Making Critical Mass « Critical Mass

I wrote this post at the airport while waiting for my plane:

One of the comments on our Indiegogo campaign page mentioned the need for good music; it was a passing mention, but it got me thinking about a song I remember and still enjoy: Istället för musik, Förvirring by Bob Hund. The translation of the title (and repeated chorus) is Instead Of Music, Confusion. Here’s the video:

So here I am in Heathrow Airport, sitting in a packed cafe, drinking my coffee and waiting to catch my plane to San Francisco. To my right, a couple from Finland in their late fifties. In front of me, the counter; servers from South America, Asia and Eastern Europe serve the non-stop flow of customers. A cart rattles by piled high with trays, clattering on the corrugated metal floor. To my left, a row of tables, all occupied, everyone’s nose buried in their food, their phone or their laptop. The one or two exceptions that prove the rule stare off into the middle distance.

From speakers mounted throughout the room, some warbling approximation of what people call music nowadays burbles away, inoffensive lifestyle wallpaper – what I call “music for people who don’t like music”. Branded hoardings surround us on all sides, reminding us how great this place is, how pure the company is, how fresh the food, how healthy and homemade all the sandwiches trucked here from the depot are.

Directly next to me, maybe three feet away, two men stand at the coffee countertop where they drop sugar and milk into their cups. They talk to each other in low tones but I can hear every word. Why wouldn’t I? They’re right there.

In fact, I can hear everything said at the counter. They’re right there as well – ten feet instead of three.

A server breezes past, drops a tray onto the stack on the counter with a clatter and moves off again. Back and forth, back and forth. The gritty sound of plastic wheels rolling on laminate and steel. The clang of the coffee machine as another dose of grounds is chambered and then blasted with hot water.

Outside the cafe, an alarm goes off briefly – for ten seconds the rotor squeal pierces my ears.

I like traveling, principally because it is absolutely the best way to meet new people, and I love people. I’m fascinated by their stories, their faces, their ideas, their relationships, the way they behave, the way they make their decisions. That’s why I would have studied anthropology at university if I hadn’t been so singularly convinced that I was going to be in a platinum record-selling rock and roll band when I was a teenager. That’s why directing in particular attracts me – interacting with, examining and understanding people. Their motivations, their emotions, their actuality.

So if I love people so much, why make a film about population issues and crowding? Why write about the distractions, the noise, the intrusion of this fairly typical public place?

I love music as well. I play the drums, not so much these days though – my shoulder ain’t what it used to be and my bald spot doesn’t look very sexy under a spotlight. Zappa said “music is the best”. Stephen King calls it “the fabled automatic” for its ability to transport us instantly to a memory, a state of mind, an emotion. Magic, pure and simple.

But music is based on principles of melody, harmony, form and composition. Even dissonant music, of which I’m a big fan, has order within it, intentionality. Two of the most important elements of powerful music are restraint and quiet. The guitar solo you love probably wouldn’t be so beautiful if the guitarist tried to play every note on the guitar the whole time. Restraint. The part where the song pares down to a single instrument, holding a pulse or tune, and then it builds, slowly, tremendously, to a thundering climax that makes your heart race, your hair stand up, your skin go goosey – if it was full-on loud with everyone playing at once for the whole song, it would lose its power. It would lose its implicit order, its intentionality. It would cease to be music and instead, become confusion.

The beginning of Jungle Boogie, when the bass kicks in, is one of the funkiest moments in the history of music. If you don’t find yourself moving to it when it takes off, get your pulse checked because you may be deceased. Why is it so balls-to-the-wall funktastic? Because the bass isn’t playing up until that point. When it kicks in, you notice, because it is new, insistent, intense.

John B. Calhoun, the doctor whose experiments form the narrative backbone of Critical Mass, described a phenomenon among the rodents which he called “overliving”. As more and more rodents crowded together, they bumped into one another ever more frequently until it became unbearable for them. Too much unintentional contact with one another eventually made meaningful , intentional contact between them less likely, even impossible. A society, which is fundamentally a network of individuals communicating meaningfully with one another for their mutual pleasure and benefit became instead a muddle of competing noises and competing interests. Connections were briefer or non-existent, lost in the cacophony.

