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Trump, Fake News, Gonzo Society & a series of Unfortunate Satirical Events.

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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"You Brits", 2016 Election, Alinsky, America Today, British Airways, Comedy, Democrat, Doors of Perception, Fake News, Gonzo, Harvard Lampoon, Hogarth, Hunter S Thomson, Intersectionality, Jewish Global Conspiracy, Lakota Sioux, LSD, Matt Monroe, Moliere, Moore's Law, My Favourite Year, National Lampoon, New World, Nixon, Old World, Pentagon Papers, Pizza Paedophile Ring, PJ O Rourke, Radicalism, Relativism, Republican, Ridicule, Rowlandson, Rules For Radicals, Satire, Saturday Night Live, Social Media, Sy Benson, Trump, Watergate, You never cut funny!

AKA Trump, The Gonzo President.

An hour in the company of PJ O Rourke – iconoclast, much lauded author of the seminal Republican Party Reptile, contemporary of Hunter S Thomson, man of letters, polemicist, contrarian – and of course the near mythical voice of some legendary BA adverts that wrote themselves into our cultural mythology with that laconic opening statement: “You Brits!”

The Theme for the gathering – a TortoiseMedia-eye look at America Today in the space between Presidential conceding and inauguration. Rich pickings indeed.

What’s not to like.

PJ O Rourke is a hero, the meeting of which can be a precarious thing at the best of times, as James Harding, Tortoise co-founder and our host rightly pointed out. But we were in safe hands. Mr Harding’s effortless steerage allowed us to hang out in our PJs if you will, consuming PJs warm yet remorseless observations without said meeting popping the heroic balloon.

The hour was spent walking the tightrope between PJ’s ability to infuse Zoom with the smoky,  peaty warmth of an antique Chesterfield chair and the frothy opinion and polemic bubbling up in the chat stream at the expense of the departing POTUS . 

What does the lampooning and highly satirical Republican-ish writer PJ O Rourke think of The Yellow Hair?  [my imagined Lakota Sioux name for said POTUS].

A proponent of Gonzo Journalism, this was the man who famously wrote on “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” He also notably served as Editor-in-Chief of National Lampoon for many years with his imprint on many National Lampoon classics. His room for satirical manoeuvre was vast.  

And then it hit me – the fact that a master of Yan-kee satire and lampooning would be discussing a political culture of shifting-sand sensibilities underwritten by fatuous and sometimes almost wilfully funny untruths struck me as ironic at best, or at worse, a conflict of interest. 

This tension felt like it deserved a little more poking.  

To most people outside the U.S., and a rather large number inside, American Politics feels like it has been hijacked by the writers of National Lampoon and The Onion – with a smattering of H R Puff N Stuff and The King Of Kings screenplay bringing in the wings. At the heart of it all? Fake News – a master class in obfuscation. Everything is Fake, unless the Real President says otherwise, with @realDonaldTrump playing a pungent role in the Real Fake divide. Madonna or Maradonna? You decide.

Fake News – ridiculous flights of factual fictions, fantasies and potential conspiracies –  all liberally doused with the petrol of incensed ‘values-based’ hurt and ‘spiritual’ mortification. As the American master Mark Twain proclaimed:  ‘Why let the truth get in the way of a real story.’ Amen! Each new ‘real’ news story is  another tongue placed firmly in 330 Million or so American cheeks – and all the while POTUS gleefully flicking off the critical flies with pronouncements of ‘Fake News.’

Fake News feels so, well, American.  The right to shape any truth, fact, system, person, group, taste, belief, or data point in your own inimitable and highly subjective image feels more than just human. It feels like a goddam’ amendment in the constitution of all that is American.

Hunter S Thomson summed it up thus in his seminal Gonzo tome, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

‘But what was the story?

Nobody had bothered to say.

So we would have to drum it up on our own.

Free enterprise. The American Dream.’

