Of course you pay your taxes. You’d be locked up if you didn’t. It’s easy for the government to catch you. But what if avoiding tax was as easy as pirating a film? Would you do it then? Even if you wouldn’t, you’d better bet someone out there would. Swiss bank accounts are for the very very rich. P2P technology (the kind you use to download films) is for everyone.

Say hello to Bitcoin. Here’s the science part.

Bitcoin is P2P currency. Billed as ‘global, untraceable money’, Bitcoin uses P2P technology to circumvent state control — and hand it back to you. It’s a virtual currency that’s distributed between a network of users — and the way it’s distributed makes it virtually untraceable. Money is transmitted using a similar system to PGP encryption and the amount of money in the system is independently verified by users running a ‘proof of work’ algorithm on their computers, rewarded for their efforts by a regular lottery of bitcoins distributed at random to people who take part. If it helps, think of it as a kind of digital cash-in-hand — a shadow economy beyond the reach of prying eyes.

Bitcoin is essentially a barter mechanism for the 21st century — anonymous, practical, secure, cheap. But it has the potential to be much, much more. Don’t worry too much about the science part. What’s really important is that Bitcoin is anonymous, grass-roots, and utterly out of reach of the state. In other words, it’s a currency that’s full of possibilities.

A digital gold standard?

Bad fiscal policy, quantitative easing and continuing uncertainty have seriously wounded currencies such as Sterling and the Dollar. Meanwhile the debt crisis contagion spreading across the Eurozone makes the Euro look more and more like a crash in slow motion. It’s only a matter of time before Greece defaults. And when that happens, all hell will break loose. It’s little wonder investors are switching to gold.

Gold remains the international standard for barter and exchange outside the realm of fiat currencies which are, by definition, only as good as the governments that guarantee them. But it’s slightly impractical to pay for your groceries in gold sovereigns. Last time I checked, Tesco wasn’t accepting the Krugerrand. And unless you live in Fort Knox, it’s probably not safe to stash gold bullion under your bed. Suddenly, Bitcoins are looking much more practical. While they aren’t widely accepted — yet — a growing number of individuals and companies are getting in on the action.

Introducing the digital wallet – and the digital rebellion.

Of course, there’s already a way to pay and be paid that doesn’t involve the bank, cash, or credit cards. But Paypal have already stated they’re not going to be trading in Bitcoins any time soon. Nonetheless, digital wallets such as Paypal, combined with contactless payment technology via smartphones and apps, provide us with both a digital and a real-world model for how a cashless currency system might work in the future. Add anonymity into the mix and it becomes a powerful brew.

Paypal is already running scared. On July 26th thousands of users cancelled their accounts as part of a viral protest against Paypal’s refusal to hand over legitimate donations to Wikileaks. The alternative payment mechanism recommended by the campaign — you guessed it. Bitcoin. The effect was immediate. The share price of eBay, Paypal’s parent company, fell from $34.5 to $33.5 in an hour, wiping over 2% off the company’s value in minutes. Their shares continue to trade lower — over 3% off their July 26th peak at last count.

The numbers are small but the analogy is clear. When users boycott your currency, you become less powerful. Translate that analogy to fiat currency and suddenly the power of Bitcoin becomes apparent. If just 1 or 2 percent of government revenues are lost this emergent technology will have caused a major upset at the exchequer. And the government will have no-one to blame but themselves — for taxing people too much and for wasting the money when they receive it. For blowing our money on foreign bailouts and foreign wars. For pursuing reckless economic policies and expecting ordinary people to pay for it with runaway inflation. Given the ability to choose, people might not choose to pay for it.

Demand more for your money

While a mass tax revolt seems a long way off, technology has finally given us a way to hit the government where it hurts — not at the ballot box, but in the wallet. A government that cannot pay its bills cannot stand. Or else it must use violence and risk open revolt.

I’m not suggesting revolution. Truth be told, I’m a little too conservative for that. It’s unlikely that emergent technology such as P2P money will bring down governments. But it may lead to a brighter, freer future.

P2P filesharing hasn’t killed the entertainment industry. It’s forced studios and record labels to adapt to the demands of their customers, offer newer and better services, and deliver value for money. Perhaps P2P money will force governments to do the same thing.

The government has the ability to demand tax from you and then spend it how it likes. No private company would be allowed to function that way. In the free market, you choose how your money is spent.

In the future, emergent technology like P2P money may give people the ability to withhold payment from the government — forcing it to take greater account of our wishes.

Schools and hospitals or bailouts and foreign wars? In the future, you might be able to choose. But you won’t make your choice through the ballot box. Because whoever you vote for, the government always wins.

With P2P currency, you’ll finally be able to vote with your wallet — and demand real change.

