When was the last time you had a fight? I don’t mean an argument over shopping with your wife/girlfriend/lover. I mean, a genuine toe to toe, hand to hand combat, man to man, sweating and panting fist fight? Let’s suppose you never spent time as a rank and file teenage thug on the terraces, you’ve been fortunately free of a mugging in the city and you’ve never pursued a sporting career in the ring; where would you find yourself not only prepared to defend your honour with your fists, but so filled with the power of rage you could bounce a snarling Rottweiler head off the hard tarmac? In a drunken brawl at the Uni bar? In the primary school playground when someone snatched your Doritos? A pushing contest ending in a tenuously connecting punch, random kicking and then a pained, tearful retreat, your arm in the grip of a kindly teacher sparing your humiliation and, if male, adding a severe shaking and an equally kindly cuff on the back of the head to send you on your way?
Is that moment of violent impulse so far faded the memory has reduced to a sepia glow? You’re a quiet, peaceful, ordinary guy. Really? So that really wasn’t you a couple of months back, feet tracing the steps of an inarticulate salsa over tarmac melting in the blinding sun, palm slapping the open door of your abandoned Audi, shouting into the face of the driver in the BMW behind, whose head and spastic arm seem to be trying to escape from his side window (prior to you obligingly wrenching open the door and dragging him into the oncoming traffic) as he’s telling you ‘You don’t know Jack’ while providing a derisively concise critique of your current driving skills, as if taking the mini questionnaire on the rear of business vehicles (‘How am I driving?’) far too seriously (‘like a cunt, mate.’) ‘I don’t know Jack? I don’t know Jack? I am fucking Jack’ you hear yourself shouting, so mad you’ve no idea what you’re saying or why your mouth is working in that odd way (probably because you’re in my story).
Well, let’s take a look at Jack. You might have seen him from your rear view mirror, heading up a line of stalled traffic, squaring up to another overweight, middle-aged middle income earner equally concerned with mortgage payments, low prospects and male pattern baldness; each goading the other into the muscle memory of that playground push and shove, pulses racing into coronaries before (in the absence of that caring teacher) the puffed up challenge (‘Oh yeah?’ ‘Yeah’) implodes into dismissive verbal abuse: “Go fuck yourself’, ‘No, you fuck yourself” and a shame-faced waddle to their remembered vehicles, all anger stranded and the emptiness of manhood exposed amid the hot, urban air ripe with embarrassment and impatient car horns.
Why? What was all that about? Jack hardly bothers to ask himself, mumbling some consoling abuse (‘Wanker’) to himself or the startled, blank faced woman in the passenger seat pretending to read the messages on her phone; the source, the detail of the incident already fading in the time it takes to slam the door, wrench the key still waiting in the ignition and lead the parade of traffic to the next obstacle (lights, roadworks, roadblock), ‘Faaark’: the slow exhalation of breath, the cocktail of emotions tuning down from boil to simmer, the pulse gradually lowering with the distraction of the journey (stilted conversation, music, forward motion) until the selective, protective amnesia wipes out the operatic emotion of the moment when Jack, who knew himself pretty fucking well, who knew his own fucking mind, all right, was not going to give way to that ‘fucking dickhead in the Audi’ as traffic funneled from two lanes to a single channel; the pettiness, the violence, the screaming all airbrushed, forgotten.
A familiar experience? Familiar enough for its own TV series. In a country where Jack, deprived of his car, on foot in the same street, the same heat, even the same stressful hurry, by chance bumping into the same man on the pavement would be falling over himself in a profusion of habitual apology (‘Sorry...Sorry...Sorry’). Sorry, far from being the hardest word, is perhaps (on these shores) still the most overused in the English vocabulary.
So, what’s happening on the road? What’s the usual tabloid answer: Stress? Natural aggression? Life in the fast lane? Immigrants? Possibly. There’s a grain of truth in every outrage. However, there could be another explanation, one which until recent times might have been consigned to the territory of science fiction.
In an era in which communication has never been so accessible, human contact is on the decline. A (brave) new world is being incubated in our 21st century of accelerated evolution; technology is advancing by the hour, shrinking the universe (to the front room, the driver’s seat). World conflict is played out in distant arenas, if not quite as television entertainment, at least featuring someone alien, somewhere alien; somewhere else. And our nearest neighbours are in the next apartment/house/etc watching the same news coverage.
