy rich and the undeserving poor, and whether either of them actually exist, or are a handy scapegoat invented by the tabloid media and government spin doctors so we have something to rail against other than the government, a revolution preventative. I have no intention of going too deeply into the wage gap debate just now, suffice to say that closing it up a bit would solve a great deal of problems.

I suppose what I have been trying to say is that more often than not people do understand your problems, try not to push them away, even if they don't have first hand experience of it, empathy is fairly universal in most situations. Even your Dad telling you to shrug it off and get on with it is just giving you the best advice he knows how to. And telling people they can't and never will understand something is just ludicrous, as a species we have an incredible race memory that has enabled us to reach these lofty evolutionary heights, I suspect there's a lot of shared experiences and empathy stashed away in that.  

Beware Lazy Activism

This morning, on opening my emails and checking all the social networking paraphernalia of the 21^st century, I found I had been invited to join a cause by someone whose opinion I generally have total respect for, and have always held in high regard morally speaking. I looked vaguely at it and saw we were protesting about fur coats again, no brainer I thought, and clicked on the linky thing. I then had to invite half the universe to join as well (like usual) no problem, so I invited people who I thought might be interested, and did all the shiny things that it asked me to do without really giving it a second thought, after all the fur thing is bad, and I am not likely to agree with anyone who says otherwise.

Now this is where it gets more interesting, this was not a straightforward “lets all say no to fur” campaign, it was in fact to get a facebook page pulled down, called “Real Women Wear Fur”. Now obviously, these are not my kind of people, I suspect the whole thing might be an exercise in trolling, much the same as my subsequent excellent trolling page idea “Real men bite the heads off babies and fuck the stumps”. I didn't go with that in the end, surprisingly, not everyone would get the joke.

In my tuesday morning foggy headed state, and general, “if somebody else tells me this is a bad thing then it must be bad” soma-drenched mood I clearly forgot my life-long commitment to freedom of speech. Had I forgotten all the time I spent pointing out the awfulness of the SOPA and PIPA acts in the USA to censor the internet? Clearly I had become as bad as the “won't you think of the children and ban everything cos I can't be arsed to check what they're doing” brigade. Thankfully, an hour or so after I had done all my clicking and feeling like I was a good person for making a difference crap, I got a comment on this facebook activity from a recently met friend. He pointed out that he couldn't follow suite due to his commitment to freedom of speech. I immediately realised my mistake, and spent more time than anybody should trying to find out how to leave the bloody stupid cause I had joined (surprisingly difficult, it turns out).

At this point I decided that a more intelligent form of activism against the awful hateful things that turn up on the internet is to engage the trolls in conversation, we must post on their pages and tell them how and why they are wrong, whilst also trying very hard to respect opinions that differ from our own. For if we go around just telling those that do not agree with us that they are a bunch of cunts who should just fuck off, or invoking Godwins law and comparing them to Hitler, then we're probably not much better than they are. Polite, yet relentless criticism is the best way to win the war, check out moronwatch on twitter for a decent example of this. He wades in where other lefties fear to tread. Oh, and while we're at it, if you are spouting off at people for their hateful attitudes, the word “retard” is probably one you shouldn't use, ok?

Now why the hell am I bothering to go on about this? I'm not entirely sure, it just shook me that with a nice big powerful tool like the internet, so many of us go off sheep-like and just share every single stupid campaign that we get sent to us (see the whole Kony 2012 debacle if you don't believe me) without checking it out first. I always assumed I was better then that, and then it turns out I started doing the exact opposite of what I have been fighting against for the last 20 odd years. I left a website I used to help moderate over completely mild freedom of speech issues (they said no swearing or political/religious discussion, I said don't be ridiculous, and took all the interesting posters over to my new site instead, it's been dull as ditchwater over on that other site ever since). I have spent the last few years campaigning against all the internet censorship acts that are continually being pushed at us. It is worth remembering that if the group “Real men bite the heads off babies and fuck the stumps” did actually exist and wasn't a joke, at least you would have a chance of tracking them down before they bit off the head of another baby. If you banned the page, and sent them further down the underground, the stump-fuckers would be a lot harder to find.

This big digital playground is ours, all of ours, and just because somebody is saying something utterly abhorrent to you does not mean that you should censor what they say. It just means that you have to challenge it, and if you can't take the rebuttals, get the fuck off the big slides and go back to the paddling pool. You also have the right to not look at the bits you don't like. If the decidedly stupid criminals wish to continue posting pictures of their criminal activity, and leaving lovely digital trails all the way back to their IP addresses, lets let them. I'm not going to go in to the ins and outs of piracy here, but it appears to be killing the music and movie industries about as much as home taping/video pirates didn't back in the 80s. Leave the web alone, let it police itself, blocking sites via ISPs can only lead to chinese style censorship, which nobody wants (do they?) if you want to stop the pirates, then get a hold of yourselves, and make it easier to buy stuff legally, when the CD costs more than the mp3 downloads to get in a legal manner, you have got it wrong.

