Essential moments… My easiest, most content, moments arrive when I look at my arms and legs and see myself as just a mere animal, a highly evolved ape, as opposed to a needing-to-be-seen-as good-looking, productive, clever and popular person. Nevertheless it is difficult to retain these thoughts whilst in the company of other humans; in fact I find it impossible. I am not comfortable enough around any human being to ‘just be’, and I find it more than tiring. I find that I naturally begin to mould myself into something which feels wrong, something which is a compromise of all that I think I am. 

However, today I feel more content that usual. Monday is my Friday and my weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday, and today is Monday today. I feel more content with who I am today. I am not feeling compelled to scrutinise myself when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the gallery windows. Somehow I am seeing myself as ‘another human’ rather than a ‘ranked’ being in a hierarchical world, where I have to be constantly proving myself. Therefore, I am less frustrated than usual. Maybe this is because I am feeling less strain in trying to swim upstream today? Or maybe I have always been carried by the tide of society, and today it doesn’t bother me too much?It usually bothers me immensely; I have found it massively difficult to retain what I regard as me whilst living in the human world. Since, high school, It has been a great difficultly to retain myself from the forces of mass persuasion; the times when I have conformed the most have been the times which have been most personally damaging, but the conflict in trying to retain ‘me’ has also caused me significant social anxiety. There was a brief spell in university when I felt I had strength against the compromising – university is a great deluder of what an individual will experience in the real world – but since then the struggle is on again to retain the aspects of me which are essential to my being. I fear what would become of me if I made this final acceptance. Part of the disease: John ledger the brand

I have to live in denial of certain things just to keep myself ticking over. In fact quite a lot of my breakdown periods are part-caused when my morale isn’t strong enough to pardon me from the aspects of my life I am in denial about. The denial is there because deep down I am aware that my need to be active and productive is far more resource-consuming and counter productive than if I was to sit in a chair and not move, but to write and draw. Nevertheless I scurry up and down trains on the Hallam line (Sheffield to Leeds, via Barnsley train line), buying coffee’s, bottled drinks (if I forget my own bottle, it appears that only safe water can be found by buying a another bottle of water), newspapers to keep me ‘informed’, just to put a couple of hours in on my drawing-work which, in theory, I could do at home. Countless times I have been sat on a train seat coming home thinking to myself “what have I done? All I’ve done is scurried up and down and I’ve hardly done anything”
However, my deep seated doubts about whether my efforts are counter-productive aren’t just there in the physical world (which is largely in terms of my carbon footprint) they are also there in the virtual environment. I have great doubts that my work, and everything else I post on the internet (no matter how anti-consumerist the message is) only adds to the consumer mindscape; adding power to its language rather than attacking it. After all, having your own profile on social networking site’s, no matter if it’s pictures of me with a new hair cut, pulling my prettiest face, or it’s a online gallery of my finest artworks, is just an advertisement of one’s self to the rest of the world before it is anything else.
Although I cannot complain about the mass migration to social networking sites over the past decade whilst I use them also, they are not how I’d wish to communicate, nor would I be advertising my work as such, if society allowed an artist the freedom of not having to fight it out in a sea of people all wishing to be seen/heard – which is, more or less, what the internet is now. I always upload more images of my artwork onto networking pages when I feel less secure about what it is I do, and when I feel under the threat of being slightly devalued as a ‘talented person’; this happens especially at points when I am low on money; these times are when the voice of capitalism speaks louder than one’s own voice. I become part of the mess, part of the ‘Alpha forest’; sticking my hand up into air, desperate to be the one who gets noticed, the one who has something to say; when, in reality, I have possibly discarded my voice by consenting to the global hegemony of rampant individualism.Perhaps I am not as counter-productive as I used to be; I no longer make t-shirts, art and music under The John Ledger package, but I still am essentially a brand. Maybe more reluctantly so than most, but reluctance is a foil for one’s disagreeable inner motives; if some part of me wasn’t stimulated by the chance of receiving a positive comment on Facebook, I wouldn’t even need to be writing this now!
The most inspired works I make, containing explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian messages, still carry the logo (hidden from view) of one’s self. The leech of stardom/heroism is always present, gripping on to one’s mind, hurrying them on with their urges to make work and “get out it out there (on the internet)”. We cannot bear to make, say or document anything which isn’t intended to be put up before our expanding internet community; and the very nature of using the internet is one of copying and editing our virtual selves in a branding manner with which we have been shown to do from years of viewing the advertising of consumer brands. In light of this is it at all possible for my artworks’, or anybody else’s, messages to be beneficial to their intended causes amongst the virtual crowd?
I managed to quit Facebook in September 2008 after well over 2 years of being largely sceptical about whether there was any benefits – both in terms of being an artist and a creature dependent on social interactions – from using social networking sites. What followed was a period in which I tried to battle what I saw as ‘irrational thinking’. I attempted this by taking my time more, in all walks of life. This included persevering with focussing my attention on things more greatly, instead of flitting around trying to do everything at once, which internet usage encourages especially. I began to read more, and reading it so that I understood it, rather than merely accumulating it in order to stamp my ‘been there; read that’ sticker on it. I could not do this with information on the internet; I find it impossible to focus on anything on the internet.
All seemed to be going to plan; I was contemplating things more, for the better, even furthering the intensity and strength of my artworks. However, then came spring and summer time of the next year, a time when I always feel an aura of social pressure to be “more productive” to show to the world that I am productive, hardworking and deserving. What calmness and composure I have in autumn/winter evaporates as fast as the summer rain. And, in July 2009, I walked back to Facebook; lying to myself, saying that it was just quick peep at what my friends had been doing in the virtual world without me. It wasn’t long before I was feeling the urge to check it every time I was in the house, and it wasn’t long before I was advertising my opinions; “look at me, look what I think about. Aren’t I clever!?”
So here I am now, glued to it again. Will I have the strength to leave again? Well, the voices of doubt in my head say “you can’t leave right now; it may be helping you to get your artwork out there, and in times as financially difficult as this, it is essential that you do that!” Then I get the voice spouting the social benefits, which I am sure everyone gets when worrying whether being on Facebook is a good thing “You’ll lose contact with friends if you quit, people won’t bother to contact you because everybody speaks on here now. Come on! It’s not that bad, you don’t use it that much!”
After I wrote the last paragraph, my train of thought was interrupted by the urge to open up internet explorer and have a quick check up on what’s happening on Facebook. That’s a reaction, not a rational decision, and it confirms that I may have unwittingly found myself caught up in this Facebooked way of thinking again. And this isn’t good, I am compromising what I do and think which is aimed at the real world, and diluting it into virtual miss-mash.Can’t let my art become like my music