As we become more distant from each other, we become more distant from ourselves. Take a closer look at Jack. Insulated in his home by the familiar glow of the ipad, laptop, computer screen as digital communication insidiously inserts itself into a modern butler’s role as the primary source of food, sex, culture, entertainment. Insulated from the streets by his phone, communicating without vision, even without voice (dextrous thumbs texting, sexting within the muffling intimacy of headphones and a personally selected soundtrack to his life); recording rather than experiencing, usually selfies showing the same old self. All of it, the whole lifestyle, insulated from the black hole of poverty by a deck of credit cards leaving him feeling secure, incognito and immortal; a voyeur of the world around him. If he needs to leave home, he won’t be stranded on the streets, he’s got his motor, a prophylactic extension of this insulated home; the world outside no more real than a computer game played out on the windscreen. So insulated is he, the adrenaline fueling the drama of his life comes from the resentment of aliens invading this imperial space, intruding on his world. These foreign bodies, these ‘wankers’, are irritations intimately attached to his adrenal gland, requiring instant removal, immediate extermination.
I exaggerate, but not by much. It’s a 20th century SF vision of the future. ipod, iphone, itouch, ishuffle, ipad, iplayer...i, i, i. We have progressed only grammatically from the ‘Me Me Me generation’ of the 70s. As it becomes our primary means of communication with the outside world (the world outside our head), technology has entrenched the celebrity of the self at the centre of our culture and placed us at the centre of our own universe It is the inevitable and natural progression of a consumer culture, the next stage of Darwinian selection, the cusp of a new age, and those who fail to keep up are left to hang around moaning and complaining until (like the Neanderthal) they finally meet extinction.
Isolation progresses most rapidly when we lose physical human contact. Touch is essentially the sense which connects us to others and it is under social threat. Human contact is old school now, the naturally tactile among us (as expressed through bodies rather than plastic keyboards) are viewed with suspicion. Aids, Ebola, sexual abuse... Can you take the risk anymore? Any form of physical contact more intimate than the handshake is suspect and even that (outside the professional environment) is under pressure from a range of alternatives as superficial as High Fives to bumping knuckles, requiring less contact, less palm to palm time. When you can be judged on the character of your grip (we’re all social psychologists now), why offer it? Parents fear striking their own children, a staple diet of chastisement in the previous generation, or even cuddling them; the paranoia of paedophilia (a national pastime, it seems) and the development of child-centred rights has placed all adult-child physical communication under stress, rendering first parents, then teachers impotent in the instruction of discipline and helpless to combat disruption in home or classroom. The cliche ‘Is it ‘cos I’m black?’ has been replaced by ‘You can’t fucking touch me’ as a standard response within the inner city comprehensive. Do not restrain that violent child, is the unwritten law, let him throw that chair, beat up a classmate, knife a teacher until his tantrum has run its course. That kindly teacher’s cuff on the ear would, in the present century, have him consigned to an inevitable law suit, consequent unemployment and penury. Even worse might be the arm around the shoulder.
So, how does Jack tutor his kids? What’s a good substitute for physical control and assurance? The TV screen and computer games ensure hours of relieving silence for harassed parents...and the opportunity for socialisation. Jack has never listened to the tired old argument of the desensitising nature of computer games (media chewing gum on a slow news day), especially when they increasingly simulate life with realistic graphics and an absence of moral values; encouraging players to adopt a new persona, one prepared to beat a prostitute to pulp, practice efficient ethnic cleansing of anonymous, disposable opposition and climb the corporate criminal ladder with Machiavellian ease.
Acting out violent fantasies is hardly a new addition to the catalogue of children’s imaginary entertainment. ‘Japsanenglish’ tripped off the tongue of 5 year olds on the bomb sites of 1960s Bermondsey as ‘Wheresdadgone’, inciting many an enthusiastic pitch battle in which it was exciting to kill like a psychopath (this was the Japs, of course, the English dying in noble slo-mo postures). Drug-dealing gangsters and Zombies may have replaced Germans, Indians (Native Americans, to you) and Japs as the new expendables but the impulse remains the same and proved no hinderance to the civilizing process of growing up, even in South London (unless, of course, you progressed to the terraces of the Den). The systematic combat and victory over an imaginary enemy is the natural cultivation of our feral selves, preparing for a combat which, in most cases, will never happen, like zoo bound tiger cubs at play (although hearing Muslim toddlers play-fighting a Jihad against the Infidel might be a more worrying variation).