My poison was always booze and it was one one boozy night that the sudden urge to change my ways struck me. This unexpected moment of clarity came when an old friend of mine took me to what must be the dirtiest, sweatiest, seediest gay bar in all of London. Not that I have much experience of gay bars — all I know was this one was pretty seedy, the windows blacked out like an old bookie’s, the thudding sound of techno beating from outside. First of all I was astonished that everyone on entry took their shirt off. I’d never seen anything like it. I’m reminded of the Homer Simpson quote: everyone else came with a six pack, I’m the only one who showed up with a full keg.

For me, the opposite was true. The girl of my dreams (I thought — how wrong I was!) had abandoned me and, in silent protest, I’d refused to eat for several months. I weighed somewhere under ten stone. With my pale skin, waxy complexion, and ill fitting clothes, I looked like the skinniest white boy (barely) alive. Blake Fielder-Civil looked like a paragon of virtue, vitality, and health in comparison to me. A virtual skeleton, my body had given up the ghost — and though I didn’t realise it, I was in danger of becoming one.

I wasn’t anorexic. I was on hunger strike. My body demanded change.

The next day I woke up with a habitual hangover and (unsurprisingly) no girl beside me in bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I thought back to the writhing mass of exquisitely carved male bodies I’d seen the night before. I laughed at the irony. It’s typical. We spend our teenage years making fun of the gays and the geeks, yet they’re the ones who end up inheriting the earth. I was never going to be an investment banker — oh no. A lazy arts grad, I was stuck peddling words for my crust. But it wasn’t too late to do something about what remained of my body. I had two choices. Accept mediocrity, or join the gym. I joined the gym.

Determinedly, I threw myself into my new role. With my geek glasses, wiry physique, and permanenet aura of bacherlorism, I was like an ad for Mr Muscle. Unsurprisingly, my right arm was stronger than my left. Had it really been that long? I guessed so. Every time I felt like giving up, I looked in the mirror. And so I set to work.

Of course I never expected instant results, but results came quickly enough. After the end of the first month I’d slowed down my drinking. I’d started eating better. I’d put on weight. More importantly, for the first time in my life, I felt strong. No longer needing to resort to the withering putdown or the silent snarl (the practised look of contempt) I found myself feeling more comfortable in my own skin. I offered to help people lift their furniture. I playfully arm wrestled my friends. I got into fights, and won.

At three months girls began to notice me or — should I say — a different kind of girl began to notice me. Previously, I’d only ever been able to attract extremly small girls (usually the sort with an eating disorder, a drug problem, or both). After all, what girl wants to go out with a man who weighs less than them? What woman wants a man who can’t put his arms around her and make her feel safe? What woman wants an emaciated wreck? I’d been in the dating paddling pool. Now I was in the ocean. And it’s true what they say. There’s plenty more fish in the sea.

The trouble with fishing is it’s no use having an enormous rod if you’re not strong enough to reel them in.

My work life started to improve as well. I went to bed earlier, I got up earlier, I felt tired less often. Sure, I was spending up to two hours a day, every day, in the company of a combination of muscle-bound posers, butch bears, and muscle marys — all to the pounding beats of balearic four to the floor — but (headphones in) for the first time in years, I felt good about myself.

I began to wonder what had kept me from the gym so long. Was it pride? Was it insistence that it was my mind, not my body, that mattered? Or was it simply laziness? A refusal to admit that results demanded hard work? Personally, I think it was the latter. Before I started working out I always assumed that eventually I would earn something for nothing, that my life would improve without me working at it. Working out made me realise that improvement is gradual. Improvement is painful. But improvement is worth it.

These days I’m healthier, happier, a more rounded individual. I look back at photos of myself from those days and I wonder just how close I was to just disappearing. I became so light, so ethereal, a breeze might have swept me away. Now I weigh a little bit more but I think the most important thing is this — I’ve got both feet planted firmly on the ground.

“The Incredible Sulk”

Blockbusters aren’t depressing — and they’re rarely cerebral. Yet Dick is responsible for films ranging from the Harrison Ford cult classic, Blade Runner to the Arnie vehicle Total Recall. This article intends to investigate what Hollywood loves about PhilDick (as fans sometimes lovingly refer to him), and why they keep coming back.

Dick was born six weeks premature in 1928 in Chicago with a twin sister Jane. His twin died six weeks later, something that would haunt his dreams and influence his fiction for the rest of his life. After his parents divorced, when he was six, Dick was brought up by his mother in Washington, DC and then California, where he spent the rest of his life. His interest in sci fi started at the age of 12 when he read his first science fiction story.

Were drugs responsible for Dick’s prolific output?

Arguably the other key influence in Dick’s life was drugs. Specifically amphetamines which he was proscribed in the mid-fifties for anxiety and depression. It seems odd now to be prescribed speed for anxiety, but this was way before our current the notion of a ‘drug culture’. We can only guess what would have happened if Dick had settled for a bottle of Marks and Spencer Chardonnay. But none of this gives us an idea of why Dick is king of the Hollywood castle.

