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Eric is Awake

The Anonymous Citizen

Notes from a fleshy tube of chemicals in UK Inc.

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Beware the Wartime Prime Minister

8/30/2013

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UK Prime Minister David Cameron may think it is the hand of history he feels on his shoulder over Syria. In fact, it is the dread hand of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. ‘Call me Dave’ and ‘Call me Tony’ are in almost daily telephone contact over this issue. In fact, Cameron has formed a strong relationship with the former Labour Prime Minister since his election, reflecting the increasingly stodgy middle ground of British politics. The background noise to Cameron’s decision on whether to go to war, as he struggles to hear Blair’s advice from a yacht in the Mediterranean, comes from the likes of retired General Sir Michael Rose who says taking advice from Blair is like asking the arsonist how to put out the fire he started.

Don’t imagine that the British Parliament voting down action on this occasion is the end of the affair. War is ubiquitous. There’s always another one around the corner or the resurgence of the one you just kicked into touch. We can be sure that before the end of his term, (so much longer than the terms at Eton) Cameron will once again march his forces up to the top of hubris hill and next time there’s no guarantee that he will march them back down again.

What Cameron probably fails to appreciate is that the man on the end of the phone is an addict and he runs the risk of becoming addicted to the same toxic hubris of all recent Prime Ministers faced with a decision to preside over a history enhancing military intervention. Not a week goes by when our most famous middle-east peace envoy isn’t advocating military action against Iran, Syria or that dodgy Muslim grocer down the high road who is definitely, according to intelligence, overcharging for onions. 

Blair was always susceptible. He saw the Falklands effect on Margaret Thatcher and recognised a significant factor in distracting the electorate from examining too deeply his style over substance approach to political ideology was a short satisfying military action with an relatively defensible raison d’etre. 

His first taste of the forbidden fruit was Bosnia. The moral case was clear - prevent the Serbs from another bout of ethnic cleansing after 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica. Then, when the tide turned and the Albanians returned to wreak vengeance on the Serbs, Tony resolutely looked the other way. Even as scores of Albanian children were named ‘Tonibler’ in honour of their saviour, he had moved on to set up his next score. It wasn’t enough and the first hit is always for free. You don’t pay until you are hooked. 

He has learnt a little, our Tone. He no doubt has advised Cameron against compiling a dossier on Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Instead a ropy Joint Intelligence Committee analysis that could no more than suggest that it was possibly probable on a wet Wednesday when all things had been considered that Assad might possibly, even probably, but never definitely have been involved in the use of something that may be described as toxic, or skin-altering, such as fake tan or even maybe phosphorus. Oh wait, no, not phosphorus, that’s what the Americans used in Fallujah and there wasn’t any need for international condemnation or a red line there. Let’s just say chemical, possibly. And the Syrian rebel groups, including those affiliated with Al Qaida, have very probably, possibly rained fairy dust on their enemies, but never, ever anything vaguely chemical. Perhaps. 

After the reverberations of his humiliation at the hands of the House of Commons have died away, the only sound ‘Call me Dave’ will hear at Number 10 is the insistent ringing of his telephone. If he has learnt anything at all this week, he’ll let it go to voicemail. 


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Wildlife Documentaries - The Truth

8/26/2013

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There are few stories that can truly be described as genuine exclusives. All that is about to change as I reveal one of the best-kept secrets in television.

For years, wildlife documentaries have won countless awards for their stunning photography and for the proximity to some of the most dangerous and fascinating creatures in the world that many film-makers manage to achieve. Credits have been given to many, but it can now be revealed that the names listed as cameramen are merely pseudonyms. Most of these films were shot by a large mountain gorilla called Lionel.

I tracked him down to his dockland mansion on the Isle of Dogs and, at first, he denied everything. But after suitable blandishments had been offered, (one overripe banana and a female called Tatiana kidnapped from London Zoo), he agreed to give me an exclusive interview.

Q: Are you the only animal camera technician in existence?

