It’s rare you get people from left and right of the spectrum agreeing with each other, but when the likes of Guido and the Taxpayer’s Alliance are lining up with the Trade Unions and Labour MPs to condemn the VAT increase, you’ve got to sit up and take notice.

VAT is a regressive tax. That means it hits the poorest hardest because they spend more money on VAT chargeable items than the rich. A rich guy might not notice the cost of his shopping or his petrol rising by 2.5% overnight. But the poor, and even the middle classes, sure as hell will.

More than that, it’s just plain stupid. The economy is — just — in recovery from the worst recession in living memory. Is slapping an extra 2.5% tax on every product bought and sold in the land really going to aid that recovery?

VAT is the most offensive tax to me. Worse than income tax. Because every time I hand over a banknote to pay for something I’ve bought with my hard earned money, I’ll be thinking of a government agent dressed like a 30’s gangster putting a gun to my head and demanding 1/5th of everything I spend as “protection”. At least the income tax man only comes knocking once every year.

I’m angry about the rise in VAT. I know that Labour’s ridiculous overspending and inability to balance the books led us to this, but the rise in VAT is just plain unfair, regressive, and counter-productive to a recovering economy.

In my mind it’s the first bad move the coalition has made.

Let’s not even get started on capital gains tax. Yeah, it’s a tax on fuckwad property developers, but it’s also a tax on entrepreneurs and small business owners like me, too. The acumen to help the wider economy by growing your own business should not be punished. It’s a tax on aspiration. The government should reward people who want to get rich through hard work, not punish them.

But it’s an interesting point. Who gets clobbered more? Is it the poor, having to pay 2.5% more for pretty much everything, or is it the rich, who have to stump up over a quarter of the fruits of their labour when they come to sell their businesses? Arguably, both taxes are pretty immoral and harmful to the economy. People will buy less, and entrepreneurs will be less motivated.

In short? Whenever tax rises, the economy contracts. Whether that’s because people are buying less or working less hard is irrelevant. The British people are already taxed to the eyeballs. Is there such a thing as a fair tax? It depends on where the money is going. If we must pay tax, how come we get so little say in where it’s being used? People might actually vote for an increase in tax if, say, the money was being spent on better schools. But the majority of government projects are vast, over-managed black holes into which tax money never comes out again.

At least this government had the bottle to institute some cuts. Although as the Libertarian Alliance points out, “overall Government expenditure is set to rise from £637bn to £711bn over the five-year term – a mere £74bn increase (that’s well over 11.5pc).”

There’s a simple solution to cutting tax. Put more of the vast machinery of the state into private hands and make people pay for what they use. Should I, a single, childless man, be made to pay for your schools, or your marital tax breaks? Where’s the fairness in that? Come to think about it, why should someone who hasn’t used the NHS in years still be funding it? The British economy is closer to collapse than it has ever been. Drastic times call for drastic measures.

We can cut tax. We just have to start cutting government, as well.

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.

Richard Allday

• 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/ 3 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)

To them, this is the first day of setting right the world’s wrongs. Of saving the world from global catastrophe. To the rest of us, it’s just another way for the politicians to rip us off.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock you must have noticed the huge scandal about the CRU — the scientist boffins who’ve been cooking the books to make it look like climate change is more of a threat than it really is.

Now they’re trying to say it’s the Russian security services smearing the name of our good scientists. Well, frankly, whoever it is, they’ve done us a favour.

They’ve put these tree-hugging, pot-smoking, save-the-world-types back in their place.

The fact is, I’m gonna drive my car, eat red meat, and smoke chimney stack cigars. And I don’t give a toss what you think about it. I’ve got news for you, hippies. The world’s already going to hell in a hand cart. You’re just using “climate change” as the latest excuse to get all self-righteous on the rest of us.

And the politicians are using you. It’s in the interest of the political class to impose more laws on us. To control us, as people. The green lobby is giving politicians the chance they’ve always wanted — to have a legitimate excuse to clamp down on our personal freedoms.

Today they come for the car drivers. Tomorrow they come for the meat eaters. And don’t even think about setting foot on that plane. That’s bad. You’ll take the rest of your holidays for life in Skegness.

Science offers progress. Science offers civilized solutions. We should be researching ways of using science to improve our biosphere. We shouldn’t be using research as an excuse for returning civilization to a pre-industrialized dark age.

