• 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/2009/12/07/shitty-shitty-copenhagen/ http://thethingis.co.uk/2009/12/07/shitty-shitty-copenhagen/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:12:45 +0000 admin http://thethingis.co.uk/?p=477 Hippies. If there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s all of you lazy, self-righteous, uninformed, piss-ignorant hippies. You know, the sort of prick whose heart strings get tugged every time they see an Action Aid ad of some tree getting cut down in Africa. Well, It’s the first day of Copenhagen today and the hippies are out in full force.

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

This thought occurred to me after reading about a project that uses hard disks to detect earthquakes. The project relies upon the fact that hard disks have vibration sensors so they can shut themselves down when they experience forces that might otherwise damage them. Individually, a hard disk’s vibration sensor isn’t sensitive enough to detect earthquakes, but if they are connected to a network of computers that all share vibration information the collected data can be used to locate the epicentre of an earthquake, and even possibly give warning that an earthquake or tidal wave is coming.

In the future a similar idea might allow the detection of cosmic rays, because of the way they affect memory in computers. It’s always hard to know how the public will react to privacy issues, as Facebook demonstrated when they tried to introduce their ‘Beacon’ advertising plan. I would be happy to share any information my computer gathered on earthquakes or cosmic rays: in both cases the information would go to a worthy cause (saving lives and science) and no useful personal information is given away.

Mobile phones with GPS may soon become similar sources of data — Nokia has a speculative design for a mobile phone that would gather information about the weather, and a phone with a radiation detector that could be used to alert authorities to possible terrorist activity has also been mooted.

Another example of this is a sat-nav system which transmits information about vehicle speed back to a central point. If several cars are seen to decelerate in a particular place then it’s likely that there’s a traffic jam and the system can then relay this information back to drivers so they can avoid it.

Of course there is a correlation between how revealing information is and how likely people are to share it, so this kind of data sharing is always going to be limited in scope. My decision to share data is also affected by how it will be used. For example, I wouldn’t be prepared to share anything that might be commercially useful unless I received money for it, and event then I’d be reluctant.

This will probably limit the application of the concept of gathering large amounts of data from personal electronics to science but some more frivolous applications come to mind.

For example, it’s possible to detect a person’s mood by using software to analyse the tone of their voice. If mood data (gathered during phone calls) were transmitted to a central mood processing centre it would be literally possible to “capture the mood of the nation”. To get a statistically relevant model only a tiny fraction of phone users would have to agree to have their mood anonymously reported.

Obviously most of the time, and in most places, it would be very random. However, it might be possible to see a small community that had suffered something tragic, or to map fear in an area of a city that had experienced a crime wave. Politicians might watch the national mood graph to see how announcements went down; economists might take the national mood into consideration making predictions.

I’m sure there are many other potential uses that are too bizarre to even imagine, and I’m not sure I want to be able to refer to a map of the mood of the nation — it would certainly be an interesting experiment though.

As gadgets with environmental sensors become more and more ubiquitous and a greater number of devices have access to the internet, aggregating this kind of anonymous personal data will become increasingly easy. It’s never very easy to know how people will feel about sharing information; still it may not take many people to get a statistically relevant sample size.

One day we might get used to our kettles reporting levels of chlorination to the Environment Agency or the hoover sharing data on airborne bacteria. This kind anonymous data sharing has many obvious benefits – but experience suggests that the ready availability of data frequently comes with unexpectedly intrusive repercussions.

Jimmy Tidey

What interests me is the way there has been an absolute seismic shift in our attitudes towards drugs, drug-taking, and drug takers in the last ten years. This week’s Horizon was titled, somewhat provocatively, ‘is alcohol worse for you than ecstasy?’ The programme itself was somewhat dull – little more than a televised summary of last year’s paper in the respected medical journal The Lancet – which suggested, rather unsurprisingly to anyone with even a whisper of medical knowledge – that the current system of drugs classification is based on little more than hearsay and scaremongering.

