Dawn of the Dumb (24 page)

Anyway, if we must debate things online, we might as well debate that. It’s not like we’ll ever resolve any of that other bullshit, is it?

Click. Mine’s bigger than yours. Click. No it isn’t. Click. Yes it is. Click. Refresh, repost, repeat to fade.

On wishing one was a punk rocker (with flowers in one’s hair)

[9 June 2006]

I
’ve not heard that Sandi Thorn single all the way through yet, but I’ve seen the TV ad about six billion times, and the short, poxy burst on that is more than enough to convince me that if her sudden rise to stardom
wasn’t the
end result of a shrewd marketing campaign, the implications are terrifying. Because to believe the official story—that thousands of people voluntarily subjected themselves to this shit online, then recommended it to their friends—is to lose your faith in mankind completely.

There’s a simple way to setde this once and for all, and that’s for the huge crowd of people who apparently watched Thorn’s inaugural bedsit webcasts to step forward and make themselves known. Come on. Hands up. I want to see your faces. And then I want you smacked to death with brooms. You people are the enemies of fun. Your bland emissions pollute the atmosphere, threaten the environment. For the sake of humanity, you must be stopped.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Sandi Thom genuinely touches some people. Whoever they are, I can’t relate to them. Woody Alien once marvelled with horror at ‘the level of a mind that watches wrestling’, and I’m the same with Sandi Thom fans. All I hear is that telltale, indefinable something that immediately marks it out as something that’s bypassed the soul completely: consumable noise for people who don’t like music but know listening to it is ‘the done thing’—like mutant imposters mimicking the behaviour of humans. I can’t relate. It doesn’t go. I’m being alienated by the replicants.

There’s a word for this sort of thing. It’s not ‘art’, it’s ‘content’. And it’s everywhere, measured out by unseen hands, mechanically dangled over the replicants’ flapping gobholes: flavourless worms for android hatchlings.

Sometimes I can
almost
see where content is coming from. Take Angels’ by Robbie Williams. It’s a massively popular piece of content, beloved by millions. If I strain really hard, I can just about make out some genuine emotion. Just a speck or two—but enough to make its huge success at least vaguely explicable. Compared with anything that has any semblance of balls whatsoever, ‘Angels’ is a bowl of cold mud—but next to most content, it’s a towering emotional epic. It almost makes you feel something. No wonder it’s become the official theme tune for thick people’s funerals.

Anyway, back to Sandi Thorn. As luck would have it, while typing this article, I’ve just heard ‘I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with Bollocks in My Mouth’) on the radio, and the real brain twister is the lyric, in which she yearns for a time ‘when accountants didn’t have control and the media couldn’t buy your soul’. It’s a bone-headed plea for authenticity, sung in the most Tupperware tones imaginable: a fake paean to a pre-fake era. It’s giving me vertigo.

Wait. It gets worse. I’ve just looked it up on Napster—oh Christ. I didn’t realise how far this had gone. The B-side is a cover of ‘No More Heroes’ by the Stranglers. ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ she warbles, knowing full well she’s replaced them. She’s the musical Antichrist.

This is too creepy to be mere coincidence. Someone’s messing with us. The replicant kings are trying to mangle our minds. Plug your ears. Block the signal. Final phase. They’re taking over.

Plucky little England

[16 June 2006]

T
hanks to the magic of newsprint lead times, I’m writing this yesterday, before Great Britain’s soccer match against Trinidad and Tobago in the World Trophy competition, so I’d like to take this opportunity to retrospectively wish them all the best. Good luck Britain! Here’s hoping for straight sets!

Ha ha. I’m hilarious. Enough of the lame sarcasm. Yes, I’m a member of the apparent minority that dislikes football most of the time and grows to actively despise it during the World Cup. But this year, I’ve decided not to moan about it.

It’s quite simple. I’ve finally realised that loudly and repeatedly complaining that the World Cup is a whopping great pain in the arse ultimately achieves nothing. Us haters can’t win. We’re either accused of adopting a contrary position for the sake of it, or told to just ignore it (which we can’t, because it’s bloody everywhere). Sometimes fans yawn and say they’re bored by us killjoys moaning about it, even though they can’t possibly be as bored as we are, bored with every flag and cheer and news report and rebranded chocolate bar: the kind of boredom that gnaws at your bones till you don’t want to live any more. They just don’t understand.

