A dystopia is a speculative situation where the absolute minority of people habitually experience hope and joy. Embedded in every piece of dystopian fiction is utopian thinking – the speculative condition where the absolute majority of people habitually experience hope and joy.

Commercial dramatic fiction requires tension between two poles. It requires stakes, change, a goal to advance towards. Conflict. Dystopian fiction is almost never actually about the dystopia itself (although writing dystopia is good, crunchy stuff with lots of detail to relish in the authorship). Dystopian fiction is almost always about the utopian reach that’s suppressed by the situation.

(*There are exceptions to every rule and statement do not @ me)

The request for more hopeful, optimistic and utopian thinking in popular drama comes around every few years. Utopias run up against the structures and strictures of popular drama. It’s hard to tell a conventional drama when, um, everything is awesome.

(Unhappily for everybody, a utopia, as a perfected human condition, is a static society, and static societies are dystopias)

Dystopia is one of those parts of speculative fiction that function as early-warning systems for bad sociocultural weather, a function I’ve talked about at length elsewhere. Dystopia is also about the fight for a better world. Every well-written dystopia is, unlike most other forms of drama, already always about hope.

(*I haven’t slept properly in, I dunno, probably two years, so don’t take this as a considered proclamation cut in stone, I’m just thinking out loud to myself.)

Please enjoy this cheerful image I accidentally took on the way into London on Monday.

(originally written 16 January 2019, recovered from morning.computer, re-upped here by request)

For some considerable time, one of the most essential podcasts on my list has been Brexitcast, and I hope to god there’s one in the morning to help explain and contextualise what I’ve been witnessing on BBC Parliament all day. Here’s its homepage.

Laura Kuenssberg and Katya Adler, Adam Fleming and Chris Mason, and editor Dino Sofos, thank you so much for all you’ve done, all the madness you’ve navigated, and all the years you’ve clipped off your lifespans by staring into his faecal abyss for us.

I am rebuilding my travel kit. I did a trial-run trip a few weeks back, and what I have learned is I have forgotten how to do this.

What still works, and it must be at least six years old at this point, is the Briggs & Riley Transcend 200 Series 19″ Carry-On International Upright. It fits every overhead bin, even the ones on America regional jets. Pretty sure they don’t make it any more. Hit eBay. There was a year when that bag was being loaded on to a plane anywhere between every six weeks and every three days, and it’s in good shape.

And the Sony NWZX1060B X Series 32GB mp3 player. Which they also don’t make any more! But it still works, after ten years or more! What I did discover is that 1) I hadn’t changed out the music on it in four years, blah 2) the cheaper Sony earbuds I got to replace my expensive but irreparably dead Sony earbuds get uncomfortable after an hour or two, So we’re testing a new pair, the 1MORE Quad E1010s. (UK) (US) Because I don’t want to fuck around with Bluetooth in an airplane. I want to stick some wired earbuds tightly into my ears, put on some music, read a book and go to sleep. And the mp3 player can play for something like 20 hours straight before it asks for power.

The one thing I did do right beforehand was buy a new powerbank, the Anker PowerCore 26800 Portable Charger. (UK) (US).

My real and terrible indulgence is that I have two Kindle Paperwhites. One stays at home, and the other is either in my day bag or in my carry-on. This is what “read a book” on a plane means. The two devices sync. I have a library in my pocket. You don’t need the Kindle Oasis, it’s overkill. You just need a Paperwhite. (UK) (US)

I have a new travel laptop, a current Lenovo X1 Carbon (UK) (US). I used to use a Dell XPS 13, and still have it – its wifi reception is just too weak, and while the keyboard was serviceable (after applying a remapping application to it), it wasn’t a Lenovo keyboard.

I’m not going to blogchain this? But I will return to it, because I’m still assembling kit and trying to solve the fact that I have forgotten how to do this.

A quarter of the way through Tom McCarthy’s fine new book SATIN ISLAND and I encounter what I can only describe as a Hubertus Bigend figure: one of those cultural-commercial spooks who darkly alchemise outbreaks of the future into product and wealth.  McCarthy’s Peyman isn’t as comically shadowy as Bigend, but, in his constantly moving post-geographic manifestations, just as elusive.  The sinister appeal of these characters is in part that they’re the Jason Bournes of cultural workers, teleporting through airports, known by the trail of their murky haloes of incoming data, materialising in rooms and halls to disrupt the flesh of the now with hails of information and beaming out again in pursuit of the next opportunity and the spoor of the new.