Sneer at me now, but see how you like it when the hippies make you give up your car for a daily commute on a bus that takes twice as long. They’d have you in a pony and trap if they could.

Fuck you, hippies. Fuck you and your carbon trading passports. Fuck you, celebrity hippies, who endorse us mere mortals brushing our teeth and pissing in the shower to save water, yet think nothing of hopping in their private jets to go stage some fucking celebrity concert about saving the world.

Most of all fuck you George Monbiot, and your shitty cabal of “green” (hardline, left wing) followers. To equate scepticism about an unproven scientific theory with holocaust denial cheapens the memory of millions of dead. It’s a cheap semantic trick used by the left. The same trick they always use. Smear your enemy as a murderous, egomaniacal bad guy, a racist, a denier… a comic book villain. It just doesn’t work any more.

I believe in individual freedom. The freedom to choose. The hippies would limit our freedom, would limit our nations’ growth, would limit industrial progress — that’s the reason you’re reading this right now instead of living in a mud hovel — in the name of saving the environment.

Well I say it’s time for science to pull its finger out of its arse and start saving the environment for us. Because turning the clock back isn’t an option.

Make no mistake. The Copenhagen summit is nothing more than a bloodletting excuse for bleeding-heart liberal guilt. It’s a wallet-lightening experience where rich nations will be forced to shed bucketloads of their citizens’ cash just because some phony doctors have cooked up a statistical model that says industrialization might cause some sort of harm to the environment. Maybe. Possibly. We’ll have to check the figures. Which we won’t show you. Which we’ve accidentally destroyed.

Fuck off, hippies. On your bike.

Chad Fanstor

I suppose the first colour in my wardrobe came when someone sent me a demo tape of some early Interpol recordings back in 2001, and I was just blown away that there might be more to life than two albums and a tragically short career.

Okay, so listening to Interpol wasn’t exactly opening my door to all the colours of the rainbow, but it was at least the adoption of some muted shades of contrast, a chiaroscuro landscape out of which I could finally begin to imagine life beyond the travails of a lonely teenager. Then of course it happened. I got into electronic music via way of Radiohead’s Kid A (2001) when someone said “yeah, they’re good, but they’re just copying Aphex Twin.”

I felt like a musical philistine. From that moment I set forth with one goal in mind — to become a musical elitist. I think I studied the music of Autechre harder than I studied for either of my two degrees. I still didn’t get it. There was a reason for that, as I would find out years later, doing an interview with them via email — they were just pretentious posers. Like me. Or like what I wanted to be.

I would sneer. Believe me, I would sneer. If you didn’t understand the cultural implications of the breakcore movement and hold it akin to revolutionary Marxism, based on a semiotic analysis comparing and contrasting it to the proto-punk movement, you were in trouble. Of course, you were sitting there rolling your eyes and wishing I would put some Pink Floyd on. Or some Eminem. Or whatever. Anything that wasn’t going to induce an aneurysm.

I’m not sure when exactly my fall from grace happened. I could tell you, for example, that Rachel Stevens 2005 hit ‘Some Girls’ was sampled from the Timelords (who were, of course, the KLF) 1988 ‘Doctorin the Tardis’ and that that track was itself based on a sample from Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock n Roll part II’ — but you wouldn’t catch me tapping my toe to it. Musically, I was still dressed in black, only now it was the skinny jeans and tight t-shirts of the self proclaimed artiste (naturally I dabbled in Logic Pro) rather than the gothic trenchcoats of my youth.

Don’t get me wrong. I still go mad for an experimental album. Scott Walker’s 2006 masterpiece, ‘The Drift,’ still rates, I think, as one of the finest albums of the last decade, perhaps forever. But it’s so avant-garde it’s practically art, not music at all, and certainly not pop. Something in me changed. Maybe it was reading Gary Mulholland’s This is Uncool in late 2005. It’s a beautiful book — acting as advocate for the 500 greatest pop songs you should’ve heard and never should. I think I downloaded them all. Naturally, thinking it would make me more cool.

And suddenly, there was colour. I could enjoy Slowdive, but now suddenly I could tap my feet to Hall and Oates’ ‘I can’t go for that,’ too. I suppose that opened up the door to a lot of other stuff. Have you heard Chromeo covering that song with Daryl Hall in his studio? Just beautiful. And come to think of it, have you heard any of Chromeo’s recent stuff? Pure pop perfection.

