A year ago, both my parents died. My dad in January and my mum in February. They were on opposite sides of the planet but had a number of things in common. Both deaths were unexpected - dad's was a late cancer diagnosis giving him weeks to live, mum's during recovery from an operation. The rest of 2023 was somewhat coloured by this, as you might imagine, and it struck me, as these anniversaries chime for the first time, that I've not tried to write about it, and that maybe I should try.

Over Christmas 2022/23 I had a sudden recovery after 6 months of Long Covid. I'd got a particularly bad dose in July 2022 and had been suffering from fatigue for the rest of the year – not bad enough to keep me bedridden but enough that a reasonable amount of exercise, mental or physical, would render me next to useless for the next two days. Over the winter break I realised in hindsight that I hadn't felt like shit for a few days and while I had the fitness levels of someone who had done no exercise for half a year, I was definitely on the mend.

On January 8th Fiona and I were getting ready to leave for Winchester. Dad had been admitted to a hospice and this was probably the last chance to see him. Just as we were about to lock up I got a call from my step-sister that he had died. The funeral was on Feb 1st.

On Friday Feb 10th, the week after my dad's funeral, I got a 6am call from my sister in New Zealand. The prognosis for mum's heart surgery had changed and the increased chance she might not survive meant I should seriously consider coming over before the operation on Monday.

By noon I was on my way to London for an 8pm flight from Heathrow, landing in Auckland 30 hours later. I saw mum that afternoon and again on the day of her operation. She came through it OK and there were a couple more visits, but then there was a complication and my sister and I got the call from our step-dad that she'd died. The memorial service was a week later.

I stayed in New Zealand for a month in total, living with my sister and her family who I hadn't seen much of over the last few years, what with Covid and them being on the other side of the planet. And then I few home.

Shortly after I was back in the UK and back at work I noticed my arms were aching, specifically the inner pointy bits of my elbows. Also, the fatigue was back and I was unable to do a full day at work. It was like Long Covid, except it wasn't. I was very confused until a good friend told me this was grief.

The idea that grief could have a physical manifestation was news to me. But then everything about grief was news to me. Somehow I had gotten to the age of 51 with no-one explaining to me what would happen to my brain and body when my parents died. I'm being facetious because of course they hadn't because we're shit at talking about death in this country.

So I now had grief, which I was told would pass, which was good to hear.

In June my sister came over from New Zealand and stayed with us for a while. At the end of the month we had a memorial day for my mum's UK-based friends and family and scattered her ashes. I wasn't expecting this to do much for me, based on the last three months of nothing really doing much for me, but afterwards I felt like a weight had lifted. I don't know why, but I wasn't going to argue.

July and August were pretty good in comparison. I built a couple of massive community composting bays with my friend Dale and started therapy.

When I was in New Zealand talking with my sister she mentioned she'd gone through some therapy to unpick some parental stuff, and it occurred to me that I might have some buried things to work through too. Once the grief hit hard on my return I started looking into affordable options and settled on weekly online sessions with the Meridian Centre in Birmingham.

I think they're working for me. At least people who know me say it seems to be making a positive difference. I don't know if I can quantify the difference, but it's certainly there.

One twist is that I'm not really dealing with any parental issues. While they are obviously there, the main stuff seems to be related to my autism, specifically my sense of self. And this has had some repercussions.

Over the autumn the strain of work started to get the better of me. Like many small businesses the last four years have been insanely tough and we are all quite exhausted. Loaf is still standing and is a perfectly viable business that is not in danger of closing any time soon, but maintaining that in the face of bonkers inflation has taken a toll. I think that in a normal year I'd be fine, but not this year.

In November Fi and I went to Fuerteventura for a proper holiday in the sun. Despite sleeping a lot and going to the beach and basically doing nothing, I actually came home more exhausted.

By December I was put on light duties at work. My doctor could prescribe nothing more than rest, which I was already doing because after a few hours of activity I was having to spend the next day or two in bed. It was like Long Covid all over again for third time, and it was starting to get really annoying, especially as my niece, Isobel, was over from New Zealand for two months and I was pretty incapable of spending much quality time with her.

Christmas came and went and Fi, Isobel and I went to Brighton for a week. I barely left the apartment, and everything in the apartment annoyed me. On the way down I started reading Fern Brady's memoir Strong Female Character, about living with undiagnosed autism until her 30s. Her situation was very different to mine but every chapter had me gasping with recognition. I finished it in two days, which considering I've barely made it past chapter 1 of a book since 2020 is saying a lot.

I also revisited a booklet on autistic burnout someone had sent to Fi in the spring. For some reason, despite getting a fucking autism diagnosis in my 40s and going into therapy with the aim of understanding what that meant, it hadn't occurred to me that it might be the reason I was having such a shit time of it. I made a note that one of my autistic traits might be ignorance of when my autistic traits are kicking in.