What really caught my attention was the public reaction. Or rather, the lack of it. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to even air something like Horizon. A decade ago, in the wake of the Leah Betts furore, it would have been controversial, to say the least. The programme received some gentle mocking in Wednesday’s Times for its ‘top of the pops’ style countdown to the most harmful drug, but no real criticism. Not even the tabloids touched it. I mean, come on – where’s the hysteria? Where’s the outrage? The BBC all but advocated the legalization of a class A drug this week, for Christ’s sake… come on! Surely that’s got to register?

Okay, so maybe you’d expect The Mail to be too busy chasing Mad Mullahs, bent traffic wardens, or whoever else their bogeyman du jour is right now. But not even The Sun went for it. They did, however, run with a front page splash about Amy Winehouse’s ongoing battle with crack cocaine. So it seems that while it’s not big news when a major, taxpayer funded institution advocates illegal drugs, prurient speculation about the self-destructive impulses of the rich and famous is still cool. In terms of attitudes, that strikes me as a big shift. Why is one big news and not the other? The answer is obvious. Drugs aren’t big news any more. But celebrity is – just as it always has been.

Why have we suddenly become so relaxed about drugs? Is it the effect of this £200 an ounce super skunk we keep hearing so much about? (Note to any journos reading this: if you paid 200 on the oz, you got ripped off.) I can’t help but wonder if it’s because taking drugs has become boring and middle class. It is, as Noel Gallagher once quipped, as ‘normal as having a cup of tea.’ If you think back to how controversial that statement was in the press at the time – and consider that’s exactly what Horizon spent an hour telling us this week – you can see just how much mainstream attitudes have changed.

Once the preserve of the very poor, the very rich, and the very dangerous, drug-taking has become, dare I say it, acceptable. Everybody knows someone who does or, at the very least, has. And society hasn’t crumbled yet. But is this complacency a good thing? Middle class dalliance means that most people – including those journalists who now shape the mainstream media – will brush with drugs but rarely see its most debilitating effects. This tends to strike those who take drugs to excess. Generally, these people are still either very poor or very rich. Either way, they’re usually pretty desperate. They’re rarely journalists.

I’m not anti-drug. I’m not pro-drug, either. I’m pro-freedom. Provided you’re not hurting anyone else, I don’t think it should be my business – or the state’s business – what you or Amy Winehouse or anyone else puts into their systems. But I am anti-complacency. I’ve seen people use ecstasy and cannabis – even heroin and crack – experimentally, without any serious long term effects. But I’ve also seen all four of those drugs destroy people’s lives. Addiction. Ill health. Insanity. All linked to one word: excess.

Some drugs, like the latter on that list, are far more likely to send people off the rails than others. But until we start treating all drugs as potentially dangerous and stop trivializing the issue with pop-culture programming like Horizon, we’ll never grow up. The nation is experimenting with drugs. Literally, and as an idea. Let’s hope we don’t push it too far.

Richard Allday

Don’t get me wrong. They’re probably a really nice bunch of guys (and gals, though it’s worth noting that their head honcho is a bloke) but ever since they formalized the miasmic coagulation of what had once been a pretty disparate, minority interest scene, the rest of us have had nothing but titty tassels thrust in our faces. This is not a good thing.

Burlesque is not in any way empowering. It does not give women the freedom to reclaim their bodies. Get this: you cannot be a feminist if you objectify your own body. If you’re up on a stage screaming ‘look at me’ you are not empowered, you are desperate — at best for attention, at worst, acceptance. Don’t try and tell me you’re a performer, or an entertainer, or even a dancer. You’re a stripper. Deal with it.

The reclamation of burlesque as an innocent exploration of feminine sexuality is a fantasy dreamed up by a post-feminist collective consciousness that has sublimated the pornographic urge of the male psyche into the supposed ‘empowerment’ of dominance via sexual means. Yet objectification it remains.

Girls on stage, think about it for a minute. Do you think anyone would want to see you get ‘em out if you were old, ugly, or morbidly obese?

No.

