Combat Fragments
Ukrainian soldiers brew up in a fox hole, a bailiff takes away a mans pick-up, someone teeters on the edge of a waterfall, seen from a balcony young men scatter as police arrive, Ukrainian soldiers again… Me who has been sneering at people scrolling their phones is caught now with YouTube’s new feature SHORTS. When I scroll SHORTS the tide of random data rises up in the head, there comes a point when I’m full — fully deadened. If I scroll the YouTube home page without clicking any video it takes longer to deaden, but I get there all the same. (I’ve been way behind on the tendency to shorten clips — I never saw Tik Tok).
I begin to understand that you only need long enough for recognition and a turn in the gut for the factoid to be implanted. Short visions like the ones that people have after car crashes — flashbacks. Pre-digested memory inserts, experience you can almost claim as your own. A violent world (when it is not absurd) flashing by as a six by three inch stream of AI consciousness.
By way of SHORTS war is stretching back up into the supporting countries, the places where the armament and the technicians to use it come from. Life between twenty and thirty degrees east has always been pretty shitty and now the permanent battlefield (ebook) is generating new tropes at a rate of knots. Old tropes have been burnt thru: mothers weeping, troops sprawled over a tank, a bank of flowers for a child crushed, sorry looking men with a leg missing — what is needed to keep the war going is light relief: the Russian soldier who fires at a bank of canisters and gets blow-back, the missile that turns round and hits its source. Now those clips are embedded in a stream of pout lipped bed gymnasts and brazen bike thieves and men that save deer from ice and policemen pummelling a black man and a bride who falls in her cake and a fake beggar being outed and so on (tho clumsy pixels make a boundary, things you shouldn’t see, death upfront, what soldiers wont speak about).
Most behaviour can be linked back to the primate itch, those women flicking thru garments on a rack are berry hunting. What is the man at the next table at the café at the railway station doing as his thumb strokes rolling clips? Imagine he was on a beach with acres of more or less the same hand sized pebbles and that underneath some of them, not many, was a succulent sea food. Wouldn’t he be turning them over?
SHORTS are win win for that sub-adolescent masculine world which produces maths geniuses and bus spotters. Obsessive displacement behaviour before the dreadful cloud of sex rolls into every corner of the brain. I actually caught someone who makes it their business to video buses pulling up and opening their doors, just that. (Finnish cineaste Aki Kaurasmaki makes that mechanical event part of his lexicon).
This competitive fetichism, the honing to a finer and finer edge of tiny scenarios mimics the way in which language evolves. The user is king. The weight of people finding the easiest way is irresistible, natural unorganised chaos gives plenty of space for the primate’s wits to work. Regulations are for dullards. Anybody in your way is not a person.
Johnson understands this, it is his language — look at him there in Kiev admiring the metal plaque with his name on it. Would he be enough himself to declare in his speech Ukraine will be great once we clear away the bodies as he did in Libya? I think not.
In a flurry of fists and kicking a just about teenage gang beat up a ten year old to post a fragment online. They have been trained by video games to see enemies. Too much video life has to be slaked by physical contact, sex or violence or both at the same time. Levelling up — a thousand slum based Bullingdon Clubs generating vicious buffoons. Meanwhile the relentless capstan of the Permanent Battlefield is twisting strand after strand of daily life into a comic book colour narrative. No Daily Mail front page is complete now without a misty picture of a British destroyer hassling some unseen Russian boat.
How can capitalists not want to step in and exhaust the resources of that enormous, badly run, loose jointed part of the world called Russia? In Russia itself the luvvies are being held to account by GOVNO (Detecting Enemies of Our Society),
“…the creation of an open registry of cultural figures who are not recommended to hold public office because of their anti-state position. Creating a register of officials who support agents of foreign influence and who are advised to change their public position or step down”
The anti-wokespersons speaking out of the Conservative rump will not be far behind GOVNO the day Truss says I have the ship.
Don’t get me wrong, I hold no brief for wall-to-wall lefty boilerplate but recognise in that rhetoric part of the prickly surface of tomorrow’s world. These people are saying to capitalists — ok you want to suck the blood out of me? Then you’ll have to come and get me as I am, feathers and all. The one hundred and fifty thousand choosing GB’s new boss have drawn their own shrinking circle. May it be a noose that strangles them.
