The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant.

There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement  - though I’m not sure if this was a compliment or not – and that without the scandal of police brutality (or inevitability, one might say) it would have already died down and disappeared.

Either way, it’s happening: people are occupying Wall Street, and demanding… well, just some basic justice. Teachers and nurses and factory workers didn’t run up toxic debts – gambles, effectively – that have cost the world economy trillions of dollars and meant spending on services for those less well off has had to be cut. No, that was those in the banking sector. And their reward? Government bail out money, and Christmas bonuses. Privatised profits and nationalised losses. Pretty damned perfect.

If you’ve visited here at all in the past couple of months you’ll know that I’m working on a book on piracy, and why we continue to be fascinated with these maritime thieves. Well, it’s proving to be utterly absorbing, and I’m genuinely excited about how it’s turning out. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a niche area and I don’t expect it to sell hugely – but I do believe that for those out there undertaking activism like Occupy Wall Street, it may contain some very useful stuff.

Here’s the thesis: pirates emerge whenever what has been traditionally in ‘the commons’ becomes enclosed for private benefit. Those who turn pirate are not the powerful, nor the influential. They are the oppressed, those who have simply had enough and have no more to lose. Having been stripped of everything by an unjust system, they decide that they might as well live a ‘short but merry life’ for a while, because they’re dead either way.

This ambivalent affinity with death is important. Pirates sailed under ‘the jolly roger’ – a flag that did not signify so much that they were bearers of death to others, but that they represented the dead, the discarded, the rejected themselves. Because they were already ‘dead’ they had nothing to lose. Now here’s the thing: we tend to think of pirates as thieves, but after the reading I’ve done, I think it’s more accurate to say that their thievery was simply them getting on with what they’d always done, but for their own good, rather than that of the system. Moreover, they did so in a way that was more equitable (their code demanded that profits were shared equally) and more inclusive (they were multicultural, multiethnic and multifaith.)

This is what ended up scaring the sh*t out of the emerging capitalist empires of Spain and England: here were a strata of people who simply didn’t care. They were living ‘off the map’ and outside of the ethical code that reinforced class structures and kept the money flowing to the wealthy princes and merchants, even though the ships – the engines of this new global economy – were run entirely by brutalised sailors.

So here’s my tuppence-worth for those out in Wall Street, or Greece, or wherever:

1. Ask yourselves this: how much do you still have to lose?
2. Pirating the bankers will not necessarily mean thieving from them. It will certainly mean carrying on what you do best, but in an economic loop that is more equitable, and better connected to ‘the commons.’ The transition towns movement has a lot of good to say on this.
3. Appreciate that your occupation is a TAZ. It will meet resistance, and it will be broken, but while it holds you should use the liberated space to create and build social and physical networks that will survive and thrive and regroup once the inevitable enforced clearance comes.
4. History is with you. But it says this: you won’t win this round, and you’ll be portrayed as losers. It will take time, but good things will come – not at first from above, but among one another.

I ended up on the 7th floor of a multi-story car park in Peckham this evening, at an event hosted by Bold Tendencies, which looked at the car parks from an architectural and anthropological point of view.

One contributor made the point that the problem of car parking only became such as Henry Ford developed his production line techniques to make the Model T: there were suddenly so many of the damn things coming out of the factory gates every day that it became a nightmare working out where to put them all.

I think this throws up some interesting points. Firstly, if I say I’m going to a park, there’s an inherent idea of freedom and movement within a city context. A park is an open space, where we have a wider and more open horizon. But a car park is precisely opposite to this. Cars are sold to us as objects that give us masses of freedom – think of all the ads with uncluttered open roads – and yet in a car park we find them castrated and motionless: the car park is a place to store objects that are redundant. The ceilings are low and dark, the space reduced in order to pack more vehicles in.

We mostly use car parks when we travel in to city centres for shopping. So the car park – this problem space created by the economics of mass production, is the place where we go in order to consume and transport back more and more stuff, all of which has been sold to us via the same message that it will bring us more freedom and self-worth.

