We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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To be honest I have never understood what the fascination people have with so-call ‘reality TV’ programmes like Big Brother. I have forced myself to watch a couple times and ended up despairing for the future of western civilization. Suddenly my taste for explosion filled action movies and lycra clad starlets with guns does not seem so low-brow after all.
Oooo! Very exciting!
No doubt some of our faithful commenters will put me right on this area of complete disconnection between me and an entire baffling area of popular culture.
But maybe this Disneyfication of the entirely unfunny term ‘Big Brother’ that George Orwell coined will soon be coming to an end.
Then maybe we can start getting more people frowning with concern rather than smiling vacuously at the sound of the words ‘Big Brother’. Why bother watching the TV to see a bunch of self-absorbed cretins in a room back-stabbing each other when you can be in your very own rolling endless episode of ‘Big Brother’ by just walking down almost any CCTV filled high street in Britain?
Here is some real reality TV, staring… you.
 
From the Radio Times (paper only) of 14-20 June 2003, on the subject of the BBC4 TV programme “High Rise Dreams”, shown on Thursday June 19th:
Time Shift looks back at how a group of idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, inspired by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier and new materials, only to be thwarted by financial restraints, poor craftsmanship and Margaret Thatcher’s private ownership creed.
In the Radio Times of 21-28 June 2003, on the subject of the repeat showing on BBC4 TV of the same programme on Sunday June 22nd:
In the first of three programmes on architecture, Time Shift looks at how idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, only then to be thwarted.
Well that removes the obvious political bias, but I’m afraid that if the idea was to make this puff less wrong-headed, it scarcely begins to deal with the deeper problems of it.
The implication, still being assiduously pushed on the quiet by the more blinkered sort of dinosaur partisan for the Modern Movement in architecture, is that the failures of the Modern Movement were all externally imposed, by penny pinching bureaucrats and by horrid, politically motivated politicians like the hated Margaret Thatcher, and that if only more money had been made available and they’d been allowed to get on with what they were doing unimpeded by their mindless enemies, all would have been well.
A logical (if not moral) equivalent would be if the Radio Times were to talk about how a group of idealistic Nazis tried to improve the world, inspired by the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but about how they were thwarted (a) because not enough resources were devoted to doing Nazism, and (b) because Nazism’s opponents decided, for who-knows-what wrongheaded and arbitrary reasons, to barge in there and put a stop to it. With more money and less silly opposition from ideologically motivated enemies, all could – and would – have been well. (I dare say there are still a few old Nazis around who think this.)
The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating.
The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I’ll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens.
The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an “experimentally designed” block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited.
The idea of a “vertical street”, also made much of by certain Britain’s Modern Movement architects, is also rubbish. Streets have to be at least a bit horizontal or they don’t work. Think square wheel.
I’ve chosen those two notions in particular because they were emphasised in the programme itself, the general tone of which was decidedly different from the puffs in the Radio Times.
I think I’ve found the culprit.
A small piece of art history from Jim of Jim’s Journal, commenting on this:
About twenty years ago – Binghamton University in upstate New York – a paved plaza between the main library building and the computer center building – an installation of assorted works of “modern art” sculpture is scattered about this plaza as part of some arts festival. There is an empty cement base near the entrance to the computer center, apparently the sculpture that is supposed to be there has not yet arrived. There is a construction project at another part of the campus, at least half a mile away.
During the night some unknown group of pranksters hijacked a huge section of concrete tube – perhaps six feet in diameter and eight feet in length – and somehow transported it to that empty base. Hundreds of people passed it every hour as students went from class to class. Most ignored it, just as they ignored the other sculptures, but many paused to glance at it, even to stop and study it, discuss it. Everyone assumed it was another example of modern art. (I must confess that I fell for the trick; to me it didn’t look any stranger than any of the other “works of art” on display.)
