A few years ago, in a fairly juvenile period of my life, I was living with ‘the lads’. We were’t laddy lads, but we did like Mario Kart and PEZ… It also transpired that we liked Weetabix. We liked them so much I decided to let Weetabix know of our adoration for their product.
From: ME (removed my email to stop spam) Sent: 21 March 2008 17:20 To: ConsumerService [at] Weetabix.Com Subject: Media/Press enquiry
Query Text:
Hello,
This morning I ate 6 weetabix, quite a feat in this house of three young chaps. The event caused a debate, how many weetabix can you eat in one go? We were interested to find out and began our research, only we were disappointed to find out that there isn’t currently a world record. We don’t have a target to aspire to, and thats a shame, but then we realised that it was actually an opportunity.
In one go, we reckon we can get through 12, but we’ve not tried it yet. We want to set the record, and we want your help to do it. We want the world to see our world record attempt, and we want to document our training. How about we put the whole thing online and make it go viral? The more we thought about it, the more excited we got about it and thought up many amazing things we could do surrounding the record attempt.
If you’ll endorse us, we want to throw down the gauntlet on weetabix, we want to set the record for others to never break. What do ya say? The internet will love it, you’ll get great viral advertising, we get the record, and the adoration of the weetabix community.
Help us to help you!
Phil (The reining weetabix champion)
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From: ConsumerService@Weetabix.Com Sent: Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 4:25 PM To: ME (removed my email to stop spam) Subject: Media/Press enquiry
Dear Mr Harper,
Many thanks for your enquiry.
We do not maintain records for Weetabix consumption, either in ‘one go’ or over a period of time. We feel eating any food in excessive amounts, short or long term, is unwise and should be avoided.
As part of a healthful, balanced diet Weetabix are great but we take no part in attempts to eat them, or indeed any of our products, in large quantities. We advise against any such activity.
Yours sincerely
Dan Herrin Consumer Services Manager
Weetabix Limited
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From: ME (removed my email to stop spam) Sent: Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 8:11 PM To: ConsumerService [at] Weetabix.Com Subject: Re: Media/Press enquiry ref 419356
Dear Mr Herrin,
In light of your stern and solemn response my friends and I have become somewhat discontented with the weetabix brand. Our excitement for your product was quickly diminished the moment your email graced my inbox and bored everything it touched. We thought that your working in an environment as stale as a weetabix factory would make your desire for nonchalant and jovial banter grow exponentially, evidently this is not the case and the factory has ground you down into a lifeless cog, and that’s a shame.
Our disappointment at Weetabix’s lack of interest in their fans has given us no option but to move on to another brand. They’re called Wheat Biscuits and they’re made by the good chaps at Somerfield, no doubt they stole the creation from you but nonetheless they’ve done a mighty fine job of it. There won’t be a world record for Weetabix eating, there will only be a world record for Wheat Biscuit eating, and guess who’s loss that is.
It’s been more than a week since I got back from Glastonbury, and I’m only just coming round to the bitter monotony that we call reality. My entire year builds up to, and winds down from that festival and that idea got me thinking; wouldn’t it be great if Glastonbury lasted longer than five days? I started to write down some ideas, and before long I’d written nine or ten pages. The next weekend I met with some ecologically concerned friends and my ideas went into overdrive. No matter what you may think of these ideas, I thought I’d be doing myself an injustice if I didn’t at least get them down on paper. It’s taken me a long time so the least you can do is read them all, treat this article more like a short book than a blog post, grab a coffee and settle in. I give you, Glastonbury City.
That Glastonbury Thing
Happening at the height of summer – usually within a few days of the solstice – there is something ritualistic and maybe even pagan about Glastonbury. The first time I went there in 2005, summer solstice happened on the first day of the festival and a parade of sun worshiping hippies marched past the Pyramid stage banging drums, carrying flags and recruiting bystanders to their pagan ritual up at the stone circle – it was a moment I won’t forget.
There’s something in those Somerset hills that comes home with you, a taste in the collective psyche of your fellow campers that warms your heart for the full five days. Altruism flourishes like spring blue bells, infecting everyone from the moment they set foot on Somerset’s sun warmed orchards. But however magical and wondrous that thing is, it dies slowly but surely over your summer until the dark nights of September set in and your aspirations shift away from the sun-toned Somerset hills and nose dive headlong into a beer puddle that shields you from the aggressive British winter. That’s the transition you feel so painfully each and every year you walk off Eavis’s farm; from spiritual to survival. From how I’d like it to be, to how it is.