The thing with a diagnosis, especially in mental health, is it's mostly an educated guess. I can't say with absolute certainty that I have "Autistic Burnout" but that doesn't really matter. What matters is whether diagnosis describes symptoms I recognise and offers a model for recovery that benefits me. So far (and it's early days) it seems like it does.

One of the ironies of accepting you have an autistic problem is that you then proceed to get more autistic. I've realised that because my autism isn't as severe as some, I've been able to hide, or "mask", it fairly successfully all my life. From other people of course, but more critically from myself. Because I have a sense of how I should be thinking and behaving, I prop myself up and push myself through situations that, if they're not actively hurting me, are taking way more energy than might be considered normal. When I was young and relatively fit and healthy I could accommodate this higher cost, but as I drifted into my 40s my capacity has shrunk. (This is probably why there are a lot of middle-aged autism and ADHD diagnoses.)

At first, when I was unable to find the energy to mask, the traits occasionally bled through, but now I've totally given up the pretence, and boy oh boy are they pronouncing their presence!

The first thing that I've really noticed is my sensitivity to stimulus has gotten markedly worse over the last six months. I can't deal with spotlights and bare bulbs, and ambient noise has become painful. I actually thought I was going deaf but it turns out my hearing is pretty much fine – it's my ability to filter and process sounds that is broken. I now have proper noise cancelling headphones which I wear at work (lots of fridges and extractor fans in a bakery) and keep a pair of earplugs with me at all times. Socialising is next to impossible at the moment but on the rare occasions I do go out, I make sure I take breaks from the room, walking around the block or just standing outside like a smoker.

The second thing is headaches from thinking. Before Christmas I realised I was taking painkillers every afternoon just to get through the day. Now I'm finding I can do about two hours of proper thinking before my brain starts to hurt. It's not like a dehydration or hangover headache, more like a sinus pain, only around the back of my skull. This loss of executive function is actually quite distressing because I really enjoy thinking, problem-solving and organising. It's something I've gotten quite good at over the years, and now I can't do it without hurting myself.

These bring into question the whole purpose of recovery. I'm clearly knackered after a shit 18 months, but if I were to rebuild my capacity so I can mask and push through the days again, is that enough? The goal I've set with my therapist is to move from an oscillating pattern of capable / incapable where I at best budget in crashes, to a smoother line where I work within my limits and don't crash. This feels sensible, but critically it involves respecting my limits.

The autistic burnout guide talks about recovery involving "grief work", where you accept that you can no longer do what you thought you could do, or think you should be able to do. In the short term I'm more than happy to accept that I can't do stuff, because I'm exhausted, but in the long term it feels like I'm writing off the rest of my life. The big question, I guess, is what the capacity of "recovered" looks like and I have no baseline to work with right now.

Also, more grief? Seriously?

I'm blessed, and I don't use that term lightly, to have the support of my wife, Fiona, but also to be working at Loaf who have been more accommodating than I could ever hope for. I'm also lucky to have some proper friends who genuinely seem to give a shit about me. I'm 100% sure that without them I would be burning my bridges and starting from scratch, as has happed a few times in the life of Pete (1991, 1998, 2003, 2008 and 2017, to pick a few years). But not this time. Partly because I genuinely don't have the energy to start from scratch, but mostly because I don't have to.

I'm still on light duties at work, going into the office for a few hours here and there to keep the finances ticking over and working from home on the business planning. Resting is hard as I just want to do things, but I'm getting better at it. I even read most of a couple of books. In April I want to try building up my capacity again, but only if I'm ready.

If you've made it to the end, thanks for reading. I could go on, and I probably will talk about more specific things at a later later date. But the purpose of this was to get down the facts as I see them, to get 2023 out of my head and into words. And there it is.

In January we went to Brighton for a week's holiday. Usually we go to the Welsh coast for a winter break but this year we had my niece, Isobel, to stay and thought Brighton might be a bit more interesting.

One evening we met up with an old friend from Birmingham who'd moved there, at The Fortune of War, a pub on the seafront. After a pint I went to the loo and was greeted with a rough sketch of an alien from the movie franchise Alien, smoking a ciggy and holding a pint.

In the 1990s a cartoonist called Ralph "Ralphie" Kidson produced a series of self-published comics: Sad Animal, Giant Clam. Envelope & Stick and Captain Dolphin to name but four. One of his strips was titled Allens and told the story of a family of aliens from the movie franchise Alien with the surname Allen who lived in a suburban terraced house. In the first strip, Allens vs Predator, then played pool with a Predator.

