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HEAVY BRAKING. A cautionary tale for our times.

29 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Blueberry Muffin, BREXIT, Heavy is the Head, Kiera Knightly, Lexus, Life On Earth, Love Actually, Maltesers, mamma mia, Playlists, recycling, Sir David Attenborough, Skidmarks, Snap Chat, Speed of Life, speeding, Spotify, Stephen Fry, Stormzy, SUV Hybrid, TXTing

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Mike did not see Sir David Attenborough until the moment he stepped in front of Mike’s speeding Lexus Hybrid NX 300h.

Thankfully Mike did what every right-minded father-of-two raised on endless episodes of Life on Earth would do when a force of nature steps in front of your vehicle.

He braked; heavily.

Truthfully Sir David was never in danger. A combination of a fierce primal instinct to preserve Sir David’s life and the superior braking system of Mike’s new hybrid Lexus SUV meant that Sir David was successfully avoided. Mike was highly attuned to forces of nature. He recycled – and drove a hybrid, albeit a self-consciously ‘desirable’ one.

No, It was the occupants of Mike’s car who experienced the full weight of this event. In so many different ways.

The first fact we must absorb is that Mike is speeding. No surprise there. It’s not that Mike is irresponsible. He is a very cautious man in many ways. But. The smarter the technology life gives us, the simpler and more effortless our ability to accelerate to fibre-light speed, and the more cocooned we are made to feel as we do it, the more oblivious we are. And ultimately, the faster we go. It’s a human thing. It’s what we do.

Now to Mike’s driving. Is he fully attentive to the road? Kind of. Truth be told, he is perhaps a little preoccupied with how things are going right now. Mike is a reasonably senior director in a small local firm. And BREXIT has been a little bumpy – but things are sort of OK. They’d only had to lay off Sharshi, but frankly that was more to do with her being a gob-on-a-stick as well as being highly inappropriate with the logistics manager over company email than it had to do with any financial pressures bought on by ‘BREXIT. But Mike cannot shake this creeping feeling that failure is lurking around every corner at the moment.

The other occupants in Mike’s speeding Lexus NX 300h with superior braking are: Tilly, Mike’s partner. Tilly is an exceptionally rigorous and controlled laboratory director at the local University. And part time keep-fit instructor.  Though right now, data sets and crunches are the furthest thing from her mind. She looks blankly at the txt. thread she should never have answered talking back to her now in highly physical terms. Words like sucking and pumping shouldn’t be in her message threads, especially when accompanied by a picture like that. Jesus! Her laboratory was potentially losing funding – cheers BREXIT – so everything is a little crazy.

Next is Kiera [yes, really. Blame the film Love Actually.] Kiera. 15 years old. Up to her ears in GCSE study modules, performance anxiety and Spotify playlists [her most recent being MentalSplinter – music to die for.] At this very moment life is a mixture of ear-bleeding headphone-induced oblivion, fierce self scrutiny, a particularly tricky spot on her hairline and a pubic pimple that was frankly freaking her out. Fuck growing up if this is what it had to offer.

And then there is Rachel. The ‘clever’ one. Rachel is 13 and better read than Mike currently. Two more text books and she will over-take her mother. She is startlingly astute, with a vocabulary and syntactical sensitivity that could fell Stephen Fry. BUT. For all of Rachel’s blistering astuteness, learned appreciations and curious ability to breakdance, she cannot fathom what to do with the complete B in year 8 making her life an utter hell on SnapChat. Speccy virgin. Shoot yourself. Skiddy Knickers. Nightmare. And no idea how to stop it. Yes. I know… I shouldn’t even be on Snap Chat but COME ON people. Anyway, right this minute, the sun’s streaming across her and ABBA are on her playlist. LOVE Mamma Mia!

And now to that series of events:

Well, heavy braking creates a rather remarkable succession of immutable truths – unstoppable occurrences that one always hopes will end well. So with an optimistic note, let’s unpack them a little more. 

The minute Mike hits the brakes two things happen. And they happen in hyper-slow motion.

Firstly everyone in the car is dragged [sometimes screaming] at hyper-speed from whatever thought, moment, reverie, dream, fantasy, space or private perceived hell hole they’re in into the Now. Boom. And what a Now it is.

As the driver’s reflex dictates, Mike puts his left arm across Tilly’s chest to potentially stop her over-accelerating towards the dashboard and, hopefully, the airbag – and in doing so comes far closer to her breasts than he has been for quite some time.  

