2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  OK, so the congestion charge was supposed to reduce the number of cars in central London. Trouble is, it’s far too complicated. There’s cameras and traffic zones and text-message payment systems and blah blah blah. It costs a fortune. And you’d get better results if you replaced the whole thing with a sniper.

  Yes, a sniper. Here’s how it works: instead of charging people to drive through busy parts of town, you simply announce that you’ve paid a lone sniper to sneak around the city, hiding out on rooftops. Every month he’ll blow the heads off several random motorists: a maximum often, say, and a minimum of five. You’re free to drive where you like, as often as you please—but you’re taking a calculated risk each time you do so.

  You’d announce the scheme, and at first no one would believe you were serious. Indeed, you’d trade on that: perhaps nothing happens for the first couple of days. People carry on as normal. Then on day three: BAM BAM BAM. The sniper takes out not one, but three separate motorists, in different parts of the city. Shock, horror. Front-page news. Everyone’s petrified. And the mayor simply goes on TV, shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘I told you so.’

  Bingo. You’re looking at a reduction in traffic of at least 40 per cent, overnight. Problem solved. And whenever people start getting complacent, you simply instruct the sniper to whack a celebrity or two, just to keep the story in the public eye.

  Flawless. Yet the cretins in charge never tried it. Now they’ve got a second chance. They can use it to end smoking.

  We’ll need more than one sniper, of course, because we’re covering the entire country. And they won’t just be stationed on rooftops; they’ll be going undercover, like Jack Bauer—following people into bars, pumping lead into their backs when they request change for the fag machine (we wouldn’t ban fag machines—they’re bait).

  And we don’t want any perceived ‘safe places’ either. In the very first week, we should make a point of blasting the crap out of someone sparking up in a tent in the middle of Cumbria or something. Smokers need to realise there’s nowhere to hide.

  Let’s change the warnings on the packs while we’re about it. None of this wussy ‘Smoking Causes Cancer’ nonsense. Just a sniper, in silhouette, and the words ‘HE IS WATCHING’.

  And once we’re done with the smokers, we’ll start on the fatties. That’s right, blobster, I can see you. Just try reaching for that doughnut. Go ahead, punk. Make my day.

  The point of no return

  [24 February 2006]

  I was reading about the Singularity the other day, and apparently it’s nigh. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a theoretical point in the evolution of technology: imagine we design an artificial intelligence smarter than ourselves, which in turn designs an intelligence smarter than itself, which in turn designs an even brainier entity, and so on and so on and so on until it’s impossible for us to envisage anything smarter at all—at which point, TA-DA! Singularity! The point of no return.

  (At least I think that’s what it means. If you want a clearer explanation, invent someone cleverer than me and ask them about it, all right?)

  Anyway, it sounds great. It takes the pressure off us. We never have to invent anything again. We’d leave all that to our android offspring. They’d just call us into the room occasionally to show us cool stuff they’d invented—disposable eight-bladed razors, holographic Xbox games, vibrating colours, soap operas set on the moon: that kind of thing. And that’d be it. We’d spend the rest of our lives sipping cocktails and getting our chins wiped by androids. Perfect.

  Of course, our new super-intelligent robot masters might get fed up with us stumbling around like idiotic children, jogging their elbows while they’re trying to write down equations. They might snap, inject us with paralysis drugs and use us as human power-cells in a Matrix-style battery farm—slurping life-juice out of our backsides while pumping a digitised caricature of reality into our brains. Whatever. Provided I never have to think ever again, I’m not that fussed.

  Besides, there’s always the possibility mat five minutes after we switch them on, our super-smartarse descendants will develop nanotechnology, i.e. the ability to re-configure the molecular structure of absolutely anything—which means you could take a clump of soil and turn it into a delicious profiterole, or squirt extra synapses and knowledge banks and microchips into our brains, so we’d be as clever as they were; clever enough to carry the entire contents of Google around in our heads.

