The Men Who Stare at Goats

This is a book about American military intelligence, written by a British journalist. It is mainly concerned with how 'new age' or 'hippie' ideas in the 1960s were co-opted by the American military establishment, following the trauma of the Vietnam War.

The book makes a lot of wild accusations, often based solely on the testimony of its interviewees. Not that this need necessarily be a problem, but a lack of commentary from Ronson is, because it leads to a confused tone. Is he a sarcastic Louis Theroux type 'journalist' or is he genuinely sincere?

As such, the best parts of the book are those that are easiest to substantiate. For example, I had no idea that the widely reported blasting of 'Barney the Dinosaur' music at prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, was fist introduced to the public as the 'funny' story at the back end of the news - a sort of, anyone with young kids knows exactly what torture is! And, they can't be treating the prisoners too badly if this is the kind of thing that they were getting up to. Except we all now know that what they were doing was very bad indeed, as the photographs that got out at the time reveal.

The bits about Jedi Warriors, Psychic Spys, and one unfortunate General's attempt to walk through walls, are all put pay to the idea of one of the Generals at the start of the book who says, "We do not experiment on each other. It is not part of our culture." This was the quote that stuck with me as the details within the book proceeded to undermine him time and time again.

All in all, an odd read. I don't think I really learnt anything about military intelligence or people who have that kind of mindset - I have always suspected them of being rather strange. So a decent book, but it would have been nice if it were a bit more authoritative.

It Felt Like a Kiss

Put together in his trademark montage style, the film ties numerous story strands together in order to evoke the atmosphere of the kind of world that American power was ushering in in the late 1950s and 1960s. In the absence of Curtis’ trademark voice, narrating the action, subtitles and the rest of the soundtrack - the music in particular, pick up the slack.

As a piece of visual art, it is well worth a watch. But unlike the rest of his work, after about 20 minutes, one does begin to wonder - what is the point of all this? What is he actually trying to say? Maybe it is not as simple as all that, and the film is just what it says it is - “a story”. Maybe the film itself is incomplete outside the context of the live performance it was originally intended to cooperate with.

There are a few funny, strange, interesting little cultural titbits and juxtapositions, but the babyish seeming nature of the narrative is troubling - this happened, then this happened, then this - as is the overall tone. Is this a serious examination or a black comedy? The way that everything turns on a pin with the Kennedy assassination, America losing its innocence, this is something that I have seen peddled time and time again, and I just don’t buy it.

Available for a limited time only on Adam Curtis’ BBC blog, here. I recommend you make up you own mind.

Back by popular demand

"Second star to the right, and straight on 'till morning"

I don't want to come back to earth, to concentrate on what I've got to concentrate on in order to get my work done, I want to keep my head in that Star Trek space-place and carry on thinking about what happened and what might happen, and what I think about what happened and what might happen.

I don't want to have to write about oil and gas production and exploration in the Middle East, which, when you're sat in an office in Norwich, typing on an iMac, is not nearly as exotic as it might sound. I want to read up and learn about spaceships and new technology, and start planning how I might be able to join Starfleet, when it is formed in the early part of the 23rd century.

Fears that Abrams casting might be more Dawson's Creek-soft that science fiction-hard prove unfounded. The actors hit all of the right notes, playing young, ultra-smart, boundlessly energetic versions of the characters we have all grown to know and love, excited by the possibilities of time and space and adventure and themselves. There are a lot of exclamations in this movie: “I can do that!” “I've never done that before!” Hinting at the characters that they might one day grow into, without ever resorting to parody or pastiche.

The series is so written in pop culture folklore, it seems almost like sacrilidge to start praising individual actors when none of the them (Leonard Nimoy excepted - he is Spock) are played by the original cast members - but praise I must. *SPOILERS AHEAD* Kirk is strapping himself into a seat on a shuttle ready to blast him and the rest of the new Starfleet recruits out of the atmosphere. A less than sane sounding man is kicking and making his voice heard somewhere off screen; a crew member asks the crank to take a seat. You see the vacant space next to Kirk and immediately start thinking about Jasper Carrot and the nutter on the bus. When he sits you don't recognise him, of course, until he announces, "All I've got left are these bones." Dr Leonard McCoy has arrived.

This movie is that thing that the earlier Star Trek movies never were, young and vibrant. The TV show sets the positive future template for this throughly entertaining movie, which re-writes the past, and as a consequence, the future we thought we already knew. Thanks to a rip in the time-space continuam exploited by a Romulan miner out for revenge, Star Trek reality has been re-written. Chris Pine might not necessarily grow up to be William Shatner, Spock might not learn to keep his human side under control - all bets are off, and I for one can't wait to see what happens next in the continuing voyage of the Starship Enterprise.