I think this is why car parks, no matter how well dressed up, are inherently depressing places: they are where the consumer dream hits the concrete buffers. All these things that have promised so much, transported in cars that cocoon us in leather and conditioned air… and here we are on level 4, underground, trying to find the right change, the smell of piss burning in the stairwell.

I’ve been away for a couple of days, so haven’t posted again on the aftermath of the night of looting that gripped various locations in London, and then spread to other cities in the UK. But in the mean time I’ve faced some criticism for my previous post for a) appearing to back away from the piracy ideas I’ve been explaining that I’m working on and b) for not being prepared to admit that these ‘riots’ are a genuine political act on the part of London’s poor.

I want to deal with the second part first. Some observers have wanted to put forward a thesis that these riots represent a rising up of a British underclass against a dominant culture that has grown in them material desires, while refusing to give them fair access to wealth to fulfil these desires. Actually, I do believe that a riot of this sort is possible in London, it’s just that I don’t accept that this was it. Why? Because a careful examination of the people involved in the disturbances and the places in which they occurred just doesn’t stack up to allow that. Yes, I’d love it to be really simple and to follow some historical precedent, or some careful theory about class violence, and yes, it is possible that there were pockets of this occurring, but the vast majority of people involved in these disturbances were not there to engage in political violence. As I’ve said before, they were there for the spectacle.

Now, it may be that the spectacle is itself something we need to analyse and think about, and that a society which has a large number of potentially bored and uninspired young people may be a tinderbox for this kind of looting, but if so we have to reject the idea that this is the poor of London rising up. It isn’t.

The Guardian have posted a map of London, coloured by degree of deprivation, and over-layed the areas of disturbance – asking the question if there is correlation between the two. It would be tempting to say that there is a strong correlation, but this is highly problematic, because we know that over 70% of those arrested were arrested in a different postcode from where they lived. People travelled to these places. The map also gives a false impression because it doesn’t grade the severity of incident in each place. Remember: some of the major centres of disturbance were Clapham Junction, Ealing Broadway, Croydon – none of which could be described as deprived areas.

Yes, poverty and alienation was and is a factor, but, as I said in the last post, it’s facile to suggest that this was a riotous uprising of the poor. It doesn’t add up.

Secondly, and connectedly, none of this has made me reconsider the work on piracy that I have been doing. If this were a riot with the poor rising up against a system that was blocking their access to the economic freedoms that others enjoy, I’d stand up and say that this could be interpreted as an act of orthodox piracy and understood in that context. But this isn’t that riot.  Of course, I am working with what we might call the ‘ideal pirate’ and constructing things around that – and no act will probably be seen as this ‘ideal’ act of piracy, except what we see in the crucifixion, but that’s for another day!

I’m currently reading Marcus Rediker’s excellent book Villains of all Nations – Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, in which he looks closely at why pirates emerged at that particular time. Much of his socio-economic analysis is highly relevant for today, but none of it suggests that what we saw in London could be raised from the level of common theft to a true act of piracy.

One (flawed) piece that may be worth reading is David Goodhart’s in Prospect:

A rapper called JaJa, interviewed by Sky TV, said if he was younger he would have been out with the kids. He then admitted that most of them were doing it for fun, to feel powerful, “for 15 minutes of fame.” The actual rioters I saw interviewed on television did complain about the Duggan case, but the real complaint seemed to be the police’s power to stop them committing crime.

I dislike Goodhart’s lazy assumption about the racial make-up of the rioters, but some of his analysis is correct. It’s too easy to label this as ‘the poor rioting against the rich.’ I don’t believe it will serve London well to pursue this idea as a way of getting to the root of what is a far more complex problem.

It’s perhaps too soon to work out what the hell really happened in London last night, or why. I stayed up til 2am following the news and the Twitter feeds, and I have to say it was one of the saddest nights I’ve ever spent in the capital.

There has already been some debate about the reasons for all of this, but I wanted to put a bit of a marker down on a couple of things that those on the outside may not have realised. I’ve lived in London for nearly 20 years, taught teenage Londoners for nearly 15 of those, and teenagers who I could well imagine getting involved in these ‘riots’ for nearly 10. I don’t claim some special knowledge, but I do feel I can tell the difference between one kind of fight and another.