The sheer quantity of material. Speed had a practical benefit – it allowed him to write fast, so there are many novels and short stories to mine for movie ideas. As Dick himself put it, “In five years I wrote sixteen novels, which is incredible.” Some of these, especially the early stories are out of copyright. With reports that some modern writers are turning to Modafinil, are we heading back to the good old days of page-a-minute-page-turners?

Perhaps not. Because there’s another important ingredient to Dick’s writing. Dick was a Christian. While his books may be pessimistic, they have a strong moral heart that appeals to Hollywood moguls (and many non-moguls among us). We may or may not call ourselves religious, but faith in humanity and the power of love are attractive qualities. And ones that remain stubbornly irrational, an atttitude Dick liked.

A moral man who questioned his place in the universe

Dick was a gnostic. Dick’s spiritual faith was not your usual piety of church and good deeds. No, this was the amphetamine-powered, reality questioning variety of belief. He was a man who’s earliest and pre-drug fictions had probed the nature of what is real, and this became a deeply personal matter for him as his mind – and identity – crumbled under industrial quantities of speed. What could be more contemporary than the radical doubt that lies at the heart of gnosticism.

So, Dick combined a somewhat conservative ethic with an exceptionally radical, or at least trippy, epistemology. – bingo. Here we might remember that in his final novel VALIS, he referred to the Dick character as ‘Horselover Fat’ – Philip meaning ‘horselover’ in Greek and Dick being the German word for ‘fat’. It is exactly this ingenious kind of thinking, and sense of humour, that makes him perfect for Hollywood. And luckily, for every conventional movie like The Adjustment Bureau, there is a weird gem like A Scanner Darkly.

Why does Hollywood keep coming back to Philip K Dick? Perhaps it’s because no other sci-fi writer managed to combine quality with quality — and maintain a deep-set moral outlook. Dick was a prolific writer, so we’ll probably see many more films based on his work in years to come.

Well, folks, the inevitable has finally happened: the Neo-Burlesque Movement is now fully mainstream.  This initially underground movement started in the early 1990’s with the founding of Dixie Evans’ Miss Exotic World pageant, and has been growing and growing to the point that now Burlesque is everywhere. Neo-Burlesque has finally crossed the mainstream threshold with the release of the movie Burlesque starring Christina Aguilera and Cher.  To complicate the situation, stripper-turned-burlesque instructor Jo Weldon just released The Burlesque Handbook, which spills the beans on most of burlesque’s trade secrets and lowers the bar for practically anyone who wants to do burlesque to jump in. There’s nothing wrong with being mainstream unless you can’t handle it, and there are many problems within the Neo-Burlesque Movement where they have set themselves up for their own failure now that the spotlight really is on them. One of Neo-Burlesque’s problems is inherent in its very existence: Neo-Burlesque is part of the very problem that it is trying to be a solution for. How?  Read on to find out.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released the 68-page Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. The report seeks to demonstrate academically something that women in Western culture already know—that women are subjected to an ongoing and never-ending sexualization contest that values them solely on their “sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics.”  This comes largely from the media, but to exacerbate the problem further, women become obsessed with the sexualization contest themselves to the point that they objectify themselves and each other, using a few impossible-to-obtain body types as their reference points for performing well in this competition.

There is really no better way to explain the rise of Neo-Burlesque than as a response to this appalling sexualization contest. The stories about how women get into burlesque generally follow this pattern: They were already obsessed with the sexualization contest, depressed because they were losing it, or both.  They went to a burlesque show, saw the wide variety of body types parading across the stage and being cheered unconditionally for it, and wanted to get in on the action.  They were nervous and scared before their first strip show, but when it was all done, they too got their own unconditional adulation.  It forever changed their lives, and now they are happy and gleeful in the burlesque community, regularly taking it off for other women and being praised for—sexualizing themselves. In other words, the Neo-Burlesque Movement still buys into the Western Culture Sexualization Contest’s ever-present message that a woman’s value is primarily based on her performance as a sex object. Their sexualization of each other continues on, only in a “soccer mom” kind of way where everyone gets a prize.

Over and over again in burlesque, women will use word “empowered” to describe how they feel when they perform.  But is this really “power”?  If she were the only woman alive, the argument that a woman has acquired “power” by causing men to helplessly lust after her would hold some water.  But what if this man is bored with the “empowered” dancer’s act and falls asleep during her performance?  Or, let’s assume that while our “empowered” burlesque dancer is putting on her show, another woman came along that was a little more willing, and the man the dancer has “power” over trots off to bed with the other woman.  What happened to her “power”?  What we see is that her “power” is not tangible power at all, but rather an illusion of power. She may feel like she rules the world, but what she feels and what exists in reality are two very different things.  The 30% of the burlesque audience that are men and who smittenly watch our “empowered” woman are consensually giving her the “power” that she possesses, and can shut it off at any time.  She cannot collect lust from them the way that the government collects taxes.  So how exactly is this “power”?

