Despite the relative obscurity of the brand, Idm has been around longer than you think too. It’s never easy pinpointing the exact beginning of any genre of course, but the generally referenced milestones you’ll need to know are; Warp’s artificial intelligent vol.1, Afx’s Analogue Bubblebath series & Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and Autechre’s Amber LP.
On the face of it a pretty disparate selection of records, but its their shared aversion to repetition and loose way with musical structure that prevents them from being just another list of unrelated albums.
Which isn’t to imply that Idm is all rule book burning and tokenistic subversion. Polyrhythmic experimentation might just be a fancy expression for playing out of time, but in Idm there often is a method to the seemingly chaotic madness, meaningful patterns to be found in the random glitches and collapsing waveforms.

Either way the ongoing murmurings of ‘pretentious anti-music’ ‘unlistenable sophistry’ still seem inordinately hard to shake off.
Surprising since Idm has always tethered itself to quite a strict set of musical rules, even if it does stray from its musical moorings its strength has always been in knowing when to return back to shore.
Infact it’s this carefuly balanced synergy between spontaneity and conformity which has in many ways made Idm the natural successor to Jazz. Modern Bebop for the socially invisible yet economically prominent home-listener market.
By doggedly raising the point “who said electronic music had to be danceable anyway?” to an unlikely mix of past-their-sell-by-date ravers and bookish young fogeys, Idm has done the close to impossible; carved its self out a cosy niche in an industry in which scraps of territory are regularly defended & attacked as sweeping plots of land.

The industry is of course a far less certain a place than it was ten years ago, times have changed, things have shifted.
Fortunately the Idm community seems to have survived the shakes and tremors of the ‘Internet revolution’ relatively bump-free.
Not just a case of catching the wind at the right time, artists and label owners within the scene were snapping into position and gearing up for the big change while most genres had barely even noticed that the paradigm was already shifting beneath them.
Amidst stuffy vinyl-bores & ardent purists attempting to boycott Internet downloads on an ever sliding back-heel, Idm has been a veritable model of progression in comparison.
Even going as far as to team up with ‘scurge of the music industry’ p2p program Soulseek – releasing music and promoting artists through their main website. If you cant beat them join them.

But while Idm has often placed itself at the front of the queue for new technological innovations and in most instances benefited, the latest serving of technological innovation has arguably placed Idm at the back of the creative line this time round.
With easy access to plugins such as dbglitch & livecut, Idm producers can now achieve those Afx glitches and Squarepusher stutters with next to no effort, turning music production into more of a creative indulgence than a creative struggle.

However in typical early bird fashion the Idm fraternity have responded to the artistic quandary just in time. Inter- genre cross synthesis is where it’s at now – the Dubstep osmosis of Boxcutter, the country ‘n’ glitch of Nik Jade, the multi-genre pilfery of Luke Vibert.
Cross pollination encouragingly seems to be working in both directions as well, channeling the spirit of Idm through marshal amps and fender telecasters, a new generation of bands weaned on electronica has emerged. Bringing Postrock to an ever growing audience of Edm defectors and baggage free young fans.
Together with the current trend of mixing & matching Idm with its nearest musical cousins, Postrock seems to add further confirmation to Idm’s sustainably potent life force. Just like the infinitely recyclable punk ethos that came before it, Idm has shown that it carries with it an implicit philosophy, an unspoken set of rituals that exists far beyond the music.
More of a transferable concept than a musical discipline, its not a case of where Idm is going, it’s a case of where its going to turn up next.

None of which is anything new, in fact the artworld’s appropriation of design has been something of an ongoing trend since the art boom of the mid 50s when the likes of Warhol and Lichtenstein first adopted design as their ‘cause célèbre’.
Despite the inherent problems of lifting commercial aesthetics for the purposes of self expression, in their defense it’s always been argued that this was all just good natured cultural philanthropy on their part- letting the ad men have their moment in the recessed spotlights.

Although tellingly we don’t remember the names of those forgotten few who originally designed the iconic Campbell soup ads, we only remember Warhol, chic Manhattan loft spaces, films shot on grainy super-8, and of course the throng of trannies.
While it could be argued by the cynic that the pop-art mob were simply exploiting designers for their own ends, we also shouldn’t forget that designers have never exactly been masters of self promotion either.

Design’s distinct lack of cultural cache might also be somewhat related to the symbols its adopted along the way. The ubiquitous cattle-stamp of disposable consumerism; ‘the barcode’ in particular has probably done damage than anything else when it comes to inauthenticating design.
With the aesthetics of design now inextricably linked with our low-end consumables design ‘the process’ starts to look a little past its cultural expiry date.
And when consumer faith in the cultured capabilities of design is this unsettled, only the discrete price tag of the gallery can hope to re-establish niche market appeal, design as sophisticated relic again – contrived exclusivity for the credulously rich.

There’s certainly never been a better time to trade in cultural security for insecure capitalists either. There’s a lot of money to be made in the ever expanding market of middleclass aspirations and design is practically begging to plucked off the assembly line.
Art is allowed to cannibalise and exploit design of course, that’s what art does, and design (in theory) has always had the opportunity to play art at its own game.
But advertising is still advertising, it only truly transcends itself once its peeled off the barcodes and pinned itself against the wall.
And that’s always been the rub for the ad-men, the peripheral language of commerce effectively swamps the main content; forever discrediting their creations as the real deal – art with a capital A.
Their work requires a higher grade of pushy marketing rhetoric if we’re to put aside our prejudices and take any of it seriously. You can use advertising to sell art, but if you want to sell advertising as art to us, that still takes the marketing expertise of an artist.

The art gallery is really just the twilight-zone when you actually think about it, nothing is what it seems and everyone walks around in a state of dazed confusion.

The contemporary gallery of course is a very different beast to the fine art institutions of the past, the contemporary gallery doesn’t really exist in order to display art, it exists in order to displace design.
Lifted from their natural habitats commercial objects are turned into de-commissioned relics ready for inspection, strangers to their past lives as objects of pure function.

But to be able to pull any of this off the gallery owner first has to adopt the interior designer’s flair for décor, each exhibit must exist in zen-like isolation – anchored in surgically anesthetised white space.
Every possible associative trigger, every conceivable motif of detracting unsophistication must be removed; freeing up the necessary conceptual space for disbelief to suspended itself within.
In this commercially-fumigated interior, the atmosphere should now be one of infinite plausibility, where objects of mass consumerism moonlight freely & undetected as self-knowing, cutting edge statements of intent.
Commercial associations should fail to thrive and cease to exist here, allowing new associations of sophistication to take root and germinate in their place.