I have learnt to never give in to the pressure to conform, in the hope that it will fulfil the ambitions and desire to be respected. By doing this one loses that small token of freedom they found in that long struggle they went through with the searching they did to try to understand why it was they had these feelings of inadequacy in the first place! – you have gone away, re-found some self-worth but now feel pressured to have it valued by those who actually stole it!
I have to keep telling myself not to feel that I am a lazy artist because I don’t push myself commercially, because I don’t liaise at every art event I can get to. I have to tell myself that deep down I am as artistically equal to them, even as they exhibit in new city spaces as I exhibit in cupboards in the wrong kind of town. The entrepreneur has infected the artist and he is telling him/her that they aren’t good enough/are failed artists if they don’t chase the curators around gallery spaces with red wine in one hand talking over-enthusiastically about works of art which they have no real love for.
I have to tell myself not to feel pressured into become this, as what I am saying, in my cupboard in the wrong kind of town, speaks as confidently about our current era as any other work does. My work shows a massive disillusion with the minimalist post-modern ‘cultural’ spaces, desperate to look ‘professional’ that oil the wheels of enterprise, as if the two (art and business) were the best of buddies. Deep down I know that if my work is rejected by these places, it is a rejection by one infected cell in a hugely ill system, which is looming dangerously close to its own destruction. This is not to say that all artists who ‘make it’ in this society are phoneys, but it also needs to be remembered that those who don’t make it’ aren’t inferior to them.A final acceptance

The implications of living in such a commercially driven society are that one’s personality is chopped, diced, and edited, until it is able to fit in to the slots created by a society that has become more and more generic as commerce prospers in a global community, where the means to distribute information are owned by so few; the pressures to conform to a whole manner of conventions are immense.
One becomes more fearful of being without money, not for the means of survival but for the means to be an active and participative consumer. When money, the lack of it, starts to be a real worry, one finds their minds crammed into the tin can of capitalist thinking. When so much emphasis is placed on personal appearance and one becomes convinced by the illusion that he/she is surrounded by seemingly confident, beautiful, consumer kids, who appear to be better than him/her -no matter how fabricated their new-found persona image may seem – they too find themselves pitch-forked in to the shopping aisles.
High culture, as well as low culture, is advertised in a manner which aims to persuade us that we should be fearful of ‘missing out on an event/being left behind’. Cultural experiences have become a commodity. Those bookworms in Waterstones, (I include my own book hording moments) even those backpackers setting off to tour the great European Cities (and I include my own Berlin trip), are no less immune to the system’s mass persuasions than the boy racer, with his large car exhaust, blue lights and loud speaker-systems, is.
Many who try to find individual empowerment over the suggestions of the system can easily fall short of the mark, as even the accumulation of knowledge/current affairs can become a rat-race. We think we need to be informed about everything, but by setting off on this chase for info, trying to find shortcuts like car drivers in the 9-5 rat-race, a feeling emerges of never knowing enough to feel empowered. We perpetually hand over the reigns to a non-existant leader-like person, who we assume is the worthy possessor of the bigger decisions, and we then channel-in on our own limited choices within. And, yet again, we find ourselves accepting the ruling ideology’s fundamental suggestion that we are powerless little children who need to be told what to do all the time – if we haven’t been told that it’s what we should do, we shouldn’t do it!
These are but a few ways in which freedom of thought is suppressed by the ruling capitalist ideology. The system is against the thinker. Its advances make it increasingly more difficult to have the space to be one. Someone who tries to resist conformity (a conformity which I believe most are troubled by, at some unspoken level of consciousness) can, at times when – as the Joy Division front man Ian Curtis put it in the song Love will tear us apart – “routine bites hard and ambitions are low” feel like they are on the verge of a final acceptance. A place from which they know they will have to put their head down and accept commonly used remarks as truths, in order to save themselves from the despairs, and mental illness’s that trying to swim against the tide of society often inflicts.
The only thing that truly keeps me going, in the long term, is my spells of creative output, whether writing, drawing and painting. ‘Getting it down’ on paper is essential for my well being; in fact I actually feel more myself after doing so. This is because it has become my one method of resistance against the looming despair and final acceptance, and this is due to my years of art college being the years when I began my journey from being a shy, but sentimentally-padded, Stone Roses-loving boy, to a young man, who couldn’t forget the visions of our fragile-civilisation, whilst feeling ever-more socially isolated. This is why creative output became a necessity rather than a hobby.
For this reason, I struggle immensely, and constantly muse over the Love will tear us apart lyrics, when my day job requires all of my time, and I have no time free to do this. I find it very difficult having to follow someone else’s rules, without having the space to exercise my own thoughts. I can only follow someone else’s path if I can make my own rules up as I go along, if I cannot do this I start to lose respect for the person I am, and my eyes start to sag to the bottom of my face, collecting grey mist, and wishing to be excused from the sight of things that could cause friction.
To be able to just pack a bag, and work in a small sustainable community, far enough away from the billboards of the major cities to feel the pull of them would be the best way to avoid a final acceptance without the immense difficulties of battling amidst the thick of it. It has taken me the best part of ten years to turn my paintings and writings from mere splashes of things (of which I appreciate –when done well – by others, but just aren’t me anymore), to the politically direct pieces of work they are now, but I am still not a stage from where I could leave ‘all this’ behind. As I mentioned in my comparison with Brave New World’s society, the ruling ideology’s creation of feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability, if we were to live outside of it, coupled with consumer daydreams, of Disneyesque happy endings, and beautiful non-existent lovers, make it so hard for those of us who even want to leave to be able to do so. Even though it may deliver us more misery than content, it is very hard to think “stuff this, I don’t need it to be happy and safe”. I am finding the idea of ‘letting go’ of these illusions very difficult which is why, for now, I must carry on trying to swim upstream.
So, trying to get through, day to day, the track which I seem to have placed my life on is intense. The only outlets from this intense and over-serious path seem to be dead ends (quite literally, in the corners of a pub or in the refuge of my house, which is on a sleepy cul-de-sac). The intensity comes to a head at countless points within a year, from which the only remedy is a very very early night (12 hours sleep). This is possibly not a route to a final acceptance within itself; it is more a refuelling of me; I am no use for anything whilst I’m sat on train, internally screaming, and externally twitching, from all the noises going off on the train. A point from which everything becomes evidence of ‘the tyranny of Capitalism’ – mobile calls, I pod sounds, even conversation about domestic subjects, causing obvious friction with all around me. The rest-bite possibly helps me reground in sense.
From the rest-bit I will find sense again, but this process will build up and build again and again; (to use the treadmill again) it is like getting on treadmill at a slow jogging space and, very slowly – so slowly that the difference is tiny – upping the speed, until I find myself sprinting so fast that I fall off.
It goes without saying that I have a compulsive personality which, at points during a year will completely take over my life. Compulsive disorders are perhaps unique to people living under a giant global system, which inflicts a feeling of powerlessness onto them. My obsessive patterns really began to take control over my life, when I first started to ceaselessly worry about our (humans’) place upon the planet.
This was in the summer of 2002. I was 18, and there was a story on the news about an asteroid (NT7 2002) which was possibly on course for impact with the earth in 2018. I was on my summer break from college, and I had been a very solitary teen since August 2001; I had decided that solitude made a much more comfortable ride for my teenage self who had constantly found himself the butt of jokes in his groups of friends, because of his low self-esteem, and tendencies to leave himself ‘wide open’ for ridicule (these things happen; all young people do it; if there was somebody more lowly than me, I’m sure I’d have had no quarrels with him being the whipping boy – the friends I fell out with are now some of my best friends again; we’ve all grown). The solitude was an important factor, because you think differently as a loner than you do when you’re a social creature – you contemplate the ‘point of this’ and ‘the point of that’ far more, because you’re completely free of suggestive words from piers.
The news of the asteroid flung open a door to a new way of looking at things, a door which the New York terror attacks of September 11th had previously unlocked for my new-found solitary-self to peer through: Although both were not directly linked to environmental concerns (although I do think that our missiles should be aimed at incoming asteroids rather than at each other) the fear of humankind’s ignored fragile existence on this planet become dominant in my mind. I was possessed by a feeling of utter dread, and there was still no outlet for this fear at this point in my life – I was a massively shy and embarrassed person, with a poor vocabulary. I couldn’t have talked about them with anybody; I didn’t know anybody who thought about these things, I was still in fear (all-be-it irrationally) of the ‘High School mentality’ which would have seen someone who thought about such things as a “weirdo” “pussy” or “gay boy”.