Furthermore, computer nerds will also explain in earnest, anecdotal detail how these games are ‘highly social’ and players from distant countries ‘come together’ in a regular feelgood community, a united nations (of war and attrition). However, they are players, not friends who will run off to the shop, chippy or cafe once the ‘war’ is over, before spending the afternoon playing football or drinking in the park. For some, the war is never over, just played more efficiently at a higher level on screens in silent bedrooms absorbed by the quality of their graphics, their simulation of ‘real’ people. There is no further social infrastructure to provide a bonding of friendship, just social media, ‘Pro-anorexia’ and ‘Why don’t you die you loser’ websites. We don’t have to sound like an out of touch high court judge to observe a difference and a distance we are subtly and not so subtly placing between us.
Adult games produce a similar distance. Having bought an app for internet dating Jack scans the catalogue of availability (does any male actually study the carefully contrived profile blurbs?). Height, weight, picture (maybe ‘education’, for social class); then a text for interest, a phone call for voice, coffee for final analysis. With so much choice, focus is narrowed, judgements fine-tuned and characters objectified as consumer products. Although the sex is obviously hands-on, it is, by process, judgemental, particularly in the context of the hours Jack puts in systematically working through his laptop’s free pornography (more addictive than his son’s Call of Duty).
Once isolated, the next stage is the loss of empathy, the failure to see others as human. This is the mind of the autistic and the psychopath, many of whom, with the advantage of cold-blooded ruthlessness and a lack of conscience, are apparently working in the upper levels of the political and corporate world, in control of social engineering and the production of the sleek, seductive products Jack avidly consumes. ‘Some people ain’t people’ says the paranoid Eddie Carbone in Miller’s 20th century drama A View from the Bridge. In the 21st, evolution has taken us to another level where we lose the ‘some’ in Eddie’s conviction. We trust no one.
In such a society, is it any wonder we might find the computer screen a seductive sanctuary. However, in the world of electronic communication a keyboard jockey is freed not only from the pressures of real life but the internal censorship which is natural in face to face contact. Social media makes us antisocial. Trolling and hacking are mere symptoms of the malaise in which social mores are transgressed with ease, like ancient borderlines fortified for a different age and no longer patrolled. Now Hobbes’ vision of feral life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ is fully exposed as our physical and psychological distance, alongside the consequent anonymity, allows us free reign to assert our spite for others, a genuine cocktail of fear/hate which has only been repressed, it seems, not eradicated by years of a necessary social contract within polite society. Face to face, we had to get along, and so we did. Now we can do and say what we like and what we do and say is, apparently, our real human nature. We have never coagulated into one organic social whole. We have attained, passed through an unconvincing ‘civilization’ and come out the other side, untouched.
So, is technology any use to us? Really? Is this even a serious question? How would we even know if it’s functional or dysfunctional when we have no idea what we are struggling to achieve? ‘Progress’ is the usual answer. Progress; the word itself asserts it’s own validity (ipso facto a positive) and implies an advance from century to century toward some ideal state of achievement which, of course, is never in reach during the lifetime of any generation. Yet each generation is convinced it is taking a step forward (‘forward’ is always a good thing, even if each step takes us closer to the edge of a cliff). What we mean of course is material progress, the sucking dry of the planet’s resources in the production of consumer ‘welfare’. As the planet has a finite limit of these resources logic tells us this can’t end well. Yet progress moves on in its inevitable way, as inevitable as the creation of the nuclear bomb, in a ceaseless stream of thoughtless ‘forward’ motion (just as neuroscience has discovered such a concept is no more than a convenient illusion to help humans make sense of the world). History is seen in a timeline measuring this progress, showing human ingenuity moving us towards some worldly nirvana. Yet this progress only feels like an advance when viewed in retrospect. The forward motion just calms us, keeps us sane, gives is a sense of purpose. We see how the car, for example, in less than 100 years has become the sleek, elegant machine beyond the imagination of the original inventors, yet we find ourselves if not already maimed or dead, sitting in it for hours on static motorways, fermenting the primitive urge to kill any driver daring to pull into the space ahead of us, pushing us back one space in a queue which is going nowhere.
Could it be this ‘progress’ is another illusion? Could it be we never have had any control over our destiny? Could we, in fact, be merely driven by the market forces which kicked in and accelerated in western culture around 1700, when the industrial revolution bullied us from a simple but harsh rural existence into the mechanised, organised, time-driven lifestyle of cities which, through human ingenuity (Blake’s ‘mind forged manacles’) have grown outward and upward, connected ever more intimately by the arteries and veins of canal, road, rail and air networks to increasingly develop the efficiency of ‘progress’, a progress which in the present wave of information technology, this second industrial revolution, ironically brings us superficially closer as a planet while isolating us from immediate neighbours. Our relationships are changing again and changing us. No one has planned this just as no one decided the Cro Magnon should evolve at the expense of the Neanderthal, it’s just human nature, the nature of the human condition, and arrogant as we are sitting at the wheel, our foot hard on the impotent accelerator, we are merely another stage of a species in long-term evolution going nowhere.