In the previously mentioned The Burlesque Handbook, author Jo Weldon tries to explain how burlesque dancers differ from strippers: “As a strip-joint stripper, I usually looked for one individual to perform to, and that individual paid me.  As a burlesque performer, I play to the entire house, and the house (show producer or venue owner) pays me.” She then recalls the pain when “As a…stripper, my appearance was constantly evaluated and commented upon openly…it was a rollercoaster for my ego.” As dehumanizing as it is for conventional strippers to be scrutinized like they are, at least they have the strength to get up close with men.  Burlesque dancers, on the other hand, have a wall of separation between them and the audience, and have rigged the show to where the audience can only give positive reinforcement. In this environment, all the “power grabs” and attempts and being “daring” end up being, as Roger Waters put it, “the bravery of being out of range.”

The Alternative: The Vintage Movement

So you’re an audience member that’s getting bored of burlesque and tired of saying “Woo!” to everything they do.  Or you like older styles of clothing and ways of doing things, and really want to get away from the sexualization contest. Where to you go? The answer: check out the Vintage Movement, which had its breakthrough year in the UK in 2010.

The Vintage Movement looks to the larger culture of the mid-20th Century, with the intent of bringing the better ways of life from the period to the current day.  It is welcoming to newcomers, features real gentlemen that are kind to ladies, and ladies who come in all sizes and shapes who are appreciated as whole people.  The ladies in the scene are genuinely loved and appreciated for who they are and what they do, and don’t even have to take their clothes off to receive that love and appreciation.

Here’s an overview of what has been going on so far.  The tradeshow-sized Vintage At Goodwood festival made the biggest splash of the year, followed by the traveling event Judy’s Affordable Vintage Fairs. Vintage resellers fuel much of the movement, some running their own shops on Etsy, and others, such as Sadie Boon Vintage, running handsome online boutiques.  Vintage fashion blogs like Va-Voom Vintage also drive the scene, and hard-copy magazines such as Vintage Life support it further. The men come in with blogs like Manly Vintage and magazines like The Chap.

The Vintage Movement’s music looks to be what will gather people together and perpetuate the movement even further.  Dutch chanteuse Caro Emerald broke this territory open in 2010 with her multi-platinum selling Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor. Expanding the musical vocabulary further is the upcoming compilation This is Vintage Now, which features Miss Emerald, living saxophone legend Big Jay McNeely, exotica revivalists The Waitiki 7, classic jazz singer Beverly Kenney, and many others.

With so much excitement and so many nice people in the Vintage Movement, who needs the same old trite Cherry Bettie Kitty Bottoms taking their clothes off whilst holding the PC gun at the audience, demanding unconditional applause?  The sexualization contest is tragic, but obsessing about it further in a narcissistic way and seeking “I win you lose” answers and imaginary “power” acquisitions is not healing, but a continuation of the problem.  And this is only one of many issues inherent within the Neo-Burlesque Movement that suggest that the show is almost over.

David Gasten is a Vintage enthusiast and producer of the soon-to-be released compilation This is Vintage Now.

Everyone’s trying to out-Ellis Ellis. So what does Ellis do? He tries to out-Ells himself. That’s the result of Imperial Bedrooms, a curious novel that comes over twenty five years after its prequel, Less Than Zero, the blandly beautiful, minimalist, nihilist novel that catapulted him to stardom. And it almost works.

But not quite. More than a sequel, Imperial Bedrooms attempts to be a summation of Ellis’ entire oeuvre, and yes, that includes the graphic rape and murder bit, too. So Imperial Bedrooms functions more or less as a parody. Whether it’s an intentional parody or not, that’s the question.

We’re greeted to a quote from the master, Raymond Chandler, as soon as we open the book. Ellis’ LA is less than noir, it’s just relentlessly bleak. It’s not black and white, it’s faded and bleached and dried out in the sun, much like Ellis’ characters themselves. Remember Rip, Clay’s drug dealer when he was 18? Well, now Rip’s ‘face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized.’ Don’t worry, though. The kids are still blandly nondescript and beautiful. But this is a novel about growing up.

Ellis is, in many ways, returning to the scene of the crime. Clay notes that one of their friends “wrote a book about us” and is pretty pissed off about it, twenty five years later. But Clay is also a filmmaker and a scriptwriter and still bears more than a passing resemblance to Ellis himself. And that’s where the conceit comes in — and by conceit, I mean it in both senses of the word.