The world of burlesque is more inclusive than the sex industry. It has a few professionals and a hell of a lot of amateurs. You don’t need to be a pneumatic blonde or be willing to have a German shit on your chest to do it. Yes, women of varying shapes and sizes can perform, but is there anything more depressing than the stubby, slightly overweight one at the end parading around in stockings and suspenders like a closet tranny in front of a Travelodge mirror? The facts are inescapable. This sort of performance is predicated on the objectification of the female body. The fact the power dynamic has shifted away from the audience and towards the performer changes nothing. Burlesque demeans women.

Case in point, the hideous little troll I overheard down my local boozer last week telling two men about how she was a burlesque dancer, explaining (in some detail) her act. The poor thing would have looked vile even in a burlap sack if I had a paper bag over my head. Yet she seemed sensible, articulate and personable — valuable qualities in any person, let alone a potential partner. Why, then, did she feel the need to get up on the stage and do the tassel routine (always with the fucking tassels, don’t you people do anything else?). She, too, had bought into the great con that self-esteem comes not from a contentment with our own appearance (and personality) but from the approbation of others. It’s a tragedy that the way she chose to make herself feel better sets the cause of women’s liberation back every time she disrobes on stage.

Spreading out from our glorious capital city like an unacknowledged fart gently wafting through the room, burlesque has become big business, spawning regular club nights and a host of ‘professionals’ offering lessons in ‘the art of tease’ country-wide. Ultimately, it is a lie. I’m no feminist. I’m a man. I like seeing women take their clothes off. But why women would want to do this for peer acceptance is frankly baffling. We are all of us sexual beings. But do we need to get up on the stage to prove it?

So go on, girls. Flaunt that funky stuff. Does it make you feel big? Does it make up for being teased or shy or geeky in school? Fuck the lot of you. If you want to argue about it you’ll find me down the Clerkenwell Titty Bar, watching girls demean themselves for loose change. At least it’s honest. Who are you people trying to kid?

Chad Fanstor

Imagine arriving for a play with a ticket that leads you to a solitary piece of cardboard in a smelly doorway on Clapham High Street. You sit down. Slowly, you notice a few of the people passing you on the busy street are beginning to look familiar…

The irresistible allure of site-specific theatre is that it can occur just about anywhere. Clapham High Street is a hectic place more suitable for a Saturday morning shopping frenzy than a theatre production. Yet it is because of this that site-specific theatre works so well – drawing on its surroundings, physical and emotional, to deliver a unique performance.

Site-specific theatre happens at that special stage when half the audience know the score and half are wondering just what the hell is going on. If you are in the informed half of the group this division must at least double your enjoyment of the show; you get to be smugly unsurprised by whatever the production throws at you, while revelling in the other half’s initial bewilderment, surprise and enjoyment. It is not a new genre, but it is taking on a whole new sense of cool. With recent productions taking place in sites as diverse as disused warehouses and busy train stations, it has moved from entertainment enjoyed just by the most avant-garde of theatre-goers to the mainstream audience.

As a theatre-form ‘site-specific’ can be briefly defined as a production that takes direct inspiration from the location in which it is performed. However, many theatre companies cheat by simply staging a traditional play in a new surrounding. I spoke to Caroline Garland, co-founder and associate director of Kilter Theatre Company, to try and clear up this issue. She persuasively argues that a true site-specific work must enter its space with no previous agenda and devise from there.

Let us return to that solitary piece of smelly cardboard for a moment. Caroline was one of those familiar faces walking up and down Clapham High Street and highlights a few moments during the play that she would describe as truly site-specific. At one point, while ‘off stage’, she rings a public telephone box and an audience member is encouraged to answer. This part of the play was devised purely because the telephone box inspired it and yet is instrumental within the work. Another scene occurs down a grimy alleyway. During the devising process, the actors were asked how this area made them feel and the result was a particularly dark scene in the play. However, with no negative implication, Caroline points out that the characters in the play were already at least partly formed before they reached the High Street and this stopped the play being a thoroughbred piece of site-specific theatre.

Instead, she argues, phases of site-specific theatre exist, starting with a straightforward production of Hamlet that is performed, for example, in a castle, through to a play that is devised entirely on-site. The cut-off point for her comes with the question of whether the play can tour. If it can, then it is not site-specific. There is considerable debate at the moment as to whether the terminology used should be changed to highlight these differences. Caroline favours ‘site-responsive’ as it draws attention to the fact that the play must be a direct response to the site it appears in.