What came were the feelings of utter powerlessness and uselessness in the face of these huge worries I had. This resulted in the ‘revving up’ of a 3-year-old relatively obsessive eating and exercising routine, and turned what had previously been merely a rigidity, which hampered certain social aspects of growing up, into a physically destructive disorder. The ultimate control I tried to inflict on my life was protection against my feelings of powerlessness; the world around me went from being a nice-sounding pop song, to being a whirlwind of chaos. What I did was what countless other people do who develop an obsessive disorder: in order to forget the mad world outside they impose maximum control on their own little world.

My eating disorder took me to a place from were I could physically go no further. I had to go back, hating the fact that my perceived triumphs in my quest to lose as much weight as possible, were all being undone again as I began to put it back on. When you are stood on a weighing scale, observing the fact that you are 8.3 stone, when the machine tells you ‘you are 3 stone under weight, and your mind is saying to you “well done: you’re winning”, you have put yourself under such a controlled mindset, that the possibilities of becoming seriously ill don’t bother you; the mind has closed itself off from the exterior fears, and any walk back into the real world is going to reopen those bad thoughts again.
When the weight was appearing back on me, the only thing to I could do, because it wasn’t possible to go down such a dark route again, was to look for things to blame for what had become of me; and what started out as small sources of irrational finger pointing, such as individual High Schools, eventually grew to associate larger sources as being to blame for my problems. It soon became apparent to me that my Eating disorders were partly caused by advertising, and that soon grew into awareness that the entire system of capitalism was causing all the social and environmental issues which were filling me up with this dread. The asteroid NT7 2002 was not a man-made threat to the planet, nor did Sept 11th have a direct link to climate change, but they had kick-started my visions of the ‘bigger picture’ and the western way of life’s fragile existence within it.
My art work follows this progression like a mirror image; what started off as pictures of unexplainable fears soon became direct pieces of opposition to the system of capitalism. My manic anger with this system, my tendency to bring it into all conversation, is a direct descendent of my control-freak manners which ‘came of age’ when I was 18. It is a voice saying “hey you fucker! You’re trying to kill me!”
I’d like to point out that Eating disorders are as institutional to Capitalism as acorns are to Oak trees; they will only cease when this system of all inequalities ceases to be.
It’s taken me eight years to be able to talk about my eating disorders, in such a casual manner (well except when the jaw-bridge has been down when I’ve been drunk in my early 20’s) and this is because I now see it has just one small part (my life) of the macrocosm of effects caused by the wholly-destructive capitalist system.
The periods of solitude gave me chance to find out my own mind. However, not enough to secure me from the feelings of fear and inadequacy that the mass persuasion, dealt out by the ideology, imposes on me. It is a battle to stop them winning. I can’t go back to being the sentimental teen that I was, but I can still be beaten into submission, and every long spell of depression sends me closer to the final acceptance – as a means to stop the mental suffering of trying to battle against the tide of persuasions to retain my real self. I’d describe the final acceptance as a point where one feels that they can’t fight anymore.
I find that this moment is perfectly summed up within Radiohead’s album Ok Computer; it is combined in the mood of tracks 9 and 10 – Climbing up the walls, and No surprises. For me, Climbing up the walls depicts the build up of one hell of catastrophic breakdown, ending in what sounds like a big machine shutting down – the plugs being ripped out of the ‘paranoid android’. The shut-down, is followed by the soft but fragile and morose melody of No surprises…. “A heart that’s full up like a landfill. A job that slow kills you…………I’ll take a quiet life a handshake with carbon monoxide”. All hope has gone; all that can be asked for is a life mute to all outer-possibilities, ambitions and worries, and just hope for a slow-painless ride until death. The system has won over a possible dissenter, not by direct force, not by a threat from the secret police, but by a life-long mental bombardment, which he has finally succumbed to.
The transition from the giant breakdown in Climbing up the Walls to the final acceptance in No Surprises is, for me, one of the greatest ever musical moments, and it speaks about the difficulties of life in our modern urban/digital worlds solely. On a personal level, this moment, possibly speaks to me about my life more than any other piece of music. It describes how my own last stance as an individual would feel, before I was finally ‘nailed down’.
I suppose one possible reason for the larger and more cataclysmic crashes of my late 20’s is that I have become a much more complex and questioning thinker than I was when rushing about in my endorphin-hooked teenage years. What I have tried to do since is to run a far more complex and intricate machine at the same speed as a much less intricate, much simpler, machine. Sometimes it can cope. But if the heat is kept on far too long, it is only a matter of time before a mind trying to be deep and complex, whilst running at express train speed, will shatter into small useless pieces with no energy stored left in them. After a crash, I pick my body back up again by running, getting the blood flowing again. This encourages a ‘fresh start’ with my art, my reading and thinking. But the treadmill only ever gets faster, and another crash is as inevitable as another economic crash under Capitalism.
However, this process can’t go on for ever and the main worry (which my denial methods are usually good at forgetting about) is that a final acceptance is inevitable to stop me having the energy bursts (“No alarms and no surprises please!”) and the questionings arising to which I try to commit myself. This would be a life where I would have to be vigilantly cautious to make sure nothing but society did my thinking for me. I’ve had my 5 fruit and veg today! Well done; I’ve worked five days this week. I can enjoy a drink now! Capitalism is the only way!”