1. This was not about race

Already people have been talking about ‘reclaiming London from the foreigners.’ Total nonsense. The looting and violence that took place was committed by blacks, whites and asians, and we mustn’t let idiots from the far right take advantage.

2. This was not about the shooting of Mark Duggen

The violence that sparked off in Tottenham at the end of last week was about the understandable anger that that community felt over the police’s handling of the Duggen case. The Metropolitan Police screwed up. They should have been open with the family, they should have listened to them and not left them outside for hours with empty promises of meetings with high level officers. And they certainly need to start telling the truth about what happened that night, and whether Duggen did fire his weapon, which is now doubted.

But the violence that kicked off in different areas of London last night was not about that. The people who were out looting were not out there expressing anger at their treatment by the police.

3. This is partly, but not wholly, about disenfranchisement

Mary Riddell has written a powerful piece in The Telegraph examining some of the reasons behind the violence, in which she says this:

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

I do agree with this, but only in part. What I think Riddell has failed to factor in is the viral nature of the looting. I mean viral in every sense: this spread through social networks, but it also spread – as I’ve seen violent action spread in classrooms and playgrounds countless times – through the spirit of the mob.

In playground violence you do get those at the centre who will spark something, but the vast majority who get caught up in things would never, never do so without the mob. They get caught up and excited and act not from some anger or frustration of their own, but by proxy. Yes, they will use the excuses that they’ve heard and quote things about police attitudes and Mark Duggen and the rest, but the hard truth is that most of the people out on the streets were there for a bit of a laugh. They were there because other people were there, who were there because other people…

Without doubt we have to deal with inequality, with the bastards at the banks who have got away with a different kind of violent theft. But we must understand that much of this was far away from these triggers. People set fires because they saw that other people in other boroughs had. People turned over cars because they saw others had. There’s been lots of talk of these people being on benefits and having no jobs and all the rest. But I am absolutely certain that the demographic, if you really analysed it, would be kids from pretty decent homes, kids still in education, kids with parents in good trades. Yes, there will be those who see their futures as bleak, but I honestly don’t think that this is all about that.

The video above has rightly provoked complete disgust, but I think it’s significant because it goes some way to showing the complete lack of cause among people involved. There’s no sense of camaraderie, of a spirit of protest or some aims in mind. This was excitable people caught up in collective madness – in the sociological sense.

What do we do?

I think it may be too early to tell, but I feel that needs to be a careful response from parents, a thoughtful response from the media about how best to calm the situation and not further enflame it, and a community response (which I’ve already seen) to get out, clear up and stand up and be counted and show just how much the majority care for their community and one another. The political response – deep reflection on the nature of our inequitable capitalist system and our obsession with the banks – also needs to start right now.

Certainly, this should give the Labour party food for thought. Stop running to the middle, and let’s have decent policies to improve the lot of the poorest:

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution.

That, would you believe, is from Riddell in the Telegraph too. And if the Telegraph is saying that we need to divert more money into expensive public sector services, it’s time to sit up and listen, and lobby Cameron and Osbourne to think again on these deep cuts.

Update:
I’ve just been listening to the news, where teenagers who were involved in disturbances last night have been justifying their actions. ‘We just want to show these rich people who own these businesses that we can do what we like.’ ‘Yeah, we just want to show the police that we can do what we like.’ The response when asked if it will happen again tonight? ‘I hope so!’ I think this gets to the heart of the matter. There has been much talk of alienation from communities and how we’re in ‘Broken Britain’ – and I think there is a very serious political responsibility that Cameron has to take for talking this up into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Children will do what is of expected of them – good or bad. But I think the key alienation here is not from person to person, but from the self itself. The lack of self-knowledge and understanding shown by these responses is so very sad, and the core question must be how we can help our young people to discover who they are, and what their place is.

This, I think does boil back down to a capitalist problem. People are so busy having to work to make the money to buy the house to get the nice things because everyone says that this is where value lies… so there is no time to spend being with children, who are sat in front of TVs and games where they are told again and again that the way to be valued is a) to have loads of stuff and b) in GameWorld™, you just smash shit up without thought for the consequences to get what you want. And that, I’m afraid, is exactly what they did when they finally turned off the TV and did something.