As someone who wrote a 1300-page fantasia of journalism, I recognise cultural fantasias when I see them. It’s a seductive confection that should be resisted.  But I booked flights to Europe anyway.

(written 16 September 2015, recovered from morning.computer)

I can’t remember who said it first.  But it was said that a screenplay is only ever half a piece of art.  If that.  It cannot be a complete statement, because it is animated and changed by acting, cinematography, sound, economics and direction.  This is only right and correct, of course, as making a film is a massively collaborative act.  The nature of screenwriting, too, is that the original voice is rarely the last voice the film speaks with.  One might wonder why 97% of the screenwriting community bother writing them any more.  They can only ever be scaffolding, and very few are ever made.  And, with US cinema ticket sales at a low not seen since 1995, and writers running with open arms towards television, and Marvel and DC releasing their film production schedules for years in advance, much of the near-future output of American cinema is mathematically predictable.

I have, however, been endlessly fascinated by Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay for THE COUNSELOR.  Any number of people will tell you it’s a bad screenplay for any number of technical, classical and structural reasons.  And yet, it stands as a complete statement, in and of itself. Perhaps that’s why Ridley Scott apparently found it so hard to film, unable to save himself from treading on its fingers and speaking over its words.

Only McCarthy, of course, could offer a screenplay like that.  (Although JC Chandor’s abbreviated screenplay for ALL IS LOST, by its largely silent nature, is also odd in its way.)  And it was published as a book, joining McCarthy’s canon.   It’s a fluke.

All that said: the book makes me wonder. Film is still loved, as a concept, for its central affordance: to depict a transformational experience in two hours-ish, and, right from the start, to show things that have never been seen before.  Literary fiction has flirted, many times, with forms that resemble screenplays.  It’s easy to daydream about some (final!) phase in popular cinema.  I might even just be imagining some new iteration of the early relationship between film and theatre, I don’t know.  (I write these first thing in the morning, remember!)  Maybe I’m just sitting in front of a stack of WGA screeners, wishing for better films.

THE COUNSELOR makes me think about literary screenwriting, for the first time in years: in, I suppose, the way a beginning screenwriter must.  It’s nice to think about more things like that, before the word “film” becomes inextricably redefined as “theme park preview” and everything else is seen on home screens.

THE COUNSELOR, Cormac McCarthy: (UK) (US)

(Thinking out loud.  Still assembling a thought.)

(written 3 Jan 2015, recovered from morning.computer)

Generic blog post about turning shit off.

A ways back, Venkatesh Rao coined the term waldenponding.

The crude caricature is “smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social media platforms.” It is less of a caricature than you might think.

The above is drawn from the long and contrarian essay he wrote about it, AGAINST WALDENPONDING. How contrarian?

…as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level. It’s a world-and-life negation. A kind of selfish free-riding/tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load required to keep the Global Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) running effectively.

Oh yeah. I have recently noted that Venkatesh has muttered darkly about becoming a “post-Twitter being” and has locked his account, so I’m guessing he’s trying out the other side of his hellish joke. You should read the whole thing – it’s unfettered vantablack comedy.

Everybody’s made excellent points, now well-trodden, about offlining as privilege and privilege-signal. And, at the end of the day, I’m a freelance writer, and I can’t go completely offline forever.

What I can do is recognise step-changes in my career and adjust accordingly.

I always encourage everyone to tune the tools at hand until they work for the individual’s specific situation. This is something that’s gotten harder and weirder in the contemporary moment, because monolithic enterprises have grown from the financialised mechanic of making you miserable. To the point where, now, everyone does it. Here’s a whole bit from a newsletter I sent the other week:

I was going to just stick a bunch of photos of my shelves in here, but that felt like cheating, and repeating the point that streaming media doesn’t serve everybody and social media is boring. I went out of town during the week, didn’t check social media once and only listened to downloaded podcasts or music I own separately from services like Apple and Amazon. When I got home, I threw up my Tweetdeck lists on the big screen in the office as usual, and it did not appear that anything had changed in the intervening 24 hours. Except that maybe it becomes clearer that serious testing has informed all media companies that making you angry, sad or confused rrrrrreally brings the clicks home.