Damn right. The Right to live out a Truman-show life under God & Fake News feels pretty damn good. Throw in a Rifle and I’ll pay the damn sub RIGHT NOW – in dark web crypto-currency of course, so those long-haired, bean-shoot-smokin, pinko sons-of-bitches can’t trace me. Hell yeah. I’m a Boy and Proud of it. Get me?

When the fact that the greatest political satire is real life – when everything is Fake, up is down, black is white, left is right, sex isn’t gender, fixed is fluid, everything’s a meme and the question of ‘how did we get here?’ gets begged – my tuppence-worth of an observation is this.

In the old courtly world, high satire was exactly that: the rarified and vaunted art of the rapier strike – of barbed projectiles of intelligent drollery fired against the pustular buffooning of royals, aristocrats and their petite bourgeoisie henchmen, with a liberal dose of mockery reserved for the sprawling, brawling plebiscite. 

But in the New World – the land of opportunity –  where every man was equal under God [though not the women – and…uhm…oh, yes, those dark skinned folks and any Native Indians we haven’t killed or filed under D for Destitution – just saying] – everyone should be allowed to play. Why just let the nobs of Nob Hill have all of the fun. 

Cue the heady days of the 60s and 70s. American polemicists took the spirit of free speech and the people’s right to voice their disdains, loathings, suspicions and truths to a whole new level. In the social splintering of the politicised Beat Generation and with the late Sixties agitprop movements came a new wave of satirists and lampooners with a much more audacious and ambitious sense of their audience. Hell, if a washing powder can change the behaviours [and underwear colour] of millions of Americans through television – just think what we might achieve. 

Mid West college kids, East Coast ingenues and West Coast dilettantes, growing up on the mass-market all you-can-eat-buffet of the American Dream, got busy. And they got tooled up. They armed themselves with Satire. What’s more, they got populist. [For the people by the people. How could they not. The whole point of propaganda, whether to stop a war, a politician, or a bunch of racists, is to inflame a reaction in the hearts and minds of as many people as possible as often as possible for as long as possible. Ridicule became the power tool of their populist propaganda.. 

Serious political discourse and posturing was already in full flight across most US college campuses. Over arch and deeply myopic, radicalism, was the order of the day and it had ‘rules’ as Saul Alinsky so clearly set out. This modern radical agenda and its propagandas cut deeply into the fresh-faced self-serving idealism of the existing New World elites. But it would always be a throw-back from the old world that would cut deepest. And that throw back was Ridicule. 

Ridicule, an art practised slavishly and to a higher order in the Old World of the 17th and 18th Centuries was, once again, to threaten the power elites of the New World. The using of formal and informal fallacies and fakeries to undermine someone or their argument – to make a mockery of their position or beliefs and in that way disavow them of any credibility, credulity or integrity – was to have a U.S. make-over.

As a weapon, Ridcule, designed to wither and erode the very foundations upon which someone stood, was remorseless and relentless. Ridicule is engineered to destroy the essence of the thing it targets. Forensic. Calculated. Cruel. 

The new satirical U.S. version was simply the old Ridicule dressed up in a goofy Matt Monroe jumper.

In playground terms, National Lampoon magazine could be said to have ‘started it’. Originally the Harvard Lampoon, NL parodied, mocked and ridiculed everything and everyone. In that way it was VERY egalitarian.

In it we can find perhaps a ground zero – a crucible moment – in a Gonzo to Fake News trajectory theory.

True Facts, one of the magazine’s cornerstone pieces and in fact the only factual part of the whole rag, used such bizarre obtuse and ridiculous pieces of real news from around the world that reality, even when it was in evidence, was barely distinguishable from ridiculous madness and satirical surreality.

It is at this point that the connection between Gonzo Journalism and Fake News becomes clearer for me. In that moment, where reality and the ridiculous were purposefully blurred beyond comprehension, the possibility of a Gonzo society became an unsettling reality.

