Are we living evermore in some vast corporate art installation? Here is a precis of what I see in my beloved Londinium. Militant profiteering from the nightmarishly unrepentant British Establishment. Vulture-Economics, soft genocides. A litany of elite-serving forecourts and landscaped non-spaces disguised (barely) as redevelopment and 'urban regeneration' - inert and soulless secular temples, venerations of absence - lining a sinister path to a glittering new feudalism. We are left drowning in the wake of emergent dead zones, pastel-coloured investment silos for unaccountable off-shore power-brokers. Ghost places that have asset-stripped the future.
Things are losing their texture, rough edges hewn to a porcelain sheen. A photoshop consciousness. We deny the necessary imperfections of our skin, deny our pores, our public discourses, the blind spots of our cognition. Our politics intransigent, our socialism laminated, lacquered in gloss of the eternal tragic present - no past, reforgotten, no future, unproposed and unfinanced by our self-appointed imagineers. London is being colonised. A theme park with only the merest connection to history, or hard-fought or hard-won human rights. Only as much history as can fit on a blue commemorative plaque; struggle and achievement as Tweet. Social progress (for the cash shufflers) as status update. Soundbites are far too unwieldy these days.
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