I recently appeared as an extra in a site-specific production. The play was called Remote Patrol and was brought into being by the company Caroline co-founded, Kilter, a ’sustainable theatre company’ that engages its audiences in ‘issues surrounding the environment, social justice and English heritage’. The play was devised and performed in a disused cemetery and chapel. The production team decided to only use props created from materials they had already found in the space. A surprising array of treasures were unearthed and were then used to help form the play itself.

The result was a deeply atmospheric and moving production that made the audience re-engage with an area many knew but had neglected. By being an extra (a drone, just in case you were curious), I was able to spy on the unsuspecting audience from various concealed vantage points as they made their way around the cemetery. As I repeatedly saw what seemed like exaggerated expressions of bemusement, joy, amusement and delight, I wondered if these were the faces people normally pulled in the darkness of a traditional auditorium. How wonderful then that the audience members could express them in the open, albeit unaware they were being watched from behind a fir tree by a renegade drone…

Speaking to Caroline about this observation demonstrated exactly why she is so enamoured with site-specific theatre. With traditional theatre, the audience is never really more than a spectator; the necessary level of engagement can be very low. With site-specific, the audience is often likely to experience exactly what the actors are themselves experiencing. For example, to return to the grimy alleyway, by creating work that directly responds to the emotions felt by the actors in that space, the audience’s reaction to the alley is predicted and catered for. The physical aspect of site-specific work has a similar affect as the audiences are often literally within a hair’s breadth of their actors. As with the audience member answering the public telephone, they are frequently actively involved in the play; they become, willingly and knowingly or not, part of the cast. In her considerable experience, Caroline has found that the audience is nearly always positively surprised by these encounters. She describes the experience as an adventure that requires bravery and trust in the face of the unknown; everyone participates and comes out the end smiling.

We end our chat by discussing the future of site-specific theatre and I learn that, although it has been around for a while (its heyday was in the 70’s), it is undergoing a considerable revival, which, we both agree, is jolly exciting.

Lucy Langdon
Illustration by Robert Nicol (www.robert-nicol.co.uk)

Having worked with a number of ephemeral buildings in London, the group secured their legacy with a six-month residency in a disused car showroom and parts centre on Bristol’s Cheltenham Road. Originally squatting the premises as a reaction to the wasteful neglect of such a prominent building, the project quickly gained the support of the local community. The street-facing ex-showroom became a glass-fronted, walk-past gallery featuring the cream of Bristol’s artistic endeavours and offering an outlet for those factions of the artistic underground who could not or would not find gallery space. Other internal spaces became rehearsal rooms and the setting for workshops, talks, film-nights and various cabaret performances from the Invisible Circus – the group’s performance wing. An epic finale show ‘The Road To Nowhere’ sealed the fame of the group, the building and the ethos of the project. And a newfound legitimacy beneath the moniker ‘Artspace / Lifespace’ facilitated the group’s progression and purpose beyond a single structure.
Doug Francis – Artspace / Lifespace founder commented at the time:

“We could all be a bit more aware of the spaces around us and the potential that might lie in them. Many buildings fall into disuse easily and people will all too readily complain when these places become an eyesore, or an attraction for crime or anti-social behaviour that can damage the surrounding area. We’ve shown that all it takes is determination and commitment to a project to completely turn somewhere around and make it an asset to the community.”

The car showroom was begrudgingly returned to its owners but the point had been made. Redundant space had been recycled into a thriving, multi-use arts hub. An eyesore had been turned into an asset. To say that it had all been done on a shoestring budget would be disingenuous; Artspace / Lifespace’s means consisted of volunteerism, donation and sheer, unwavering determination.

Unofficial accreditation from the council and mentorship from various parties allied with the energised team of volunteers and affirmation of potential. After several other offers made themselves available, the Artspace / Lifespace team were offered the chance to take on the Old Pro-Cathedral and Steiner school in Clifton. They took it.

Six months on and you can see the progression the group has made from their last venture. The Pro-Cathedral is nothing short of a triumph, housing a luxurious burlesque bar / lounge room, grand theatre and colossal Cathedral altar room.