Several days passed before the organizers of the art exhibit realized what had happened. The temporary work of art was returned to its intended use at the construction site and campus security was ordered to investigate. The arts community was in an uproar. The perpetrator of this crime against society must be tracked down and punished!
I don’t know if campus security took this seriously or not. (I think that they probably just enjoyed a good laugh over the matter.) The culprits were never caught.
Jim
Anticipation is growing… Angel of Darkness, the latest instalment of Tomb Raider is about to hit the streets, Deus Ex: Invisible War is coming soon, Doom III is snarling its way towards us and the most anticipated of them all, Half Life 2 will soon be on the shelves.
After the disappointment of the by-the-numbers Unreal 2, the bug-fest of the otherwise promising Devastation, the even buggier CFS 3 and that mixture of complete genius and forehead-to-keyboard annoyance that is Splinter Cell, I think on balance it will end up a fulfilling year for hardcore gamers.
One of the things the (relative) failure of Unreal 2 suggests to me is that for single player games, great graphics and effects are just not enough anymore… those are more or less expected now. For a game to really rock a gamer’s world these days, there needs to be betters quality plots and an engaging story (which is what made Half Life and Deus Ex such durable successes and in so doing, raised the bar).
The BBC has a great, big monkey on it’s back and that monkey is America. The nabobs who run that state broadcast organisation just don’t understand how a country that (in their eyes) does everything wrong can end up so supremely dominant in terms of power, wealth and influence, while a country that does everything right (such as France) seethes and whines impotently about the unfairness of it all.
You can see the tension in their news reportage, torn as it is between a horrified revlusion of America and, at the same time, an unquenchable fascination. That was very much on display tonight in a 90-minute TV special run on BBC2 and called ‘What the World Thinks of America’.
Despite all the negative polling data that was apparently gathered from all around the world and a studio in London that consisted of people like firebrand British leftie Claire Short and former French Culture Minister Jack Lang, it was not the belligerent anti-American hate-fest that I thought it was going to be. What amused me most was general agreement that the USA was rich because of its economic model and, at the same time, a complete rejection of the idea of copying it.
In fact, it was rather dull, equivocal and not quite sure of itself. The underlying theme was largely one of self-pity and petty jealousy culminating in a morose admission that America was the unchallengable world superpower and there isn’t much the likes of France can do about it except whine and bitch. They may as well have called it ‘Inferiority Complex – The Movie’.
Over on the BBC website (and doubtless in anticipation of forthcoming EU regulations) they have provided a forum for Americans to answer back, hosted jointly by the respective Chairmen of Democrats and Republicans Abroad.
Perhaps some Americans might waggishly suggest an US TV special called ‘What Americans Think of the EU’. Now that I would pay to see.
… and that includes making music, creating pictures, writing verse, shooting films and producing computer games that annoy the crap out of other people.
An attempt by the usual ‘guardians of morality’ to regulate the nature of computer games in a way that would never be tolerated for the written word has been defeated in a US court.
“If the First Amendment is versatile enough to “shield the paintings of Jackson Pollock, music of Arthur Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll”, we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection. The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence.”
Score one for the good guys!  Now let me fire up my copy of Grand Theft Auto… I feel like running over a few hapless pedestrians.
The full ruling can be found here [pdf file].
Are you sick of popular entertainment with every sort of bad person being bad in it except the actual bad people we all know we are actually up against?
Go see a movie. The terrorists trying to blow up the world will be from the Balkans, won’t they? Or they’ll be Germans. Or Russians. In Hollywood movies the villains (and many of us over here take a kind of quiet pride in this) are often British.
What they won’t tend to be is Islamofascist. Islamofascist bad guys are just too close to the truth. If Jeremy Irons wants to make a living playing Brit villains, or German villains, fine. Nobody will confuse that with reality, so no skin off any noses. But Islamic villains? Well, that might cause actual offence, mightn’t it. That might reinforce conventional stereotypes. The sort of conventional stereotypes that are quite widespread. The sort of conventional stereotypes that are quite widespread, because they are rooted in reality. Because, that is to say, they are true. So, no true stereotypes please, they’re trouble. Get Jeremy Irons to do another implausible European, and confine the plausibility to such things as detonators and passports and hidden cameras and AK47s.