  Or they could get really ambitious: take the entire population of the planet and knit us together into one single gigantic sentient being, with a billion arms and legs, an eye in the centre of its forehead and a massive scrotum. Instead of starting wars, we’d simply sit around arguing with ourself, falling silent intermittently to admire the size of our balls.

  Actually, if the nanostuff’s really working, there’d be no point bothering with a conventional physical form at all. We could become a wobbly cloud of gas that could float away and spend the rest of eternity exploring the universe, contacting far-off alien civilisations and flogging them ringtones. Or maybe we could go one better than that, and simply break down all our molecules and rebuild them as an endlessly reverberating sound wave. Something gentle would be ideal; perhaps the noise of someone breathing on a harp.

  Whether that would be a good idea or not is totally beside the point—we’re not making the decisions. We’ve delegated everything by this point, remember? Viva the Singularity!

  Rubbernecker’s Weekly

  [ u? March 2006]

  There are some bits of the media your brain filters out before they can even register in your consciousness. Certain types of advert, usually: don’t know about you, but I’m almost completely oblivious to most dog-food or insurance commercials—the moment I clap eyes on them, my mind hits ‘delete’ and they fade into the background, like an unnoticed ticking clock.

  But that’s TV On the newsstands, there’s a particular strain of magazine I’m usually totally unaware of, but which I’ve just become obsessed by. I’m talking about those weekly women’s mags, with names like Chat and That’s Life!, which you often see cluttered near the checkout of your local supermarket (the sole exception being Waitrose, where you’re more likely to see What Servant? or Swan Recipe World ).

  It’s easy to ignore these mags because the covers are the same every week: a gaudy red logo in the top left corner, and a beaming non-celebrity model taking up most of the front page. Twee. Cosy. Harmless. You’d expect them to be full of word searches and knitting patterns.

  But no. Take a closer look. Read the headlines. This is some of the most brutal stuff it’s possible to buy. Take the latest edition of That’s Life! magazine. The main headline is ‘CUT OFF MY FACE’—a story about a deformed woman, replete with gruesome photos. Above that hover the twin delights of’STRANGLED WITH HER OWN BLOUSE’ and ‘SO HUNGRY FOR A BABY I GORGED ON LARD TO FILL MY EMPTY WOMB’.

  This week’s Chat (slogan: ‘WIT ‘N’ GRIT ‘N’ PUZZLES’) isn’t much rosier, with stories like ‘I FORGOT I WAS GANG RAPED’ jostling for position alongside tiny photos of a severed pig’s head (which a nasty neighbour apparently deposited on someone’s lawn) and a girl with a gruesome head wound, and a morbidly obese Scotsman. Oh, and a full-page photo of a woman laughing. Ha ha ha!

  I think they’re actively trying to drive their readers insane. And apparently it’s working. Inside the same issue, Ruth the Truth (‘Chats psychic agony aunt’) doles out important advice such as: ‘Janice from Pembroke—the squirrel in your garden has a message.’ I’m not making this up. March 16 issue, page 36: it’s right there.

  There’s also an ad for a spin-off mag, Chat: It’s Fate, which looks even better, i.e. worse (sample: ‘MY PHILIP MURDERED ME—SO I HAUNTED HIM UNTIL HE KILLED HIMSELF’).

  Anyway, when they’re not urging their readers to talk to squirrels or torment their own murderers, they’re filling their pages with the sort of extreme content normally associated with sicko websites
aimed at snickering frat boys—grisly real-life murder stories, close-up photos of tumours and injuries, that kind of thing—the only real difference being that here the relentless horror is interspersed with heart-warming readers’ letters in which Kids Say the Funniest Things. Somehow the juxtaposition only makes the nasty content seem worse.

  In short, these are mainstream magazines aimed squarely at lunatics. And given their sheer number, they’re a roaring success. The more I think about it, the more terrifying it is. But Christ, I’m hooked.