A: Not any more, no. There are a few very promising antelope coming out of the Nyabingi Game Reserve Film School. I heard about a stick insect who set up his own company planning to specialise in insect shoots for David Attenborough. Sadly he was crushed by his camera on his first job and David refused to pay his expenses. I saw his widow the other day in Sainsburys. Stepped on her, in fact.

Q: Is the job well paid?

A: In animal terms, yes. I’ve got a few soft fruits stashed away, I don’t mind admitting it. But I had to fight for it I can tell you. In the early days on ‘Survival’ and ‘Wildlife on One’, I was paid peanuts which, let’s face it, is monkey fodder. A 450 pound gorilla just can’t live on that. But after a round-table discussion in which several things were tossed back and forth such as the producer’s gonads, we managed to come to an amicable agreement. Nowadays we’re talking mondo bananas. Cold-weather allowance for arctic shoots, dry-cleaning expenses for those productions that involve a certain amount of guano and, of course, axle-grease.

Q: Axle-grease?

A: It’s no picnic getting down some of those gopher holes you know.

Q: You have, of course, won many awards under various pseudonyms for your stunning photography. But much criticism was made of the extremely wobbly footage you shot of the lions mating for ‘Life on Earth’.

A: Yeah, well, there are always knockers. But what critics have to remember is, it was my mating season as well.

Now that his secret is out, Lionel has agreed to test the new Panasonic AJ-HPX3700 for a review in the next issue of ‘Wildlife Cameramamal’. Lionel’s initial reaction was lukewarm.

‘Full automatic shooting,  native 1920x1080 imager, including 10-bit, 4:2:2 full-raster recording is all very well’ he said, gnawing a bamboo shoot, ‘but can you crack coconuts with it?’



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Celebrities Pose for the Paparazzi in the Park

8/24/2013

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Running through Westminster last week, I wove my way as usual between the crowds of tourists posing with the wildlife in St James’s Park. In a thousand holiday snaps I am the blur behind the smiling face; a Google Street View phantom, jogging on for eternity past the lake with Horseguards Parade or Buckingham Palace framing my vague outline in everybody's holiday background.

It is in this capacity that I have been in a position to glimpse the hierarchy of animal celebrity and how they play the PR game, continuing the Park’s long history of decadence and depravity amongst the infamous elite.

The Earl of Rochester, who had the good sense to die of syphilis at 33 before he could inadvertently commit a non-venal act, wrote a poem called A Ramble in St. James's Park that is impressive in its Rabelaisian licentiousness. Must have disturbed the pelicans no end, or more accurately, their ends must inevitably have been disturbed along with everyone else’s.

The pelicans, of course, are the A list stars. The Russell Crowe of waterfowl stand for the minimum amount of time in front of the Clickerati before attacking a random photographer and retiring back to their island.

The heron is more obliging but haughty. She poses like Angelina Jolie, wiry, ramrod straight, impossibly beautiful, tolerating the attention for as long as she needs to before flapping slowly away, the weight of celebrity hanging heavy on her lean limbs. Her immobile face says she is here for as long as it takes to promote her fragrance and then she is out of there.

The squirrels of course, are all from Essex. Reality stars, posing provocatively in the most promiscuous photogenic poses wherever they are required. ‘Where do you want me?’ say their quivering little noses. ‘Over here? Shall I nibble this cobnut in the gutter or do you want me to run up your trousers and take a peanut from your fingers? No, really, it’s no trouble. We’re all going to be struggling for crumbs from your table come the winter.’

The ducks? Well, the ducks are just hangers-on. Like those perpetual crowd artist extras the pigeons, no one’s really interested in a desperate duck.

And it is a desperate duck, or something that sounds very like it, that the venereal old Rochester was talking about.

‘Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,

Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.’


