OK, folks, just a quick one: yours truly is about to move house again, clambering down the country’s backbone and returning to the dubious but familiar bosom of this blog’s namesake, Velcro City.

Problem being that I’ve not yet managed to nail down a new place to live on a permanent basis. Luckily, Velcro City is full of good friends, so I’ve places to stay in the interim… but the backswing of the situation is that access to the intermatubes is going to be a little patchy for the next week, and quite possibly scarce for a few weeks following that. Which won’t make a huge difference to the admittedly patchy blogging schedule here, of course, though it’ll be more noticeable over at Futurismic (where I’ve scheduled a similar announcement for later today).

For those readers among you with whom my relationship has elements of business included, an email will be forthcoming later today explaining what’s going on.

For those readers among you wondering about where I might be found in terms of public events in meatspace: I’ll not be at Eastercon this year (have to do the final paperwork/handover stuff on this flat that weekend), but if you’re at the Clarke Awards ceremony on the 27th of this month, you’ve got a very good chance of bumping into me there.

And before I drop the shutters here for a brief period, I’ll take the opportunity to re-crow yesterday’s excellent news: I placed an essay with the Culture Lab blog at New Scientist, and I am pretty bloody stoked about it, thankyouverymuch. This year is shaping up to be full of exciting changes in my life, of which this is – I hope – just one early harbinger.

So watch this space.

Courtesy of Locus Magazine‘s short fiction critic Lois Tilton, reviewing the stories in Fables from the Fountain [preorders available now OMFG!]:

“A lot of arcane trivia in a complex tangle that isn’t too credible.”

I’m getting that printed on a T-shirt. SRSLY.

Related: the signing sheets from the hardback edition came and went earlier this week. Sign your name a few hundred times in rapid succession, and watch the resulting scrawl lose all meaning. It’s a bit like chanting a short sentence aloud over and over again; meaning dissolves in repetition, leaving only a looped pattern dissociated from its original purpose. A reminder that meaning is created on the fly. Maybe.

Well, this is… weird. It’s the first time in my life I get to see the guy in the paper awaiting sentencing and go “hey, wait, I used to work with that guy!” This link points at a Daily Hate article, and hence has been deliberately broken so as to avoid giving the bastards any pagerank; just add the two missing letters, and you’re good to go. now points to a masking proxy that makes things more convenient; cheers, Ad.

But the gist is this: Terence Brown was making money from selling CD-ROM anthologies of articles from the internet, billed as a more up-to-date version of the notorious (but perfectly legal at the time) Anarchist’s Cookbook: bombmaking, lockpicking, all that sort of stuff. Y’know, the sort of stuff that most of you reading this could probably locate within ten minutes of trying it, given a working computer with an internet connection.

Welcome to the wonders of British anti-terror legislation! Terence Brown was “convicted of seven counts of collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000, two counts of selling and distributing the information under the Terrorism Act 2006 and a further count under the Proceeds of Crime Act.”

Let’s just look again at that highlighted crime, there:

“… collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism… “

That’s a staggeringly vague thing. A good lawyer – heck, just a skint lawyer – could probably look through my hard drive and bookshelves and get me on the same charge, right now: I have books on organic chemistry, electronics and practical nuclear fission*, for instance. But Terence probably didn’t even need to buy books to do it, either. Even the Daily Fail itself says the discs “contained a vast collection of material downloaded from the internet”. So stuff that people could have just got for free, in other words, if they’d taken maybe five minutes longer than they took looking up “anarchist’s cookbook” on Google.

Is it perhaps the selling of that freely available information, for profit, that elevates Terence to the loft heights of terrorist? Daily Fail again:

“The law is clear that it is a crime to gather this information without a reasonable excuse or to disseminate material which is clearly intended to be of use to terrorists. A person’s intentions or motivation for doing this is irrelevant.“

So, selling free-to-read information that might be useful in planning a terrorist event to people who could have been terrorists, and making money from it, is a crime, regardless of the ideological reasons for doing so.

I’m assuming, then, given the legendary proportion and scale of British justice, that people who sold physical weapons and substances made for no other purpose than war or terrorism to people who were definitely terrorists, for profit, would be guilty of a far greater crime than Terence there, regardless of their reasons for doing it?