At the exact moment Mike stamps on the brakes, Tilly’s txt concerns become utterly irrelevant as a mixture of gravitational pull and sheer momentum pitch her towards the dashboard in a rather twisted and uncomfortably movement caused by her badly positioned seat-belt [Tilly always slightly wriggles the seat belt down and across her so it doesn’t cut into her gunmetal silk blouse.] The raised airbag logo on the dash board is something she has no wish to become more closely acquainted with but equally appreciates that she may well end up emblazoned on her forehead. What’s more it will be reversed in much the same way that AMBULANCE is written to be legible in the rear view mirror. Nonetheless forwards she goes. And she is uncertain as to what is less welcome, the word airbag tattooed on her forehead, or Mike’s hand hovering in intimate proximity to her breasts.

Rachel’s master plan of destroying Yr 8 B in a firestorm of BRILLIANT Snap Chat ripostes simply leaps from her mind as she starts a low-rider body slide towards the back of her mother’s seat. The combination of highly-synthetic patterned jeggings and the leather-creamed sheen of the open-stitched leather seats quickens her already pacy trajectory as the lower seatbelt-strap ratchets up over her hips as its diagonal strap hovercrafts upwards over her wrinkled chin towards her pert nose. The phone that’s in her hand is now just another item in the vehicle heading forwards at a greater velocity than the vehicle in which it is currently travelling. Mamma Mia, here I go again…my my… how can I resist it. For Rachel resistance is futile as forwards she goes in super slo-mo, her wide eyes furiously snapping a million single images in quick succession to turn into some survival slide show for  a later date.

Kiera’s mind’s eye has dumped the multiple threads of general teenage angst, confusion over two-timing Archie, the pubic pimple debacle and exam horror to concentrate solely on her trajectory towards the back of her father’s driving seat and the small plasma screen currently showing High School Musical 3 with the sound off. In this moment Kiera is focused on the general dynamics of her motion towards an irritatingly perfect Troy Bolton as her seat-belt steps into the role of Sharpay, holding her back from an accelerated rendezvous with Troy’s plasma-screen lips. This series of unfortunate events is accompanied by the 4th random play track on her Mental Splinters playlists. As it turns out, Stormzy’s Heavy is the Head is the perfect anthem, given that her heavy head separates from her headphones like Usain Bolt on a very good day.

The second thing that happens in times of heavy braking is an exercise in relativity. When seen from the outside world through which it moves, the car slows rapidly, but when viewed from the inside we see that the the occupants inside the slowing vehicle experience the polar opposite physical phenomenon as they accelerate through the cars space, embarking on a whole new journey through space and time. And not only the occupants, but every other thing in the car that is not of the car.

As the Lexus screeches to a halt things fall open, fall apart, tip over, reveal themselves. Objects roll out from under seats and from behind head and arm rests and door side pockets – things once considered lost, or misplaced, or nicked by one’s siblings: Those special Lego characters thought pilfered. A small corner of an ancient blueberry muffin, a load of CDs [wot they] that simply got transferred from the old car to the new one and got dumped in the boot. Three random and now chalky Maltesers. A pen. Old car park tickets. Carb Killa wrappers. A branded gym water-bottle A scrunched and discarded note, written by a teenage admirer. A copy of a ‘no idea, never been there’ restaurant payment receipt for a meal for two. And a Final Reminder letter that proved to upsetting to open. 

Once these are seen, they re-enter the lives of the car and the occupants, evidence of other times and moments until recently lost to them.

In a time of heavy braking, as the speed of life both reverses and accelerates, the unseen become seen. Things reveal themselves to Mike, Tilly, Kiera and Rachel – material things, physical things, emotional things, spiritual things – things that they might otherwise miss, ignore, over-look or feel able to hide in the usual speed of life.

And in the midst of this moment, their minds will demonstrate exactly how quickly we adapt – how we create expanses of inner space in what we thought was a mind full up with life’s really important stuff – an expanse of inner space that gives us the room to take up new threads, scrutinise events, record information, and expand to accommodate all of those tasks and complex conundrums and puzzles to solve in the next few nano seconds.

In a moment of extreme reflex survival, our hearts and minds demonstrate how resilient they truly are – how fast they can operate, how much they can absorb, how much thinking they can do, how much consideration they can muster and how many decisions and commitments they can make in the lifetime of infinitesimal moments that occur in times off heavy braking. And in that moment we are re-stitched into the fabric of each other’s lives in the most profound way.

All of this seems clear enough.

