Digital Messenger Pigeon

To elevate some of the massive guilt I feel for, in the words of Ben Folds, "y’all don’t know what it’s like being male, middleclass and white." I’m a member of charities, that sort of, broadly cover the major err, bad things of today. Covering my environmental guilt, I’m a member of Friends of the Earth. They don’t want to be my friends though, they just want my money and my name as it happens. I was contacted about some critical, climate, chaos and asked to type my name and email address and send it to my local MP, Lynne Featherstone.


Pressing send is probably the least amount of effort for the ‘I’ve made a difference’ feeling you can get. I thought nothing of it until today when I received a reply from Lynne Featherstone. Not bad, I thought, democracy isn’t the over bloated, bureaucratic beast, I thought it was until I realised the message from Lynne was automated. Automated! I feel dirty even typing the word. They may as well have automated phone voting, which incidentally they do in John Brunner’s, Shockwave Rider which I’ll write about, as soon as I can get this accursed infantile mind around the complex concepts found there in. But for an abridged version, check out what the old man had to say about it:

‘…But Brunner has also given us another, more optimistic image: the Shockwave Rider, surfing the waves of change, exhilarated by the ride. It is this image, I hope, that will have a still greater resonance. For it is the very turmoil we see around us, that is the grounds for my optimism. Amidst the destruction and disruption of the patterns of our daily lives, new possibilities are being created, if only we can sense them. A new landscape of human being is waiting for us to nudge into existence, if we so choose.’

Anyway, the whole experience has left me feeling like a bird brained, carrier pigeon, glancing stupidly at the text tied around my leg but with no understanding.