social media – Lights In The Sky

Reset

By C Stevens | 1st October 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

As I’ve said before in this blog, we live in worrying times. Previous entries have addressed other recent threats to our well-being; principally populist rulers, unaccountable billionaires and the organisations they run, including their corrosive and equally unaccountable social media platforms; but these all pale into insignificance beside the clear and present danger, which has come sharply into focus in the current news cycle. The existential threat posed by the collapse of the biosphere will mean the end of human civilisation and cannot be mitigated by technological fixes despite all self-serving claims to the contrary. The likes of Boris Johnson waffle on about ‘Green Capitalism’ as an acceptable version which would allow for continued economic growth. But as a number of commentators have pointed out, any economic growth is in the end unsustainable, and the only way out of the coming catastrophe is to drastically reduce the size of the world economy and with it the size of the world’s population.

When very rich people start buying up land in geographically-isolated places such as New Zealand, and tech billionaires draw up serious plans to colonise Mars as a back-up planet to Earth, then it’s time for everybody to worry.

However most people don’t have the options of the super-rich, and the number of sufficiently-isolated islands with the resources to support a significant population is necessarily finite. Those wealthy people wishing to seek this kind of asylum will need to act quickly, as the drawbridges are likely to be lifted very soon. You can probably think of the quarantines imposed recently by the likes of Australia and New Zealand as a sort of dry run for what they will be forced to do again later. And in the end it may be to no avail, as the populous and militarily-powerful nations at most risk of collapse are unlikely to just sit on their hands when things get desperate. Ecological collapses in the past have always led to warfare and violence, just ask the Easter Islanders!

At some point in the near future, a one-way trip into indentured servitude on Mars is going to look like a very attractive proposition, and millions will be applying.

Ironies abound in our current predicament; that we should have reached this point when pure science has enabled us to gain a frighteningly-sophisticated understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it, is merely the most poignant. But it’s not pure science which is the villain here, it’s the application of that science in technology, and the Abrahamic social and economic doctrines pursued by all urbanized societies which have brought us here.

And the reset part?

This is not a new phenomenon for our planet; mass extinctions are par for the course, although the active complicity of a sentient race in the process is (as far as we are aware) a new variant.

In the end the planet doesn’t care, it has a built-in self-correction mechanism. If things move too far in one direction it acts (blindly one assumes) to correct the imbalances that have built up within the system. All that pesky carbon will eventually be safely locked up again and the climate will return to something less inimical to higher forms of life. But in the meantime (and we’re talking millions of years here), evolution will be reset, starting again with the few hardy and adaptable species able to survive both the collapse and the testing times that follow, and it will be their descendants who eventually inherit the Earth.

Whether any of these creatures will achieve sentience is, of course, unknowable.

And if you’ve wondered why we’ve never been contacted by a technologically-advanced species from another star system…

The Author October 2021

Pluralistic Absolutism and Adversarial Hyperbole

By C Stevens | 25th August 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

A new (and in Western liberal democracies, at least) dominant philosophy has emerged in these most worrying of times, which I have given the name pluralistic absolutism. Now I did Google this, and nobody seems to have used this precise term before. It is however a new spin on an old notion, that of cultural absolutism; the notion that the values of your nation, region, ethnic group, religious persuasion, social class, or ideological belief system (delete as appropriate) are paramount and cannot be challenged. Like much in contemporary culture, this notion has mutated and been transformed by the influence of the internet, and in particular, by social media.

Ironically, an innovation that promised to bring peoples, nations and cultures together, has had precisely the opposite effect; the online world has instead atomised society, facilitating the rise of identity politics. Societies have become far more tribal, with people finding others who share their ethnicity, gender, and sexuality (or any combination of the aforementioned) and have similar beliefs, norms and values, within cyberspace. These new virtual communities are no longer necessarily limited by national boundaries. But, rather than resulting in a more tolerant attitude towards difference, a reaction against cultural relativism has led to the opposite. A Holier than Thou attitude has become mainstreamed, as everyone noisily proclaims the difference and uniqueness of their group’s particular take on the world, and its moral superiority to every other point of view.