The big question is this – when the period of heavy braking is over – once the agile, highly engineered and resourceful Lexus NX 300h comes to a stop [beautifully of course, as the hi spec ABS and sports suspension has fulfilled its role] – once everyone is checked and found to be OK, other than the odd scuff, chaff and wrench – what will Mike, Tilly, Keira and Rachel have learned? About themselves and those in the car with them? What life lessons and outtakes can they pop in the back of their memory for later?

Will the shared moment of dramatic suspension – the memory of their collective journey through space and time, hurtling through the inner space of Lexus engineering towards the unknown [the cosmic unknown that is – there is very little unknown about a windscreen, air bag or dashboard], the intimate proximity of it, their shared expulsions of breath, their primal exclamations, all mixing in some primal soupy in-car atmosphere of survival – will those things positively imprint on Mike, Tilly, Keira and Rachel? 

Will the experience make them see how some things are barely worth the anguish or the upset – and how sometimes our vanities and inflated expectations of ourselves and what life serves us are just that and with the gift of a clarifying experience to guide us, should be set aside and good things embraced.

Who knows? But you can only hope. 

In these times of heavy braking, take the time of slo-mo living that it presents to look to those closest to you, open your eyes to them – freeze frame these moments. And try and catalogue the gifts this time gives us. Starting with the realisation that the previous speed of life was bullshit really. And all that shiny ‘look at me’ momentum was simply that, the veneer of our vanity. Take the time to think What If… what if we managed to capture even the smallest of the gains from this time of heavy braking – insights, realisations, commitments, behaviours, resolutions, even the smallest of transformations in ourselves, our families, our communities and our societies. That would be good. That would be something.  

Author’s Note: I apologies if the use of Sir David Attenborough as the human embodiment of Nature’s volatility. Sir David is Nature to millions of people – so I popped him in there. Though he may not like being used to represent COVID 19 – and some might even question the ‘natural’ nature of the virus given humanity’s ability to turn it into a blight.

ABBA, Anamnesis & social memory in the 21st Century.

14 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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70s & 80s Music, ABBA. Social memory, Anamnesis, Bowie, Christian Theology, Dancing Queen, Dylan, Ga Ga, Gamification, i-pad, Incarnation, IPv6, Madge, mamma mia, memory, multi-generational, peta-flops, Reinvention, social networks, Socrates, Swiss Army Knife, The Day Before You Came. Ibiza, Tour Of Duty

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By my reckoning ABBA and the philosophical Socratic theory of anamnesis will finally meet somewhere along IPv6, just at the crossroads where peta-flops of ’70s and ’80s pop tune mash-ups collide with the PDF of the Ga Ga/Madonna/Bowie Manual of Reinvention.

Given that there’ll be 6 billion online personas (giving the current 2Bn + users a very conservative 3 online personas each to play with) using the crossroads at the same time, its going to get messy out there.

Now ABBA, fine, got that bit – and the Lady meets Madge meets Thin White Duke stylie for reinvention and the death of discarded personas, yup. Got that but Anemwhat?!

Anamnesis. A simple philosophical Socratic theory – and a pretty powerful one. Which is why it was quickly air-lifted into Christian Theology as a fabulous way to frame an infinite eternal re-incarnate soul running through all of humanity over time, with Christian teaching merely being a way of ‘recovering’ pre-existing yet dormant spiritual knowledge within us to accompany the soul we are born with. Nice.

Wikipedia cites the following descriptor: Socrates…   …suggests that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth.What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten.

So what on earth have ABBA got to do with it?

I reference ABBA in this piece because, for me,  they represent one of those entities that have transcended standard memory and entered a longer, denser living framework of collective or social memory – one with multiple and complex networks of interrelated life times.

They have also reached far enough into the future from their heyday to touch the hem of the skirt of the Infinite Digital Now and all that it brings. And I have a feeling that, through their burgeoning role in the global fabric of social memory and the furious sharing psst! pass it on culture of the social networks, ABBA are hurtling  towards a state of anamnesis.

OK, in the realm of philosophical profundity ABBA’s Waterloo doesn’t quite set the same bar as perhaps Dylan’s ‘Times They are a Changing‘ but that does not exclude them from becoming something that a classical philosophical text might describe.

How they do this is another question entirely. Maybe they’re just so wrong they’re right. Perhaps the unique fusion of chirpy and deceptively engineered pop music and the flip-flop nature of their lyrical content: from the charming euro-nonsense lyrics of Waterloo to songs like The Day Before You Came, sung with the long shadow of Leonard Cohen and Der blaue Engel hovering over it, seems to have allowed ABBA, like all music of increasingly mythical status to become one of the more powerful threads stitching together the fabric of our social memory.

