The internet is clearly dividing into at least two things. The first is, and always was meant to be the great liberation of information which would catapult creaking democratic entities into a new era of transparency and accountability. It would facilitate a free exchange of ideas and knowledge—the sort of thing that Wikipedia sought to achieve (and perhaps does, if not wholly successfully). The second internet thing is the internet of things. Lots of people see this later development (perhaps after seeking advice from Alexa) as a way of assisting them cope with modern life (I was rather impressed on the doorstep whilst canvassing the other day when one resident didn’t tell his dogs to stop barking but merely said ’Alexa, shut up!’ in order to turn his music off). Simple tasks performed by in-house internet connected appliances will inevitably lead to more complex tasks being performed too. I am always reminded of E.M.Forster’s short story The Machine Stops to provide us with a clue as to what happens when the machine does actually stop. And on occasion it will, and we’ll stand around waiting for it to fix itself having ourselves forgotten how it works.
But in another sense what is the internet of things if indeed we ourselves are not the ’things?’ This is a world where we are made to fit the internet rather than the other way round. I will comment on what is a trite but common experience. I have been sent by Sainsbury’s an email telling me that I can get £15 off my next online order worth at least £60. A little later the email tells me my ’coupon’ is worth £13 off £60. I thought I would alert Sainsbury’s to their obvious mistake. Which one is it—£15 or £12? To advise them of their error I thought of using their ’Contact Us’ tab. This merely takes one through a list of preset questions with preset answers. There is actually no obvious route to ’contact us.’ It’s just a faux friendly dead end. At the end of the process I got the message that my effort had been recorded. Whilst this may be a trivial case (and frankly you always spend more on these money off offers than you intend to) the same cul-de-sac approach is now taken by nearly all large businesses online, (especially) including those you do actually rely on (e.g. energy companies). I have the strong sense that we, who once ruled the all-powerful sovereign Kingdom Of The Consumer (ha!) are being prepared for a techno-subservience nobody has yet quite understood. It may be convenient at present to deal with online businesses without too much hassle, but at the slightest drop of a hat we can be left high and dry. BT customers are discovering this with their transference to super fast broadband, which when it goes down leaves them without any form of communication at all (unless they have subscribed to another provider’s mobile service I presume). Things will go down, won’t they (and yes it’s sometimes your fault for tapping the wrong keys or some such)? Against this new age of unresponsiveness (or strictly permitted responsiveness) stand the regulators and our austerity hollowed-out democratic institutions. Are they more likely to give you any more personal attention than the things they adjudicate? It’s possible, but not uniform (I won’t recount another recent experience, except to point to a very early blog post about the unregulated plague of CCTV cameras on every street). I wonder if the Consumers Association is on top of this creeping defenestration of the once noble consumer? Twenty or thirty years ago we lamented the demise of the ‘citizen’ as the consumer became ‘king.’ Now this ‘king’ is being replaced by ‘thing’ but the phrase ‘The Customer Is Thing’ doesn’t inspire much confidence.
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As the world is transfixed by yet another war, another war is being lost, and being lost badly. It sounds like a good thing that the taps may be turned off Russian oil and gas as the West seeks to punish Putin, but the knock-on effect will I fear hasten the use of fossil fuels from other sources rather than lead to a sufficient development of renewable energy. Our own beloved PM has already been on a begging mission to the murderous Saudi regime (he came back empty handed it seems) and now there is talk of the urgent necessity to ramp up production of what’s left in the North Sea, as well as getting rid of an irksome moratorium on fracking. But it’s not just fossil fuels that are about to enjoy a renaissance—new nuclear power plants will spring up all over the place, at least according to a government minister on the radio this morning. It seems some of these life savers will be on stream by the end of the decade which would be a seismic shift since nuclear power stations generally come in 15-20 years late (and during that period, during construction they only contribute to climate change rather than the reverse).
