Apocalypse Never: why we’ll never know when climate change has ‘arrived’

Climate change is often perceived as a single event that will happen at some point in the future, whereupon all the world’s weather systems will suddenly, simultaneously go haywire.  All the ice will melt, and sea levels will rise and instantly flood through our city centres;  tsunamis, hurricanes and forest fires will terrorise the coasts and countryside;  and we’ll finally know – once and for all – that this anthropogenic climate change thing scientists have been warning us about, was real all along.  

Except that won’t happen.  Climate systems are more complex than that, and changes will probably occur over long periods of time, and even rates of change won’t be constant.  We’re currently living through a period of gradual atmospheric shifts, witnessing the biosphere mutate around us.  But it’s very difficult to see this happening.  The interplay of different geological cycles and systems means we’ll never be able to draw a line in the sand and say:  “All past hurricanes were just bad weather.  This one, (and all those yet to come?) was a climate change hurricane.”  (Though some people, famously including the mayor of New York, have done just that.)  

This is dangerous, because if we’re always waiting for the ‘aftermath’ of some grand catastrophe, we’ll end up waiting forever, whilst the harmful consequences of global warming and unstable weather patterns continue to build incrementally around us.  There will be no ‘after’ – only an increasingly unpleasant ‘during’.  In order to take effective and timely action on climate change, we must build social movements that re-imagine the apocalypse.

Short-term human imagination

Why is it that we find it so hard to conceptualising gradual change over long periods?  Why do we think in terms of the ‘normal’ present, versus the post-apocalyptic future?  Why is it, to paraphrase Fredric Jameson, that we’re so readily able to imagine a future earth as an apocalyptic wasteland, but don’t have the imagination to avert this by re-thinking the way we organise our society in the present? 

It’s often suggested that humans are simply incapable of thinking in the timescales needed to avert long-term climatic change.  That our psychology is evolutionarily hard-wired to let us solve problems that will help us immediately – how to find food, shelter, etc – but doesn’t let us comprehend bigger, more abstract things like the future, quantum physics, and the popularity of Robin Thicke. 

But I’d argue that there are loads of everyday things that would be really useful to understand but we have no clue about how they work – like consciousness, and love.  On the other hand, there are loads of examples of humans having a very good grasp of phenomena that operate across huge scales of space and time.  We understand (pretty much) how stars work – how amazing is that?  And – under the right circumstances – people have conceived projects designed to last for centuries. 

Bazalgette’s London sewer system comes to mind (famously over-designed to accommodate a potential population boom in the capital), as does a lot of other Victorian civic architecture.  But even simple objects:  in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell regards a stone water-trough, which he claims was made at least 100 years ago.  He muses, “That country had not had a time of peace of any length at all that I knew of ... But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years”.  [OK, the water-trough is fictional - but you get my point.]

Media simplification

The mainstream press doesn’t lend itself well to long, nuanced, multi-stranded narratives.  A related but separate problem is that discussions around risk and uncertainty are very difficult to convey succinctly or punchily.  Scientific uncertainty is often misunderstood as meaning “scientists don’t know what’s going on”.  It’s also not usually possible to go into the detail of how scientific consensus is formed, or what it even means to say ‘scientific consensus’ in the first place – so when people say ‘scientists agree climate change is real’, it’s not always clear what that means. 

The media is happiest when it can explain a whole story in a single bombastic headline, then supplement this with some background detail to add a bit of colour.  Where there is room for debate in a story, it is generally presented in black-and-white terms, with two rent-a-quotes who are framed as being from two diametrically opposing camps, who say the opposite to each other in order to provide a sense of ‘balance’.  This echoes the archaic, adversarial traditions of debate so beloved by our law courts and parliament. 

[Of course, the above is an equally simplistic and unfair characterisation of journalism, and there’s a huge amount of variety and depth in the way that climate change and other stories are covered in the national media, depending on the news outlet, context, the format of the piece, etc.  But I do still think that these concerns remain a barrier to a better public understanding of climate change.]

This approach leaves limited room to air more subtle shades of critique between different parties.  It gives little scope to tease out the whole web of issues that usually underpin a story.  Questions as broad as climate change are particularly adversely affected by this style of reporting. 