However, this does rather create a realism problem. Take this TV series they’re showing now, on the BBC, called Spooks. Episode one of the new series, shown last night, had a villain from – yes you’ve guessed it – the Balkans. A Serbian to be exact, steeling guns from the British army and then shooting up or blowing up the “Cobra” committee or whatever it is, which consists of the Prime Minister and Head of the Army and other such Head Government Persons. But we have a real terrorism problem in our midst and we all know it. Spare us this.
Episode one was on BBC 1 from 9pm until 10pm, and then episode two was at 10.30pm on BBC 3 (a digital channel which I now have), and at the end of episode one they showed foretaste excerpts of episode two which made it seem quite enticing and interesting. For what is this? Episode two starts up, and a fat bloke in a beard and with a cloth around his head, is spouting stuff about how this country will one day soon be entirely Islamic and that it is the great achievement of “a boy like you” that you have kept yourselves pure, so try this on. And he hands this boy a suicide jacket. → Continue reading: The British Islamofascist menace – more than a ripping yarn from the BBC
[SCENE 26. Int. LUCY’s bedroom. Night.]
Open on shot of bedroom wall opposite the bed. There is a large mirror hanging on the wall. In the mirror we can see the reflection of LUCY and JOHN making wild, passionate love in the bed. Camera turns down and pans across bedroom floor, past assorted clothes discarded hastily in the fenzy of mutual lust. LUCY’s cries of climax drown out JOHN’s heaving grunts. Camera closes in on bed as JOHN rolls over. Both are glistening with sweat and breathless.
LUCY: That… that was… fantastic!
JOHN: Yeah… great. You were great.
LUCY: Do you know what I want now?
JOHN: What?
LUCY opens the top drawer of her bedside table and produces two large carrots.
LUCY: Want one?
JOHN: Oh, you bet.
LUCY hands one carrot to JOHN who begins to munch it manfully. LUCY nibbles her carrot, savouring the little bites.
LUCY: Mmmmm… I just have to have a carrot after sex.
JOHN: Yeah. Nothing beats a post-coital munch.
LUCY: So, am I going to see you again?
JOHN: Well, now that Sheila and I have split up… I reckon so.
LUCY: Why did you two split up anyway?
JOHN stops eating his carrot and looks away, trying to hide his shame.
JOHN: She… she was a celery-freak!!!
[END]
I went to see The Matrix Reloaded last night, with two other Samizdatistas, who will no doubt share their opinions with you here. Based on my impressions, which ranged from boredom to frustration with the pomposity of the characters, I concluded that the film is so firmly wedged up its own backside that it is unlikely to re-emerge for the next sequel due in November. The Matrix Reloaded is a far cry from the original film’s mind-twisting plot, lacking its predecessor’s film noir atmosphere and plausible ontological riddles.
David Edelstein of Slate has put it so much better:
The grim news is that The Matrix Reloaded is as messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It’s an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least). Then it ends as it’s just beginning: Stay tuned for The Matrix Revolutions, coming in November to 8,000 theaters near you.
Almost from the start, Reloaded feels different from the original—more stilted, mechanical, blockbuster-business-as-usual, Lucasoid. Dull staging, tin-eared dialogue (I haven’t even told you about Eurotrash king and queen of evil, played by Lambert Wilson and Monica Bellucci), bad acting: What went wrong? Have the Wachowskis been pickling in their own self-importance for too long? When they made the original, they’d come off their terrific low-budget lesbian noir Bound (1996), and they gave The Matrix a lean, no-nonsense, B-movie thrust. Here they seem to be bogged down by their budget and by Owen Paterson’s top-heavy sets, and almost every sequence goes on for too long and to no particular end.
