Saturday, 26 November 2011

Eric Fisher, A visualization of London using Flickr and Twitter accounts. Orange dots are the locations of Flickr accounts, blue dots are the locations of tweets and white dots are the locations of both, 2010
Even if you were having a great time in 1991 (I sure was), you should resolutely refuse that year any reverent nostalgia. That halcyon year is gone for ever, yes, but its legacy is alive and also unstable. 1991 was the heyday of cyber-counterculture. 1991 was the triumph of neo-liberalism over the corpse of Communism. 1991 was the flushed, tubercular onset of the dotcom collapse. 1991 was when a feral oil market destroyed a new world order. 1991 was all of those things at one time. The past takes its meaning from what we do today, and 1991 can be construed – just as 2031 can.
1991 hasn’t yet been through the full, awful rigour of historical revisionism – it’s not like the year 1789, chewed to mulch by generations of ideological stakeholders. But the only fate that history offers is to be re-interpreted; re-cast as retrodiction, more and more wildly as its constituent elements vanish, as its eyewitnesses leave us, as the past’s quotidian aspects become remote, romantic, fantastic ...
Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.
2031, by contrast, has the common 21st-century population: huge and old. Back in 1991, only Florida, Japan and Italy had that solid, permanent preponderance of the elderly that is common everywhere in 2031. This vast social transition changed everything and created all kinds of financial and political mayhem, but it was nothing much to get excited about, because there was nothing much to be done about it. Nobody ever gets less old...

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@'Frieze'

Melbourne 2050

Harrison and White with Nano Langenheim, Implementing the Rhetoric, 2010, Graphic rendering of Melbourne in 2050, from the exhibition ‘Now and When’ shown at the Australian Pavilion for the 12th Venice Architectural Biennale, 2010
Via

Smug and complacent, young and free

'Not Forgiving'

#Tahrir

The Tunisian fruitseller who changed the Middle East

A poster of Mohammad Al Bouazizi (Photo: Getty Images
Time magazine gives its annual Person of the Year award to the person or group who has had the most profound effect on the year's news. By definition, therefore, it tends to go to the great and the good. This year it should go the man who started the Arab Spring: a 26 year old Tunisian street vendor named Mohammad Al Bouazizi.
Last December, confrontations with a local government official left Mohammad fearing he was losing his family's only source of livelihood. Desperate and unable to get the authorities to listen to him, he set fire to himself in front of the gates of the Governors office in Sidi Bouzid.
He died on 4 January 2011 from his injuries. In the intervening time, rioting, sparked by his act, had started in cities across the country. Before Mohammad died, the man who couldn't get anyone to hear his pleas was visited in hospital by President Zine el-Abidine Ben, and 10 days after his death, the President fled the country.
As we now know, this was nowhere near the end of it. Presidents have fallen in Egypt, Libya and now Yemen. Tunisia itself has had democratic elections. The West has been pulled in to new military action. Syria is in civil war. And all can be traced back to a fruitseller in a small provincial Tunisian town.
Of course, Mohammad Al Bouazizi could not have known where his protest could lead. But that is not the point. One man's act has changed the Middle East more than decades of diplomacy have managed. And I think his influence and memory should be marked.
I don't know if Time will make him Person of the Year -- they've short listed him (which is great), but he's not the favourite. Steve Jobs appears to have a clear lead.
But this year? Please drop Time a line and tell them there's really only one choice.
Richard Morris @'The New Statesman'