Glastonbury is a rite of passage that convinces you until you feel it in your stomach that the world could and should be a nicer place. For five days, never ending commuters crusade onto Worthy Farm to be transformed, they cast aside their shackles of cynicism and see the world as it could be, and maybe they see the world as it should be. There are still hints here and there of the old world – there’s rubbish, but at Glasto it seems to be organised, it’s all recycled and people really play their part. There are still police officers walking around, reminding you that outside the city walls authority remains king, but inside the city walls, the police officers themselves can’t help but get caught up in the existentialist experience that surrounds them. Take these two for example, I spotted them talking to a chap smoking a spliff whilst asking if there was a pharmacy nearby. The spirit of Glastonbury rose above the authority of unworkable laws and it gave birth to two humans posing in non-human uniforms, and look how pleased they are! They’ve subtly hinted with their wacky spectacles that they too have been transformed into beings of a higher spiritual order. They’ve unified with their other, with me and you. I fear their crash back into their concrete reality will be felt harder than anyone else’s, but despite the vicious bump, I’m convinced they remain transformed. That’s why people flock to Glastonbury each year, to nurture their other self, their more charismatic, caring, fun loving, sun worshipping, friend cuddling self, only to neglect it again throughout the rest of the year. They want to be transformed.
With thousands of people carting in supplies, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, the gathering feels biblical in scale. It feels akin to the plight of the North Pacific salmon, who put such colossal efforts into their fresh water pool parties in Northern Canada, only to die en masse. I hope such a tragedy never ruins my beloved Glastonbury. There’s something earthy and human about Glasto, a sort of modern, godless pilgrimage to the better self. Its meaning, at least to those who take part, can hardly be over stated. In thousands of years time, a bearded post apocalyptic archaeologist will discover the site and rub his beard in wonder of what happened there. Why, he might ponder, are there hundreds of thousands of metal pegs in the ground? What significance do they have to the stone circle upon the hill? Why does the Pyramid face south? Why are there water pipes and huge troffs in the ground? Was this a site of mass sacrifice? To many, it is just a gig in a field, but history might offer it more significance.
With a capacity of 177,500, it temporarily becomes the third largest city in the South West, sitting just behind Bristol and Plymouth. Consider that for a moment; in little under a day, enough people show up to Worthy Farm to build a city bigger than Bournemouth. With some initial infrastructure already in place, the hippy masses build a city in which no one goes hungry and everyone has a roof over their head – in around 24 hours. That’s an inspiring thought – when focused we can construct magical cities in very short periods of time. It seems that for the construction of a 24 hour city we need only one thing – a shared idea that inspires and motivates. In Glastonbury’s case the end creation is so wonderful that the shared idea must be something even more inspiring than the festival itself. Anyone who’s really been to Glastonbury knows exactly what that idea is, it’s that Glastonbury…thing. It’s the guy who’ll chase you 100 meters to bring you a can of strongbow you unknowingly dropped. It’s the arm that appears with a lighter the moment you need it, punctuated with a loving nod. It’s the magical chance meetings with caring strangers whose lives inspire. It’s the tranquillity of the tipi fields overlooking the masses at the pyramid. For me, it’s the sunrise refracting through the morning mist that erupts into a celebration at the stone circle. The moments you share with the best of friends stick in your memory attached to vivid feelings, smells and emotions. A Glastonbury memory is rarely exclusively visual, so the moments stay with you forever.
Working for your weekend
People drag impossible quantities of food and supplies up hills and in the baking heat to fulfil their ambitions to feel that Glastonbury thing. They drag things for miles while the sun pounds down on their shy white skin teasing out their first sweat of the year; it’s tough work, but with the promise of that Glastonbury feeling they soldier through. They bring boats, lights, candles, sky lanterns, fire wood, poy, tipis, bikes, tuk-tuks, circus tricks, healing fields, pharmacies, shops, food, drink, saunas, theatres, make-up and make believe, dragging it miles across the country to share it with their fellow festival goers. Hard labour goes into overload before Glastonbury starts and it’s not fueled by money or the promise of material gain, it’s fuelled entirely by that Glastonbury thing. Who’d ever have thought that people would work so hard at the promise of such a great time? Money motivates, but so do shared ideas. Glastonbury is proof of that.
All sunshine makes a desert, so the ancient Chinese proverb goes. It’s an idea I’ve considered over the years, and to some extent I’ve got real meaning from it when things go horribly wrong in life. If it (‘it’ really can be anything in this argument) was good all the time, then we wouldn’t know good and we’d experience only monotony, eliminating good as a real feeling. Maybe the reason Glastonbury happens only once a year and for only five days is for this precise reason? If life was like Glastonbury all the time then it’s allure would be lost?