DG 2015
Is that moment of violent impulse so far faded the memory has reduced to a sepia glow? You’re a quiet, peaceful, ordinary guy. Really? So that really wasn’t you a couple of months back, feet tracing the steps of an inarticulate salsa over tarmac melting in the blinding sun, palm slapping the open door of your abandoned Audi, shouting into the face of the driver in the BMW behind, whose head and spastic arm seem to be trying to escape from his side window (prior to you obligingly wrenching open the door and dragging him into the oncoming traffic) as he’s telling you ‘You don’t know Jack’ while providing a derisively concise critique of your current driving skills, as if taking the mini questionnaire on the rear of business vehicles (‘How am I driving?’) far too seriously (‘like a cunt, mate.’) ‘I don’t know Jack? I don’t know Jack? I am fucking Jack’ you hear yourself shouting, so mad you’ve no idea what you’re saying or why your mouth is working in that odd way (probably because you’re in my story).
Well, let’s take a look at Jack. You might have seen him from your rear view mirror, heading up a line of stalled traffic, squaring up to another overweight, middle-aged middle income earner equally concerned with mortgage payments, low prospects and male pattern baldness; each goading the other into the muscle memory of that playground push and shove, pulses racing into coronaries before (in the absence of that caring teacher) the puffed up challenge (‘Oh yeah?’ ‘Yeah’) implodes into dismissive verbal abuse: “Go fuck yourself’, ‘No, you fuck yourself” and a shame-faced waddle to their remembered vehicles, all anger stranded and the emptiness of manhood exposed amid the hot, urban air ripe with embarrassment and impatient car horns.
Why? What was all that about? Jack hardly bothers to ask himself, mumbling some consoling abuse (‘Wanker’) to himself or the startled, blank faced woman in the passenger seat pretending to read the messages on her phone; the source, the detail of the incident already fading in the time it takes to slam the door, wrench the key still waiting in the ignition and lead the parade of traffic to the next obstacle (lights, roadworks, roadblock), ‘Faaark’: the slow exhalation of breath, the cocktail of emotions tuning down from boil to simmer, the pulse gradually lowering with the distraction of the journey (stilted conversation, music, forward motion) until the selective, protective amnesia wipes out the operatic emotion of the moment when Jack, who knew himself pretty fucking well, who knew his own fucking mind, all right, was not going to give way to that ‘fucking dickhead in the Audi’ as traffic funneled from two lanes to a single channel; the pettiness, the violence, the screaming all airbrushed, forgotten.
A familiar experience? Familiar enough for its own TV series. In a country where Jack, deprived of his car, on foot in the same street, the same heat, even the same stressful hurry, by chance bumping into the same man on the pavement would be falling over himself in a profusion of habitual apology (‘Sorry...Sorry...Sorry’). Sorry, far from being the hardest word, is perhaps (on these shores) still the most overused in the English vocabulary.
So, what’s happening on the road? What’s the usual tabloid answer: Stress? Natural aggression? Life in the fast lane? Immigrants? Possibly. There’s a grain of truth in every outrage. However, there could be another explanation, one which until recent times might have been consigned to the territory of science fiction.
In an era in which communication has never been so accessible, human contact is on the decline. A (brave) new world is being incubated in our 21st century of accelerated evolution; technology is advancing by the hour, shrinking the universe (to the front room, the driver’s seat). World conflict is played out in distant arenas, if not quite as television entertainment, at least featuring someone alien, somewhere alien; somewhere else. And our nearest neighbours are in the next apartment/house/etc watching the same news coverage.
As we become more distant from each other, we become more distant from ourselves. Take a closer look at Jack. Insulated in his home by the familiar glow of the ipad, laptop, computer screen as digital communication insidiously inserts itself into a modern butler’s role as the primary source of food, sex, culture, entertainment. Insulated from the streets by his phone, communicating without vision, even without voice (dextrous thumbs texting, sexting within the muffling intimacy of headphones and a personally selected soundtrack to his life); recording rather than experiencing, usually selfies showing the same old self. All of it, the whole lifestyle, insulated from the black hole of poverty by a deck of credit cards leaving him feeling secure, incognito and immortal; a voyeur of the world around him. If he needs to leave home, he won’t be stranded on the streets, he’s got his motor, a prophylactic extension of this insulated home; the world outside no more real than a computer game played out on the windscreen. So insulated is he, the adrenaline fueling the drama of his life comes from the resentment of aliens invading this imperial space, intruding on his world. These foreign bodies, these ‘wankers’, are irritations intimately attached to his adrenal gland, requiring instant removal, immediate extermination.
