Half way along the road we have to go ...(MidJourney)

 

Since April I've been using an image generating artificial intelligence program called MidJourney. Previously my experience of the cutting edge of AI had been putting a few basic requests into ChatGPT, none of which I found particularly inspiring. I'd discovered MidJourney via a Twitter post from Mary Harrington who was commenting on the "nefarious" atmosphere of some of the purportedly more photorealistic images produced by the AI. The images in question were of groups of attractive young women, seemingly hanging out at a party. The composition was naturalistic, like a candid shot taken with a old Polaroid. Only when I looked closer did the figures begin to lose their air of authenticity. The limbs were not quite in the right orientation, hands were slightly too small or large, and most obviously at least half had missing or extra fingers. There was also something about the expressions on the faces of these digitally created nubiles that was, well, a little off, like the expressions on waxworks but far more fleshy and uncanny.

Harrington was right, there was something nefarious about these pictures, like the photographer had captured a scene never meant to be exposed to public view. Anyway, it was enough to peak my interest and have me sign up for a few minutes CPU time on the MidJourney server, which is accessed via the Discord app (I have no prior experience using Discord, which is apparently mainly used by gamers). I soon came to realise that quirks of anatomy are a common feature, particularly of the earlier versions of MidJourney - which as of this month is up to version 6.

Like all of these image generating AIs it responds to prompts fed in by the user, which can be either text, images or a combination of the two. There are also a variety of commands that can be used to tailor the images and to select basic parameters such as aspect ratio. Once a command is submitted the MidJourney bot - which you are in communication with on Discord, usually responds within 30 seconds or so, presenting you with a grid of four images the differences between which will depend on how you have configured the prompt. For example increasing the '--Chaos' level will add greater stylistic variation, while the '--Stylize' parameter sets the level at which the bot will improvise around your prompt. There are also levers for 'Weird' which I've yet to find a use for, and 'Image weight', which allows you to tweak the degree to which either the image or the text part of a prompt determine the output. There are a lot of other little features but these are ones I tend to use as standard.

So what's the point of this thing? What are people doing with it? Well, generalising somewhat, I'd say there were four main areas or genres of use based on the public gallery on the MidJourney site and images which have garnered popularity on social media:

1 - Fake news or comedy images of celebrities, politicians and other public figures. This is where you got those images of Donald Trump seemingly being dragged by police to jail. Now, this stuff has only really taken off on MidJourney since they've released versions that can actually reproduce a good likeness of the person being punked. Version four was passable but required a lot of coaxing by adding real photos of the individual to the prompt, but things really took off with version 5 and especially 5.2 which can produce excellent likenesses of major political figures without the need to feed it a picture of the person. Version 6 (I've only used this for a few days) appears to be just as good, but with better overall complexity and compositional coherence. It's the potential for misuse - or really any use - of this feature that gets a lot of people worried about the possibility of AI undermining democracy or rendering all news images untrustworthy - as if this wasn't already well on the way.

2 - A picture of your dream girl, often suspiciously young looking, and either anime style Asian or Teutonic blonde babe in appearance . Yes really, I'm not glossing this; it's clear this is what's going on, and why should we be surprised that in the world of OnlyFans and chatbot girlfriends that people immediately gravitate towards using AI in this way, as if the developers at MidJourney had a mainline into the deepest desires of the average extremely online male. But what really bothers me about the trend is how formulaic all the images are. It's all waify (or should that be Waifu?) skinny pixie girls or vivacious models of ambiguous age framed in soft light, staring out vacantly at the sex starved prompter on the other side of the screen. None of these kinds of images are pornographic (more on that side of things later), if anything they're just boring in their cute Eurasian / Aryan predictability. I have no doubt that this is going to be a major growth area in AI development as it so neatly tracks the general state of social and sexual atomisation in the developed world. One could imagine going to your doctor with depression born of loneliness only to be prescribed a fully customisable AI companion. It's cheaper than therapy!

3 - Mainstream entertainment spin off type imagery / fan art.  This needs little explanation, and it's perhaps understandable that at a stage in which the people most likely to be using this technology are geeks and the extremely online that a significant proportion of the content will be Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Pokémon adjacent type images. So what? it's boring but it's entertainment, and that is what most people will be satisfied with.