I’ve formed the opinion that this is nonsense. Life needn’t be exactly like Glastonbury all the time but wouldn’t it be nice to experience that Glastonbury thing in the parks and on the streets of our cities? Every morning, as you wait for the bus, someone might offer you a cup of tea from their flask – that would be nice wouldn’t it? If you were painting your house, people might appear from nowhere to help out, bringing drinks, life and a party atmosphere – that would be nice wouldn’t it? Sculptures would appear in our parks, pianos would materialise on our street corners and theatre would entertain us at our drinking establishments, all for that Glastonbury thing, and not those circular metal things that the bankers, wankers and bureaucrats currently hoard. It doesn’t take a radical mind to conclude that as things currently stand, you and I are being royally shafted by the powers that be.
We don’t need to replicate the toilets and the non stop consumption of cider, but couldn’t we somehow replicate that Glastonbury thing that comes home with you? That warm earthy feeling you get in your stomach as you drive onto Glastonbury’s car park? There’s a feeling you get at Glastonbury of kindred with your other festival goers. Surrounded by a swathe of humans all sharing your understanding of Time to Pretend, you come to an amazing realisation; that you’re not alone, that you are not just a lifeless cog in a machine, and that there are hundreds of thousands of people just like you. That feeling is the very thing that dies over the remaining weeks of summer. Why do we let it die each time the festival ends? How can we nurture it and share it with others upon our return to the normal lands? The people we share that feeling with for just five days a year are the people we should be living with full time.
The foundation of the idea. Money.
For the fairly large sum of £185 we get five days of music and a wonderland to explore. We share drinks, stories, songs and experiences, have a painfully good time then we go home. It’s a great deal because as well as the wonderland to explore, the music is probably the best in the world. I’ve often felt that for many people, the music is of secondary importance to that Glastonbury thing – it’s that Glastonbury thing we’re all chasing. If we seem happy to pay £185 to build a magical but temporary city, would we be happy to pay £185 to build something more permanent? That’s the question I’d like everyone who reads this to answer.
If everyone who went to Glastonbury this year each put £185 into a collective fund, we’d have £32,837,500. Could we build a city with that? We wouldn’t be able to pay Stevie Wonder, Muse and Snoop Dogg to headline, but we’d have enough money to build something pretty special. It’s enough money to buy most of Bulgaria if we wanted to, but it’s also enough money to buy a plot of land here in the UK – the spiritual home of Glastonbury. Is it possible that we could build a permanent Glastonbury? A spiritual theme park? A tall task, but whatever your thoughts lets start with what we know to be true. The team at Glastonbury Festival can build a substantial infrastructure, employ an army of 30,000, pay thousands of performers to entertain the crowds and still cut a profit at the end of the year using just that ticket fund. With a few priorities shifted here and there, what could a team of 177,000 build with thirty three million pounds? We can already build a Glastonbury Festival, so what are we capable of building if we approach it slightly differently? I’d cross jungles to hear other Glasto goers ideas on what we could build. What if we designed a festival that had an end product – a gift to the world, a place for people to come and visit and share in that Glastonbury thing all year round. These questions ignite my imagination into overdrive.
From Primaculture to Permaculture
How many people reading this blog took more than one packet of baby wipes to Glastonbury? At Glastonbury City (the name I’ve coined for a much longer Glastonbury festival) you’d take a flannel, and it would last the entire festival, no matter how long it lasted. How many people took boxes of museli snack bars, biscuits and bread? At Glastonbury City you’d take seeds and you’d learn to grow and harvest them and the lovely folk down at the tipi fields would show you how to make the most wonderous snack bars the world has ever seen. A huge proportion of what we cart up those hills to Glasto are products wrapped in the excesses and wastefulness of the culture we’re desperate to escape. I hate to say it, but Glastonbury Festival is to gatherings what Primark is to clothing; it’s epic in scale, but ultimately it’s throw away and wasteful. Glastonbury is Primaculture and it needs to be Permaculture.
What if, rather than the Primaculture structures of Tesco tents, we took the time to build something that would last longer and be more comfortable? Something that adds to the surroundings rather than takes away from them? It might require an additional amount of labour initially but with ambitions to last longer than 12 months, Glastonbury City would require some more substantial housing. To do this, there would have to be a huge increase in the use of Tipi’s but another solution might be a new type of structure called an Earthship. Earthships are a type of passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials, they generate their own power, they’re warm in winter and cool in summer, and they process water in a way that allows plenty of vegetables and plants to be planted nearby. Even more amazing is the way they are built, by collaborating with friends and using materials you can get for free or very cheaply all over the country.