Now I’ve just read that the Canadian federal government has given approval to an undersea oil extraction scheme, ’Bay du Nord,’ off Newfoundland which it is hoped will start gushing in 2028 and will produce 300 million barrels of oil. Putin of course will find other markets for his oil and gas, India and China are top of the list. Oh, what else happened in the last week? The United Nation’s latest IPCC report on climate change was the grimmest yet. Nobody really believes that limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C is remotely any longer feasible. Get ready for a 3.2 increase seems to be the bleak assessment. This is part of a publicity statement I’ve recently read on behalf (of all things) a café:
Everywhere we go we find a sameness which is nauseating to the sensitive mind. The little village store, with its essential individuality has gone and its place has been taken by the multiple shop a shallow and vulgar mockery, where ‘service’ is a catch-word and cellophane mistaken for wholesomeness. Where tinned foods take the place of rich farm produce and quack medicines the place of brimstone and treacle. Life today lacks reality.* ‘Life today lacks reality.’ What a contemporary lament! Everyone knows that tomatoes today aren’t what they used to be. But this particular lament comes from 1936, advertising a famous Hull café called Jenny’s which became the meeting place of something called the Hull Art Club. Even in the heyday of Bakelite people were bemoaning the loss of authenticity, the plasticisation of everything. Perhaps only art could stem the tide. I found this vignette of a forgotten facet of Hull interesting inasmuch as Hull never quite acquired its own cadre of artists. In those, and in somewhat earlier days, all sorts of places were becoming identified with a rejection of the triumph of industrialisation, what Jenny’s café would call perhaps the cellophane society. Up the coast from Hull was the Staithes Group of artists who celebrated rural life (in a kind of murky brown sort of way) and then in contrast in Cornwall was the sun-blessed brilliantine ex-Londoners, the St. Ives Group, formulating a less realist but inner realist vision of landscape. There had been the Scottish Colourists (the Glasgow Boys) discovering sunshine in the grim North. In London, there was the Camden Town Group, who perhaps were like the Staithes Group when they were at home. For some reason, there didn’t, so far as I know, emerge a Hull Group. Of course, this is not to deny Hull its separate history of poetry, from Andrew Marvell to the Hull Group of Poets. For most people these days the only ’Hull’ poet is Phillip Larkin but the sixties and seventies saw many others coalescing around some form of Hull identity. This identity was to some extent based on the city’s pride in its isolation, the ‘fishing village at the end of the line.’ I recently watched a 1960s film, available for free on the BFI website, charting the early days of the folk revivalist band, the Hull-based Watersons. It captures in unforgiving monochrome a city in a prolonged post-war recovery, a recovery which for many struggled to succeed. Hull still has one or two city centre car parks based on World War II bombsites. There are some gleaming office block shells speaking of regeneration, but these (I imagine) provide more lucrative locations for the out-of-towners who dwell in the salubrious suburbs which dominate the west of the city (outwith its boundary) and whose daily escape to their ex-urban lives takes place on roads passing through depressed inner city streets. As evidenced in so many places, artists can lead regeneration by taking over old buildings and turning them into studios and galleries, very often at little or no public expense. But once developers and landlords prick up their ears, these endeavours can be squeezed out by high rents and other exorbitant costs. What may have temporarily have been an art district becomes an ‘arts quarter’ full of the faux aesthetic which is considered chic. None of this would have gone down well with the proprietors of Jenny’s café. I suspect they would have had a hearty laugh over the concept of ‘levelling up’ - a concept bereft of any cultural context. *In “Allanson Hick: Architect and Artist 1898-1975,” complied by Arthur Credland, pub. by Hull City Council and Hutton Press, 1991. I have wisely or unwisely taken up the election baton again, this time standing for a contestable seat on North Yorkshire County Council, which next year will become a unitary authority providing nearly all local services. I am finding it an interesting experience since at the present time nobody seems to have a handle on quite how things may go. Normally at this stage of a government’s existence, local elections would go in the opposition’s favour, just as we expect the US midterm elections to go against the incumbent president. Everybody seems to acknowledge that the UK has a corrupt and incompetent government, but there’s still a whiff of ‘you’re all the same.’ Of course, there are many pundits who are filling their column inches with all sorts of predictions, but since I doubt any of them have been on the doorsteps talking to voters they really don’t know s**t. I can say however that Labour should be doing a lot better, were it not perhaps for our lack-lustre leadership. Starmer has been an issue on the doorstep—which is when I remind voters that this is a local election.
Putin’s senseless war is helping Boris Johnson, who perhaps before election day on May 5th will be photographed in combat gear riding atop a Challenger tank. That would be breaking electoral ‘purdah’ rules, but as a committed rule (and law) breaker this wouldn’t concern our glorious leader, who now it seems reckons his ‘Partygate’ scandal has blown over. This too is our first election since the pandemic started, so after a couple of years’ hibernation the propensity of people to actually go out and vote will be tested. Everything seems to be up for grabs. The Tories are even claiming they could win the Labour council in Sunderland. If that were to happen Starmer will surely be toast. I don’t know on what basis the Tories are making this claim, but I notice there’s little such bravado coming from Labour ranks about the Tory-run councils we think are winnable. That says something. |
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