 

4 - Decoration. I'm revealing my Baconian prejudices here, but for me perhaps the most uninspired use of the this vastly powerful technology is in the production of purely decorative images, whether they be for marketing purposes, website design, or just stuff people can use at home. It's dull. End of. But it's also possibly the most "everyday" application image generating AI will be used for. This is where we fear for the graphic designers who face an 'adapt or perish' situation when this stuff goes mainstream. In fact it's already going mainstream with Adobe Firefly which will combine generative AI with Adobe's already wildly successful Photoshop and Illustrator products. So, I don't have a problem with using AI for basic graphic design, but it is for me - as the workaday application - thoroughly pedestrian and only likely to track the mediocrity of contemporary culture. 

So what have I used this technology for? What has held my attention over the last nine months and encouraged me to pump about £200 into a monthly subscription and extra CPU time? After the initial novelty wore off, and I realised I couldn't just upload a picture of myself and expect it to produce a perfect likeness in whatever Kabuki drag scenario I chose, I began to explore what you could call its inner aesthetic tendencies. My attitude was straightforward; I wasn't interested in a digitally enhanced version of reality. What interested me was pushing the AI into making images of a world that could not, and perhaps should not exist.

This is where I think the developers of MidJourney show their conservatism and adherence to the basic coordinates of traditional Western thought about aesthetics, since they constantly talk - in their Discord announcements - about 'prompt following' and 'coherence'. What this amounts to is fixing the horizons of the AI to the field of representation. The images the AI is meant to produce should visually represent as closely as possible the verbal and visual data fed into it in the prompt. If you ask for a black cat on a white mat, then that's what it should give you each time, except this is in aesthetic terms a very formal and empty description, which in and of itself could never be said to constitute the salient datum for a unique work of art. Either the same cat on the same mat would be produced each time, which would satisfy very few people, or an infinite number of radically different cats and mats would result, which would show MidJourney to be an engine of arbitrariness and rob the prompt engineer of their status as an "AI artist".  

Now, the developers know this, which is why they've put so much effort into MidJourney's ability to understand natural language prompts and in training the AI to interpolate those prompts with its dataset (or supercluster as they call it) in an increasingly coherent and complex way. The results, as you can see with the comparisons between V4 and V6 are startling. 

Left V4 Right V6 - Prompt: Videodrome, surrealism, cybernetics + the same 4 prompt images

Even so, I wonder what the ultimate end goal is for MidJourney's programmers when it comes to the question of representation? Do they want an tool that if given an essay on the aesthetics of Van Goghs Sunflowers could perfectly reproduce the Dutch masters painting (an idea which makes certain assumptions about art criticism), or do they want an AI that is itself an artist? If it is the former then they would seem doomed to produce endless iterations that track the user's prompts to ever greater degree of representational accuracy, which - since everyone will have a different idea of what that cat on the matt should look like - will never become the reliable tool of representation they might hope for, and will likely never satisfy those users - like myself - that hope AI can offer something uniquely nonhuman to the artistic process.

I don't know if that's what their engineers  want, perhaps some, the more commercially minded of their staff, do. After all, MidJourney is usually promoted as a tool for artists, not as an artist in its own right. If this is their intention then what they'll sacrifice, and indeed some versions have already bordered on this, is the wildness and surprising interpretations MidJourney gives to the prompts, and in particular how it interpolates radically incoherent combinations of text and image.

This has been my entry point to MidJourney, the USP without which I doubt I would have stuck around. You could call it dialectical, though that's probably a bit high flung. The attraction is the interplay between intention and randomness, and the feeling that there's something truly uncanny (a ghost in the machine if you like) behind the coding, that is working with you when you use it. This is also what makes it potentially addictive. You craft your prompt, maybe it takes only a minute, maybe it takes ten minutes, or twenty, before you fire it off into the heart of the rough beast. Then there is the delay while the magic happens; compare it to the gap between a dice throw and winning or losing. There is the slow incremental appearance of the grid, and finally the finished result which you scrutinise for hitherto unknown aesthetic qualities - also count the fingers, if there are meant to be fingers, and especially if there are not. It is genuinely addictive and I think even more so when you're trying to produce weird and unconventional images, since half of the fun is trying to sneak something past the moderators in the hope that'll push the result into more interesting territory.

And yes there is moderation, lots of it. Generally speaking you can't pump explicit images into it, or words that are likely to generate explicit images. That is not to say that it doesn't generate explicit images anyway, it really does, and with very little help; I do wonder whether the moderation is aimed more at controlling the inner tendencies of the AI than of the users! I just can't imagine the supercluster training set and coding is able to be thoroughly purged of the raw material that goes into making up a pornographic image. If it knows what Botticelli's Venus looks like then it knows how to generate nude female figures. To exclude all images of nudity would cut it off from a large swath of the cannon of Western art. This is another reason why I find no use for the --weird command. Just adding extra dissonance to the prompt, in either text or image form is enough to throw the result out to odd places and seemingly activate its inner tendencies and interpretive habits.