It is one of those urban myths that on being told an MP had been arrested after being caught in the bushes with a Guardsman in St James Park, Churchill is said to have remarked ‘In this weather? Makes you proud to be British.’ On the whole, the real world of celebrity and the PR machines of the entertainment industry, pale in comparison with the quiet park that has been a microcosm of Britain’s elite misbehaviours since 1603. Makes you proud to be British. 



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Where to Stand in the Fourth Estate

8/22/2013

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The torrid debates around the detention of David Miranda, partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and the actions taken against journalists in the phone hacking scandal have exposed a potential set of double standards that has red-top tabloid champions seething at the perceived injustice and the UK’s Guardian newspaper claiming the higher ground. The tone is unmistakable as both sides take the mastiffs of their prejudices out for a little walk around the Fourth Estate.

In one corner, Brendan O’Neill and many others deride the Guardian’s railing at the use of Terrorism legislation against what it defines as legitimate journalistic endeavour, whilst staying silent on the long judicial limbo hovering over their compatriots in the hacking scandal.

 In the other, the broadsheets point to the moral chasm between investigative journalism that holds the Government to account and prurient muckraking amongst celebrities and the families of murder victims. In the digital din of perpetual content churn, it is not always Juvenal’s question ‘who shall guard the guardians?’ that is being answered.

Leaving aside the increasingly frequent instances when these two worlds collide and a broadsheet behaves like a tabloid and vice versa, the arguments on both sides have some legitimacy regardless of the context. Where you stand on Fleet Street should not determine how strongly you defend the principle of public interest over public prurience.

The use of legitimate investigative methods and being allowed to make a public interest case for the use of leaked whistleblower material that speaks truth to power should be a constant. The press should always be testing this principle and it is a tension that must exist if their role is to have any significance in the age of Yochai Benkler’s Networked Fourth Estate defined as ‘the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government.’ For some reason he doesn’t mention the upskirt shots of the paparazzi and the practice of ‘collects’ - those intimate photos of the murder victim, coaxed from grieving families usually by the unpaid interns now ubiquitous at both ends of Grub Street, but then he’s a busy man.

When politicians prohibited from conflating their personal financial interests with their public position are then found to be taking the shilling of those they award access to patronage, it is legitimate for that hypocrisy to be exposed and the argument can then be had about the methods used to discover this information. It’s just a shame it happens every news day. Repetition dulls the readership however proud curmudgeonly ancient Roman finger waggers such as Juvenal would be.

However if a soap star or local mayor has not suggested fidelity as the abiding tenet of their every waking breath, then the details of their fornication with the lower mammals or the surprising use of random items from the fruit bowl to satisfy their baser desires is interesting and may sell papers and groceries, but is none of our business. Entertaining though, isn’t it? But if the aim is to feed the entertainment industry, then that is not and never has been journalism. That is treating Juvenal to an  up-toga shot. That’ll teach him to step out of his chariot without his knees locked together.

Both stories may have been exposed by similar means, but it’s the principle not the methods that need defending. Everything else is PR.



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Meditation for Misanthropes

8/18/2013

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Listening, not for the first time, to celebrity ex-addict Russell Brand expound upon the merits of meditation and how world leaders should all practice a daily cleansing dose of Transcendental Meditation to improve the planet and all its ills, I am reminded to pass on the tenets of a more pragmatic philosophy increasingly pervading the ranks of the less karmically inclined. The ones who bought all this New Age stuff and tried traditional meditation only to find they yinged when they should have yanged.

The best way to practice the radical mindset of Inconsequential Meditation is to find an actor whose vocal style most resembles Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut or Sylvia Plath and get them to record the following text in a slow, dolorous voice to assist you with your daily meditation.  

“Now find your meditation posture. This can be cross-legged and upright in your local park, in the foetal position in the bed of a stranger you met only last night or slumped on a couch in the small hours. Take deep cleansing breaths. Concentrating on your breathing, calm your raging emotions and find your place in the Universe. Do not attempt to find your centre. You are not at the centre of anything. You are barely on the edge of a periphery. You are one segment of a Higgs Boson particle in one universe amongst an infinity of universes. In the great scale of all that exists, you don’t even qualify as a speck. You aspire to be a speck, an ambition that will never be realised.

