I’ve been in Singapore for three weeks now. Last night, just after sunset, I was out for a run, and thought about the thousands of other Europeans doing the same thing, running loops and circles around Singapore roads; for a moment I imagined us spinning the flywheel, building momentum, making things turn faster than some people born here might like them to, part of a long line of outsiders stirring things up and changing the psychic landscape. Being here makes it impossible to avoid thinking about who I am and who I’m not, and while I’m able to pretend to ignore difference when I’m the UK, here difference is the one thing everyone seems to have in common.

I may have just been dehydrated and imagining things, of course. The last few weeks have been busy, arranging visas and contracts, meeting teachers and game developers, learning my way around new transport routes and vowel sounds, remembering how tiring constant novelty can be. But I think I might be able to see everything settling down a bit more, and I’m looking forward to having more time to consider some of the things that have struck me since I arrived here: modernity, time and the spirit world, place and history, language, culture and power. These are all things I don’t understand and that seem especially present in everything right now.

Back next week. See you then.

I always imagined that being a crane operator would be different to any other job on a building site: entering the site with the rest, checking your safety hat, perhaps eating a thin bacon sandwich from the van, but always leaving them early to grip the first rung and start the long climb away, to the glass box where the ground looks unreal and mistakes are so consequential. Up there the radio link to your colleagues below would be slow and clumsy compared to the signals and nods that pass between you and the other crane operators across the rooftops. On sunny days the shadows cast by the latticed jib on the cab would turn your brothers into strange amputated shadows – a booted foot, a firm hand and the rest uncertain behind the cab glass, turned to sky and clouds on the vertical edge of the city. In pubs you would recognise each other by the tanned wrinkles beside your eyes, and the way your colleagues treated you with respect but no affection, not trusting your love of the high places.

Last night I met a man who called himself a stevedore. He wasn’t sure whether we knew the term: I described him as an expert on lifting anything and he said “close enough”. He preferred the word to “docker”, which he thought made people think of tattoos and bad behaviour, and I agree that it’s a fine thing to have an excuse to use a word like “stevedore” and mean it. Most of his work is in ports around the Severn, although he modestly suggested that his expertise sometimes calls him to London, and he spends his time in gantry and tower cranes, lifting crates of things that come from far over the horizon. I was thrilled, though I hope I kept my cool. Finally, to meet someone who could share with me something of the brotherhood. I tried to remember that he would be surprised by my insight. Could he see other crane operators? He could? And did they nod to one another, closer to their brothers than the earthbound below? He said, no, not really, they tended to use the radio to talk to their crew.

On the way home I heard fireworks nearby. Looking for the light, I saw they were coming from the bridge I had to walk across in a couple of minutes. Should I walk on and cross further down? But that would be cowardice and as good as saying I don’t live here: I carried on to the bridge. Halfway across I saw them: a middle-aged man, hands in pockets, looking embarassed, and a woman near him, leatherette blouson and gold hoop earrings, with a carrier bag of fireworks and a grin on her face a mile wide, firing them one by one across the New Cut.

Internet language, by which I mean hip internet language, the sort used by twenty-four-year-olds who have been twenty-four for long enough now to understand tax returns and how to make money from selling t-shirts that carefully mean nothing, the sort of approach to communication that thinks “i have an extra controller do you want to play as luigi i know that’s not much but this is my house” is a good sort of a thing to say on a masthead, the kind of speech that reckons that, if ordinary metaphor is two kinds of meaning and intertextual metaphor is three and that’s better, then metaphor which is likely shorn of any referent for your audience is NONE times THRIFTEEN better which is win, this kind of language is, I intend to propose once I’ve thought this through a bit better and the flashing lights have gone from my peripheral vision, this kind of language is a perfectly good response to the problem of having a thousand and two billion people at risk of reading your words.

By which I mean, analysing memey language (the language of lol and of fail and having all of things belong us, not specifically memetic language that copies and replicates extant modes of communication) according to computing history, or the affordances of the technology present when a certain kind of speech was established, or the prevalent youth codes active in the populations that propagate these ways of talking online might not be as elegant a way of approaching this indefinable (really) but instantly recognisable (honestly) internet trait as coming to see it as a way of preserving self through obscurity, a tacitly recognised capitulation to the need to remain unknown to most people (this is normal and healthy) while still being available to all. If I use a metaphor that makes no sense (“scratch and sniff” for “have a look at the archives”) then maybe what I’m really doing is looking for the least (not most) relevant yet meaningful connection I can make, in a signal that, if you understand, even inarticulately, my reasons for doing that, then you will understand.

My god it’s hideous, this thought, so different from the pure and snowy notion that drifted in just two paragraphs earlier. The class have been cruel in their passion, stubby and unco-ordinated fingers blurring essential features, warping what were harmonious qualities into the kind of ghastly shape I hope never has a pulse. Obviously, understanding the need for obscurity through language has been a hallmark of youth talk since things were copacetic, and the imperative to say things to be got rather than have them contain things to get is what makes cool things cool (if you have to ask, then…). But it seems to me that in this lies a possible defence against the relentless flaying of our social skins by the sharp demand for transparency issued by the web, that in defying Wittgenstein and making languages private we might find a way to wriggle out of the riddle posed by socially-targeted ads and Amazon recommendations, by googling new employees and only posting our good shots on flickr, and that maybe the development of the notion of ‘cool’ in the twentieth century is what will help us hang on to the concept of ‘self’ in the twenty-first.

