writes.casa

Visiting the Science Museum, the school party stood before its Van der Graaf Generator. Every half hour its static charge released a lightning bolt that crackled towards Earth. But it was the late 1970s and there had been more exciting cultural lightning for kids raised in a rural backwater to marvel at. There were people with extravagantly spiked hair, but also a new wave of sparks, including the keyboardist from Sparks, mimicking Hitler’s look as he strolled down London’s Exhibition Road.

Those kids are now dispersed into a culture that spent the next 5 decades ramping up warnings to itself that unless it radically fixes what it has been doing, charges for everything will go up and well-being will discharge. It has (neo)liberally ignored its science because it has misunderstood technical innovation as the fix when it is democratic imagination that might unlock its predicament. And so for now, no-one is in charge, more people look unironically like Hitler and everything is *static*.