Skream seems to think so, too. That’s why he’s remixed Chromeo’s Night By Night. It’s his best track since his remix of La Roux’s ‘In for the kill’ earlier this year. And that’s about as pop as it gets. I almost found a way to stay po-faced about music forever. There’s always an insular music scene you can latch on to. I’m sure drum n bass is still going, and getting darker day by day. But I’m glad that dubstep seems to have found its sense of humour. Let’s just forget the remix of I kissed a girl ever happened… Sure, a lot of dubstep has gone pop. But there’s plenty of great serious artists out there at the moment. For the purists, there’s always Datsik,  I still don’t think Joker can put a foot wrong, and Borgore still brings a smile to my face.

The point is, I have been cured of my addiction to po-faced music. Sometimes I like it dark and dramatic. Other times, I want to blast out some heavy beats. But sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll catch me singing along to Robyn’s cover of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since you been gone’ while covering as much ground as I can in my car.

I suppose my musical journey has been very much like that of television. We thought black and white was awesome at first, but now I’ve discovered life’s so much better in colour.

Richard Allday

What we fail to realize is, this isn’t all we have to worry about. This is just the surface of a much deeper disaster. We’ve become a self-diagnosing, self-medicating, self-absorbed mess. To say it most simply: drama drama drama, we are so fucking drama obsessed.

Somehow, being fucked up has been glorified into ‘alluring tragicness’, and the worst of our generation has embraced this idea and made it a lifestyle. Drug addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, depression – the new problem does not simply lie in these actual things anymore; the issue is embodying and adopting them in order to define yourself as a person, and to attract and attach others who are the ’same’ – consequently creating social bonds which serve to amplify how driven we’ve become by drama.

The scariest factor is the thought of a generation so bored, lost, unimpressed and disillusioned that there is nothing else worth aspiring to, that there is no other worthwhile way to spend time, that self-esteem is so low the ability to form relationships with a healthy ‘normal’ foundation, has vanished.

But all this is a little too sympathetic. Because rather than popping pills for our latest mental ‘defect’, why don’t we call it a difference, call it a day, concluding “I’m just being too dramatic”? Why do we instead make such a fuss? The answer is, we WANT the drama! We crave it. We want, we need, to be fucked up. We feel special that way. We feel more interesting.

We could claim, somewhere in between too many pills and watching Twilight show us love is being saved from near death experiences, we have subconsciously learned to associate drama with happiness. We could say, I suppose you can’t really blame us when the people responsible for us were too preoccupied being their own version of fucked up.

Or
We could say, lets just stop being so fucking dramatic
and get over ourselves.

Rina B

A much deeper problem is that it’s hard to genuinely slate a piece of art without opening a can of worms. Are you really going to claim that you have the objective standard by which art can be judged? You can say you don’t like it, or that there are better examples, but would you really be prepared to say that any given piece was totally fucking meaningless? Well, my visit to the Turner Prize Exhibition left me inclined to give it a go… . Ok not really, but criticism seems to be in order.

Going to the Tate Britain at the weekend blessed me with the opportunity to observe plenty of visitors (screaming children expressed an understandable viewpoint), and as a result I was privy to much conversation. Not once did I hear anyone articulate anything that approached understanding, delight, emotional displacement or pleasure.

A notice board at the end of the exhibition which solicited the punters views confirmed a failure to engage with the works. People were mainly moved to draw cocks with the drawing pins or relate bawdy versions of nursery rhymes. You might think of that as creative reaction to the psychological whirlwind of the previous hour, but I think it’s more likely to be indicative of people bored out of their minds, with nothing about the exhibition to say.

If the works of the Turner Prize had emotion to impart, pearls of wisdom to espouse, or polemic to orate then they roundly failed to deliver their payload to the three-wheeled pram-pushing masses. But what of the experts, who are judge, jury and short-lister of the Turner Prize? Perhaps they are able to fathom some deep and complex meaning in these works, which eludes us mere mortals.

Certainly Goshka Macuga’s piece might lead us to believe we needed a higher expertise in art. Her work is about the relationship of the wives of artists Paul Nash and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famous in their field perhaps, but not names that come up around the dinner table. Not in my house anyway. Fortunately the blurb tells you what the installation is about, because if it didn’t it’s pretty clear we’d need a large team of forensic art experts to find it out. I didn’t hear anyone saying “Oh look, isn’t that Paul Nash’s wife? Do you know, I’ve always pondered her relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Roche’s other half.”

