Category Archives: Blog

Blog

NASA debunks the 2012 Mayan apocalypse myth

Grand Jaguar pyramid - Tikal, GuatemalaNASA has taken a step into the rough-and-tumble world of conspiracy theory by posting a point-by-point debunking of the 2012 apocalypse meme, brought to public prominence by the recent movie based upon it [image by auntjojo]. You’ve got to admire the blunt certainty of it – here’s the first of the Q&As:

Q: Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
A: Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

(Personally I’d have worded that more carefully, just for the sake of covering my own back. Nothing bad will happen in 2012? Nothing at all?)

The 2012 thing has been kicking around for quite a long while, at least if you move in the right circles. I was a dedicated student of conspiracy theory and speculative archaeology for a long, long time (old habits die hard – I still admire these stories for their tenacity and narrative zing), and I first encountered the idea of 2012 as an Omega point for humanity in the writings of Terence McKenna, who had that date as the end-point of his “Timeline Zero” novelty theory… which reads kind of like a psychedelic/spiritual equivalent to the Technological Singularity theories of Vinge and Kurzweil, interestingly enough (and is well worth investigating if you have any interest in anthropology, cultural evolution, psychedelic experiences, or all three – start with Food of the Gods).

The end of the Mayan calendar’s Long Count has provided a convenient hook for a lot of other related theories and marginal occult weirdnesses, too… Graham Hancock suggested it as a link to some form of cyclic geological apocalypse (if I remember correctly… crustal slippage, magnetic field reversal, maybe some combo of those two and something else), and a number of the people obsessed by the famous Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull have glommed on to the calendar’s end date as a critical moment in future history (though some suggest it will be a “soft apocalypse”, a return of benevolent deities to the abandoned tribes of the Earth or somesuch).

Most damning of all for the 2012 theory is that the Mayans themselves tend to denounce it as complete bunk, not to mention an exploitative twisting of their traditional beliefs that is putting a lot of money into the pockets of entertainment companies but none into their own. Having read quite a few of them, I suspect many of the earlier occult/secret-history theorists were motivated more by genuine (if misguided) belief, but the recent band-wagon pile-on by Big Media is a different kettle of fish entirely – we all love a good End Of The World riff, after all, and with a well-known temporal hook like that, well, you’d be a fool to pass over it, right?

Or perhaps Hollywood knows the truth, and the 2012 movie is a cynical attempt to scrape a little more hard cash out of us all so that the Secret Masters can finish building their space ark and flee the planet in the company of Xenu and his rainbow panoply of space-deities. Which, come to think of it, perfectly explains why NASA are debunking the story: it’s a straight-faced double-bluff! HOW MANY OF YOU WILL BE SAVED, NASA? EH? HOW MANY OF YOUR RICHEST AND MOST POWERFUL EMPLOYEES WILL BE RESCUED IN THE FINAL DAYS, LEAVING THE REST OF US TO REAP THE ANGER OF THE UNSEATED COSMIC BALANCE AT THE END OF ALL TIME? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON THE GRASSY KNOLL? WHAT WAS THE SECRET THAT DROVE HOWARD HUGHES SO CRAZY THAT HE HAD TO BE POISONED INTO A STATE OF CATALEPTIC INCOMPREHENSION? WHY HAVE YOU NEVER DEBUNKED THE WORKS OF ERICH VON DANIKEN, EH?

Oh, hello, Doctor – I didn’t hear you come in! Is it the red pills today, or the green ones? Sometimes I lose track of the sequence, the colours can be so… distracting…

Blog

Brain-food: white hats, anti-hackers and post-modern political loyalty

1 Comment

By way of an experiment, I thought I’d round up a handful of links which made for interesting reading, but about which I felt no particular urge to editorialise (or waffle tangentially, if there’s any measurable difference between the two in my case). If you like the format, let me know in the comments and I’ll do more of them in future. Now, let’s see what we’ve got here…

  • Have you ever wondered why it is that the good guys always wear white? If so, MetaFilter has a comprehensive round-up of pieces about the psychological and/or neuroscientific roots of our association of blackness and whiteness with badness and goodness.
  • If you’ve ever wanted an insight to the world of the computer security professional, SlashDot points to an account by the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab about their recent beheading of the Ozdok botnet. Simultaneously fascinating in the manner of occult literature (e.g. full of bizarre words and phrases for which most of us have no context whatsoever) and mundane in the manner of a corporate progress report (it’s mainly lists of domain names and IP addresses), it’s an insight into the language and attitudes of a profession we largely ignore, and the sphere in which they work. Great research material for anyone writing a story featuring hackers and counter-hackers.
  • And if you’ve wondered about my curious and relentless obsession with charting the withering of the nation-state as the uppermost level of global political structure, the two minutes it will take you to read this post by John Robb will explain it more thoroughly and concisely than I’ve ever been able to do, despite coming to a similar (though much less elegantly formed) conclusion some number of years ago. Here’s the first half:

    Globalization is in the process of eviscerating traditional loyalties. In the 20th Century, loyalty to the nation-state (nationalism, often interwoven with ideology), was supreme. In today’s environment, a global marketplace is now the supreme power over the land. It has drained the power of nation-states to control their finances, borders, people, etc. Traditional ideologies and political solutions are in disarray as the fluctuating and often conflicting needs of the global marketplace override all other concerns. As a result, nation-states are finding it increasingly impossible to govern and the political goods they can deliver are being depleted.

So, there’s some brain-food for your Thursday – tuck in! Do let me know if you’d like to see more of these bite-sized morsels on Futurismic.

Blog

But is it art? Modern Warfare 2, computer games and morality

2 Comments

Modern Warfare 2 - box artSerendipity, yet again… Jonathan’s latest Blasphemous Geometries column on the moral dimension of modern computer game mechanics arrived in my inbox last weekend, and hence (unless he has contacts in the industry of which I am unaware), he’d have had no idea that this week would see a firestorm of controversy over a certain level in the newly released Modern Warfare 2 game. The level in question requires your character to inflitrate a terrorist group and, so as to maintain your cover story, participate in the shooting of innocent civilians; MetaFilter has a good round up of reviews and opinion pieces on the game, and the comment thread is full of interesting responses from both sides of the fence.

The predominant question seems to be whether this sort of gameplay can be considered “right” – yet another iteration of the “do computer games cause/encourage violence” debate, which itself rolled on from a similar public angst around the proliferation of graphic horror movies in the late eighties. There have been numerous surveys and research projects designed to accumulate evidence around this idea, but to the best of my knowledge there’s been nothing truly conclusive either way – though my instinct as a formerly rabid gamer (I don’t have the spare time to play often any more) suggests to me that computer games do no more to encourage violence than Saturday morning kid’s cartoons.

Indeed, it occurs to me that the rightness or wrongness of the “No Russian” level of Modern Warfare 2 – the hand-wringing over whether such a thing should be allowed to go on sale – is a false dilemma; the more pertinent question is that of what it says about the world in which it exists. Plenty of commentators are branding it tasteless, and I have a certain sympathy with that viewpoint – but there’s a lot of things out there that I consider tasteless, and I don’t believe that things should be made to go away just because I don’t approve of them. Censorship should start (and end) with your own finger on the off button, IMHO.

But thinking about the plot of the level (and of Modern Warfare 2 as a whole, from what I’ve been able to glean from reading reviews and opinion pieces about it) from a writer’s (and reader’s) point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense in the context of modern counter-terrorist narratives, with the result that it puts the player into a morally questionable situation that reflects the world beyond the game… though exactly how accurate that reflection may be is open to debate. Perhaps there is a valid argument to say that games like this might put ideas in people’s heads, and end up glorifying what they’re supposed to demonise (if there’s any real difference between those two words beyond one’s personal moral code), but I suspect that the sort of person who’d be encouraged to acts of random violence against innocent civilians by media of any sort is already psychologically predisposed to such an action. And if computer games are a nefarious way of seducing the impressionable with the power-trip of consequence-free violence, what then should we think about the United States Army, which has used the taxpayer-funded computer wargame America’s Army as a recruiting tool since 2002? Is it OK to encourage violence so long as it’s against the right targets?

[Related bonus item -did you see the article at Wired about the Libertarian-penned “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” web-based strategy game? If nothing else, that demonstrates amply that when people encode a political or ideological subtext into a game to the detriment of plausibility, the end results are invariably laughable. And that’s not a partisan statement, either; I’m pretty sure that even were the boot on the other political foot I’d be equally amused by (and disgusted at) the incredible crudity of the sermonising, which reeks of the same childish mudslinging that’s currently packing UK news venues as the incumbent Labour government enters its final earth-bound tailspin and the vultures of opportunism don their bibs.

But then last night I watched an excellent documentary on the history of the Berlin Wall, and found myself laughing at the crudity of the archive propaganda from both sides of the Iron Curtain… before I remembered that, to be effective, propaganda only needs to be slightly more sophisticated than the average media literacy of its target audience.]