I have tried in vain to find this comic on the internet. I probably have a copy in the many boxes of zines in the spare room and when I finally sort through them I'll try to remember to take a pic for this post. In the meanwhile here's a review of Giant Clam #2

Every so often a Banksy will be discovered and there's a huge rush to save it, either so it can be sold for a fortune or preserved "for the community", before someone takes it for themselves. This had happened a couple of weeks before we were in Brighton where a Stop sign, altered into a protest presumably against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, was removed by opportunists, prompting the deputy leader of Southwark council to say “We’d like it back so everyone in the community can enjoy Banksy’s brilliant work.”

The confluence of protest art, vandalism, safety infrastructure, cultural value judgements and celebrity is so deliciously potent that I struggle to unpick it, and kinda prefer it that way.

So when I saw a piece of graffiti by an artist that a couple of decades ago I considered one of the major figures of the British cartooning scene, I wondered what would happen if I decided it was worth removing. How would I do it? What would the repercussions be? Could I get permission? Brighton is a city that values the arts and here was something I could probably argue was worth saving.

In the end I left it, so that everyone in the community could enjoy Ralphie's brilliant work.

The above aerial photo of the volcanic eruption on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula (taken from a Kottke post) is of interest to me because, in the blue circle, is the Blue Lagoon spa, which Fi and I went to on our honeymoon in 2015.

The spa is obviously closed at the moment, because of the volcano, but I'm sure it'll eventually re-open when it's safe to do so. Even so, the location of that photo of my wet bald head is currently within walking distance of red hot lava.

In 2009, while visiting family who had emigrated to New Zealand, I went on a trip to Whakaari, aka the White Island volcano. New Zealand has a few active volcanos and this one was a island you could visit relatively easily, like going to a mountain summit by boat. We were given gas masks, hard hats and were told to wear proper shoes but any real danger was underplayed. I had great fun and took load of photos.

If you know about White Island it's probably due to the 2019 disaster when the volcano got a bit more active than normal and 22 people died. I remember this news quite vividly because I'd been on that island. The guide had casually said that while we'd be following a plan, the landscape tends to change weekly, because you know, volcano.

Tourist trips to White Island has been suspended since 2019 and don't look likely to resume any time soon.

So I've been to two volcano-related tourist attractions that have been shut down by volcanic activity. One was done pre-emptively, one in the terrible gaze of hindsight. The thing is, I rationally know I shouldn't have been taken to the island – the option should not have been available to me – but I'm really glad I went.

A week or so back, someone asked Nick Cave, the musician, what he thought of Nick Cave, the artist who makes "soundsuit" costumes. He said:

I have admired the work of the American artist, Nick Cave, for many years. In creating his soundsuits he famously and audaciously turned the rage, grief and helplessness he experienced after the LAPD’s beating of Rodney King into deeply joyful, even rapturous art. The soundsuits became a kind of ecstatic armour.

You can read an in-depth account of their creation and subsequent proliferation here, but I was drawn to the origin of the first one.

It was a very hard year for me because of everything that came out of the Rodney beating. I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man – as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as less than.

I started thinking about the role of identity, being racially profiled, feeling devalued, less than, dismissed. And then I happened to be in the park this one particular day and looked down at the ground, and there was a twig. And I just thought, well, that’s discarded, and it’s sort of insignificant. And so I just started then gathering the twigs, and before I knew it, I was, had built a sculpture.

I was inside a suit. You couldn’t tell if I was a woman or man; if I was black, red, green or orange; from Haiti or South Africa. I was no longer Nick. I was a shaman of sorts.

Cave has continued to make soundsuits over the years and uses them for performances and exhibitions.

Yesterday, in their "my best photograph" feature, the Guardian had Charles Fréger’s photo of three Babugeri, "men who dress in full-body animal costumes and perform rituals intended to banish evil spirits",

Fréger says:

It is obvious this costume is phallic – a lot of these traditions are associated with fertility. There is also a Greek tradition called Arapides, where the guys dance in a circle dressed a bit like this, with very tall costumes made from animals. You have to be a teenager or a young man: no children and no women are allowed in the circle. The rules are very strict and you always want to know why. Because at the end of the day, what is this? In Bulgaria, it’s a group of guys who are going to spend three days jumping around and dancing, drinking too much alcohol and posing for selfies to post on social media. I think the combination of wearing the costume and the lack of oxygen inside, plus the alcohol consumed, can make people believe they are a real animal.

They are visually very similar, of course, which is why I'm writing this post. Synchronicity is fun and pattern-matching can lead to interesting thoughts.

