The Future We Saw
(It’s total bollards)
In a post-cyberpunk game of current politics conducted through other means, set in the far future of next year, the promises of Capitalism, progress, and technology die with barely a whimper in prolonged agony. Quite the bleakest dystopian vision you are likely to come across outside Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Paranoia’s Alpha Complex; if I were going to run a ‘punk game today, it would either be in this setting or very heavily influenced by it — WH40K, WFRP, Mörk Borg, SLA Industries, Blade Runner, Dystopia, Judge Dredd, however good they may be, however much fun they might be to play, watch or read, however grimly dark, they’re still heavily romanticised fantasy escapism; there is nothing so grimdark as the real world of self-driving vehicles that aren’t … a ‘shared consensual reality’ so awash with advertising, influencers and fake news there’s no room left for actual content … and fruitlessly competing for a one-day gig in an Amazon warehouse with a CV/resume no human, only ChatGPT, will ever see — unless it’s doing the work speculatively, hoping nobody else manages to do more by the end of the day (because the one who shifted the most boxes is only one who will get paid). “Remember when we told you there was no future? Well, this is it. Right, next up … more of the same” — Blank Reg, Max Headroom. The Future We Saw … wristslittingly believable Science Fiction.
I’mma repeat myself here, because it seems nobody ever clicks on the linkouts and at least half of what I’m trying to convey gets missed as a result.
So … if you’ve read some of this word for word before, you’ve only others to blame — I suggest you find out who they are and intimidate them into mending their ways at the very least.
The influence our environment … the everyday sights and sounds of our lives …. has upon our aesthetic sensibilities is really quite remarkable.
On the one hand, mine is strongly influenced by London’s urban decay
You see that thing above ^^^ … titled Heaven’s Gate … that’s a linkout — try clicking it. It leads to material that is relevant at this point but tangential, so, rather than clutter up the main discource with repetition, it’s there for you to peruse separately. If you are over twelve years old, you could try opening it in another browser tab, reading it and then closing the tab, returning you here, where you can pick up where you left off. Otherwise, well, you could try another Barney the Dinosaur Two plus two is four clip on … look, YouTube will be too much for you, so, give Tiktok a try instead — you don’t even need the attentionspan of a goldfish for that ¹ ).
Aaaaanyway … where was I?
Oh, yes … that’s right … London.
Or rather more specifically I was about to remark upon how my personal aesthetic is influenced by London’s urban decay, because …
… but, on the other, also by its Georgian and Edwardian architecture … whilst also by the almost Georgian (and early Victorian) London quality of much of Paris … that of Germany … of Belgium and Holland … of Spain … Portugal …
That sensitivity to urban decay that appeals means that where I like most in any of them are the previously genteel areas that have since ‘gone to seed’ (especially noticeable in Lisbon, for instance) or previously poor areas that have been (semi) gentrified (like Camden was in London, before it was boutiqued to the point that I no longer recognise it ⁴ ). It’s that hybrid of the industrial and the organic ⁵ … the organic inorganic … that calls to my soul (in a way the bucolic ‘splendour’ of the countryside never has or could ⁶).
And that crosses … synaesthesia like … into all manner of my appreciation.
I saw Björk in interview once and, when asked where she drew her inspiration from, she replied that it came from the sounds of her everyday life: birdsong, the babbling of the stream at the end of her garden and so forth.
I thought “Fuck off … the sounds of my life are the pop of the photocopier, the clack of the keyboard, the beep of the bar-code scanner, breaking glass, car alarms, police/ambulance/fire-engine sirens, the screams of muggers’ victims, the car horn, car crashes, tearing metal and falling masonry, not that bucolic, tree-hugging hippy crap — where in Hell, does she live!?!”
Years ago … maybe thirty or so … my then girlfriend and I were cycling through a nature preservation zone in Germany when I noticed the tonal quality of the massed crickets, which were incredibly numerous and fantastically loud.
I turned to her and said (translated) “Hark at those crickets … they sound just like the hum of overhead power-lines!”
I was sitting in a friend’s home in Paris one day, when I heard the industrial pail swinging off the crane on the building site opposite clang into something … and thought “That’s a great tone … really nice resonance on the reverb tail.”
Years before that … fifteen maybe … in London … I was in bed one night … well, okay, in the early hours of the morning as usual … and could just make out some music from a party happening somewhere … in one of the other houses in the street. And it was fantastic … some of the best music I’d ever heard. But it was one of the rare … basically unheard of … occasions in my life on which I just didn’t have the get up and go to get up and investigate — besides which, I could just knock on a few doors the next day and enquire about it.
Which is what I did.
I knocked on every door in that street.
I knocked on every door for two streets in every direction.
No-one had had a party the night before.
No-one.