The Creatives

I don't know about you, but I've read a lot of articles about the internet (on the internet) in the past couple of weeks. Apparently, the internet (or “web 2.0” as you might have heard it called) is forever changing the way we interact, socialise, think and behave. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the birth of a new kind media, leading to unparralled levels of interconnectdness, while Wiki and blogs are busy democratising information.

All sounds rather grand when you frame it in those terms, but is it really?

I don't know about you, but a typical net outing tends to mean visiting the same ten or twelve sites, checking my e-mail and... not a lot else... Where is this brave new world I’m being promised? Maybe I missed a meeting.

In a recent article, self appointed, "obnoxious media know-it-all" Toby Young pointed out one of the essential problems with Twitter. It's one big game of follow the leader. You can post things to other people, but unless they happen to be "following" you, you don't get anything back the other way. It’s the computing equivalent of talking to a brick wall – typing at a screen!

It's very easy to argue that I just "don't get" it, but even on the rare occasions that I feel tempted to join in, curious to see if these shiny new "apps" can satiate my futurist desires, yet another mention of Stephen "courdroy-trousers-pipe-and-slippers-and-a-mug-of-hot-coco" Fry, and my dreams of a bright new digital future are crushed under old oak beams of convention. It would be chirlish to blame him personally, 100, 000 "followers" must give one hell of an ego massage.

This feeling of disconect reached its nadir when I read about Cadbury's new £3.7m ad campaign, and the entusiasm it has been greeted with, bouyed by the internet. A robot-sounding corporate exectutive proudly mugged about the company’s “innovative new approach”, starting the "buzz" by “letting the bloggers have it first.” Bloggers, were then, presumably, so flattered to have been approached they proceeded to let the world know about the lastest piece of marketing genius from “the creatives” at Cadbury. (Remember that Gorilla on the drums? That was them too! Wow!)

So, finally, here’s the rub. Where are the power centres in this equation? Are we really hearing a multiplicity of voices, or does the song remain the same? Has a plague of free thinking broken out or are we doing what we're told, for fear that doing otherwise might mean we don't get heard at all?

How the average blogger, with an audience of one (normally themselves), generates any "buzz" is beyond me.

Word of the Week

Ossify

Future Shock

We are being watched. Right now, everything I type is being logged, calculated and fed into algorithms designed to help corporations sell me things. At least, that is according to Nicholas Carr, in his book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Edison to Google.

The book is split into two parts. The first is a relatively sober, scholerly account of the rise of so-called ‘cloud computing’ – examples include: Facebook, and YouTube, and Twitter – a basic definition being, an IT service run from the internet, drawing computing power, software tools, or storage capacity from a ‘remote’ source. Blogging is another good example.

Carr talks about the extent to which the internet is used to deliver and then run programs previously run from your desktop. He talks about the massive data centres companies like Google and Microsoft are building in secret locations around the globe, in order to support this new web infrastructure. In doing so he draws parallels between the cuurent move to ‘utlity’ computing and the creation of the electric power grid, highlighting some of the socialogical and economic changes that resulted from electricity becoming something you could just plug into. Carr believes that the tranferr of power from the PC, to ‘the cloud’, will have an equally profound effect on the popular culture.

Then there is Carr the futurist. In this section he paints an increasingly authoritarian picture of what might result from ‘the switch’, as the internet transforms (without a lot of people really realising) from the World Wide Web into the World Wide Computer. Carr seems to want to warn us to remain skeptical, by equipping us with the knowledge and tools we need, to question the authorities that would impose such a change.

In the final chapter things get very strange indeed as Carr reveals the ‘true’ motivation driving Sergei Brinn and Larry Page, the brilliant young mathematicians, who co-founded Google in 1998. What he says sounds ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel, making it exciting, ludicrous and very scary. However, what is fanciful fiction one day is making headlines the next. “Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people,” the Finacial Times told us here on February 3, 2009.

So, given the potential threats to security, ownership, indentity, plurality and dare I say it even spiratuality, the book highlights, it seems odd that Carr should view the change as inevitable. The fact is, the internet can do great things, but that doesn’t mean everything should be on it. For the time being at least, each of us remains the master of our own destiny, we still weild ultimate power over the machines – at the end of the day, we can turn them off.

Word of the week

Ephemera

Word of the week

Instantiate