So, next time you find yourself just clicking a link from a trusted old friend, have a go at reading the whole thing first, and doing a little research before you commit yourself to some cause that it turns out you fundamentally disagree with. Otherwise you're no better than the Nazis (Yay, Godwins Law invoked!)

It's also worth pointing out that signing an online petition and sharing a few videos and pages of sad looking children/bunnies/corpses do not make you a social activist, or a good person. Get out and help real people, make a proper difference, I don't much, I'll admit, but I don't pretend to be a good person either, I chuck a few quid at a few charities every month and hope it makes me a better person than I know I really am. If you have just punched your wife in the face and then told you kids to go fuck themselves then signing an online petition to stop the bunnies getting condoms jabbed in their eyes will not cancel that out. Just a thought.

How buying stuff now makes me sad

Strange title I hear you say, and you'd be right. Surely the fact that the internet now allows you to buy any book/record/movie/hedgehog lure that you could ever possibly want is a good thing Dave?

True, that is a good thing in some ways, I merely have to think of a thing I want, and I can google it, compare prices and then get it from amazon/ebay/hedgehog molester.com no worries. If I hear a band I like, I can quickly look through the web, discover their entire back catalogue, and download it to listen to the same day. Or order it all on CD so I can read the liner notes and do it old school, I can even get it on vinyl if it exists like that, not a problem. This is the sort of system that the 14 year old me would have loved.

However, the 14 year old me was just as skint as this here 34 year old me, and mostly taped stuff he liked from his mates. Not entirely legal, and I spent the rest of my meagre income in second hand record shops, buying albums with pretty covers, and thus discovering bands like the Residents, the Incredible String Band, Atomic Rooster, etc. etc. Which I would never have googled up (though I'm sure amazon might have recommended them to me at some point, the law of averages says they have to get one right eventually).

So where's my problem? The problem is, that I still have no money, but now rather than only being able to buy what I can find in second hand record shops/book shops etc, I merely have to think of a thing, and I can buy it. Decision making is hard. Should I get that one Velvet Underground album that I don't have to complete my collection? Or should I go for that Cloud Control album I heard on the radio the other day and really, really liked? This is why 20 years after I bought my first Zappa album, my collection is still an ongoing project. Other records get in the way, they never did if there was a Zappa album I didn't have in the shop.

Same with books, I remember discovering the Discworld series back in about 1995, and slowly building up the full collection from what I could find in the local shops (not much, I grew up in Devon) it took me years, and when I had finally caught up I felt some kind of sense of achievement (misplaced perhaps, but there you go, I was the same when I finally got Live at last and completed my original Sabbath line-up collection).

If I had got into these things now, I could have had the whole lot, just like that, and the years of patient collecting would have not been needed.

I don't know if I would have been happier with instant gratification or not, I still need a copy of Cat Stevens' Numbers on vinyl to complete that set, but am resolutely refusing to get it off ebay, and waiting to see it at a car boot sale or charity shop, does this make me some kind of dinosaur? I'm not sure anymore. I only know that the anticipation of going into a new record shop in search of some sublime album I've been after for ages is slightly tempered by the knowledge that I could go home, fire up the computer and order the damn thing if I wanted. I have walked past records that i have wanted for years in shops, safe in the knowledge that yes, I will see it again, and probably cheaper. Whereas in the past I would have sold a kidney to get that first pressing copy of Trout Mask Replica, now I can safely hear it by streaming it online anyway, so what does it matter? Incidentally, Trout Mask was one of the first albums I ordered off the internet back when I first got online, it seemed to be the best thing in the world then.

Recently I started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Saga, I have only read the first book, as I am trying to do it old school and only buy what I can find in real life. I have books 3-9 sitting on my to read pile, as I got them at the car boot sale. Still no sign of book 2 though, and my resolve is weakening, I may have to go to Amazon (like I have done with countless Zappa and Grateful Dead albums). It's a good experiment, because every time I see one, I get that old familiar glow of must-buy-that-now-I'll-never-see-it-again that I used to get when I saw a Rory Gallagher record/cd.

Has the joy of collecting actually now disappeared forever? Or is instant gratification good? I am stuck in two minds about the whole thing, the world-wide-web is a double edged sword in so many ways, I will have to explore some of these later, as I am aware I may be waffling now.

Why do I have a blog again?

Hallo cyberspace, nice to type at you again, sorry it's been so long.
I still have nothing to say, as I am too tired to put my irrational thoughts into sensible words, +people I am annoyed at might read this, so it's not as much fun as it was back in the day when there were only 3 of us on the internet. However, I have just joined google plus, which also only has 3 of us on it as yet. It is a lot better than facebook, as there is less shit on there. Hoorah!
Current game is trying to persuade the family to get rid of sky so we stop sponsoring newscorp in their attempt at global domination. Also trying to decide which of the 4 bands I am currently in is shittest, and which is best, and how many I can realistically keep up.
Exciting times we don't live in.

Also realised it was 20 years ago that i went to see AC/DC at donington. I feel old...