This worldview has many additional consequences, including a conviction (on the part of everybody, it would seem) that there is a fixed way of doing everything, from watering plants in hot weather to writing genre fiction. All of this is spread and facilitated via social media, often linked to different identity groupings, and taking its place alongside the innumerable conspiracy theories, faddism in medical treatments and diets, and all the rest of the detritus.

Every little identity group now maintains that their narrow view of the world and their particular way of doing things is right and rejects (and often condemns as evil), all competing philosophies and methodologies.

The result of this is civil paralysis and confusion, which is exploited by Populists and authoritarians, and threatens democracy and the basis of Liberal society itself, which relies on tolerance and the willingness to agree to differ.

Accompanying this is what I will term adversarial hyperbole, in itself nothing new in the pages of the popular press. However this is now aggressively colonising other areas of the media once considered immune. Hence, every pronouncement by a celebrity or public figure is now an admission rather than a comment. Mild observations about others are repurposed as ‘brutal’ or ‘crushing’ criticisms! (sidebar: when did our public vocabulary become so limited?)

Every form of public discourse now appears to be conducted in the most ludicrously adversarial terms, and one has to ask what this fashion for violent public discourse tells us about our culture and about the likely fate of our democracy.

Not wishing to be alarmist here, but the Weimar Republic comes to mind, and others have already drawn parallels between the Reichstag Fire and the storming of the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters. This leads me to the conclusion that the new pluralistic absolutism is effectively a product of the Baroque phase of Western Liberal Democracy, and likely a harbinger of its imminent dissolution.

On that cheery note, ’til next time

The Author August 2021

The real enemy

By C Stevens | 17th July 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The actual result of the Euro 2020 final on Sunday turned out to be the least of our worries; of far more concern is the ticketless thugs forcing their way into Wembley (fer Christ’s sake!) during the final of the European Soccer Championship. These ‘England supporters’ also punched stewards, terrorised legitimate ticket holders and caused damage to the stadium. Others (presumably legitimate ticket holders) booed the Italian National Anthem, while an attention-seeking reality tv star invaded the pitch.

Monday’s papers brought the news that a British Grand Prix racing driver was attacked and relieved of his £40,000 watch (a gift from his team) in a supposedly-secure stadium car park. In purely-footballing terms this and other incidents has probably put paid to any chance Britain and Ireland had of staging the 2030 FIFA World Cup, but that’s not really the issue.

Away from the stadium, the West End is trashed, England players are savagely attacked by racists on social media, drunk and stoned thugs parade around our town and city centres, threatening people for dining in Italian restaurants (or even just eating pizza!), without a police officer in sight. I personally witnessed this in Birmingham’s New Street on the day after the final.

What this tells us is that criminality and public disorder in this country is getting out of hand, and the real enemy isn’t the Italian soccer team, nor is it the European Union, it’s actually a violent and social media-organised minority who appear to be taking over our streets.

And we know where the blame for all this lies, don’t we?

The man who has cut the budget for policing, decimated youth services, attacked and undermined the judiciary, and subverted Parliament. The man whose vacillations would even alarm the protagonist in a Wood Allen movie! Hiding behind the door so recently and opportunistically plastered with England flags (those vanished pretty smartish, didn’t they? presumably as soon as the winning Italian penalty hit the back of the net!). The same gleaming black door that will soon be issuing excuses and announcing abrupt policy U-turns, as COVID 19 explodes once more and we’re all back in lockdown.

The problem with Johnson is that, on the surface, he’s plausible. Unlike his role-models around the globe, our Prime Minister is not obviously-deranged, nor is he on first name terms with genocidal dictators. Johnson says the right things (even if he doesn’t mean them), while coincidentally giving out messages of encouragement to the extremists and nutters who form much of his core support.

I referenced in the past the notion of the Antichrist as a metaphor for the various difficulties that threaten us. The problem would appear to be that rather than just the one promised in Revelations, we are beset by a multitude of them. The aforementioned genocidal dictators now being joined by a new wave of megalomaniacal billionaires from Silicon Valley, who have the gall to pretend they’re actually saving us!