Friends often opt to camp in large tents of five or six at Glastonbury, they spend a few hours erecting their large tent so that over the next few days they can play happy families and have fun in their temporary home. Even more common is a large group of friends building a miniature tent commune that consists of five or six tents with a happy sitting area in the middle. A similar thing could happen at Glastonbury City, with groups of five or six building an Earthship to live in over the next 12 months. The initial investment in putting up your accommodation would be greatly extended, but consider this additional building time in the context of a festival that lasts more than year, a festival with ambitions to create an eco city that stands the test of time. If one day of building and dragging supplies up hills is deemed a good deal for five days of Glastonbury Festival, a four week building stint for 12 months of that Glastonbury thing might be just as good a deal, I for one would sign up tomorrow! If we were to represent the potential for greater enjoyment visually, it might look something like this:
Food, land and the economy
Now, we’d all be blind eyed fools if we thought that the 260 days of “Woo! Glasto!” could happen with just two weeks prudence and saving. If Glastonbury festival were to last longer than 12 months it would need a sustainable economy for festival goers to be a part of. It could be an economy with ambitions to make a modest profit with sustainable growth, allowing for more and more people to join the festival over the year, or it could be a completely sustainable economy that takes out exactly what it puts in. Whatever was decided, Glastonbury City would need a way to support itself, because 340 days of consumption dependent on imports would be an ecological, economic and hedonistic disaster on a biblical scale. Think the end of Rome littered with empty cider cups. It’s certainly a tall order to drum up an economy from scratch but lets humour the idea and start with the fundamentals. The highest thing on the agenda should be food production, would you agree? If so, the question that needs answering is this; could a collection of people as large as Glastonbury become self-sufficient in food production?
Current farming practises, at maximum capacity and using every trick in the book, can feed around 5 people per acre of land. That figure is based on curent western eating habits of high carbohydrates, plenty of meat, and industrial intensive farming. The downside, for us at least, is that you can’t really live on the land you’re growing food on because it contains just one crop. The colletion of earthships and tipis would get in the way of your oil guzzling tractor when you come to harvest it, we’d need a big central processing unit and everything would just get a bit messy and industrial. Living on a traditional farm Glastonbury Festival style is out of the question. There’s a reason Eavis kicks us off every year; we’d just get in his way.
There’s potentially another option. Permaculture (a settlement, gardening and food production philosophy that in recent years has really taken off) claims it can feed upwards of 10 people per acre. It requires no fertilizers, no pesticides, and after an initial outlay of labour, a permaculture system can require as little as 10 days maintenance a year. Permaculture, in a nutshell, is a system of farming that attempts to replicate nature rather than work against it. Think of it this way, if you leave a plot of land to nothing, stuff grows on it like crazy and within a year or two, you’ve got some extremely over grown land. How much effort was put into creating that growth? Precisely none, because nature took care of it for you. Permaculture is a way of bending the rules by creating mini eco-systems that compliment each other, it allows nature to do what it does best and it produces some fantastic results. The first thing I ever saw about permaculture principles was this, about a guy called Geoff Lawton who achieved the impossible on a plot of land in Lebanon. If they can do it in a desert 50m below sea level, we can do it here in the UK.
Theoretically, a Permaculture system on the 900 acre Glastonbury Festival site could support 9,000 people all year round, which is quite impressive but it’s a far cry from a festival supporting 170,000. If that idea were ever to come to fruition, an area 18 times the size of the current Glastonbury site and around half the size of Manchester would be needed – about 17,000 acres or so. You might think that finding a plot of land 26 square miles in size would be an impossible task, but you’d be surprised at what’s available.
The largest plot of land to ever go on sale in the United Kingdom has just come onto the market in rural Wales, all 23,515 acres of it. It includes a 4.75 mile long lake that’s over 140 feet deep, it has the UK’s first ever stone built damn and it’s home to a 5,000 acre forest, there’s also 90 species of birds living there, 31 cottages, and 14 leased farms. It’s certainly large enough to fit everyone in, but what about the cost? The price tag is £11 million for a 125 year lease, and I’m not really planning on being around in 125 years time so that sounds like quite a good deal! For arguments sake, lets say the Glastonbury collective bought the land using the £185 ticket fund, we would still have £21,837,500 left over to kit the place out. There would of course be a million t’s to cross and14 farmers to negotiate with but the possibility is there, right below our noses. Take a look at the potential location for Glastonbury City, the festival that aims to go the distance in time and scale. So where would you pitch your Tipi?
