Cognitive Whiplash

I first came across the phrase cognitive whiplash last summer, helping facilitate a group of amazing young tech activists.

One of them used the term to describe their experience of social media: how feeds constantly jolt them from graphic content of dead Palestinian babies to hilarious videos of cute animals; self-harm exhortations to tutorials on efficient life-management.

The effect is jarring, confusing, isolating, addictive and deeply damaging.

I’m writing this newsletter from the inaugural South By Southwest (SXSW) London. It’s the place to be for future-facing, early-adopting, jump-the-trend visionaries.

And a giant IRL Cognitive Whiplash Escape Room.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise. Shoreditch has long been the UK epicentre of digital innovation. And shite. The way Silicon Valley fucks with your head will inevitably be followed by Silicon Roundabout. But still, seeing it, walking it, feeling it IRL comes as quite a shock.

In Shoreditch Town Hall to see our Clare in conversation with filmmaker Asif Kapadia and author Monique Roffey the whiplash is unavoidable. They are here to talk about how culture might play a part in changing the law.

Clare was one of nine Extinction Rebellion women found not guilty of smashing HSBC HQ’s windows – an act science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson said was an example of time travel. Monique’s latest book Passiontide was described by Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair as ‘a resounding testament to the rebellious spirit and bravery of Caribbean women… By the end of this book, I was ready to join the revolution’. Both are serious women taking the work of being an active, cultural, creative citizen very very seriously.

Asif probably needs no introduction, but one’s worth repeating anyway: he is an Academy Award, BAFTA, Grierson and Grammy Award-winning film director, writer and producer and one of the most influential filmmakers of our generation. His latest film, 2073 (there’s a good C4 News piece here), is an utterly unsettling investigation into what we at Absurd Towers call the Multifaceted Intersecting Shitshow. The sheer complexity of the entangled nature of the crises of climate, tech, democracy and capitalism-driven extraction and inequality makes for a tough 85 minutes.

The scene is set for a great SXSW conversation.

BUT HANG ON. Also: (WHIPLASH!) same building, same time, David Cameron’s talking about A Healthcare Revolution. Don’t like Asif’s searing indictment of Peter Thiel’s (NHS-eating) Palantir? Just swipe twenty feet upstairs and be in the room with the kind of guy that hangs out with The Broligarchy.

Or maybe (WHIPLASH!) you like your former PMs a little more edgy, a bit more… war criminal? Swipe to Tony Blair and Labour Friends of Israel’s Peter Kyle on Government and AI! What’s going on here? Two of the most reviled characters of recent British history are the future?

SXSW, in response to inevitable withdrawals and claims of artwashing say: “as one of the world’s largest festivals across tech, music and the creative industries, SXSW London respects everyone’s views and positions and aims to create an open, diverse space for debate and discussion.” Exactly the kind of response that we heard from the Design Museum when we removed our work from their major summer show Hope To Nope in 2018. They’d been hosting Italian arms manufacturer Leonardo. SXSW are platforming the bloke that fired them into Iraq.

To give them some ‘everyone’s’ dues, you can also experience the Palestine Live Comedy Club, Peloton Bodyweight Strength (WHIPLASH!) and Nile Rogers. That covers several positions.

But… what the actual fuck.

SXSW is a 3D version of the algorithm. Festival technology as neutral provider of content. Something from and for everyone. Curate your own feed. Swipe left, swipe right: there’ll be something different, another point of view in a sec. The channel isn’t the problem.

You don’t have to hang out with the genociders, you can chill with the genocided.

Free speech, consumer choice. Don’t likey? Look away.

WHIPLASH.

Then, there’s the sheer weight of words: 25 minute panel piled on 25 minute panel: an endless smorgasbord of differing differing differing opinion.

Don’t get me wrong. There are gems. Our crew organised one of them. Caroline Lucas, Zakia Sewell and Modern Cockney Festival’s Andy Green on Reclaiming English Identity was a banger. So too the aforementioned Roffey-Farrell-Kapadia. But here in the homeland of Nathan Barley it is all about the talk talk talk talk talk. And as our Alex said two weeks ago: Narratives need enacting, otherwise they’re just words.

My head is full. I yearn for this time last week, where words were rarer than hen’s teeth, and I saw the heart and hands show how culture can meet community. For this is a tale of two festivals.

Out There Festival is run by Out There Arts, the national centre for outdoor arts and circus. For three days it transforms Norfolk’s Great Yarmouth into an open-air stage, its streets, parks, beach and hidden corners teeming with mayhem.

Hard Art brought some of it too. Our dear friends and collaborators Camerados set up a public living room, Love After Oil their bike-powered sweatshirt-making; Bureau of Silly Ideas’ Sid and Nancy caused beautiful chaos. Brian Eno gave a barnstorming keynote. The Empathy Museum’s Ear of Britain once more posed the question: If you thought Britain was listening, what would you say?

All of this amongst a cohort of juggling, wire-walking, slap-sticking, improvising and death-defying performers intent on eliciting raw emotion. Love, connection, amazement; piss-your-pants laughter. For three days this was culture at its most connected: unpretentious, effortless, spiritual. Most brilliantly: accessible. There are no barriers in this world of street performance and circus. You don’t have to understand high concepts or arch references. There’s no need to shell-out hundreds for tickets, or cross the threshold of some unnerving gallery.

This is culture that literally meets people where they’re at. Not in that patronising liberal dumb-down-theory sense, but by actually DOING IT. Going to Yarmouth. Meeting, embodying, enacting. And fuck me was it exhilarating. When was the last time you laughed and laughed and laughed at the dumbest shit (an Elvis Presley James Bond, say, with an over-clingy mother and terrible songs), only to seconds later witness the peak of human physical agility on high wires (and no safety net)? That shit does something to you. It opens you up. It tells myriad stories of what it is to be alive. It challenges. It restores. It totally doesn’t feel like WHIPLASH.

It’s fitting that Out There’s home is Great Yarmouth. The town is dominated by a breathtaking collection of turn of the 20th Century Art Nouveau entertainment buildings. They look like churches. They probably supplanted churches, much as new technologies always leapfrog old. They’ve certainly held many worshippers. Today though, the preaching’s on the street.

For three days all human life is invited to simply be, and feel. There’s no need to analyse, or decide. Sometimes it punches you square in the face: Los Galindos’ production MDR is like watching Beckett played at the Jim Rose Circus by Buster Keaton, a dark, dangerous, disgusting spectacle and possibly the best 70 minutes of theatre I’ll ever see.

Sometimes – Dulce Duca’s Um Belo Dia – you are reminded, in the most enrapturingly surreal way that humanity is love.

It is in this context that Out There is able to examine our world in ways unthinkable on the heady streets of Shoreditch. Gorilla Circus’ Aithentic for example a far more real representation of AI’s march on society than SXSW’s marketplace of actual tech start-ups: dance trumping debate as navigational aid.

The heart, and hands (those hands! Juggling chainsaws, gripping ropes 100ft above ground). The heart, the hands, they connect in a way that the head just can’t, well, get its head ’round.

We took the Common Census boards back up to Great Yarmouth. Their open questions and effortless interface a riveting insight into where people are at.

This board was fascinating. The last time we were in Yarmouth in October the first question hemispheres were pretty equal. Since then we’ve had another six months of Starmer, and local Reform MP Rupert Lowe has been suspended by his party over allegations of violence.

It’s a shift we are seeing everywhere we go: people have given up on those in power.

And then, returning to Babylon, on the up escalator at SXSW’s Old Street, you realise that there is a (black) mirror image situation.

For those in power are giving up on people.