The steep approach to Garyland

All forms of media are contained within another. Except one.

Salt air

In the old days – about five years ago – if you were writing a book or a play or something in-depth and of a creative complexion, the best software – professional software – was good. Good enough. As good as it got. 

We all used it.

And if, like me, you didn’t install the professional software onto a PC – the P in PC stands for “personal” which means the machine is aimed at more consumerist and professional-non-pure-creative, manipulative tasks – from social media to spreadsheets and CRMs. Management not art creation. 

If you used the professional maker software on a professional maker computer it worked even better. A maker machine is hardware designed for creators – be that in the field of music or books or movies or animations or stories in any conceivable art format and all the (production and) post-production tasks that these things may entail. It makes sense to run a professional piece of software on a professional piece of hardware, integrated as one from the off by creative professionals. It makes sense to me, that is. You wouldn’t drive to work on your child’s go-kart buggy any more than you would file for divorce without deferring to the services of a lawyer.

Running a retail business off your personal laptop – the same one you use to bank, shop and socialise (and I‘ve had plenty of clients who genuinely believe this is acceptable) is comparable to the arrogance of the guy who sets a pop-up shop on the high street between Costa and Waterstones, constructing his space by utilising his outdoor camping tent and other such domestic equipment, now doubling up as professional capital. Sitting there looking all puzzled as to why he’s not shifting lattes and hardbacks akin to his neighbours.

If you take your work seriously and come to recognise it as an art – you go get the right gear. You don’t have to. It’s an attitude that goes directly to the question of quality and personal standards. Not personal preference. Standards. 

And if you went one step further and ditched the laptop dinky-ness of laptops (which makes you tilt your head downwards and think like Plato) for a desktop format- so the monitor onto which you author sits as a large glass easel, gliding on a hidden back-stand above your real wooden desk (which, when seated appropriately, makes me tilt my head ever so slightly upwards and un-think, like Aristotle) in my favourite space where the daylight emanates from all the right angles at just the right intensity and after dark the cityscape neon glares up and across at me as just my perfect swooning siren – replete with all the promises by means of which she might lure me – my version of what they call “living your best life” – then everything seemed to really come into its own and I was joyous. I was productive to a quality. When artistic creators build computers to create art, go create.

Similar to when, as a native in-lander, I de-camped from Beckenham, Kent, to the Sussex coast and got an apartment one block from the beach where I would dramatically and with some required vigour, throw up the old sash windows to receive an instant experience of sand and salty air. Kinetic and tactile. Not just audio-visual. Multi-sensory. Multi-dimensional. Non-digital. I was living it. You know, productive and to a quality. 

So, writing as described above was – to use a northern adjective that conveys joy unfettered – ace. 

But it was hard work. 

And then the software upgraded and everything changed. And it didn’t just get better. It really changed. It changed to the point that I realised I had not been simply writing. I had been managing tech and writing. And I’m not that techy. And I wanted to just write. Yet I never knew because I was too busy just doing it. 

Saltaire

Just outside the city of Bradford in the county of West Yorkshire in England which is Britain to US readers (they get confused) sits the quirky town of Saltaire. 

Titus Salt built a manufactory complete with a new model town for his workers featuring a school, parks, shops, a splendid church rinsed in Italian marble shipped over to order, and all clean living Victorian amenities. It was a temperance town so alcohol was banned. No need for the Eighteenth Amendment in Britain. You just build a town where no town previously existed and lay down the law of Prohibition by simply calling it. The US loves its Constitutional rights but didn’t Saltaire find them out a little bit red-tapey? No two-year national referenda. Just Prohibition. Good old Britain. I’ve just been reading an excellent book by Bob Woodward on Joe Biden’s achievements so I’m looking across at the high-spirited US Constitution – which I really do love in all truth – and then I’m looking at how it goes wrong as much as how it goes right. And, as an aside, I’m all for the First, Second and Fifth – so I’m not some preachy European old elite with a politically correct propensity.   

Workers were paid tokens to spend in Saltaire. Wholesome-in-a-box was his shot at Stepford, with a life expectancy significantly higher than the mighty industrial city next door where typhoid and cholera were dominant and children did not enjoy school education nor a bed to themselves. 

The simple rule was that, as an employee and Saltaire resident, you turned up for work and worked your shift. 