“Melbourne dog attack leaves boy with serious facial injuries.” Is this world news suitable for placing into your global Twitter feed, The Guardian? No.  World-class news story there – dog bites somebody.  But it will make people sad and angry, right?  “Megan Rapinoe: Can a pink-haired lesbian be an American hero?” That’s from BBC World News.  And someone has actually thought about that, because it invites Ian Betteridge’s “law” – any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.  So, angry and confused and sad.  All the clicks.  You would kind of hope The Guardian and the BBC would do better – the BBC isn’t even “a business” as is commonly framed, it’s a public-funded national entity, the oldest and largest broadcaster on the planet, and it does not need to show its arse for clicks.

(I wrote all this last night while v tired, and was going to delete it this morning, and then BBC News South East lead out with “two puppies die in fire” so fuck it)

And that’s just the social media-facing corporations. That doesn’t even take individual actors into account. The Global Social Computer in the Cloud — which, as ever, is mostly just people hired to sit in badly lit rooms and slave themselves out for data entry – is just noise. Murky, immiserating noise that demands sorting-braincycles that I can put to better use elsewhere.

I process a lot of stuff, and keep up with a lot of things, and a shift is required to allow for the career step-change. You can’t be dogmatic about anything. Situations tend to be fluid and dynamic, and you need to be able to flow and adjust in response.

I’ve been filling my office with DVDs and Blu-Rays and CDs for reasons.

I’ve killed all social media notifications, moved IG to a folder at the back of my phone where I will quickly forget about it, deleted some of its more egregious news apps (bye, New York Times) and generally turned stuff off. I’m not doing that thing of “making a dumbphone” or greying out the screen. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I am likely to have to appear more present on some services in the immediate future, but I’ll be doing that in as mediated, buffered and time-shifted a way as possible. This is a whole new stage of gone for me, and we’ll see how it goes.

And this whole post has really just been a way to lay it all out in front of me so I can see it properly.

While I’m telling stories, I don’t think I ever told this one.

Four years ago, I woke up and the right side of my body was dead. Couldn’t move it. Couldn’t feel it. My right lung wasn’t working. Vision was weird in my right eye. Confused. I sleep on the right side of the bed. I couldn’t get out of bed. Flopped around like a dying fish. Tried to yell for help for a while. Which would not have immediately done me any good because nobody was home at that precise point. Someone came home ten minutes later. Breathing was becoming interesting at that point, but I managed to make enough sound to summon help.

I was helped out of bed. I was fully aphasic at that point. Two minutes later, I was fine. Very weird. But I thought, shit, I better go to the hospital, right? I was clearly still confused, because it didn’t occur to me to call an ambulance. I packed a bag and went to the hospital under my own steam. Checked in at the counter, gave them a full report of the experience, and sat down to wait to be seen. Sixty seconds later it happened again. It took three people to wrestle me into a wheelchair and transport me into the room. I was conscious but aphasic and the right side of my body was dead. Five minutes later, I was compos mentis enough to understand that I was being conveyed to the Acute Stroke Unit.

I was there three days.

On the first day, I was told I’d had a massive stroke.

On the second day, they told me it was a trans-ischemic attack, which was explained to me as an early warning for a stroke.

On the third day, they told me they had no idea what the hell had happened to me, because there was no trace of stroke or TIA and you can’t cure a stroke by standing up, and so they named it a Miscellaneous Neurological Event and sent me home.

Now, fifteen years previously, I’d had what they believed to have been a high blood pressure event (although it turned out at least one visiting doctor thought it was a brain tumour and had told my partner to call him if I was still alive in the morning) that rendered me mostly unconscious for some six weeks. So, yeah, this wasn’t the first time I nearly died. This one did give some clarity. It’s not high blood pressure, it’s “massively fluctuating” blood pressure, in tandem with acute hypertensive stress and some physiological fluke wherein the pressure surge or drop happens across a cluster of nerves that control or affect a bunch of stuff in the right side of my body. Basically, if my stress reaches a certain point, it trips an Off Button.

“You’re young to have hypertensive stress this bad,” said the consultant.

“Hi, I’ve been a freelance writer for twenty-five years,” I said.

