The Light Is a Headlight | 2140

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The Light Is a Headlight

Hello everyone, I’m back from my holiday. It was lovely, thanks for asking. I posted some photos from the trip on my blog if you’re interested.

I do hope that you enjoyed the Night Dream’s episode last week. The Night Dream Podcast has fast become one of my favourite podcasts. I’m thrilled that Laurie made a guest episode for Permanently Moved. If you haven’t listened to it yet, or skipped it in the feed do check it out.

They say that a change is better than a rest, but a holiday is better than both of those things. The dislocation provides distance to reflect on everything one has left behind.

I didn’t sit down and think too deeply about things. But things were still thought.

Sitting beside the pool with a beer and a book in the sun I thought about how the last 18months put a lot of things on hold. Walking around the coast shadowed by the medieval walls of Valletta, a moment of reflection on where I have and haven’t been putting energy.

One of the things I did reflect on for a while were all the failed and abortive attempts at getting my shit together. You know, doing all the things that need to be done to resolve wider issues. These routes one needs to take always seem so simple when you are somewhere else.

Living in the UK over the last 6 years or so has felt very much like frogs being slowly boiled in the waters of unreality. 

My brother lives in Asia. He said recently that from the outside, the UK looks like a selfish incompetent island full of selfish incompetent people. He’s deeply, deeply embarrassed.

I’ve only been back since Wednesday lunchtime, but it feels like I’ve returned to a deranged dream world. These rogue dreams include: arming politicians with handguns. Supermarkets putting large format photos of products like shelves of washing liquid and asparagus into empty trays. Hiding shortages and giving the illusion of full shelves. The BBC for a moment thought the Queen had died but wasn’t sure.

It is at this moment in my original draft that I launch into the second half of the episode. About just how more unreal things are going to get when the Queen dies. But I cut it, as the subject requires more attention than I’m capable of after coming back from holiday. Plus I went to the pub last night. 

I will return to it though, as a friend said. “High geo-politics royal correspondent” is one of his favourite jaymos. Maybe next week. We’ll see.

In the few short days that I’ve been back, I have slid from a state of of relaxation back to normalised levels of anxiety. A background psychic pressure that I wasn’t aware of until it was gone. Now I’m back, it’s back too.

Speaking to friends the background levels of anxiety seems to be coming up though the very fabric of society. A psychic scream, like rising damp. Permeating people’s lives as a background hazard.

I have since the end of 2018 tried to avoid putting content powered by negative vibes out into the world. Or at the very least tried to live by Oswell’s Maxim: No critique without alternative proposal. However, today I’m making an exception.

In March of this year I mentioned that my essay collection “Your Attention is Sovereign” from a few years ago had reached 10,000 downloads. Not bad for a little PDF.

It’s about the attention economy, the feeds, the news, the hellsite and the internet we ended up with. There’s still some value in it, and worth reading if you haven’t already. Others must think so too as it’s still being linked around the web.

A few years on from having written it I was too kind on social media. Especially with the sort of language I used.

I would now, in October 2021. Be more inclined to use words like ‘social poison’ and ‘pollution’ to describe the effects that Web2 social media has had on our society. The result of long term exposure to this environment has been chronic brain worms. 

The worst of them infecting the people who are nominally in charge of culture.

Media people and people in politics spend 100% of their time on Twitter. But less than 30% of the UK population even have an account, let alone go on there multiple times a day. It’s a huge waste of time.

To pick up what I also said in the same episode in March. Social / media has produced a media environment that is absolutely deranged. Unreflective and completely divorced from reality.

If you think that the last few years have been bad. Returning to the UK this week has hardened my belief that things are going to get even worse. 

If you think that you see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel at all, you are mistaken.
That is in fact the headlight of an oncoming train.

I’ve spent the last 18months of my life inside. I am, like many people, full of resentment. Just a week away makes me realise just how many things there are, I want to do, things I want to achieve. The only approach that I can see is to check out. Completely.

I’m interested in model making, unreal engine, train sets, boat building, permaculture and other weird shit.

I’m just going to read and listen to the things made by friends and do my own thing. Avoiding the mess as best I can.

Worse disasters are about to unfold. I just want to live my life and create stuff for other people to enjoy.

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The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the audio due to time constraints.

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