So what did Titus Salt, 1st Baronet, Manufacturer, Politician and Philanthropist actually do? What was he in the business of making? Well, aside from his business card as laid out above, which kind of gives the game away, I contend that his perception of his function was in deficit. I contend that, in fact, glory is purblind. 

Just as until recently I thought I had been simply writing – Salt was firmly under the impression that he was processing wool for textile fabrics to be worn as clothing. And, of course, lording about in Whitehall with the other new middle-class men.

The high altitude Manningham ledges of the Bradford valley boasted the world’s first street-cars (public tram system) and all-night suburban street lighting. Free access parkland with boating lakes, bandstands and picnic arboreta, swimming pools for high-dive boxes with changing and wash facilities. Nearby, Cartwright Hall accommodates garden terraced water channels inspired by the Taj Mahal. Cliffe Castle was a private residence for the woollen magnate Henry Isaac Butterfield, its sumptuous interiors containing more gold leaf than Buckingham Palace. And they still do. It was (and is) the repulsive kitsch bling of the nouveau riche. A Victorian Silicon Valley whose Imperial facade of public philanthropy shielded its privileged Oxbridge-funded engineering patents just as the neon Strip lights of Las Vegas successfully deflect onlookers from the Cal-Neva politico, mob and union racketeer cash that entirely funded its construction. I reckon Peter Sutcliffe rather sullied its erstwhile reputation. I still love going back to Bradford. That’s what I prefer. 

It was like coming on some mystery city in the wilderness. Like some eighth wonder of the world you never expected to see out here. It just showed up.

Saltaire might look cutesy and touristy now but step back and see it from above. It was a marvel of engineering genius, as clever as it was simple. 

Break Neck Lane

Salt was educated at Batley Grammar – less than two miles up the road from Heckmondwike Grammar – where I was running riot in my day. And he was a bona fide Victorian whose adult life chiefly spanned the very pinnacle of the Victorian era – giving his kids names like Whitlam and Amelia and patenting a raft of visionary inventions from his estate in Lightcliffe.

I reckon, just as I retain a belief that a man in a finely cut two-piece suit can do anything, a lady by the name of Amelia Salt could surely live any life she chooses. Quite a name, that.

I run up through Lightcliffe sometimes when I’m in Yorkshire. As recent as last month, in fact. The steep approach to the town is coming from the Leeds side of the village of Bailiff. Descending the Leeds Road to Millbridge I’d make a right onto the Halifax Road and keep climbing steadily. Winding up through Hightown and Windy Bank and then out across to Scholes before the world ends and I’d seemingly fall off the end of it – one of the sheerest gradients around – down and down into the vale of Brighouse. Once there, if you can make it from the depths of that quarry-stone hollow all the way directly up to St Matthews church in Lightcliffe you’ll have transcended bodily fatigue and your reward will be Shibden Hall a couple of miles on as the hill peaks and dips gently before Break Neck Lane gives onto the ravine we all call Shibden Park. Put a foot wrong as you’re running the ridge up there and you’d know about it.

Lightcliffe still carries an air of its finest era. Well appointed Yorkshire dark stone terraces and detachments. Communal greens. Sweeping vistas of the valley. Aiming high. Looking up, not down. (I bet he had a desktop computer, not a laptop, our Titus). 

Re-defining water

So why was Saltaire so amazing? Or am I just some obsequious fawning Yorkshireman doffing my Braemarl flat at a lad from Batley Grammar? We’d always beat them at football. Heckmondwike, that is. But they always killed us at rugby. 

Elegance is beautiful and simplicity is elegant. Beauty appears to us as the object we are looking at, yet for the most part is a type of hidden elegance, if you will, that sits just underneath or behind or to one side of the thing that amuses us. And this hidden elegance changes how we see. Not what we see. Although it may as well. 

Water, since time immemorial, was used as a transport system. Inside your body, canals (or annals) of blood carry rafts of proteins that do stuff like drop calcium off as the red river rounds the bend where your teeth and fingernails are. The rivers of blood. Enoch Powell, look down and learn. This is a nice way to use the phrase. 

Likewise, canals of water in your body transport electricity signals from the brain to everywhere else. And outside of your body and down on the planet ships and boats sail on the sea. More to the point, cargo ships carry goods on rivers to in-land destinations and where none existed, before road and car technology, men and women would dig out their own rivers and call them canals. The Leeds-Liverpool canal was such a communication medium, cutting through England’s highest mountain range using a system of locks, aqueducts and mechanical lifts. Thereby connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. 