Going back to my three-chord punk band at the age of sixteen, which morphed into a prog outfit playing twelve-minute through-composiitions – there were four of us. Perhaps with five, ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty people, we might have written truly exceptional material, way beyond what only the four of us were capable of. But if there were fifty, a hundred, a thousand people in that band, what melody, harmony, form or composition would be possible then? Would it have been music, or confusion?

When I set out to make this film, I wanted to learn about the subject of population and introduce people to it so that we could have a real dialogue. I wanted to know what kind of music we used to play, what we play now and what the songs of future will be if we don’t change anything or could be if we do.

I love people, just as I love music. That’s why I think we should have an open conversation about what is going on around us, so that in the future we, our children and our children’s children can have music instead of confusion.

First of all, let me apologise for the long gap in writing, and for the lack of new comments being approved. Both of these have reasons:

1. I have been flat out trying to finish the film (which is looking good) and my writing/thinking time has been minimal.
2. I have not approved any new comments for a long time due to the preponderance of spam clogging up my dashboard. If anyone knows a fast way to delete over 1,000 comments from handbag- and shoe-bots rather than by 20 at a time, please tell me! We will be getting some kind of human-confirmation device installed shortly, and then hopefully all of these Viagra and SEO peddlers will leave us alone.

On to more pressing business – this post will be a little more like a news digest than a developed opinion, mostly because of my aforementioned lack of time, but also because the links speak for themselves.

Most of us who follow the news out of the US have been stunned at the backwards nature of the discourse there on contraception and reproductive health. I say backwards in no inflammatory way to imply mental incapacity – “backwards” is a perfect description of the direction signified by this swell of mostly conservative, mostly Republican, mostly male bleating about the issues. These so-called controversies are dragging America backwards in time. Here’s a smorgasbord of ridiculousness*:

– Terry England comparing women to animals.

– Sam Brownback promising to sign a bill taxing abortion.

– The Pope, as usual, having high-handed moral opinions about everything other than child abuse.

– Bill O’Reilly being Bill O’Reilly.

– Arizona being Arizona.

– Colorado setting up a possible challenge to Roe vs. Wade (the case which made abortion legal in the US) by the back door (pun not intended).

– Utah bans sex ed.

Before those outside of the US get too smug, here’s what’s up in Russia.

*Because of my aforementioned shortness of time, all of these links are from Raw Story, although you can find these stories replicated in most other media outlets.

Tied in with all this wrangling over what seems to the rational mind to be the most basic interpretation of human rights, we have the ongoing debate over whether long-term (i.e. after 2050 at the earliest) population stability or shrinkage is a catastrophe for modern economies. In a nutshell, this centres on the fact that modern economies are predicated on growth (in order to provide consumers for mass-produced goods and in order to provide an ever-expanding labour base to service debt and pay liabilities). Since population growth inherently demands economic growth, in the sense of more goods and services, and since economic growth is represented almost uniformly as the only way forward for any nation’s economy, this debate unintentionally represents a deeper question, namely: Are human beings economic components to be ‘brought online’ according to the needs of the market, or should the market perhaps adapt to the needs of human beings?

Exhibit A: This New York Times article by David Brooks.

Exhibit B: This excellent rebuttal on Slate.

Lest I run the risk of writing a blog post without being overbearingly opinionated:

1. Women should have contraceptive/reproductive health care if they want it, and that access shouldn’t depend on what other people think.

2. Abortion is a matter for the couple, not for the government, the church or any other organisation. I’ve known enough women who have had abortions to know that none of them entered into it lightly. That’s about as far as any man’s opinion should intrude on the matter as far as I’m concerned.

3. Anti-homosexuality measures/discrimination/inequality are just plain rude. Stop it, America. And for that matter Russia, Uganda, Malawi…oh, the list is too depressing to go into.

Trying to finish a feature film with no money can be mentally and emotionally exhausting, and never have I worried more for my own sanity than when I found myself agreeing with Pat Robertson. Scary stuff. It must be the end times…

On Wednesday September 21st 2011, The Irish Examiner ran an editorial by Steven King (not the horror author) on the world reaching 7 billion people. All personal politics aside, the main problem with the article was that it was in many places a direct copy of a speech delivered by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, at a debate at the Battle of Ideas in London on October 30th, 2010.