It has to be set up this way of course because we have a natural blind spot for content, rarely if ever in fact do we engage with it directly.
As beings of highly evolved laziness we’re far happier referring to the context and simply outputting what ever it is we assume to be the appropriate response.
Hence objects in a sophisticated environment will invariably transform into objects of sophistication, and objects in a disreputable environment will seemingly take on the same dodgy qualities as their surroundings.
Context doesn’t just colour our perception it dictates the entire state of play, and the gallery is an expert in playing up to our hidden prejudices.

Of course none of this would work without that deferential pull on us; that inner voice whispering ”comply”, and just like Paul McKenna tells his ex-audience participants since gone mentally awol, you can’t complain because the illusion couldn’t have even occurred without your willing consent anyway.
And Perhaps we shouldn’t either, it is us after all who allows the gallery to play around inside our heads, set the terms and conditions, and then aesthetically bully us into a corner the moment we try and question any of it.
In psychobabble speak we’d be the‘facilitator’.

We know deep down of course that we haven’t really got any reason to allow ourselves to be intimidated into unquestioning cultural subservience, but we still do regardless.
Probably because the gallery is claws deep in heritage, and you can’t argue with heritage. And you certainly can’t argue with those indoctrinated but-don’t-they-know-it curators.
We’re far too secretly impressed by it all anyway, the convincing establishment bluster, the sense of something ‘cultured people’ do, the spectacle of a near-extinct brand of authoritarianism of the sort that makes us want to be part of it all before it’s cosigned to the annals of history for good.
And like all institutions with a past the gallery has instant walk-through access to our mental plumbing anyway, that dangerous way of absolving us of responsibility; getting us to relinquish our intellectual and moral sensibilities without us ever feeling like we’re personally risking anything.
It’s ok to enjoy a bit of tat in a 4×4 room because it’s just another Milgram experiment in which the authorities in badges will take the heat for anything that might come back to haunt you.
Turn up the dial and enjoy your human perversities.

What’s your Pleasure Mr.Cotton?

Beyond Mckennaesque slights of hand and subliminal manipulation, the gallery does admittedly provide a reasonably diverse range of services to a fairly broad set of people.
For the city high earners tired of sycophantic yes men and over pampered egos, the gallery offers the next level up in psycho-sexual masochism - Public humiliation at the hands of a civic dominatrix who’ll patronise you in front of your friends and then confuse you into buying something you’re not sure you understand let alone like.
And for those who never really had a ‘drugs phase’ or those that just cant afford risking their mental health by dabbling anymore, the gallery offers a reliably safe alternative to the garbled logic of the acid trip. Inconsequential objects become life changingly significant – nothing is too mundane to be rendered meaningful.
Even the Sunday papers lot get something out of it all; a trickling target of risiblity, perfect for when all the real news stories have dried up.
In fact going purely by first impressions the gallery seems to offer something for everyone, but there’s still something missing.

It can’t be a lack of virtues, because the public and private gallery has plenty of those - bringing public attention to life’s overlooked marvels, providing a decent respite from the knowingness (the bad kind) of the highstreet, offering an impervious sanctuary for those who burn with an inner weirdness that pop culture alone cannot tend to.

It would all work like a Swiss timepiece in fact were it not for the self-assuming slumber that seems to have become the gallery’s trademark disposition over the years; too quick to rely on the proceeded reputation, a little too eager to lull in the familiar comfort of those cemented hierarchies, the system has knitted itself into a never ending series of safety nets from within.
This postured laziness seems to have blighted the work ethic and cultural life cycle of both audience and contemporary artist alike. The artist works out early on in their career that the gallery itself can make their whole statement for them; exhibiting works that often wouldn’t even be recognisable as art outside the gallery space.
While the audience increasingly falls into the trap of expecting and depending on the gallery to define this whole art thing for them; waiting for the final gesture of appropriation before issuing aesthetic acceptance.

  All Hail the Monolith!

Like the student who can do critical thinking inside the class room but for some reason never outside, the gallery encourages domain-dependency from all angles; leaving aesthetic appreciation terminally context-bound to the exhibition space.
Non-withstanding the effect of context on our perception, i suspect that this is partly related to a primal vestige left over from the days when having a sloped head didn’t mark you out for social exclusion, and dinner was something you spent most of your time chasing.
We evolved to place value in the huge, the vista-spanning, the immovably present. Whatever posed a threat or conversely could be turned to your advantage looked down on you – never the other way round.
Predator or prey, Turner prize or mate. We want art that’s monolithic, that stares down at us from its perch; commanding the full breadth of its allotted space.
Art in small dimensions just doesn’t work for us, just like a ‘would be’ pint-sized leader, rightly or wrongly we just cant bring ourselves to respect it.
The knock on effect of all this on the world of design is that we end up placing little value on its efforts – magazines, webart, record sleeve designs, cd-cases all lose out from the constraints inherent within their respective formats.
Too small to effectively grab our attention, even if we do notice them we probably wouldn’t bother ascribing them any meaningful cultural value anyway. We’re comfortable with what we know, and that’s art as towering m-o-n-o-l-i-t-h.

Besides the more obvious problems of logistics and parking for the ‘just looking’ crowd and the huge headache of inflated prices for those who actually want their art waiting for them when they get home.
The central premise gone askew here is the assumption that the gallery should not only physically house art, but should act as a selective arbitrator of taste on our behalf.
In going along with this we can become tasteful connoisseurs of course, but only by default.
With most of thinking done for us, the gallery offers little more than a safe arena for pretend subversion, art appreciation with mouth guards and crash mats.
Nothing is truly challenged here because the dictum ‘anything is art’ only holds as long as you’re inside the gallery.
Once outside it’s business as usual, any notion of meaning beyond prescribed function collapses under the absence of any critical scrutiny; unmade beds are just something to sleep on, advertising is just there to sell and comicbooks exist solely for the entertainment of kids and stunted adults.
This near instantaneous revision of the gallery’s lesson is a great shame since gallery exhibits in their defense, do often have one very important point to make – everything no matter how seemingly incongruous has aesthetic merit, anything in theory can be beautiful.
But for those ideas to transcend the gallery space requires an effort on the part of the public to think beyond the artist and beyond the constraints of the exhibition space.
Solely challenging conventions of taste in an arena in which conventions don’t exist anyway is getting kitted out in speedos and goggles in order to shock the ‘unsuspecting’ public idling down at the local swimming baths.

