What a Riot

While England recovers from its latest night of broken glass and the traditional finger-pointing begins (bad parents, laziness, computer games etc. etc.) I thought I'd share a quote from a fellow Fifer. Book one, chapter one. Something that's been in print since 1776 and which surely one or two of our millionaire cabinet members will have read.

"It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people."

Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations

A friend of mine made the observation that pretty much any civilisation's golden age (Roman, Egyptian, British, French...) begins with massive industry, productivity and "universal opulence", and ends with an enormously rich and powerful elite that have normalised their own corruption and have become far removed from the society they were chosen to govern. It seems to be the nature of things that, rather than trickling downwards, wealth and power gradually percolates to the top.

The corruption of the elite becomes so engrained that we begin to accept it as the truth by which we all must live. So we accept being robbed by well-groomed, smooth-talking men and women in expensive suits, but we are somehow shocked and angered when a tiny minority of hoodies and chavs take control of large parts of the country for a couple of days.

Sigh.

Rioting for Fun and Profit. A practical guide to the redistribution of wealth. This photo was looted from the Daily Mail, a self-styled "newspaper" with right wing leanings, printed in England.

"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."


The Wealth Of Nations, Book I Chapter VIII

Preview of new artwork

House

Artist Lars Stenberg talks about his latest art project.

House, a site-specific, time-based work will take shape in two phases. The first phase, a collaborative sculptural project between the artist, Westpac and Bunnings, explores the tension between the empty, unfinished volume of the building and the unceasing monthly mortgage repayments. The second, performance-focused, phase will involve selected members of the public who will “live” in the space created in the first phase, interacting with the work and contributing to it by fortnightly electronic transfer.

“Like my last work Car, House is a truly post-modern exercise,” said Stenberg, “as it employs self-knowing irony to explore the banal and uninteresting concerns of a middle class, middle aged man, and cleverly fuses the most popular contemporary method of expression, financial accrual, with traditional techniques such as painting and nailing things together.”

House builds upon the success of Stenberg’s most notorious work Personal Pension, a 45 year performance in which the artist burns an ever increasing sum of money every month, and which was shortlisted for the What Investor? product of the year in 2006.

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British Life To Change Forever

David Cameron or Nick Clegg warned today that he would change forever the way the British lived. Dismissing accusations of social engineering as “the whining of wound-licking socialist running dogs” he stated “there is no such thing as society, therefore there can be no such thing as social engineering.”

The UK prime minister warned that the cuts to public services would be unpleasant, however the good news was that he would never meet those most affected by the changes at a dinner party. He went on to say that unpleasant things were always good for you, which meant the cuts were Common Sense and the Right Thing to do. The war in Iraq and the medicine his nanny used to give him were proof if proof were needed, he added.

Speaking later at a London private club to an audience of Daily Mail readers bussed in from Middle England David Cameron or Nick Clegg said “in layman’s terms the problem with the NHS and social welfare is that they simply do not make any money.” He then went on to attack the idea that these services were necessary. “I’ve never had to use them, and I can’t see why anyone else would need to either.”

“These cuts are not motivated by ideology, they are simply Common Sense. We plan to close the NHS and stop welfare payments to voters in the North.” He then went on to talk about the importance of continuity, pledging to continue the Labour Party’s policy of donating tax revenue to the banks. “They make excellent profits, and this is Good Business.”

Hitting back at criticism he said “suggestions that public spending can somehow support growth and improve the economy are the insane ravings of the sort of left-wing university intellectuals who never invited me to their parties at Oxford.” Stepping back from the microphone he then punched the air and shouted, "who's the daddy? I own you bitches" before continuing to lay out the government's planned cuts.

Inspired by the public apology given recently by Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, for the excessive cuts of his predecessors David Cameron or Nick Clegg announced that the UK government would quickly form a Canadian-style Star Chamber of Private Sector experts to make government more efficient. “The speed with which BP have dealt with the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico should be a lesson to us all” he shouted over rapturous applause from the Daily Mail readers.