What you’re looking at is just part of the glorious estate that stretches over a billion square feet and houses a lake that’s visible from space. It’s incredible to think that it could be ours if we put our money together. That land could be the UK’s first ever ecocity, where pollution and overcrowding are a thing of the past. Everyone could get round on bikes or by boat along the lake, the daring amongst us could use kiteboards or windsurfs, and where trucks and vans were needed we could even process our own biofuel. For example, did you know that everyone in the country is now entitled to 2,500 litres of biofuel per year absolutely tax free? That’s the beginnings of a micro-economy right there, and micro-economies are currently all the rage in Germany. If we had the capacity to generate our own biofuel, and everyone had 2,500 litres to start with, the currency could be benchmarked against the biofuel we have created. It’s like a gold standard, only ours would be a biofuel standard.
Have you ever been taught what money is, how it works, or the history of it? They seemed to skip that class at school and as a result money has just been a constant thorughout our lives. We never question it, we don’t really understand it, we can’t imagine life without it, it’s just there, a universal constant. When you look at it a little closer you’ll confirm the niggling suspicions you’ve had all along; we are being made fools of by central banking. I don’t think you can overstate the level to which we are having the piss taken out of us. If you’ve not so much as pondered “what IS money?” then watch this film, it will take you forty minutes but it’s if there’s one thing you should watch from this blog post, it’s this video. The fundamentals present in it will, I hope, help to make a future economy that’s fair for everyone.
I don’t want to venture too deeply into the depths of creating a sustainable economy, I’m going to produce two follow up articles on this exact topic and I’m hoping I’ll get readers such as yourself to submit ideas and thoughts to the process. Just know that a sustainable economy can work but we will still need to trade with other economies, so whatever happens, Glasonbury City will have to produce something. Whether that’s cider, an eco-tourist trade, wax candles or biofuel is yet to be seen, but get your thinking caps on.
What are you doing now that’s so important?
When we crash land back to planet earth after our intergalactic trip to Glastonbury we’re left feeling like a demoralised fish who doesn’t have the energy to even flap about whilst it slowly dies in the baking sun. Our faces droop and our fingers flail at lifeless keyboards under the monotonous buzz of halogen, our sun rises and sets at the flick of a switch and our primal desire to hunt and claim food is undermined by Pret A Manger and Tesco. Everything is so catered for that to merely exist, a privilege of such atom smashing consequence, requires no fight at all. Existence becomes a series of repetitive humdrum events sewn together by desperately short booze fuelled weekends. With no problems or challenges in our physical world we create problems our mental worlds. Anxiety, stress, paranoia, depression and work addiction are all symptoms of a society that has never had it easier, it’s a society starved of meaning. Our problem is our lack of problems, our problem is a desperate lack of meaning. The only challenge we collectively have is global warming and pollution, but they feel so abstract and unfathomable that we can’t possibly feel connected to them. We can’t feel as though we’re having an impact. That’s all we want isn’t it? To have an impact? Just throw the glass in the recycling each week and maybe you made a difference.
“My job is important… isn’t it?” you might wonder.
Well it isn’t. Face it, your job is not important. It isn’t important unless you’re helping humans learn, or helping humans get better. Everything else is just sandwich filler designed to stop you leading an existence in which you question the existence of the state. Where jobs aren’t important people create myths, meaning and mantras to make them so, because it makes them feel important too. So desperate are people for identity and meaning in their lives that a demigod has risen from the flames of hell to bless the misguided amongst us with the nod of acceptance. Simon Cowell’s phrase of “you’ve got three yes’s” is our generation’s journey through the gates of heaven, only on the other side there’s nothing but a vacuous hole that sucks out your soul and sells it to a newspaper. Welcome to the rise of the idiots, people living on the fringes of popular culture holding their fingers up to a system they want no part in but with no idea for a system they’d like to take part in. Nowhere to go, nowhere to turn.
Isn’t that why we flock through Eavis’s gates each year? Because it’s a world we can feel connected to? A world we can fell a part of? If you’re looking for meaning in your life you’re not going to find it in the latest EP from a hip band who just arrived from California. It’s derivative of the vacuous culture as your own. You won’t find it on Brick Lane or on the editing room floor of a media conglomerate. Even the affluent amongst us, the people we most aspire to be, are absolutely consumed with emptiness and problems they themselves created. Amy Winehouse offers us nothing, Pete Doherty offers us next to nothing, Mark Ronson offers us nothing, and the vacant stare of Alexa Chung is nothing but an aesthetic high to temporarily plug the gaping whole in your soul. Our culture means nothing. But for five days a year, we mean everything. Our purpose emerges, and it seems to be aligned with being good to each other, being sustainable, using less mobile phones, being together and sharing new ideas stories and experiences. It’s about the construction of a better existence, or as Eavis himself calls it, “an alternative state”. If, as I believe, our generation is being strangled by the cynicism of our dying culture, isn’t it about time we started a new one? We don’t need liars, crooks, mercenaries and and thieves, we can do this ourselves.