Drawing upon equal measures of commitment and sheer bloody-mindedness, context & format respectively must be psychically exorcised and internally dissolved in order to fully revive content again.
Ostensibly since the only real difference between a Peter Saville sleeve design and an abstract wall-hanger is about three quarters of a metre each side and a 30 grand mark up, there’s as much money to be saved expanding your artistic horizons as there is cultural ground to be gained.
Although the beauty of design and highstreet illustration doesn’t simply lie in the financial savings incurred, it rests in the reassuring contentment that any value you ascribe it will never become muddled or mixed up with the value added on after by the market place.
Design is the real deal, art whenever you decide it to be.
It doesn’t need to be procured or hunted down either, the masterpieces of the supermarket shelves live on under your bed, in the draw, down beside the chair.
Rediscover your own junk, wipe off the dust, see past the format, look deep into the content and osmose. Just don’t go hanging any of it on the wall.

You can practically set your atomic-clock to the weekly column inches given over to the new self-elected officials of atheism these days.
The academics spearheading this new movement infact seem every bit as omni-present in the media as the monotheistic deity they can frequently be seen rallying against.

The crusaders of the nu-atheism are (pictured from left to right) Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Danniel Dannett, and Christopher Hitchens.

What I’m going to show here however is that their mandate extends far beyond simply upsetting a few apples in the theologist’s apple-cart.
This isn’t a movement solely preoccupied with it’s own righteous atheism. This is a re-emerging ‘scientific’ movement which has its ideological origins firmly rooted in the initial fits and starts of the enlightenment itself.

The enlightenment for those abit hazy on their history was a key scientific stage in which dogma was temporarily adopted in order to overturn the predominant trend of the day for all things superstitious and mystical.
It had to be this way of course; old truths and methods are rarely put to rest to make way for something which might or may lead us into a brighter future.
No, science had to be sold to the public as something wholly infallible, only then could the principle rights to the public consensus lay safe in the empiricist’s bosom.

Of course the problem is that mysticism is back in again – intelligent design in schools, creationist museums popping up in places we’ve never even heard of before, consensus polls which suggest a public that still quite fervently believes in ufos, esp and ghosts.
If mysticism is to be resigned to past, or at the very least downgraded to the harmless fun of over-the-table anecdotes. Then science is going to have to put rationalism on the back-burner and embrace the polarised dogma of the enlightenment once more.

Scientism Explained

Now i should probably explain what scientism is before anything else.

Scientism is what happens when you get large groups of scientifically-inclined men together who think in aching naive black and white terms.
If society then offers them up a sacrificial common enemy, then irrationality and dogmatic fervour is almost certainly guaranteed.

This is infact essentially all scientism is – dogmatic science, although more than that it’s an ideology which ruthlessly eschews all the ‘tedious fact-checking’ and ‘dull neutrality’ of the scientific method proper.
It’s Science minus the method with only the consensus itself left intact.
Science proper of course isnt anything like or approaching the gospel-empiricism of scientism in which belief precedes fact and confirmation bias frequently sets the tone for any sort of public discourse or enquiry.

‘there are no facts, just things which can’t (or haven’t yet) been falsified.’

That’s the sort of hard-worn nihilism a real scientist has to begrudgingly adopt in order to convincingly call him/herself a scientist.
The impressive self-sadism of the scientist doesn’t end there either.
The scientist (amateur and professional alike) is probably one of the slowest yet methodical creatures in the whole of the animal kingdom – piecing together the consensus over entire life-spans of pain-staking and unforgiving research.

Which is not to say that scientists aren’t risk takers.
Infact it’s an important but easy-to-forget point that the scientific facts we take for granted today, all without exception started out life as usually quite wild and risky speculations.
It has to be this way of course because speculation and hypothesis are the absolute bedrock of the scientific method.

But it’s this unremittingly murky, perpetually out of focus, proven-nor-disproven aspect of the scientific method that seems to be a continual source of consternation for the scientism lot.
For what ever reason they just can’t seem to get to grips with the scientific fundamentals of speculation, hypothesis, and theorising.
It’s all abit of a lost concept on them, or perhaps just abit of an affront to their two-toned monochromatic view of the world which myopically only seems to allow for ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’.

No wonder then that in the hands of the scientism lobbyist science is routinely miscast as little more than the de facto religious doctrine of the day.
Scientific authority replaces religious authority on a purely ‘if you say so basis’.
Infact the entire process of career-risking speculation and hypothesis seems to be wilfully ‘forgotten about’ in favour of the pre-approved orthodoxy of the vindicated consensus.

This however sadly misses out on the whole point of what science actually is.

Science is in reality a huge revolving door of trial & error, with facts replacing fictions, fictions replacing facts, and data that leads us to believe in something one day and then just as suddenly instructs us to discount it the next.

If you cant treat science as anything, you definitely can’t afford to treat science as a sacred doctrine.
A doctrine is a closed-system, nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Its as true today as it is the day you die.
Science on the other hand is always moving, and usually headed in the direction directly away from your dearestly held sensibilities.
What science will ask you to believe in 50 years time would be unthinkable for you to even consider today.

Don’t Mention the ‘P’ Word

Yes *spooky-hands* I’m talking about ‘the paranormal’.

Scientismists absolutely hate, and I mean hate anything remotely paranormal, weird or seemingly mystical – ufos, ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyancy, bigfoot ad infinitum.
Its all bollocks to them in a very old fashioned ‘age of reason’ type of way, and they tend to arbitrarily group it all together as more or less the same thing – a threat to science and to reason.
And its not for any lack of proof either.
Infact if empiricism was part of their mandate they’d have to acknowledge that there’s technically more statistical evidence of telepathy than there is for parallel universes or dark matter (all of which they’ll dutifully accept anyway of course on purely authoritative terms).

But still the myth lingers that if any of these paranormal things were true (and it’s of course perfectly feasible that they might not) we’d have to re-write the entire laws of science and the universe itself.
Strangely, even a meagre amount of fact checking confirms that the universe is theoretically more than weird enough to accommodate something like clairvoyancy.
Time certainly isn’t the linear succession of events we phenomenally perceive it as.
Modern science infact seems to consistently confirm that if anything time is a uni-directional relative affair in which cause and effect can work either way, and in which time represents more of an ‘undivided whole’ than a directional flow of events.

On this basis, you have to wonder if the scientism naysayers actually bother with the fact-checking or empiricism that they purport to live by, or whether they instead simply allow ‘the truth’ to be measured against their dyed-in-the-wool sensibilities.

Going out on a limb, but hardly that far out; Id suggest that stauch anti-paranormalism is larged based in unwitting auto-association: Where the term paranormal ends up correlated and lumped-in with everything science once fought to over come – ‘superstition, irrationality, witches, divination, etc’

While ‘science’ lovingly coaxes all those pleasant sounding words from the back of the mind like – ‘rationality, logic, reason, truth’.
In this more common than you’d think game of free-association-science, words trigger long-held beliefs that are so ingrained you needn’t bother with anything as time-consuming and dry as ‘empirical research’.
Instead you need only let your sensibilities sort it out for you, while relying on a good old bit of confirmation bias if you need to ever justify your beliefs to the conscious part of your brain that demands you actually have ‘reasons’ for why you believe xyandz.