You are not at one with the universe. You aren’t even a pimple on the arse of the universe. The universe has no interest in you. If the universe stepped on you on the way to infinity, your lifeless stain would not be remarked upon on because eternity is unaware of you. You. Don’t. Matter. And because you don’t matter, nothing matters. Your rage at the parking ticket, your frustrations at your work, the emptiness or turbulence of your relationships or your lack of them, your aches and pains, grief and loneliness, your impending death. All will pass into nothing within the briefest sliver of time on a river of eternity that will wash away your existence so that no trace can be seen because you were barely a trace in the first place. Now you know your place. Now you can find your purpose. Take a deep breath through your mouth and slowly release it through your nostrils over the following thought. You are here to unlearn everything you have been taught. You are here to fill your tiny segment of forever with as much sensation as you can cram into our lives. You are here to suspect widely held beliefs, shibboleths and Godheads. You are here to experience everything a fleshy tube of chemicals is capable of feeling. And you are to remember at every stage that if the Universe does not care about you, you can ignore it. You have your own Universe. You are at the centre of it. You decide whether it is a selfish or an altruistic place, where kindness reigns or tyranny prospers. You are in charge and you are mad with power.”

Repeat daily. The misanthropic meditator, like Brand, aims to become a better human being. But there are many routes to Nirvana and we who take the route of ‘No one Mindsfulness’ don’t even have Nirvana entered into our Sat Nav. We are on our way to nowhere and we can’t wait to get there. Have a nice day.


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Sports Boycotts Never Work Except When They Do

8/13/2013

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Following UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s rejection of Stephen Fry’s somewhat forlorn request for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in the southern Russian resort of Sochi due to the Putin government’s recent anti-homosexual laws coupled with a rise in homophobic attacks; several contributions really rankled in their implicit attitude to the exemplar of sports boycotts - South Africa.

Former UK Olympics Ambassador Sebastian Coe said he was against boycotts and maintained that they only damaged the athletes. Columnist David Fearnhead went further saying that ‘South Africa did not end apartheid because the Springboks weren't allowed to play international rugby’ in an aside that deals lightly with the most successful sports boycott ever mounted. People may forget that South Africa was barred from almost all international athletic competitions, including the Olympics, from 1964 to 1991 and campaigners like the poet Dennis Brutus paid a high price for their part in achieving this. Besides imprisonment on Robben Island, he was exiled and shot in the back. Tellingly, the first ambulance called to attend him when he was shot, was sent away as it was for whites only. Tread lightly on the sacrifices made in the name of sports boycotts. Dismissing them as ineffective is to deny a bloody and hard-won place in political history.

The truth, of course, is that boycotts on their own do not bring down oppressive regimes. Neither do the protests of the athletes themselves. But who can deny the effect on public opinion of the many examples where Olympians themselves demonstrated their commitment through their efforts? Jesse Owens confounding Hitler’s eugenics beliefs by winning four gold medals in the 1936 summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos highlighting civil rights anger by raising two black gloves at their awards ceremony in 1968 and the many athletes who not only stayed away, but were loud and vocal in their reasons for doing so.  

Perhaps in this case, as acknowledged by Fry, the answer is for athletes to make a stand against inequality in Sochi by protesting in similar ways, either by emphasising to the media and the Russian organisers that they are gay after winning their event and daring them to arrest them or by finding their own way of expressing solidarity through protest. After all, doesn’t every athlete want to compete on a level playing field? Isn’t that supposed to be part of the Olympic ideal?