Are you the same, that yank dogs
with choke leashes, and smash shops?
Tight necks, chain nooses
and restricted passage-ways:
the dispossessed will tonight
by force, take possession
of dogs and televisions
women and matches
and, for a moment,
burn brightly
before waking,
smouldering
with no cause
to kick the ashes
of what time
had tried to build.
Fuckers, all of you
with your weapons out
to club away at that which
you could not control.
This place is going to the dogs,
you sneer, and bark at those who
hold out their hands with nourishment.

So sad, so pointless. Young men with no cause. This is sheer idiocy. A very sad day for London.

Interesting piece in The Independent yesterday, asking why people bother going to festivals when the sound quality is crap, there’s mud everywhere, you can’t sleep, and people push and spill beer all over you.

I visited Glastonbury once, many years ago now, and left utterly mystified. Why, I wondered at the time, did so many people feel, and with such obvious sincerity, that the music they loved would be enhanced by a pervasive smell of excrement and kebabs? Why was it thought to be an advantage to sit on a carpet of compressed garbage and observe one’s heroes from a distance at which they were virtually invisible?

This is a good question. Despite the great TV coverage, there is a part of me that still feels jealous of those who are actually there. And that’s, I think why, despite slightly depressed numbers this year, people will continue to go to festivals, especially in a digital age.

Why? Well, I’ve written more fully about the importance of festive, carnival spaces in Other. Glastonbury is (or can be – outside of the uber-commercial aspects) a TAZ. It is a place ‘penetrated by the marvellous’ – and exists for a short time only, but in that short time it re-frames us. Festivals are also dirty spaces. The fact that you don’t wash much and change your hygiene and sleep boundaries again force us to engage with otherness, and feel restored because of it.

But there’s also the indescribable sense of presence at festivals. You are THERE. And you are there together. And no matter how good your 3D TV and surround sound system, you won’t feel that unless you really are prepared to get down and dirty and be in the crowd. And that’s the sad thing about so much technology – it wants to replicate this sense of ‘togetherness’ but without the dirt. It wants us to be ‘in the action’ – at a football match or festival – but in a sterilised, mediated environment. And that’s just never going to cut it.

Which is why, after much thought, I had to be at Wild Goose. Where I won’t be blogging or tweeting much, just getting filthy and being with people, even if the sound quality is crap.

Interesting piece yesterday looking at why kids might play their crappy, tinny music through their stupid phones when on buses on trains. And why good, responsible adults might find their blood boiling when it happens.

With mobile phones in many a teenager’s pocket, the rise of sodcasting – best described as playing music through a phone in public – has created a noisy problem for a lot of commuters.

“All you can hear is ‘dush, dush, dush, dush’. It’s irritating. So many times I end up with a headache,” says Tracey King, who has signed up to the Shhh! Scheme set up by bus company Arriva Yorkshire to stop the noise on their services.

While I sympathise with Tracey, I would think it highly unlikely that the noise is actually going to give her a headache. Irritating it might be, but the volume that phones pump out is hardly going to damage eardrums.

“As teenagers, they don’t seem to have the capability to think about others. I have heard older women turning round and saying ‘will you turn that down?’ and sometimes they will… and other times I’ve heard them with abuse and swearing at other people.”

This is a classic case of having to deal with ‘the other’ – and is therefore something that my thoughts in the book should be applicable to. So what’s going on here? Why do people play music like this, and why do other people find it so irritating?

Firstly, the music. Some students who were interviewed for the piece didn’t think that playing music was antisocial, just that the bus was too quiet and they wanted something to listen to. However, a sociologist sees it being more about marking out ownership of space. This can be done physically – by lolling out and taking up a number of seats. It could also be done graphically by ‘tagging’ around various places. But the most immediate and obvious way of stating that you have control over a space is aurally because it flows so widely.

Clearly this is not about a need to hear music. The sound quality on a phone is terrible (though improving, and, horribly, music companies are now mixing music to sound better on these devices by boosting the treble) and wearing headphones would clearly lead to better sound for them and silence for everyone else. But it’s not about the music – it’s about trying to own a space.