And sometimes people look genuinely upset, and implore you to stop having a go at the World Cup on humanitarian grounds. ‘Leave it alone, it’s just a bit of fun…it’s done nothing to you,’ they whine through their disgusting football-loving faces, as though the World Cup were a defenceless nine-year-old girl you’re attacking with a hammer, instead of an overhyped money-spinning festival of tedium in which the world’s thickest millionaires kick a rubbish ball round a poxy field to the wonderment of an audience of foghorning cretins. In my pathetic opinion.

Anyway, like I say, I’ve decided this time round I won’t gripe about it in the slightest. If it gives pleasure to millions, who are we to quibble? The fans are right: we’re killjoys. Besides, I’ve just read about an exciting development in World Cup technology that just might entice me to start taking an interest. I’ve just read about the Robot World Cup.

RoboCup is now in its tenth year. It’s a tournament (held in Germany) in which boffins from around the world organise football matches between teams of specially designed robots. Each year, as both the mechanical designs and the artificial intelligence powering them improve, the players grow more lifelike and proficient. It even has two robotic commentators, called Sango and Ami, who narrate the proceedings in synthesised voices and pump their arms in the air when somebody scores. By 2010 the players should be turning up with an entourage of absurdly spindly robotic wives in tow. By 2014, the first act of robotic football hooliganism. And so on.

But the really exciting bit is this: the organisers reckon by the year 2050, the robots will be good enough to compete in—and win—the ‘real’ World Cup. Now that I want to see: plucky little England taking on the might of an emotionless army of steel. The tabloid coverage would be priceless.

I’d support the robots, obviously. Especially if they’re allowed to eviscerate their human opponents using extendable buzz-saw arms. Because they’re robots—that’s what they do. Do us proud, robolads! Come on you rivets!

On having a nice day

[23 June 2006]

G
reetings from America, where everyone’s so bloody friendly and laid-back and nice it makes you want to puke blood in their faces. Earlier today I found myself sharing an elevator with one of the bellboys, and, to make conversation, I asked him whether they had any celebrities staying in the hotel.

‘Every guest is a celebrity to us,’ he replied, without pausing. And then he smiled.

A few minutes later I’m standing in a corridor, when an engineer walks by.

‘Hello there,’ says the engineer. ‘My name’s Frank.’ He taps his nametag. It is indeed. He smiles. ‘You need anything fixing, any trouble with the TV in your room, computer problems, anything—just call the front desk, ask for me.’

‘Um, OK,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Frank.’

‘You’re welcome’, says Frank.

‘Have a great day now.’ Then he taps his cap and ambles away, whistling.

I almost have to pinch myself. I’ve just experienced precisely the sort of benevolent human encounter that only occurs in preschool children’s programmes, except it was real.

In the afternoon I visit a high-street clothing store. Nothing posh; part of a chain. I examine a pullover, but I’m not sure if it’s my size. XXL appears to be the only one available. I turn to look for an assistant, and discover one’s already beside me, standing at precisely the right distance—close enough to be of use, not so near as to seem invasive.

‘I think we still have those in other sizes,’ he says. ‘Want me to check?’

A few minutes later, I’m buying the pullover. While he’s folding it perfectly, the assistant (whose name is Milo) asks if there are any cool bands in England he should know about. He’d been holding out hope of seeing the Libertines, but they split up, which sucked. I rack my brains, but can’t think of any cool new bands. Not one. Lamely, I offer the Arctic Monkeys. It turns out Milo’s heard them, and thinks they’re pretty good, but something about his manner implies he’s a touch underwhelmed.

In an excruciating bid to curry favour with my new friend, I say I hear there’s this new girl called Lily Alien who’s been getting a lot of coverage. Milo writes her name down on a piece of paper and tells me I’m awesome. I walk out of the shop feeling young and fashionable. But I’ve never heard Lily Alien. What I just did was almost unbearably pathetic; somehow Milo made it seem OK.