For example browsing other users pictures I found that the term (Nether Regions) in brackets, which is a kind of soft English slang for genitals (from the idiom of hidden Hellish things), would push any image with organic content into looking, well, not like actual nether regions, but just more gnarly, as if the biological components were suffering from some awful disease. An odd discovery, and only one of many similar counter-intuitive examples of non representational prompting. It doesn't give you what it says on the tin but it does something interesting and fairly consistently.

It's perhaps saying too much that there is a poetic quality to MidJourney, but it is striking the way in which it interpolates the different parts of a prompt, and can turn grammatically or semantically jarring words into coherent compositions. There is then an internal logic perhaps beyond the human ability to make sense from disparate linguistic and visual data. This is perhaps it's greatest strength as an artistic tool and it'll be interesting to see whether the developers are curious enough or sufficiently philosophically minded not to smother MidJourney's wildness in a race for ever greater representational accuracy.

London is a Dead Museum: Pt1. Boroughs

I was born in Camberwell in the London borough of Lambeth, high up on the 8^th floor of the Ruskin wing of Kings College Hospital. Upon being lowered to earth I was taken across the nearby border to a house in the borough of Southwark. Later I was to work several short stints at that hospital, labelling samples, ferrying intravenous fluids up and down the Escher-like backstairs of that Victorian structure. In my mid-teens I spent a week clearing out and cataloguing old medical records from a dusty hovel of a room in the basement, my arms rash red from the ancient detritus and mites left undisturbed for decades. Turned out that dank oubliette was paradigmatic of the NHS’s attitude to what we now call data integrity. Years later I trespassed upon a quasi-ruin of a hospital in the process of being demolished in West London to discover wicker baskets full of records secreted in long forgotten places. Somewhere along the line I developed a healthy dislike for hospital environments – as many people do – and have been thankful for remaining largely free of their mixture of bureaucracy and disfunction, interspersed with what devotees of the art call “Healthcare”.

I attended schools in Southwark and the neighbouring borough of Lewisham. These were my three psychogeographical Graces, the tripartite alma mater of my formative years.  I would not live or work outside of their borders until I was 22 years old. This latter fact would count against me as the tide of “anywheres” swept over the Capital during the 2000s. People who had come into the city for work or study would look disparagingly upon someone born here and who chose to stay, as many of my school and university friends had not. But If London was such a great place to be, full of opportunity and “buzz” then how could they begrudge me for having been here all along? This attitude prevailed most strongly amongst the home-counties pavenus, those small town high achievers who took to the city as if they had won a special prize, bringing with them their market town kitsch and insularity. These people were the principle beneficiaries – though not the architects – of successive waves of gentrification which claimed once affordable working class areas of the city, from Dalston and Stratford, to Brixton and Clapham.

One of the most visible consequences of this interior migration has been the replacement of pleasingly down-to-earth and integrated communities – each with their own character - with a network of twee BoBo enclaves, all extolling a variation on the same monoculture of vacuous coffee house chic, faux street food and boutique urban living. Oh! insipid parochial bumpkination, oh Bermondsey and Borough Market, your stalls once laden with affordable produce now overflow with cupcakes and artisan vegan scotch eggs! Oh Electric avenue! whose pioneering illuminations now light the way to “Brixton Village”; the countryside as a military Green Zone, inside the city walls, evicting the traders and welcoming well healed beardy craft brewers and premium Ramen bars.

I attended the opening of Brixton Brewery’s expanded production facility in late 2018. The only non-white faces were in the steel drum band. Pints of Pale Ale held by men in gilets with kid skin gloves. Brixton’s long and chequered history distilled (or fermented if you like) into easily marketable brand names; Coldharbour, Atlantic, Electric; streets once rocked by the riotous voices of the unheard are now as unaffordable and neutered as any of London’s most fashionable boroughs. The average monthly rent for a single room is over £1000, and the rent inflation has driven out many of the traders and small business owners that used to line those streets whose names the brewery has appropriated. It’s not an isolated phenomenon. Across the capital the same process of gentrification has taken place, turning once characterful districts into expressions of the same shallow white middle-class vision of urban life. It’s not that the black and brown faces have disappeared, far from it in fact, but what we now have is a stage-managed version of a multi-ethnic city where expressions of diversity and difference are only acceptable as a live-your-best-life narcissistic consumer product (or career path) for the white middle-classes, many of whom have come to the city late and approach its history and varied communities like a continental breakfast buffet, rather than a genuinely integrated form-of-life. Liberal Progressivism sits happily amid all of this, since the activism it promotes is skin deep and its administrators are made up predominantly of the same laptop class who have an interest in maintaining the status-quo.