Unlike Less than Zero, there’s some kind of plot. Clay falls in love with some actress who’s only sleeping with him to get a part in his movie and she’s also dating the guy who used to be his best friend and (look away now if you don’t want to hear any more spoilers) she’s also dating Rip. Quite why Clay falls for her so hard is never explained, although a past history is mentioned — in passing. And that’s the problem. Less than Zero worked because it didn’t really have a plot. Imperial Bedrooms has a paper-thin plot that’s sub-Ellis, sub-Chandler. It’s as convoluted as Glamorama, albeit condensed into 170 pages, making it at least a little easier to swallow.

Imperial Bedrooms isn’t a bad book. It’s an experiment. It’s a novel where Ellis looks back on his career and tries to make some sense out of his changing focus. The fact that the-too-cool-for-school Clay is revealed to be as deranged as Patrick Bateman may be jarring to some, but, as Clay himself points out, the clues were always there. We just weren’t looking for them.

Ellis started getting all postmodern on us with Lunar Park, where a character called Bret Easton Ellis attends a fancy dress party where he attends as himself. ‘You do a pretty good impression of yourself,’ he’s told. Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’ impression of himself carried out to its logical conclusion. It’s both brilliant and flawed and if you’ve read the original, it’s probably one of the must-read books of the year. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t stand alone and that should give you more of an impression about the strength of the writing and the characterization and the plot than anything else. When a book functions solely as a coda to an earlier book, it’s not much of a novel.

By all means, buy this book, read it, laugh one more time as Ellis paints the stark, rich world in which his characters live in in black and white. But don’t expect a successor to Less than Zero. This is just the final chapter, the final punchline, delivered by a man who’s getting older, twenty five years too late.

Allday

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The question is, why now? As ever — cui bono — who benefits?

The material used for this ‘scoop’ came out last summer. It’s been readily available for a long time. It’s possible that the Telegraph — which presumably has reservations about the Lib Dem — Conservative alliance — is behind this hatchet job. But somehow I doubt that.

The Telegraph alone doesn’t really benefit from this. It seems logical that, given the timing, they were given outside help — a source — pointed them in the direction of Laws expenses and told them what to look for. Otherwise this would have come out much sooner.

So who’s the source?

I can’t point fingers. I can only speculate. But just as the Tories are having trouble with their traditional, authoritarian right wing in this coalition, so to are the Lib Dems having trouble with their ‘social democratic’ left.

Vince Cable, a leader on the social democratic left, resigned as Deputy leader of the Lib Dems this week, to rampant speculation. At the very least, it’s an orchestrated attempt to put a left-leaning Lib Dem in the deputy position, whilst also being in a position to be able to be ‘outside the tent, pissing in.’

I’m not saying that Cable himself is responsible. There’s no evidence for that. But taking these events cumulatively, this is beginning to look like an orchestrated response by the Lib Dem left to reassert control of the party. Laws is a leading figure on the right of his party and a key member of the coalition. He has the guts — and the balls — to cut spending where it’s needed. And a lot of people in his own party don’t like that.

The timing of this scandal is just too convenient to be coincidence.

Someone wanted Laws out. I speculate that it’s the Lib Dem left. Cable is unhappy about being marginalized. And the wider Lib Dem left is unhappy about the right-of-centre direction their party in coalition is taking. It only takes one disgruntled staffer or activist who feels ‘betrayed’ by the coalition to rock the boat.

Laws has been caught out. And he is in the wrong. But he has done no worse than a vast number of MPs from all parties have done. The expenses scandal is old news. They were all at it. We know. In the wider context of things, the £40,000 he paid to his lover is a pretty small sum. In fact, had he been living alone, he would have been claiming more.

Laws is key to this coalition. It will be significantly weakened without him. Aside from having more than a whiff of prurience about his homosexuality, which is really nobody’s business, this scandal strikes me as being part of an orchestrated campaign to wreck the coalition from within.

Why call for Laws’ resignation when Michael Gove is allowed to sit on the front bench after much more serious evidence of home ‘flipping’ and abuse of parliamentary expenses?

I have been truly optimistic about this coalition. It’s a good thing. For the first time in two generations we have a truly classically liberal government dedicated to cutting taxes, starting with the poorest, to incentivise work.

Any attempt to remove Laws from his position is a calculated attack designed to weaken the coalition’s stance.

Laws should apologise and resist calls for his resignation. He has a job to do. And as a principled, intellectual, classical liberal, he’s a linchpin in the current coalition arrangement.

This is a smear campaign, no doubt about it. Whose? I’m not sure. Who benefits from seeing Laws’ name dragged through the dirt? Laws fucked up. But he should apologise and get on with his job.

I for one would rather judge him by his actions in government, by how many billions he’s able to save the British taxpayer, rather than by the paltry sum of £40,000 he’s taken at our expense.

Laws broke the rules in opposition. He’s been in government a couple of weeks. I say let’s give him a tabula rasa — a blank slate. Give the man the chance to redeem himself. Let his future actions amend for any past mistakes. Don’t take away one of the new government’s rising stars. The British people have a strong sense of fairness and to my mind giving David Laws a chance to redeem himself and do a service for his country is much better than letting him slink into the night in disgrace.

