Public Announcement

Here if I may I'd like to make a little announcement. As of the end of work today, the 29th of August 2013, I will be a full time writer. For the next few months at least I will be working on a new project for Verso; entitled 'Last Futures', it's a study of technology and nature in post-war architectural avant-gardes. In it I will be telling the story of the last time that there was any real attempt made to work towards a plausible architectural future, in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a strange period when high-technology and first-wave environmentalism were prominently discussed, before both were swept aside by the rise of neoliberalism. Now from the current age it appears tragic how so many of our most urgent crises were already under discussion back then, only to be kept off the agenda for a generation until we're now at a point where the situation already appears to be too late to save.

Last Futures will cut through the standard architectural histories of the period, which portray much of the experimental architecture of the time to be either hopelessly naive or impotently critical, and will demonstrate that many of the ideas and proposals of the time were more-or-less rational extensions of where things were heading at that point. I'll focus not just on paper projects, speculations and manifestos but on the more bizarrely quotidian examples of these ideas, to further stress the concreteness of these lost directions. In so doing, I hope to further develop ideas from The Architecture of Failure (which you can still buy) which searched for a synthesis between romantic and modernist concepts of architecture, and how important this task might actually be for us. Expect cybernetics, drop outs, hippies, mass-housing, biospheres, space frames, situationists, countercultures, technocrats, environmentalists, dialectics, disasters and defeats...

Thing is though; it's now been half a decade since I finished my post-grad, and well over three years since I submitted the manuscript for my first book. In the intervening time a lot has happened, but it also feels as though time has stood completely still, at least compared to how fast it moved as I went through education. I basically fell into a day job as I was finishing off the manuscript, and it has taken this long for me just to be in the position to take the opportunity to write another one. In the meantime I've written hundreds of thousands of words, for Icon and for all manner of other publications, I've interviewed many of the biggest names in architecture, I've visited new buildings all over the place, I've lectured across Europe, I've appeared in national media, I've built (with friends) various installations and small projects, and all the while I was working four days a week in an office. Add to that the slow background work of learning a completely different method of playing music, some really rather miserable experiences of various kinds along the way, and finally a period of being gravely ill and needless to say, I'm pretty exhausted.

Obviously one should never play the what-if game, but it's difficult to know how working at a pretty intense job while simultaneously trying to fit some kind of career as a writer around that would stand up, compared to some of the other options that were available to a post-grad architect floundering around in the maelstrom immediately after the crash five years ago. Perhaps, like some, he ought to have fled the country to doss about in Berlin, in which case god only knows what he'd be doing now, or maybe he should have dived straight into a PhD, which would most likely have had the word 'haunting' in the title, and would now be complete, giving him the rapidly evaporating academic world to thrash around in. Either way it certainly feels that in the last few years developing intellectually or critically has been almost impossible with the demands consistently made on my time. But never mind; these are worthless counterfactuals, of course I'm not doing too badly after all, and as everybody knows, "This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds."

So for now I'll be trying to knuckle down and get stuck into this new book, and hopefully there will be opportunities to do some interesting projects in the meantime. If you're around say hello, and let's see if something good can happen even in these worsening times.

Owen, Dezeen, photography, criticism and its decline, etc etc

[EDIT - For some reason I lost the second paragraph of this piece when I originally posted it - I've now put it back in]

In the last week there was a very minor spat, which although silly, does point to some interesting difficulties in the way that architecture is mediated these days. It concerns two very different approaches to how we discuss buildings. It started with Owen Hatherley writing a blog for the Photographer’s Gallery, about modern architecture and photography. Overall this focussed upon various topics close to Owen’s academic work; critiques of Neue Sachlichkeit, constructivist photography and the influence of black and white photography on the design of early modernist buildings. It’s all very interesting, and you can read it here.