One especially acute example of this I experienced last year was in Walthamstow, another once affordable edgeland now being given the hipster craft-beer Bobo urban cleansing treatment. On the long weekend of the late Queen’s Platinum jubilee a friend and I visited the craft beer breweries and their associated taprooms which now sit on the East side of the Maynard and Lockwood reservoirs, forming what is colloquially known as the Blackhorse Beer Mile. Nothing unusual or distinct was seen at first, just the usual mix of “high-class bar snacks” and highly hopped brews in converted railway arches and industrial units. Only later in the evening did we notice the bass that was rocking Exale brewery’s “favela chic” taproom was emanating from a huge dub sound system set up around the corner, outside a local Caribbean eatery and community centre. In a flash of 20 yards we went from white middle-class progressive monoculture of craft beer, gender neutral toilets, and indifferent clientele to an all black street party of goat curry, Dancehall and Red Stripe. We lingered on the fringes before a woman came across and invited us to join in. Clearly she found the unofficial segregation taking place as uncomfortable as we did. So, we stayed for a couple of beers and some bone shaking bass.

Later I asked a young woman working behind the bar of the Exhale brewery what she thought of the spontaneous division. She hadn’t thought about it at all, not noticed. She was of student age, perhaps attending some London college or university, which no-doubt makes a big deal of progressive politics and diversity, and yet she experienced no feeling of being out-of-joint at such blatant racial divisions. Was this perhaps because such divisions were common in whatever small Shires town she was from, or perhaps she just spontaneously preferred white urban monoculture? Whatever the truth, I had never seen the shallowness of modern London’s so-called multi-culturalism so clearly displayed.

In Lewisham, my secondary school – Forest Hill School for boys – was a hugely diverse place and had a high proportion of kids of Afro-Caribbean heritage. This resulted in a sort-of pigeon of Jamaican and London slang becoming the lingua franca of the playground. This way of talking is so common now that it’s become almost synonymous with London youth culture as a whole. But in the early 90s it was fairly new and quite scandalous for white working-class parents whose sons would come home talking like a cockney Horace Andy. It was also independent of hip-hop culture which didn’t take over until a few years later. The point is we grew up together, we blended and took on bits of each other’s backgrounds in a context of open, mutual and non-judgemental exchange. When in the mid-2000s I moved to West London, I started finding myself in pubs and other public places that were almost entirely white. Then as now I found it disconcerting.

As time went by I found myself in such spaces more frequently and in areas with large long-standing minority communities. Lambeth and Southwark for instance, saw huge amounts of gentrification in the first decade of this century. By 2010 I often found myself in newly regenerated pubs and bars that I now recognise as catering for that same white urban monoculture. What was jarring was that this was happening against a backdrop of historically high levels of migration into Britain, especially London. So, although on a purely numerical basis London was becoming less-white, less European; more and more I found cultural segregation and an increasingly boring, white middle-class expressing itself through parochialism and a small-town mentality.

Paul Kingsnorth made similar points about gentrification and standardisation in his 2009 book Real England; “the same chains in every high street; the same bricks in every new housing estate; the same signs on every road; the same menu in every pub”. He wasn’t wrong, and the “blandification” of life has only continued apace, now amplified by a burgeoning digital first culture that seeks to manage your preferences before you even know you have them. But what I think was difficult to foresee in the late 2000s was how a bland monolithic urban culture could rise that doesn’t appear like the usual chain shop takeover of the high street or corporate shopping mall experience. Instead, it appropriates the language of cultural and urban diversity while sanding down all the sharp edges, especially those which resist big finance and the myriad forces driving proletarianization. What you get then is a high street where kitsch sits alongside poverty, where market town twee cohabits with the gig economy, cashless craft beer bars with Poundland. The same powerful corporate forces are present, but now they sit under the surface of a superficially affluent and diverse urban environment which maximises consumer choice and “experience” to the detriment of everything else. As I have written elsewhere, the slogan for this new world, born from out of an unholy alliance between crisis response the DEI industry, is the now unavoidable “Be Kind”. And yet at the same time society becomes more isolated and spiritually atomised. Nihilistic, anti-social behaviour across all ages and backgrounds is now commonplace.