In that effect, I believe that for all the good they did, and for all the rotten edifices they collapsed, the arch lampooners and satirists have at least a little to answer for in regard to to the polluting and toxic nature of what we now call Fake News.

The multiplier in all of this? The steroid of mass media – the exponential reach and influence of Television and the Movies.

Hot on its heels of National Lampoon came the fire-starter of Saturday Night Live. From its inauguration in 1975, SNL packed and wrapped ridicule for mass American consumption. By the mid-to-late seventies it was a seed-bed of cultish satirical showmanship. 

Between National Lampoon, SNL and all the subsequent mischief makers they spawned [The Onion being a notable example], the intelligent populist, comedic contrarian and anarcho-satirist had the opportunity to fire their ire into millions of homes via both printed piece and the cathode ray. What’s not to like?  

The small flaw in the blessed trajectory?

If everything is ridiculous, then nothing is serious – and more importantly, nothing is sacrosanct. There are no safe places or secure vaults of immutable truths and irreversible facts. Relativistic trick-cycling allowed anyone to present even the most rigorously tested or peer reviewed truth or fact as open to disdainful disregard or suspicion. Nothing can be fixed. Everything is fluid. Everything suffers a Borderline Personality Disorder. 

In a culture still mostly raised on the biblical trope of Let him that is without sin cast the first stone, the idea that any flaw whatsoever disavows you of being able to stand in serious and sometimes punitive judgement of a belief, moral code or political position, satire is more than just an intellectual foil, it is an instrument of faith. When that happens, you’re effectively fucked.

Everything is flawed – ergo – it does not have the untainted status, permission or the credibility to ever take higher ground or present an unassailable position, framing fact or truth.  In that instance, everything is relative and nothing is what it seems, to the person or persons ‘seeming’ it at least. So any and every thing can be ridiculed, undermined and summarily dismissed with no right to reply. Sound familiar?

The satirist and the lampooners power to pull down edifices of bullshit, self interest, political filibustering, outright deception and lying changed the face of massed political debate and its accompanying sophistry, in some cases irrevocably, removing its cloak or invisibility and invincibility completely. 

More recently, Social Media has simply accelerated the whole kit and caboodle – leaving us with Radical Pamphleteering to the power of Moore’s Law.

People under the cosh of power elites have always seen potential witchery and devilry in those above and beyond them. Unknown darkness and debauch in the big houses and the strange ways of those who Have have always been with us. And elites have always attracted suspicion, with wild stories of their excesses and self interest [often true] used as propaganda to bring them down. Put that sensibility into the New World and the land of Salem Witch Trials and the Pilgrim suspicions of the excesses of Mammon and, well – light blue touch paper and stand well back.  Conspiracy theories have always existed. But as with any fact or ‘truth’ generally, pop a conspiracy theory into the super-fly, deep-fat-frier of investigative gonzo journalism to the power of social media and shazaam, Bob’s your slightly unnerving and sexually ambivalent Pizza Delivering Paeodophile Uncle of the Jewish Global Conspiracy variety. 

Suddenly, It feels like a very short walk 

from 

everything is underwritten

to 

everything is undermined

How does one sustain a shift of that scale and nature? 

Comedy of course. Great comedy. Crazy comedy. Off-beat comedy. Free-form rough-edged comedy shit. Funny shit. People love to laugh, especially at things that would otherwise make them cry – like the state of their wallet, their world or the nature and idiosyncrasies of the people tasked with running it – elected or otherwise.

Funny is what we do when all else fails. Humour is how we navigate the madness. Funny is sacrosanct; a human right. We don’t like people telling us what to laugh and not laugh at. If you need proof, look no further than the belief that the the inauguration of Donald J Trump was in part powered by people reacting against being told what not to laugh at. Don’t mess with funny. Even it if is offensive or potentially dangerous. 

‘Sy Benson’ discusses comedy and Coffee with ‘Benjy Stone’ [AKA Benjamin Steinberg].