We can speculate on these things when you’ve seen the movie. And you will see it—and maybe even convince yourself it’s spectacular. (Some people thought The Phantom Menace [1999] was a good movie—there’s a collective delusion for you.) But a bigger bang for your buck would be the Wachowskis’ related package of nine short animated films, The Animatrix, which proves that peoplelike cartoons can be much more enlivening than cartoonlike people. In The Matrix, Neo broke through the artificial into the real; in The Matrix Reloaded, he’s stuck in a bigger simulation, with no exit in sight.
I am sure this will upset many a Matrix affictionado. I too was genuinely looking forward to seeing the film. I loved the first one and still cannot comprehend how the same people managed to produce such stilted, pompous and at times boring sequel. Sure, the special effects are amazing and will enter the film-making history, just as the first one did. (The motorbike in the car chasing scenes did quicken even my pulse briefly.) But do they compensate for the feeble plot and insufferable dialogue? Well, I don’t think so.
From the ever alert b3ta.com comes news of giant microbes. My favourite is the common cold.
Billions of people a year catch the cold. Now you can get one too — without getting sick! Learn all about the Common Cold with this cuddly companion.
GIANTmicrobes, in a fit of propriety, calls these things “health dolls”. No GIANTmicrobes, they’re sickness dolls.
What, you are probably asking, does this mean for the prospects of western civilisation, immediate and longer term? I do not know. They are cute, I think.
This, on the other hand, also via b3ta, has got to be bad news for France. → Continue reading: Further proof of how weird other people can be
I am not sure that there’s any libertarian principle that objects to planned failure in DVDs, or that there’s any logical distinction in the comparative consumer rights between DVD rental and DVD self-destruction. For that matter I’m not sure that there’s a logical distinction between (the much maligned) software rental contracts and leasehold on real estate, not while there is Copyright protection, anyway.
I am sure, however, that a great many people of all stripes, including the most avowedly propertarian libertarians, hate the tendency in the entertainment and consumer software industries to enforce their intellectual property rights and create new, lesser rights in their products in which to sell licenses. I am also sure that Copyright is simply losing the minimal respect that is required for a law to be effective. That libertarians should be part of this too should tell us something. After all, we seem quite happy to take un-PC views on the side of big-oil, big-pharmacy, big-tobacco, big-corportate-bogeyman-of-the-week – and revel in how contrarian we seem, how opposed to the “idiotarian” received wisdom. Why not do we not support big-Hollywood too? → Continue reading: The death of copyright
Walt Disney will introduce self-destructing DVDs for ‘rent’ this August in a pilot project to crack a wider rental market. The discs, dubbed EZ-D, become unplayable after two days and do not have to be returned. They stop working after a change in colour renders them unreadable, starting off red, but when taken out of the package and exposed to oxygen, the coating turns black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.
The technology is impervious to hackers as the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology. However, the disc can be copied within 48 hours, since it works like any other DVD during that window.
The only purpose behind this wasteful production of DVDs I can see (think of all the waste from the useless discs!) is Walt Disney having a go at the rental market in an attempt to recoup the return on films released on DVDs. Presumably licenses or other means used to control the rental market are not good enough for them.
For the customer the benefit is marginal, I no longer have to remember to ‘return’ the disc, whose only use thereafter will be as a tacky coffee mug mat. In fact, there will cease to be rental market as such, as there will only be two kinds of DVDs I can purchase. The expensive ones that last and the cheap ones that will play only for 48 hours. It is not clear whether they will be distributed by a similar network of ‘rental’ shops. It certainly makes economic sense to do so, since one of the benefits of renting a DVD or a video is the convenience of being able to do so close to one’s home and at any hour of the day.
I do not have sufficient detail to take a firm position on this one. My gut reaction is that any attempt to control markets by restricting either supply or demand eventually blows up in the face of companies whose delusions of market power got better of their business sense.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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