The man made a mistake. It shouldn’t cost him his career. And if we lose him, it may cost the country much, much more.

Allday

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• It’s a giant iPhone.
• It doesn’t have a camera.
• Or multitasking.
• Or USB.
• Or flash.
• It costs twice as much as a netbook,
• it does half as much,
• and it doesn’t have a keyboard.
• It’s got a 4:3 aspect ratio…
• and a 90s-tastic 1024×768 native resolution.

In other words, it’s a barrel of shite with a rather nice touchy-feely interface. But somehow every other reviewer in the land is being paid stacks of cash or freebies or blow jobs or whatever to rave about this overpriced digital doorstop. Lucky for you then that someone at apple forgot to grease ol’ Chad’s palm or spit-shine his cock, so I’m gonna tell it to you like it really is.

If you buy an iPad, you are buying into a fundamental power shift in the user / device paradigm.

You are no longer a creator. You are a consumer.

Apple founded its reputation on being the creative’s choice. Long before it became the machine to be seen posing with while sipping your non-fat latte and working on your god-awful rom-com screenplay lovingly based on your own life, Macs were machines for graphic designers and musicians and other creative types who wanted to get shit done.

Then Apple turned evil. It started out small, with the iPod. But make no bones about it, this is where it started. The iPod is solely a consumption device. It’s to consume media. More than that, it’s a feed to encourage you to buy media. Remember when everyone used to just share music on tape or CD or Napster or Soulseek? Well, now you’ve got the shiny Apple iTunes store selling tracks at a ridiculous price for something that isn’t even real, taking an enormous cut, and basically dictating the direction of the music industry.

The iPad is Apple’s attempt to dominate the publishing industry in exactly the same way. Think about it. These fuckers want you to consume your books and your magazines on the iPad. That’s what it’s been designed to do, supposedly, if you believe the reviews, more or less perfectly. But do we really want Apple controlling our digital futures?

People rail against Murdoch for being monopolistic and attempting to dominate markets. Doesn’t the iTunes store now have more or less a stranglehold on the music industry? Apple aren’t the good guys any more, folks. They’re the evil empire pushing the little guy around. Just because they make shiny quasi-futuristic devices that look great and are easy to snort coke off, doesn’t make them the nice guys.

Think about digital bookstores. No more sharing your favourite book with your friend. You can’t just lend them your dog eared paperback. How’d you lend a DRM protected, encrypted file? Heck, knowing Apple’s track history, you probably won’t even be able to cut and paste.

The iPad is a device designed to get you to spend more money.

Think about the “app store” and the “app” revolution. What a crock of shit. You’re all a bunch of fucking asswipe dummies. 90% of “apps” are just a repackaged way of requesting, receiving and displaying data from the internet. And you’re paying through the teeth for the “convenience” of it.

Apple is a closed platform, folks. That means they’re in control of it. They control what gets uploaded to the app store and what gets deleted — if it’s got questionable content, it’s gone. If Apple had a similar stranglehold on the publishing industry, what else might get deleted? Would Lady Chatterley’s Lover be facing a new obscenity trial in the digital age — with judge, jury and executioner being some faceless suit at Apple HQ?

Basically, the iPad is shit. It’s a shit expensive portable monitor designed to encourage you to buy more shit, like apps to view newspapers and magazines that are available for free right now online anyway. The iPad isn’t designed so you can create. It’s designed to encourage you to consume. It’s like having an advert in the palm of your hand all the time.

Oh, and it can’t do Flash.

Chad Fanstor

Further reading: http://ipadmakesmesad.blogspot.com/

]]> http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/04/08/apple-ipad-sucks/feed/ 4 http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/02/09/smoke-stacks-to-apple-macs-the-digital-landscape-is-a-vista-to-be-painted/ http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/02/09/smoke-stacks-to-apple-macs-the-digital-landscape-is-a-vista-to-be-painted/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:13:06 +0000 Jimmy http://thethingis.co.uk/?p=498 Zizek has summarised Marx as having said that the invention of steam engine has caused more social change than any revolution ever would. Marx himself doesn’t seem to have provided a useful soundbite to this effect (at least not one that I can find though Google), so I’m afraid it will have to remain second hand. It’s a powerful sentiment, whoever originated it – which philosopher’s views cannot be analyzed as the product of the social and technological novelties of his day?

It’s easy to see that the technology that is most salient in our age is the internet, as made possible by consumer electronics. Have our philosophers stepped forward to engage with the latest technological crop? Perhaps Wikipedia is proof of a consensus theory of truth? I’m sure many  theses are addressing concerns in this vein as you read.