Twenty years ago, when I was doing random minimum wage jobs as a temp, I took a job at Birmingham's Sea Life Centre during the school break. Two of us were to take it in turns wearing an otter costume to entertain the queue. One in the costume, the other to shepherd past obstacles and guard against unruly teens.

I blogged about it at the time (saved by the Internet Archive) and remember it being a revelatory experience, being in a full body costume. My identity had been erased. Everyone other than the smallest of kids knew there was a human in there, but they didn't know what kind of human. I could dance around like an idiot without any fear or shame. This costume which restricted my vision and movement gave me an incredibly visceral freedom.

This is quite different to wearing a distinctive piece of clothing for the first time, which will make me feel immensely uncomfortable. I guess I want to be relatively invisible as I move through the world, and changing how I appear changes my visibility in ways I can't assess.

But I can't feel seen in a full body costume, because I can't be seen. Only the costume is seen.

I haven't seen The Zone of Interest yet but I very much intend to and have been following the reviews. I particularly liked Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's discussion which included some observations from Mayo who has a prior interest in Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss's story. It looks to be an amazing piece of work.

A month ago, like most people in the UK, I watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office after it sent shockwaves through the British establishment in a manner I haven't seen for a long time. The show is, of course, excellent and if you haven't seen it I highly recommend you do.

The fascinating thing about the Post Office scandal, for me anyway, is the vast majority of people who were persecuting the innocent postal workers thought they were doing their jobs properly. They had been given a remit, whether it was to investigate suspected theft or to preserve the good name of the Post Office, and it seems it takes more than a computer bug affecting a proportionally small number of people to derail it.

Humans don't like messy decision trees. They want to tie everything up in a neat bow and go home. And tying a neat bow is rewarded, so there's an extra incentive to ignore the wrinkles. Post Office boss Paula Vennells was not given a CBE by accident – she was rewarded for doing her job properly.

My biggest fear after watching the show was that the media would look for a scapegoat, finding individuals who could be blamed and then stopping. Because this was not the fault of individuals. This was a systemic issue.

Before Christmas I rewatched Unbelievable, the Toni Collette / Merritt Wever starring miniseries about how police can utterly fail rape victims. One of the countless great things about this show is that they allow the detective whose decisions cause such irreparable harm to confront his mistakes. In a lesser drama he would be cast as a the villain, but here he's someone who thought they were doing the right thing, following the proscribed rules and doing his job properly. Upon discovering that his by -the-book actions had allowed a rapist to not only escape but to rape again and again he looks utterly drained and, notably, powerless to make it right.

It's just two or three short scenes and the show is most definitely not about him, but I appreciated how it told us not to just blame the individuals. This is a systemic problem that runs throughout the justice system. The achievement of the detectives played by Collette and Wever to solve the case took immense strength and determination but this is not something to celebrate. It is an indictment of a system that is not working and does not have the ability to fix itself.

Similarly, Mr Bates and his fellow travellers are heroes, but they shouldn't have to be. The corporate rules by which The Post Office operates meant it took pigheaded tenacity and a sense of injustice, spread over decades of relative indifference from the establishment, to raise a blip of awareness about this miscarriage of justice, and without the emotional push of a big TV drama it would probably still be a niche story in Private Eye.

As someone who likes a good system, I'm not against bureaucracy. My dream is to live in a society where shit just works and nothing annoys me more than when the promise doesn't match the reality. I'm more than happy to accept that things will go wrong, mistakes will be made and so on, but I live in the hope that lessons will be learned and improvements will come.

The biggest mistake anyone ever makes is assuming the system works all the time. The best you can do is assume it works most of the time (otherwise you need a new system) and that there will be exceptions which you need to allow resources to deal with.

The Post Office is a long-standing British institution, about which people get dewey eyed and emotional, that has been infected by a capitalist ideology which does not allow for self-reflection. Anything that affects shareholder value, be it suspected theft or bad publicity, must be squashed without mercy.

The US police service is a flawed system propped up by self-mythologising which prevents any attempts to reconsider its value and purpose to society. (The British police aren't great but it seems much worse over there.)

There are countless other examples. I sure you can name a few.

Systems that don't have a feedback loop built in are, at best, going to fail in their aims and, at worst, going to inadvertently cause harm to the people they are supposed to help.

I'm framing this piece with a film I haven't seen yet about Rudolph Höss, the Nazi in charge of Auschwitz where an estimated 3 million people died. I do not want to compare individual police offices and Post Office management to Höss – that would be crass. But I do think their roles exist on a spectrum. It's notable the holocaust did not just suddenly happen – it evolved over a period of years in service to an ideology which could not be questioned. Höss may have taken the job because he was a fascist, but he was rewarded for doing his job efficiently and effectively.