Well, of course it is.

For anyone other than the government that passed the law in question, that is.

I worked with Terence Brown for nearly three years; he was a doorman at The Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth where I used to do box office and other FOH stuff. He’s no thug (yeah, I know, you’re thinking of the doorman stereotype; not a thug, nor even a “hard man”), he’s no terrorist, and he’s no callous nihilist either. The most he’s guilty of here is possibly some copyright infringement, along with making a fast and easy buck selling publicly-available information to lazy idiots – and if the latter’s a crime, the Daily Fail should probably unsaddle the high horse.

His is exactly the sort of theoretical case that we were repeatedly assured the Terrorism Act would never be used for. And I’ll say it again, publicly and for the record: you could search my flat right now and pin the “collecting information” charges on me, just because of stuff lying around on my bookshelves and hard drives… not to mention the library shelves in almost every decent-sized city in Britain, and the multitudinous servers of the internet.

The Terrorism Act, used in this way, is not about terrorism. It’s about freedom of speech, and the silencing of voices that dissent, or even ones saying things you just don’t like or want heard. If you value your voice, use it today and talk to someone about the Terence Brown case.

Yes, speaking out marks me as complicit in some of the same crimes as Terence Brown. Staying silent, however, would make me complicit in the crimes of the state.

Easy choice.

J M McDermott’s heartfelt essay at SF Signal chimed with me for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that certain recent Life Direction Decisions™ of my own are now pointing me toward an economically wasteful Masters degree, but also because McDermott seems to share a lot of my own value systems. You should surely read the whole thing, but here’s a few favourite bits:

Be proud of me. Be proud of my economic waste. The greatest tragedy of our culture is that we have allowed the financiers to take over our young imaginations. Our brightest minds from our greatest universities flock to high paying jobs, where they try to make as much money as they can before they die. The best and brightest children our nation has to offer have all been seduced into believing that ownership of large houses is more important than the environmental footprint that our McMansions smear all over our fragile ecology. The systems of wealth culture have brainwashed our youth into believing that upward mobility is something everyone should aspire to, and that being a leader is something glorious and respectable and sexy, and everyone else is a slacker or failure, and that it is a shameful thing to be a janitor or a waiter or a truck driver or a stay-at-home mom.

We, all of us, need to stop that shit right now. The best and the brightest of our world should neither be measured by how much money they earn, nor by whether they own big houses, fancy clothes, or all the consumerist bullshit things like that. The only measure of a person that matters is how they affect other people, and how we all can find a way as individuals, communities, and continents, to contribute in a meaningful, positive fashion to the very tiny world we all share. The best and the brightest should, in fact, in a fair world, see high-paying jobs as corrupting influences on the pursuit of true value in the world.

[...]

As this experience winds down, I like to think of all these supposedly economically useless degrees, especially degrees in the creation of artistic things like poems or pottery, like getting a degree in being super heroes. By day, people with useless degrees are, most of us, working hard to keep our pantries stocked with food and our lights on. If we are lucky, our daylight work is engaging and interesting. If we are not, it is a minor inconvenience as long as there is food and light. Then, we leave our day jobs and our lives open up. We read, and analyze, and create. We engage in debate on the internet and in the magazines of our fields–for instance, at SFSignal. We continue pursuing our interests, beyond graduation, and maybe we make things or ideas that whisper out into the world, rippling chaos theory’s caribou sneezes to rend the walls of Jericho. We go out to buy groceries afterwards, and nobody knows us. We go to work, and maybe we tell one person there over lunch what happened in our esoteric pursuits. We work hard, raise families and/or pets, and most people don’t even know what we really are in the wee hours and the corners of our lives, when we pursue what interests us.

But, at night, in the corners of our lives, when no one is looking, we are superheroes.

Yes.

From the NewCon Press press release that just hit my inbox:

Fables from the Fountain (ed. Ian Whates) is a volume of all original stories written as homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, featuring many of today’s top genre writers…

… and some other guy with a silly name. How’d he sneak in there? Item five in the TOC, look:

The Fountain, a traditional London pub situated in Holborn, just off Chancery Lane, where Michael, the landlord, serves excellent real ales and dodgy ploughman’s, ably assisted by barmaids Sally and Bogna (from Poland).