The entire project encompasses many of the cornerstones of Bristol’s creative heritage and status quo. The theatre room – its parquet floor still garnished in the faded markings of a onetime sports hall – is, quite literally, one giant mural. Graffiti artist Xenz has spent many hours atop a scaffold tower adorning the walls with overwhelming vistas in implausible detail. It truly is a Sistine Chapel for the 21st century, its themes drawing from those of the project itself: beauty from decay; use from disuse.
Artistic Director Doug Francis took a moment out of his seemingly endless schedule to pass on a few words:

“We’ve received some financial help this time round. The developers Urban Creation have been hugely supportive and we have a great working relationship. We’ve also received support from the Arts and Business fund, the Scarman Trust and the Arts Council. But it’s still been really hard for us. We’ve really only managed it on the strength of the people who’ve helped out and given their time. That continues to be the case every time we put on an event… We are very excited about our winter season at the Pro-Cathedral. We feel that now is a crucial time to re-establish the creative profile of the city and lead by example, to some degree, in combating urban decay and environmental degradation nation-wide, with a fresh creative approach to an old social problem.”

The Pro-Cathedral is now a fully-fledged venue, having just been granted its full licence. Running under a temporary licence up until now, all of its shows and performances have sold out. With Bristol’s Old Vic theatre currently closed indefinitely, the Tobacco Factory theatre calling for financial support and Bristol Hippodrome cancelling shows due to “poor ticket sales” perhaps it is precisely Artspace / Lifespace’s idiosyncratic brand of participatory culture that is needed to motivate and inspire the masses.

Ed Williams

So what’s in store for our post-peak lives? I recently attended a Peak Oil talk at the Bath Royal Literary and Science Institution where I learned the answer….

Humanity loves to think about the future. A glance at the sci-fi sections of any book or film store will prove this. Representations of the future broadly fall into two categories: either we have moved forward hugely in our scientific way of life, or we have regressed to a more primitive level of civilisation.

This first vision, where technology and humanity co-exist (with or without tension), is normally a bigger, more powerful and shinier version of today’s world with robots to do the washing up, personal ‘copters and silver buildings stretching off fluidly into the distance. Blade Runner, Brave New World and Futurama all offer varying versions of this future. The problem with this type of future (despite the obvious lack of harmony present in all three examples) is the simple fact that we lack the energy to reach it. All fossil fuels are finite and the most important ones (oil, coal and natural gas) are peaking. Unless a new sustainable form of energy is discovered and implemented within the next five years (the doomsayers claim it is already too late), we will have to massively reduce our energy consumption just to survive.

‘What about biofuel?!’, I hear you cry. Well, maybe, it’s definitely a possibility, and the same applies to renewable sources of energy. However, right now, there’s nowhere near enough investment in either ‘solution’. Furthermore, many green thinkers are concerned about the various side-effects of biofuel, the most significant being the ‘food vs. fuel’ debate: I, for one, would rather cycle to work than die of starvation in a traffic jam.

The second generic vision of the future offers a hugely altered but, again, recognisable society, where economical, social, political or natural collapse is found in various cheerful combinations. Waterworld features life on a flooded earth, Mad Max pictures a petroleum- impoverished society suffering from a breakdown in civil order and Twelve Monkeys describes a life forced underground by a deadly virus on the earth’s surface.

Not a great choice then: the first is unachievable unless we discover and implement some radical new form of non-carbon, sustainable energy within the next five years, and the second is less than optimal for the majority of the world’s population.

But wait! There is a third choice! Sarah of Transition Bristol (part of an international movement that aims to respond to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and climate change in towns and cities) offers the suburban lifestyle of Wallace and Gromit as the vision of the future we should be aiming towards. With its close-knit community and love of organic vegetables, this way of life is wholly sustainable.