All of these people share one obvious character trait with ‘the Father of Lies’, and together with their legions of supporters they constitute the real enemy…

The Author July 2021

Modern unicorns part two: Nuclear Fusion

By C Stevens | 14th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

It’s a truism that nearly all the news about real life is bad these days. As if to compensate, the media seem to be turning in desperation to increasingly speculative subject matter, presumably in an attempt to boost morale and have something positive to talk about.

In my last post I referenced the stream of stories about Martian colonisation plans which currently infest the popular media. In this post I will cover the other ‘positive science news story’ that virtually every periodical (or at least, all the ones that feature in Google News) is now pushing, namely nuclear fusion.

The line that perennially introduces the subject of fusion power is that it is ‘thirty years away’, in fact it has been thirty years away for the whole of my adult life. It has also been the subject of constant reinterpretation and misinformation, a prime example being the fallacies perpetrated by the advocates of so-called cold fusion in the late 1980’s. Fusion has a tendency to lie low for decades, but like Dracula rising from his grave, will always return when least expected, or wanted.

One of those times is now…

The current attempts to develop nuclear fusion as a ‘reliable power source’, are characterised by the following; on the one hand, vast amounts of money spent by Governments who really ought to know better, building huge white elephant projects that suck in huge amounts of energy (as well as cash), without giving anything back. On the other, lone ‘geniuses’ working small-scale projects in obscure research institutions, making the same sort of extravagant claims as the proponents of cold fusion. The result is always the same; at best, fusion that lasts for nanoseconds and no prospect of anything approaching commercially-viable electricity generation.

One side side of me (the Romantic side) hopes that I’m wrong and one these lone geniuses will get it right, the rational side knows this a chimera, and the lone geniuses are in fact the modern equivalent of Medieval alchemists, doomed to spend their lives trying to transmute their base metal into gold.

The fact that any of this gets house room, let alone endless column inches promoting highly-speculative claims, tells us rather more about our current society than the credibility of the fusion lobby.

It tells us we have an obsession with the notion of genius, and of genius (sic) solutions. These are often promoted as hacks (or tricks), i.e. shortcuts that will enable us to solve difficult and intractable problems. As such, they appeal strongly to generations with limited patience and rather short attention spans.

Even a cursory reading of history tells us that these sorts of attitudes have prevailed in the past, usually in times of rapid technological change (the 1880’s and 90’s spring to mind), when even the highly-educated begin to lose track of the giddying pace of change and start to see science as a source of magical solutions. This particular zeitgeist is, of course, ripe for exploitation by charlatans.

There are however, underlying all of this, some even more fundamental notions:

1, that more tech is the solution to everything

2, that technology is always the solution to existing problems, never the cause of fresh ones

3, that endless economic growth is both possible and desirable

Recent history gives the lie to the first two; one only has to look at the intractable problem of storing the by-products of nuclear fission, waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years; at the non-biodegradable plastics filling our oceans; and to the dangerous climate change being unleashed by releasing millions of years of stored carbon through the burning of oil and gas.

The fallacies inherent in the last statement are nicely illustrated by the recent claim that ‘a population of trillions can be supported off-world by exploiting the resources of the Asteroid Belt!’

When it comes down to it, this guff is ideological and quasi-religious; advocated by people who propose spreading the Abrahamic notions of the Old Testament (‘…thou shalt have dominion over the Earth’, etc) throughout our Solar System and beyond.

As, like a plague of technological locusts, we seek to consume and destroy everything within our reach.