The world is falling apart at the seams and we’re watching it happen, we’re swirling round the plughole clinging to paper thin ambitions of Bohemia. The party is over, the lights are coming on, and the venue is upside down. It’s time to etch the world we love so dearly into the hills of the Welsh countryside, permanently. There are plenty of things to think about, food production, economy, law, and everything in between, but it’s not impossible. Far from it. We’ve already put a man on the moon, we can make this happen.
I’ve made my point and now I guess this idea is in your hands. If my views have in anyway resonated with your own, if you’ve been waiting for something to shine though the sea of cynicism, maybe this is it. Sign up and then share this article into the upper echelons of the psyche sphere. I’m Phil Harper, and I’m on board.
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I’ve just heared a song by “3!OH3″ called “My first kiss (feat Ke$ha)” and was told it isn’t a joke.
I just can’t believe we’ve descended this far. Popular culture has imploded, it has spewed so much irony that everything is dripping in the putrid stench of senselessness. No one knows up from down anymore, is it a joke, is it serious, is it real? It no longer matters, the beat goes on and the DJ’s continue to play it. Maybe they’re as confused as their listeners are. Someone, somewhere, made the decision to put it on the Radio 1 playlist, evidence to confusion that has gripped our psyche and reached even the highest rungs all things pop, the playlist creators at Radio 1.
Pop culture has begun to parody the tiny fringes of alternative culture so much that no one knows what is real any more. Radio 1 DJ’s and T4 presenters genuinely thought The Ting Ting’s were an indie band, they really thought it was real. They didn’t cotton on to the Ting Ting’s being a two-strong “manchester band” in which at least one member, is not from Manchester. They didn’t cotton on when they asked them “who influences your music” and they got a giggle filled awkward response of “I don’t really know”. That was the beginning of the end for pop culture, the moment the Ting Ting’s were allowed to play the John Peel stage to rapturous applause at Glastonbury Festival was the moment the great man himself turned in his grave and the psyche of a generation nosedived into the ether. The Ting Ting’s are to indie what Il Divo are to Opera. Culturally, the shit hit the fan and its repercussions were felt everywhere.
Urban Outfitters, the “coolest” fashion outlet, now sell back mass produced “vintage” clothing to people desperate to escape the dregs of popular culture by being “alternative”. (Look how many inverted commas I had to use to make my point, irony is literally everywhere) But that style of vintage individual clothing was born out of a complete and fundamental rejection of all things mainstream for the very reasons I talked about above. Pioneers of the alternative movement decided to seek refuge in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s and created their own existentialist meaning in the clothing they decided to wear because there was no meaning anywhere else. There was no alternative culture. That movement is now prepackaged, mass produced and sold on the shelves of Primark to people desperate to get to the next Kesha gig, because SHE is the alternative goddess that will save them from the mainstream shit storm. They’ve got no idea they’re in the belly of the beast munching on irony pie, because no one has a clue any more. Is Katy Perry alternative or is she complete bullshit? No one can tell, not even Radio 1 DJ’s, because ultimately it’s all shit.
The golden days of 90′s brit pop are distant memories, even then sideline critics would have had a thing or two to say about Take That and the Spice Girls but there was something organic and natural about them that is just not present today. Take That wrote the songs themselves, the band served a purpose to screaming teenage girls, it all felt normal. Pop was a kind of music young girls could go with their mothers to watch, and it would be a shared cathartic and aspirational experience. Today we’ve have the square root of naff all to fill that requirement. N-Dubz, nothing. Kesha, Nothing. JLS, nothing. What we have now are low quality factory produced goods. Meaning lies dead in your iced water, the superficial is the sandwich filler and expect nothing but white chemically induced bread, this party is as about as interesting as smash hits magazine.
Snoop dogg rapped on a Katy Perry record. It’s over. The Ting Ting’s played Glastonbury festival. It’s over. Julian Casablancas of The Strokes recognised the problem and has begun to parody himself. It’s over. McFly, arguably one of the only decent pop bands left, are releasing a dancy grime track. It’s over.
Even those alternative folks, who’s paper thin culture has now been bastardised into pulp by the pop culture machine, have nothing left. They hardly had anything to start with but they had some bands and clothing I suppose. They skipped the “principles” part of creating a culture and just focused on taking drugs and taking pictures of themselves, but if anyone is to blame for the irony invasion, it’s them! This is the level you now have to go to visibly escape the deathly grip of popular culture. You literally have to dress like a total moron to be considered different, because even alt hipsters can’t get their heads round the idea that you can express your interestingness through avenues other than clothing. Superficial nonsense scores another slam dunk.