The Victorians of northern England re-defined water by changing it’s function and not just once. 

You see, water does not just carry things that float upon it. It pushes things. It is kinetic. Like muscle. Should you be near a fast flowing river (Yorkshire can be very steep in places) and should you place a water wheel in the river, it will turn with incredible velocity. 

Or, should you heat the water by burning coal underneath a big tank of the stuff, it will convert to steam and steam, when funnelled tightly, will push anything of any magnitude if you get clever with engineering. In this fashion it is also like muscle. 

Mid-way through the water-to-steam conversion process, water is also heat. Very big heat. And in cold northern mountain factories in winter, if you run that hot water through pipes that ring-fence the workplace, people stay warm. People stay alive. 

Who’d want to be at home, freezing to death?  You’d sooner be in the workhouse. 

And once you could install light bulbs – that came along before our discovery of how to master electricity – and once you set everything up properly, that same water became light. 

Now we’re cooking with gas! Well, with water. And since I use the word well, drinking clean water in a city riddled with the plague whose origins lay in waterborne contagion was also quite handy. 

The Victorians changed how they looked upon the water that flowed past them in the upland hills. And that’s very very beautiful, to me. 

Elegance

In the early part of the industrial revolution, fast-flowing rivers centred Yorkshire for the money action in the age of the waterwheel. But soon, steam power brought to the party any place where water, even gently flowing rivers with low currents, could be found. Lakes. Dams. Lowland basins. Altitude fell off.

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumph is complete and there are no new worlds to conquer.

Raintown

Elegance shows up in how Manchester re-thought water.

Almost at sea level, so as low in altitude as Yorkshire is high -literally in the foothills of our mountains, yet riddled with its own brand of infectious genius, Manchester, as Celtic as my own county is Viking, began to wake up. The way Manchester thought (and still thinks) is worth a minute or two of your precious time. Keep in mind that both Yorkshire; Danish Viking and split into three parts called “Thirdings” (modernised to The Ridings) and Manchester (British, Pictish and Irish Celtic) are not Anglo-Saxon. Cornwall is a similar outlier. We all think differently, see differently and act differently because we are different.

Only two inter-regions ever had the strength, number, guile and organisation to make a smash'n'burn run on London. Both with devastating marks still visible and with a sense of unfinished business palpable in our parts.Yorkshire’s is called The Pilgrimage of Grace but I love CommotionTime from the Cornish. Less egoistic. And such a cool name! Either way, don’t presume the status quo is forever. We don’t like being ruled from elsewhere. Period. And I’m serious.

But back to the neighbours: mad as a box of frogs and equally as effective. World-changing. Manchester recognised rain and saturated air – the dampness in the air between rain showers – as literally the only environment where cotton can be processed without killing the workforce.

Yorkshire looked down at the rivers. Manchester looked up at the skies. Plato and Aristotle.

And as the second wettest city in England, but the only one that sits up north in, come the mid-nineteenth century, an already up-and-running hot-seat of productive chaos – near the Atlantic Ocean and just off the canal system connecting to Bradford, Leeds, Hull and Europe – Manchester realised it sandwiched two mighty and newly media-accessible continents – the primary raw material market to the west, and the secondary wholesale market to the east.  And as if God-given by mother nature – it had a natural, meteorological monopoly on how to handle cotton. Manchester changed how it saw what was always in front of it. Here, in West Manchester, right where I live, they accessed the beauty of the mundane. This city gifted itself the chance to look and see. 

My own CommotionTime

In the late 1980’s as a teenager I’d gotten first-hand experience of why Manchester really was Cottonopolis. In a textile mill in Batley, Yorkshire, we made beds and there came a point, after coiling the springs and baking them into mattresses in big ovens and after creating textiles from Shoddy and Mungo (mashed up clothing from the rag and bone man, crushed in looms made of nails that simply ripped the clothing to shreds before feeding the dry fluffy mulch into a hopper) – there came a point where even over in Yorkshire we’d need to finish the bed. We’d need a bit of cotton. And we’d sooner not send our money back over the hills. Owt for nowt, we’d say. Not for the want of trying. Thing is, if you don’t learn your lessons, you’ll be taught them. You’ll get schooled and there will be a price to pay.