As Sy Benson, head-writer on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade in the movie My Favourite Year proclaims when challenged to remove his ‘Boss Hijack’ sketch, a bitingly satirical yet potentially libellous piece on a Mobster thug:

“You never cut funny.”   

The relationship been truth, satire, journalism and dangerous living are ancient. Telling powerful people, or massed tribes and types of people exactly what you think of them and their shibboleths has been getting satirists into trouble since Aristophenes in Ancient Greece first thought to poke fun at both Socrates and the Athenian Court System. The golden age of Satire was no different – Moliere, Voltaire and Boileau-Desperaux in France and Swift, Pope, Dryden and Hogarth in the U.K. walked a perilous line with the potential for censure, prison and death threats as the reward for their caustic, parodical exclamations.

This whiff of danger has lurked in the wings of Gonzo since its inception. The counter culture and its harrying of state instruments and bodies in the era of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and Watergate bought investigative journalists, cultural commentators and bold satirists closer to the flame again. To be seen to be distributing a truth that did not align with the ‘confected’ truth of the governing elites was a very dangerous pastime. 

Furthermore, it wasn’t always political truths that were being smashed or subverted. This was also the era of brutal self enquiry, identity myth busting and raw revelation – where people mined the underlying flows, fractures and flaws of the human psyche through explorations that sought to break down multiple doors of perception in search of some greater cosmic truth via LSD. A search for absolute truths in whichever shape they came could be cause for concern

Again Thomson, this time in a Rolling Stone Article in 1973 states:

“Absolute truth is a rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” 

If you set out to design, engineer and seed a social movement custom-built to suffocate serious debate and enquiry, undermine universal ethical and moral constructs, and effectively neuter any intellectually-rigorous and profound discourse or enquiry, you couldn’t do better than Gonzo Journalism and National Lampoon’s anything. A stroke of genius. In these two pillars the foundations of a Gonzo Society are born.

To that point, one could posit that Gonzo culture and Gonzo Society both deserve and create Gonzo Politicians. 

Followed to its logical end, one could say that Donald J Trump was the only choice in 2016.

Trump is the ultimate Gonzo Politician. The perfect POTUS to sit in power at the heart of a nation of states suckled on gonzo lampooning and relentless irreverence. In 2016 Hilary was the epitome of a satirical target. Rooted and raised in the self serving circles of political power elites and Washington well-doers, Hilary was never going to have an easy race against Trump in a predominantly Gonzo Society. Gonzo was the pixie dust in Trump’s armoury, the accelerator of his ambition. The 2016 election was far more a realisation of gonzo politics than an assertion of real inalienable political will. 

Is P.J partially responsible for the political mood in 2016? Kinda but not really. No more than for any election since 1969. Should Hunter S Thomson take a bow? Again, it’s a No.

But their legacy does certainly taint the world we now live in, for both good and bad.

If showbiz rules and we’re all Gonzo now, Trump Rules – or at least did for 4 years longer than most of us would have liked. But, careful what you wish for. And perhaps more importantly careful what you laugh it. Because someone might take you seriously.

Inspired by the very real events and conversations [recorded] in an An Evening with PJ O Rourke hosted by Tortoise Media. The topic? America Today.

Tech, Purpose & The Aspergers Economy

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ADS, Animal Spirits, Artificial Intelligence, Aspergers, Aspies, coders, Courtney Love, Daryl Hannah, Evolution, High Functioning Autism, Identity, IQ, John Maynard Keynes, Microprocessors, Moore's Law, Programmers, purpose, Rajesh Anandan, Scott Wilkinson, Stanley Kubrick, Tech, Tim Burton, Virgin Media Business

_76970532_624_einstein.jpg

Tech is nothing without Purpose.

And in our increasingly hyper connected world, Purpose is nothing without tech.

Purposeful companies and businesses increasingly use tech, digital platforms and the social networks to shape, co create, disseminate, sense check and activate their every purposeful initiative amongst the crowd.