In any event, Coe’s view that boycotts never work needs countering. It is not acceptable to say athletes are above politics any more than it was right for the rock group Queen to make the same claim when they ignored the boycott of Sun City during the apartheid era before eschewing their ‘we’re just simple rock stars not politicians’ stance to play at Nelson Mandela’s birthday many years later. All of a sudden it becomes very necessary to line up and show your political commitment to something when the barometer of public opinion has swung behind the cause already won by those who were not so mealy-mouthed. It takes a lot more courage to do so, when everyone is lining up to tell you your gesture would be futile and that your training and ambition would be crushed by allowing such trifling matters as discrimination and inequality to affect your decision on whether to stay away or to compete and then protest.

 “I don’t think one can place sport in such a high category as to say that it was instrumental in bringing about change, but I think what it did, it focused people’s attention on the fact that we couldn’t live almost a dual life in terms of which in everyday society we were denied basic rights, we were denied the opportunity to exercise our universal rights and then go and play sport as if it was a normal world. So from that point of view the political influence in sport played a tremendous role in bringing across to people that society is far broader than simply the question of where you stay and what you are allowed to do etc.
It also has to deal with interaction between human beings, and you can’t be equal on the weekend when you play sport but then for the rest of the week you are treated as being unequal.” Joe Ebrahim. Former President- South African Council on Sport


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Free Erics for All

8/11/2013

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Forgive the momentary diversion from a deep immersion in the topics of the hour into the shallow byways of commerce, but, well, you know. 
   For two days only 31st August 2013 -1st September 2013, the Kindle version of 'Eric is Awake' is free to download. This begins at Pacific Standard Time and after what Amazon says may be a few hours delay due to 'system latencies'. So I've extended it to two days to allow for the mysterious latencies. Remember you can download a Kindle app for IPad, mobile, laptop or PC and read it even without a Kindle device. Please take advantage and download, read and review it on Amazon. As Gore Vidal said,  'it is not enough to succeed, others must fail', to which we may add, 'it is not enough to publish, others must notice'. 12th August 2013 is Free Eric Day. 


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Can Standing on your Head be Monetised?

8/8/2013

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As a teenager, George Orwell encountered his first love Jacintha whilst standing on his head. When asked why he was engaged in such a practice he said engagingly, ‘you are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up’.

From the moment we engage with the modern world via internet, national insurance, tax code, mobile phone, hire purchase, social security and all the myriad varieties in which we cede our privacy to scores of databases, we are a commercial asset to someone somewhere. We can be monetised.

In Ancient Rome, the goddess Juno was also known as Juno Moneta, the protectress of funds and in this role, the manufacture of all Roman coinage took place in her temples. From her, we get the cursed word ‘monetise’. ‘How can we monetise that? I’ve monetised my youtube videos. I’ve managed to monetise my outside toilet during the Notting Hill Carnival by charging £1 to use it. No, Ma, I’m not a prostitute. I’ve just monetised my physical real estate in a bull market, namely, Pier 45 at West 10th Street’.

It seems only a matter of time before the community of hacktivists grow weary of the denial of service attacks, released subscriber lists and writing ‘Free Bradley Manning’ on the PBS website knowing such activities cause a modicum of short-term inconvenience, but always end up being repaired and reinstated by the corporations and organisations targeted, by teams of ex-hackers employed to tidy up after their ex-playmates have finished their latest campaign. In fact, in 2011 they seemed to have already understood the next stage of the game and were noticeably more collegiate, clubbing together in loose alliances to wage operations like Operation AntiSec which campaigned against the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency among many others.

Recently these politically motivated hacking communities are engaged in activity that runs the gamut from attacking Walmart Canada for firing an employee over a dog to campaigning on behalf of whistleblowers like Snowden. But the actual number of serious disruptions of corporate or Government databases by campaigning groups has slowed to a trickle leaving the cyber war mainly to nations and corporations raiding each other for commercial or political advantage.

However, there is some evidence to show that the armies of commercial and nation state hackers have already gone a stage further, planting false rumours, affecting share prices with bogus information and generally making a higgledy-piggledy mess of their opponents data by deliberately mixing up and falsifying the database SQL structure and index itself. If this continues and proves much harder and longer to fix than a hole in a website’s security or a database that has been compromised through mere exposure, then we are in for an almighty extra threat to every individual’s liberty in the future.