The whole factory was next to a beck – an old fashioned Yorkshire word for a tributary of water – usually shallow and formerly a vale stream that had been funnelled into something resembling a man-made canal – rather like the River Medlock in central Manchester today. The becks in the Spen valley in West Yorkshire usually drain into the Aire or the Calder – the big rivers – but it meant that our factory sat pretty much on the water table – and we had a cellar – a big room mined out of the ground beneath the factory space hundreds of years ago, that we called the cotton cellar. For it was the only place consistently damp enough to refine cotton bud from its fluffy state to a neat yarn thread and a fine cool cloth. The watery air would temper cotton – which is furiously wild and still made us choke and our eyes water. It was just about manageable in this condition. In all other parts of the factory – from the fitters shop to the carpentry benches to the sewing room to the loading decks and the ammonia laundries and the fettle-feeders, each team of men specialised. But no one specialised in the cotton cellar. We’d draw straws with the shortest draw working the terrible cotton shift. Character building. 

The silence of eternity

One day I came across a stairwell leading mysteriously down beneath the worker's canteen – and so – to my mind- to a room below even the cotton cellar. It was on a corridor with no lighting so it just peeled off in pitch – like in some horror movie. None of my colleagues had ever mentioned it. I eventually summoned the courage to grab a torch and work my way along it – even the walls were running damp and then of all things this stairwell cut from stone like something on the Giza plateau. I inched down step by step. It was deathly silent and I could feel something massive next to me. And sure enough, I could only descend about a dozen steps before my flashlight ran across a massive chamber and my feet hit cold still water. I was looking across a waterline which suddenly announced a dozen rows of a dozen drowned cotton looms – only the tops of which were peeking out of the lake. Black water. Eery and beautiful. One hundred and forty-four cast iron ballet dancers symmetrically all but submerged yet still pointing to the heavens in a proud salute that nobody but me would ever see again. The occasional drip from the walls rippling an echo across that mechanical pond that I can still hear now. Ghosts of lives of loom spinners a hundred years back ran a shiver up my spine. Elegance again. A glimpse of real beauty. The silence of eternity interpreted by love. This whole section of the mill, worked by my predecessors, had long since sunk beneath the water table and upstairs, in typical Yorkshire fashion, everybody just carried on as normal. 

Standing awe-struck halfway down that stairwell for what seemed like a lifetime – I got the message. Cotton is best dealt with over the Pennines in Manchester. 

Alt air

Saltaire is a portmanteau. And so for that matter, is the word portmanteau. Like smog and brunch and Jedward (anyone?). A portmanteau isn’t just a word that describes two former words now melded seamlessly (or clumsily), it is also a carrying case that opens in an unfold motion to create two equally sized storage sections. It is a blend of the French words Porter (to carry) and Manteau (cloak or coat). So it’s a coat carrier (or suitcase) that literally and metaphorically splits both itself and the words that name it into two whilst describing all other words that behave in this way as their possessive noun affirmative. Wow! This, for me, is like all the candy in the shop all at once. 

The river Aire flows swiftly through the valleys of Bradford and Leeds and Titus Salt added his surname to the river name to come up with his town’s fashionable tag. Like the Cadbury family’s model Quaker town Bournville, to the south-west of Birmingham and the Lever brothers Port Sunlight out on the Wirrall. It was all the rage. If you didn’t have a marble church in your own bespoke philanthropic model town for your crew, it was the equivalent of driving around in anything “less than” a Lexus in the modern day. You just wouldn’t be able to show your face at the next Debutantes Ball. The very shame of it. 

Not content with providing sinners with an alternative form of fresh Yorkshire air that was free from killer diseases and further still might be actually pleasant to encounter and good for the soul, Saltaire sits weirdly on a kind of island between the River Aire and the Leeds Liverpool canal. Bounded by water.

Raw materials (wool and coal) arriving from the Americas and local collieries float into Saltaire on the canal, drifting literally under the factory buildings which are stilted and from where they are pulled from the water and elevated up into the many storeys of the massive factory. And sunk down into the kilns. At the other side of the mill, fresh water flows from the River Aire into massive tanks as big as swimming pools underneath which a coal fired system representing Dante’s Inferno gets to work. Steam drives pistons and miles of pulleys on such a massive scale (think of the film Titanic) so that literally hundreds of looms are driven into deafening motion and the workspace is heated when its cold and lit when it is dark and everyone enjoys clean water from the wells with which to wash and cook and, not least, drink. 