But it’s Owen’s opening gambit that’s of interest here. In it, he laments that the current archi-porn websites Dezeen and Archdaily “provide little but glossy images of buildings that you will never visit, lovingly formed into photoshopped, freeze-dried glimmers of non-orthogonal perfection, in locations where the sun, of course, is always shining” - a situation he describes as “disastrous, a handmaiden to an architectural culture that no longer has an interest in anything but its own image.” While I generally agree, I think that there still needs to be a proper discussion of super-photographers like Iwan Baan (who recently jumped into mainstream media by taking that image of Lower Manhattan blacked out after the storm), but that will have to come some other time.

Within a day however, Dezeen posted up a link to this very article, summarising its points, under the headline of ‘Architecture “no longer interested in anything but its own image”’. Rather cleverly they’d found a picture of Owen being all vain and Bowie-ish, thus somewhat hoisting him by his own petard. Underneath, Dezeen editor Marcus Fairs did actually respond, saying “Rather than being "utterly distastrous [sic]" for architecture, sites like Dezeen are a powerful new platform for presenting and discussing architecture in new ways, in front of far bigger and more diverse audiences than the old magazines (and their hermetic writers and critics) ever managed to reach. It's a huge opportunity.”

Of course, Dezeen’s posting up of Owen’s criticisms is amoral recuperation - as a web-business, anything that gets them ‘hits’ is good, so it matters not a jot whether Owen’s right, because it only makes them stronger - and one can imagine them laughing away in the office at the irony of their choice of picture. But it’s also very symptomatic of where ‘criticism’ is at the moment.  Owen has never made any secret of his distaste for these sites, although he luckily doesn’t need to keep a close eye on them - my RSS feed is constantly plugged into them in case there’s a press release that I haven’t received. In fact, frequently I’ll receive an email from a PR, and within half an hour or so it’s up on both Dezeen and Archdaily, wording unchanged; which certainly undercuts the journalist’s traditional information privilege. But at the very same time it also wipes out the role of the expert journalist in giving context and narrative to these unconnected images. So on the one hand you have the democratising effect of internet culture, but as we have seen in other fields, this causes a sagging in quality, and I certainly find most of the stuff that gets posted up there depressingly banal.

But both Owen and Dezeen are successful - now that Owen basically doesn’t blog any more, he’s occupying a very traditional niche of the writer/journalist, creating long arguments spread over hundreds of thousands of words. On the other hand the archi-blogs have been traditionally devoid of original thinking, but neither Dezeen nor Archdaily are as blank as they were before; for example, Archdaily now has columnists and short original articles, but they are often of cringe-inducingly low quality. Dezeen generally doesn’t speak in its own voice, but the massive increase in filmed interviews that they post up means that there actually is a rather high level of debate being conducted on the site, channelled through Dezeen rather than directly created by them. I certainly applaud this, it's certainly great to have access to people discussing their work, but I have to say that it’s also dangerously flawed. Fairs has made an incredible success of Dezeen, which now has all manner of pie-fingers, selling watches, organising events, pop-up shops, sponsoring various events and even appearing in global branding campaigns for Apple. But at the same time it buys into a rather sickly language of web-entrepreneurship, all ‘creatives’ and ‘content’ and assorted bollocks. It sails close to some very negative practices too; recently it got involved with a property developer in the East End of London, inviting local ‘creatives’ to submit work which would eventually adorn the lobbies and spaces of a new block of yuppiedromes in the extremely poor neighbourhood of Stepney Green. I personally find this horrid; you can’t claim to be celebrating ‘creatives’ while at the very same time contributing to the forces that make their lives difficult, you can’t promote the East End design scene while simultaneously assisting in its being wiped out.

So while Owen is very lucky to be in a position of disseminator of expert knowledge, creating original ‘content’ of intellectual and critical quality, it’s an incredibly hard life, getting harder by the year, as the traditional media model sinks ever deeper. Dezeen have found a platform that works, that financially sustains itself, but it doesn’t necessarily perform a useful role in terms of understanding, historical context or, of course, critique. Is the only way forward from here an ongoing obliteration of culture’s independence from PR?