Gentrification, infantilisation, disneyfication, gigification, museumification, civilisational decline; there are many terms that try to capture this phenomenon. All express something of the truth of London’s story over the past three decades but perhaps none capture how it feels to experience these transformations first hand. How a home can become an alien and unliveable place, and why so many people who were born here have chosen to leave, including myself.

All Aboard the Arc

 

I recently investigated the website of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) who held a conference in London in October with a list of ‘dissident’ speakers - of both Left and Right persuasion – that included Jordan B. Peterson, the historian Niall Ferguson, Former Prime Minister of Australia John Howard and current Tory MP Miriam Cates. Framing itself more as an odd-ball think-tank than a party or lobbying organisation they include on their website a collection of questions which readers are invited to respond to and send to the organisation. ARC, as the acronym suggests are about renewal, presumably against a backdrop of cataclysm or eschatological fervour. But they also quote Martin Luther King, Jr's bon mot “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”; which evokes the long durée of historical progressivism. In short, like so many of these Right leaning conventicles they are a confused mishmash of influences and styles. Nevertheless, most of the questions here assume concepts and forms of thought drawn from garden-variety (or perhaps late 19th century variety) Liberal democratic and free-market orthodoxy. More on account of boredom than serious engagement, I set about in full doomer mode to respond to their questions.

 

Can we find a unifying story that will guide us as we make our way forward?

A story that unifies a nation or community can only come from out of that community's specific historical circumstances. As such, it could never serve as a universalist mythologeme to "humanity" or other such abstraction. Local stories and myths have been the foundation of every historical community until Christianity assimilated them or swept them away, only for its own stories to be superseded by the universalism of progress and global capitalism, neither of which preserve the specificity or spirit that grounds a living people. Only the overthrow of globalist universalism can open the way to new myths and new foundations. We need a multitude of myths not a monocultural mythology.

 

How do we facilitate the development of a responsible and educated citizenry?

One can never be responsible to an abstraction, so, in order to foster a responsible citizenry we must first nurture communities that bind their members through an autochthonous loyalty, that is a loyalty born from out of the everyday social relations specific to a historical community. No one feels responsible in a mass society governed by empty formal values such as those proffered by Liberalism. The hyper-individualism of our present day is incompatible with a demand for substantive social obligations beyond those demanded by the law. If the law could be remade to instantiate a leading culture of substantive values, and those values imbedded in institutions then perhaps we could talk about specific responsibilities. As things stand it is perhaps true that the renewal of responsibility may only come through the cooperation required for preservation of self and kin in the event of a general collapse. Thus, pampered Western complacency must end.

 

What is the proper role for the family, the community, and the nation in creating the conditions for prosperity?

These things have been rendered defunct by contemporary financial and technological global capitalism. Family, community and nation are all social formations that set limits by including some excluding others. Such delimiting is opposed to the liquifying effects of global Capital which seeks to break down barriers to its self-expansion, rendering all persons fungible within a world-market for goods, services and cultural ephemera (delivered in a digital first economy). Now, the old-world formations of family and nation can only be defensive, a bolt-hole to wait out the collapse of the global so that a new and modest idea of prosperity might arise. As Hannah Arendt once said, "I do not love the world, I love my friends". This is a statement of limits and a good start.

 

How do we govern our corporate, social and political organizations so that we promote free exchange and abundance while protecting ourselves against the ever-present danger of cronyism and corruption?

Cronyism and corruption are a natural outgrowth of any organisation once it becomes disembedded from its local role and turns global. Most institutions, whether political, corporate or social have become totally marketised over the previous few decades such that they all work with a similar set of concepts that have nothing to do with any autochthonous community or identifiable set of values beyond profit, loss and market share. It is foolish to imagine any other values could arise while the present set of social relations prevail.

 

How do we provide the energy and other resources upon which all economies depend in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe and efficient, including in the developing world?

There is no technological solution to the problems of energy and resources. The club of Rome report in 1972 which identified limits to growth is still the most clear sighted and straightforward statement of a basic fact. As long as human beings conceive of themselves as separate from their environment, and as long as they harbour the desire to obtain the God-like power to transcend environmental limitations, we will continue on this path to destruction. It is perfectly possible that human beings are marked above all else by hubris and that collective self-destruction is our natural fate. But small pockets of human life may survive and be able to start again. Build back from out of ruins.

 

How should we take the responsibility of environmental stewardship seriously?

