Well Labour Meetup hasn’t exactly gone ballistic. One week on and we have 10 members (there were 11 but I think somebody realised their mistake). By contrast conservative.meetup.com has 236 members but to be fair they are mainly quite scary looking americans and it has been going for longer. There’s quite a nice quote on the site though “Active Conservatives Near London, England: 6”.
Month: October 2003
Somebody told me last night
Somebody told me last night that she’d been to a wedding where the best man’s speech was given by powerpoint. I worry about the future of the human race.
I have a bit of
I have a bit of an on-off reading relationship with openDemocracy. I used to be a very regular visitor, and thought they really were paving the way to a new way of publishing online. But for the past few months I have to admit when I’ve had a scan through the email each week I haven’t clicked through many times. It’s become a bit predictable, dare I say it, a bit opinionated. The editorial policy has meant that like the Guardian (or for that matter the Daily Mail) I didn’t really have to read on beyond the headline to know roughly what line they were going to take.
Anyway, the reason I’ve noticed is that this week I clicked through again. They’re running a piece where Canadian academic Shadia Drury discusses her work trying to explain what Leo Strauss was on about and why we should be worried. She’s been writing about him for 15 years but it’s only now, with US foreign policy driven his devotees, that people are waking up to her message. Adbusters also did a brilliant network map of the influence of Strauss on the administration in their last issue if you’re interested.
The Labour party takes a
The Labour party takes a tiny step into the internet age as my request to set up Labour as a topic on Meetup.com has been accepted. You can join at www.labour.meetup.com. Oh, and tell your friends.
After all the talk about
After all the talk about technology changing politics last week with Douglas Rushkoff in town, I thought I’d try a little activism of my own. I’ve submitted the Labour Party as a topic on Meetup.com for the first Wednesday of each month… I’ll let you know whether it gets accepted.
So William Gibson has stopped
So William Gibson has stopped blogging for a while. He’s off to write another novel and sees blogging and writing as incompatible. I read his last novel Pattern Recognition earlier this year and while it didn’t blow me away I realise now that it lingers in my mind and has planted a few ideas that won’t go away.
When I first read his now infamous book Neuromancer, it did blow me away. In a single beautifully crafted novel he created the concept of cyberspace, not just the word but also a vivid picture of that dark, virtual, alternative universe. And you have to remember he wrote it before the Matrix, before the web, in fact before just about anything that could be construed as ‘cyber’ — it was first published in 1984.
Pattern Recognition, is a very different beast, although it retains Gibson’s wonderful turn of descriptive phrase. “In the sunlit street, all is still; nothing moves save the cinnamon blur of a cat, just there, and gone.” The book hasn’t got universally good reviews (Pat Kane gave it a good slating in the Independent, Toby Litt was less than full of praise in the Guardian) and sure it’s not the step change that Neuromancer represented but a few months on I can call up the characters, the places and the ideas pretty clearly.
The main character is called Cayce (in a sly self-reference back to Neuromancer’s main character Case) Pollard, a freelance cool-hunter-come-branding-expert with an allergy to shameless, blatant branding. Her worst fear is being trapped in a room with a likeness of the Michelin Man. Her latest project is to track down the creator of mesmerising, anonymous video clips posted on the internet that have developed a cult following among those who know. Her search takes her through London, Tokyo and Moskow via expensive hotels, mysterious credit cards and the first class cabins of British Airways (Gibson obviously did a bit of fieldwork in the latter).
What I realise now is that the fictitious, paranoid, nervous, fast, caffeinated world of Pattern Recognition is a world that some people live in, a parallel universe to the experience of the many perhaps, but nonetheless, one that I recognise. Maybe that’s because I’m writing this sat in a coffee shop using my iBook not a million miles from the Camden and Soho where much of the book is set. Paul Kingsnorth wrote an article for the New Statesman recently that I think is a wonderful poem slamming the growing ‘placeless’ jetsetting elite that Cayce somehow represents. I wouldn’t be quite as negative as he is (maybe because I’m an occasional member of the great travelling conference centre caravan) but Gibson might have picked out the aspect of connectedness that is the most real and has the largest effect.
I remember too the phrase ‘mirror world’ from the book — a pretty good catch-all for our globalised world. A friend told me that about the Thai phrase that translates literally as “same, same… but different”. Bars, cafes, breakfast cereals are the same the world over but different in little ways. I’ve done quite a bit of travelling this year and it fits with my experience. I remember too the idea of jet lag being the process of your soul catching up which reminds me of a perhaps apocryphal story of African tribesman who having arrived via an airliner sat on the runway at Heathrow and when asked why replied “we are waiting for our souls to join us”.
So there you go, a few thoughts on something I probably should have blogged at the time. I do look up to William Gibson, I like his style and I like the understated radicalism of his ideas. I’ve often wondered how he does it and on his site he says, “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
Maybe I watch too much TV.
Read other reviews here.