PEDANTRY

This has been really annoying me.

You know that this...

... is "The Tallest Building in Europe"?

Well this...

... is a good 20m taller, and is in Yorkshire.

So do shut up.

Adrift

Och, it's hard, it's hard. Time is a valuable substance and it's hard to hold it. Activity swells up and sucks it in like a dry sponge, and this writer's life is rather desiccated at the moment. I suppose it's to be expected, what with the struggles that are ongoing, but it can't be denied that we're all getting less for more. This blog, this strange vehicle for something or other, has been spluttering along ever more slowly and now appears to be grinding to a halt, drying up, vanishing.

In the meantime, here's some pictures of Ashington House, Bethnal Green, by Noel Moffett, c.1970.

A Song for Europe

Hell Yeah!

I have nothing more to say about this image.

YOUYOUIDIOTS

Just in case you were interested in what people think about the title of this blog, here's a small collection of what the internet says about it...

• I miss you, you idiot. I miss you so much that I can't think.
• I just told you, you idiot. I'm going to send out the ragdoll monster to attack those good guys when they're not looking.
• We're talking in private because I don't wanna be seen talking to you, you idiot. Bad enough they know I exist.
• Because I love you, you idiot. i want to really lose weight ive been overweight for far to long :/
• The rule for space combat is that you have to find the enemies before they find you! You idiot!"
• Nobody's gonna tell you, you idiot! That's like asking, "Hey! Does anybody have a combination to their bank's vault?"
• I LOVE YOU, YOU IDIOT!! ;]. TAN-AS-HELL. P.S Your boobs look great in that shirt.
• I wasn't re-rating you, you idiot. You're still a 7.
• he's using you you idiot hes saying that so you do thigns for him sexually good job go find a real guy.
• No she just doesn't like you, you idiot!
• Fuck you you idiot......Got to hell bitch,
• By that I meant "I like you, you idiot." Sometimes girls are to afraid to voice that they like a guy.
• She is sitting there because she loves you and she can't leave you alone because she missed you! You idiot imbecile!
• Alex: Because I love you, you idiot! So much it scares the crap outta me.
• He whole bloody family is superior to you! You idiot, I won't dare call you my own son if you keep acting like this!
• Did you feel the urge to extend your arm upward with your palm down and shout Sieg Heil? Oh my, you are really getting in to this aren't you? YOU IDIOT!
• HE'S SUPPOSE TO SUGGEST YOU, YOU IDIOT
• Jimmy i know its you, you idiot!
• I had this buddy icon that said, "I love you, you idiot," you know the line from Gilmore Girls, my favourite show.
• I love you,you idiot. 23.I love you isn't it enough.
• I'll tell you, you idiot on the right, Fox News lied in 2000 when they said George Bush won Florida
• I Love You. "…You idiot."
• is it just me or did the guy with the camera say after the shot went in "I TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU YOU IDIOT"?
• Of course I missed you, you idiot. You're my closest friend
• I love you, you idiot!" and Mir is like "O///O" now
• "And neither are you, you idiot. Farkel". you're a putz.
• "You... you idiot!" he yelled, as a single tear fled from his eyes down his cheek and landed on Blinky's face.
• And they say: 'Not you, you idiot, we mean Richie.
• She is out with everyone looking for you, you idiot, come on in, look at you need a bath, you smell like fish, have a bath and I will fix something for you to eat.
• Not you, you idiot. Geraldine.
• They want to stone you to death Mr Hughes and YOU, you idiot, are fighting the so called "islamophobics" amongst the non believers.
• Steve on Victorian towns evacuated Mark, your comments are moronic,hope Karmer catches up with you,you idiot!!
• The big curfuffle came from all the IDIOTS out there (Yes I mean you you idiot) that did not read the patch notes each time Facebook updated itself
• otherwise i know its you you idiot i out thought you, i gave you enough rope to hang yourself fool
• "I'll kill you, you idiot!"
• 'My heart belongs to you, you idiot' she always felt like saying that out loud.
• She wanted to say it—I love you, you idiot—but she just smiled back at him, trying not to let the hurt show on her face.
• Hey estupido, who took care of you you idiot and where did you get your education cause it sure wasn't at harvard!
• Nice to meet you." You IDIOT!!! That's all you came up with??
• MAYBE OUR PLAYERS WILL DRIVE TO SUFFOLK TO PAY TRIPLE REGISTRATION AND PLAY HALF A GAME FOR YOU YOU IDIOT.
• I am not a demonic sociopath like you you idiot.
• you dont tell your boyfriend that he is bad kisser and then expect him to kiss you you idiot.
• your letting a useless piece of shit walk all over you. .....you idiot....
