COME SAIL AWAY WITH ME [482]

Is it truly possible to “get away from it all”? Not by just going on holiday, but by disconnecting from routine, resisting the need to “check in” at anything other than an airport.

 

I am routinely guilty of checking what I will be coming back to after a week off from work, but I cannot bring myself to delete the app we use from my phone - we are not required to use it other than in the office, but the illusion of “advantage” means it remains on my home screen.

 

The allure of an ocean cruise constitutes the nearest I can physically remove myself from the networks that run everyday life, without the ability to travel into outer space. 

 

Transatlantic travel would be even more effective, removing all intermediary ports of call, and any opportunity for your phone to connect to a cellular network - Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, the only liner currently offering such a journey, is an opulent destination unto itself, and a more than adequate distraction. I clearly need a break if I am thinking about it this deeply.

 

Of course, you would then be subject to the temporary network created by the liner, something once solely constructed and run by a ship’s crew, now supplemented by the online purser’s office of a digital planner service available to passengers using the ship’s on-board wi-fi, booking meals and activities to distribute people around the ship. Cunard’s planner, “My Voyage”, is a web-based outlier in an industry that encourages the downloading of an extra app to access all services, but even while a printed daily programme is still provided to guest rooms, and most services on Cunard ships do not require booking, there is the implication that accessing a network will be easier and more convenient for the smooth running of the liner, and of your trip.

 

Or you could “stay in touch with friends and family with one of our on board internet packages, and discover our top tips for using your phone while at sea”. If you choose to add it to your voyage, Cunard charges $20-28 per day to access Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite network Starlink, charging the higher amount if you want video streaming in addition to what is titled the “Essential Internet Plan”, which is web browsing, e-mail and social media, like you never left port. 

 

Having paid £7.75 per day for five days to continue using my mobile phone in New York in 2023 strikes me as a different proposition because I was on dry land during that time. I could have used a printed map and guide, but it was crucial that I could react at the same speed as the city in which I was located. At sea, it is more possible to set your own pace, and to put a distance between yourself and that which demands attention now but could wait until later. 

 

Buying the sort of internet access you could find on land means you may as well have taken your holiday on land, because it means you are willing not to take a proper break - you remain on standby, in the middle of the ocean. I need to explore whether the lives we lead – the life I lead – is able to give us a proper break from them.

IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN [481]

Instead of always thinking about the next article, I have been persuaded to look back on my writing in the last year. Without going into all fifty-one of them, I have compiled lists of my ten most-read articles published in 2024 – fortunately, I am happy with the quality of all of them – followed by five that I think should get an extra mention.

I don’t see any deliberate connections between approach or subject matter between them, which is a good thing, as I don’t want to be tied down to a predictable formula. However, I do see that they are the products of reactions, either to personal experience or to the news. There is scope for more approaching subjects in a more creative fashion, and to go into greater depth on some subjects, so do expect some experimentation in 2025 – judging from what topped the most-read list below, I had better start exploring approaches to cybernetics, and the cyber-society in which we find ourselves.

I can see the articles listed below cover a lot of ground, which I hope is an indication of confidence. My five hundredth article will appear here during 2025, most definitely the result of perseverance from week to week. Oddly enough, it is only during this year that a couple of ground rules have made themselves known to me: aim to pass five hundred words, but hope to reach a thousand; and attempt to sum up the point you want to make in the first sentence, like how the below piece about Jaguar began: “Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising.” I may have got that last idea from reading something about Stephen King.

Eight out of the ten most-read articles were been published in the last three months, which I have put down to my having ditched Twitter in favour of Bluesky – my handle is @leighspence.bluesky.social – which thankfully feels like the egalitarian Twitter of old. Having locked my “X” account in response to its owner’s twisting the site’s experience out of all recognition, the switch to Bluesky pretty much confirms that links to external sites from “X” were being throttled – once my local bus company stops using “X” for service updates I am deleting the app altogether. I hope to use social media more in 2025 to let people know what they can find here, now that the dust from the social media square-dance-stampede is settling.