Blog

Under the dome: the Winooski that wasn’t

5 Comments

Score one for internet serendipity, and another for news organisations republishing archive articles. Both SlashDot and architecture/design webzine Inhabitat.com ended up pointing toward the story of Winooski, Vermont, and the flirtation that city had during the last gasp of the seventies with the idea of encasing itself in a giant geodesic dome to protect itself from the snow-bound New England climate. Here’s the 1979 article from Time, when the idea was still freshly under consideration:

Tigan has no inkling yet of such details as whether the dome would be inflatable or rigid, what it would be made of, how air would be circulated, or even roughly how much it might cost. An artist’s rendering commissioned by the town shows a structure about 200 ft. high at its center (enough to clear the town’s tallest building, eleven stories high), covering a square mile of Winooski; it is transparent on its southern side, where there are also solar panels to catch the sun’s rays, and becomes gradually opaque on the northern exposure. The principal entry points are two half-buried tubes that would serve as the major cross streets. Travel inside the dome would be by electric cars or monorail—to avoid lethal accumulations of automobile exhaust.

And here’s a contemporary piece at H+ Magazine that digs up the whole story [and from where the copy of the concept drawing below has been borrowed; please contact for immediate take-down if required]:

Winooski dome concept drawing - John Anderson

Enthusiasts organized an International Dome Symposium, held in March 1980. Buckminster Fuller, then busy assisting in Brasilia, the planned capital city in Brazil that had been hacked out wholesale from the Amazonian jungle, flew in to express his enthusiasm. Fuller (naturally) proposed a structure of multiple geodesic domes, but in any case declared the engineering “not terribly difficult,” and pointed to already existing structures like large airport terminals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Fuller had built the “US Pavilion” at Expo Montreal in 1976 — three-fourths of a sphere consisting of 1900 molded, transparent Plexiglas panels, 200 feet high and 250 feet in diameter, covering 1.1 acres. Winooski’s dome would cover nearly the entire town, 800 times that area. He stressed that the biggest challenge was not keeping the dome up, but holding it down against the force of rising warm air.

It’s easy to look back and laugh at what seems to be a bout of naive and ludicrous old-school futurism… but is it really that crazy an idea? Surely we’ve got the architectural and engineering skills to be able to build such a structure by now, and cities like Winooski – which are likely to become even more harassed by the weather as a result of climate change and rising energy prices – might find there were few other palatable answers to the question of how to remain an economically viable place to live. Is it perhaps time to reconsider Bucky Fuller’s geodesic domes as a last resort in our stand-off with the environment?

Blog

White faces in the day labour queue

2 Comments

I clearly remember my first day travelling in Mexico, walking out from my hostel to check out the zocalo at the centre of El D.F. and catching sight of long rows of men stood by their open toolboxes, with little signs explaining what sort of work they’d do, and for how much money. I’d never seen people queuing for day labour before; I don’t know if it’s ever happened in the UK during my lifetime.

It’s a more common sight in the US, apparently, especially in cities with high densities of immigrants, legal or otherwise. And now in Las Vegas (and elsewhere) the immigrants are being joined by US-born citizens as the economy continues its slow grind through the low times [via GlobalGuerrillas]:

In the latest sign of the Las Vegas Valley’s economic free fall, U.S. citizens are starting to show up in the early mornings outside home improvement stores and plant nurseries across the Las Vegas Valley, jostling with illegal immigrants for a shot at a few hours of work.

Experts say the slow-starting but seemingly inexorable trend is occurring nationwide.

“It’s the equivalent of selling apples in the Great Depression,” said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

It’s grim news from an economic perspective… but there may be a positive outcome, depending on your attitude. While there’s every chance that competing with illegal immigrants for low-dollar work may exacerbate the resentment and racial tensions that certain talk-show hosts love to exploit, in some cases the reverse may occur – citizens brought low by the financial crisis coming to realise that immigrants are people just like them, in other words.

Bernabe said organizers came across one case where a local sheriff had been sending officers to answer complaints about day laborers and then found one day that the sheriff’s neighbor, a citizen, was among them. Police in that area have been less likely to harass laborers since then, he said. These events will occur more, changing people’s attitudes in the process, he said.

“For a long time, people have looked at day laborers and said, ‘The problem is the immigrants.’ Now the economy is changing. Now people may see it’s a problem of the labor market, of the rights of workers,” Bernabe said.

Buchanan, meanwhile, looks forward to a future that includes a steady job and an apartment. “I’m trying to dig my way out of this,” he said. When he does, however, he sees himself as a changed man.

“Before, I was part of the majority. Now I’m part of the minority … I’m not going to forget this. I’m not going to forget any of this.”

It’d be ironic if the recession helped people to realise that the divide that really matters isn’t the border lines drawn on a map, but the invisible one drawn between the poor and the rich – the one that cuts across nationality and ethnicity in every country on the planet. It’d be ironic, but it’d also be the best thing that the recession achieved. What social changes might we see in a country where the poor refuse to be divided and conquered by the rhetoric of the rich? Would the atmosphere of brotherhood last, or would the first signs of recovery herald a return to the status quo?