I’ve had a few brushes with it since. And, frankly, the last couple of weeks haven’t been great. Anything that smells of threat or crisis, the numb patches start appearing and I get vertigo and blurred vision. But, so far, I haven’t needed to be back at the hospital for more than a day, so we live in home that we have the procedures to calm it until it’s fully understood.

I remain a source of frustration to doctors, because they can’t figure out how the mechanism works. Until they do, all I can do is carry the meds that’ll save me if I can get to them, and try to avoid stress.

Hi, I’m a freelance writer and producer who works in television and comics. How do we think that’s working out?

So that’s how I nearly died, that time. Hopefully the next one will be nearly too.

I had drinks with a screenwriter earlier today, and the subject of Kevin Smith came up, so I told him my Kevin Smith story. It occurred to me on the train home that I’ve never told this in public before, so here it is.

I don’t know Kevin Smith. Never met him, spoke to him, or communicated with him. I was given to understand, many many many years ago, that he was a bit pissed off with an offhand comment I made in an interview one time. So that’s the context.

This is all, as I say, many years ago. This guy emails me and says, my best friend’s in the hospital and it doesn’t look like he’s going to come out again. And he loves all Kevin Smith’s stuff. He works in comics like you, and you guys all know each other, so is there a way to, I dunno, get a letter from Kevin Smith for my friend, or a phone call, or a signed something, I dunno?

I don’t know Kevin Smith. I did meet Joe Quesada about five years previous, and I don’t know him as such at that point, and I don’t have a relationship with him, but I do have an email address for him, and I know he knows Kevin Smith. So I send the email to Joe and say, I know we don’t really know each other, but would you be okay with forwarding this to Kevin Smith?

A few months later, I get an email saying, I’m the guy whose best friend was in the hospital. And here’s what happened.

Joe, who had no reason to read any email from me, saw the email and with huge kindness forwarded the email to Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith has no reason to read an email with my name on it either.

Kevin Smith stands up, makes some calls, gets on a plane, flies all the way across America and goes to the hospital and spends an entire day with the guy’s best friend.

I still don’t know Kevin Smith, and have never spoken to him, but here’s what I know about Kevin Smith. He stands the fuck up.

And that’s my Kevin Smith story.

I was thinking about cave lions.  These were British lions that were the size of a car, that haunted Britain ten thousand years ago.   And by haunted, I mean the myth of the British lion extends into Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden.  And by myth I mean the persistent story of a wild British countryside.  Lions and brown bears, aurochs and lynxes and wolves.  The brown bear vanished in the Dark Ages, and the wolf was going while Shakespeare was writing As You Like It.  The Tarpan horse was gone before people started walking the Ridgeway.  The Neolithic enclosure was permanently altering the landscape millennia before the Enclosures Act. This is why people talk about rewilding, and why, in A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE, Martin Shaw talks about having to go halfway up Mount bloody Snowdon to find “wilderness.”  It’s a small island, heavily managed for many thousands of years, and nature long ago became a story we tell ourselves while we tramp down footpaths and national trails on the powdered bones of giant lions.  

(originally written 16 October 2014, recovered from morning.computer)

Yesterday I had a meeting at the British Library.  I was expecting a sit-down in a side office.  Instead, I was conveyed down into the guts of the building.  

It has several sub-basement levels, not all of which are accessible on all the lift shafts. The ceilings are ribboned with conveyor belts, which transport materials from all over the building to the reading and listening rooms in the public library.  The red trays on the conveyor travel at about a mile an hour — it can take forty-five minutes to transport any one requested article — because some of the Library’s materials are too fragile to survive any faster movement.  

In a sealed room sits a signed recording of James Joyce reading from ULYSSES, preserved in conditions approaching that of Mars.

I saw twenty-inch vinyl records made for the armed forces by NBC, handled Edison wax cylinders, and met an engineer trying to pull a digital transfer off a 78 made out of gelatin and glass.  Great marches of travelling racks full of music, scripts, radio capture and field recording.  It’s only being there that drives home that they keep everything.  

The cultural breath of the whole country, and every form of culture that enters it — it all goes here.

I didn’t want to leave. It was like living in the heart of perfect Albion for a moment.  

(originally written 28 Oct 2015, recovered from morning.computer)