Blog entry supplemental nineteen: I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’
I finished my last post by asserting that irrationality is a virus, a contagion that spreads via the internet; nothing that I have read, seen or accessed online in the last month has dissuaded me from this view! What do Isis, and INCEL have in common? Well, they’re examples of amoral, anti-social lunatics who would previously have remained isolated, but have now formed online ‘communities’ with devastating results! Reinforcing and justifying each others appalling attitudes and fostering a culture of thwarted entitlement!

I recently viewed an art exhibition, part of which featured posters of tech billionaires talking with chilling smugness about the virtual ‘village squares’ their technologies had made possible. Now the village square (and the town hall meeting) have a cherished place in English and American folklore, but one has to remember that Salem was a small town! At least the madness there was confined to one place, via the internet it can grow and infect others…

So, when viewing this exhibition, Pandora’s box and the Law of Unintended Consequences came to mind. I’ve realised that what I’m actually writing in the Great Flood, and in Lights in the Sky generally, is (in the best traditions of English science fiction) a ‘cosy catastrophe’ which provides comforting escapism from the ‘real’ twenty first century which sometimes seems too terrible to contemplate!

On that cheery note

Stephen Clare   May 2018