I find the details of his imprisonment and trial interesting for their weird ambiguity. He is clearly a bad man who did a terrible thing and deserves his punishment, but (according to the quotes on his Wikipedia page anyway) he comes across as someone who has been dehumanised by the process he managed and detached from its implications.

I want to be clear I am not casting Höss as a victim. But the spectre of fascism is upon us once again and it will not be enough to merely fight the populist figureheads and their shock-troops. We need to also look to our institutions and the systems that run through them.

I do not know how to end this because I don't have an answer for how we do this. Hopefully someone out there does.

This interview with Tilda Swinton is a delight on so many levels. I commend it to you without question. So much in there about the importance of art, and also the importance of not doing art, of just being. She's such a breath of fresh air, both cleansing and invigorating. Go read.

Here's the bit I want to pull out, regarding her time as one of Derek Jarman's troupe in the late 1980s / early 90s

Like most of her friends back then, she identified as queer, but for Swinton it was more about her place in the universe than her sexuality. "I lived through my 20s in a whole queer environment and it was just at the point when queer was being reclaimed because it had always been a term of abuse. It just so happened I'd also been a queer kid – not in terms of my sexual life, just odd. People said I was queer, like she's a queer fish." She had never quite fitted in anywhere, and for the first time she felt she did.

As someone who was also a bit of a queer kid, not sexually, just odd, this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently as I see more and more people reconsidering their place on the neurological and gender spectrums. In particular I see people from my generation looking at the younger lot and reassessing ourselves, from parents whose kids get an autism diagnosis realising that they too have those traits to those looking realising the new language of gender diversity gives meaning and structure to the confusion they've been repressing or struggling with for decades.

Language is powerful because it gives us the tools to organise our world. Fuzzy nonsense attains clear edges when given a name. You can then hold it, understand it and build with it. A definition, however vague or in-progress, has a force like gravity, pulling ideas together and creating new worlds.

As a young adult I confess to feeling jealous, sometimes, of the gays I knew. Yes, they were scarred from prejudice and violence, but they could hold on to their queerness. It had substance. I was just a bit odd, living my life the best I could but with this mass of whatever it was that didn't make sense buzzing around me. The depression diagnosis didn't help because that was just a symptom, not the thing itself. For a long time I leant on "brain chemistry" as my framework, though no-one ever checked it. It was the shorthand I used to explain myself away.

These days I use "autistic traits" because in 2018 medical professional talked with me for an hour and said I had strong ones. They're not the sort that medical professionals treat, so I haven't seen another medical professional since, but they do put me on the spectrum.

I like "strong autistic traits" as a personal framework and am happy to embrace it. Unlike brain chemistry and depression, it feels like something I can build on. It takes those times when my brain is a fuzzy, confused, angry mess and gives them meaning. I still get confused and angry and I still make gut-wrenching faux-pas, but less so and when I do I understand what's going on.

More importantly I'm able to see the problems coming and mitigate against them. I've noticed during the pandemic that I have developed a kind of mental "spidey-sense", where my brain just stops me from doing the sorts of things that in the past would have ended not-well. I suspect this is partly because like most people I'm exhausted, but I think it comes from embracing this framework.

Tilda Swinton is a great actor, but then so are a lot of people. What makes her special is that she's so unique and otherworldly while also being down to earth. She redefines normality into something much more interesting.

As I get more comfortable with my oddness, thanks to the language I'm now able to apply to it, I find myself not wanting to identify as weird, in opposition to the normal way of things. Now that I'm able to articulate myself, my self feels normal, part of the broader world. I like this feeling.

I wonder if this is how the genderqueer people feel, like they're no longer on the edges looking in. Having a nuanced language for how the world feels to you makes you part of the world.

Oikos, from the Greek for 'household', is a new term to me, and it's made up of letters arranged in such a way that it refuses to stick in my brain, so I'm having a bit of trouble getting my head around it, but I'm definitely intrigued.

Matt Webb goes into some detail as to why it interests him, because the traditional political compass doesn't seem to work for today's world. (Sidenote – the political compass is another thing that one might assume has been around forever but which is relatively recent, being launched in 2001).

Oikos seems to be the position that it's morally OK to favour blood relatives, or more broadly "people like me". A Polis view is the more traditional "everyone is equal and should be treated equally". Oikos is also called "Mafia logic" and from the perspective of the left it is generally associated with bad things and bad people. Trump is oikos all the way, but it also crops up in more mainstream conservative thought. "There is no such thing [as society]. There are individual men and women and there are families" as Mr Thatcher famously said. And while I might fundamentally disagree with her, she wasn't talking about running a kleptocracy, simply that "people look to themselves first" before thinking about the wider society.