In particular, it is the black-and-white (in fact black versus white) approach that seems to lend itself to arguments over whether climate change is happening or not.  Discussions over the extent of the capacity of oceans to absorb CO₂, or the pros and cons of different policy approaches to minimising deforestation, are too vague to make good headlines.  They’re also less suited to the topical immediacy on which most news items are pegged. 

The upshot is that climate change debate is often limited to the question “Is it happening or not?”  Or at best, demanding to know exactly what concentrations of atmospheric CO₂ will cause specific temperature rises, and what precise meteorological effects these will correlate with.  (Spoiler:  we can’t predict it that accurately.)

Missing middle, but no end

In the face of an oppositional discourse where climate advocates are pitted against climate deniers, we end up with all the climate campaigners focusing solely on the most harmful effects of climate change – the devastating end-times that humanity must strive to avoid – just in order to get the public and policy-makers to take it seriously enough to act.  But in only telling the end of the story, we lose all the action in the middle, and skip straight to the denouement in the final chapter. 

The trouble is, if we wait to witness a disaster before we’re satisfied that climate change is real and problematic, it will not only be too late to mitigate its causes, but we may not even notice it going on all around us.  If we’re searching for an ‘aftermath’, we’re never going to find it – because we’ll forever be living in the present. 

Linear narrative

I suspect the media question isn’t just about presentation of climate stories, but the way we’re trained to process narrative itself.  The way culture is produced and consumed often relies on being able to sell a simple linear narrative arc, with a beginning and end, and often with goodies and baddies.  Books, films, and TV series all leave us with the expectation of a resolution, to end on a perfect cadence.  (Of course there are exceptions to this rule, like The Prisoner – but they are indeed exceptions).  Likewise, when we engage with narratives on climate change through these same media, we’re presented with a view that has to be easily packaged into the standard format. 

If our brains are trained to think in terms of rigid narrative arcs, with a beginning and end, it’s more difficult to think in terms of a never-ending process that will continue to play out indefinitely.  We’re always searching for a mental milestone to signify where the story ends.  (Even if there’s a sequel planned for afterwards).

Disaster movies and hell on earth

Climate change is imagined as an impending disaster (which it pretty much is).  We’re already very familiar with what disasters look like, because we’ve seen them in hundreds of films.  Disasters look great on the big screen, because they come with big explosions, a lot of human suffering, and often a topical moral message. 

The trouble is, disaster movies almost always portray the apocalypse as a one-off, traumatic event.  But climate change is a bit more like 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with successive generations of a village living through years and years of small, cumulative disruptions and developments.  This makes climate change very hard to put on screen.

Films featuring the aftermath of epic, world-changing phenomena such as nuclear winters and zombie outbreaks, are our main fictional frames of reference for imagining post-crisis landscapes, which means that when climate-perturbed futures are mapped onto these expectations, something gets lost in translation.  Films featuring individual extreme weather or geological events (Perfect Storm, Twister, etc) maybe relate to some of the local disturbances that could be thrown up by climate change, but they don’t give the whole picture of everyday life.

There aren’t a lot of fictional films explicitly dealing with anthropogenic climate change and its effects (The Day After Tomorrow is one), though a few touch on general themes of ecological collapse (Wall-E springs to mind).  The Day After Tomorrow depicts climate change as a singular event – a tipping point that creates instant global devastation at a single stroke presumably – due to the constraints of Hollywood narrative requirements mentioned above.  But it seems unfair, and almost beside the point to pick this one example – we’ve already learned, through exposure to decades of apocalyptica, to think about time by dividing it into epoch-defining moments of crisis.

In modern Britain, beliefs in traditional notions of Hell – an eternity of literal fire and brimstone – are less prevalent than they once were.  However, it has been suggested by some that Hell is a concept that has not been lost, but secularised.  It has migrated to Hollywood cinema screens depicting floods, explosions, and wastelands;  to crudely constructed, orientalist portrayals of regions in the world that suffer armed conflict, genocide, and famine.  

Yet these secularised visions of ‘Hell on earth’ retain something of the transcendent;  the abject;  the infinite and unknown, that have always characterised Hell as an unsettling concept.   Perhaps by tapping into this portion of some cultural subconscious, disaster movies speak to some buried anxiety of eternal devastation brought about by our own wrongdoing, closely aligning with the same visions of moralising and hellfire preached by many in the environmental movement.  [Not that there's some homogenous, universally held version of Hell, but I do think a hazy conception of Hell is recognised widely enough to carry significant resonance for many people.]