I know this for two reasons. First, because I was filming that debate for my documentary almost a year before King published his editorial. Second, in order to bypass my possible self-delusion in spite of video evidence, I obtained a transcript of O’Neill’s talk from a third-party website in order to compare it with King’s article.

Although I will not go into the background of O’Neill here, this article will give anyone with a high pain threshold a very good round-up of the origin of the network which has its roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party here in the UK, later known as the Living Marxism (or LM) Network whose peculiar brand of “humanism” is a beautiful demonstration of Orwellian doublethink.

Leaving aside the questionable motives of the original author and the spurious nature of the content, let’s merely compare the texts:

O’Neill (30/10/2010): “The main Malthusian idea I want to challenge is the idea that resources are finite. The idea that the Earth itself is finite. The idea that we live on a finite planet and therefore we can only have a certain number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food.”

King (21/9/2011): “the notion that we inhabit a finite planet and, therefore, we can only have a certain maximum number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food, must be challenged.”

O’Neill: “It seems commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and a bit mad to say that it isn’t, but it’s important to recognise how fluid and changeable resources are. It’s important to recognise that the usefulness and longevity of a resource is determined as much by us – by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the existence of that resource in the first place.”

King: “It might appear commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and slightly perverse to say that it isn’t, but it’s imperative to understand how fluid and changeable resources apparently limited are. It’s important to recognise that the utility and longevity of a resource is determined as much by humankind — by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the amount and availability of that resource in the first place.”

O’Neill: “Resources are not fixed in any meaningful sense. Resources have a history and a future, just like human beings do. The question of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

King: “So, resources are not static in any meaningful sense. Resources have a past and a future, just as human beings do. The issue of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

O’Neill: “So in Ancient Rome, one of the main uses of coal was to make jewellery. Women liked the look of this glinting black rock hanging around their necks. No one could have imagined that thousands of years later, coal would be used to power massive steam engines and an entire Industrial Revolution, forever changing how we produce things and transport them around the world. “

“Two thousand years ago, the only way people used uranium was to make glass look more yellow. It was used to decorate windows and mirrors. You would probably have been locked up, or subjected to an exorcism, if you had suggested that one day uranium might be used to light up and heat entire cities – or indeed destroy entire cities at the push of a button. “

King: “the supposed limits to resource-use have been transgressed time and time again by advances in human productivity — whether that is in terms of discovering that coal could be used not just for jewellery, as it was in Roman times, but to power an entire Industrial Revolution, or the use of uranium to heat and light (or destroy) entire cities, or the so-called “green revolution” in agriculture.”

O’Neill: “Thomas Malthus himself, the messiah of modern-day Malthusianism, argued in the early 1800s that food production wouldn’t be able to keep apace with human reproduction, and as a result there would be ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would sweep off millions of people. Yet in his era, there were only 980million people on Earth – today there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

King: “Malthus argued that food production wouldn’t be able to maintain pace with human fertility. Yet in his time, there were only one million [sic] people on Earth; today, there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

O’Neill: “Malthus’s problem was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His fundamental pessimism meant that he considered it impossible for mankind to develop beyond a certain, nature-enforced point. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the industrial revolution and various social revolutions, mankind did overcome many social limitations and found new ways to make food and deliver it to people around the globe.”

King: “Malthus’s problem — shared by much of the environmental lobby today — was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the Industrial Revolution, mankind did overcome many social limitations and discovered new ways to make food and transport it to people around the globe.”

O’Neill: “The idea of sustainability is anti-exploration, anti-experimentation, anti-risk – all the qualities we need if we are going to make the kind of breakthroughs that earlier generations made with coal and uranium and other resources.”

King: “the whole idea of sustainability is, at core, anti-exploration and anti-experimentation — the qualities we need if we are going to replicate earlier generations’ innovation breakthroughs.”

O’Neill: “The ascendancy of the Malthusian outlook can really be seen in the way people are frequently discussed these days: exploiters, the mere users of resources, the destroyers of things.”

King: “We need to think about people as positive agents of change not mere users of resources, destroyers of things.”

O’Neill: “we created the means for extracting and transforming those resources; we created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources; and every time, we managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and created new resources along the way.”

King: “We created the means for extracting and transforming mineral resources. We created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources. Every decade that passes, as a species, we have managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and create new resources along the way.”

Well, that was fun. So who is this (un)masked man who publishes his opinion in the form of other peoples’ words?

