It’s not in the streets

Perhaps this post is late by a few days. All it took to shift the situation was the second largest fires in recorded history. But it was there for all to see - Channel 9 News actually mentioned climate change in relation to a real world event before cutting quickly to footage of a baby Koala suckling on a bottle, rescued from the inferno that engulfs the country. A victory of sorts.

Coverage of climate change by a large portion of the media is eye-rollingly bad. If October’s Climate Strike or November’s IMARC protest were covered at all it was in relation to disrupted traffic flows through the CBDs.

In Australia 2020, Vietnam era mass protests suffer from a failure to control their messaging. Instead the gathering of tens of thousands of worried citizens in major cities is edited, manipulated, pounded flat, reconstituted, overdubbed and chopped into a...

It was over a cracking line to the UK that I interviewed Calum McFarlane last year. The father of two had thought deeply and written eloquently about having and raising children in an age of climate uncertainty. His thoughts were moving in their honesty and his investigations had clearly brought on a very dark chapter in his life where he had questioned his choice to bring children into a world whose future was at best utterly unpredictable. How could you prepare the next generation for a planetary state without precedent? How do you convey the violence inherent within civilisational collapse without lying? How can you explain intergenerational treachery to the generation that will foot the bill? All these questions Calum considered with steely-eyed honesty.

His journey required he confront one of the final taboos within the climate movement - that it may already be too late. To be...

Watch this first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX0kwVLPmD4

Corporation or the Consumer
In fifty years time, when we are sifting through the rubble, trying to figure out resposibility for the destruction of Civilisation 1.0, we’ll resolve the most relevant chicken-or-egg question of our time: was it the consumers or the corporations? It is a question that haunts those many minds wondering why are we heading towards climate catastrophe with reliable knowledge of what awaits us and the full control of the levers to stop, and yet do nothing.

Ultimately, the corporation vs consumer answer will arrive in the form of proportionality. And with it we will have figured out what blame lies at the feet of the average citizen of the developed world. We will have to wait till then to discover the final number but what is crystal clear today is that because everything we consume has a carbon...

To arrive in a new country by plane at night is to invite dissonance. The jetlag, the lethargy of sitting for hour upon hour chain-watching B+ grade movies. Landing. Then walking from the plane through the tunnel and into stale air, amongst perfume advertising of beautiful and well rested people. Then a flurry of action - the cold-war-ness of the passport check, the farm-animal at the feedlot of baggage retrieval then out into carhorns and traffic of some foreign night. Some unarticulated awareness that this is the instant you go from a carefully controlled and curated experience of a digitally tracked passenger into a world where, without phone, internet or even potentially language skills, there is the distinct possibility of vanishing without a trace.

Given the press of Johannesburg this feeling for once was acute. I stood kerbside at the airport’s pickup and watched with twitching...

In idle moments I return to an internal conversation in which I consider the impact of September 11 on American cinema. Those before, particularly those immediately before, rest on the assumption that the only problems left were in our own head. Movies like Momento, Being John Malkovich and the Matrix mark a time where the most fallible structure was not the deep state, rising dictatorships or global terrorism but our own psyche. It seems quaint now to look back on this cultural moment of post-modern malaise, a time when history had ended before being jump-started again the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

In her novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation author Ottessa Moshfegh locates this epoch and conjures it up in a masterful satire embedded deep within that flawed, naive and pathologically self-obsessed world. We follow her...

Let me begin by saying that I’m a Sam Harris fan. I think he’s a sensible centre we desperately need in a time when we’re at a risk of being torn asunder by the titanic longitudinal forces of the left and the right. His injection of relentless rationalism serves as ballast to our increasingly “I just feel that…” culture in which emotions trump reason. His strident anti-partisan stance on issues and his tendency to take nothing at face value should earn him the title of warrior of reason.

Yet a quick survey of his Sam Harris & The Future of Reason facebook page shows that the most vocal of his fan base are far from rational actors. Instead post after post contain the most the heinous conspiracy nutterism inclined to label anything from climate change to gun debate as a globalist conspiracy.

Every corner of the internet has a troll infestation to varying degrees but within Sam Harris’...

I had gone far far out on a limb by recommending House of Leaves for my book club. It had been in my queue since I had heard about it on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast. For those unfamiliar with this podcast, the author of American Psycho whinges to different guests about the decline of cinema: how nobody goes to the movies, how films are made for iPads and how PC culture has made Hollywood into a moral safe space unwilling to take artistic risks. True perhaps but it would be better if he stopped pushing this agenda on guests.

He rarely mentions books and it would be far more interesting for him to talk about the state of that medium, ie the one that actually made him famous. Instead he plays the old curmudgeon drawling in fluent disaffected SoCal with the complete lack of self awareness only achievable by a native Los Angelean.

I did manage to catch a moment when he interviewed Mark Z...

What could be more chilling than Black Mirror, a show that triple distils modern anxieties into terrifying possibilities? Perhaps trading out “possible” for “plausible” to create something less white knuckled?

So, imagine a near future in which the chaos breaking out in today’s news was amplified a little - say thirty percent - then depicting how it affects the lives of people just like the viewer.

This is the premise of Years and Years, a BBC HBO co-production that follows a Manchester family as they struggle through a world in turmoil. Our world to be precise. Beginning in 2024 each episode takes place a year after the previous one.

The key is relatability - this is not some dystopian nightmare but today’s world taken to it’s logical conclusion. And unlike a nightmare, you cannot wake up because the seeds from story-lines will bombard you from every device with Breaking News...

You can imagine the relief. All the noise, the mess, the chaos, the crossed purposes, the convincing, the sweaty uphill climb to get anything done. This damn inefficient business they call democracy. You can understand the lure to just send in the goon squad, prod those paper pushers and make them answer questions for a change. It proved irresistible.

After it all, Peter Dutton, in Sri Lanka to discuss people smuggling, must have put down the phone and threw open the hardwood doors of his taxpayer funded rented villa to step out onto the balcony and bask in the fresh and uncontested silence.

To understand the AFP’s raid on the ABC last week, it’s important you avoid considering the national broadcaster a credible counterbalance to a government with authoritarian leanings. But for 4 Corners like some failing light on a hill, the ABC not. Rather Aunty’s ability to speak truth to power...

Last night I interviewed investigative journalist Michael West about his documentary and report Dirty Power that he completed in partnership with the Greenpeace Investigative Unit. Listen here. The report details how Big coal exerts influence on the Liberal Party.

How they do this will be of no surprise to anyone that has generated enough cynicism watching the major parties since Kevin 07. Power is exerted through three spokes - Industry groups, lobbyists and the media. Michael and Greenpeace reveal a sprawling system of influence based on existing relationships and a revolving door mentality between these organisations and the Coalition. An example from each spoke:

• Scott Morrison’s Principal Private Secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, was the former CEO of Crosby Textor, the Lobby Group responsible for Project Caesar - a concerted media campaign to discredit renewables.
• Morrison’s...