It is difficult to take it seriously since it ascribes to us a collective power that is only an illusion. We did not collectively reason our way into climate collapse and we cannot collectively reason our way out of it. Industrialisation and the mass exploitation of the earth's recourses was a process that took centuries and was never planned out on a global scale. The claim that global humanity can manage its way out of its own fate is nothing but hubris and mass delusion. Only small communities, beginning with the family can begin to withdraw and prepare for the cataclysm.

Enough Rainbow Flogging!

 

Just as the pandemic was getting started in 2020 I wrote a long essay about the contentious issue of whether biological sex was binary or existed as a spectrum. This was a response to a lot of noise around this subject that I’d been seeing on the fringes of what we now know as the gender, or trans wars. Part of that piece included an analysis of the meaning of spectrum as it appears in the rhetorical and sign strategies of LGBT activism. The rainbow - I argued - was the paradigmatic spectrum and the most readily identifiable symbol of LGBT discourse, whether as a flag carried by participants on a Pride march or used as a marker on products, literature or anything else. Describing biological sex as a spectrum was then a sort of territorial claim packaged with a cluster of associations which disrupted normative thinking around sexual dimorphism and the idea of the typical case, in a similar way that the expanding list of labels for sexuality and gender identity disrupt normative understanding of those categories.

I think an addendum to this analysis is in order on account of the way in which the use of the rainbow symbol has metastasised over the last three years. Very few people in the Anglophone world (as always it's worth noting that these phenomena reach their greatest intensity in those countries - at the vanguard of Decline) could fail to have noticed the massive expansion of the rainbow symbol beyond its common association with LGBT activism. We've come to a point where it's now hard to avoid encountering it in any number of incongruous locations. For example one might traverse a rainbow painted road crossing (displacing the traditional 'Zebra' black and white design) in Chiswick or Ealing. Are these places especially in need of ostentatious symbols of inclusivity?  Do they have a known lack of diversity or history of discrimination against LGBT identifying people? The intention is opaque. If you visit a hospital or other NHS facility you're positively rainbow bombed by murals, information leaflets, signage and the now ubiquitous - and slightly threatening - rainbow adjacent imperative BE KIND. In addition to these publically funded examples you're also likely to come across private businesses making a strong show of their 'allyship' or status as a Stonewall accredited LGBT employer, replete with bright and shiny rainbow graphics. So, why all the rainbow flogging?

In my analysis in 2020 I drew attention to the use within LGBT activist discourse of the concept of "spectrum" and of the rainbow as the paradigmatic spectrum. On the one hand the rainbow with its multiple colours highlights diversity and inclusivity. All are welcome under its umbrella, and - as the concept of spectrum indicates - the symbol is able to accommodate an infinite multitude of non-conforming and emergent identities. In addition to diversity and inclusion the rainbow also symbolises equity, that all members within the spectrum are equal and there is no place for normative categories of any kind. No-one has the right to claim normative supremacy against which the others are but lesser variations. Everyone is a winner, everyone should be celebrated. Taken as a whole the rainbow stakes a claim for a form of totality - albeit of a rather circular kind. It is a circle of mutual celebration and normative dissolution where the members are considered equal but without singular consequence. It is a flag under which you can be whoever you want to be, but all you will ever amount to is an equal in an otherwise free-floating and boundless community. The burning of a thousand minor stars is blinding.

There are I think at least two main highways through which the rainbow has come to symbolise this new totality. The first should be familiar. During the pandemic the child-like painted rainbow became the symbol not only of collective support for health workers, but of collective conformity with government restrictions. During my many long walks in 2020 I would see this rainbow in windows beyond which lived people terrified to leave their homes. I saw it marked in chalk on pavements next to spray painted signs to KEEP YOUR DISTANCE installed by local councils. I saw it in the gaudy lights of giant advertising boards in Piccadilly circus, on the sides of busses and in stations. The rainbow came to mark a boundary and a sign of allegiance. You were either compliant and clapped the good people of the NHS and the government trying to protect the vulnerable, or you were with the MAGA conspiracists, the death cultists, the anti-vax 5G proto-fascists. Quite a dichotomy set up there, but it was one fuelled by politicians for over two years, and that particular piece of divide and rule has only continued into the latest round of crises. And herein lies the crux of the matter.