When the wool is machine finished into clothing it is packaged and dropped back down onto the canal where it continues east out to the port of Hull and across the North Sea into Europe for sale in another novelty – shops. After leaving Saltaire, the world’s first off-the-peg tailors work their magic on it in the city between Bradford and Hull. This is Leeds. The origins of a clothing retailer that would conquer the kingdom, when a Russian-born Polish immigrant called Michael Marx set up a stall in the Kirkgate market with local entrepreneur Thomas Spencer. The name is Anglicised to Marks & Spencer for marketing purposes. Not just global super-mighty household-name retail conquerors. Leeds M&S conquerors. Built in Yorkshire. Made here. Ours are the streets.

The identity delusion

When my new writing software came along, I realised that up until this point I had been managing my writing into a kind of computer format. I had been creating stories and becoming computer-savvy as a necessity. I had no choice. 

Titus Salt and all the other factory men were only manufacturing stuff half the time. The other half, if not more, was consumed by having to generate their own power. They were having to be power stations as well. Be it a water wheel or a steam turbine. Every single factory was a power station and a factory. 

Imagine what Salt could have done if the power was sorted out as a given? Imagine if he’d have even seen himself for what he was? A power generator. The man from the Electricity board. How lowly! He’d have hated that. 

He’s buried in his own mausoleum under his top notch church in his funky model town. A souped up tomb with a glass elevated viewing platform. I’d wager he had a rather generous impression of himself. 

Cloudier

In the ancient long distant past – about fifteen years ago – every business organisation – even small setups – had a server room where they had to employ tech staff to store, clean, manage and guard their own intellectual proprietary power.  The information. Data are to us what raw kinetic manpower was to the Victorian mill men.

I worked at big organisations like the Financial Times where the tech staff was an army of people as numerous as the editorial and advertising sales teams combined. I worked at ten-man start-ups where the “server guy” was a single person who was treated with a vague and discomforting reverence, like a kindly witch or a genial outcast. The essential pariah. And the “server room” was a cupboard. 

Every publisher I worked for saw itself as a press organisation yet they were chiefly, looking back, IT managers. The men from tech support.

And just like Mr Salt, and I, they chose not to see it because it clashes with the more palatable image of press baron, manufacturer and writer. Mighty egos are resistant to challengers. But also because you can’t see what is coming next, often, until it arrives. You’re too busy doing now to think next. You’re too busy doing now to know what now is.

Electricity, caught, stored and distributed on tap: all mastered by an uneducated North Yorkshire Wesleyan preacher living in London called Michael Faraday, obliterated the in-situ necessity, and so the over-supply, of waterwheels and coal burners and pistons and steam tanks and pulleys forever. De-localisation begets actual de-materialisation. Think of how townhouses in big cities built over one hundred years ago have stone steps leading up to the front door which is raised to the first-floor level. What's that about? It is about the media. When horses were trains, bikes and cars, there were more horses in cities than people and when that's the demographic you'll be ankle-deep to knee-deep in horse dung so you're gonna wanna live a storey above that, as opposed to in it. Empty spaces in modern cities are often silhouette-shaped in a nod to a medium that has since disappeared.

And Faraday turned night into day forever. Delivering winter-long heat in the northern hemisphere. 

Cloud computing is a replica tale of how we manage our intellectual property in the modern world. An exact replica of the story told above. By me, just for you and your narrative inner warmth. So what, the tangibles became the intangibles? It’s the same deal. The same story playing out.

What gets contracted out next?

Think about it. And think bigger than you were taught to think. Not the next SaaS or comms medium or robot or shopping facility. That's all just stuff. It's all just the what. This is about the how in case you hadn't figured already. The elegance and the beauty. The how.

Understanding media

What are we all doing that could be centralised and delivered back to us on tap – something so obvious that we cannot see because we’ve simply always just got on with it? Come on. Anyone ? You. Yeah, you in the red top with a beard next to the bald guy. Sorry mate.

The mechanical power. The information. What’s next in the sequence? What even is the sequence? What is the nature of its contingents? What are you doing now?

Can you see that what you are doing now, and forever, is entirely determined by how you think things are and this even informs how you are executing the what?

Or to put it another way, all forms of media are contained within another.

