Let's pretend it's 2014

Our aerial was never very good and we kind of stopped watching TV and then cos we never watched it eventually we got rid of it and now I don't know what to be afraid of any more sorry. It's a problem sometimes. Like when I had to go to the security office at work one time and they'd hung a big Australian flag above the front desk.

"New flag?" I said.

"Mm," the guy said, looking stern and harried. "You know, because of everything that's been happening." He fussed around with some papers.

"Mm," I said, and looked out the window. I had no idea what the fuck. As far as I could see the sun was still shining and gravity was still holding everything more or less where it belonged. I was still four billion years old: fuck yeah. Capitalism was still eating everything and shitting out commodities but it hadn't eaten everything yet so there was still time to stop it doing that: fuck yeah that too. Air moved around and I could breathe in and out: fuck yeah that as well: what was all the fuss about now then.

That was a while back; now let's pretend it's now. C'mon it'll be fun! Let's pretend it's 2014. Let's pretend you're alive in 2014, and all this is happening in real time, so you can feel the seconds pass. Like you can actually feel them happen to you.

Let's pretend you're alive in this glowing world, feeling the seconds. Let's pretend you also feel separate from the glowing world and from me and from all the rest of life and from the past and the future.

Pretend there's something called space that makes that separateness possible, then pretend there's something called time that stops everything happening at once. Pretend both those things can only have names because of something called language. Then pretend language completely messes them both up, so that sense of separateness just falls apart when you peer into it.

I mean when and where are the words I'm typing and you're reading? C'mon people. I am typing them here and now and you are reading them here and now. So you and I and here and now are all fused together in these words, in these twin acts of the glowing world writing them and the glowing world reading them. The glowing world's all through you. What even are you but the glowing world? It's gorgeous. X

Li

14 loosely-connected thoughts on how that KONY2012 strawman is full of shit

1. So a few times this last week I noticed one person or another casting aspersions on online campaigning with some smug variation or another of a line like 'Hey, online campaigning slash clicktivism is cool. We got Kony, right? KONY2012!'.

2. Maybe it's been going on longer than that but a) I am not that perceptive and b) I keep getting distracted by the majesty of the fucking sky. Seriously, that thing is amazing. I just stare at it like a fool.

3. If you don't know what KONY2012 was, it was an online campaign based on lies. The lies got found out and so it failed. What I am calling the KONY2012 strawman is the notion that because that campaign failed, online campaigns are necessarily a waste of time.

4. No-one actually puts it as bluntly as that, because if they did you might realise they are full of shit, but I will and you should and they are. Because here's the thing: the magic ingredient that causes a campaign based on lies to fail when the lies are found out is that it is based on lies and those lies are found out. It being online or offline makes not the tiniest fucking whit of difference to that.

5. I have noticed that some of the people making that argument - such as it is, since it's not spelled out - are people skeptical of the ability of anyone to do anything useful about anything. Some of those people, like Helen Razer, make a living by eloquently expressing that skepticism in print. Others are seduced by the combination of said eloquence and their own paranoia into repeating the argument. It's still a bad argument.

6. By paranoia I mean - and I'll go into detail about this another time - if you're alive now in a rich country you simultaneously suspect a) you're not doing all you could to help keep alive the thing-of-all-things that gave and gives you life, and b) that maybe there's nothing you can do OMIGODWE'REALLDOOMED.

7. re a), you're probably right. My humble suggestion is that repeating bullshit is not the way to deal with that. My humble suggestion is that instead you walk outside and gaze up into the infinite sky and ask the thing-of-all-things if it could use a fucking hand not bleeding to death and if so what it suggests and then see what it says and then go and do it. That will bring you as much peace as you can reasonably expect from this life.

8. re b) this is an old argument. It's half right. Our salvation lies in the other half. The half that's right is that there are forces larger than us and we don't have perfect freedom - all our choices are constrained by history &c &c - and many of those forces are dire.

9. The other half is fuck you, don't try and wriggle your rich-country way out of doing what you can with what freedom you have. It's 2014. You have so much power. DON'T FUCKING WASTE IT.

10. The thing-of-all-things is saying this through me. I asked it to speak through me and now I just say whatever shit comes out of my mouth. It's also saying it loves you very much: I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. BUT SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP AND QUIT WASTING TIME.

11. I have been blessed this last 12 months to get to hang out with campaigners who don't care whether you're skeptical and who are getting on with doing what they can to save what ecological and social furniture they can as the flood of late capitalism sweeps lo! across this earth. All of these people use online campaigns as part of what they do.

12. Since those people are overworked and operating on the scent of a coaly rag, partly because you have not yet had that conversation with the thing-of-all-things have you and so they are doing it without you, trust me when I say they would not bother a second with online campaigning if it wasn't useful. Seriously. Think it through for more than a few seconds: why would they waste those precious minutes otherwise?

13. Sure there's all kinds of useful questions to ask about efficacy, especially around turning online actions into offline ones. But when it comes to thinking about those questions I trust the people who are actually using online tools to try and do something useful more than I trust the people who make a living out of putting hopelessness into fancy words.

14. Whatever your other views on online life, it's clearly a big chunk of how we are social, now, or you wouldn't be reading this. It's not a magic space somewhere else. So the fancy hopelessness people should quit trying to pretend we should cordon it off from how we work to keep the thing-of-all-things from bleeding to death. Because a) if we did that they'd just criticise us for that, because their schtick is critique, not efficacy; and b) their KONY2012 strawman is full of shit. X

Fuck yeah language

I did this thing today where I gave away the chance to have an interesting day. I swapped it for money. This was 2014, it was a thing back then. We called it 'work'. I had three jobs of work. Today I was a four billion year old technician in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a giant cavern on the side of an ancient river. The wind blows past it and it sings, it can't help it. It's like a giant termite mound just there, all shot through with tunnels and secrets.

I was walking around at work, four billion years old and then I got bored and decided to be a system of rivers and oceans, walking around the convention centre. As luck would have it I had an ocean inside me. Some time before LIFE had done this thing where it wrapped bits of ocean in membranes and sent them off onto land to see what was what. I was one of those. My veins were rivers, rushing around. My bones marine fossils or somesuch.

This was back in 2014 and we had this thing called language

o man
It was so fine
you could do almost anything with it
ah it's hard to explain and maybe you had to be there but man
it was really something

FUCK Y
            E
                 A
                         H L A N G U A G E
it was so good

I was drunk on it, which had its dangers. One time I got too drunk and I vomited a whole bunch of it up, letters and syllables blergh! all over the floor like
aft me i a the whe is is is an t y u i o p

Outside there was some giant explosion going on. I could see it through the window. It hung in the sky and made things warm. You could see by the light of it. It felt dangerous and daring, navigating by the light of an explosion. I liked it. X