Steven King, or, to give him his full honorific, Dr. Steven King, is currently the director of the New Delhi office for APCO Worldwide. The man has degrees from three universities, one of them Oxford, and for years was the chief political adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party. He ostensibly left politics to join the Policy Exchange, a British think tank where he worked as the External Relations Director from 2006 to 2008. The Policy Exchange is “powering the renaissance of the centre right” according to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

I’ve written about the creeping (and creepy) influence of the think tank system before. The Policy Exchange isn’t to my knowledge affiliated with the IEA/Antony Fisher crowd, but the intellectual high ground they profess to inhabit can be shown as quicksand very easily nonetheless. Today, the Policy Exchange are having a debate at the Labour Party Conference called “Remonopolising power? Reforming the electricity market”, which is sponsored by Oil & Gas UK, who describe themselves as working “to strengthen the long-term health of the offshore oil and gas industry in the United Kingdom”. So both major political parties in the UK are participating in a debate about energy issues which is sponsored by an industry lobby group which recently danced on the grave of the mooted EU offshore drilling moratorium. The only other speakers were representatives of Policy Exchange, another think tank called the Regulatory Policy Institute and a representative of the lobby group sponsoring the whole sordid farce of “policy-based democracy”. Policy written by whom, based on what and enforced by what public mandate, one might ask. As we will learn from the heads at APCO, this falls under one of the global PR machine’s primary strategies: “the imprimatur of a respected third party”.

So back to Steven King, now that we’re familiar with his pedigree. He works for APCO Worldwide, one of the largest PR companies in the world. Frankly, I’m at a loss as to where I can begin with these people. Let’s just go through their greatest hits:

In 1993 APCO founds TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) on behalf of Philip Morris after secondhand smoke is classed as a carcinogen; the intention of the “grassroots” movement is to “prepare and place opinion articles in key markets”.
In 1995 APCO, on behalf of Philip Morris, spearheads the “tort reform” drive to stem the rising tide of product liability suits. APCO also represented Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha that year after the adverse press caused by the detention and execution of nine environmental activists including Ken Saro-Wiwa.
In 2007 Ken Silverstein gives an excellent account of a meeting he took with executives from APCO while pretending to work for a company interested in livening up the image of Turkmenistan – I won’t go into further detail here but his article is a riot.
Speaking of riots, that same year Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat in India, hires APCO after over 1,000 people were killed and thousands more injured in riots in 2002 which Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to. In 2005 he was refused a visa to enter the US on the grounds that he was “responsible for, or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom”. This from an American government that had Muslims detained without trial at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. Go figure.

Oh, I almost forgot. TASSC, the APCO front espousing concern over “junk science“? They’re also the leading purveyor of doubt-fog on other “controversial” scientific topics like pesticides and climate change. George Monbiot outlines their role at length here. With reference to my previous article about the Institute of Economic Affairs, it’s worth noting that Ralph Harris wrote a screed about secondhand smoke during the same period as APCO’s campaign against the “controversial” scientific assertion that breathing in secondhand smoke might be bad for you.

This PR strategy/trend appears again and again – multiple “unconnected” sources producing counter-intuitive, market-led objections to common sense concerns about the social or physical environment. So how is it any surprise that a representative of APCO publishes an “opinion” in The Irish Examiner that happens to tie in with exactly the market-uber-alles corporate dogma peddled by the clients of the company that pays his salary? What is surprising is that a man with three degrees working for one of the world’s largest PR firms puts his name to an article largely copied from a source which goes unmentioned and unacknowledged.

Even more shocking, or, perhaps worryingly, not shocking at all, is that an established newspaper will accept editorial opinion from a representative of a PR firm retailing specific market ideologies without pointing out that the same guy saying that human population growth is not a strain on our biosphere works for a company that defends dictators, excuses human rights abuses, casts doubts on the carcinogenic effects of smoking, refuses to see pesticides as potentially harmful to humans and classes climate change due to CO2 as a controversial theory.

I cannot help but see a certain irony in Steven King arguing the “human ingenuity beats scarcity” case with words he plagiarised. Perhaps honesty is a finite resource.

Category Archives: Making Critical Mass

Instead Of Music, Confusion

Time travel is possible…if you’re a dick about women’s rights.

In Other Words: The ‘PR’ stands for Plagiarism