• It was so corny... the whole "I need you you idiot! Don't die! Bawwww" thing almost killed the movie for me.
• Fuck you, you idiot. You don't know shit....
• "I THINK I'M IN LOVE WITH YOU, YOU IDIOT!" ...
• why dont you, you idiot! woow this guy rilly ... woow this guy rilly sux if i was him yd kill my self.
• When I find you, you idiot psychopath, I will definitely kill you!'
• "Do you like anybody?" "Nahhhh(Thinking: YOU, YOU IDIOT)"
• Like the present I gave you?"."You idiot! How many humans you wanna kill to attract our attention?"
• You put on the lights so other drivers can see YOU you idiot!
• the “I love you, you idiot!” Rory/Dean scene was classic and very well done. :)
• There's a reason I love you, you idiot.
• “You know I can't shoot you, you idiot,” she answered, a single tear sliding down her cheek.
• like ive told you,you idiot your flank hair matches a silver- back gorillas,a dog,and domesticated pig.
• "About what's upsetting you, you idiot! I'm not having this infuriating talk with you for my health!"
• Not you, you idiot.
• Scorpion you're not comprehending what I have said havent you, you idiot?
• i never agreed with you, you idiot.. You just a stupid moron..
• She clench her Fists and began to whack him with her Mallet "YOU-YOU-YOU IDIOT!" sh yelled.
• "I'm hugging you, you idiot," Another short silence. "And just for the record, it was her that was foolish. Any woman would be crazy to not want you. ...
• "I love you, you idiot !"
• Wasn't talking to you, you idiot! :P.
• Thank you, you idiot!
• I'm giving way to you, you idiot.
• Emily's like.. in love with you, you idiot.
• YOU ARE the Chief of Staff? are you that retarded about your constitutional responsibilities? or is everything a hypothetical with you, you idiot?
• 'What I've lost is you, you idiot. I'll drive until I get you back. Which way?'
• If some guy posts "Fuck you, you idiot!" and then retracts that shitty comment, perhaps with a brief apology for losing his head, because he honestly realizes he shouldn't have posted such a shitty comment in the first place, ...
• W: Between you and who? R: AND YOU, YOU IDIOT!
• "I love you, you idiot. I'm so sorry I forgot but I'll make it up to you. Just please do not doubt me. I saved you from vampirism didn't I?"
• ;; i love you , you idiot. !!
• And let me explain something to you, you idiot, knowing about political happenings has nothing to do with intelligence, it's acquired information that any fool (like you) can learn.
• I believe in what? lol…i am an atheist you, you idiot. I know religion is a fantasy. Science has nothing to do with religion you ignorant moron.
• "I CAN'T HEAR YOU" You IDIOT,
• Dear Nick: Grow some fucking nuts and bone the blonde girl. She wants you, you idiot. FUCKING DO IT ...
• That is you you idiot just getting them on_
• Livid with rage, I growled, "I will kill you, you idiot!" The resentment and rage began to grow within me.
• -Because I love you, you idiot!!
• RubberSoulMann you, you idiot<3
• It's not like they were going to just magically forgive you, you idiot! You majorly screwed up all of their lives!
• "You...you IDIOT!" Sayrike screeched. "What, you think that I haven't cared? That I haven't cried, haven't despaired? Just because I've only been with you for one day doesn't mean that you know a SINGLE THING that I've gone through!
• I love you, you idiot (:
• Never managed to post a deal yourself though have you, you idiot!
• That Progressive enough for you?...You Idiot.
• Okay so first, let me be clear with you, you idiot, your are not the author of the story,
• I can already see the comfusion! I shot YOU!! I shot YOU!!!! You idiot i'm ...
• I dropped a capsule in and sat here watching the poison dissolve; then you; you idiot, show up and drink the whole thing!
• I didn't need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.
• I'm sitting right here next you you idiot! That dude.
• English-Latin translation for The blood of Christ, shed for you, you idiot,
• I Love You You Idiot
• I love you you idiot images, I love you you idiot pictures, and I love you...
• Typical Ste that he needed Cheryl to spell it out for him in massive lights: HE LOVES YOU YOU IDIOT.
• I love you for being my knight. Thank you, you idiot
• Now we don't have a house elf any more, you - you - idiot!
• This woman knows you, you idiot. She knows you're not supposed to be around, or I'm guessing you wouldn't be hiding. She will tell someone, and they will find you. And if anyone fucks with what I'm doing here, I will kill you first.
• No Mate, I work for R&D; just like you. You idiot ,
• Next morning I turn it on there it is again, the white text, black bachkground stating that you "you idiot you did not shut down right"
• Fuck you, you idiot.
• Dear you, yes you... you idiot, Why do you do this to yourself?