The Fountain, in whose Paradise bar a group of friends – scientists, writers and genre fans – meet regularly on a Tuesday night to swap anecdotes, reveal wondrous events from their past, tell tall tales, talk of classified invention and, maybe, just maybe, save the world…

1. Introduction – Peter Weston
2. No Smoke without Fire – Ian Whates
3. Transients – Stephen Baxter
4. Forever Blowing Bubbles – Ian Watson
5. On the Messdecks of Madness – Paul Graham Raven
6. The Story Bug – James Lovegrove
7. And Weep Like Alexander – Neil Gaiman
8. The Ghost in the Machine – Colin Bruce
9. The Hidden Depths of Bogna – Liz Williams
10. A Bird in Hand – Charles Stross
11. In Pursuit of the Chuchunaa – Eric Brown
12. The Cyberseeds – Steve Longworth
13. Feathers of the Dinosaur – Henry Gee
14. Book Wurms – Andy West
15. The Pocklington Poltergeist – David Langford
16. The Last Man in Space – Andrew J Wilson
17. A Multiplicity of Phaedra Lament – Peter Crowther
18. The Girl With the White Ant Tattoo – Tom Hunter
19. The 9,000,000,001st Name of God – Adam Roberts
20. About the Authors

Yup, that’s actually a real story by me. In a real book. Alongside writers who… well, just look at that list.

Holy shit.

(Yeah, I’ve known about this for a while, but it’s still crazy as hell seeing it in real words.)

Anyway, don’t let my presence in that TOC put you off, because this is for a Good Cause:

2011 marks the 25^th Anniversary of the Arthur C Clarke Award.  This volume is produced in part to raise funds for the Award, which lost its sponsor last year due to the closure of Sir Arthur’s publishing company. The book will be released May 2011.

Available as an A5 paperback or a dust-jacketed hardback, limited to just 200 copies, each individually numbered and signed by all the authors. Cover art by Dean Harkness.

Price: Paperback, £9.99; Signed Limited Hardback, £29.99

The NewCon Press site is currently offline pending the resolution of some rather troublesome domain registration SNAFU, but I’m told you should be able to pre-order Fables… from Amazon in the fairly near future. More details as I get ‘em.

Holy shit.

Those nice folk at SF Signal occasionally ask me to pitch in on their “Mind Meld” collective-interview thingies, and I’m always happy to take part, usually because they ask me questions that I haven’t thought to ask myself. The latest example: What books/stories do you feel are just as good now as they were when you first read them?

Unusually for me, I didn’t take the opportunity to deconstruct the question (though I could have done – are the stories in question just as good in the same way, or is it that they always seem to have something newly satisfying to offer on each return visit? There’s a deep-seated nostalgia in genre fiction – and in culture in general – that I flich from instinctively, and I can’t think of any book that I return to as “comfort food”, but that’s a personal preference rather than an edict). I also decided to skip briefly over one of my biggest lasting favourites because I’ve mentioned it so many times before in previous Mind Melds… so go find out what I (and a number of other smarter and more erudite folk) picked out.

Emergent pattern of interest: Ursula LeGuin makes a very good showing, though with a selection of different titles. Maybe quality does matter after all, eh?

OK, so, let’s get this one out of the way: I’m packing privilege. Privilege up the wazoo, right here. I know this. I work as hard as I can at unpacking it, and sometimes – probably far more often than I think – I fail. This is one of those times. If there is a fault here, it’s mine.

Perhaps this is one of Those Posts where Privileged White Western Male whines in a privileged way about how he can’t see this whole privilege thing that he’s supposed to see, and someone should really show him, BECAUSE IT’S HARD BEING AN ALLY OMG AND SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE X Y Z.

I don’t want it to be That Post. Part of that is surely me trying to cling to my self-image as Privileged White Western Male Trying To Get Better, but part of it is the fact that in this instance I really struggled see why the teachable moment is supposed to be a teachable moment; indeed, it was the level of struggle that made it obvious this needed to be looked at more closely. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me trying to debate it out, but if there’s one thing we can probably all agree on, it’s that complex ethical debate and the 140 character limit don’t mix; hence this post to get my thoughts out in one coherent lump.