Nonplussed I went back home and wondered what the hell had happened.
And finally … sitting there, listening to the ‘silence’ … it dawned on me: what had happened was that I had been listening to Industrial music for so long that, to me, everything was music. I’d been hearing the creaks of the house, the air in the radiators, the sounds of cars in the streets, the opening and shutting of doors in the distance, far-away aircraft passing overhead and various other, half-to-barely heard sounds in the night and my brain had turned them into music — the best music I had ever heard in my life! And I have to say that I am so grateful for it. For, to this day, my preference for the industrial and electronic mean that … where other people live in a world of occasional music against a background of noise and disturbance … I live in a world of constant music — it’s there in the background all the time, from the amazing reverberation of the industrial-sized metal pail banging into something on a building site … to the screams of someone getting knifed in the street.
Our habitual environment informs our senses across the board: where the countrymice can’t sleep with all the noise of the city around them, the eerie silence of the countryside keeps me awake and the dawn chorus kicking in without warning is like an alarm going off at an ungodly hour of the morning … I hate them both.
I even find the harshness of city life soothing ⁷
So, I’m aware that my sense of beauty is probably markedly different from that of others.
But …
There’s also an element of the hollow laugh that comes with our cynically dire prognostication being proven, as ever, prescient: we don’t find the thing in the least bit funny, but we laugh in whatever it is that schadenfreude is when it happens to us instead of someone else, if you see what I mean — we prophesied that our future would be bleak and, boy, were we ever right to do so.
And that revamp (if such it can be termed) of Old Street, well … look, if you know the UK, you’ll know why I’m so nihilistically amused by how funny it isn’t. It’s a typically British poundshop version of New York; ‘Silicon Roundabout’, says it all — there’s a reason Banksy did Dismaland and named it so (there’s a real Brazil quality to the UK ⁸ ). But it’s aesthetically comforting; it just wouldn’t be London, if it weren’t so dreadful — if they’d actually built the thing promised in the glossy brochures, it would’ve been alien … an uncanny valley experience that would attract tourists but make Londoners feel uneasy and avoid the place.
There are worse places, of course …
… but they’re in Zone 3, so, what can you expect?
So, weirdly, I kindasorta … well, I don’t like it (it’s horrible), but it looks and feels right — it looks and feels like home.
London … it may not be perfect, but at least it isn’t where you live ⁹.
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¹ Yes, I am aware that goldfish have an attentionspan that is longer than that of most people these days — please … don’t try to educate me … I was making a point ².
² You see those underlined words above ^^^ … ‘don’t try to educate me’ … they’re a linkout, they are — try opening it ³.
³ Siii…iii…iiigh … I’ll come around and scroll for you as well, shall I?
⁴ And I lived there before it became the sink of Bohemian depravity it was in the ‘90s/’00s and was so much the centre of luvviness for people who had far too much money from being ‘something in the media’ (long before the Nathan Barley types discovered Hackney, let alone Shoreditch) that it became a byword for discussions along the lines of
Pseud A: “NW1 isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind.”
Pseud B: “Actually, dahlink, it’s more of an état d’esprit.”
⁵ Sonically best exemplified by The Prodigy’s album Music For The Jilted Generation, in which there is that analogue warmth characteristic of what went before in the genre but given a distinct digital crunch — it’s a unique sound that hasn’t been replicated by anyone since … not even Liam Howlett himself.
If you haven’t already got it (not as mp3!), you really do owe it to yourself to remedy that and buy it (not as mp3!) — YouTube, Spotify or wherever just can’t do it justice.
⁶ The city is appealingly grubby : the great outdoors offputtingly muddy.
And it’s so quiet that every little sound is like an alarm clock going off — you’ve just drifted off to sleep again and there’s another owl hoot … or fox bark … or whatever.
And as for the dawn chorus … I’d wring it’s neck, if I could.
⁷ If I have a kink, it isn’t sexual … it’s aesthetic — there’s something visceral about a glass in the face that appeals in a way da boyz in da ‘hood never could.
⁸ And, even though it isn’t London, I love Croydon’s architectural vernacular — it needs a preservation order slapping on it! It’s just so utterly random, with practically no two adjacent buildings having anything in common that it’s the ultimate example of anti ‘vernacular progression’/’vernacular development’ — you won’t find anything else like it anywhere, I don’t think. So, the local planning ordinances should be formulated such that permission is only granted for new buildings that look like nothing else near them.
⁹ Yes, that is another linkout … well done, you! You’re really getting the hang of the whole “if it’s underlined, it’s a link you can click on — try it” thing, aren’t you? Who knows? Maybe by the end of this post you won’t need prompting anymore ¹⁰.
¹⁰ Hahahahaha … yeah, right, the likes of you learning something — I kill myself sometimes 🤣😭💀