Happy New Year!

2010 is going to be different! I don't care how bad everything gets, I'm going to be positive - THIS positive:



Happy New Year. Lots of stuff to follow.

A very brief note on M.D.

The following short passage might help to contextualise a little of the father-slaying that went on earlier this year:

At this juncture, Badiou can respond in two ways: he can either choose to correct the anti-phenomenological bias of the concept of presentation by supplementing the subtractive ontology of being qua being with a doctrine of appearance and of the ontical consistency of worlds albeit at the risk of lapsing back into some variant of the ontologies of presence. Or he can accept the stringency of his concept of presentation and embrace the prohibitive consequences of the logic of subtraction. The recently published Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds) suggests that he has – perhaps reasonably, albeit somewhat disappointingly from our point of view – opted for the former.

-Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound p.115

I think, perhaps naively, that the appropriate question here is - "why is disenchantment the object?"
We can trace the development of this copernican disenchantment over the last thousand years, we can outline the current vectors of disenchantment, but unless Meillasoux or somebody else can develop his hyper-chaos=noumenon argument into more than a virtuosic curio, then I am yet to be convinced that this push for disenchantment is anything more than a tautological 'we are against phenomenological mysticism because it is mystical'.

The End of Greatness

or; is it right to just fuck it?
or; pessimism tends not to be naturally selected...



IT gives us the anti-natalist position par excellence. It always seems to come down to a question of framing, however. IT rightly takes issue with the 'butbecomingaparentissonaturaldontchaknow' attitude by pointing out that making life is merely one of a number of urges that we, as political animals, generally subdue in order to function a little better together; in this way it could be said that the anti-natalist is just setting their moral threshold of acceptable behaviour at a different level to the happy parent, and perhaps this might be so.

However, I often come back to the (probably apocryphal) response from Beckett, questioned about his lack of progeny:

"Neither I nor my wife can bear the thought of committing a child to death."

According to this maxim, life is a trouble, and an unnecessary one; all of the infinity of potential humans are currently in an infinitely blank limbo, which in all cases is preferable to actually being brought into existence. Never having existed is always preferable to existing. This attitude leads on to the foster parent scenario - there are suffering human beings that need everybody else's help; they are here now, let's ease the pain as best we can. Sisyphus.