As the title doubtless made clear, I refer of course to the Martin Amis quotes about writing children’s books, as featured in the Faulks On Fiction program on BBC2 last week or so. These ones:

“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book, I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”

“I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,” he added.

Now, to be abundantly clear here: I can easily see the general distastefulness of the statement, and there are hundred other ways it could have been phrased which were less so. I also know that Amis is notorious for incendiary statements – to the point where he blatantly grandstands for effect, knowing it’ll get in the papers – and is not, at least as far as his public persona goes, a very nice chap.

Furthermore, I can see that his statements are offensive, because I can see other people’s offence – there’s your litmus test, right there. What I’m trying to do here is understand what it is that I can’t see, and why I can’t see it.

First of all, the implied slur on authors who write for children. It’s clear to me that Amis considers writing for children in some way beneath him, something he has an active disinterest in doing, even something quite repellent to him. This is certainly an elitist thing to say, and a classic case of genre snobbery. Snobbery and elitism aren’t nice things, but nor are they necessarily hate speech. With the boot on the other foot, similar disparagement would pass unmarked – if not lauded – on any number of genre fansites. Slagging off other genres isn’t big or clever, but it’s endemic, and it strikes me as a very minor issue here.

Does that mean I think children’s authors who feel attacked by Amis are taking him too seriously? To be honest, yes. The difference between Amis’ dismissal of an entire genre, and the countless similar dismissals that occur on what must be an hourly basis, online and off, is that Amis has more than twenty-five people listening to him at a time. Does a big soapbox bring greater responsibility? I think it should, but that’s hard to enforce. We can’t realistically legislate or mutually police a commandment to be nice, and not being nice is Amis’ only crime with respect specifically to children’s authors in this incident. Last time I looked at the bestseller lists, children’s authors as a group don’t have much of a claim to being an oppressed minority; certainly no more of one than any other literature marketing bracket. I can see the arguments to the contrary, and would be happy to debate them further, but that’s not the bit that I got hung up on.

Which brings us to the slur against people who have suffered brain damage or mental illness. Further to the above, I feel that any assertion that Amis is equating the writing of children’s literature with brain damage in a general or universal sense is unsustainable; he’s very clearly not saying “you’d have to be brain damaged to write for kids”, but that “I’d have to be brain damaged to write for kids”. I read it as an expression of exaggerated personal horror, very much in the same mould as “you’d have to tie rats to my face to make me write Petrarchian sonnets”, or similar.

To reiterate: it’s not a tasteful way of putting it; crass overstatement seems like an eminently fair charge to make. But is it a deliberate slur on the mentally disabled?

I never thought I’d find myself playing devil’s advocate on behalf of Martin Amis, but I really can’t see that he meant it that way. Perhaps he did, but for the purpose of my own personal quest here, I’m going to assume he didn’t, because it gets me to the real question, which is:

Why am I struggling to see that it’s a slur at all, even if it wasn’t an intended slur?

The answer, of course, is my privilege. I’m not mentally disabled. I have not walked in those shoes.

“Oh, well done, PWWM. Film at eleven, yeah?”

Well, yes. But why didn’t I spot it sooner? I’m far from perfect, and I catch myself rockin’ the privilege a lot – pretty much every day – but I try hard to analyse and neutralise it. I like to think I’m getting better at it, too. It’s my burden to carry, and I’m not begging for a 101 here, nor a pat on the head for being a good fellow traveller. This is me trying to learn out loud over one of the hardest cases of personal privilege blindness I’ve encountered in a long time.

And the only conclusion I can come to is that I’m trying to over-rationalise an emotional response in others. (It would be consistent with, well, pretty much my entire life to this point.) I keep coming up with thoughts along the lines of “but Amis is just using it as an avatar of some massively transformative event!” or “it’s a metaphor for being a completely different person to the one he already is!”, or even “but it’s not directed at any specific person or illness or affliction!”. These thoughts are persistent, largely because I honestly believe them to be true assessments of what Amis was thinking as he spoke. (Yes, I could be wrong; I do tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, which is another privilege substructure – the risk levels of me trusting in people’s general good nature are lower than they are for others. That’s another dragon, to be fought another day.)

But now we can locate my blindspot, inferring its position by looking at the spaces around it. It’s the same one Amis himself has. And it’s a very fundamental blindspot, not to mention one that – if you’d have asked me – I’d have confidently claimed I don’t have.