We are beginning to move beyond the cultish tech for tech’s sake ‘everything’s genius’ approach to all things digital. People are not blindly saying ‘yes’ before they even know what they’re being offered.

And it is not only in the masses’ response to the latest highly questionable i-phone up grade new grade what grade launch that we see a little of the emperor’s clothes being shredded. A number of financial analysts regard the herd of Unicorns that have appeared  in the last 3 or 4 years as ‘fluffy stock’ with questionable valuations. Simply put they’ll trade and make cash out of them while they can but they think they’re a little puffed up in the value department.

Even the hard-core geeks and nerds – those applying the genius of AI and machine learning to their business, platforms and product ideas – are using them to unlock more humanity in the tech and in the customer experience, not just capacity and capability.

But being more human isn’t a purpose. I would say its an evolutionary imperative.  Just because some tech or platform play is possible or probable doesn’t make it palatable. You can’t guarantee that everyone will just continue to have an appetite for everything because it’s cool or does more shit that the last one.

Moore’s Flaw is that, although the keep doubling it trajectory of hyper accelerated microprocessor capability might be a fact, generally, people are not linear and they are far from modal. People are suspicious of being hyper accelerated, and after the first rush tend to push back against it. This is something to do with their emotional sense of risk, control and threat and how they respond to it, beyond the rational Should I? Shouldn’t I?

In some ways the tech future scapers need to apply a mechanism somewhat similar to how John Maynard Keynes’ Animal Spirits was applied in the world of finance and economics – where he pointed to the lateral and randomly applied instincts, emotions and proclivities that ostensibly drive human behaviour in regards to the adoption of risk in financial situations. Understanding how people feel emotionally about the adoption of hyper accelerated tech and its dizzying ability, for example in the work place, would make for a far richer and more realistic tech and digital landscape.

But I digress.

If Tech is turning the world, beyond the increasing humanities of its evolution, is their a purpose it might embrace beyond its direct impacts in society? One rooted in its community?

Is there a massive unspoken cause that it could rally around – one which is rooted in its own culture and expertise – and ultimately that delivered a mutuality of interest for every stakeholder – employees, customers, suppliers and partners?

In rifling through various pieces on tech and society over the past few months, Scott Wilkinson, head of Brand at Virgin Media Business and myself came to a thought.

The answer might lie in its heartland and population – and by that we mean the teeming populous engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, developers, coders and designers et al who keep this massive multi Trillion dollar industry turning.

There is much spoken of the ‘on the spectrum’ nature and culture of the super tech geek world – or any geek world for that matter.

But we have noticed that most of the ‘noise’ is around an almost cultish celebrity status given to people with ‘astonishing’ minds.

High Functioning Autistics – the celebrated ones – have become a sort of ‘new rock n roll’ – the super brains – and in the tech industry these human super processors are the Natural Intelligence that shapes Artificial Intelligence and astonishing paradigm shifts in the world.

The fact that in broader popular culture the likes of Courtney Love, Darryl Hannah, Stanley Kubrick and many other HFAs make no secret of their condition is redeeming and very helpful to remove the stigma that still surrounds the condition.

But having an above average IQ, the intellectual skills and the successes that they do still sets these HFAs a long long way away from the average person with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

People who exist lower down the ASD spectrum with less immediately identifiable symptoms will find life far more difficult as their behaviours can be misunderstood.

So the question is this – beyond the rock n roll of HFAs, how many ASDs exist in the Tech Sector?  And if that number is highly over indexed versus society (researchers estimate that 1% of the population have some form of ASD*), and if the sector is proven to host a disproportionate number of ASDs and equally profit from them and their condition, then perhaps therein lies a Purpose for the Tech Sector rooted in a pure truth and within both its interest and expertise to act upon it.

Tech Guru Rajesh Anandan, founder of software company ULTRA testing only employs people on the spectrum, and for what he sees as very very good reason, the benefits of their engagement far outstripping the immediate issues of their behavioural difficulties.  The idea of Aspies being celebrated and valued in tech circles is far from new.

