Check this out – it’s a concept for a futuristic airship, where you actually get to see inside etc.
What’s cool about this, is that it’s full of ghosts.
The music in the background is the sort of music you get in South East Asian Airport transit lounges, when you’ve got a 2 hour transfer at 4am and your brain is at 1/2 mast… and there are similar sorts of ghosts, wandering, wandering… and you’re one of them. I particularly like the way the music has a hand-clap… forced enthusiasm from the world’s tiredest/boredest hotel-lobby covers-band. It’s Ballardian as fuck.
That Edward Snowden is (at this moment) trapped in such an environment… in Russia. International airports are all the same – this artificial veneer of prosperity… consumer-brand-land 3D wallpaper… plastered over the interior of what is essentially a prison… a cattle-run for “processing” the people who can afford to be there. The only chink in this armour is the eyes of the people who can’t afford to be there, but who work there – for the lowest wages that international capitalism can possibly bestow… the ghost-shift… each one haunts a shop, largely unseen by the people that pass through. They only see what they want to see. Or what someone else wants them to see.
Reminds me a bit of what they did to various Irish shop-windows during the recent G8 Conference:
Fake prosperity for the masters of the world… who have between them conspired to allow a tiny minority of people to skim 32 trillion dollars out of our economies, locking them up in tax-havens
And I guess those are the people who are supposed to be the ghosts in the airship.
The trend is in the opposite direction… standing seats…
Because, as David Simon has so presciently pointed out, from here on in, human-beings are worth less and less. This is not an accident. Capitalism competes to charge the maximum possible price for the lowest possible expenditure… so wages are systematically driven down. People (those that do have jobs) are expected to be more and more and more “productive”, for the benefits of “shareholders”, aka: people who get an income without having to do any work.
Have you noticed how Dornob.com et al seem to have this trend for tiny apartments… shipping container appartments…
The tasteful and talented, living between the cracks of greed. God those micro-apartments look desirable. I wonder how much they cost? Let me guess… 150 years of the average wage. Best rent then eh. No choice really.
Between the cracks of greed – “Market Rates” means as much as can possibly be got away with. This is how we’re choosing to live?
That’s the thing that Alvin Toffler got wrong. He predicted a kind of techno-utopia, which assumed (and depended) on, a kind of radical abundance – rather than what we have, which is radical scarcity, arising from the “market rates” rentiersm maximising prices from a cartel-monopolised hierarchy of human needs… starting with land, and ending with a land-grab of “information copy monopolies”. The reason we have radical scarcity is not because of population growth, it’s because the world’s economic systems have been built around the interests of a class of people who are essentially parasitic… monopolies come from scarcity… and if a scarcity doesn’t exist, these people will try to create it.
There was some old cunt on the TV the other night arguing (in essence) that “we can’t have affordable housing, because that will drive property prices down”.
What’s wrong with this picture? Henry Ford knew he needed to pay people at a certain level to create a market capable of buying his cars… so… (“we can’t have affordable housing, because that will drive property prices down”)… what’s wrong with this picture?
Ghosts. That’s what’s wrong. Imaginary people wandering aimlessly around imaginary airships. Imaginary bustling shops of prosperous people plastered in paper over boarded up windows, to protect the delicate sensibilities of a ruling class, assembling to plan their next move… which will allow them to suck even more blood into secret blood-banks.
We need to start dismantling this shit. We need to replace the people in power, with a system in which there IS no power. Personally, I think an organisational virus built upon Liquid Democracy has a lot of promise.
Anything good that happens is going to happen in spite of our governments… until we can replace the people in our governments. The New World order looks increasingly like it’s not a system of control so much as a rising tide seeking to abolish (or at least sublimate) illegitimate control, operating at any level. What’s happening in Egypt is also happening here.
So there you go.
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
< No neoliberal nut-jobs required >
No, no, no,
This world has more then enough resources if only we would stop wasting them on the crap du jour with 6 month till obsolete warrenty.
Greets, Ed.
This world has more than enough energy… assuming we’re not expecting (as a species) to last longer than the sun.
As to resources, I was under the impression they were finite. See ‘Peak Helium’ etc etc… and things get to be a little more complex when population density becomes greater than the capacity of the land under it, to sustain it. Take a flight over London sometime and look down… “enough resources” isn’t a simple mathematical calculation.
As to 6 months til obsolete – given radically fast tech progress, I don’t seen this is necessarily a bad thing… but we need cradle to cradle manufacturing/product life-cycle processes to avoid turning civilisation into a giant machine that takes resources and uses them to create landfills filled with 6 months old toys.
Yeps, I live in Venlo a Baumgart approved C2C city. With some C2C buildings a C2C Floriade (agricultural show on a world scale) and have met Baumgart (and own his C2C book). Problem is your right off course.
– If energy is unlimited (and indeed the sun will feed us more and more energy the comming 300 million years, in fact untill we fry, but 300 million years is pretty long time) we only need to harvest it (and I live near Germany that is working on it on a big scale, solar roofs, some the size of football pitches if a all stables and barnes are included are common place agricultural practice these days, combined with rotors to harvest the wind) which we (talking about the Dutch) still not are likely to do, on a scale that we should do it.
– If resources are treated as such and considered rare and in design reclaimable, which they are not these days……dose anyone remember the iPod with the load a few times and buy new iPod battery?
– And if products are made UPGRADEBLE or repairable, which they are also not. A van Bommel shoe of classic Dutch fabrication has lasted me years now, it’s in the decades to be precise….if the leather sole wears out I send it to van Bommel, they refit a new sole and polish the leather as a service. Now try to do that with your standard Nike, Adidas or Puma.
My 4th solution is to step down from being a buyer to advance to being a builder. You need a burgler alarm buy a few motion sensors, a few microfones and an arduino and write some code and do some wiring. If you need a programma panorama head, buy a few stepper a few antibacklash gears (made in Canada) and some pipes and build you own code (my current project) and if you see the amount of money I saved (and the amount of knowledge I build up in the proces) I am talking in the thousands of dollars here. Do the same with a design for a 3 axis milling machine (CNC of course) and a 3D printer.
Be your own creator……or to use a parafrase on the German Ikea add…”Kaufst du noch oder bauwst du schon?”.
So my answer to C2C is:
– Harvest the sun
– Build to reclaim
– Build to last and to be repaired and upgraded
– Build yourself
Greets, Ed.
P.S. The arduino project was partly inspired by your website, so thank Nick.