I exaggerate, but not by much. It’s a 20th century SF vision of the future. ipod, iphone, itouch, ishuffle, ipad, iplayer...i, i, i. We have progressed only grammatically from the ‘Me Me Me generation’ of the 70s. As it becomes our primary means of communication with the outside world (the world outside our head), technology has entrenched the celebrity of the self at the centre of our culture and placed us at the centre of our own universe It is the inevitable and natural progression of a consumer culture, the next stage of Darwinian selection, the cusp of a new age, and those who fail to keep up are left to hang around moaning and complaining until (like the Neanderthal) they finally meet extinction.
Isolation progresses most rapidly when we lose physical human contact. Touch is essentially the sense which connects us to others and it is under social threat. Human contact is old school now, the naturally tactile among us (as expressed through bodies rather than plastic keyboards) are viewed with suspicion. Aids, Ebola, sexual abuse... Can you take the risk anymore? Any form of physical contact more intimate than the handshake is suspect and even that (outside the professional environment) is under pressure from a range of alternatives as superficial as High Fives to bumping knuckles, requiring less contact, less palm to palm time. When you can be judged on the character of your grip (we’re all social psychologists now), why offer it? Parents fear striking their own children, a staple diet of chastisement in the previous generation, or even cuddling them; the paranoia of paedophilia (a national pastime, it seems) and the development of child-centred rights has placed all adult-child physical communication under stress, rendering first parents, then teachers impotent in the instruction of discipline and helpless to combat disruption in home or classroom. The cliche ‘Is it ‘cos I’m black?’ has been replaced by ‘You can’t fucking touch me’ as a standard response within the inner city comprehensive. Do not restrain that violent child, is the unwritten law, let him throw that chair, beat up a classmate, knife a teacher until his tantrum has run its course. That kindly teacher’s cuff on the ear would, in the present century, have him consigned to an inevitable law suit, consequent unemployment and penury. Even worse might be the arm around the shoulder.
So, how does Jack tutor his kids? What’s a good substitute for physical control and assurance? The TV screen and computer games ensure hours of relieving silence for harassed parents...and the opportunity for socialisation. Jack has never listened to the tired old argument of the desensitising nature of computer games (media chewing gum on a slow news day), especially when they increasingly simulate life with realistic graphics and an absence of moral values; encouraging players to adopt a new persona, one prepared to beat a prostitute to pulp, practice efficient ethnic cleansing of anonymous, disposable opposition and climb the corporate criminal ladder with Machiavellian ease.
Acting out violent fantasies is hardly a new addition to the catalogue of children’s imaginary entertainment. ‘Japsanenglish’ tripped off the tongue of 5 year olds on the bomb sites of 1960s Bermondsey as ‘Wheresdadgone’, inciting many an enthusiastic pitch battle in which it was exciting to kill like a psychopath (this was the Japs, of course, the English dying in noble slo-mo postures). Drug-dealing gangsters and Zombies may have replaced Germans, Indians (Native Americans, to you) and Japs as the new expendables but the impulse remains the same and proved no hinderance to the civilizing process of growing up, even in South London (unless, of course, you progressed to the terraces of the Den). The systematic combat and victory over an imaginary enemy is the natural cultivation of our feral selves, preparing for a combat which, in most cases, will never happen, like zoo bound tiger cubs at play (although hearing Muslim toddlers play-fighting a Jihad against the Infidel might be a more worrying variation).
Furthermore, computer nerds will also explain in earnest, anecdotal detail how these games are ‘highly social’ and players from distant countries ‘come together’ in a regular feelgood community, a united nations (of war and attrition). However, they are players, not friends who will run off to the shop, chippy or cafe once the ‘war’ is over, before spending the afternoon playing football or drinking in the park. For some, the war is never over, just played more efficiently at a higher level on screens in silent bedrooms absorbed by the quality of their graphics, their simulation of ‘real’ people. There is no further social infrastructure to provide a bonding of friendship, just social media, ‘Pro-anorexia’ and ‘Why don’t you die you loser’ websites. We don’t have to sound like an out of touch high court judge to observe a difference and a distance we are subtly and not so subtly placing between us.