The Author January 2021

Letting the Jinn out of the bottle

By C. E. Stevens | 3rd June 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Something blindingly-obvious occurred to me this morning, something that had never occurred to me previously, but once thought of, could not be subsequently unthought. My insight was that tech, and by this I mean the goods and services purveyed by the billionaires in Silicon Valley, is our culture’s equivalent of the Jinn in Arabian folklore.
The Jinn is capable of great benevolence and possesses miraculous powers, as befits a supernatural entity. But its benevolence comes with a price tag attached. Our relationship with modern ICT would seem a perfect analogue to the wonders formerly promised by the Jinn once released from its bottle, with the difference that your smart device actually delivers to anyone with a phone contract or a broadband connexion. With none of that inconvenient rooting around in dark and dusty caves looking for magical oil lamps.
The wonders performed by modern ICT would (and did) appear wondrous to my parents’ generation, who lived in a world where news came from printed media, two television channels and three radio networks, the banks closed at three (so if you ran out of cash, tough!), telecommunications were strictly voice-only from fixed locations, and researching almost anything usually required a visit to the local library (which also tended to close early!).
I was born and grew to adulthood in this world, and things didn’t really begin to change significantly in practical terms until the beginning of the nineties (although cash machines/ATMs had become available from the mid-seventies, and video gaming had become popular), with the notion of cyberspace confined to science fiction novels. Then, the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the internet all came along in short order, to revolutionise the way we do almost everything.
I find it difficult to think back to a world where you can’t answer almost any question in seconds, where you don’t have instantaneous electronic communication with all your friends, where you can’t remotely map and view almost any location on Earth, or listen to virtually any piece of music at any hour of the day or night.
However, I do remember how frustrating, how slow, and how boring it all was. So I am grateful for Google Documents, email, SMS, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps and all the million and one applications that make life today so much easier.
But nothing ever comes for free…
In exchange for the convenience of all these lovely (and apparently free!) tools and applications, we give (unless we are very savvy) the tech giants unlimited access to our personal data, which they obviously want to exploit commercially by targeting appropriate advertising based on what they (or their algorithms) know about us. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this, if it means that we are alerted to products and services which we are likely to want to buy, although these algorithms would seem somewhat unsophisticated in their predictions, if personal experience is anything to go by, but hey! Maybe I’m just contrary.
However, If this data falls into the wrong hands, it can be used by criminal enterprises half a world away, adding a whole new level of anxiety, as cyber crime can potentially strike us from anywhere on the globe.
However the most insidious consequences of letting the Jinn of artificial intelligence out of the bottle are less obvious, but actually pose the most serious threats to our society. I refer, of course, to the impact of social media.
People who have been following this blog will know what’s coming next…
The unintended consequences of the spread of social media have included; the destabilising of conventional media and the undermining of journalistic ethics and good practice; the creation of ‘echo chambers’ whereby large numbers of people rely entirely on partial media for their news and current affairs, and are never exposed to any content that challenges their prejudices and preconceptions; the wholesale spreading of falsehoods and insane conspiracy theories; and finally, the creation of forums that enable and facilitate people with dangerous and anti-social views to meet and act in concert.
Did I leave anything out?
The overall effect has been the promotion of extreme views and the destabilising of democracy, which, for all its faults, remains the fairest, most humane and most efficient form of government yet devised.
But it’s not just random nutters we have to contend with…
Much more worrying is the clear evidence that the fabulously rich and privileged elite who run the tech giants have actively been promoting an agenda of ‘disruption’ designed to bring about a series of economic, social and political changes that they believe will benefit themselves and their corporations, to the detriment of virtually everybody else. I was recently both intrigued by the BBC series Secrets of Silicon Valley, which documented this, and appalled by the sanctimony and arrogance of many of the people leading these companies, who appeared to have bought into their own PR, and had adopted the view that their selfish actions are somehow morally justified.
Do no harm, anyone?
In the short term, the upshot of all of the above has been to put us all at the mercy of the various dangerous populists who have come to power in key countries around the world.
Returning to my opening analogy, my inevitable conclusion is that getting the Jinn back in the bottle is a lot harder than freeing it in the first place, and the consequences of summoning this spirit and making use of its miraculous powers, may now have become unstoppable.
The Author June 2020