Here, I am almost beginning to repeat the words from the computerised voice of Fitter happier another Ok Computer track. But if I cannot retain my resistance and I begin a final acceptance, an android is what I’ll become; a body free of independent thoughts, who only acts to orders made by others. I naturally refer to Ok Computer by Radiohead when I ever have thoughts on my final consent to conform to what I perceive to be the norm. Strangely, I bought this album in May 1999, the same springtime when I first began to have immense feelings of social inadequacy. I adored the music of Radiohead in the spring
of 1999, but I left it alone for some time after in favour of bands which didn’t conflict with my then prevailing rose-tinted optimism for the future; a pre-millennium optimism shared by the majority. The Stone Roses, Doves, The Verve, Oasis – your typically ‘indie’ melody-makers – kept me singing “everything’s going to be Ok” and I believed it would be. Ok Computer, accompanied by the bleak 13 by Blur reminded me too much of the sour and anxious spell of spring/summer 1999, and I wanted to keep that door locked. Nevertheless, the post Sept 11th, NT7 2002 me returned to Radiohead with a stronger connection than before; I now felt aligned with the troubled-messages within their songs, rather than seeing them as a threat. After I regained my weight in 2004, I knew there was no way back; I had to try and ride the storm rather that stick my head in the sand and deny its existence.
Will I ever have a No-surprises-style final acceptance? I am not sure, no matter how low I get and how consenting I become in order to relieve the pain, it never seems to happen. The totality of what makes me seems to be ill-fitting to conformity under Capitalism and I hit so many brick walls when merely trying to just ‘get along’. But if don’t finally accept where do I go? I’ve also been spoon-fed the consumer drug from the first moment I set eyes on a TV commercial. The only way I can think of to be cured would be for me to be sent to rehab in some mythical socialist bloc. I constantly (much to my friends’ annoyance) re-iterate the The The lyrics “I was just another western guy with desires that can’t be satisfied”, as these lyrics highlight my constant dissatisfaction caused from having a consumer diet on drip feed from an early age.
However, the compulsive methods of defiance against capitalist conformity I find myself propelled into after spells in the doldrums are very heavy on my body, so heavy that at 26 both of my knees, my back, and my guts are getting to the point where they’ve had enough – they are worn out. There may be a day, not so long from now, when I literally cannot move. People may say that it is my own fault that my resistance comes undone so easily most days, because I don’t eat for hours on end, therefore I am low on energy, so closer to breaking point. But it is a systematically induced parasite that attacks my persona from both sides, leaving me no alternative but to go forward, in a search for a way out of the only way I’ve known, down the only route I’ve known: the contradiction is massive, which is why I fear the final acceptance so much.
A viable alternative to this life really does seem far off. Maybe it will arrive? But in what state will my resistance have left me in at that point? I really do not know. If I find myself permanently worn-out I am unsure as to how I will manage. But like humanity as a whole, which puts off the issues of climate change/peak oil, until one day it may cause our downfall, I am doing the same for my own little, insignificant life. More than anything I am dreading the possible ‘shared downfall’ of my own life, humanity and nature.A happy final acceptance?

Arriving at my studio today after work, I initially felt an uneasy feeling. “What am I doing going this way, when everybody else is going the other way?” Today is a big day for the country of England: the England football team play their first match of the 2010 world cup, against, of all teams, The United States of America. The land is draped in St George, and union jack flags. Is this good? Is this bad? Well, it isn’t important to me right now.
What is important for me is the feeling of inner strength I felt whilst walking the other way; Yet again “ploughing my own furrow”. Maybe, after all’s said and done, my final acceptance will be actually be an acceptance that I will always be the one walking the opposite way – even if the consequences are long term solitude.
I used to think that all true artists are depressives, and this is what makes them kick against the conformity washing over them day after day. But actually, true artists are outsiders, and if they become depressed it is merely a symptom of this. Outside of the crowd is their place and they should be proud of it!
We are of value. If we didn’t take a walk out of the crowd, and look back at it, then who else would do but the tyrant wishing to control them all? The outsider must, if he/she is to survive, become an artist, of any sort, as although he/she may find that they are stood on the margins with a dictator, they are the crowd’s last bastion of hope against the ways of the dictator. Maybe I can never slip into the abyss of the other final acceptance without losing my life. So, as long as I am I, I will only be able to accept the more ‘positive’ final acceptance.
Now as enter my studio with, what appears to be, the entirety of England singing to the tune of football behind me, I feel strong in my studio, swimming upstream – with a free run for once! Nothing is around to try and shape, twist or wear me down: the streets and, especially, the trains and buses are empty of the scrutiny, mocking and cyber-space interactions that usually roll down the carpet for me to succumb to the resignation of me for the day. The train home will be empty. I, if only for 2 hours, have almost free reign over myself. I should cherish these times and not feel excluded from the football mania!

 What is becoming of us as we spend more of our lives in the virtual world?

The conversations which we may have shared between a few of us, the photographs which we may have shown to a few of us, are now shown to numbers that rise well over an hundred. Hundreds of people are seeing fragments of our otherwise more personal lives and they are making comment upon it, comparing it to their own lives, and, likewise, we find ourselves doing the same.

Why do we do this? Even those who are aware that something here isn’t quite right, and fear an alteration of perception, still end up explaining their lives away.

One gets reactionary thoughts in their heads at moments during the day which translates as “hey, that’s quite clever/funny; I should put it up on Facebook” or “that really speaks of who I am; I’ll post it on Facebook as it’ll give people a better understanding of the bits of me I want to be seen!”