And so, here is the list of my most-read articles published during 2024:

1. LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (published 28/01/2024): nailing down a working definition of “cybernetics”, for when I eventually plan to write about cybernetics. With control and communication being key factors across the definitions I found of the word, I can only guess this is a subject that people found important, and not just entertaining to read about.

2. AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT (24/03/2024): rediscovering “Seinfeld”, the sitcom that initially made no impact in the UK, having been relegated to midnight screening on BBC Two when Parliament was not in recess, and how it was my little secret before DVDs and streaming made it more accessible. Jerry Seinfeld made some controversial statements when promoting his new film “Unfrosted”, so I guess that added to the interest. 

3. YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (13/10/2024): why did ITV station Meridian Broadcasting use a half-sun, half-moon face to present television in the south of England? See under “things that lived rent-free in my head for years”.

4. BUT STILL THEY COME! (03/11/2024): being bombarded by “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” in a busy shop. I don’t think I made clear that I loved listening to the album in full, but that visceral experience in HMV in Oxford Street led me to leave the store empty-handed, hardly the outcome the staff wanted.

5. TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK (10/11/2024): Donald Trump is re-elected, but I already talked about him the last time around – unlike him, I didn’t feel like re-litigating the past so, like this list, I linked to what I’ve mentioned before.

6. WE FADE TO GREY (27/10/2024): Fiat won’t sell you a grey car, as it’s not “La Dolce Vita”. This was a case of “I beg your pardon?” upon finding out both that the favourite new car colour in the UK is grey, and that Fiat saw fit to respond.

7. LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE (20/10/2024): Coca-Cola Spiced, a short-lived drink where “spiced” meant “with raspberry”. I had bought the drink, was underwhelmed about it, and with its withdrawal being announced not long afterwards, I could understand why...

8. GONE FISHIN’  (17/11/2024): the nostalgic, Proustian delights of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish – this one literally wrote itself, including the snap back to reality about burgers being a “sometimes” food.

9. BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT (06/10/2024): constructing an article using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. This one became as much of an introspective work as this article was, and has many lessons for 2025, including: “Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.”

10. I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD (24/11/2024): the reinvention of Jaguar, after people stopped noticing their cars. I felt indignant about the lazy use of “woke” being used to describe a creative endeavour, regardless of it being one from a multi-billion pound company, and that made this article very easy to write.

...and here is my personal list of honourable mentions:

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT (07/04/2024) and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (14/04/2024): a work performance review leads into a two-part exploration of Bugs Bunny, the witty and fearless cartoon character and queer role model.

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE (31/03/2024): the death in March 2024 of Wave 105, a very popular radio station that served its local area until its owners realised the license could be fulfilled with less effort, reducing it to local news and ads on a national network. (Since then, two other stations in the same area, Nation Radio and BBC Radio Solent, took on nearly all of Wave 105’s on-air staff, with Nation Radio becoming a more local station in the process – where there’s a will...)

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG (18/02/2024): celebrating the career of Steve Wright, the immensely popular radio presenter, and discovering how he built the signature sound of his shows. “His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man.”

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO (28/04/2024): although prompted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts comedy biopic “Unfrosted”, the opening sentence, for a look at how Hollywood’s demise has been predicted many time, is definitely that of a film scholar: “To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.”

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE (15/09/2024): defining “Pages from Ceefax” as a genre of music, taking in the nostalgia of watching, and listening, to teletext pages filling the gaps between TV programmes.

LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM [433]

AI image generated via Dall-E 3: "cybernetics, but without using human form"

I have built a long enough list of words I have needed to look up to clarify their meaning, I could start my own dictionary – “proscribe”, “sententious”, “speechify”, “extant” and “disdain” have been my most recent additions. I like to be sure, and I want to be clear, so I need to use the right word if I can.

“Cybernetics” is one of those words for which I felt I should know the meaning, but the breadth of the subject made it hard to grasp in one go, when what I would like is a working definition that may form the basis of further discussion. Therefore, the grasping has become the discussion.