The Rise of Unreason revisited

By C. E. Stevens | 6th April 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Back in less alarming times, I wrote a blog entry entitled The Rise of Unreason derived from a minor key blues song I wrote back in the eighties. The blog entry (and later versions of the song) referenced the rise of irrational belief systems in contemporary culture, arguing that this tendency, reflected in the popularity of fundamentalist religious views, had now been augmented by irrational behaviour not linked to specific belief systems, but based purely on rumour and conspiracy theories spread online.
There was a time when these were relatively harmless; refusing to accept that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon, or believing that the World is flat, are (in practical terms) harmless eccentricities, and not something that threatens the well-being of society as a whole.
However, the campaign against vaccination which claims, without evidence, that vaccines are linked to autism is a different matter. It constitutes a threat to public health, which has allowed diseases that were under control (such as measles) to become prevalent again. It is also anachronistic and risible to even see this as an issue given the number of highly-talented people who lie on the autism spectrum. Of course, the proponents of these wacky ideas never let facts get in the way of their irrational beliefs.
I was interested to read that the latest unhinged theory, spreading like a virtual plague through cyberspace, namely the belief that 5G phone masts are spreading (or causing, take your pick) COVID-19, is linked to ideas promulgated by the anti-vaccination brigade. The attacks on supposed 5G masts that have followed are reminiscent of the waves of mass hysteria that characterised the late-Middle Ages (which is apt given we have our very own version of plague), and with a side order of Don Quixote, phone masts now standing in for windmills.
With the sort of doublethink that is beyond satire, these people are presumably using their mobile phones to coordinate their attacks on the very infrastructure that makes this possible. Presumably, once a vaccine finally does become, these people will refuse to take it.
Words sometimes fail me

The strange death of Liberal Democracy

By C. E. Stevens | 1st March 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

It occurs to me that there are a couple of possible criticisms of the Lights in the sky series, if we consider it purely as futurology. The most pertinent currently, is the lack of any evidence of (or reference to) infectious disease during the breakdown of civilisation to which (in the novels) I give the name ‘The Collapse’. I talk about fire and flood, I reference civil war, species extinction and resource depletion, and I describe mass migration, the breakdown of law and order and war between States. I also depict whole countries being lost to the waves, and I do say (or rather Marta Camacho does in the sixth novel, Maya) that the human population of the Earth drops to a third of pre-Collapse levels. But nowhere do I mention the role pandemics play in this process. Nor do I specifically mention famine.
I’m not alone in this, at least as far as disease is concerned. Neil Gaiman, in his television adaptation of the Good Omens (the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett) has bumped Pestilence from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and replaced him with Pollution, a more ‘up-to-date’ Horsewoman. Recent events should now be persuading him of the error of his ways.
My abiding impression viewing this series was that even though it was set in 2018, it now appears to be part of the more distant past. In fact, a lot of contemporary culture is beginning to look distinctly like it’s on borrowed time. It all has a fin de siecle feel about it twenty years too late), with everyone desperately trying to have their fun, make their point, push their interest group, consume to the nth degree, before it all gets too late. Before our globalised world economy and related global culture start to come apart at the seams as nation states retreat behind their borders, trading blocs break up, political alliances fracture.
The pressures bringing this change about are many and various. Some are progressive, some are reactionary, but all speak to a truth that our current way of doing things is unsustainable. We cannot (physically at any rate) be citizens of the world for much longer, the environmental costs of the mass transport of people around the world are becoming too high. The idea that your food should be grown on the far side of the globe and your clothes made there also, is now palpably absurd. There is (I think) a curious sort of unanimity across political divides, with people who loathe, despise and refuse to debate with each other reaching startling similar conclusions by completely different routes.
The populist right appears to dismiss the notion that an environmental crisis is upon us. However, if you examine much of the content of right-leaning social media and the reactionary populist press, so much of the talk is about looming catastrophe, expressed in terms of out of control weather, imminent asteroid strikes, super volcanoes erupting etc etc. To me this all has the appearance of metaphor, a bizarre process of transference whereby the truth they all know in their hearts but dare not admit (i.e. that our civilisation is headed for a fall) cannot be completely suppressed and comes out in an attachment to fringe catastrophe theories.
Opposing shades of political opinion appear to be moving inexorably towards the notion of smaller political units and a less integrated global economy, with the liberal democracy that promoted globalisation in danger of being sidelined somewhere in the middle.
I mentioned that there were two possible criticisms; the second relates to timescale, as I have my Collapse happening near the end of the century, far enough away in time to not be immediately threatening. As I concluded earlier in this blog, I am (in the great tradition of English science fiction) basically writing a ‘cosy’ catastrophe.
However, it looks like Armageddon isn’t prepared to wait, and, unlike the world of Lights in the sky, there doesn’t appear to be a benign deus ex-machina waiting in the wings to save us…

