We’ve come a long way since the end of the nineteenth century. Only today I had occasion to gaze into the Abyss, and of course those words of warning were foremost in my mind, giving me pause until I thought, “of course!” What had I come up with? Mirrored sunglasses. You look one way, people looking into your eyes end up looking the same way you do, only back to front. Spent a happy hour or two watching the Abyss gaze at itself, till I felt I might be intruding.

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.

to the tune of the Wayward Barber
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to Richard
Happy birthday to me!

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

I’m watching the fireworks from the balloon festival on my balcony: giant blooms that live for a second, fading as gravity claims them and the points of light fall towards the dark. The smoke drifts across south Bristol in a long snake, reminding me of old oil paintings of battles fought with guns and confusion, and it occurs to me that it’s travelling in time as well as space. At the snake’s mouth, the first red flower still lives; halfway along are the tiny sparkling golden canapes that accompanied the huge green and purple courses; hovering over the old warehouses I can still see the final barrage of the huge spirals that ended the display. The explosion lasts for a brief moment, leaping and falling in an eyeblink: the smoke lit by the city lights spreads this compressed time into something more manageable. Totterdown is the beginning of the first burst, Bedminster the point where the stars fell to earth. Mapping time with wind and light.

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.

I just installed the Akismet spam plugin: previously I’d been adamant that a blog this little-read shouldn’t need to even acknowledge that spam was a problem, and had been manually deleting every comment. Naive; maybe even stubborn. But I’ve been proud of the fact I don’t get email spam, and I didn’t want to admit I suffered like everyone else.

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.

By which I mean, who can name the tiny musics in this clip?

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.