Anyway, it’s my strong suspicion is that whatever degree of prior knowledge you had her sculptures constructed form the steel and glass fittings normally used as banisters in public spaces never quite aspired to the sublime, or even the awful. They might perhaps teeter on the insipid.

Cathy Wilkes’ arrangement of female mannequins, supermarket checkouts and dirty bowls of baby food do come together to indicate some kind of meaning. I don’t think I deserve a prize for guessing that her thrust (although she probably doesn’t approve of the inherently male gesture of thrusting) may have something to do with feminity. For this reason this work stands out as the winner for me – not because it’s great, just because it has some kind of meaning that I was able to discern. And for that reason I’d like to exclude it from the criticism that follows.

All of the works, excepting the mannequins, fail a test that I thought up during the extreme boredom of being subjected to Mark Leckey’s video. The idea of this test came to me by way of the post-modernist essay generator. It’s a website that automatically generates essays by stringing together randomly ordered catch phrases and buzz words from post-modernist thought. The results are convincing in the sense that they are very hard to tell apart from some genuine academic papers. I think it’s fair to say that if an essay cannot be told apart from a randomly generated one it can only be of any value by coincidence, and a very unlikely coincidence at that.

So, the Turner Prize equivalent: as a thought experiment imagine having a computer spit out a random plot for video art – or a random selection of ‘found objects’ randomly arranged for a sculpture, and see if you can tell the difference between what you imagined work and the work you are evaluating. What I’m trying to get at is the idea that you might expect a piece of art to convey some more meaning than any random arrangement of matter.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be hard to pick out a video of tuk-tuk drivers doing nothing (Runa Islam’s submission) from “coal miners learning French” or “oranges rolling down the stairs” (my random inventions). The tuk-tuk drivers may have significance and meaning, but even when I try really hard, I can’t see very much. Actually this piece may have been slightly less than random – think back to the 1997 Turner Prize winner “Frozen Policemen”. An hour long video of, you guessed it, policemen doing nothing.

Take another piece of Islam’s – a single continuous shot (I think) of some kind of workshop space. Whatever, frankly.

Perhaps a soporific and interminable video of man making inscrutable points about cartoon cats (Mark Leckey)? What about a black and white epic about the growth cycle of sorghum in China, with subtitles in binary (plot randomly generated by me)? Whatever.

What about a video of someone smashing porcelain cups? What about someone chasing a fictional greased weasel round a fetid bathroom? Can you guess which one is a real submission?

So I don’t quite want to say that these (putative) works are totally fucking meaningless. I want to say that they are about as meaningful as any other randomly chosen arrangement of matter.

Who cares? – well, it’s not the holocaust obviously – but I can’t imagine that art history will give the Turner Prize the prominence it currently enjoys.

Jimmy Tidey (Follow me on Twitter)

But the Southbank is the city’s concession to holiday makers. It might be extruded in brutal concrete, but the skate boarders, buskers, and arts institutions and their enormous bars all open their arms to the tribe of the camera and baseball cap.

All this passed through my mind as I stood on the balcony of the National Theatre, watching Addictive TV project their creative output onto the side of the building. It’s an annual event, held every summer, and it works pretty well.

When you’re already in the landscape of the tourist, with all its artifice and showmanship, having a televisual experience on a screen the size of a house is somehow appropriate. I was half expecting the Millennium wheel to roll of down the Thames and blocks of flats to synchronise their lighting with the party’s pulse.

On at least two occasions the video exactly reflected what was actually taking place. While watching a group of people pass an oversized wrap of coke around with complete nonchalance a coke snorting scene from Pulp Fiction was chopped and cut in time with the music. We cheered on a guy who clambered on to a roof underneath the screen with his pants around his ankles, only to be confronted moments later with grainy footage of football streakers.

As the evening progressed the media types seemed to melt away, and to my surprise they were replaced with the kind of people who have three festival wrist bands as tokens of their summer achievements. Passing spliffs, trampling through the wheat that was incongruously planted on the roof and drinking cans of beer. I don’t know why I didn’t expect there to be a “party” contingent, its just that it’s a bit too, well, authentic, for this kind event.