I couldn’t see that what Amis meant doesn’t matter as much as what people felt he meant.

Like all simple answers, obvious in retrospect, it presents an entirely new array of deeply troubling questions about the way I look at the world, and the other people in it. I still have a lot to learn.

But if this self-indulgent handwringing soul-search has demonstrated one thing, it’s that I can sometimes write my way to an answer that I can’t talk my way to. That is, I hope, a tool I can use.

Yeah, I’m still here, both figuratively and literally – still behind the wizard’s curtain at VCTB, and still in Stockport. And, yes, still counting down the days until the latter no longer pertains.

Today saw a new phase of Operation #Back2Southsea* begin, namely the phase that focusses on ensuring that I have somewhere to move into down there before my tenancy expires up here. The three agencies I spoke to today all said that it’s a bit early to be hunting for a rental property with an April tenancy start, which I kind of expected. But still, I emailed them all a list of requirements, and will be doing the same again every weekday this week.

This is partly because I want to feel like I’m actively working on making the move a success; moving house is never much fun at the best of times, and doing it over a ~250 mile distance makes it all the more complicated. My major concern here is that I want to be sure that there’s no void period between the two tenancies; I have a whole lot of stuff (most of which, to be fair, is books), and don’t want to have to go through the hassle of putting stuff in storage, imposing on friends or crashing in a B&B for a few weeks, so on and so forth. A nice clean transfer’s what we’re after: get everything signed off on the new place before I have to be out of this one, then load my junk into one single (large) vanload, down the M6 and out into the new manor. Sorted.

It’ll probably work out that way, too. What’s interesting (in a kind of “damn, that seems a bit counterintuitive, not to mention annoying” kind of way) is how taking positive action as detailed above seems to have actually increased my anxiety about the move a little bit.

Thinking about it, though, it makes a certain amount of sense: actively beginning the house-hunt is functionally equivalent to opening a new book of uncertainties, and uncertainties – for me at least – are a big source of anxiety. Probably the biggest, actually; bad news I can deal with, but not knowing whether I’ll need to deal with bad news or not? That’s the killer. (I know; go figure.)

And right now there’s a whole lot of uncertainties flying around: job applications, freelance opportunities, further education options, creative directions, all very much up in the air like a set of juggling balls just about to reach the peak of their trajectories, and whose exact downward vectors are all interdependent on one another. Or like a selection of Schrödinger’s cats in quantum entanglement with each other, maybe. When just one wavefunction collapses – just one – the others will start to resolve themselves in a chain reaction, and the way forward will become clear. Until then, I’m stood like Hermes at the crossroads on a tarot card: one step beyond the fool’s blind leap into the unknown, buzzing with potential… but the real journey has yet to begin.

And so I wait for a bolt from the blue, for a cat to die-or-not-die, for the balls to fall. I don’t wait well, but I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I?

[ * Yes, my relocation has its own hashtag. That's just how I roll, yo; altermodernistic network realism, all up in yo' grill. ]

Is anyone still tuned in? This station as good as went off the air for a while there, didn’t it*?

Those of you who follow me elsewhere (most notably Twitter) will be aware – to a greater or lesser degree – that the last six months have been pretty bloody miserable for me; while I’ve made a handful of good friends up here in the Manchester area, living on my own in the rotten heart of an economically collapsed Northern industrial town has taken a considerable emotional toll. In short, and in the name of avoiding a drama-trip: I’ve been lonely as all hell.

The events of the last year-and-a-bit have taught me a lot of things about myself, many of which I’d probably not have chosen to learn, but all of which (I must assume) I’m somehow better off for having discovered. The largest and most pertinent of those is this: home is not defined by geography. It is defined by people.

The very title of this here blog represents the long and lingering love-hate relationship I’ve had with Southsea since moving there in 1994 as a callow and socially inept teenager. I’ve always resented it, for some reason I was unable to explain; why was I (like so many others) stuck to it, seemingly unable to tear myself away? Sit down and make a list: Southsea doesn’t seem to have much going for it, really. A cultural ox-bow backwater, cut off from the mainland both symbolically and physically, Britain’s only true island city; economically deprived and politically raddled; overpopulated, underfunded, and largely ignored by the world outside; faded, crumbling, caked with cheap make-up to flirt with the 21^st Century.