 

The NHS is collapsing. In some respects we no longer have accessible public healthcare in the UK. Certainly many people, myself included, no longer bother trying to access it unless it's a question of life and death. Over 10% of the UK population is currently waiting for NHS treatment and the average waiting time for an ambulance is such that if you were to suffer a stroke, heart attack, or be involved in serious car accident you are most likely to die on the street. As I have written before, comprehensive public health was abandoned during the pandemic in favour of a war economy aimed at one eminently survivable disease. The damage caused has been vast and will only worsen, since not only have many NHS services never returned to pre-pandemic levels, we now have a population wracked by physical and metal ill health, the direct consequence of being confined to their homes and having their social existence decimated by wrongheaded and entirely short-sighted authoritarian policies. We  now also have rampant inflation, the combined result of disrupted supply chains (again due to the pandemic response) and the decision of European nations to shoot themselves in the foot by weaponising energy supplies in their now open conflict with Russia in Ukraine.

The second highway towards total-rainbow has been the mainstreaming of the gender wars at the same time gender activism has been making major inroads into State and third sector institutions. The main protagonists of the latter in the UK have been transgender organisations Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, and the establishment LGBT+ organisation Stonewall, whose Diversity Champions Program and associated Workplace Equality Indices have come under scrutiny for among other things misrepresenting the UK Equality Act. There are however a whole host of advocacy/activist and associated gender-conventicles working across the economy, all using similar rhetoric and symbolism, including variations on the ubiquitous rainbow.

At a time of such self evident decline it's hardly surprising that the rainbow sticking plaster, with its infantile imperative BE KIND has conquered all before it. People have every reason to be angry; they are being taxed for services they cannot access and are freezing and starving to death in order to maintain American global hegemony. Western Governments have done little else over the past few years but sell out to big tech and big pharma, while at the same time annihilating the societal base upon which their populations may have been able to self organise and resist. We are angry, disenchanted and atomised. Our politicians have no answers to the grand problems facing post-industrial societies in climate collapse.

The rainbow provides a convenient image with built in semiotic slippage. Its ability both to totalise and to divide inside from outside make it invaluable - as it was during the pandemic - to rally people behind its nebulous cause, and stifle opposition. When after waiting weeks for a doctor's appointment you finally get to the overcrowded surgery only to find your appointment has been cancelled owing to staff shortages your understandable frustration is confronted by the sign fixed to the plastic screen (another retain from pandemic days) in front of the reception desk. It tells you 'We take a zero tolerance approach to any abuse of our staff". The words are ringed by a rainbow above which reads BE KIND. The reality being presented to you here is clear; you're either with the good guys, the cult of permanent celebration, that waits quietly masked up for treatment that'll never arrive, or you're the proto-fascist horde, the anti-vax thug, the deplorable superspreader event with bells on that deserves nothing from our entirely faultless and virtuous welfare system.

Pull back and apply the same logic to other situations where the rainbow appears like a warning. Whether you're an employee uncomfortable about being told to add your pronouns to your email signature, or a teacher unwilling to teach children about the existence of hundreds of gender identities, or just anyone going about your business only to be confronted by this new creed, this unspoken symbol of your compelled compliance, the rainbow makes clear you are either with us or against us. The rainbow has been radicalised and now represents a boundary permitting the distinction between insiders and outsiders. In a collapsing civilisation diversity, equity and inclusion becomes just another cudgel, another way to govern the ungovernable.

Interestingly, the emergence of the rainbow as a symbol of political kitsch coincides with its collapse as a symbol of unity in LGBT politics. The rise over the last two years of alternative activist frameworks which diverge from Stonewall's monopolistic approach is a sign that the reality of conflict between interests and the limits of facile liberal universalism are beginning to be felt. The Progress Pride flag is perhaps the strongest visual symbol of this conflict. It features the traditional horizontal bars of the rainbow flag but now it is bisected from the left by additional colours meant to represent  marginalized people of colour, trans people, and those living with HIV/AIDS. The point of the triangle cleaves into the rainbow at a 45^o angle as if it were trying to split it in two, the formal arrangement of which brings to mind El Lissitzky's Soviet era constructivist image 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge' 1919. In Lissitzky's picture, the Bolshevik red wedge is shown symbolically dividing the mass of the anti-revolutionary white army.

 

The progress pride flag, and all the many variations of it testify to a fundamental failure of the LGBT movement and of the liberal identarian dream more generally. If the rainbow flag, which by its own definition is the most inclusive flag imaginable, is not sufficient to hold the demands of your ever expanding list of constituents, then this might point to the insufficiency of personal identity and self-expression for founding a stable political community, or to escape conflicts over competing Rights claims.   