What interests me about this is how it might apply to co-operatives and other non-hierarchical member-run organisations. Are the co-operative values and principles compatible with an oikos view? Matt is at pains to stress oikos is not necessarily a bad thing:

Community is an oikos value! Neighbourhood is an oikos value! Closing the streets to city traffic so kids can play, that's an oikos value! Mutuality and cooperative organisations… traditionally left wing, but elements of oikos there.

I'm not sure. Co-ops are an interesting mix of broadly left-ist ideas of community and equality, but contained within a membership structure which by definition creates a them-and-us dynamic. A co-op can be quite socialist in how it operates, but from what I can see there's no requirement to be. Indeed, there is a Conservative Co-operative movement, set up by Tory MP Jesse Norman who is certainly not some wet centrist, as an adjunct to Cameron's Big Society idea, though it seems to have faded out in 2014. Housing co-operatives, usually associated with affordable housing in the UK, run luxury apartments for the rich in New York, which always blows my mind. I wonder if they subscribe to the co-op values?

Art my co-op, Loaf, we spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about our values, why we do things they way we do. Our primary goal, it's fair to say, is to provide stable long term employment on a living way to our nine members, being ourselves. We have many many other goals, but that's the primary one, because without that we'd be unable to do much else. Are we using an oikos value to create a platform for non-oikos activity? Does that even make sense?

Charity begins at home. Think global, act local.

On a personal level I've never been that bothered about blood family ties. They're important, I guess, but only because they trigger a primal psychological connection and that mostly comes from spending a lot of time with them as a child. Adopted kids have the same thing, so family more about socialisation than genetics, I guess

Even so, the idea that one person is more important than another simply because I have a familial connection to them is woefully subjective and a terrible way to run a society. It might work on a small scale, giving us the bonds we need to survive, but it's objectively meaningless. It's like opinions and beliefs – I have them and I rely on them to navigate, but they don't matter as much as knowledge and wisdom.

Oikos is how you get through the day, but it's a terrible way to run the world.

(Conclusions pending, more pondering required)

'The Tragedy of the Commons' is one of those terms that is often taken at face-value and assumed to be true. Humans, when left to their own devices, will consume and exploit everything they can until there is nothing left and they all die. The theory was devised by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 and, in my experience anyway, is most often employed when moaning about littering.

Around the same time Hardin was writing that "ruin is the destination toward which all men rush", Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, was seeing the opposite in her work. When faced with scarcity, humans devised systems of mutual benefit to manage those resources, subject to certain conditions.

The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the 'community' doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.

This feature on Ostrom goes into some detail on her work and case studies from the world of conservation. There's an emphasis on complexity and the unique and variable situations that she studies, and the struggle of scaling up to national and international levels, but above all there's a repudiation of the doom-laden Tragedy myth, which is nice to see.

So there's a new Adam Curtis film out. It's 8 hours long over 6 chapters and in it he attempts to explain, or outline a theory explaining, how we have gotten to where we're at at this moment in time and why the world doesn't seem to be working for anyone anymore.

I have had a fluctuating relationship with Curtis' work over the years. The first film (I'm calling them films because while they tend to exist as TV serieses, the nomenclature of the tellybox doesn't quite fit) of his I saw was The Power of Nightmares in 2004 which turned me into a raving fanboy for a while. Once the honeymoon wore off I became more cynical of his approach, seeing it as something to be avoided even if I do mostly agree with him on things. I think it's that thing where someone working close to your wheelhouse prompts a unique flavour of criticism, because you swim in those waters and you know what they're like. Yes, that stuff he's talking about is interesting, but he's doing it wrong.

I don't pretend to be Adam Curtis' peer, but it amuses me that my (stalled due to pandemic) 1972 Project could easily be a Curtis film. It sees me approaching middle age and considering how events and ideas surrounding the year of my birth might explain how we have gotten to where we're at at this moment in time and why the world doesn't seem to be working for anyone anymore.

So yeah, Curtis dropping an 8 hour film on pretty much the subject I'm been pondering… Nice.

The first part of Can't Get You Out of My Head is, I was relieved to see, classic Curtis. A brain-fart of disconnected ideas and obscure characters bundled up in search of a narrative thread. I confess I joined in the commenters jeering in the Guardian's review, noting the peculiarity of focussing on Kerry Thornley, the founder of Discordianism (of which I know something), but utterly ignoring the contribution of Robert Anton Wilson who at the very least popularised it all.

But I was intrigued, so I watched the second part. And reader, I loved it, and the rest. The final chapter is quite divine and fully quashes any reservations I might have built up over the years. There's even a note of optimism, a sense that we are stronger and weirder than the forces that try to control us, that we might be able to find a way out of this nihilistic stupor and build a better, or at least different, future.