My interest lies in those millions who still live in the shadows – those who have not truly identified their condition and struggle with its impacts – those who have not stumbled into tech as some Wardrobe to a Narnian world where they feel more at home and alive.

Is there an Action Group to be created drawn from the heads of the Global Tech Players – to set an agenda for helping those with every level of ASD in regards to education, training, employment and community – what better use to put a world leading ‘tech campus’ of smart, energetic, highly connected people to than taking care of their own?

Does a purpose rooted in unleashing opportunity for all those people who otherwise struggle with ASD in its lesser forms fit with the global tech culture?

No idea. Simply a thought. Something that revealed itself to us.

This kind of initiative may already exist. It certainly deserves greater exploration.

Perhaps the sector might think ‘not interested’ – or ‘we already do enough’. It is always hard to get people involved because it requires investment. And Purpose rarely unlocks investment. But profit and finance does. Securing growth does.

Perhaps they will only do it if someone puts a value on ASD as one of the engines of the Tech sector’s astonishing rise and success. A value that they feel compelled to protect.

Perhaps that what’s we need to do. If we were to be able to measure the  impact and value of ASD in the tech sector and present it as a highly particular economy – what I tentatively call The Aspergers Economy for want of a better label  – that would change the lens on people’s perception and appetite for investment. By rooting the value of the sector within the gift of a certain group, perhaps the value of their contribution as a highly productive constituency driving a global economy worth in the trillions of dollars; perhaps people might the be prepared to invest in the resilience of that global economy by improving the  opportunities of the primary actors in its success.

That might be a Purpose worth pursuing because, ultimately Tech is Nothing without Purpose, and that Purpose has to be more than another AI story or ‘look at my slidey new interface’ youtube film.

 

 

*SOURCE: Foundation For People With Learning Disabilities –

http://mhf-ld.unified.co.uk/help-information/learning-disability-a-z/a/autistic-spectrum-disorder-asd/

Accelerating History, Universal Rules & Tappist Conundrum

20 Monday Jun 2016

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Back to the future, Bowie, Castro, Cold War, Conspiracy Theories, David St Hubbins, Dia De Los Muertos, facebook, Frank Cannon, GOOGLE, Guy Fawkes, History, Interior Design, JFK, Kevlar, Kruschev, Low, Marilyn Monroe, May Flies, Moore's Law, Mrk IV Continental, Rum Bean Stew, Simon Schama, Spinal Tap, Street Food, Will-i-am

Screen Shot 2016-06-20 at 11.38.20.png

The future is Now – or just a hop, swipe and a quark in front of the moment we’re in – apparently – and every leap forwards we experience just another masterful identification of yet another inflection in technology – another opportunity or possibility seized by one silicon valley giant or another (and at which they ferociously throw themselves like a clown-masked bank robber sprawled across the bonnet of Frank Cannon’s Mark IV Continental, money spilling from his pockets like confetti, killer app strapped to his oversized gloved hand, joker grimace mouth frothing with messianic fervour).

And as each Now is seized, another rush of them pop up in its wake. Not one. Many. Nows are like May Flies, their single short life, their moment in the sun though brief and bright, is followed by not one but many more, their job of expanding their universe efficiently and economically done. And like May Flies, those Nows and the wave of possibility and opportunity that accompany them are coming thicker and faster than ever as technology and the Moore’s Law slingshot applies.

But there’s the question (if you can be arsed to ask it).

These Nows, and the infinite relentless possibility that comes with them are coming thicker and faster BUT are they rushing towards us, and if so what’s pushing them? Or are we rushing towards them – and if so, what’s propelling us?

Are we in a delicious Pull relationship with that point somewhere between the far side of the Now and the leading edge of tomorrow? Is the mesmeric possibility and galloping expectation of ‘what might be’ seducing us to rush at ever greater speeds into that space, self-propelling ourselves on the accelerating nature of tech capability?