For those who find theirselves caught between this urge and a concern about living our lives out on the internet, this thought is usually followed by “Is this all that my life is to become? Just an attempt to write something clever/of novelty value, to grab the attention of my fellow networker’s, whilst meanwhile my output into the real world diminishes?” It is a feeling of total negativity that, by getting caught in the mental environment of trying to prove oneself a valuable person on the internet, they are actually doing very little in the real world.

The life of a visual-artist, like me, fares no better on the social networking sites than any other individual vying for attention. The importance of being noticed online, and getting artwork online, suddenly seems to become one the prime motivations to make work in the first place. I become my page; just like others, except I am using my artwork instead of images of myself, to project what I believe is the best version of me, but by doing so I am placing my hopes onto the virtual world, loosing incentive for action in the physical world.

The paragraph below was something I wrote when this particular concern seemed highly probable.

I hide behind the veneer of the works I have made, which I am most proud of, but the veneer begins to crack from the day that the production of work deceases as I become ever-more dependent on online interaction as my real life becomes more solitary. My works of art, which I hide behind, become an empty shell; a creature once lived inside the shell but is now long gone.

However, a sense of urgency to act more-so in the real world can be massively demoralised by empty feelings encountered when stepping out into physical human environment, luring one back to the ‘dreamscape’ of the virtual world. The physical version of world is never adequate after an immersion into the virtual; the virtual produces a much better vision of the world; continuity between events, with no empty spaces; an edited version of the world, all glitzy and free of discomfort. One looks up at the tops of a city’s tallest and most flashy buildings, from the train station as they head home feeling unfulfilled by the physical human interactions within the city, and one imagines that the people who reside in the top of these towers are having a better, more wholesome, more meaningful existence; an experience that we can only believe we can reach when in expectation of what we will find when we next log on to the world-wide-web.

However, it can never provide that human need for something more wholesome, no matter how much its promise continue to delude. The odd elations one may receive in their virtual lifetime, as one shares an online ‘intimate moment’ with another, are but grains of sand in a vast desert of disappointments and demoralisations caused by the futility of trying to express one’s self, showing one’s individuality, via novelty groups, novelty quotes and novelty applications -even the artist finds himself to be nothing but a budding novelty amidst this desert, which could never quench our thirst for satisfaction.

This is the triumph of absolute pointless pap over the human soul!!

A pointless pap which has also triumphed over important current affairs.

One finds ‘Networkers’ joining novelty Facebook groups en masse, stupid groups like ‘I once lost my phone up my arse!’ Groups which they’ll never ever go back on to, because they’ve joined so many of these it would be impossible to do so!; all this virtual novelty whilst the physical world carries on out there, getting more troublesome by the day, as it slowly veers into the abyss that the 21^st century threatens to be.

Ok, distraction, novelty, stuff that serves no purpose but to give us a brief 2-second smirk, has always been around and has always been needed, but never before the internet has it been so omnipresent, so triumphant over all other information.

Fact: post a link on Facebook about something serious – i.e. a link to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, or a George Monbiot blog on the issue of climate change– then post a feed about eating a big wedge of cheese before bedtime; the cheese will be triumphant, with many more replies and ‘likes’.

I read an interview recently in the magazine Adbusters with one of the main architects of the 1968 Paris uprisings Raoul Vaneigem; one sentence really stuck with me; “never in Europe have the forces of repressions been so weakened, yet never before have the exploited masses been so passive”

This is the result of a Europe indoctrinated by consumerism, but for me it spoke clinically of our collective mindset from the moment it was propelled into the virtual sphere (a moment which probably collectively happened after 2005 rather than before); one where an immersion in ‘quirky’ titillation seems to bubble-wrap our minds as if they are still on-course to be posted to the ‘better-world’ Millennium that was anticipated in the 20^th century, before the sobering possibility of a millennia bleaker than the last one made itself known. But by ignoring this reality, we also ignore the opportunities to overthrow the ruling ideology that is directing us to this bleak place. But “the forces of repression” will not be “so weakened” in a future as bleak as our current ‘millennium-route’ seems headed.

Our desire to retain this passiveness, so not to notice the ‘grim expectations’ may be indirectly due to the bleak entrance into this new century, and the internet social networking site is providing our passivity, constantly, so we may waste time which may otherwise have been used to show us something we did not wish to be shown: a world outside that isn’t doing that well by any measure.

The passivity helps us imagine that “all is good”. “That I hate Jeremy Clarkson page really speaks for me, and it has lots of other followers too! All is good!”

The takeover of the social mind

As there ever been another moment in history where the private lives of individuals have been so non-private; transparent, as if we are looking down on each other, sat in roofless buildings, like looking down on a Lego toy-land or a computer game simulation of a town?

There has never been a moment like this. The dystopian fantasies, such as George Orwell’s 1984, depicted the terrifying scenario where the individual cannot escape the all-seeing eye; and this fear persists, and we recite it whenever there is in an increase in surveillance cameras in the area in which we live. However, perhaps such novels have encouraged us to look in the wrong places. Do we not all now feel actively encouraged to tell everyone about what’s on our minds/what we are doing by the means of social networking sites? The ‘big-brother’ eye, which we fear, is not the main concern, and this fear has distracted us; the biggest concern is how we are actively explaining our private lives out to a large community of people on social networking sites on the world-wide web; we are walking towards the all-seeing-eye, and we are beginning to live inside of it. We are all following like zombies, transfixed by a dream of a virtual utopia, being drawn-in by the buzzing sound of our computers; a scenario which seems to draw similarities with that of the fate of the Eloi at the hands of Morlocks in H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine.

Recently, sat next to a friend on a train, we were talking about cinema; a conversation subject I struggle to contribute anything to because I hardly ever go to the cinema. She was telling me about 3D film, where “you feel like you’re inside of the film” and how she believes it will become the norm in future cinema.

I’m hardly a technology know-all, I don’t know much about new gadgets and product names, but I am aware that there has been a massive shift in the past 10 years, especially through the way we communicate with each other, which as altered our perceptions of what is around us and altering what we take for granted.

At some point during the last ten years, I became somewhat more of a techno-sceptic than I had been (I think this moment came at the same point at which I started to become cynical of modern popular music and youth culture trends – this might just be when I became a miserable bastard, but I think it’s more likely to be an element of both aspects). More accurately, it was at a moment when my dependence on the social networking site ‘grandad’ Myspace grew. Since this moment, I have been alarmed by any further advancement which allowed further immersion into these sites in particular. My ‘environmental woes’ were alive and kicking by this point and I was probably feeling that further immersion could only have negative consequences for a species which is constantly loosing its connection with the terra-firm upon which it depends.