After the speech James Kirk, a Daily Mail reader from Penge said “finally we have a government with Common Sense. It’s about time those scroungers in the North stopped taking out of the taxpayer’s pocket. If they want health care they should cash in some of their investments to pay for it like I do.”

“At last we've got a proper English government that we can look up to instead of all those fucking Jocks.”

A hommage of sorts to the Daily Mash

The 75kg Mobile Phone

What does your mobile phone say about you? Is it the stylish, hot, latest touch-screen PDA model or do you cringe with embarrassment when forced to answer in public your three year old brick that’s held together with parcel tape and still plays that factory ringtone because you never figured out how to change it? Or do you not cringe with embarrassment? Do you wear your parcel tape and tinkly ring tone with pride, a sign that you are apart from the herd; that you know that all phones are, at bottom, just phones.

Mobile phones are slimmer and lighter than ever before, and yet every mobile phone weighs a whopping 75kg. That’s 165lbs in Roman numerals. How can we possibly carry this sort of burden around with us every day?

Every product we buy has what is known in the naturally lit corridors of eco-world as an "ecological rucksack", the amount of waste generated in producing one unit of a product. According to the guide The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) the manufacture of a computer uses up nearly 1,500 kg of resources, a laptop 400 kg, and a mobile phone 75 kg. Add together all the mobile phones you've ever owned for an even more impressive figure!

That chic new upgrade has just used up 75kg of resources; some of them rare, some hazardous, and many extracted in countries where labour conditions are suspect and environmental degradation unpoliced. Did we really need that new phone, or did we just want it... really, really badly? Maybe the upgrade was just part of the contract and our provider was almost threatening to take us to court if we didn’t upgrade (know the feeling)? This is why, up against global marketing and the need of business to keep selling us stuff, knitting our own shopping bags doesn’t even begin to cut it when it comes to making a difference to our environment. One decision to NOT upgrade our mobile phone and we have, at a stroke, performed the equivalent of a year’s domestic recycling, a lifetime’s reusable bag carrying or probably a thousand years’ worth of “not printing out this blog”.

This is the nub of the Envirobitch argument. The global capitalist system works by selling us stuff. In order to sustain itself it must sell us more the following year, and the year after that. The mobile phone market is an obvious example of how we are sold and sold again more or less the same product. There have been useful developments such as SMS, but many other extras are more about creating the want than fulfilling any real need. I know… I’m back to wants and needs again, but if we’re really serious about tackling climate change, helping the environment or whatever we want to call it, we could do worse than look at our purchasing decisions. Not the “shall I stump up the extra for the conscience-salving so-called-green version” buying decision, but the “do I really need that” non-buying decision. To buy nothing is also a choice.

Sure, we can recycle our “old” mobile phone, and that’ll go a small way to offsetting the impact of our decision, but it won’t stop the demand that encourages the manufacture of more phones. And hey, if we hadn't ordered the new phone in the first place, there'd be no impact to offset. Come to that we can recycle the box it comes in too… but we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that compensates in any way for our decision to buy.

So, before we “upgrade” our perfectly functional phone (to one with more stuff we’ll use approximately once, and a shorter battery life) we should consider just why we reckon we need it. Remember, even if your phone is old, even if it's not one of a range of fashion colours, even if the ring tone is something by 50 Cent that your teenage son installed and you've no idea how to remove it, we still love you, okay?

A few folks need the functionality of a Blackberry in order to do their jobs (although how their job has been shaped by this technology in the first place is worthy of another post at some point), but most of us don't, even if we're pretending to ourselves that we do so that we can feel like a captain of industry with all that control at our fingertips. If you want a new phone because you have a lurking desire to place it conspicuously on the table in the pub next to your BMW key ring; if you think the polyphonic ringtone’s a conversation starter; or that folks on the tram will be envious or impressed, you need to ask yourself some serious questions, and they’re not environmental ones.

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If you suffer from insomnia, or you're an enviro-nerd have a browse through The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) for more information.