That, and rooting bare-fingered through the slime and detritus of flooded cities for anything we can burn for fuel, or course. This might be a worry only for a very short time. But still: it’s an idea I’d like to record, to leave in its various stunted forms on the shelves of my inner art store, to wander about and reconstruct in its Platonic glory from the absences present in these muddled sentences. It says “notebook” up there for a reason, after all.

• USA
• Singapore
• Italy
• Finland
• Canada
• USA again (there’s lots of them)
• Germany
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Belgium
• Ireland

I feel like a CB radio ham in the early days of radio, looking for faint signs of people from far away and wanting to contact them just to say “hey you’re there! I’m here!”. I can’t talk to them — the only way I can signal them is to disconnect, and that goes to all of them at once, which is a bit blunt. But I feel like we’re connected. Well, we are. I mean obviously we are. I was thinking of the kind of connection I was taken taken to the Commonwealth Centre as a schoolchild to experience, the kind of connection that sounds cheesy and Hallmarkish, too utopian even for early Rheingold.

I guess we’ve all got at least two things in common, which is that we like Heroes, and we’d like there to be more of us. I wanted to be able to right-click on the Singapore IP and send them a message about having a singtel address and how slow their broadband is. Social objects again.

These ruggedly-engineered, existentially-tested mirrored research lenses are just the first in a line of products from my new Institute for Experimental Philosophy (we’re going to need more than the glasses, after all, they’re only going to appeal to a Nietzsche market). Why should we, alone of all the speculative arts, be satisfied with the same eternal questions? Why should we not make best use that we can of our wonderful new technologies to shield ourselves from the harsh extremes of the philosophical working environment? What is wrong with a straight yes-or-no answer in this age of discovery and advance? We shouldn’t; we should; nothing: those are my answers.

You see how easy it is to break free from our rhetorical shackles, if one has half a mind? I was helped, of course, by these gloves: can’t say how they work at present, valuable commercial information, terribly sensitive, but they’re invaluable for dismantling metaphor of all kinds. Comfortable, too: we’re working on a new breathable fabric, Gorgias-Tex. Five minutes with these and you won’t want to describe anything else as fitting like a glove. It’s not just protective gear, either: we’re doing a lovely range of architechtonics, fizzy and still, really put the colour back in your arguments, and for the little ones a Lego version of Milinda’s chariot. And we’re working on a set of diagnostic tools: “Locke’s Socks” mast and axe-handle DNA-gathering kits, a set of nested plastic heap measures (“Soriteaspoons”) and a range of webcams and microphones specifically tailored for trees in all locations (quads, forests, makes no difference).

This is all awfully exciting, obviously: not just me involved, needless to say, tremendous amount of brain working away in the back rooms there, signal honour to be counted as a colleague, can only hope my humble efforts in some poor way support their great strides, &c., &c. Really, I wouldn’t talk about it at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that our new Google map affair is telling me I’m where I can speak, and so I feel I ought not to be silent.

I hope I don’t grow any older. This is quite old enough.

I’m thirty in a few days time. I’d love to see my lifesmoke: the last decade’s passed in the time it takes a firework to live and die, and I would appeciate the chance to see my actions spread out into something more comprehensible, something I could walk back and forth along, something I could use to digest what’s happened and understand it better. Perhaps, though, I ought not to dwell on the smoke. Perhaps I should concentrate more on the firework, and start thinking less about the echo it leaves.

So this was my first time going through the Akismet list, double-checking it was weeding things out correctly (and I’ll never do it again, so I’m sorry if your comment doesn’t ever show up). I’d never encountered so much spam in one place: the cumulative effect of it is very different to the way it seems when you’re just weeding a small number out each time. After a few screens, I realised that what I was watching was the gradual fall of language to a prelapsarian state when only our most basic needs and desires mattered, no fine words disguising the animal grunts that drive everything. And all this filth and depravity will from now on stay unseen, ignored, the only sign of it a tiny message on my WordPress dashboard (“Akismet stopped you facing up to 377 expressions of what humans really want”) and an ever-increasing load on the server where this lives.

Back in the wonderful days of the nineties, when transhumanists and believers in the singularity had columns in Wired and weren’t laughed at, there was a lot of talk about the machines achieving self-consciousness. I don’t remember anyone talking about what kind of subconscious they would have. Now I know: when the Net becomes a person, the hidden things that give it bad dreams will be made from the billions of three-word advertisements for the filthiest human pornography. We’re building the machines’ superego, one WordPress plugin at a time.

The percussive noises in the background come from the birds of Hyde Park, in Perth, where this monolith hovers (around its foot frolic tiny ape-creatures, dancing to Strauss). I guess all of them are corporate. I only recognise a few, though – any clues?

Bonus points if you can spot my favourite one.