Whilst musing the idea of 3D cinema on the train, and before I could get on my usual ‘ranting box, I noticed that a man sat opposite us had flicked open his lap-top computer. The familiar crackling noise and the Windows load-up screen reminded me of my contradictory feelings towards technology. In the most explicit sense, I have a love-hate relationship with the computer world. The loading-up of the windows screen, and the crackling remind me of warm memories of my very early teens, when my dad brought the college lap-top home for the weekend; it evokes a feeling which is similar to the noise of running an hot bath on a cold winters day; and, of more recent times, comfy visions of socialising without the uncomfortable situations involved in the real world.

The song ‘Computer Love’ by Kraftwerk remerged in my head again, at this moment. The ambiguous yet prophetic voices, calling from way-back in 1981; a song which, towards it’s ending, evokes a feeling of submersion – the inevitable of a possibly doomed-species (like the Reptilian calls in the depths of the brains of the humans in J.G. Ballard’s Drowned-world voices, calling us ,mammalians, to go back into non-existence and let the reptiles rule once more). The lyrics of computer love could not have better described this era of virtually transfixed individuals.

Another lonely night
Stare at the TV screen
I don’t know what to do
I need a rendezvous
Computer love

At this moment, on the train, we started talking about whether 3D immersion computer interaction will be the inevitable next step after 3D cinema. In a capitalist society, if such a progression is possible then it is inevitable. 3D immersion would create the possibility for us to be sold to from all angles, without leaving our homes; imagine shopping mall, white walls, logos, a simulation of a real friend behind each doors, regularity, cleanliness, no uncomfortable moments. (Then imagine the outdoor world as this point, taking into the account the likelihood of a increasingly volatile world, due to arrive at some point in this century. Will capitalism go full-on virtual in order to survive the diminishing real world in which nobody wants to spend anymore?)

One only has to look at how closer technology has advanced towards this vision in just 10 years, to see the huge possibility of this happening; the web becoming permanently attached to people, just as it has attached itself to mobile phones – another relatively recent phenomena which the majority of humans cannot function without, although they have only been widely available for just over 10 years.

A 3D internet immersion would disconnect us from the ever-encroaching noisy urban environment. We would ‘switch-off’ from the noisy buses and trains, not by just putting our headphones in, but by talking to simulations of our buddies (a process which couldn’t really look much less schizoid than those who already use mobile phones with headphones) on a ‘walk-in’ Facebook-of-the-future.

This disconnection from the real world is exactly the kind of future which exists in the novel Feed by M.T. Anderson. This novel, which is categorised as ‘teen-fiction’ but is so much more than this, may actually be a prophecy. As well as the social and environmental consequences described in it, it also describes a future people fully disconnected from reality to a virtual land of distractions, created by internet corporations, who know how to tend to everybody’s personas. (Amazon and Facebook are already serving out adverts aimed at our personality descriptions, and Google is already attempting to transfer the entirety of the real world onto a virtual plane.) The real world is falling apart in Feed, but the consumers couldn’t give a shit. They are constantly satiated by a personalised virtual fun-land.

Does this sound like a far-fetch fictional novel? Does it sound like an unlikely scenario for our world? I am not so sure; I fear the worse under the current procession. The deterioration of the planet’s eco-systems is increasing at, what seems to be, a pretty much consistent level to the increasing technological advancements: as the world is getting more and more volatile and the waters rise, we are climbing into monitor screens, hoping to sale away into a virtual utopia. However, we are still made of skin and bones.

An increasing isolation

The major alterations, during the last decade, to the way we communicate – cell phones, internet communication – have, by their nature of requiring the user to contact the rest of humanity via their devices, perpetuated isolation. We are increasingly required to communicate with people without coming into physical contact with them. This creates an inevitable lonesome outcome, which prompts the individual to search harder, speaker louder, within the only places he/she can find an audience – which are in realms of cyberspace; thus further escalating the usage of these places to communicate, thus further escalating isolation.

When I’ve over-tired myself to the extent that I cannot join in, in the disconnection, and switch off to “that space cadet glow” on my MP3 player, I find myself ‘people-watching’ whilst on the train back. The people are not looking at other people they are tuning in to little boxes, with their gazed fixed on little screens of options. There is noise – babies crying etc – but most noise is from isolated sources; sounds from I pods, mobile ring tones, conversations through cyberspace with people miles away that we (the passengers on the train) can’t see.

There is a link between the reasons why I seem to spend my ‘days off’ solitary travelling up and down the rail-line, and the increasing amount of time I, amongst most others, spend contacting the rest of the world from behind a screen. I could spend an whole day behind a screen; not an happy day, certainly not a morally uplifting day, but certainly a day eternally finding ‘tasks’ to be done.

It is easy to feel captive to the computer room when more and more of one’s life appears to be channelled through the computer. Whilst in this captive-like state of finding endless cyber-space requests made of you, one is also a captive audience to the impression of the world that the world-wide-web conveys: it creates an impression of the world whizzing past you, succeeding, accumulating, producing, and leaving you, who is sat gathering moss on the computer seat, behind in the process.

The internet is a forest of people, all vying to be heard. The social anxiety, the pressure to be noticed, revered as someone of worth, is massively claustrophobic. It is a pressure that forces one to think “I need to be more productive, I need to show that I am a hard working and individual”. But equally present, no matter how much one ‘networks’ their perceived talents, are the feelings of malaise and uselessness whilst sitting, captive, in the computer room, urging one to go out and do something un-lazy and productive in the real world.

The urge to go out is fired by an urge to make the trip a productive outing, because of the feeling that all those ‘tasks completed’ in cyber-space accumulate to nothing, whilst the feeling that one still needs to prove themselves of worth in a forest of people, seemingly all doing likewise, persists. So, outings become a race to make a day productive; a productiveness which can hardly be guaranteed by a stroll in the countryside or meet-up with friends. Hence, one finds themselves ‘tasking it up’ in the physical world; organising their life around a train route (I don’t drive a car) to fit enough in, so “today can feel like a success and a day well done!” This is why as soon as something productive is achieved (in my case, a new piece of art made, or a thought written down) one feels an urge to “get it up on Facebook!”