The Public Face of Scientism

So lets get to know the main culprits abit better.
As I brought to your attention in the first paragraph there’s the big guns of Richard Dawkins, Danniel Dennett, James Randi and Christopher Hitchens. Although other notables like Michael Shermer and Chris French also play a large part in this modern scientism crusade.

Now to give you an initial idea of where these chaps are located within the varied spectrum of scientific belief here’s a quote from the Harvard professor of philosophy and author of the book ‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon’ Dan Dennett.

” I have absolutely no doubt that the secular and scientific vision is right and deserves to be endorsed by everybody. ” – Daniel Dennett

No doubt whatsoever? No wonder Dennett doesn’t have any faith in a divine being, he’s donated it all to science.

Dawkin’s himself however makes his academic partner-in-crime Dennett look quite the moderate in comparison.
Authoring books with titles like ‘The God Delusion’ embossed in large jumpy-outy font; you barely even had to leaf through the book atall to guess at the central premise.

Infact Dawkins is quite the man on a mission these days, as I write this Dawkin’s has just put out his new channel 4 series ‘the enemies of reason’. Which he proports will help guide people to “changing their consciousness”.
In this he will lay his sights on everything within the broad realm of the unexplained and set out to prove that it’s all just another form of wish fulfilment for the religious and innately credulous.
However while this all sounds vaugely reasonble on paper there’s a two-fold danger in this – Dawkins doesn’t really want you to understand the process of science so you can join the dots for yourself and make the informed choice.
He just doesn’t want you to believe in anything that exists outside of it, which from what I can make out includes almost anything you care to imagine.

This is memetic reduction over meme induction; Dawkins isn’t interested in adding to your selective pool of knowledge, he simply wants to prune you abit and kindly relieve you of your intellectual falsehoods.
Which to a limited extent is fine, only this hurried removal job isn’t likely to enlighten, without the scientific method or the process of empiricism ever explained, all this is likely to do is breed a new generation of scientismists who believe science is the way forward and yet can’t even begin to explain why.

While Dawkins is out and about debunking religion and anything anything seemingly ‘anti-science’. James ‘the amazing’ Randi in a plume of smoke has materialised onto the scientism circuit as the new self-appointed chief debunkee of the telepathic and ‘paranormal’

If you’re not aware of who Randi is by the way, its worth pointing out he isn’t infact a scientist himself (small detail) he’s just been partially adopted as one by elements within and outside of the scientific community for making the right noises.

By trade I’m told he was originally one of those top-hat and tails magicians that society’s fickle whims have since grown a wee bit too sophisticated for.
All harmless fun, except during the course of his extended career hiatus Randi’s managed to convince himself hes a qualified scientist fit to design controlled experiments.
This has culminated in the creation of the million dollar challenge, which in it’s current guise looks like this.
http://www.randi.org/research/challenge.html.

It’s also worth mentioning that the outspoken atheist, anti ‘woo-woo’, and author of “God is not Great” Christopher Hitchens is also the underwriter of this challenge. Proving that the authors of the nu-atheism have interests far beyond whatever it is joe-bloggs chooses to say a silent prayer to before bed.

Now if you didn’t look at the site, the basic idea of Randi’s challenge is that if you have some sort of ‘supernatural’ mental ability, you can contact Randi who will then screen you as a potential applicant before putting you forward for his show-trail.
If you do manage to achieve the impossible and prove the existence of your ability to a man who’s staked both reputation and hard cash on ESP being arse-gravy, then he is in theory duty bound to hand over a million dollars.

Dawkin’s had this to say about Randi and his challenge

‘’Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe.’’ – Richard Dawkins

What’s jaw-dropping about this statement is that James Randi isn’t actually a scientist; or even a qualified psychologist.
So its hard to work out how Dawkins has spontaneously decided this test can be anywhere close to what would usually pass for science.
Apparently though, anything is science and anyone can be a scientist when they’re out there getting their hands dirty -confirming your biases on your behalf.

The great letdown here of course is that this is the precisely the kind of personal belief and invasive whimsy that scientists have struggled so hard to painstakingly remove from research over decades and decades of experimentation.

And yet in one deft hand Randi has introduced it all back again; putting himself in position of losing both reputation and hard cash if the experiment doesn’t go his way.
Which by any interpretation of empiricism i’d think takes a huge steamy piss over the whole notion of it.
Randi isn’t worried about losing the challenge though, he gets to screen anyone who wants to take his challenge (no I’m not making this up) which is sort of like putting the pope in charge of investigating pedophilia in the catholic church.

Interestingly, no proper qualified scientist has ever set up one of these challenges which should tell you something. Fringe Evangelic Christians have though which should also tell you something.
Dr.Hovind has a huge wad for you if you can prove the theory of evolution to the satisfaction of his strange criteria.
http://www.drdino.com

Do all dogmatic minds (even ones with diametrically opposed beliefs) think alike?
If Randi and Dr.Hovind are anything to go by, im pretty convinced that they do.

All Paths Lead to CSICOP

So far qualified scientists have rightly steered clear of these sorts of ‘experiments’.
Id suspect because they probably believe as I do that these sorts of things aren’t science, they’re publicity stunts designed to imply the non-existence of phenomena via the looming spectre of an ‘unclaimed prize’.
However one of Randi’s more rational friends at the CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) has spoken out against his divisive methods.

Dennis Rawlins slammed the Randi challenge and described Randi as unfairly behaving as “policeman, judge and jury”.

However this rare outburst of rationalism seems to be the exception to the rule, the organisation has never really attempted disguise the fact that it’s little more than an extension or front for the scientism movement, or as they would probably prefer to be known ‘champions of reason’.

This in itself wouldn’t be a worry if CSICOP didn’t have their sticky fingers in so many influential pies.
CSICOP are the umbrella organisation for such publications as the Skeptical Inquirer and skepticism websites like skepdic.
And in their own modest words are” the defenders of the Enlightenment”, so we can see already why Dawkins is onboard then.
Ah I didn’t mention that did I, yes CSICOP is a veritable who’s who of modern scientism – Dennett, Rhandi, Dawkins and tv-rent-a-skeptic Chris French are all denizens of this tight-knit fundi cabal.

Having all these strong-viewed fundamentalists onboard certainly raises the issue of impartiality and hidden interests, but being men of reason they should still be immune to experimental bias surely?
Sadly it would seem not, Randi himself has been publicly quoted as saying

“There’s no reality to psychic phenomena, nor to reincarnation, other than the conviction of some incautious or seriously deluded individuals who can attract publishers who know the naivety of the book market“ – James Randi

Lee Nisbet the Executive Director of CSICOP isn’t shy about exposing his biases for all and sundry to see either.