Adult games produce a similar distance. Having bought an app for internet dating Jack scans the catalogue of availability (does any male actually study the carefully contrived profile blurbs?). Height, weight, picture (maybe ‘education’, for social class); then a text for interest, a phone call for voice, coffee for final analysis. With so much choice, focus is narrowed, judgements fine-tuned and characters objectified as consumer products. Although the sex is obviously hands-on, it is, by process, judgemental, particularly in the context of the hours Jack puts in systematically working through his laptop’s free pornography (more addictive than his son’s Call of Duty).
Once isolated, the next stage is the loss of empathy, the failure to see others as human. This is the mind of the autistic and the psychopath, many of whom, with the advantage of cold-blooded ruthlessness and a lack of conscience, are apparently working in the upper levels of the political and corporate world, in control of social engineering and the production of the sleek, seductive products Jack avidly consumes. ‘Some people ain’t people’ says the paranoid Eddie Carbone in Miller’s 20th century drama A View from the Bridge. In the 21st, evolution has taken us to another level where we lose the ‘some’ in Eddie’s conviction. We trust no one.
In such a society, is it any wonder we might find the computer screen a seductive sanctuary. However, in the world of electronic communication a keyboard jockey is freed not only from the pressures of real life but the internal censorship which is natural in face to face contact. Social media makes us antisocial. Trolling and hacking are mere symptoms of the malaise in which social mores are transgressed with ease, like ancient borderlines fortified for a different age and no longer patrolled. Now Hobbes’ vision of feral life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ is fully exposed as our physical and psychological distance, alongside the consequent anonymity, allows us free reign to assert our spite for others, a genuine cocktail of fear/hate which has only been repressed, it seems, not eradicated by years of a necessary social contract within polite society. Face to face, we had to get along, and so we did. Now we can do and say what we like and what we do and say is, apparently, our real human nature. We have never coagulated into one organic social whole. We have attained, passed through an unconvincing ‘civilization’ and come out the other side, untouched.
So, is technology any use to us? Really? Is this even a serious question? How would we even know if it’s functional or dysfunctional when we have no idea what we are struggling to achieve? ‘Progress’ is the usual answer. Progress; the word itself asserts it’s own validity (ipso facto a positive) and implies an advance from century to century toward some ideal state of achievement which, of course, is never in reach during the lifetime of any generation. Yet each generation is convinced it is taking a step forward (‘forward’ is always a good thing, even if each step takes us closer to the edge of a cliff). What we mean of course is material progress, the sucking dry of the planet’s resources in the production of consumer ‘welfare’. As the planet has a finite limit of these resources logic tells us this can’t end well. Yet progress moves on in its inevitable way, as inevitable as the creation of the nuclear bomb, in a ceaseless stream of thoughtless ‘forward’ motion (just as neuroscience has discovered such a concept is no more than a convenient illusion to help humans make sense of the world). History is seen in a timeline measuring this progress, showing human ingenuity moving us towards some worldly nirvana. Yet this progress only feels like an advance when viewed in retrospect. The forward motion just calms us, keeps us sane, gives is a sense of purpose. We see how the car, for example, in less than 100 years has become the sleek, elegant machine beyond the imagination of the original inventors, yet we find ourselves if not already maimed or dead, sitting in it for hours on static motorways, fermenting the primitive urge to kill any driver daring to pull into the space ahead of us, pushing us back one space in a queue which is going nowhere.
Could it be this ‘progress’ is another illusion? Could it be we never have had any control over our destiny? Could we, in fact, be merely driven by the market forces which kicked in and accelerated in western culture around 1700, when the industrial revolution bullied us from a simple but harsh rural existence into the mechanised, organised, time-driven lifestyle of cities which, through human ingenuity (Blake’s ‘mind forged manacles’) have grown outward and upward, connected ever more intimately by the arteries and veins of canal, road, rail and air networks to increasingly develop the efficiency of ‘progress’, a progress which in the present wave of information technology, this second industrial revolution, ironically brings us superficially closer as a planet while isolating us from immediate neighbours. Our relationships are changing again and changing us. No one has planned this just as no one decided the Cro Magnon should evolve at the expense of the Neanderthal, it’s just human nature, the nature of the human condition, and arrogant as we are sitting at the wheel, our foot hard on the impotent accelerator, we are merely another stage of a species in long-term evolution going nowhere.
DG 2015