Why then does this lead to such intense irritation? Again, it is not really about the sort of music being played. Would people complain less if someone boarded a bus and was playing Beethoven? I think that would depend on the person who was doing it. Because this is the thing: it’s not the music that is threatening, it’s the people playing it.

The anxiety and irritation that comes from music played like this is about the sort of people who are challenging to take control of a space. People find it irritating because they see it as a threat.

The music is an aural declaration of ownership of a space, and the anxiety is about not wanting those people to have that ownership. Why? Partly because we find it annoying that what is meant to be a democratically shared space – a bus – has been turned into a dictatorship. But partly because we find teenagers threatening per se – especially noisy ones, especially noisy ones from another culture.

This is what I look at in the book, drawing on Levinas and Zizek. Levinas is more of an optimist. ‘Look into the eyes of the other,’ he says, ‘and you’ll find goodness there.’ His challenge is to get to know these people, to overcome our fears about them. In other words, these teenagers are good people really, it’s just that we don’t know them yet, and so are afraid.

Zizek is critical of this. He sees that our anxiety comes not from our own unresolved feelings about the other, but from our concern that they have not resolved their own feelings within themselves.

In other words, the fear that we have of teenagers is that they are fearful and insecure themselves. This, I think is far more insightful. People play music on buses because they want to mark out space. But why do they feel the need to mark out space? Because they feel insecure, feel the need to proactively grab space and make it theirs.

What then would this suggest about how best to deal with the problem? Firstly, I’d say that we need to look into ourselves first and think carefully about where our irritation is seated. Perhaps we have an insecure sense of self too? Perhaps we are worried about being attacked? Or perhaps, as older people have always done, we feel threatened by the young.

Secondly, I think addressing the root of the problem will be about helping young people to feel secure in themselves. It is tough being a young person in a big city, and the need for safe spaces is huge. Playing your music on a bus is one way of creating some control over a space, and making it feel like home.

Teenagers are treated pretty badly by society in many ways. Not allowed into shops more than 2 at a time. Moved on by the police. Given tougher and tougher educational targets to meet – and then told that the exams were just easier when they meet them. So this problem needs to be faced by schools, and by parents and local councils and authorities too, who need to make young people feel welcomed and involved.

But more immediately, a smile can help. I regularly ask people to turn their music down, or off, when on a bus. And I’ve very rarely been refused. Why? Because I’ve tended to do so by trying to be polite and positive about it, rather than snapping and grimacing. Young people are not bad or totally lacking empathy. They just need to work out what their place is in the world. And it’s our job to make room for them and help them find that, not immediately snipe when they threaten our peace and quiet.

You can buy ‘Other’ here.

Undoubtedly a moving story – a guy fallen on hard times begs by the side of the road and is ‘rediscovered’ as having the perfect voice for radio and voice-overs. Just begs the question… are the homeless who aren’t so blessed with some great talent not worth helping?

Although the official records will say that bookmakers paid out on a ‘white Christmas’ in London in 1999 and 1996 (the technical definition being a snowflake falling on the London Weather Centre on that day) the last proper blanketing of snow on Christmas Day was apparently in 1895, which is right back in the picture-postcard days of gas-lamps and horse-drawn carriages.

So, given that we are heading to have some pretty decent snow-cover on Christmas Day this year…

White Christmas, London, 2010

So, this, then, after all these years
is a White Christmas in London:
the reek of burning clutches
sliding buses and late parcels
snaking queues at abandoned airports
while angry trains, delayed and sniping,
lose power and freeze on lines
alongside motorways stuffed
with abandoned cars,
the empty shells of thwarted plans.

And this, then, after all these years
is where we’ve digressed from
the nostalgic postcards with
breasted robins and holly
in its Dickensian element:
where we once entered the stillness
of silent nights and
were moved only
by the nativity journey,
we now fetishise movement,
and, determined to travel
head out on naive journeys
refusing the silence and stillness
of here and now,
running after elsewhere,
grinding to brown slush
that which would, left alone
retain its clear beauty.

Stop moving, people. Localise. And enjoy.