ABBA, like Mozart, Piaf, Elvis, Bowie and Ga Ga, have come to be both perceived and used as a sort of socio-cultural swiss army knife. They are a lever, a key, a signpost, a mapping point, a cork-screw and an emotional cattle prod in the ever-expanding and lengthening fabric of social memory. Music like ABBA’s fixes points of social memory into a particular context, thus creating a door through which we can access them.

But just a great song doesn’t cut it. That’s just a memory – a time machine to what was. To become part of social memory – the stored, dormant library of evolution strategies that we draw upon when life’s challenges open out, shut down, twist, stutter, or fail around us – the music must be potent enough, rich enough and loaded enough to be capable of regeneration – of itself creating a living, constantly-reincarnating relentlessly-reinventing self to qualify.

Whatever it is, and whether you like it or not, ABBA have done an amazing job of creeping under the skin and into the psyche of multiple moments, moods and generations. ABBA. The moves. The powder-blue eye shadow. The melancholy. The show. The Movie. Meryl Streep!. Madonna!! The spiritual and social halo of ABBA is immense. And the ley-lines of its cultural, social and generational impacts fall across every shape and form of social group and individual typology.

For me, being a divorce child of the 1970s in southern England, living the bleak video musical backdrop of The Winner Takes It All; and with most summers spent partly on the White Island amongst Scandinavians of all hues (long before the football hooligans and pill head fraternity turned up) I can attest to ABBA being a great example of the social big bang theory – from its very particular era specific explosive beginnings to hurtle outwards in an exponentially increasing mass of social knowledge, reincarnated and recovered across many lifetimes.

The second I hear those words. “I don’t want to talk…  …cos’ it makes me feel sad…”  I am hurled into a cement lorry of memory and feeling. That’s already more than just a memory. It is a living recollection that occurs with feeling and context – a trojan horse of social memory: an echo of its first incarnation. On hearing it I am immediately primed to mitigate all manner of degrees of emotional distress

But also, if I am on a dance floor and hear Madonna’s Hung Up, it’s the ABBA sample and the latent recovered feeling carried in the Trojan horse of it that lifts my heart, not Madge’s new self conscious re-fabrication of it. But the complexity of emotion that the music evokes is layered by the moment in which it is now being recreated and in which I am enjoying it. It is reincarnated.

But in the same way, the surprising joy I get when I watch Mamma Mia with my 6 year old daughter is transcendent. In this way it is incarnated again with additional and highly complex additions of light and shade for me.

This to me is a good demonstration of how music moves from being an anthem for a time past to being a source of energy, revitalisation, reassurance and guidance, transforming itself as it evolves into a burgeoning strand of social memory.

It is at this evolutionary level that music moves from being a linear recollection of a bunch of chords and stuff you liked – a piece of sentimental data as someone once chose to describe emotion –  to being a living evolving strand that entrenches itself in cultures communities and tribes across multiple generations, drawn on as a social tool and in doing so, becoming reborn again and again.

My daughter will internalize the Mamma Mia experience, along with my own recollections about ABBA, music, the 1970s and my parents as part of that recollection, and it will create emotional triggers and feelings that will continue to exist, carried within her  – only to be reborn every time she hears the opening chords and voices of Dancing Queen.

The enriching memory and the spiritual and emotional information and knowing carried within it is evolving, becoming more dense and complex, developing a mythology of its own as opposed to simply reflecting that of the people who carry it.

It is in that way that something as trite as “I don’t want to talk…” or the first 4 chords of Dancing Queen, a shard of popular culture from 30 something years ago, begin to transcend normal memory, and become living social memory: a source of emotional intelligence and evolutionary experience that the same tribes cultures descendants can draw on to keep reweaving resilient communities, navigate turbulence and upheaval and ultimately manage change. This is much the same journey as that of pieces of philosophy, spirituality, faith and religion, continuously regenerated retold and proselytised across tribes, regions, cultures and generations to expand to cover the world.

To demonstrate the process in action, and of how the ripples of impact and emotional knowledge grow both more complex, and abstracted the further they get from their original source we might set an experiment:

If we were to play the opening chords of ABBAs Dancing Queen to a massed variant audience – a mixture of 8 years olds, 18 years olds, 30 year olds, 50 year olds and 70 year olds, both in villages and cities in different regions and parts of the world – and then, subsequently record the emotions raised, feelings felt, wisdoms recovered, the light and dark of their deeper emotional reflections; to reveal the texture and richness of social memory being stirred and potentially drawn on – I think we would be staggered at the scale, breadth and depth of social memory: the ‘recovery’ of deep rooted emotional ‘knowledge’.