Everywhere I turn, members of the service industry are smiling at me, holding doors open, straining to help. I know most of the time they’re angling for tips, but I don’t care. Sometimes they’re just being nice. In London, Frank the engineer would’ve told me to piss off. The clothes shop guy wouldn’t have said anything. I’d be nothing. I’d be less than dirt. Here I’m treated like Sir Lordship of Kings.

Now it’s getting late. I’m in my room, typing this. There’s a problem with the TV But I don’t call reception and ask them to send Frank up. We’ve already built a rapport in the corridor. Now he’s my buddy, I’d feel uncomfortable expecting him to do chores for me. So I don’t call him. He doesn’t fix the TV. He doesn’t get the tip. Spin on
that
, Frank.

Too old for MySpace

[30 June 2006]

I
t had to happen, and it has. Age has crept up on me. I’m becoming resistant to technological change.

It used to be so different. I’ve always been a geek, and proud of it. In my twenties, I lived in a chaotic mangle of keyboards and wires. I was the person people would phone up when they had a problem with their computer. I wrote for video-games magazines, making up jokes about polygon counts and eel-shading.

Then the internet roared up. I ran a website called TV Go Home, which was essentially a fortnightly pisstake of the
Radio Times
with lots of unnecessary swearing in it—just the sort of thing that’s been a staple of comedy spin-off books since year dot, except because it was on the internet it was somehow seen as the shiny sharpened bleeding edge of new. My career prospects suddenly changed. Traditional media came calling—TV, newpapers. They wanted me. As far as ‘they’ were concerned I was someone who ‘got’ the ‘modern’ world and all that went with it. For about nine seconds, I felt vaguely cool.

Fast forward to now. I’m looking at MySpace and I’m a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew’s digital watch.

Because I don’t ‘get’ it. I mean, I know what MySpace is and what it’s supposed to do and how influential it is. It’s just that whenever I’ve visited a MySpace page I’ve thought ‘Is that it?’ and wandered around the perimeter looking confused, like a blind man patting the walls for an exit he can’t find.

So users create a page and upload their music and photos and videoclips; they post blog entries and links to other stuff and leave witty little messages for one another. And it all meshes together to form a thriving social network. Okey dokey. On the surface it all makes sense.

Yet it’s not for me. I mean, I could go and create a page myself, but somehow I’d rather scrape my retina off with a car key. At thirty-five, I’m too ancient for MySpace—I’d look like a school-gate paedo—but that’s not really the issue. No. It’s simply bloody-minded ‘olditude’ on my part—the same sort of fusty grumbliness that made greying musos boycott CDs in favour of vinyl in the 8os because
they just didn’t want to know
about this new-fangled whatchamathing.

Last week, in the US, I saw an advert for a handheld gizmo using the slogan ‘It’s not a cellphone: it’s MySpace on the go’. It’s a terrifying first—a new gadget I know I’ll never want to buy. I’ve never felt so lost.

Or perhaps it’s MySpace’s ‘social’ element that disturbs me. I’m a misanthrope. Everyone on MySpace seems young and happy and excited and flip and approachable, and this upsets me. Still, at least the teenage MySpacers are getting on with the business of being young and alive, unlike the fustier elements of the ‘blogosphere’, who just waste the world’s time banging on and on about how important the ‘blogosphere’ is and how it spells the end of every old notion ever, when the truth is that, as with absolutely every form of media ever, 99 per cent of the ‘blogosphere’ is rubbish created by idiots.

Especially the word ‘blogosphere’. A word I refuse to write without sneery ironic quote marks either side of it. Because I hate it and it’s crap and
i just don’t want to know
.

Rise of the invisibles

[14 July 2006]

A
ccording to clever scientists with spectacles and calculators and pipettes and blackboards and brains the size of beanbags, only 4 per cent of the total energy density in the universe can be accounted for. The rest consists of’dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’, which basically means they don’t have a clue what it is. But you’ve got to hand it to the scientists—‘dark matter’ is such a cool term, it distracts you from accusing them of ignorance…although if I was in charge, I’d have called it ‘magic space blancmange’, because that’s even better.

Anyway, dark matter doesn’t just exist in space. There are millions of people who essentially consist of dark matter; unknowable swaths of the population I have never encountered and will never understand.