It is one thing to be targeted and penalised by an efficient surveillance network that has catalogued all your personal data correctly; but what more lasting damage can be done to credit records and official information that make you eligible for all manner of legitimate access to international, national and municipal services if the information is deliberately altered and falsified? The greatest threat as far as the corporations and governments are concerned is not to our privacy but to their capacity to monetise our data. Damage that and you are hitting them where it hurts.

In my book, ‘Eric is Awake’, a man who believes himself to be Orwell, although it is clearly impossible, becomes involved in a campaign to reduce Government intrusion and surveillance in the 21st century.

In effect he suggests that instead of attacking the government servers and disabling the databases, hacktivists should be sabotaging the actual information; replacing names and details, mixing them up, changing them around. A bad insurance risk becomes a triple A ‘person of high financial worth’. The subscriber to a Harrods store card becomes the owner of a Lidl Cash account. The fencing enthusiast becomes a baseball card collector. The bid on the hoover becomes a bid on a hovercraft. A Coutts bank account holder gets entered on to a credit blacklist. A true counter-intelligence Data War in which we lowly citizens are merely bystanders caught in the crossfire. Not an attractive prospect for personal liberties already under threat and compromised at every turn. The world turned upside down. A true counter-intelligence Data War. After all, you are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up. 



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Is Living Outside of Society a Crime?

8/7/2013

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When Orwell set off in 1946 to live in the remote northern end of the Isle of Jura in a  house with no electricity, he planted fruit trees, started a vegetable garden and shot rabbits to sustain himself and his small household as he struggled to complete the final draft of ‘1984’.  His aim was to absent himself from the demands of a ‘literary life’ where he remained constantly in demand to write articles and columns that he regarded as bread and butter work keeping him away from what he felt was his true calling. He loved the remote and inaccessible hermitage he created in the farmhouse at Barnhill, 30 miles away from the island’s only shop. But I wonder how easy he would find it to exclude himself today and how many legal hurdles he would have to overcome?

In a world where an increasing number of people feel the many forms of tax they pay seem to increase as the benefits and safety nets society is supposed to provide are eroded, more and more are seeking to live outside of society.

There is a common view that Governments around the world have, in their desire to control economies for their own short term electoral objectives, blindly and irrevocably started to dismantle their own legitimacy. The gap between rich and poor, between the haves and the have-nots has so widened that it is said by those who subscribe to an inherently anti-government stance that those who are supposed to represent the populace have fatally increased the number of the disenfranchised. In this, they believe, lay the seeds of their downfall.

The accepted orthodoxy of people who like to think of themselves as rugged individualists goes something like this. If you can no longer get free access to treatment when you are ill, if you can no longer afford a home in the first place, if you can no longer get a job or receive help to obtain one, if you can no longer protest without being arrested, if your children are sent to fight in wars you did not vote for, if your life savings are not safe in the bank, if you are not taken care of when you get old, if your taxes rise whilst your bins remain un-emptied and your schools become the graveyards of ambition, if your leaders enrich themselves and the corporations that helped them into power and not society at large, if your children kill each other on the streets because they have no aspirations worth speaking of, if the authorities no longer police with consent, but suppress and collate your every movement and communication, if you cannot vote against any of these things because no party represents your desire, well then, why are you here and to what are you contributing? Well, that’s a question that may become more materially evident to them when they attempt to do without it. Home made antibiotics and amateur surgery anyone?

Human beings formed tribes, then villages, then parishes, then counties, then cities, then governments to draw warmth from the flames of the campfire and to support each other; to protect their children and to make decisions collectively for the greater benefit of the people, for the enrichment of that nebulous thing ‘society’. But increasingly many believe that if  told that society can no longer afford any of these hard won basic rights to life, then people can rightly ask the question, ‘what is society for?’ They will increasingly reject and live outside of it. It is already happening. Some no longer see the point of contributing to a society that offers so little but requires so much of them. People are disengaging. But how easy is it and is it legal?