My spoken words contain my thoughts. My books contain both. The TV drama contains a stage play. The music in my headphones contains a live performing band. And if you think about it, the power contains the information. Whether harnessed from the electro-magnetic field or the water or the man or the horse, the power is a medium that has a see-saw relationship with the information medium. The information contains the power. Contains the information. Contains the power. Like Russian dolls or my own reflection from within a hall of mirrors. These are the fractal dimensions.

You don’t often see the media you are consuming. You consume the message – which is the medium within. Media alter the ratio among our senses. But if you concentrate and take a step back in pensive contemplation, you can appreciate the form and function of the television or the phone or the book or the magazine. This computer. That chair. Those sneakers. Her latte.

Sneakers? Yes. Sneakers are a media contained within another; the facility of travelling on foot. The transportation of things from A to B. A smorgasbord of actual and potential connections that may be described precisely as communication media. The sneakers are the Post Office's Royal Mail. FedEx. DPD The drones are Amazon. Romans would run via to communicate at speed: famously 26.2 miles from Athens to Marathon.

And what about clothing and housing and roads and clocks and cars? Can you see them as media yet? Weapons and money and water and numbers and food?

All forms of media are contained within another.

Except one. 

The bulbs of essence  

What I am about to say is both potentially of worth and misguided. That, as if to illustrate my point by demonstration, I might fall into the trap that I speak up to warn against.

Think light. You know, the outlier. The one medium that is not itself contained within another.

The nature of light concerns a speed limit. So what’s of a quality that makes the speed limit an obsolescence? 

It’s coming. The next big out-source. Can you see it yet? And if you can, can you also see the problem with the quality of your observation?

I’m not nudging you toward step-change. I’m talking sea change. Sat Nav in cars twenty years ago was not a real change. It was just an additional dashboard tool. Driverless cars have not sea-change. No cars at all – that would be something approaching big. But dwarfed by what I address in this article.

The Friday car

In 1978 an English car manufacturer rolled out the very early beta version of dashboard technology that would feature in its new car launch ten years hence, hailed as Austin Maestro. I was six years old and playing on my skateboard on a residential new-build cul-de-sac in a northern semi-rural former mill town. Darryl Moorhouse, who lived opposite, got the Maestro and invited my dad and me and all interested males in sight to wow and drool over this supposedly sea-change techno car. This model of car was bad. In retrospect, it was so poorly conceived and designed that many marked it as a seminal event in the decline of British motorcar manufacturing, in much the same way that the Cadillac Cimarron spelt the nadir of Detroit's output over in the US. As my childish senses ran amock and inspected the Austin Maestro even I was disappointed.

Austin later became Rover. There was a period in the nineteen-seventies in the UK when drivers of various models of brand new cars made by British Leyland including the Maestro and the Allegra, would open the door to exit the vehicle and the door would come off in the driver's hands. These became known as Friday Cars when ex-workers at the production plant in a town called Leyland in the North West of England - one of four countries in the nation known as Britain and comprising roughly half of the largest of its four thousand islands - the biggest or "Greatest" in old-speak - logically named Great Britain - began to report that workers on Fridays regularly went unsupervised and so didn't finish the cars properly for lack of incentive. No, really.

Conduct me an orchestra

Austin Maestro spoke. Yeah, the car spoke. It’s nineteen-seventy-eight. I can barely get any sense out of the three-channel television and we’re in an age where the primary building material for anything from television sets to public trains, escalators and sports stadia is wood. Wood! But sure, the car’s gonna speak. You knew something was amiss when this lesson on how not to manage customer expectations dropped from British Leyland.

Plus, it had a digital speedometer as opposed to a dial.

The trouble with reaching for the stars and missing is that you end up in the gutter at closing time with all the other drunkards.

When it attempted to say Speed limit reached it drooled out something a couple octaves deeper than Chewbacca. Everything it wanged out of the speakers was ten-thousand per cent unintelligible. Like Pac-Man having a stroke. It was real ZX81 dub, man. When it went for door open it sounded like Stephen Hawking on Quaaludes. You thought you’d been limed by John Wayne Gacy. The digital speedo was a little early for digital interface tech. So the car was always doing eighty-eight miles per hour on the eighth of August. At least, come hard launch, it was nineteen-eighty-eight. It got the year right. For a while. Those bright red square eights. Jeez! Look out Quartz. Keep that patent pending. The point is, there are dangers in both aiming too high and not aiming high enough.