When I previously defined cybernetics here as “the science of control systems, communications and technology”, I was still under the impression that the term was mostly to do with technology, the prefix “cyber-” having been popularised in the 1980s by the cyberpunk movement of culture and literature. The use of “cyberspace” to describe online space also dates from then, but the word dates from the 1960s, “Atelier Cyberspace” having been the name of a husband-and-wife artistic group from Denmark producing installations about the management of physical space.

“Cybernetics”, both the word and the discipline, dates to 1948 and the publication of the book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” by Norbert Weiner, following a Greek word meaning “steersman”, but more usually translated as “governor”. This title is similar to definitions I found for “cybernetics” used by the Oxford English Dictionary at OED.com, and via the macOS Dictionary app, which used the Oxford Dictionary of English. Merriam-Webster is more detailed: “the science of communication and control theory that is concerned especially with the comparative study of automatic control systems (such as the nervous system and brain and mechanical-electrical communication systems).” This definition reads like it was written before technology captured the meaning of the first two syllables, examinations into artificial intelligence as part of cybernetics having begun further into the 1950s.

The most straightforward and useful definition of cybernetics I have found is in the book “Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape” by the artistic and philosophical collective Acid Horizon, published in 2023 by Repeater Books: “Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary science of control and communication. One can use cybernetics as a science to build social machines of control, and one can use cybernetics to analyse the machinations of production that attempt to direct and govern social reality.”

After positing that we have arrived at the “vision of ecstasy and anxiety all at once” promised by cyberpunk, the book explores how we can escape the management and control inherent in this “Cybercene”, by way of a manual produced by a fictional institute concerned with studying how systems organise, recognise and compartmentalise ourselves. The idea of this book is exciting, and it is my reason for making cybernetics that will come up here in future: it is “having a moment”. Deciding what kind of world you want to have starts with how the world acts with you, or on you.

STUMBLE YOU MIGHT FALL [431]

The BT Tower, seen from St Paul's Cathedral

Leaving home for work as usual, I opened the BBC Sounds app on my phone to play BBC Radio 6 Music. Chris Hawkins has a brilliant weekly feature about people’s names heard unintentionally during songs, and as the time for it approached, the app would not load. Sometimes it takes a while, but realising this was taking longer than usual, I opened my web browser to stream the station via the BBC’s website. This also failed to load, along with any other website I tried.

Arriving at my bus stop, unable to check why my phone had no internet signal, I hoped the bus company’s app will let me catch the bus. Restarting my phone did not re-establish any connection. Fortunately, I was able to carry on my journey, as whatever codes needed for the app to work today must have downloaded previously.

Unaccustomed to travelling in silence, and with my MP3 player at home, I was resigned to listening to music saved to my phone before the near-unlimited choice of a music streaming app made purchases rare. I compromised with the Muzak Corporation’s “Stimulus Progression 5” background music album, various songs by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and the reworked version of David Bowie’s 1987 “Never Let Me Down” album released in 2018, an interesting exercise that could still have been left alone. Listening to the sublime original “Rawlinson End” piece by Vivian Stanshall, I thought of looking up more information about it, then had to sit there realising I could not – I couldn’t leave my bus to work to stop at a library.

Finally logging into my work computer confirmed that Vodafone, my mobile network, had an outage of their 4G and 5G internet networks, but not phone calls and text messages – Vodafone introduced text messages to the world, so maintaining its use must be a point of pride. I thought the internet came back just before starting work at 9am, but this was after going to an area of the building with poor reception (the staff toilets) caused my phone to search out the still operating 3G network instead. This network will be phased out by Vodafone during 2024 to bolster 4G and 5G reception, a good idea in the circumstances, but GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), introduced in 2001 and still used for calls and messages, will remain.

Cybernetics is a subject I plan to discuss in greater detail in coming weeks, but nothing serves to focus your mind on the science of control systems, communications and technology than being temporarily kicked out of such a control system. As much as I would like to think I could live without the internet, I have surely arrived at the point where any period of disconnection will cause frustration. Its initial usefulness became a welcome extension of myself, and it may be time to properly make sense of that.

Everything was back to my new normal by 11am, and I listened to Chris Hawkins’ radio feature during lunchtime.