Or are we being pushed? – bullied and bumped by the expanding exploding mosh of what has momentarily just been…by history, its knee relentlessly in the small of our back: its open palms flat battering against our shoulder blades – oooffff – sharp shoves with vertebrae clicks as the metronome of our progress?

And if it is the latter, when did quaint, doleful, dusty history get so pushy?

Though providing a huge potential for sounding a little like David St Hubbins from Spinal Tap (how could we forget his musings on Infinity – “if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.”), the question of whether we are being pushed towards the future (and if so by what) or whether the future is rushing towards us is a rather fun thing to ponder,

My interest lies in the two camps that seem to vie for attention in this Tappist space. On the one hand the Historians have always felt very strongly that the answer to every human question yet to be asked has already been answered somewhere in history so they would say that history reaches forward into the Now and the Near Future continuously, shaping, poking, and priming them as it goes, and, ultimately isn’t everything rather circular anyway in our Goes Around Comes Around world?

And on the other, the futurists have a tendency to simply view history as the collective debris strewn behind our relentless pursuit of that great big beautiful rush  of ‘Now’s – the past simply the rusting wreck of all that furious Doing and Being – the landfill of quadrillions of previous ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’s – and a fistful of ‘maybe’s’ – now old; spent; finished; past; dead.

It would be fair to say that in our tech-fuelled accelerating world one might be forgiven for believing that the Futurists are ahead

Bar the odd Simon Schama moment and the old farts watching Time Team re runs – and a small deep fetish for period dramas – it’s all i Robot, Future Shock, cyborg, Artificial Intelligence, the upcoming sensory smack addiction of VR, multiple Wireds by Will i am, and the ‘prism-meets-kaleidoscope-meets-mirage’ of social network identity.

But for my tuppence worth, I believe we are not being drawn towards the relentlessly multiplying possibilities of an accelerating life powered by accelerating tech.

We are being pushed towards them.

Life is not accelerating – history is. It is also expanding and deepening as it does so. Technology is not accelerating future opportunity; it is amplifying, multiplying expanding and accelerating the Past at an exponential rate, which in turn pushes the future. (I can hear the sound of a split hair readying itself for further splicing!)

The Past is throwing more and more data, options choices, threads and wormholes over our shoulder into the path ahead.

The old, odd, sloth-like and highly personal model of living history – a straggly tendril poking us along our merry way, or popping up for some reason every now and then – has transformed into a high, broad and deep wave of such staggering proportion that the sheer critical mass of it relentlessly rising up behind us presses us forward at ever greater speeds.

History has stopped being the inert supplicant to the edgy today and ever more glamorous tomorrow. History is no longer dusting off books and only getting noticed when the 120 pound muscled-up Now feels like kicking sand in its face.

History is now the big kid on the block. History has changed its diet. History is bulking up, doing free weights, and running faster and further than ever before. History’s arms are more ripped and wider than ever. History’s shoulders have expanded, laying on more muscle and width. History has binned the old singular enormo-head of massed experience, chronology and intelligence and now rears up like a hydra, multiple heads sparking, spitting and snapping in every direction at once.

History is so NOW. Alive. Vibrant. Ripped. (Ooohhh.)

And this History is no meathead. This History has taken up Humanities. Broadening its mind at the speed of light fibre. This history ‘listens’. And it learns.

The old, mean, sharp dry propagandas of the old History – mean, brittle, myopic, self interested, closed, elitist – have been supplanted with a broad minded, expansive all seeing History, fired by myriad reference points and concurrent history threads on any given subject – all of which can be viewed ‘in flow’, hyper linked to each other in a cats cradle of information, opinion, feeling, insight, record, and data. History is not only alive. Its groovy: switched on. Tuned in.