The opening credits of the feature-length film Wallace and Gromit: The curse of the Were-Rabbit pan across a series of pictures of the pest-fighting duo. The couple begin by smiling but then become annoyed with one another and move into separate frames. Peace is restored by the small act of Gromit knitting a new stripy tank top for Wallace, thereby doubling his collection. In a post-peak world where the three r’s of green thinking, reduce, reuse and recycle, are expected to become a more staple way of life, this homely harmony is an ideal model of a more restrained lifestyle. For example, the home knitwear and the terraced housing of this nondescript Northern town will help keep heating use to a minimum.

Wallace and Gromit’s local community is based around the parish and the well-respected bobby patrols the streets at night. Many scenes in the film take place in the terraced backyards of the community where all space is judiciously devoted to the organic growth of vegetables- not many air miles there. A Giant Vegetable Competition is held annually at Tottington Hall and the locals take enormous pride in their entries and in their pursuit of the much-coveted Golden Carrot award. This kind of annual celebration of vegetable growth would be a key feature of any Transition Town’s community spirit: Think big, act local.

Problem solved! There we have a ready-made vision of the future that is neither unachievable nor catastrophic. Or do we…? What if, like Wallace, you don’t really like vegetables and would prefer to dine on Stinking Bishop- a cheese with, no doubt, an energy-inefficient production process? Gromit’s disapproving looks at Wallace’s expanding waistline and the community’s obsession with vegetables create a desperate situation for our poor hero and, in a rather sinister turn of events, he resorts to mind control to conquer his apparently inappropriate urges.

Does this not tell of a community fixated with conformity? The result is the creation of a monster (the Were-Rabbit) who is, quite literally, forced underground to survive. As the plot thickens we are subtly presented with a version of Frankenstein’s creature- the misunderstood beast brought into existence against its will, shunned by society and forced to survive through theft and violence. Denied a real partner he resorts to abducting the local totty, conveniently named Totty, and holds her ransom atop Tottington Hall in a scene evocative of King Kong.

Not then, the environmental utopia it first appears.

So, you have your choice: a cheese-free, vegetable-obsessed nanny state or a guerrilla style existence in a flooded/deserted/anarchist world (delete as appropriate). I wonder if we need to commission some more variations on our visions of the future.

Lucy Langdon

Enjoyed this? Or perhaps you’re terrified by the thought of a cheese-free future. For an altogether different take on the future, check out our interview with futurologist Ian Pearson.

We hear so often about the explosion of blogging on the internet, but then there’s also the flickr feed, delivering a constant stream of your photos to the world, not to mention YouTube.

Or how about a phenomena sometimes referred to as microblogging, best exemplified by Twitter? Fed up with the glacial pace of your blog? Never fear, because Twitter allows you to deliver a blow by blow account of your day: a therapeutic letting of the bodily fluid that is the stream of consciousness. What you see, what you think, and what you do can all be turned into a preformatted flow of data. As far as I know, no one has quite hit the nail on the head for the “where you are” feed — yet. Don’t worry; this gap in the market will make some trendy Californian nerd very wealthy indeed.

It seems natural to wonder what the zenith of this might be. Are we heading for a Google powered Vulcan mind-meld? What does this amount of exposure to someone else’s psyche mean? The national telecommunications network is already called the UK Spine, and could well go on to form the central nervous system of some collectively conscious beast with a cortex stretching from Exeter to Hull. It’s easy to imagine various parts of the UK responsible for different aspects of brain function. Soho, for example, would certainly be the cerebellum and take charge of all of our most basic functions while Glasgow would doubtless be responsible for our fight or flight mechanism. Presumably more the former than the latter.

I’m genuinely terrified of what might happen if the government were to make (more) use of access to the quantity of personal data that will soon either be knocking around on the web, or gathered through CCTV, road pricing, mobile phones, ISPs, credit cards, and so on to infinity. Anyone who doesn’t fear this must, presumably, trust the intentions of government. I can understand this illusion- I don’t imagine that Our Dear Leader sits in a swivel chair, stroking a cat and pondering some diabolical scheme. But collectively, when the minds of the polity fix on some warped vote harvesting scheme, they are less than rational. In fact, many aspects of policy at the moment are, if you are honest with yourself, bonkers. But I’d better stop short of a polemic against the government because I don’t want you to think I’m a nutcase. And besides – they might be watching…