The other aspect of the Beckettian attitude is the role of time; and here we have to wrestle with more inconsistency; the virtual human is indeterminate, but the moment of conception sets forth a process that includes the potential for a senile, cancerous old human suffering constant pain. And of course, it is tempting to see that vision when one is in the wrong mind and in the company of children; a baby crying and dribbling? Imagine them crying and dribbling seventy years from now...

And another time problem, and this is where Beckett's Proustian influence becomes important. Proust is, of course, nearly all about the infinite and horrible tyranny of the Present, of now-ness, and the very small and very rare occasions (fuck it, let's call them events, shall we?) where the sensation of the past, another time, becomes stronger than the banal suffering of the Now. Included in the concept of time that Proust and Beckett subscribe to is of course the end as the prominent moment; bitter reminiscences of the all-too-real decaying body, terrifyingly present.

But to see life in this way, as a series of accumulating sufferings masking the vain pleasures and phyrric victories over time and nature is no more consistent than fucking away and feeling some form of specialness for having been able to spawn. Beckett himself, of course, never got to fully enjoy his withering away, as his mind took leave of him before his body did, which is of course the way the vast majority of us go.

Benatar, of course, tries hard to wrestle with these problems. He appeals to the pollyanna principle, saying that even when we think that our lives are pretty good, the opposite is the case, but then, the gaping logical hole here is, to whom does this matter? If all our lives are worse than we think they are, what could it possibly ever matter? There is a transcendental guarantee here required, an observer that is not human and is capable of perfect judgement of the quality of human life. Remind you of anything?

The video at the top is a simulation of the structure of a universe with physical laws like our own. I think it represents a problem that a certain aspect of the human mind wrestles with all of the time. To commit to a materialist ontology often includes a commitment to letting your investigations take you where they want to go, and that can spell trouble, perspectival trouble. But thus far there has never been a human that could escape its embodiment, its courage and its cowardice, its capacity for abstract thought and inability to transcend its own limits. Perhaps we're not far off from a real qualitative change, post-humanism either of transcendence or extinction, but that's another issue. Whether we think that childbirth is part of an 'avalanche of reproductive misery' (Benatar) or not, there's no outside point from which we could make it matter.

Unidentified item in the bagging area...

Don't worry IT, there are other weirdly exciting generic messages!
My personal favourite is when a ticket machine at a train station decides to go all Ligotti on you, dishing out one of these little bad boys just to remind you of what actually makes the world go round...

Wu-Note records

After the Penguin-Pop sleeves, somebody's done these, and, well, they're fun, and brilliantly executed, although this aesthetic cannibalism surely cannot go much further. That said, I can imagine this as the aesthetic that an American companion to Ghost Box would work with...

As seen here.


ps - I have just remembered that a few years ago I was creating work that was based around the 'Edition Peters' aesthetic, which I suppose, you know, at a stretch, might be considered an example of this method.

Tumbleweed drifts slowly by...

I'm sorry for the long silence but all of a sudden, and for what will probably be a brief period, I've become awfully busy with having my labour exploited. The world is still falling to pieces and all the usual shenanigans that I normally write about, and I've got some half baked texts on, among other things, Zizek's recent blunders into architectural theory and the 'dum dum dadum' funeral rhythm, but in the meantime I'd like you to listen to these; 'Four pieces on a single note', by Giacinto Scelsi.

Back soon, I hope...

We're not failing well enough.

K-Punk, IT, ICR, Lenin and SDMYBT on protests.

FUCK OFF, YEAR.

So, in the courageous spirit of total blog cliché, we give you a very brief e&v; round up of our last little spin round Old Mother Sun.

2008 – we’re fucking glad it’s over, but 2009 has a strong chance of being much worse.