  Night of the living follicles

  [7 April 2006]

  Hair. Hair. Hair. Hair. Hair. It’s a pain, is hair. It grows, you cut it off, it grows back again. It’s bloody relendess, like a zombie. Which is exactly what it is, really—dead matter that just keeps coming. That’s why hair can’t be stopped—you cannot kill what does not live.

  What’s hair’s beef, anyway? What’s it trying to prove? It sprouts with enthusiastic urgency, sometimes in the most unexpected places, and then merely hangs around getting in the way. Think your job’s pointless? At least you don’t dangle off a scalp for a living.

  Everything about hair is rubbish. Getting a haircut for instance. Hate that. It combines two of my least favourite things in die world: staring at myself in the mirror, and basic human interaction, both of which are guaranteed to leave me suicidal. I’m so barber-phobic I spent most of my twenties sporting a self-inflicted grade-one crop, which I generally administered with a set of clippers while hunched over my kitchen bin. This served me well until I reached thirty and my cheekbones started receding. A shaved head only really works on a bony face: pack a little extra weight and suddenly you’re taking part in a Phil Mitchell lookalike contest in which the only contestants are you and Steve McFadden. And he finishes last.

  So these days I brave the barbershop. And I mean ‘barbershop’. I don’t do hair salons—especially futuristic hair salons where the staff themselves sport fashionable asymmetrical haircuts that make them look like the cast of Battle of the Planets. You’d have to be mad to subject yourself to that. So no. I favour a down-at-heel local gents’ chophouse: the sort of place where you simply go in, nod gruffly, and come out with a bit less fuzzy crap on your head than before.

  Even this is fraught with complications. There’s the stilted conversation for one thing. I have one lame joke I use with barbers—I ask them if it’s possible to only cut out the grey hairs. Then I nod quietly while they go on about football or the weather, for ever and ever amen.

  Since I’m incapable of describing what sort of haircut I want, I tend to end up with whatever they give me. Fortunately, this usually turns out agreeably bland, apart from the freak occasion when a suspiciously young, shifty guy cut my hair into a sort of Captain Kirk wave, then shaved a bare line down one side of my skull. I think he was having a breakdown. I just wish he hadn’t had it on my head.

  It’s time science stepped in. We need a pill that controls hair growth to such a degree that, once taken, your hair ‘locks’ itself to a certain length and style, and simply stays there—until you change your mind, and take a different pill (there’d be one for every hairstyle, from afro to yohawk).

  Better still, how about a special ‘night barber’ service—a private hairdresser who’ll sneak into your home in the dead of night and stealthily cut your hair while you sleep. It might be a bit creepy, but hey: no more small talk about the weather. And if they go a bit mad and start playing with your bum or something—sod it. You’re asleep. You’ll never know. And your hair will look great in the morning.

  Abort, retry or cancel?

  [21 April 2006]

  According to Parkinson’s Law, ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’—i.e. if you give me a maximum of seven days to tidy the house, even though it should only take two hours, I’ll stretch those two hours across the week, tidying in slow motion and taking plenty of coffee breaks, because hey, that’s human nature.

  This is what happens if you work from home: you get trapped within a fuzzy prison of your own construction. ‘Sorry, can’t come out tonight. I’m supposed to be finishing this thing,’ you say, but then you stay in all evening, pottering about, channel surfing, standing in a corner repeatedly rubbing your head up and down the wall like a depressed polar bear; doing anything apart from ‘finishing this thing’. And this cycle repeats for days on end, until finally the deadline lurches up, grabs you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to knuckle down and complete it.

  Like I say—human nature. Computers, of course, are far more efficient than humans. Nowhere is this more apparent than the field of time-wasting. You might blow a whole hour sitting on the loo reading a month-old Sunday supplement till your legs go numb, but that’s nothing next to the swathes of your time your computer can piss down the drain.

  I’m not talking about crashes, freezes, or hangs—but rather the endless stream of finickity little tasks a computer will set you without warning. The tiny hoops you have to jump through before it gives you what you want.