The Author March 2020

Your place on the curve

By C. E. Stevens | 10th January 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Timing, as they say, is everything…
To be ahead of the curve, in that curious English phrase, is never good; early adopters of new technology (and new products in general) tend to pay a premium for their feeling of exclusivity, and may also be plagued by performance and reliability issues in their role as (unpaid) market testers.
But to be ahead of the curve in the arts is worse…
I recently purchased the DVD of Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy, a film which, while praised by most contemporary critics, was ignored by the cinema-going public and lost money, to the extent that the director considered giving up making motion pictures altogether.
From the standpoint of 2020 (the film was originally released in 1982) it looks prescient in its forensic examination of the relationship between celebrity and its often deluded fanbase. The film also explores the notion that any schmuck can be ‘King for a day’ providing they are sufficiently opportunistic, amoral and ruthless, something which the rise of social media in the decades following the film’s release has served to reinforce.
Re-viewing after a gap of probably thirty years, I found the film an uncomfortable watch, as it was all too easy to identify with frustration felt by de Niro’s protagonist, and with the hostility he feels not only towards those who are successful, but also to the army of facilitators who (to his mind) work to keep the successful in place, mainly by frustrating the attempts of new talent to gain a foothold.
Without labouring the point, anyone who is trying to break into an insanely competitive creative arts field probably feels like this, which doesn’t make them (necessarily) a bad person. It’s the nature of the beast. We have two consolations; at least we didn’t stoop to morally-reprehensible actions to achieve success (or end up in gaol!), and we are unlikely ever to be on the receiving end of the attentions of the Rupert Pupkins of this world.
Returning to the original theme of this piece, two years ago I completed a novel called After the Flood, set in London, twenty five years into the future, in which rising sea levels and a perfect storm of unfavourable circumstances combine to inundate London.
Back then, this seemed like a good original idea for a book, but now it appears everyone is writing (and publishing) this novel. There’s even one set in Birmingham, however unlikely this would appear, geographically speaking…
The Author January 2020
–

Cognitive distortions

By C. E. Stevens | 21st October 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Catching up with my reading recently, I have been investigating twentieth century psychological thinking and it struck how many of the explanations for irrational and negative thought processes in individuals contained in this body of work can be applied to institutions and to our current dysfunctional culture as a whole.
I’ll give you an example; Karen Horney in 1950 talked about the ‘tyranny of the shoulds’, the notion that things should magically be different from how they actually are. Put in contemporary terms, this neatly describes the notion that Britain should still be an empire and a great power (when it is clearly neither) that characterises the thinking of so much of the pro-Brexit lobby. As Albert Ellis pointed out, building on Horney’s ideas, ‘the struggle to reconcile these thoughts with reality is a painful and unending one’, and this particular psychodrama has consumed British politics for the last several years.
In 1980 David Burns defined a whole series of similar ‘cognitive distortions’, specifically: Jumping to Conclusions, All of Nothing Thinking, Always being Right, Over Generalising and Catastrophizing.
These modes of thought seem to aptly describe our current political discourse, and are particularly applicable to much of the tabloid press, for whom every space rock approaching the Earth is the asteroid that’s going to end all life, every passing storm is a catastrophe in waiting, and every coming Winter will be the worst in living memory.
The problem facing us is that although it’s possible to counsel and treat the individual to rid them of such negative, irrational and self-destructive thought processes, how do you treat an entire culture?
As with all of our present irrationalities, the internet is the medium by which they can spread and infect the body politic and our popular culture..
Not much to report on volume seven of Lights in the sky this month; however chapter five of …when you wish upon a star is very nearly complete and ideas for the rest of the novel and more supplementary short stories (which will eventually be gathered in a compendium to be entitled, Tales from the Collapse), continue to flow unabated.
Some of you may be tempted to the view that my writing is also a symptom (or an example) of cognitive distortion, and there is an argument for that. However, in my defence, I would say that I know that what I’m writing is fiction, and as an author I’m commenting on the culture I find myself in. In short, I am capable of a degree of objectivity and can distance myself from cultural, political and societal tendencies that I observe around me.
However, out in the real world, objectivity seems currently to be in short supply…
The Author October 2019

I’d rather write a ‘cosy catastrophe!’

By C Stevens | 7th May 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

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

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