Finally, I’ll finish with this; Lady GaGa. She makes great pop music and maybe she offers pop a beacon of hope, but look at what she’s had to do with her image to escape the clutches of irony. Everything has been repeated to such an extent that to be new and original she had to go on Jonathan Ross with a telephone on her head. It’s the latest in a long line of batshit insane moves she’s had to make to get us to notice her, (telephone) hats off to her. She’s so different and unique that no one would dare to imitate her, apart from all of these people of course. Oh dear.
We’re at a point, culturally, where we need a rebirth. If pop culture were an etch-a-sketch, we’re now at that point when you think, “what the fuck is that?” and shake the shit out of it to start again. We should start with dropping irony and embracing meaning. Our future will look like a mental institution for the creatively insane if we continue down this path. Consider me off the broken bandwagon.
YouTube have just added a feature which I predict will become a game changer in the months to come. Users can now easily edit their own videos right inside the browser and reupload them to YouTube when they’re done. Currently, it’s just a nice feature that allows you to make better use of your own videos.
What if I upload a video and apply a creative commons license that allows people to make attributed remixes of my work using the YouTube editor? YouTube would have millions of these kinds of videos online and all of a sudden YouTube becomes it’s very own footage archive with thousands of amateur film makers stringing the footage together in new and compelling ways.
Expect an explosion in documentary, satire, comedy, art, music, news, science to come from YouTube the moment this feature is announced. People will be able to make feature length documentaries without ever having to download a single piece of video to their hard drive, and all YouTube need to do to make it happen is flick a switch to allow users to edit other peoples videos.
It’s technology like this that will eventually make the BBC completely irrelevant unless they do something drastic to catch up.
George Osborne has handed over control of financial regulation to the bank of England because the tripartite system put in place by labour ‘failed spectacularly’.
If my history serves me right it was The Bank of England who helped William Pitt the Younger kick start income tax to fund wars we didn’t need and it’s The Bank of England who profit from the interest (albeit quite a small one at the moment) on the country’s debt. It’s the Bank of England that own the IOU’s for all the quantitive easing cash that was created from thin air.
To hand control of our financial regulation to The Bank of England is to get rid of regulation all together. How many people are capable of self regulating? The same is true of business.
The move is akin to watching a playground full of children running riot at the hands of underfunded and understaffed dinner ladies and declaring, “you know what, this isn’t working, let’s leave this kid who’s building the water bombs in charge…”
Mervin king builds and supplies water bombs. He cannot be trusted to regulate them.
I don’t need to tell you about Israel’s utterly disgusting murder of innocent and unarmed civilians in international water, I would hope that you’ve heard the news already. Following a chat with my mother, I decided to do something about it by writing to my MP, David Mowat. I used the invaluable service of WriteToThem to send my letter, and I’d urge you to do the same; I’m happy for you to use my letter as a template.
Dear David Mowat,
I am writing to express my disgust over the murder of peace and charity activists in international waters this week. It follows a huge number of human rights abuses at the hands of the Israeli regime over the last decade, which in order to not write an entire novel, I won’t go into.
It appears that support for the Israeli regime remains strong amongst both Labour and Conservative politicians, with the lobbying group “Conservative Friends of Israel” boasting that “two thirds of Conservative MPs were members of Conservative Friends of Israel in 2006″.
I do not know if you are a member of the above organisation, which on the surface appears to be an group with nothing but sincere support for a regime which keeps an entire population under siege, abuses human rights, violates international law on a daily basis, and now – it would appear – murders charity workers.
Now that it’s clear that the IDF have murdered unarmed civilians in international waters for attempting to bring aid to a starving and desperate population, will you declare your position on being a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, and if you are a member, will you revoke your membership?
Second to this, I hope that you will stand up in parliament and represent Warrington’s disgust at this horrendous crime. We cannot let Israel continue to get away with murder, and if politicians such as yourself stand up for basic human rights, we may have some hope of stopping them doing this again.
It should come as no surprise that the election system doesn’t work. How is it the Liberal Democrats can win 22.9% of the nations vote, and secure only 51 seats in Parliament? Whilst Labour who won just 29.2% can secure 247 seats? It only makes sense within the archaic rules and traditions of British Parliament.
We needn’t look too heavily into the detail of why it works that way, instead lets take a very broad analysis of how Parliament works. I am Phillyharper, I live in Phillyharpers town, and I have many personal beliefs and values. I vote for Jo Crotty (whose policies are as close a fit to my own beliefs as I can find) to go to Westminster on my behalf and shout at people on the other side of the room. The ruling government make up a new law and Jo Crotty then votes on that law on my behalf.