But what of our artists? Will Gompertz recently posted to share an apparently widely held view that no piece of art has yet spoken eloquently from or about the internet. He cites Turner prize winning Jeremy Deller describing our era as “post-warholian”, presumably indicating that Warhol was last person to adequately reference technological change – meaning, in this instance, mass production and consumerism. I wonder if the more recent Saatchi-fueled crop of artists has  captured something of marketing landscape we currently inhabit, but whatever the last sufficient reflection on cultural change afforded by art was, I think we may be on safe ground in stating that the first widely acclaimed artistic portrait of the digital era is still to come.

Which is some surprise when you consider how engaged the news agenda is with technology: I was amazed to see that Google’s Wave technology (still barely incipient) got substantial coverage in the news, while a certain Cupertino based company recently received more than a sprinkling of press when it announced its tablet based computer….

Earning a living from the internet, as I happen to,  I’ve been curious about the Gompertz question for some time, and the  Kinetica Art Fair seemed like a good place to satisfy my pretensions at cultural engagement.   Kinetica is a museum which aims to ‘encourage convergence of art and technology’. The fair certainly captured one aspect of contemporary mood – a very reasonably priced bar was a welcome response to our collective (and my personal) financial deficit.

Standout pieces included a cleverly designed mechanical system for tracing the contours of plaster bust onto a piece of paper and a strangely terrifying triangular mirror with mechanically operated metal rods [Unfortunately I can't find the artists names in the catalog]. The mirror and rods looked like a Buck Rogers inspired torture device designed to inflict pain by a method so awful that you’d have to see it in operation before its evil would be comprehensible. The other works varied from the malfunctioning to a urinal which provided an opportunity for punters to simulate pan-global urination (sadly not with real urine) via Google maps [by Ric Carvalho]. I would defy anyone not to be entertained while wondering round the the fair, its certainly not boring art.

However, Will Gompertz’s challenge was not answered at Kinetica – the essence of the technological modernity was not distilled into any single work, or indeed represented collectively.

I’ve been mulling over various possible reasons for the difficulty of the problem, and quite a few suggestions spring to mind. Do computers naturally alienate artists? Is information technology to visually banal to be characterised succinctly?

My favorite theory is that the transitory nature of our electronic lives that makes them so hard to pin down. Mobile phones, web sites, computers and operating systems from a decade ago all look ludicrously dated – it’s almost impossible to capture the platonic form of these items because they have so little essential similarity between incarnations. Moreover, their form is almost an accident, and not connected with their more profound meaning in any way. The square riggers of the mercantile age and the smoke stacks of the industrial era seem to denote something broader -  how, for example, can communism be separated from its tractors? Yet the form factor of my computer is trivial. Form and functional significance are of necessity separated by digital goods, their flexibility is the source of their power.

In some way I think films give us tacit acknowledgment of the contingent nature of the digital environment that we spend much of our lives in: characters  are never seen using Windows on their computer, in films computer interfaces are always generic. And when we see a Mac in a movie it’s impossible to see it as anything other than product placement.

So, the Kinetica Art Fair may not have been able to help society understand its relationship with technology, but in fairness that might be a misunderstanding on my part. Really the fair was about works facilitated by technology, rather than about it.

I may have picked a straw man in Kinetica. However, the V&As ongoing exhibition Decode really does no better, though its failures and successes are another topic. In this case I think we can say that Decode exhibition does addresses itself to the Gompertz challenge, and it too fails.

As if to illustrate the perversity of the digital landscape the Gompertz post has become a de facto collection of net art, which is well worth checking out. In a still  keener illustration of the era of mass participation, despite the author’s instance that he is questioning the “eminence not of existence” of net art, commenters continue to post links in the belief that enough evidence of the existence of net art will somehow make it eminent.

Jimmy Tidey (Follow me on Twitter)

Thursday’s debate du jour was served wrapped in the rind of yet another debate. I spent the day leading up to Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time watching the socio-political fallout. With great interest I followed the story as it proliferated itself across the Internet and news outlets, rattling the doors of parliament and rousing the executive suites of the BBC. Watching again as I ate my lunch, I was again moved by just how incendiary an issue this has been. And not just in terms of the wider populous. I truly flit between opinions as to the morality amidst this issue with all its gloomy complexity. I felt as though I needed my own debate about the issue before Griffin even reached the television studio. There are too many things to be said about this issue, too many views I myself want to express. But here is just one. It is a troublesome one, but one I would love to see given the kind of intellectual currency afforded to such platforms as the Intelligence Squared debates.

I put forward the proposition that the BNP, distasteful and undemocratic though it is, is in fact a powerful force for the re-democratisation of the UK. If you can put to one side for a moment the controversy and scaremongering (not to downplay the importance of the bias and racism inherent in the what the BNP stands for), it is plain to see that the drafting of this party onto a highbrow political platform and therefore into the upper echelons of the political arena, has exorcised the populous in a manner practically unheard of in contemporary party-politics. Not since the expenses scandals have ordinary, grass-roots voters been motivated to comment on the functioning of politics and I would suggest that contrary to its outward appearance to have roused political interest, the expenses issue served mainly to cement widespread dislike of the political classes and apathy in the process of democracy and its ability to offer real options and real change.