See? Still doing it now, aren’t I…

So why am I not glad to have left it behind? Well, the circumstances haven’t helped; discovering that your main reason for doing something was predicated on a lie can give you something of a jaundiced view of things, to say the least. But there’s a gift in the gutter, and it shames me to never have realised it was there all along. When you spend half your lifespan in one place, you become a part of the network of people that makes that place what it is. There are a multitude of Southseas, of course, mapped in the minds of the people who walk their streets each day, but they overlap like Venn diagrams. Once your own set is embedded and interlaced with enough others, you end up living in a sort of consensus reality: the city’s geography becomes governed and filtered by the social networks you move within.

(As a side note, I rather suspect this happens in non-geographical spaces – e.g. fandom – in a very similar way. A riff for another time, perhaps.)

I could waffle around this idea for hours (no change there, then) so I’ll cut to the point: being stuck here in Purgatory for half a year has made me realise how important my meatspace social networks really are to my psychological well-being… not to mention how much I owe to so many excellent people. It’s one thing to stay at home of an evening because one doesn’t fancy going out, but quite another to stay home because you’ve no one to go anywhere with. I can’t believe quite how much I miss Albert Road Syndrome: stepping out of the house for ten minutes and inevitably bumping into at least one friendly face, even if only in passing. I miss the sense of belonging; I never recognised it for what it was when I had it, possibly because I moved home so often as a kid. I miss my people. I miss my home.

Yeah, you can see where this is going – I’m a master of foreshadowing, me. My tenancy on this rotten garret expires on Easter weekend this year (April 23^rd, St George’s Day); as such, I aim to be back in Velcro City by that date. I’ve learned what I needed to learn, and now it’s time to act on that lesson.

And so: Operation Get-The-F*ck-Back-Where-I-Belong is go. If you’ve any advice or assistance to offer, our switchboards are waiting for your call… and the Peripatetic Tourist Board of the Invisible Manifold City will be re-establishing a broadcast schedule, however erratic it may turn out to be.

Don’t touch that dial.

[ * A lingering malfunction with the Delicious autopost plugin emphasised that somewhat, but its usefulness was starting to wane, and recent rumblings from Yahoo suggest that relying on Delicious long-term is not a future-proof plan. Selah. New year, new tools; adopt, adapt, improve. It's time I wrote more stuff manually, anyway; curation should be something more than mere collection. ]

M John Harrison:

To call a McJob a fact-as in “facing the facts of life” -to call the Debt a fact-as in “facing the facts of the economy” -to call a career at Price Waterhouse a fact-as in “it’s a fact that you have to get on in life to get the things you want” -is actually the most grotesque distortion of the facts. These processes are as artifical as the malls & offices in which they take place.

We live in a fiction, an arbitrary structure imposed on the actual. The goal of radicalism in any generation should be to expose that structure & its constraints. That’s why it was a good thing to break into Millbank yesterday.

[...]

Everyone can see that the life offered by our society is less a life than permission to plod along the same old tramlines until you die, while states & corporates commodify everything worthwhile & measure it back to you as an earnable privilege. Everyone can see that if you get on your high horse about this you will be passed off as a mindless criminal.

Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro’s point is that we are already clones, educated to stay calm while they cut pieces off us. That’s why everyone is so angry: because their anger, as ever, is constantly taken away from them just at the point when anger is all they have.

Anger… and voices. And networks to to carry those voices.

Laurie Penny, New Statesman:

They spent their childhoods working hard and doing what they were told with the promise that one day, far in the future, if they wished very hard and followed their star, their dreams might come true. They spent their young lives being polite and articulate whilst the government lied and lied and lied to them again. They are not prepared to be polite and articulate anymore. They just want to scream until something changes. Perhaps that’s what it takes to be heard.

It is my hope that, once we realise that screaming doesn’t work (and it won’t work, beyond the momentary catharsis it brings), we’ll try turning our backs and building the world we want for ourselves. The nation-state is dying, and the only alternative to being smothered by its decaying corpse is to step out from under it; being ignored is the one thing it can’t fight with truncheons and cameras.