We can, however, take heart in the thought that in the gestalt entity which is mooted here we will be exactly as responsible for oppressing as being oppressed. We will have all merged into one, but in ourselves we would not be conscious of anything. A government sponsored pogrom would be analogous to a Freudian exercise in memory repression rather than an actual human rights abuse.
However, to posit this all-encompassing entity is to ignore the brute fact that no amount of exposure to other people’s lives gives us even the slightest clue of what it is to be them. Many people are sufficiently familiar with one another to predict the anecdote that is about to be recounted or the justification for any given supermarket purchase. But their conscious lives remain at least nearly as much of a mystery to one another as they were before they met.

So if we‘re not concerned with the outlandish possibility of consciousness migrating up to the level of the nation there is still another more probable consequence of our desire to record out personal lives on the web. At first Wikipedia’s entry on blogging seemed to be slightly stretching it when it compares the practise to the mass observation studies carried out by Sussex University. In those studies, many ordinary individuals were asked to submit diaries of the lives, detailing all of the mundanities that made up their routines. They were then used as the basis for investigation into various aspects of psychology.

But this is obviously exactly what the internet represents. Flickr as photo-elicitation, Twitter as word association. All of this data is searchable, often helpfully tagged and so vast in quantity as to be statistically unquestionable. When we next experience a psychic convulsion on the scale of the Diana lunacy, psychologists will have a field day. Imagine – comparative studies of different nations’ reactions, tracing the views of all those who link to the same news story, or studies of what activity men and women engage in as the news unfolds – the possibilities are limitless.

A cataloguing of the human mind in much the same vein as the human genome project would surely ensue. Our humanity diminished, our knowledge increased. Quantified, tabulated and analysed, a society’s reaction will be predicted by a statistical-psychology in the same way that the average behaviour of molecules can be used to explain pressure and temperature in a gas. The selection of a prime ministerial candidate and the design of new brands of cereal will be orchestrated by men wielding apathy-elasticity graphs and quoting the marginal bathos of the south-east.

In the same way that we know the climate’s getting hotter, but we still don’t what the weather will do next week, information on your behaviour might not exist, but groups of people will be easily second guessed. Would it be taking it too far to suggest that what we consider free will could turn out to be the random margin of error in a statistical sociological model? I would say no, but then I’ve always suffered from a high modulus of exaggeration.

by Jimmy Tidey
Illustration by Jack Noel.

When Marcus arrives our introductions are delayed by Butch, his Staffordshire hound and the pub dog, Morris, getting acquainted. After a couple of minutes patiently watching the enthusiastic pair sniff each others’ arseholes we opt for a more civilized handshake and a ‘how do you do?’ So far, so British. Marcus’ look is less traditional; it encompasses a curious mixture of masculine and feminine styles, he has a precisely shaved head, large metal spikes protruding from each nostril. Yet one of his eyes is smudged with black eyeliner and he’s wearing mascara and perhaps even false eyelashes. He also has a disarmingly direct gaze that somehow gives the impression that he is aware of being looked at, rather than looking at you.

Marcus does artist nude and Fem/Dom fetish modelling, which means he dresses as a female dominatrix. Although not particularly feminine Marcus prefers wearing women’s clothing when he’s being photographed; ‘even early on when I’d go to Fetish clubs I’d always wear a ripped wonder woman skirt or something like that; I’d never wear trousers.’ Fetish modeling is overwhelmingly dominated by women and there are even fewer male models modeling female clothing but Marcus feels that there is a market for it; ‘a lot of men find men’s clothes boring and if you’re into fetish you want to push boundaries; I don’t look like a woman when I dress up- I’ve got an androgynous appeal.’

He is keen to tell me about a night he is promoting; ‘Are you being served?’ at Casablanca’s in Bristol. ‘There aren’t any proper fetish nights in Bristol, it lacks glamour, hopefully we’ll be filling a gap in the market.’ My friends and I considered going to Torture Garden once but the only costume we could find was a monkey suit, so I ask Marcus to describe the fetish club atmosphere; ‘There are two sides to the scene -you’ve got clubs which involve lots of play and you get swingers there and a lot of sexual activity going on, but other nights like Torture Garden are more about the fashion and dressing up.’