Firstly, it seems there are an interesting mix of political factions who choose to drop out of society. In America, a dominance by survivalist cults of gun-wielding anti-government black helicopter fearing paranoid conspiracy theorists seem closer to self-sufficient private militias than the British ‘Good Life’ style conservationists whose principal motivation seems to be to decrease their reliance on processed food and wasteful energy.  Even the milder types simply trying to scratch a living in the loneliest of deserts in California are harassed and evicted through the use of ‘Nuisance Abatement’ when their independence threatens a future land development or road building scheme. This isn’t to say swathes of the great British public aren’t paranoid or anti-government. They just aren’t as heavily armed and they drink a lot more nettle tea.

It’s also true that separating yourself off into a wilderness that is public land and becoming self-sufficient is considerably easier in the US than it is in the UK where the proportion of what is known as common land decreases yearly. This may be something to do with the sheer size of the US in comparison or it may be that Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is a classic of American literature outlining a model of hermit living albeit on land owned by his friend Emerson and with occasional trips to town  for a decent meal. As we will see, compromise lurks around every corner on the road to nowhere.

If the aim is to be simply ‘off the grid’ in terms of power, water, phone, internet or sewage and waste disposal, then the process can be an expensive one. Even if you buy enough land to grow enough food, the UK planning laws will bite you in the behind when it comes to living on it, as one couple in Devon who fell foul of them can attest. It seems society would rather you were living off benefit in a council house than attempting self-sufficiency on your own plot with what is deemed to be an ‘inadequate business plan’. If you are allowed to exist in your own way on your own land, woe betides you simply seeking to survive. They want you to turn a profit.

Being British, you won’t only have the local and central government officials to deal with. The average UK citizen loves nothing more than to prove you are in some way sponging off the system rather than being truly independent. Therefore you will have to be pure in your self-sufficiency. Even barter will be seen as an engagement fraught with compromise. On the other hand, you are unlikely to see their splenetic criticisms on the web as you will be, by now, coping with a backed up composting toilet and wondering if your £20,000 wind generator will ever garner enough watts to let you watch the cup final.

However if your aim is not only to be independent but also to be invisible and private, then you are stuck with an intractable problem. The tax system allows you to be exempt from tax, but it does not allow you to be exempt from the tax system. It is not enough to have no taxable income; you must be registered and assessed as such. To truly disappear from government systems and databases, you run the risk of committing an illegal offence at every turn.

Forums offering advice on the topic reveal some hair-raising motivations and solutions. One plaintive contributor to a discussion of off-grid living asking what advice anyone had for ‘when the ‘sh*t gets real and I wanna drop out of society completely’ received the following responses:

‘Become a monk.

‘Council House, Benefits and day time TV.

‘Win lottery, buy island, and employ peasants...

‘Learn how to sail and buy a boat at least 30ft - more if you don't want to go alone.’

The more practical advice included the view that whatever you choose to do will be a compromise and that all manner of contortions will be necessary to stay within or outside the reach of the law. They also maintained that it would seriously decrease your lifespan although the quality of that life may be richer than you will find amongst the wage slaves on the 8.10 to the City every weekday.

So, you can be legal and compromised or a renegade and short-lived. Either way, it seems to confirm a truism that to be one of society’s outsiders is no easy occupation and something in me suggests that this feels wrong in what  increasingly feels like a societal model that has lost its purpose.



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NSA & MI5 Hand in Glove. Are You Really Surprised?

8/2/2013

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Edward Snowden’s latest revelation that the US National Security Agency funds the UK’s Security Service is, of course, a shock and a surprise in the same way that the Pope being of a certain religious persuasion and ursine mammals depositing spoor in wooded areas is a disturbing new development that merits a serious re-evaluation of all that we have thought to be true and fair and right.