In the name of being succinct I’m skipping over things like lobbying, political donations, cash for honours, chief political whips, expense plundering, bribery, blackmail and sleaze, but if it makes it more real you can assume that throughout that process all of the above was going on.
In a nutshell we elect people to represent us in a room full of old men who sip gin and tonic and shout at each other.
Aged 24, I’m the crashing tip of a huge wave of global youth that have grown up being able to debate anything they want, with anyone they want, anywhere in the world, instantly. I’ve grown up with a technology that provides me with crowd generated, crowd edited, and crowd distributed content tailored exactly to my interests. I’ve grown up as a major player in a digital society where my views are entirely my own and form part of a valid, powerful, and totally free social sphere. I grew up in a generation that created the worlds most accurate encyclopaedia from absolutely nothing in less than ten years. I grew up in a generation that wrote operating systems, wrotebooks, created games, made films, developed entire new worlds and generated an entire new economy – all through collaboration.
Having made so many industries irrelevant, created so much and entirely sidestepped the mass-mind right, I look at British Politics and think “Why do I need someone to represent me? I can represent myself!” The digital tidal wave has its eyes firmly set on Westminster and collectively thinks “you’re next”. It’s the logical conclusion to everything that has happened before today – we will consume politics and make it our own.
When Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia in 2001, the general consensus was “it will never work” – but he proved everyone wrong and the doubters are now laughing out the other side of their face. Even Nature Magazine concluded that Wikipedia was about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 2010, the idea of a digital collaborative government might garner a reaction familiar to Jimmy Wales, but I believe it can work, but more than that, I believe it has to. The doubters are people who don’t understand how we work.
We looked at the way parliament works from a very broad sense and we can do the same for a digital collaborative government. Rather than the detail, lets start with the building blocks needed for it to work. We would need an open source web application that let policies be generated, molded, edited, and eventually passed as law all through mass collaboration. That’s the first step, and it’s a step we’ve made dozens of times before. A story posted on reddit.com (hi reddit!) is like a policy – the community then discusses it and votes it up and down. The technology already exists, we just need to purpose it exactly to our needs. Reddit.com would be a great technology to start with, their comment and discussion system is widely regarded as one of the best on the internet.
Online communities are like much more efficient houses of parliament – decisions get made faster, debate is healthier, and everyone gets their say.
Then we’d need an open taxation system that allows the entire budget to be interacted with, moulded, shifted and voted on, to determine where money (or resources) were sent. Every single loophole, penny and waste pot would be accounted for, because rather than just Alistair Darling or (heaven forbid) George Osborne staring at it, the whole nation gets to see to the penny where their taxes went in an open source online web application. If they want to change it they’re just one click away. Tax levels are set at a level determined by mass collaboration – if we need more taxes then people suggest and vote for more, if people at the bottom are being squeezed too much they suggest less and vote for less. The system would move at lightspeed compared to two week tennis matches that go on with Parliament (again forgetting all the special interests at play). We could tax to meet our needs exactly to the penny, changing the rate daily like a stock market changes.
We build it agile – like everything else. Build a feature, put it live, test it and refine it. We do the same again and again for each new feature, so our government system grows naturally and organically as it needs to. We’d do the same with ideas and policies, using the machine we craft to generate nurture new ideas from their inception through to mass acceptance, and eventually a new arm of government is born. We could link science, education, communication, play and governance all into one.
The system shouldn’t be a prescriptive one, I’m already describing how it should work. I’m actually describing how it might work, but with your input the digital collaborative government might look entirely different. Like any great collaborative product, we don’t start with an end goal, we start with an inital idea. Where it goes from here is anyones guess, but if we work at it we’ll end up with a political system that includes everyone, quite literally built by the people, for the people.
It’s easy to get washed along with the excitement of an election and to feel as though your vote really makes a difference. Despite knowing that our political system is broken I voted Lib Dem, they seemed the best candidates for change. I’ve always liked Jiddu Krishnamurti thoughts when he said “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society“. In our case, I guess we voted to make adjustments to fit a profoundly broken system.
I’m writing this blog to suggest we fix the system by crafting a new one that includes all of us. Proportional Representation 2.0.
All great projects start with a great idea. You’ve probably got a million questions and ideas about how a digital collaborative government might work and I’d encourage you to leave those questions in a comment. If people are interested, I’ll set up a wiki, a chipin, and everything else we’d need to get this going. Don’t let negative comments or thoughts deter your ideas. If you think it could work, we can make it work.
We don’t need crooks, liars and thieves. We can do this ourselves.