When asked the most outrageous thing he’s done he says; ‘well pony plays pretty extreme- someone pushed a butt pug up my arse and rode me around- with reins and everything. Also I took a really full on beating by the house mistress in Subversion in London over an old 18th century rack.’ Ouch! Does he enjoy the painful stuff? ‘Its all about controlling pain and learning to switch it to a more pleasurable experience where you can enjoy the endorphins. If the body tries to resist the pain it’ll hurt more – one of the mistresses sat on my face so I couldn’t move, which helped.’ Apparently.

Is there anything he’s refused to do? ‘I got offered to go to Belgium and make a kidnap rubberist film but that involved fisting which isn’t my cup of tea so…’ Has he ever felt exploited? ‘I think everyone whores them self to some extent- ok, what I do could be seen as more obviously whoring yourself.’ Could you compare yourself to a glamour model? Do you feel you have anything in common with Jordan? ‘No the whole thing that interests me about fetish is the depth of images, the subtext of the situation, eye contact, its not just about naked bodies. – it’s about capturing an essence and simmering sexuality.’

Still, the majority of fetish photography consists of beautiful women posing provocatively with not many clothes on. It’s designed for men to wank over; not such a far cry from regular pornography. There seems to be a sense that Marcus is talking himself out of this; when I ask him why he does fetish modeling he says cheekily; ‘Cos I’m a perv.’ He quickly changes tack; ‘I studied a degree for communications studies and media culture and I looked at aspects about sexuality in that – I think sex and sexuality encompass so much of what the world is about and anyone who doesn’t recognise that is stupid.’ So fetish modeling is porn with a degree?

People seem to be able to do more outrageous things when they’re dressed up because they can forget it’s them doing it. I asked Marcus if he feels that this aspect of his work provides a sort of mask to hide behind; ‘Well yeah you could say that because the only time I did feel a bit raped is when I was doing artist nude work which had nothing to do with fetish. It feels a bit weird having someone taking hundreds of photos of your cock. With fetish images its often quite tongue in cheek – you feel more relaxed.’

So how does he feel about the fetish industry becoming more mainstream? ‘There’s a certain element of that popularization that I really don’t like, in London you’ve got a load of rich people that really aren’t into fetish but it’s very fashionable to say- oh yeah we went to Torture Garden and they’ll all spend a grand on a couture outfit and look really snazzy for the night but that’s it – that sort of bastardizes the whole thing really. But then it is enabling designers to make a living and it helps finance certain nights, you can’t be a Luddite – you have to accept that these things are going to be consumed.’ Still Marcus can see positives in the fact that people are becoming more open about sex; ‘it did make me laugh actually… I was having a threesome with a couple; I went to the shop to buy some cigarettes and the front cover of Venue Magazine said ‘Three’s allowed!’ that made me chuckle.’

Marcus meets most of the couples he has threesomes with at fetish clubs and enjoys the scene although he says that as a twenty six year old he finds that there is a lack of young people- ‘people tend to be thirty plus, people come to it later in life when they have less issues and are more relaxed within themselves, I’ve seen eighty year old men in nappies.’

The first night that Marcus went to a fetish club he instantly felt at home and felt that it fulfilled an aspect of his life that had always been missing. Fetish seems to offer people an escape from reality and their own limitations. This can place a pressure on relationships though; ‘I meet people who four years ago would have been the perfect partner but if they’re not really into the scene I know it’s not going to work.’ There’s also the danger of becoming too involved with the scene; ‘It’s quite weird if you go away for the weekend to do some work and come back – it’s a buzzed up surreal sort of world and then to go back into reality, which is pretty boring sometimes, is hard.’ To soften the blow Marcus intends to move from his house in central Bristol to a posh suburb; ‘I can get away with being more of loon up there, poke fun at every day life, you can dress up and be a bit more outrageous whereas it feels a bit stupid doing it in town- you’d get your head kicked in anyway.’ It’s certainly a full-on lifestyle, but Marcus really seems to enjoy it.

Kate Anderson