After a morning, on a day off from work, of fruitless task-completing on the computer, I have a list of things I ‘need’ to do in order to feel that I have been productive. They are all solitary, because the ‘fast and productive’ world I see before me on the internet, and the feelings of idleness created whilst ‘task-laden and ‘captive’ to this impression of the world, pressure me into believing that I have no spare time for ‘chit chat’ and fun, as I need to be breaking my back, physically. this creates the social void, from which there seems to be no way out of but to venture back onto the world-wide-web, in search of a dream-like collage of long-lost friends, all waiting for me to restart the ‘good times’ – those times which have only ever appeared to exist on other peoples online photo albums. The realisation that I have isolated myself only becomes apparent when I’m knackered on the train home; when the opportunities for the day (except the opportunities to get ‘pissed’ in my home town) are all but gone, and I look to my surrounding environment for an answer, only to see that its answer is to talk to people I can’t see, listen to things I can’t hear, via the gadgets which I suspect prompted my own isolation. And who is there to speak with about my despairing isolation but to voyeuristically tell the entirety of my online community, as there’s nobody here in the physical world to speak to!

Perhaps the ‘need to be productive’ and the ‘watching of people drifting-off into cyber-space after their days work, on the train’ are tendencies/habits which are more peculiar to me. However, what I am trying to explain through my own experience is that the environment created by the increasing presence of cyber-space (computer/internet, cell phones) in our lives doesn’t just create isolation within our domestic environments, in which we dissolve into at the end of the day, but it also creates it within the life we seek to lead in the outer-environment. It does this by both constantly interrupting an escape from it, reminding us of ‘what we are missing’ when someone on the train/bus seems to be getting more attention through it than we are, as their phones ‘bleep bleep’ all the way home; and it also does it by coaxing out a feeling that we have no time to do anything else but task completing, because “you’ve wasted way too much time sat in front of the screen this morning, and you’re not doing nearly half as much with your life as all the others on the networking sites are”

The increasing amount of evening isolation is perhaps more apparent to spot, but cyber-space is certainly helping to create the social void within the day-time, which is wrongly catered-for by cyber-space in the evening-time, as one finds they have no alternative for a cure to the isolation but to scour the web more so, and, in the process, be subjected to the appearance that everything is happening everywhere but where they are, and everybody is pushing forwards and progressing but them. This creates the setting for another day of isolation tomorrow and so forth.

The unwritten destiny of humanity?

The invention of the Net is not a bad thing; the danger is that we will begin to live our lives entirely through the net, and this would further separate us from the outside world, a world which threatens to be ever more turbulent in the 21^st century. If we ignore the world outside our doors it may evolve into an intensely hostile environment which no longer permits our species’ stay on the planet.

This would be a waste not merely for our own progress as a species, but also for the progress of the entirety of life. The evolution of a conscious creature is an incredibly important step for life. Despite our fragile existence as a species, and despite the fact that the rest of life would carry on, probably more triumphantly, without us, what we contribute to life on earth is unique. We (humans) are the earth’s brain, in every sense but that of a religious destiny.

The internet has the ability to connect citizens of the world providing a combined empowerment to stand up to the undemocratic system of capitalism, and eventually overthrow it. Yet, under Capitalism it has become the system’s most powerful tool – the most efficient of consumer distractions – distracting the bulk of its users with a barrage of novelties, badges of nonsense, which speak to ones claims for individuality, to mark out their sense of social status amongst the forest of others all doing the same (one may even actually join a group page for a democratic activist organisation for entirely this purpose!).

The net has just become the virtual equivalent of advanced consumerism in the physical world. The virtual form may not directly drain the planet of its resources, but it lights up the pathway towards doing so, like Blackpool illuminations. And It is equal if not more successful in draining individuals of their vigilance, awareness, making a nation a consumers who are indifferent to acts of global injustice and national injustice by the corporate state. So much hope was held for the internet to be a bringer of true democracy, providing information to all and eventually becoming a force to bring global Capitalism to justice Capitalism, however, had other ideas: It wasn’t going to give up so easily. It can consume anything and turn it into tool for its own benefit. These hopes were ‘so 20^th century’. If an image could sum the first decade of the 21^st century it would show a snidey grin on the face of capitalism, self satisfied with having taken democracy’s ‘bright new hope’ and turned it into its own ‘bright new star’

It seems apparent that Capitalism, left to its own devices, will seek to turn every aspect of our lives into a profit making venture: dependent on doing most of our communication via the internet and mobile phones means that we are always paying chunks of our wages to internet and mobile phone companies, to ensure that our connection to the world isn’t cut off; we are now basically having to pay to communicate, which makes the early mobile phone slogan ‘pay as you talk’ seem much more sinister. If they could they’d charge us for oxygen, in fact they probably will do if we end up having to breathe it via tanks.

Communication through cyber space, although a creation made under Capitalism, would be put to better under a more democratic, and less socially anxious society – a bringer of doorways rather than the walls of an lonely room. All technology has the ability to be a benefit, and if it is actually doing us harm then something isn’t right with the way it is being encouraged to be used. It is yet another indication that although Capitalism may have propelled us this level of advancement, we need to abandon its voyage and head for another, as Capitalism is mesmerised by the siren “singing it to shipwreck” (more lyrics taken from Radiohead – THANK YOU). Capitalism is dynamic, and the world now needs stability not dynamism, we now possess the tools to create a much more harmonious and equal order, if only it could abandon the capitalist ship. It is a tragedy that we are still aboard this ship, looking for treasures that will forever elude us.

On one of my days off from work I was going to take my camera out with me, but I lost the heart. It felt as if I would just be adding to the mess which consumer capitalism has created. “Well” I thought “maybe I can just keep them for my own use and not feel compelled to paste them on to the net?” However, I had just had the privilege of viewing the new updated Google maps.

“Technological advances in a consumer society render everything pointless!!” – I very much believe this now, thanks to the Google Empire.

I’m no technophobe; I believe in technology for the benefit of humanity. However, something isn’t quite right; the Utopian visions its advancements seem to suggest are always far from being realised. And instead of making life more fantastic and meaningful, it seems to be making it appear more and more pointless – a feeling which says “been there, done that; nothing great happened; what’s the point of doing it again?” Yet we have to do it again; we are a generation transfixed with the web. We have become glued to technological advances which serve no benefits to us or the advancement of our species, and there is a straight-forward reason for this: the triumph of commercialisation.

Today whilst searching the web, I discovered that something had happened that I had been expecting to happen for a long time: Google had taken over the world!!! OK, well that’s not entirely the truth, but Google Maps does now contain a comprehensive street view of almost every street in the UK. At some point (in the summer of 2009 – certain advertising banners on the street confirm this) Google’s high tech ‘camera-car’ has whizzed around every street sapping every house and every person who happened to be on the street at that moment.

