irulan’s other orrery

Perhaps inevitably I really like the Smiths one. 

tomewing:

If you don’t live in Britain you may not be aware of what a horrific prospect this is. Consider yourself lucky.

The Conservative cabinet minister’s face appears on bedside entertainment systems on a continuous loop saying that their care “really matters to me” and asking them to thank NHS staff.

If they want to turn him off, they have to register under a system which sees patients charged more than £5 a day to access TV, email and phone services. In some wards with multiple beds, the screens have the effect of a television showroom.

One man who visited an elderly relative told the newspaper. “It was eerie. Everywhere you looked there was Andrew Lansley. My mother-in-law had to keep topping up the machine just to escape him.”

This is both demented and repulsive. 

Yes, crafts and making are somewhat fashionable at the moment, for good and bad reasons (and some purely cyclical reasons). 

tomewing:

dubdobdee:

Creativity, ideas and imagination are literally exiled from any culture that’s divorced itself from actual physical craft in some form (“workers by hand or by brain” as the lovely lost clause four put it, ruskino-marxism at its most poetic): I don’t mean everyone has to make pots or knit hats themselves, or bake their own pies; I do mean that tactile, sensuous form of some kind has to be in relatively small degree of separation

Weirdly enough the sector (within my limited network) which most agrees with this is advertising planners and digital strategists, the purest knowledge workers of them all, for whom “making” is a particular thing at the moment, ideally with some kind of physical prototyping going on.

Feed synchronicity has just shown me this too.

Creativity, ideas and imagination are literally exiled from any culture that’s divorced itself from actual physical craft in some form (“workers by hand or by brain” as the lovely lost clause four put it, ruskino-marxism at its most poetic): I don’t mean everyone has to make pots or knit hats themselves, or bake their own pies; I do mean that tactile, sensuous form of some kind has to be in relatively small degree of separation

tomewing:

But it was with Tony Blair that the argument for moving from industry to services shifted from one of dire necessity to being an altogether more optimistic vision about Britain’s place in the world. The architects of New Labour were convinced that the future lay in what they called the “knowledge economy”. Mandelson declared Silicon Valley his “inspiration”; Brown swore he would make Britain e-commerce capital of the world within three years.

Again, the theme was simple: most of what could be manufactured could be done so more cheaply elsewhere. The future lay in coming up with the ideas, the software, and most of all, the brands. Once the British had sold cars and ships to the rest of the world; now they could flog culture and tourism and Lara Croft.

The odd thing is that all this techno-utopianism came from men who would struggle to order a book off Amazon. Alistair Campbell tells a story about how Blair got his first-ever mobile phone after stepping down as prime minister in 2007. His first text to Campbell read: “This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.”

hahahahaha oh christ.

(This whole piece is great: if you are not British and want to know abt why Britain is fucked you should read it.)