The special relationship between the US and the UK has, since the Second World War, been the same as that of a vassal state or town to the Roman Empire. Roman emperors knew certain regions subject to the Pax Romana had skills and products they needed but simply could not supply at the heart of the Empire. They therefore entered into arrangements whereby they supported chieftains and tribal elders who would ensure the free flow of the required commodity, be it glass, oil or slaves with particular skills. They were, of course, the dominant power in these relationships, but the Roman Peace consisted of a combination of military might, cultural and financial patronage and really, really straight roads. The Pax Americana consists of blue jeans, hamburgers, movies, HBO and SIGINT. The UK is rather like the ancient Roman town of Baelo Claudia in Southern Spain, which produced the finest garum or fermented fish sauce in the known world. It layered rotting fish in deep wells and allowed them to ferment and liquefy in the sun before exporting the pungent condiment to all corners of the Empire.

In return the town received from the Emperor Claudius the status of Municipium - a form of self-governance within the Empire. In other words, it made the little villagers feel as if they were independent and sovereign whilst clearly being financed and propped up by the City of Rome.

The UK has been for a long time the principal exponent of surveillance and SIGINT technology and methodology. Their special brand of sauce has been a tasty must have for the US since Bletchley Park first provided the basis for modern encryption, decryption and computing and, like downtown Baelo Claudia, it stinks to high heaven but no one is really surprised.

Knowing something is inevitably true, believing it to be so and then discovering a material fact that confirms your belief is received by the brain and processed into a stage reaction worthy of the double-take in a creaky murder mystery performed by a member of an amateur dramatic society in a shabby provincial church hall on a rainy Wednesday night. We are unconvinced by our own incredulity. We know this stuff goes on and we gasp wide-eyed indignation, protest, campaign and then move on, tacitly accepting it because we don’t believe it can be stopped.

Let us suppose a future new generation of politicians, energised by the protests of the early twenty-first century grows up to wage a radical political campaign against the surveillance state. In a new era of political thought resembling the Kennedy administration’s engagement with civil rights in the US and the Attlee government’s radical construction of the welfare state in the UK, they successfully legislate against the worst excesses of data capture and analysis of all citizens in the Empire and its vassal states. They throw open the doors of their intelligence agencies and emphasise the danger of burning liberty in the quest for security. What then? Will the technology go away? Will every country in the world regard itself as subject to the same respect for individual privacy at the price of increased security? Of course not. The spooks will consider it their duty, as now, to ignore the concerns of libertarian politicians paying lip service to liberty and will continue to ensure that they have absolute access to you and everything you do, say or think.

Orwell said ‘The same pattern always reasserts itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.’ Whilst this is true, there have been marked changes in our lives as a result of discounting this counsel of despair and fighting back. But who will be the Rosa Parks of the Data Wars? Snowden?

The one fatal flaw in the encroachment on civil liberties is that it relies on young minds in back rooms devising ever more intelligent means of surveillance and data analysis. The hackers find themselves recruited as security analysts rather than kicking their heels at home with an electronic tag on their leg and a banning order preventing them from even touching a keyboard. The technology is both the werewolf and the silver bullet.

There is an arms race going on and in the Data Wars, the corporations and intelligence agencies are the dominant armies on the plain. But there are undoubtedly rearguard actions and resistance maquisards, some not yet born, who may find a way for a citizen to be, as far as possible, guarded against unwarranted state and commercial intrusion. Many already exist, albeit with holes. But it is possible that drills of the data miners will be blunted by a clever bit of code combined with legislation and controls that will limit the price exacted for the Pax Americana. It will not be foolproof, but political equilibrium in the course of its progress from one end of liberty to another may, for a while at least, tilt in the direction of the truly private citizen. 



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    AuthorBot

    Dom Shaw is the author of 'Eric is Awake' and also a fleshy tube of chemicals working as a writer, scriptwriter and filmmaker in the UK. Was a boy, now a man. He lives.  

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