It's all too easy to feel a bit down at the moment. As events across the pond roll the cause of truth, decency and not-all-dying-in-a-catastrophic-climate-event back a few decades, it's all too easy for the shoulders to drop, to think fucking hell, they've won.
The grifters and chances, the con artists and thieves, the liars, the haters, the celebrators of all the worst traits in human nature not only won, they did so convincingly. And now all the things they said they'd do, they're doing.
It's also hard to have faith in any future shaped by the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, men rich enough to fix all poverty and hunger on Earth, but who instead prefer to get ever richer by making others ever poorer, and morality be damned.
Harder still to believe in a world where truth is valued, when it becomes increasingly impossible to believe the evidence of one's own eyes, when tech bros high on money force their shitty AI on you whether you want it or not, but insist they be given the sum creative wealth of the world's artists and writers for free to train their ersatz simulacrum of humanity.
Basically, the arseholes are in charge. And it sucks.
But this is Coastalblog, it's older than most of the people trying to insist that cryptocurrency is legitimate, it dates from a time when the Internet was fun, and about bringing people together and finding stuff out, not making shit up and screwing the last penny out of anything that twitches. And as such, and as it's my little corner of the web, I'm not letting these soulless, clueless, pointless knobheads hold sway here.
(At least until I find out that all this is being used to train a large language model, in which case, good luck lads, it's going to learn a few new words)
So instead, I want to focus more on kinder and gentler things. There's enough rage and dottle flecking the screens of billions of howling dopamine-addicted fuckers out there. No one needs me adding to it (okay, I might have just spent the best part of eight paragraphs doing just that, but you get my point).
This morning, as I walked into town to do a bit of banking, I saw something which caused a lot of my animus towards the world to evaporate. In the middle of Ormskirk is a clock tower, it's not particularly magnificent, as these things go, handsome enough, a handy meeting point, but it's got a bit of history, people like it.
Sadly, but predictably, as nothing much changes down the generations, a few bits of graffiti were scrawled across one of the plaques on the side. Tedious, but unsurprising. But what lifted my spirits a little was watching it be cleaned, a couple of old fellas from the council, meticulously, painstakingly washing it away, one was instructing the other, clearly new to this, and I found the whole thing quite moving.
In a world where the fashionable mode is to move fast and break stuff, we need people who are prepared to pick up the pieces and put it all back together again, and watching these men do their thing I felt reassured to an extent, society is still a thing, there are still plenty of people out there whose actions every day make the world a slightly better place. Cleaning off the graffiti is basically an act of faith in a nicer world. Even though it's their job, they're paid to do it, that is still part of our common purpose. I well up a bit when I see those little street sweeper lorries go by for similar reasons.
(As a side note, I think there's a correlation between despair and littering, but that's probably a post for another time)
It's a (slight) lesson easily lost amidst the sturm und drang of the madness that has consumed our discourse over the last ten years or so, and which looks set to do so for a few more years yet. But amidst all the fevered takes, wilful obfuscation and (tbf, reasonable) abject dread at our direction of travel, there remains a desire for things to be, well, nice, and there remains an impulse to ensure that this is so. I think that's something worth holding onto.
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