“[Belief in the paranormal is] a very dangerous phenomenon. Dangerous to science, dangerous to the basic fabric of our society…..We feel it is the duty of the scientific community to show that these beliefs are utterly screwball.” -Lee Nisbet

Hmm that doesn’t really sound like a sensible jumping off point for unbiased critical research and honest skeptical enquiry.
In fact it sounds like CCICOP has already made up their minds about whats true and what isn’t, making empiricism a mere trivial after-thought.
With this in mind the impartiality of their publications has to be seriously questioned.
Oh did I mention Nisbet isn’t a scientist either? Well hes not.
CSICOP did have a go at science once though, they investigated the claims of an astrologer called Michel Gauquelin – the evidence panned out in his favour and as a resort factions within CSICOP attempted to cover it up resulting in several members to resign in disgust.
Infact the whole thing was such a huge fuck-up that they never attempted anything like it again.

The New Skeptics

Nisbet and the CSICOP organisation represent the archetypal pseudo-skeptic I made somewhat implicit in the title heading.
You’ll probably know a pseudo-skeptic yourself by the way, even if you don’t think you do, they’re never that far-afield.
Theyre the people at parties who always intone when the conversation turns to the paranormal “well I have to say, I’m a huuuge skeptic actually”.
Which they’re not of course, they’re selective-skeptics.

I.e. people who only ever get skeptical about things like astrology, tarot cards, or ghosts; but never bother getting skeptical about things like black holes, m-theory, or dark matter, because that’s all proper (probably).
Although to even say they’re skeptical about ghosts or tarot readings is probably abit of a stretch, like most of the CSICOP members they just ‘don’t believe in it’.

Which is absolutely fine with me, there’s lots of things I don’t believe in too, but these convictions of disbelief are rarely based in any kind of skepticism or rational process. Not believing in things doesn’t necessarily infer critical thought.

CSICOP and its offshoot Skeptical Inquirer and web offshoot skeptic.com have infact forever altered the general public’s idea of what skepticism means via their endless stream of one sided ‘paranormal debunkings’.
Skepticism, which was once a critical tool in the philosopher’s and scientist’s mental arsenal, primarily used for testing the gross aggregate of human knowledge and experience (even your own existence) is now forever associated with people simply snorting at the paranormal.
Although this doesn’t seem to particularly bother the members of CSICOP, their scientism mandate seems to be not so much to enlighten, but to simply steer people clear of the paranormal at any cost.

Skepticism for the chaps at CSICOP then seems to be a kind of inverted confirmation bias, “I’ll believe it when i see it” is replaced with “I’ll see it when i believe it”

If you fancy checking up on exactly what I mean by the way, feel free to visit
www.skeptic.com.
You’ll quickly see there’s an echo-less void right at the intellectual heart of skeptic.com.
Plenty of fluff about crop-circles and homeopathy of course, but scant little if anything atall on the bewildering range of unconfirmed and untested theories and hypotheses raging within the scientific hierarchy.
It seems in practice that the writers and editors at skeptic.com only seem comfortable investigating things like crop-circles and telepathy.
Sacred-science just isn’t fair game in this weird pick ‘n’ mix buffet of scientific self-service.

Send in the Clowns

The big academic players of course have their faithful co-horts within the wider public media as well.
you might know some of these as Derren Brown, Ricky Gervias, and Christopher Brookmyre.
Now I’m not suggesting for a minute that Dawkins sits stroking some strange specimen of evolutionary importance in a wood-paneled study somewhere in Surrey; sending out his media-capos to get the public on message.
The point is, vested interests work at all levels of society. Dogma isn’t like the high-society lady seeking ‘professionals only’ in the personal columns.
Dogma doesn’t care what you do or what your income bracket is, she’ll have abit of anything.
And the science fundis come in all shapes and sizes, figuratively and literally.

Derren certainly isn’t shy about his scientific absolutism and distaste for anything outside of consensus.
Just like the founder of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer he’s also a reformed theist, who incidentally tend to make up the bulk of evangelic atheists and the scientific hardliners.
I suppose this works on a similar principle to outspoken reformed smokers, who always seem to make the most overwhelmingly militant ‘anti-smokers’ you could possibly hope not to meet.

Gervais does a similar line in scientism and pulpit atheism.
In his podcast he plays the man of scientific reason to Karl Pilkington’s credulous stooge who believes in everything silly, weird and irrational.
Misrepresented science wins the weekly battle with Gervais as the dogmatic victor and the round-headed Manc routinely cast as the superstitious oaf.

The greats of scientism have clearly left an impressionable mark
Especially on the novelist Christopher Brookmyre who recently did a BBC interview in which he both promoted his new book while simultaneously lamenting the public and their naivety for even taking some much as serious side-ways glance at the paranormal.

His new book – ‘attack of the unsinkable rubber ducks’ even has a prefaced dedication to the magician James Randi, for all his valiant efforts in debunking the world of mentalism.

Exactly how far reaching and influential the scientism movement will prove to be in the next decade will be remain to be seem, however it’s clearly already reaching a lot of successful celebs eager to endorse the rhetoric and spread the word.

Scientism Disrobed

Scientism then, as I hope I’ve shown in this article, is a far more broad and far-reaching movement than the relatively small radical-atheism movement that other writers have tended to paint it in as.
This isn’t simply about atheism. This is scientific fundamentalism which embraces the current trends of science but stubbornly refuses to embrace the actual methods. All the while actively seeking to spread its influence through both private organisations and publications.
In taking this approach the scientism ilk have reduced the entire process of intellectual enquiry down to an over-simplified binary choice between reason and superstition.

You’re either a credulous newager/theist who’ll believe in any old hokum or you can take the path of the arch-materialist unable to even consider anything outside of current scientific fashion.
And this do-or-die schism seems to have worked for a lot of people, regardless of what I may think either way.
Perhaps the great public could be forgiven for falling in with the wrong crowd and allowing themselves to be lead astray.
However its hard to forgive the academics and thinkers for leading them down that path in the first place.
Educated minds should know better, and an encroaching climate of religious fundamentalism certainly doesn’t provide the excuse to hang the scientific method out to dry.
Do that and you run the risk of creating as society just as ignorant as the one that preceded it, they might be on your side, but they certainly wont be able to explain why.

So in place of what would have been today’s over wrought article on the break down of communication in cyberspace (which you wouldn’t have enjoyed anyway) here’s a picture i came across by a bloke called John Gabriel who’s going to do all the talking for me…

Confidence’s never really gone out of fashion, maintaining a steady position somewhere between intelligence and beauty in nature’s global marketplace.
No one seems to know much about it either – how it works, or even why it eludes some of us yet can’t keep it’s hands off those lucky few.
Beyond the one-way determinist arguments of genetics and environment, I’ll try and address the former (and conveniently far easier) question of ‘how’.