The BNP’s appearance on prime-time television, however, is one which leaves the moral compass spinning. If pushed I think I find myself most in agreement with the ex-editor of the Sun who commented that the BBC cannot be blamed for simply fulfilling the mandate for which we pay our license fee. I am not sure I am happy about Griffin appearing on Q.T. but it’s worth noting that it is the fundamental bases and building blocks of our society – law, rules, codes of conduct – that keep the BNP and its followers from exerting a greater influence than they do in this country, and therefore we must adhere to these markers of civilisation, and follow the rules and codes in deciding whether to give the BNP this platform. This taken as a given, it is plain that the BBC had only one choice given the BNP’s six percent share of the vote and two seats in the European Elections.

In which case it is not the BBC who is responsible for my discomfort in seeing such a figure ascend the tiers of debate in which I could find at least some semblance of respect for the participants until now. It is in fact the voting public, my fellow countrymen and women.

Quite simply, I do not remember the last time such a divisive political debate lead so readily back to the grass-roots electorate. In my disgust at some of the issues coagulated within this row, I cannot help but take enjoyment from the barbed blade planted firmly into the torso of political apathy.

Ed Williams

Babylon Revisited

I’m reminded of that old F Scott Fitzgerald short story about the man who lost his family while everyone else was losing their money in the Wall Street Crash.

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.” a wily bartender says.
“I did,” Charlie replies, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

I was very fortunate, in a way, to come of age in the boom. I had an easy ride, and there was always a soft landing. Credit was easy and money was so simple to make you couldn’t fall over yourself without landing on a tenner. I spent high and I lived hard. Life was good, or so I thought.

I turned twenty five soon after the credit crisis. I was too busy to notice. My life had fallen into disarray. I was involved with two women, I was drinking too much, for all the wrong reasons, I was no longer able to command a decent salary, and the novel I’d been working on for the past four years had been rejected by pretty much every publisher going. Too commercial. Not commercial enough. The characters are too mean. But nobody will believe the story if you make them nice.

Ultimately, I only cared about one thing. One of the girls I was involved with. The rest of the world, I said, could burn.

Burn

It did. While I was busy falling apart, so was the world. I lost the girl. I quit my job. I left town. I started again.

It’s easy to look back, in retrospect, and say yes, this was my quarter life crisis. It was certainly the moment when I realized the dreams I had as a child weren’t necessarily the life I was going to have as an adult.

I had to do a lot of growing up, very fast.

I had dreams of being a great novelist. Then I woke up. As it turns out, I’m a rather good creative director. We can’t all be F Scott Fitzgerald. I’ll settle for being Don Draper. At least Don Draper can pay his bills on time, and he isn’t trying to drink himself to death.

I think I’ve smiled more in the last six months than I’ve smiled in the last five years. I’ve come to terms with who I am, and what I really want in life. (Hint: it’s not to be a great writer. I just did that to get girls into bed. It worked.) It seems as if everybody has a crisis of confidence in their twenties, when they realize how hard it really is out there. Some go running for cover. They hide in perpetual childhood, living with their parents, hanging out with old school friends. Others, a lot of girls, go the other way. They run straight into the arms of older men, father figures who’ll protect them and pay for them. Until, of course, the men get tired of the girls and change them in for a younger model. Then you’re fucked.

Don’t be a child

My point is, I guess, that you can’t put off having a quarter life crisis forever. It’ll only make your mid-life worse. You have to face up to the responsibilities of the world and sometimes, you have to do it alone. I’m  happier being single than I ever was trying to juggle all those girls. Women are a headache. Even when they’re not trying to have you duffed up. I’m running a business, I’m earning a living, and I answer to nobody. Life is hard, but I never really enjoyed it when it was easy.

Having to work, having to struggle, having to beat the odds — that’s what life’s about. We had it handed to us on a silver platter when times were good. Now I see all the quarter lifers running for cover, trying to get those times back. They’re just delaying the inevitable. Those of us who lost everything and had to start again from scratch will be the real winners.

I finally got round to washing my car today. I bring this up because it’s been at least six months. Since I moved here. Since I began my life again.

Six months of dirt and grime. It felt like I was washing away a lot more. It felt like a purification, of sorts. Sweeping the trash away. Seeing the sparkling underneath.

I spend a lot of time in that car, commuting as I do through town and country. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an adult, it’s that you’d better invest in a car you like. You’re going to be spending a lot of time in it.

Also: avoid mad women, don’t drink too much, put something by for a rainy day, no setback is ever permanent, no state of being lasts forever.

In fact, I’ve finally learned what my parents were trying to tell me all along.

Richard Allday