For example, lets take an era of historic record – The Cold War. In our new hyper connected world, at the touch of a screen I can explore the Cold War not only from the vantage point of general historic record; the standard expository account as set out in a geo political or military text book but also through ‘pulling up’ what’s out there (About 65, 100,000 results in 0,62 seconds according to GOOGLE) delivering everything from random Wikis to blogs to current affairs programmes and texts from the time, government papers subsequently released by interested 3rd parties (web platforms & activists): treatise on How and why – profiles on whom – the JFK lens? – the Khruschev lens? – the Castro Lens?  – suddenly Ive got Marilyn Monroe conspiracy films with my Bay Of Pigs and a recipe for Cuban Rum Bean Stew in front of me. There are personal biographical and autobiographical accounts of living memory (both politicians militarists, civic officers and everyday people) to swim in.

I can have a shufti at the confrontation through the 1st and 3rd person filmic, musical and artistic reminiscences of people who ‘lived it’. I can virtually experience Cold War happenings, using Google Street View to walk the streets and dark corners of the Eastern Block to bring a narrative reminiscence to life. I can listen to recordings, interviews; watch reams of old newsreel. I can even consider it through the lens of how the art direction of movies focused on the period have inspired new wave designers in a kind of New Wave Cold War Hot Looks Chic – with a range of soft furnishings furniture and wall papers that celebrate concrete block builds papered with the rural mirage of big florals rendered in a palette that cold best be described as ‘Bowie Low’ Orange

This sea of multi dimensional multi perspective references is universal.

Technology allows me to drown myself in my own historic tsunami on any given subject.

Now this new, expanding, deepening, towering hydra tsunami of history can be broadly separated into two forms.

Near History & Far History

Far History has nothing to do with timelines or chronology – Far History is the kind of history which is only occasionally drawn into our everyday consciousness – the type of history that is farthest away from our Now.

Far History is only drawn up for or by a particular reason. For example, I watch the film Book Of Life with my children; they ask me about The Day Of The Dead. I follow up with a little light research on Dia De Los Muertos and suddenly I can drown myself in an avalanche of semiotic, cultural, religious, geographic, artistic, musical rendition and reminiscence. And the odd street food recipe.

To put it another way, Far History is everything beyond the peripheral vision of a facebook timeline and a linked-in profile update.

Near History is the one to watch. Near History is the pushy one here. Near History is the type of history that is expanding to the greatest degree. Near History is the staggering funnel of information, data, reference, touch point, perspective that rushes outwards across multiple channels and platforms from any one moment, action, experience or occurrence to deliver social, cultural, economic and environmental context of staggering breadth, impact and effect.

Think of it in personal terms for a moment. Your ‘history’ was once something gentler, broadly of two parts – the highly personal – ‘Close to you’ version. Spoken memories. Photo albums. Diaries. Familial reminiscence. Shared experiences between neighbour and local. With a  nice and highly engineered ‘Part Of This’ national identity draped over the top for when bigger stuff came along – football, war, European Union, holidays, collective cultural rituals (Guy Fawkes Day).

But it was slow, intertwined, indistinct. Ambling.

Now every moment explodes with Near History – the old personal intimate ‘close to me ‘ stuff amplified to staggering proportion by the connections pictures films shares links likes revelations news sources contextual materials.

Near History doesn’t pop up eventually, a little way down the track. It goes off like a grenade – rising up and billowing around us so quickly that we are living in it – the Near History is now a part of the Now.

It is this expansive explosive Near History rising up behind every moment we live that is pushing us forwards.

Near History is not in service to Moore’s Law. It is what fuels Moore’s Law. The exponential multiplication of capability, capacity and functionality is forced forwards by the Near History of every innovating, applicable and expanding moment in technology that has just been in service to every expanding moment we’ve just lived and the legions of multiplying Nows lining up just in front of it.

I think.

Anyway, if you’re facing the future, throw away the rear view mirror, strap yourself in, pop on some flash goggles and turn that Kevlar round to face the back. And let History, especially the Near kind fire you forwards.

 

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