Look down in front of you

There are two ways of going about creativity in terms of predicting future trends. One is in big visionary strokes that paint a picture of how the grand design might be landscaped decades henceforth. This is known as peripatetic, referring to the colonnade-strewn walkways in The Lyceum along which Aristotle used to stroll, dreaming big and thinking bigger. Head in the clouds. Feet on the ground. As Mancunian as The House of Atrius. 

Walking this path, I arrive at Quanta – which promises to eliminate ten million miles of fibre optic cables in a brushstroke – just as Faraday’s electric switch obliterated ten million miles of piston-fired pulleys and drive shafts and just as combustion technology eliminated countless waterwheels in fast flowing rivers all over Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire. 

Just like that.

But the second way of approaching the issue of understanding what is going to happen next is more Plato-driven. Look down in front of you. The answer is more likely to be right at the end of your nose. It’s a much less dangerous and less charming brand of creative observation. But equally if not more effective than blue sky thinking. No fireworks. Just Eureka in a softly spoken clean British accent. Maybe with a broad Yorkshire lilt, lad. 

And when I get all Platonic, I see that the next phase of out-phasing is already well underway. Has been for years. And it’s speeding up. The demise of it, I mean. So much so that excited chatter surrounding AI (Chat GPT) and 3D printing and the Blockchain (Bitcoin) and Augmented Reality (MetaQuest3, AppleVision) only ever skirt the edges and are a little late to the party. 

It’s taboo. It has to be. Politically. Morally. Culturally. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. That’s why no body ever speaks up and names it. I once called it in a busy pub after church surrounded by all my family and my uncle still speaks of that occasion now, years later. My auntie got up and walked out in sheer disgust. Gary the maverick traveller of time. Purveyor of hellish truths. And shameless.

You’ll work it out. It’s hardly news. And it’s bigger than Quanta because that’s just a medium and so being, it is just contained within another.

And just in case you wish to propagate a clever technicality: that quantum entanglement is so qualitatively different a manipulation of photons that it transcends particle travel, which is true, thereby negating McLuhan’s law by disproving (or invalidating) the exception – this last piece of logic is broken. Because quanta, although potentially a supra-medium – in that it is a consciousness that does not travel at all but is instantaneous even at the sub-atomic level – will only ever be used by humans as media updates. Moot that.

Hiatus

I’m twenty-five thousand words into my fiction novel and it’s a project I cannot drip-feed onto social media for various reasons. Some legal. Some vainglorious. 

People I half-know in my gym and distant relatives and old acquaintances from distant galaxies have kindly inquired after my manifest bout of non-participation into my small family of online publishing spaces. And it got me thinking about the old iBooks Author software compared to the fluidity and invisibility of how I create now. Paradoxically, it’s so good – the new software – so seamless – so in the background – that it’s even got me writing with a pen into notebooks against the boisterous fervour of city centre meeting houses and libraries – secure in the knowledge that typing up is not formatting. It’s just instantly a great looking book in the cloud. My waterwheel demoted to a piece of garden furniture. My first-hand experiences of looms and hoppers but the memories of a happy old man, with inflections of my own dad and grandpa speaking with passion and a fondness, in their day, about older stuff. Never quite knowing that beauty lay not in the objects about which they spoke, but in the hidden elegance which informed how they saw them. Mayhaps they did know and chose not to speak of it.

I attended a meeting of Inventors in Manchester recently and I was so inspired by the potency of the provocative and intellectually elegant arguments put forward that I sought to build my own version of it here. The aim is to question without finding an answer – to achieve a state – a sweet spot of inspired curiosity – keen as a liquid thirst – and then retain it. Do NOT ruin it by locating answers. Keep questioning. Stay in wonder. 

Inspiration shows up when you are doing something else. Sure. But you can, too, prompt your readiness. Questions you raise are mentally shut down and ring-fenced in your mind as concluded the instant you internally answer them. So don't. Just generate high-quality questions and let inspiration come find you with the befitting answers. Be a good receptacle for a higher state of consciousness. That's how.

And besides, just beyond inspiration lay actual real invention. A glimmering fictional battle-drum city on a glorious outcrop. Garyland. Bold as Olde Yorkshire. Gold as the dapple-drawn sun. The Sunne in Splendour. How glorious! Imagine. Now type it, lass. Get typing. We ARE reading. The audience is NOW.

Real stuff. Phenomenal.

Thanks for reading.

We are one

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