It was understood from the start to be a consciousness-raising exercise, encouraging people to perceive the actual state of Britain rather than the PR state … Which is surprisingly hard, because there’s this mixture of Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap robots…
It’s Californian ideology without Californian sunshine, isn’t it?…
The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say ‘You might not like it, but it works.’ But Britain is not efficient. Instead it’s stuck in a form of frenzied stasis.
I was revisiting this article on one of Mark’s lesser known online projects the other day: the ‘Boring Dystopia’ Facebook group.
This is something to ruminate on, I think: a consciousness-raising exercise which exacerbates the weird, widening gaps in late capitalism towards its outside; egresses towards an understanding of the “eerie” nature of capital that would be teased in The Weird and the Eerie.
thanks had missed the boring dystopia page, that’s really where it’s at crumbling infrastructure, buggy code, patchworked systems, recycled entertainment, shit services, all so meh and not at all Romantic.
reminds me of the excellent mundane afrofuturist manifesto:
https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2017/06/02/the-mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/