For the purpose of this article I’m going to take confidence as a quality of behaviour and divvy it up into two separate camps.
One I’m going to call ‘faith-based confidence’ and the other I’m going to call ‘experience-based confidence’.
For brevity’s sake, I’m going to refer to people who have faith-based confidence as ‘fbs’ and those that have experience-based confidence ‘ebs’.

Of Bluff and Bluster

Confidence is the full-beam projection of self, not necessarily the ‘truest’ reflection of self or even the most deceitful. But the self in full-engagement with, and in command of its audience.
When self-doubt is extracted from the mind, confidence can be romantically thought of as the hide-tide scum left around the edges of the human psyche.

Where the confident tend to diverge (hence my binary categorisation) is in the way in which they acquire and distribute their sense of self.
The fbs (as their name suggests) are those beings that walk among us who seem to radiate natural confidence, confidence itself is an article of faith for the fbs.
Their ever-present conviction projects an unshifting belief in their ability to preform, remain calm, and cope regardless of the situation or circumstance – they have ‘faith based confidence’.

The ebs on the other hand base their self-assurity on experience.
Their confidence isn’t so much a natural ‘state of mind’ as with the fbs. Rather it’s an intellectual position held about their own abilities and successes which their personality then submits in to others as a carefully regulated mixture of doubt & conviction – they have ‘experience based confidence’.

To those with eb confidence of course, the fbs are one of nature’s most strange and puzzling enigmas.
If you have eb confidence, you’ll know by the way because you will at some point or another have experienced that rising sense of confusion and disbelief upon encountering a child or teenager with more apparent confidence than yourself.

For an eb this just doesn’t make sense – the child hasn’t had to endure, hasn’t had to pass those essential rites of passages necessary to claim true personhood, probably haven’t even been in a fight or seen any serious action (not that you have either but that’s besides the point).
If experience dictates confidence then by rights it shouldn’t be physically possible for a child to have more confidence than that of an (eb) adult.

However fbs don’t work like that, confidence for them isnt something attained by continually subjecting themselves to an endless stream of situations which promise to either validate or invalidate their sense of worth and human capabilities.
Whether you or I like it or not, the fb simply doesn’t need social permission to feel good about themselves.

And as long as the fb never questions the proportionality of their own confidence, they can remain firmly confident even in situations in which they realistically, have no real reason to assume a sense of self-assurity at all.
This of course is both a good and bad thing – never addressing your own capabilities can output a startling level of self-belief which can propel you to some seriously lofty positions of power and authority that most only get to dream of.
Fbs are able to pull off these feats of superhuman inner-conviction simply because they never base their actions upon empirical evidence.
And in the lack of any evidence either way they seem to have a pretty consistent habit of defaulting to the assumption that they will be ‘absolutely fine’ what ever the situation.
(You can read that as either profound optimism or total lunacy at your own discretion.)

As with any sort of faith-based lifestyle, delusion has to at the very least be ear-marked as a potential suspect in belief ‘s fearless escapades.
Delusion in fact is hinted at quite strongly in the behaviour of the fb. In practice this can equate to the fb vastly over-estimating their own abilities in either physically dangerous or socially critical situations.
In the very worst case scenario; where the fb partakes in sports or athletic pursuits far beyond their actual abilities, this can lead to lifelong physical injury or even death.

Even when not directly threatening their physical livelihood the fb can seriously threaten their mental livelihood – risking exclusion and derision by thrusting themselves into highly skilled social situations where braggadocio and a abit of can-do-swagger just won’t cut it alone.

The faith-based confidence of the ‘fbs’ isn’t always completely without foundation however.
A lot of fbs are of course highly dynamic, capable and intelligent people.
Although the central point to remember is that the fb doest derive their confidence from these qualities themselves, they aren’t the direct source of their huff and bluff.

Unlike the eb the fb is confident in spite of their talents, not because of them – evidenced by the fact that fbs make just as confident (and incapable) small children as they do fully grown (and largely capable) adults.

In comparison confidence for the ebs is a far less guttural affair, for the eb confidence presents an eternal measurement problem that never seems to resolve itself.
The eb methodically measures confidence against experience after experience in every social situation imaginable, with the appropriate degree of confidence then tailored to the situation accordingly.

The eb just can never be completely sure what degree of situational experience is required for them to finally permit themselves to feel (and behave) confident within the situation they find themselves in.
Even when talking about a subject which he or she is practically an expert on – lets say late 80s Detroit house.
An eb will still feel wary speaking freely on the subject with another individual who also has a similar degree of knowledge about their pet topic.
This rule still holds even when it’s obviously apparent that the other person doesn’t have anywhere close to his or her own expertise in the given subject, the eb will still be prone to feelings of being a ‘fraud’ or of being ‘found out’.
To cover themselves the eb will usually only discuss a topic with unguarded self-confidence once they’ve sufficiently measured the breadth of their knowledge against that of those in their company; and subsequently assessed the likelihood of them being publicly contradicted as quite minimal.

This year’s confidence projections are…

If the fb’s danger is in getting themselves into situations they’re not really prepared for. The eb is in danger of over-preparation by constantly re-repeating the same well worn experiences over and over again to the point of psychic over-saturation.

The eb has to attain complete and total familiarity with a subject or situation for them to even begin to feel they have the ‘right’ to assume a confident disposition.
This could mean that as a public speaker, an eb would have to take part in dozens of public speeches in order to judge crowd response and their own perceived abilities against fellow public speakers.
Only upon satisfying their own standards would the eb then allow the full extent of their confidence to take the stage.

This could of course be seen as simple insecurity on the eb’s part, but on the other hand ebs could just have a peculiar sense of honesty when it comes to their self-presentation.

By direct contrast this can make the fb appear seemingly dishonest in their own form of self-presentation.
Although we shouldn’t be overly hard on the fbs; they don’t in practice have any sort of methodology to regulate their own confidence anyway.
Their confidence isn’t so much a conscious statement of their abilities as with the ebs, it’s a spontaneous transmission of their inner faith in who they are and what they can do.
It’s not measured or cross-referenced to anything, the only thing it communicates is their own self-belief, and it does this with 100% accuracy.
Both the eb and the fb are in fact as true to their methods and non-methods as each other.

As i said when I started out, the ‘how’ isn’t really that difficult, the ‘why’ however certainly is far more tricky a prospect-throwing up the old nature/nurture debate and bringing us back into the close-quarters arena of determinism and free-will again.