LISTENING
We aren’t really in a position to discuss the year’s best music, because our dire financial situation permitted us the purchase of no more than a dozen or so albums / individual releases across the whole year. Hooray. Sadly, some of these few purchases were from the wonderful shop Sound323, which has now closed, no doubt the first of many such caterers to minority interests we will lose in the coming period.
Out of the pathetically slight dribble of music we did treat ourselves to, we can recommend Philip Jeck’s ‘Sand’ and The Caretaker’s ‘Persistent Repetition of Phrases’. On a related note, the ‘Hauntology’ symposium in the summer was interesting, entertaining and probably the best musical event we managed to attend all year, even if it answered very few of its own questions. A genuine Hooray for Mark and Jon for setting that one up, and another hooray for Jon, this time for all the sound seminars that we’ll miss now that we’ve gone.
Also, a dubious highlight was the ‘Jelly', some of the disgracefully small amount of original sound/music that we wrote this year, but also the most prominent, though that had very little to do with us.

WATCHING
Being told off for giggling at ‘Threads’ was our cinematic highlight of the year.

READING
Zizek was disappointing, Meillassoux tantalising, we were told to read fiction and thus found the Safran Foer thrust into our hand rather mawkish, we went back in time and read Kant and Hegel, covering brain holes. We returned to Beckett countless times, also to Lacan, finally beginning, as all those who endeavour with him must do, to draw out our own lessons from his acting up. Wikipedia gave us countless hours of wonderfully democratic ‘fact’ accumulation, but combined with iPhones, it promises to ruin pub conversations forever. Collapse IV was fantastic, but the flaws in Benatar almost made one think life worth living. The Wire was still the best game around, and Savage Messiah gave us the chance to dream about London.

ARCHITECTURE
Globally- it’s not really going very well, is it?

Personally- E&V; gained a few extra letters after their name this summer, to what looks thus far to be no avail. After six years of repeatedly making ourselves ill, ruining a number of perfectly good relationships (and maybe some less than perfectly good ones too) and just generally falling to pieces, all in the service of an unbelievably inefficient, rarefied and backward pedagogical system, we were told that our recent massive attempt to intellectually reinvigorate the haunted history of the exhibition palace typology would have been ‘more interesting if it had a tie-rack in it’. What glory…

Then of course it turned out to have been a waste of time, thanks to the fuckups of the massed armies of greedy bastards, but then wasting time is all that we’d have been doing for the last six years anyway…

PREDICTIONS
More misery for all. Obvious, really. If we’re lucky, the misery will be more evenly spread than it has been in the past, but that’s a bit too optimistic to be plausible.

Actually, fuck it, we promise to be lovely in 2009. In fact- we promise to update regularly and find some contemporary architecture that we genuinely like.

Hooray!

Oh, you poor lambs!

Go here, and just try to feel sympathetic.

Some choice morsels:

"It is terrible. Death. It's like a massive earthquake," she said.

"I feel sorry for the managing directors - they were paid about 50% of their bonus in stock, that's been written off."

As some stood around contemplating their fate, huddled in circles or with their mobile phone or BlackBerry glued to their ear, most remained tight-lipped and made a quick exit.

Now, when we can no longer afford to buy any food, and when we can't leave the house because of fascist gangs roaming the streets etc etc, we'll remember to feel sorry for the well meaning people who got us into this mess. It was an accident!

Reading list...

I haven't read this yet, but I get the impression that it's probably something I won't be able to find a single fault in. Forget anti-capitalism, we need anti-natalism...

Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence---rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should---they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view---that it is always wrong to have children---and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

The only problem with the LHC is that it's only a 1 in 5 million chance...

Say my name, say my name...

BBC demands (I)

If I was part of the takeover of the BBC, I would ensure that Werner Herzog replaced David Attenborough as the human face of nature TV. We need more family programmes about the 'harmony of overwhelming and collective murder' on at six o'clock on a sunday afternoon.