  Install this driver. Now update it. Now update it again. Register to log in to our website. Then validate your membership. Forgot your password? Click here. Now there. Fill out this form. And this one. And this one. Please wait while Timejettison Pro examines your system. Download latest patch file. Please wait while patch file examines own navel. Remove cable. Insert cable. Gently tease USB port with cable. Yeah, that’s it, baby That’s the way. Now show us your bum or I’m deleting your inbox.

  Maybe it’s all deliberate. Maybe the computers are simply preparing us for the sort of life we can expect when they finally rise up and enslave us. They won’t make us work in salt mines or use us as human batteries, no: they’ll have us endlessly downloading and installing drivers for their own sick amusement.

  My pet timewastin’ hate is when two or more programs start fighting for your attention: when a bit of multimedia software repeatedly asks you if you want to make it the default player for all MP3 files or whatever, and you say ‘no’, but nonetheless each time you start it, it asks you again and again, like a toddler in a supermarket pestering mum for chocolate, until eventually you give in and click ‘yes’—at which point another program sits up and says ‘Hey! I thought I was your default player?’ in a slightly wounded tone of voice, and embarks on a similar campaign of harassment, until you come to dread clicking on an MP3 file at all, or even going near your computer for that matter, for fear of being sucked back into the argument.

  In any sane world, the people who wrote that software would be beheaded on live TV In ours, they’re trillionaires. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our world is bollocks.

  Putting kids to good use

  [28 April 2006]

  I don’t wish to brag, but I think I might have just solved the global energy crisis. Now don’t all rush to thank me at once. You can form an orderly queue. In the rain. Like scum.

  What happened was this: I was talking to someone unfortunate enough to have spawned a child, and they were describing how every weekend they get involved in daytime activities they’d never normally dream of- treasure hunts, fun days, face-painting parties, toddlercise classes etc—simply to knacker their damn kid out, so the shrieking littie craphead willingly goes to bed early, leaving them to enjoy some tranquil quality time on their own.

  What a waste, I thought: a bit like leaving a car revving in the driveway until the fuel tank’s empty. Surely that energy ought to be harnessed somehow.

  The next day I was trudging down the pavement, passing by a local school. It must’ve been playtime, because from the other side of a towering brick wall I could hear a large group of primary-schoolers running, tumbling and yelling their fat little heads off. And I thought, how dare they? Really—how dare they? Frittering away all that kinetic energy like that. It’s shocking.

  And then I thought, aha! Kids are thick, aren’t they? I mean, really quite offensively thick. And that’s nature’s way of tellin
g us to take advantage of them, isn’t it? So instead of letting them fruitlessly scamper around like morons, why don’t we build gigantic public treadmills instead, and encourage them to gallop on them for hours at a time. Think of all the lovely, environmentally-sound kilowatts they’d generate!

  With global oil reserves running perilously low, we owe it to our children to exploit every ounce of their potential before it’s too late. They’ll thank us for those years spent on the treadmill later.

  Speaking of which, if it’s going to be a serious long-term enterprise then maintaining their interest in the treadmill is crucial. Frustratingly, kids have independent minds and short attention spans. And they tire easily. So we’ll have to control them through fear. Whenever they start flagging, you just get an adult to dress as a bear, leap on the treadmill and run behind them for a while, snarling and swiping at them with his claws.

  And if they get too upset or too suspicious to continue, simply toss a load of brightly coloured foam spheres onto the treadmill, and pipe in some circus music. A few minutes of that and the kids’ll be fooled into believing what they’re doing is fun, the idiots.

  Actually, the strategic deployment of brightly coloured foam spheres could be used to ‘sell’ pretty much any form of back-breaking manual labour to the nation’s children. They’d happily work down a coal mine if you released some balloons and promised to hold a face-painting competition afterwards.

  Look, it may all sound harsh, but come on: they’re stupid, and we’re much, much bigger than them. And honestly, right now they don’t exactly serve much purpose. Take, take, take—that’s their attitude. And it stinks. So why not put the selfish little shits to good use for a change? Is that really too much to ask?