I may write more about his conclusions, or I may just let them percolate in my brain and feed through my own work, but I certainly recommend you get through the first episode and give the whole thing a go. It's only 8 hours.

Further reading:

• What Does The Future Hold? An Interview With Adam Curtis (The Quietus)
• Adam Curtis Explains It All (The New Yorker)

So there's this new documentary, The Social Dilemma, which goes into great detail about how terrible the social media industry is for its users and for society in general, ultimately concluding that unless something changes we could see the end of democracy as we know it. Netflix bought the rights and it's getting a lot of exposure.

As you might imagine, I have thoughts.

Some of you will be aware that for a few years in the late 2000's I traded as a Social Media Consultant. I'm not proud, but it meant I was there at the teething of what we might now call the surveillance capitalism industry. I got in to the SMC game around 2006 or so, when blogging suddenly was a thing that people wanted to pay good money to learn how to do, which soon became Twitter and other stuff which coalesced under the "social media" umbrella. The name never sat that well – surely all media is social? – but once it had a label and was no longer an amorphous mass of nerdy shit it was quickly overrun with marketing people and I started to want to get out. (Thankfully I'd made my rep blogging about artists so actually becoming an artist was a short hop. But I digress.)

The marketing people were mostly just an excuse, though. Something was rotten in the world of social media from the get go. But when you're in the middle of the wood it's hard to see all them trees.

I developed a habit, maybe even a reputation, of writing some screed against "social media" every year or so. I think people found them entertaining (there he goes again!) and maybe even thought provoking, but I doubt they changed any minds, because they were pretty incoherent. I didn't have the language, the insight or the metaphors to properly articulate what I was finding disquieting. And ultimately I probably didn't want to prove myself right because it would render void a bunch of ideas that I'd come to identify with.

Nowadays there's a plethora of academics and activists using decades of media theory and social science to point out the blindingly obvious. I wish they'd been around in the mid 2000's.

I'd always talked about the media platform as being the thing, because that's where I operated. I drew a line from printed books to photocopied zines to online forums to blogs to Twitter and Facebook. I wasn't looking at the undercarriage, the printing presses, photocopiers, internet protocols and data-mining algorithms.

It took being an artist to bring that stuff to my attention. While digging deep into the fundamentals of photography, I came across a media theorist called Vilém Flusser who had this theory about that was fascinating. The camera is the true author of a photograph, not the person holding the camera. When you take pictures you're just along for the ride. But this goes further than simply collaborating with Nikon or Canon. Your involvement is dwarfed by the technical, industrial, economic and social systems which caused that camera to come about.

My research as a BOM fellow was centred on this and it features in a talk I gave in 2016.

Like all good theories, it's not about photography. It's about our relationship with technology, specifically media technologies under capitalism. The iPhone is not a screen, Instagram is not a cascade of images, Facebook is not updates from your friends, Twitter is not whatever it is you thought Twitter was (no-one really knows, especially not Twitter). They are systems which sits on top of systems upon systems upon systems going back through history to the first tool. There is no magic but there is massive complexity coupled with exponentially insane levels of processing power.

In looking for metaphors to describe the scale of the systems upon which our devices sit the best I can think of is the cosmicism of HP Lovecraft. In the face of an incomprehensibly infinite universe our greatest fear is our own insignificance. The algorithm doesn't care about you. You don't exist as anything more than a string of numbers. But paradoxically the algorithm is programmed to make you hyper-aware of yourself and how you fit into society. Hello ant, meet your uncaring clockwork universe.

So it was kinda remarkable and very cheering to see this sort of thinking (albeit without the Lovecraft references) underpin Netflix's documentary on how surveillance capitalism is strip-mining our emotions and breaking the world. Because so much of this stuff just looks at the surface without trying to get a handle on the tentacles writing beneath. It's not perfect of course – no film ever is – but it feels like a breakthrough.

Douglas Rushkoff has a nice little video celebrating the film and cautioning his community not to attack the makers for ripping off ideas that he and other fringe thinkers have been writing about for years. This is a victory! We're winning!

Bigger is not just bigger, it's different, and for once I feel a teeny, tiny bit optimistic about the effect of this documentary because I think it has opened the door, just a crack, to some actual change.

One of the few solutions put forward is a tax on data collection. Regulators would set a limit to the amount of data-points a company is able to hold on a person for free. Above that you need to pay a tax, set such that you would need a really good incentive to keep that data. While bad actors and foreign companies could evade this with ease, it would be in the interests of the likes of Google and Facebook to comply and change their business models. There's no reason our internet has to be funded by surveillance advertising. It didn't exist a decade or so ago. Why can't we replace it with something less toxic?