Although the ‘how’ still leaves room alot more room for discussion in its own right i think.
Are people who are shy simply located at the extreme end of the eb spectrum?
Are people who are arrogant just as likely to be extreme-end fbs?
Do my definitions count for anything outside my own head?

Well if you made it this far (and well done btw if you did, no really there’s a special badge for you on it’s way) then leave me a comment and let me know. = )

In fact if evolutional psychologists are to be believed the only reason we even have consciousness and phenomenal experiences in the first place is so we can effectively recognise and exploit the natural resources around us.
These days however (unless your name is Ray Mears) instead of using experience to exploit the available natural resources, we now spend the majority of our public and private lives plumbing the available artificial resources of tabulated and archived information – lacing daily experience with information we believe will give us the edge tomorrow.

As a species now forever hooked on perverting and stretching the capabilities of our own minds. We’re probably no different from the programmer ‘hacking’ the software or the musician ‘circuit-bending’ the instrument in order to realise new possibilities beyond the intended purpose.

The pioneer circuit bender Reed Ghazala’s philosophy of circuit bending can in fact be applied just as easily to our periodic data-mining as it can to the fringe art of diode and transistor swapping.
“The role of hardware hacking in EM is – evolution. It is the force of speculation upon constants, a survival tactic as well as a special poetry. Bending the norm equals progress, and that is life.”

In other words – he who sees the new possibility in the hardware takes the next leap in evolution.
And as a species we’ve been riding the momentum of that high-jump ever since we first learnt to use our vocal chords to express ideas.
The discovery that those same ideas didn’t even need to be orally passed on, but could simply be recorded and preserved in natural materials that we would have previously only thought to use for shelter or warmth, was a further leap into that evolutionary ascent.

In preserving our concepts and ideas we’ve in fact managed to turn a ‘natural’ physical resource into a psychic ‘artified’ one.
The resourcefulness of an inscribed stone tablet doesn’t lie in the material itself – as it once would have done. It lies in the codified information inscribed upon it.

The power rests in the words, or rather in your ability to re-encode those words onto the medium of raw human experience, this is the essence of ‘experience hijacking’.

Efficient Informers

As members of modern society we exploit our collectively constructed world of information in more or less the same way our ancestors did.
The only difference now of course is choice, or more specifically; the huge, seething, unrelenting amount of choice we now have at our frankly worn-out finger-tips.

Everyday we wake up and mentally call-up the phenomenal experience we managed to hijack the day before with  information we might have lifted from books, television, film or the internet.
We litter our own narrative past with clues to our potential future, always hoping we’ll be able to mentally locate the material in the years to come when a new problem presents itself and say – “i know what fits here!” And then masterfully select the appropriate ‘thought-shape’ from our psychic junkyard of tv-clips, magazine cuttings, and internet blog sites.
We’ve worked out the trick of experience and with the sort of adaptive ingenuity we love to boast about, managed to turn or ‘bend’ experience into a tool of our own specified learning.
We of course still have to play it natures way though – crowbaring knowledge into formats that our phenomenal experience will accept and digest as ‘reality’.

For instance, using the eye’s natural proclivity to dart around within a scene (microsaccades) we tend to place our invented symbols within (but rarely outside of) a shoulder’s width visual space – as you can see for yourself simply by opening the nearest magazine, comic, or book.
These carefully restricted parameters allow our eyes to comfortably move back and forth for extended periods of time without becoming tired or fatigued.
Similarly the pc monitor directly in front of you now, never usually any wider that the width of your shoulders; provides the dimensions most likely to transmit information to your neo-cortex without your mind or body rebelling against you or the artificial reality you present to it.

We always have to take into account our own physical and mental plumbing when engineering the format, like the circuit bender we only have a product of limited potential to tinker with, we can’t engineer from the ground up, at least not yet anyway.

We’ve conceived film & television in a similar fashion – taking into account the same constraints on experience that we had to acknowledge when inventing the parchment manuscript and more recent paper-back.
With film and television reality-scenes are recorded and played back at the frame rates and audible frequencies most likely for our brains to mistake for reality.
We can then use the tv’s talking heads as personal assistants to help us hijack our own databank of experience with useful (and admittedly sometimes useless) information.

The talking head is if anything a ‘format-translator’ – the presenter is plyed with information from the television producer in the form of the oldest sensory hoaxer – the written word.
The talking head then retro-engineers this information back to us in the even more familiar and ancient form of the human voice.

This translation of printed word into speech and non-verbal cues which goes right back in history to the Greek plays of Aeschylus. Id suspect is an unconscious admission that the information that carries itself most faithfully along the lines of ‘real experience’ is the information most likely to be digested and accepted.

For example, you don’t really remember the experience of reading a book, you only really remember the content you extracted from it.
While you can extract a hell of a lot of content from a book, you’re still relying on your own internalisation and visualisation of the words rather than an actual 3D experience, which incidently your brain is far more likely to adopt as a memorable ‘event’.
Books are still invaluable of course, it just comes down to how well you as individual can viscerally create those all important visual-scenes.

Being a better ‘bender’

J.Pryor knows all about subverting the visual mind, he’s discovered one of the most successful methods in recent times for tricking the senses into uptaking and recalling information.
Via a system called mnemonics it seems people can recall information much more effectively when using a process of ‘story line visualisation’ – i.e. memorising numbers in specific fonts and colours as opposed to simply memorising them as purely numeric, abstract entities – which our minds seem far less predisposed to.

While people like J. Pryor have created stark consensus-shifts in our cognitive understanding, its still very likely that we haven’t really explored the full limits of this class of knowledge.
For instance, associating an idea or ‘experiential scene’ with a smell might work wonders for our ability to recall; auto-association while we’re aware of it, is still a hugely untapped mental resource.
If we’re to evolve we need to continually seek and find new ways to spike our senses and piggy-bag information onto our daily experiences.

What ever the media or medium however we will always have to work within the limits that nature will allow, we can hijack her but we cant take the piss completely
I’ll give a perfect example of this.

The other day I over-ambitiously attempted to hijack my own experience – using my pc to play an audiobook on risk probability while coding a website amd while also chatting to a friend over msn.
Nature quickly let me know id reached the upper threshold limit of experience by giving me one of those sharp stabbing headaches behind the eyes that makes you want to swallow your own face.
Interestingly the audiobook i was listening to at the time re-counted the life of a scholar called Pierre Daniel Huet who was attempting his own (far more successful) experience-hijack.
Always aware of time and its constant procession away from his youth, he enlisted the help of a servant to follow him round during the day and read him extracts from the latest scholarly works while he performed mundane yet necessary tasks.
This way the chronic book-botherer could ‘read’ as many books as he felt his intellect required, even when the parts of his body usually quite necessary to reading were otherwise engaged.
For this academic, experience wasn’t just something to pepper with information from the human-well of knowledge. Experience was there to be brute-forced with as much data as the very laws of cosmos and social standing would allow.