The night did have the feel of a promotional event, which I suppose it was in a sense for Addictive TV, and certainly was for the films and equipment manufactures whose footage and names made their way into the show. At the same time there was a definite twist of anarchy and a festival mentality, we even asked for “one more” at the end. It had that subcultural edge that comes whenever there are long haired young people taking drugs.

Perhaps these kids were hooked on Addictive TV, as well as the Friday night coke-athon. Perhaps that’s the worst pun ever. Either way, I enjoyed myself.

You certainly won’t be paying for services on the web – email, search or storage – and we all know how cheap illegal downloading is. Even if you want to stay legal there are plenty of zero price options through the open source (free) software movement.

Musicians may be going hungry and the software industry reeling, but I’m concerned about what it means for me.

The price of sending an email is the reason that the global inbox is wedged full of spam. If an email cost even as much as a glass of water from the tap in your kitchen spam would cease to be viable, but because it costs close to nothing to send a million emails to find one potential penis extender spammers are able to do exactly that. I might add as a corollary an invitation to a thought experiment – how much less time would you spend writing and reading pointless emails if you had to spend a bit of money on each? If Benjamin Franklin’s time-money equivalence holds then might free email not be a false economy?

Email might be the most notorious abuse of zero cost communication, but there are plenty of others. Technorati (the blog search engine) indexes 112 million blogs, that’s one for every four English speakers. I’m not convinced that every one of the 1.6 million posts that it records every day is a valuable addition to the body of human knowledge. And Twitter – how can I say this more eloquently than its name does? – is hardly going to be running the Library of Alexandria close in terms of accrued intellectual achievement.

Copying content already available, writing for the sake of it and pointlessly echoing the opinion of others aren’t unfamiliar criticisms of the blogosphere. But even that content is a step above the one-off “welcome to my blog” posts which are probably the beginning and the end of thousands of blogs a day. All because starting a blog requires no monetary commitment.

There is a cost to hosting a webpage – it’s pretty low though, and this is another issue on the internet. When you are looking for information on the web how can you tell if a web page is genuine, legitimate and trustworthy or if it is maintained by a poorly-informed crackpot? If it’s an eCommerce site, how can you tell if it’s the real deal or a phishing skam run from a bedroom in Cambodia? It’s hard, because copying even the most elaborate webpage costs basically nothing.

Banks used to have impressive buildings to convince customers that they were there to stay and a safe vessel for your money. The tiny cost of building a webpage means that no such signalling is possible. This clearly makes the web an even more treacherous place for veracity.

Of course the idea of regulating the internet is as impractical is as it is repellent; I’d argue it’s least interesting to consider that having to pay for something has an upside.

Internet VCs, the Klondike prospectors of our day, have even coined a name for this phenomena. “The Penny Gap” – the massive increase in demand that occurs when something goes from costing even a single penny to free.

There is a simple reason for this. No matter how fantastic your product, most people don’t want it and they won’t pay anything for it. There’s no product that even comes close to be in demand by half the worlds population. However, if the product is free then a good many of people who don’t want this product will take it. Why? Because they can or because they’ve made a mistake, because it’s the quickest way to find out what the product actually is, or because other people have mentioned it. These are all types of people who have no demand for the product, and no want to satisfy.

Of course it’s not that simple, and advertising revenue throws something of a spanner in this analysis; none the less, the essential signalling mechanism of our society’s desires – price – has been neutered on the web.

“Spit” is the newest kind of unsolicited contact – Spam phone calls over VOIP (Skype and the like). It’s very hard to combat because, unlike email, there is not very much time to analyse whether an incoming call is “spit”, and being audio it’s much harder to filter. No doubt as the internet becomes more pervasive so will unsolicited contact.

It strikes me as a bizarre inversion of the problems of the command economy: on the internet we all have to wade through piles of spam just to get what we want, exactly as Russians queuing to bread (okay, I’d rather have spam than an empty stomach…). In Russia demand and supply didn’t equalise because the government would not allow prices to rise, on the internet we refuse to let prices rise because of our mindset — which is made possible because providing, for example, an email service costs very little. Instead of an inefficient allocation of limited bread, we end up with an inefficient allocation of limitless email.

What should be done? I think I’d probably be happier paying a tiny amount for my online services, just to make all the pointless chatter to go away, much less obvious is how such a system could be enforced, and I’m the last person to advocate regulating the internet…

Jimmy Tidey (Follow me on Twitter)