More importantly, I believe the rarified theory of Anamnesis will help us to explain and navigate some of the more complex philosophical dimensions of social memory as they develop in the new landscape of the hybrid virtual and actual 21st century lives we live.

And we’re going to need all the help we can get in the moral maze of the multi-device ‘me’.

My point is this: in the modern world we are expected to live many more ‘lives’ than our forebears. In our post-modern world we re constantly reborn: professionally, personally, materially. It is seen as part of thriving.

I might also venture that consumerism, locked as it is in a relentless round of reinvention of the self through a continuous stream of new identities purchased – cars clothes homes holidays – is creating a truncated state of anamnesis – an expanding universe of reoccurring rebirth across ever decreasing periods of time.

But that is not where the tension will occur.

The tension will come from the fact that underneath all of this new multiple selves we still carry with us a far more one-dimensional primal, living memory. One bound by a much longer thread of continued existence; that gets passed down socially through nurture and the cultural context we find ourselves in, from generation to generation.

But the concept of generations is being rewritten by the modern world. Generations used to be a simple descriptor to identify the progeny of humanity in such as way as to mark them out by the fact that they exist within the same age frames in the same time frames. To be 16 in 1968 for example sets out a generational viewpoint and compass from which to define and explore many different dimensions of self. Generations were a linear thread that dropped down through history tying the past to the future.

But our new world of tech induced multi-persona living is exploding the concepts of generation sideways, upwards, outwards. There are now multiple generations of individuals, communities cultures and mindsets housed in each generation

Ancestors and descendents and the linear relationship between them and the threads of social memory they carry with them have been shattered into a glittering constellation of existence virtual, real or otherwise.

They do not just stand behind and in front of us any more. Our own multiple myths and histories scatter all about us in varying forms of existence – some live, some dead, some decaying dismissed or forgotten.

In a socially charged world of the multi-persona person: whose face-book profile might accent their personal ‘myth’ or story one way or tell of one very siloed professional individual Linked In one in another: their Sim city or Tour Of Duty persona another again – add in a few Farmville coins, on line shopper profiles and PIN numbers, multiple email tags and a twitter account and you’re up to 7 personas as it is. Each one ‘born’ and nurtured and raised to fulfil its immediate social need in the context of the device or channel it exists within.

So I would venture that social memory as it used to be, framed either by classical concepts like anamnesis or more recent frameworks like nationalism, versus how we have begun to frame and explore the dimensions of social memory in the last 10 years makes for a very different creature.

The next time Dancing Queen comes on – and a herd of 50 something’s, 8 year olds, 23 year olds and the ironic 41’ers charge the wedding dance floor, the old model of social memory is at work in the new world – a linear pass the parcel of collective and compounding memories, feelings, in the context of multiple pieces of data embracing occasion, company, personal fulfillment and development, fluid time and fixed geographies.

The same one that amortises their elder’s wisdoms in a box, repeats parental aphosrisms and behavioural tics. Where the work ethics and behaviours of 3 hundred years ago have been passed from Tofflers First Wave to the Second to the beginning of the third with everyone using the mistakes of the past to try and reset the opportunities of the future in an evolutionary line.

But now, where ABBA, the classic concepts like anamnesis and our 21st century multi-dimensional and multi-existence models of social memory meet, playing out across our twittering Id Ego i – pads, there’s something altogether new and far more complex happening.

Social memory is fracturing at light speed into a hydra of persona channels – the social memory as embraced in the virtual world will evolve in a different manner to its real world cousins. The social memory of gamers will have both gamer specific dimensions as well as real world ones. The time machine of music and the ever referable digital filing systems of the cloud will create a fractured concept of temporal existence.

This is no different to what was before – just multiplied. Young men who went to war developed a parallel social memory to those of the families at home. Exclusive of of but not inextricable to the everyday lives they returned to. One they could reach in and out of as they needed to. The same stands for us. But we tend to be reaching into our parallel social memory not of trenches, gas, camaraderie, distress and man’s inhumanity to man – but that of hot dog and champagne restaurant reviews and download recommendations from last year and an blog archive!

And Philosophy, truncated by the new concepts of existence, the socially networked virtual landscape and the multiple life-strands technology offers us outside the old linear temporally locked life span, is being jugged, butter patted, creamed and squeezed through the piping gun to spell out something new: but what?

Money Money Money? SOS? Take A Chance? Dum Dum Diddle? 0r Bang-A-Boomerang?

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