If you were unfortunate enough to be one of these people, Google now has the Commercial rights to let the entire world see your body – it has been kind enough to blur your faces out, as if you were an innocent bystander in Google’s war on uncharted land. These bystanders look towards the camera with helpless bemusement, as if looking up at some medieval conqueror parading victoriously through their streets.

My first reaction to realising that the world-wide-web has got virtual access to my street, was to do something which I usually try to restrain myself from doing; I posted a feed onto my Facebook community wall, highlighting my exasperation to, what felt like, an infringement of some age old right, which had been lost under layers of insane commercial growth. Of course this was counter productive; Facebook (and the other SNS’s) already have the majority of the UK constantly updating their feeds, letting a small-town-sized virtual community know when they are eating, laughing, shitting or crying; what difference would it make if the world could see the windows of the rooms in which they do this?

After an hour or so of no ‘comments’ or ‘likes’ I decided it would be best to delete the feed, after all, I knew that most of my Facebook ‘friends’ would have glanced briefly at the feed and thought this: “John’s a right technophobe; he’s read 1984 far too many times”

Maybe I am little too ‘Over-Orwellian’ with my feelings about what’s happening. The thing is though; we wouldn’t even need some all-seeing power watching over our every move and facial expression; in the 21^st century we’re quite happily showing our entire lives to the world anyway – we seem want the world to know everything about us, whether it wants to or not. Even the disconcerted cannot escape the tidal shift towards this way of living; they cannot live without the needs that Internet communication has created.

This use of technological advances is not the be-all and end-all of what it can offer us a species; this usage is intrinsic to a consumer society; free market capitalism can have no other use for technology, but profit-making. There is a difference between a technophobe and somebody who is severely disconcerted with the speed that technology is advancing to solely cater for the needs of a dictatorship of commercialism.

The predatory mechanisms of Consumerism have become ever-more powerful on the internet. Facebook and the other SNSs may not directly sell a certain product but they most certainly function by playing on the individual’s social insecurities and desires, and create an insatiable social void, by using the exact same formulas that can be seen being used by Consumerism to sell products. It may even be apparent that, just like there is a higher intensity of Consumerism in less equal nations, social networking site usage may also be higher as a percentage in more unequal and more hierarchical nations. The UK is one of Europe’s most unequal nations, and has a much higher number of Facebook users (roughly 23 million out of a 60 million total) than other European nations with higher and similar populations but with a more equal distribution of wealth such as Germany (roughly 7 million out of an 80 million total) or France (roughly 15 million out of 65 million total). It is a fact that there is more social anxiety in less equal nations so, obviously, more people will be on social networking sites, feeling compelled to maintain or improve their social status. (On this note, I would recommend that everybody read ‘The Spirit level’ why more equal societies do better, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson; a book which goes very far in explaining the social consequences caused by inequality).

In the age when to be seen in the looking-glass, to be a celebrity, is an inescapable desire, we are all trying to prove our talents and creations. However, this now endemic desire has been rendered impotent by the culture that spurred them on; the omni-presence of cultural, visual, audio artefacts on the web has brought culture to the brink of valueless, and all that we can do is add to that decreasing. What can a photographer bring to a world which has been covered head-to-toe by the hi-tech camera abilities of Google street view? What can a songwriter bring to a world which consists of possibly over 1 million Myspace music artists also screaming to be heard? No doubt this rant will end up on my blog page; me, just another of millions of ‘me’s’ – blogging away – trying to be noticed as having something of worth to contribute; ignoring our doubts that inform us that we are merely just adding to one great mess.

This accessible but futile ‘celebrity fuelled’ dream is working side by side with the advancements of commercial interest on the internet to the ends of making everything, once of value, worth nothing. However, this omnipresence is an ever growing pacification of the masses. Everything is instantly accessible, instantly there to consume; photo’s of everywhere, every song ever, every possible porn fantasy. If we aren’t strong enough to pull away we may already be plummeting ourselves into the completely dilapidated environment described in Brave New World.

The suggestion of an increasingly powerful virtual dominance controlling the mass, sometimes seems too stronger a suggestion to merely dismiss as an irrational fear. And the recent discovery of Google’s surveying of the land, was what recently got me feeling troubled that there is something seriously wrong with the uses of technological advances in our current society. I’m no conspiracy theorist, yet I just cannot see what commercial benefits Google could receive from photographically documenting back-alleys, and cul-de-sacs in small villages. One cannot help but wonder whether Google is being funded to be able undertake such an extensive survey of the nation’s roads. One could argue that the nations with the most extensive Google street-views on the net are the ones with the most national security paranoia, over issues such as terrorism, activism and immigration; The USA, The UK, Spain, France and the Netherlands are some of the few nations which have been extensively surveyed by Google. There is a decreasing level of trust in Capitalist societies, from person to person and from the state to citizen. This is only an unfounded suggestion, yet Google’s extensive surveying seems a little ‘over the top’ for the purpose of allocating advertising space.

Perhaps it isn’t impossible to imagine that Google street view will become a useful tool for the state once the poverty line lifts above most of the population, as climate change/peak oil make resources and jobs much more scarce – these environmental consequences are destined to happen if we carry on ‘business as usual, that’s for sure. The poor will need to be monitored ever more and possibly crushed ever more as their needs become greater. This may sound more like a terrific sci-fi dystopia, but are we not close to this situation already, without the consequences of climate change?
It doesn’t require much imagination to see that the current homogenising forces of consumerism could quite easily be utilised to control the masses in a much more direct and brutal manner; the gradual increasing of surveillance in society seems to be sneakily expanding, almost in-time to suppress the social unrest which would be caused by unchallenged climate change and peak oil. Google street view, presently a consumer accessory could be easily utilised for state surveillance; signing up to social-networking-sites could become compulsory; all those who are already signed up wouldn’t be able to leave. And finally, let’s not forget the structures of the out-of-town shopping complexes; these places would make ideal holding pens/prisons; indeed, my nearest shopping complex ‘Meadowhall’ was actually built with the original intention of it being a prison! You may say I have got a very vivid imagination; I say that I am merely monitoring the tracks of the inevitable.

Without the conspiracy, one thing still remains apparent as I look at the bemused passers-by caught without consent by the camera: the rights of enterprise seem to overrule all other rights; we can’t touch Google, just like we cannot touch the billboards which bombard our minds, however it is allowed to drive down our streets, and look in our windows, all for the apparent benefits to enterprise. Nobody and nowhere seem to be exempt from these rights of passage. More worryingly, few seem concerned, as they passively tell the world-wide-web about there private lives, whilst being satiated by omni-present consumerism to an extent to which the need for democracy doesn’t seem that great.