I doff my hat to this true hijacker of experience, I wonder how he dealt with the headaches though

And ‘spam’ is just a sort of pre emptive get out clause in case i’m ever put in a position where I have to justify my unscrupulous online p.r. methods.
Its all in the title, so I cant be held responsible for anyone who gets miffed or offended, although since this is the internet i’m sure you’ll let me know if you do.

While diversity is key here, that doesn’t necessarily mean i’m going to have a bash at the red wines of southern California one week then launch myself into consumer cosmetics the next.
Culture in this instance denotes social theory, philosophy (yes people still do actually do that) and a great deal of me finding out exactly how far I can take things before getting called out on my own pseudery.
I should probably also say a few words about the header graphic at the top there, or at the very least apologise for it.
The tragedy is i probably spent more time agonising over that piece of shit than anything else.
At one point i almost considered one of those minimalist jobs where you cant actually make out what it is you’re looking at – some sort of artsy textual landscape of phosphorescent neon-tubes; which if you could only zoom out of you’d disappointingly realise was just Paul dannan’s arse lint.

As you can see though I didn’t do that at all, I opted out of sexy design aesthetics and opted in on the considerably harder (impossible?) task of trying to sum up ‘culture’ with a few hand pouched jpegs from google’s image search facility.

Of course the main problem with this design concept is that you’re ultimately condemning yourself to endless reoccurring doubts of having ‘left someone out’ or having put something in you probably shouldn’t have.
And at the critical point of construction there’s always that worry of descending rapidly into national geographic style ‘Ethno-collage’ territory before you even know what’s happened.
I really did consider buddying up the Maasai with some unsuspecting Tibetan monks at one point. Lucky though, ive seen the effect that self-congratulatory ethnic diversity murals can have on people closeup and I know its something that I’m just not morally capable of.
So this being the 21st century, chav replaces Tibetan monk, and Asimo is brought in to cover for old plate-lip.
Which is still probably a bit naff as an exercise in diversity, although on the plus side i doubt it’d get anywhere near the final design stages of a mid-90s Beniton board meeting, and so on that basis alone is probably as credible as it needs to be.

Er ok, seriously though why ‘culture’?

Because culture as well as being every writer’s never-ending ball of twine, is also one of those topics that’s just as interesting to talk about in its own right as it is to use in describing everything else.
Culture, just like getting flashed on the way home from work or finding out a relative enjoys the comedy of Jim Davidson, is always something that happens to other people.
You never actually think of you yourself as belonging to or being part of a culture, well you don’t do you?
Untill its actually pointed out to you, culture is never anything other than the over-processed tedium of your daily life.
In fact stopping to consider exactly which of your daily tasks and rituals might actually count as culture could quite easily leave you looking a unflattering shade of stupid.

Music is usually the first one people think about, then art, then museums (which you haven’t been to in years anyway) and then it starts to get a bit tricky.
Is reading the Sunday supplements with a bit of middle-brow radio going on in the background culture? Can eating a soggy breakfast in a depressing Midlands service station really be considered culture?
Well if anthropologists can be bothered to study the largely dull dietary habits and constitutions of far flung pre-civilised societies then its safe to say that by direct association they probably must be.
Of course it’s worth mentioning that the grub-eating tribesman watching his best friend and cousin dance around the fire on a particularly slow Sunday evening doesn’t think he’s engaging in anything cultural either, he’s just like you in that respect.

In fact if anything binds us together as human beings its our unified blind-spot and natural oblivion for our own culture.
Culture’s something we hardly ever experience directly, we experience it vicariously through cultural enablers and social surrogates.
The amount of our own culture that we’re actually aware of is probably comparable to the amount of our own internal organs that we could correctly name and place within our own body.
You cant get away with ‘cultural heritage’ either, i see what you’re trying to do there but it wont work.
Your cultural heritage is as faraway and distant a land as some unmapped region of the amazon, that’s not your culture at all.
And no to any Americans reading this, you cant cop-out and say you don’t have any culture to speak of anyway, it may be new and you may not like a great deal of it. But you have a country absolutely heaving with culture.
You’ve got so much culture in fact there isn’t a country in the western world which hasn’t displaced some of its own culture in order to make way for some of your own.

Culture-Club

One of the other great misconceptions about culture is that some have it, while others don’t.
Now you might be somewhat more artistically encyclopedic than the next man (or woman) but they’ve got culture too whether you like it or not.

Despite this obvious fact we still tend to think in the unshiftingly stubborn terms of ‘high culture/low culture’ or perhaps more accurately today - ‘high culture/popular culture’.
These days of course it’s pointless to think of culture as an exclusive private members club, culture isn’t a pursuit for the monied classes anymore (if it ever was).
The latest cultural transmissions are only as far away as a mouse click or semi-lucid prod of your tv remote.
Its not just that culture is more accessible now either, its that culture itself is more evenly distributed amongst the class and labour divisions than it’s ever been before.

Annoyingly (for a certain cross-section of society) this now makes it both impossible and pointless to accurately gauge who’s more ‘culturally switched on’ than the other.
In fact mentally indexing art movements and obscure Greek thinkers of the past could end up making you look distinctly uncultured compared to the 17 year old utilising his cheap mobile phone as a performance art prop to flow over some homemade beats while riding the subway home.

You see being a part-time scholar in the tragedies and triumphs of nations current and past means very little if you aren’t getting your hands dirty in the daily buzz and bustle of your own culture.
Which isn’t to say that you should eschew turner prize winners in favour of loitering yoots self-consciously reinvented as ‘art objects’.
The point is, culture can never be an ornament of the elite again.

Popularity or perhaps more accurately, ‘accesiblity’ doesn’t dictate the sharp decline in quality of content that it used to.
In fact culture that is ‘hard-to-accesss’ is more likely to be simply irrelevant or uninteresting, rather than a special secret kept amongst elites.

All this of course is largely thanks to the electronic medium i’m working in right now.
In an information age the where every self respecting westerner is ‘hooked up’ in some form or another; the whole idea of ‘high culture’ becomes the barking nonsense of a madman or the sweet delusion of someone who’s completely lost touch with their cultural bearings altogether – there’s no ‘height’ or ‘depth’ to culture because there’s no real dimensionality to it at all anymore.

Wikipedia, google, youtube, and the bloggers have all helped spread it thin right across the western hemisphere.
This ‘culture-smear’ in practice means that culture is now more of an all-you-can-eat buffet than a private lunch between guarded friends.

And i for one, will be going back up for seconds.