The modern "prosumer" (producer/consumer) of digital capitalism will not settle for being integrated anonymously into a abstract concept like the all-inclusive rainbow spectrum. Visibility, a latecomer to the activist arsenal works like an agent-provocateur setting all against all in the battle to be seen. This should not come as a surprise, since in an attention economy like ours, governed by the extreme narcissism of contemporary liberal individualism, being seen, being noticed, might be the difference between sink or swim; at least according to the market based value system that contaminates all Western culture. It is clear that self-actualisation is rarely achieved without standing on the shoulders of others.

By the same token, the attempt to mollify and capture a declining civilisation under the same empty totality will fail. What is described as the woke capture of the institutions is actually this attempt, which aims to mitigate the negative externalities of our digitally dysphoric and ever more fragmented world by bureaucratic means. But DEI policies and disciplinary procedures are no substitute for values nurtured within real historical communities and real-world practices. Ultimately the rainbow stands for everything and thus stands for nothing. LGBT activism has been thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests and subsumed into the prevailing culture of marketing and rat-race self promotion. While at the same time its colourful imagery has been generalised into a society-wide palliative and encomium to quiet compliance with the ruling orthodoxy of managed decline. The rainbow symbol's only function now is as a brightly coloured boundary running through everything. Vaccinated,/unvaccinated, Brexiteer/Remainer, Fascist/anti-fascist, inside/outside, with us/against us. These absolutes are a selection from a far longer list which now serve to divide the modern West into opposing and utterly implacable camps.

Moving Westwards - Fragment from The Archive

 

Moving Westwards

Ragged men drive women and children across the moor. Exodus from bombed out villages on East Dartmoor. Chagford crater. Makeshift camps reduced to shredded fabric. The hillside scorched. Hellfire and granite shards cut through people and things. Hum of drones with infrared give no respite at night. Beneath the stars at Scorhill circle I saw a tiny boy weep before a dead foal. His mother was left behind a week earlier. We set-up camp in a valley within the shadow of a great unnamed tor. Cold stone witness to this second age of exodus. Men with some experience of the land drew a crude map on the ground with twigs. We resolved to move westward as far from the roads as possible. A young man is sent ahead with a message for militiamen at Tavistock. He does not return. Three days later we discover the town laid waste, all supplies destroyed. Suicides mount. As dusk fell on the ninth day a strange congregation at the half derelict church of Sydenham Damerel gave us shelter in the nave. Some were foreigners, though none of colour. We, this shivering mass of non-persons and the wished-to-be-forgotten. The Muslim girls slept in the chapel. Obsidian stone forms compete with gothic revival and neo-paganism. Totems and sigils, some using human excretions adorn the walls. Frantic chanting on the morning of the tenth day. The girls are driven out of the chapel. Futility of purification leads to lingering distrust. Fug of incense and candle smoke amplifies the fear. Drone hum as counterpoint to choral plainsong. Most single men moved on during the night taking what they could from the outhouses. I stayed to assuage the wrath of the faithful. They expect libations. By the bank of the river Tamar I saw their women dance naked, raised up to a frenzy of jerking spitting flesh. Bodies scarred from revived penitentials. Rebounded superstitions, renewed extremity after the eschaton was permanently deferred.  Dead foal boy shrieking at the water's edge as if transformed into a coyote. At dusk one of the Muslim girls was found drowned in a foot of water. The remainder of us left at first light. The offer of an escort as far as the highway which cut the region from north to south was refused. We had scant sense of geography but even less trust in them. Two days to cross Bodmin then down into the South West as far as we could get by the end of the month. Ancient paths cross poisoned soil. Abandoned military emplacements stud the peaks. Freezing moorland water polluted with discarded munitions. The eldest woman among us passes out from thirst and exhaustion. We carry her to a ruined farm house. The domes and antennae of a listening station can be seen on the horizon. I know we cannot stay long.  On waking she curses her absent husband in a language I cannot understand. The food is nearly gone. She refuses her share, gesturing to the children who are not hers. Late in the evening she loses consciousness for the last time. I wake in the morning to the sound of spades cutting wet earth. A man who spoke her language lowered the body down. I could not understand him either. Tracking along the north coast a day away from Truro they caught up with us. There was no warning before the gunfire started. Most were cut down immediately. I saw the dead foal boy shaking, rooted to the spot before the bullet shattered his skull. White light panic. Screams like waves of static blot out the sound of the shots. My body carried away by them. I fall down to the beach. Wash up beneath the cliff face. Static resolves into oceanic rhythms. I wake upon the altar of a Devonian cathedral. Time is abandoned here. The world is gone. I am alone with the sea.