Generation Soundbite

The Cut-And-Paste Culture:

Is there an issue here? Or am I just an out of touch has-been, lamenting the passage of youth?

Perhaps I am afraid to see age creep up on me. But I think there is an issue, and one that has nothing to do with my own mortal insecurities. The real issue is resenting the choice to promote throw-away fashion over credible substance. It is, quite literally, a cut-and-paste culture, where the appearance of knowledge is packaged up into a product and distributed like fast-food. The knowledge-bites are never intended to stand up to serious reason. They are the result of a marketing strategy that peddles stick-on substance.

In the same way that we are bullied into a schizophrenic changing of our wardrobe, we now find the same pressure to forever 'update' our 'views' (Facebook statuses). Shockingly, this is all perfectly well 'justified' by nothing more substantial than these words, delivered from the corporate juggernaut's far-reaching mouthpiece: "Well how else will we keep people frantically buying our shit?"

'Christianity has not failed, it has never been tried'.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The Shifting Baselines of society

When Tony Benn died last month, there was a range of tributes made, in an attempt to remember him and identify his legacy.

One of the most disconcerting of these narratives revolved around the idea that he was a radical politician: 'Britain's most dangerous man'. This made me wonder about the state of the contemporary political climate. Because to be called radical for promoting equality and fairness across society, highlights the fact that the baseline from which we measure extremes, has shifted alarmingly even further to the political right.

Baselines are everywhere being shifted upwards. Think of carbon emissions, the farcical 'off-setting' scandal that means rich companies can arrogantly buy their way out of any responsibility to look after the planet. Think of food waste, portion sizes, the horrendous nutrition market that means food is now a baffling pseudo science, where we march ignorantly into obesity and disease because common sense has been hijacked by the corporates who saw a chance to make a packet by shepherding us away from real food. The whole baseline of what we need to be materially provided for has gone off the scale.

We are being bullied into ever more relentless consumption, and we are losing the will to fight in the face of such aggressive marketing. Whatsmore, the way these baselines are being presented, is to disguise this rapid shift, in the hope that we become so distracted that once we realise the extent of the conn, we will be so disillusioned that it will feel too much of a struggle to try to claw back that which has been stolen from us.

When will this aggressively engineered shifting stop? Perhaps even more worrying than the implications for our health and that of the planet, is, going back to Tony Benn the 'radical', the political situation. If we are not careful, any view held that is other than hard-line right, will be considered radical. Not only is this devastation of baselines making a mockery of genuine attempts to live peacefully, ecologically, responsibly, equally, intelligently and ethically; it indicates the global tyranny inherent in contemporary capitalism.