Now, I'm not saying this will work, but it's a good idea that sits between business-as-usual and burn-it-all-down. And once we have one good idea we can have more good ideas and maybe we'll be able to share photos and talk to each other online without destroying civilisation.

I could say much more about this doc but I set myself a two hour limit for writing about it tonight, and that time is up. If you have Netflix, give it a watch. It's worth the data-shadow of you they'll sell on the ad-tech markets. Lol.

Further Reading

• Kenneth Goldsmith on Flusser's relevance today: It's a Mistake to Mistake Content for Content (LARB)
• John Naughtons's review: The Social Dilemma: a wake-up call for a world drunk on dopamine? (Guardian)
• Mozilla Foundation's further reading list of researchers and thinkers missing from the doc. (Twitter)

Header image: Cover to Astounding Stories (1936) the first publication of HP Lovecraft's The Mountains of Madness.

I'm working on a piece where the key concept is something I've called "heritage socialism", a term I like but which I've struggled to explain. So I'm going to have a go here.

According to the Wikipedians, "cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that is inherited from past generations." What has always interested me about heritage is how selective it is. Some things are considered worthy of preservation, some are considered in need or erasure. In a city like Birmingham, where I live, this value judgement is felt keenly as each generation overthrows the heritage judgement of the previous, with the 20th century currently being wiped out in favour of Victorianana.

Another interesting, though probably unintentional, effect of heritage is to detach historical artefacts from the present. In my mind this is where heritage differs from history. The purpose of history is to draw lines from the past to the present day, so we can learn something about ourselves. Heritage should do this, but in my experience it tends to "other" the past, to draw a boundary around it and set it in stone. Heritage is mummified history, preserved and unable to talk to the present.

It's notable that we have a "heritage industry" but not, as far as I'm aware, a "history industry". History is a practice and discipline. Heritage is packaged into products, ready to be consumed.

During the 20th century, Britain underwent a number of changes that can be umbrellaed by the broad term "socialism". Universal suffrage, the welfare state, nationalisation of major industries, the NHS, free education, and so on. It reached its peak in the Post War Consensus and has been in decline since the 1980s.

I became an adult in the circa 1990 and with the buffer of Thatcherism this period took on a mythical status. We were told it was a failure, and yet the results were still all around us. Hippies were derided and laughed at, but acid house had brought us the second summer of love. It was a bit confusing.

When I could vote, I couldn't vote for an actual socialist. Tony Blair made sure of that. I didn't even really know what socialism was other than something old and broken. Around 2000, in my late 20s, I was in a pub with an older friend, talking politics. He insisted my ideas and beliefs were totally socialist. I was very reticent, such was the cleansing power of the 80s.

(For what it's worth I currently identify as a radical-agnostic cosmic-scale-nihilist with socialist tendencies, but that's for another day.)

Fast forward to 2012 and Danny Boyle put the NHS centre stage at his Olympic opening ceremony. It's a statement, but I think the political nature of it washed over most of the people watching. The health service is one of those things that is beyond politics. As a country we're proud of it, especially when we look to the USA. You wouldn't have known that the NHS is a political creation were it not for the mutterings of bias from a few Thatcherite MPs. You can debate how it should be run, but no-one would dare say it should be abolished.

Heritage Socialism, then, is the presentation of a historical socialist or socialist-adjacent idea or movement, isolated from its past and future context.

For example, the story of the origin of NHS might say the idea came from the wartime 1942 Beveridge report and it was founded by the Labour government in 1948. Doctors weren't keen because they feared a pay cut, but Nye Bevan won them over. Hooray!

By making a heritage product of NHS history, the political and social context is removed and all we have left are facts. The NHS was founded: people generally thought it was a good thing, but there has been debate about how best to run it. Denuded of anything ideological it can be adopted by the most Thatcherite of free-market politicians as something they support.

The NHS is now unmoored from the ideas that created it. It has become closer to a force of nature, something inevitable, unstoppable and impossible to erase. During lockdown we protected the NHS, we thanked the NHS, but we never worried the NHS would disappear.

Privatisation of the NHS has been happening for the last few decades and will continue, but as long as the NHS logo is on everything no-one will notice, or much care. As a heritage object it is no longer a socialist project. We do not have "socialised medicine" in the UK – we have the NHS.

Turning products of socialism into heritage objects doesn't just allow the forces that opposed their creation to embrace, co-opt and subvert them. It also divorces them from the ideas that formed them, preventing us from building on those successes in the present day. These origin stories become curiosities, events from the past-as-foreign-country.

Heritage Socialism is a theme park where we can gaze in wonder at a time when people came together and build stuff that meant something, but it doesn't give us the tools to build for ourselves, only the mild frustration that we can't.

It's a bit of a problem.