Borderlands and D-Days

Naomi Klein’s theory of the Shock Doctrine – the creation of perpetual emergency, a present moment that is permanently ephemeral and ‘now’, as a mechanism of domination – is partly reflected in the quick-fix lifestyle interventions necessary for consumer capitalism.  So-called retail therapy;  comfort eating and crash-dieting;  get ripped in 4 weeks;  the ‘before and after’ shot. 

The notion of there being an ‘after’ to take an ‘after shot’ of, is significant.  It’s an everlasting, effortless ‘after’ that follows a single burst of energy needed to create a dramatic, one-off change that will not relapse.  The greener pastures promised by lifestyle-advertising repeatedly create in our minds miniature milestones in our lives, on the other side of which lies a blissful ‘after’, a future of release.

Of course, in reality there is no ‘after’ a diet, where you can stop working and revert to your presumably slovenly, primordial, default state.  You have to keep it up indefinitely.  This is why the very concept of ‘going on a diet’ is problematic – because although it might be possible to moderately adjust to a healthier lifestyle, who could face going on a permanent diet?  (And how could you sell it?) 

The same consumer logic of one-off crash diets and quick fixes is well suited to the attraction of climate technofixes, where one catastrophic singularity is mitigated by another, one-off intervention of high technology, without addressing any of the interconnected underlying problems of energy production and consumption, resource depletion, social inequality, etc.  Our tangled global crises are instantly solved with the same simplicity of Bruce Willis nuking an asteroid.

That isn't to say we should reject technology altogether - but we need to think about what technology we deploy, who controls it, and whose priorities it serves.  To return to Fredric Jameson (sort of), why is it that many individuals and governments are prepared to accept the validity of madcap geo-engineering schemes, but dismiss large-scale solar and wind energy generation, and global emissions treaties, as implausible?  

Re-imagining capitalism and re-imagining the climate

Nina Power once said in a talk she gave for Auto Italia that the anti-capitalist revolution isn’t going to be a ‘grand rupture’.  This is the revolution figured as the ‘glorious day’, as imagined by so many on the left, and captured exquisitely in the romanticism of Silver Mt Zion’s lyrics about barricades, and the grand ‘parade’ that repeatedly serves as the metaphor for their insurrection.

Power didn’t mean that a revolution wouldn’t entail great upheaval.  She meant that the world the day afterwards wouldn’t look so very different to how it did the day before.  Our personal relationships, our streets, will still feel just as they did the previous Tuesday.  Even following times of major transition, the everlasting questions remain, ‘What do we do now?  How do we build from here?’

These questions can’t just be asked after the event.  Although many find romanticism in ideas of grand, radical upheavals that suddenly uproot centuries-old systems of inequality, real, peaceful and lasting change must come through slowly building social movements that can address these challenges.  And in fact, most of our daily experiences of participating in politics – however radical – are not about planning for some far-off glorious revolution, but are about small actions – raising awareness of particular issues;  holding debates;  staging demonstrations that don’t expect to immediately bring the government to its knees, but that hope to challenge institutions to behave a little bit better, or will inspire others to take more small actions of their own. 

This slow-burning, building impetus, for me offers hope for ways in which we might seek to re-imagine approaches to climate change.  Because climate change also requires a radical sea-change in the way society operates, but won’t manifest itself suddenly and completely.  It therefore requires solutions that are visionary and groundbreaking to create a new, different, more liveable world, but that don’t expect to see these changes take place over night. 

Having earlier mentioned Godspeed You Black Emperor’s ‘parade’ revolutionary aesthetic, their daughter band, Silver Mt Zion, offer a different vision of resistance in the title of their 1999 album, “Slow Riot for a New Zero Kanada”.  I can’t pretend to know the sentiments that lay behind this name, but for me it speaks of a sustained but powerful response to a late-capitalist, brutal world order that has created a landscape where – in the words of Wikipedia’s translation of the biblical quote in the liner notes –

“The earth… was waste and void…

There was no man, And all of the birds of the heavens were fled... 

The fruitful field was a wilderness,

And all the cities thereof were broken down… 

The whole land shall be desolate,

Yet I shall not make a full end.”

*****

Climate change is indeed a real and serious problem.  Although it won’t make its full effects known in a single day, its impact will be enormous – and ongoing.  Likewise, we need to develop solutions to re-organising the economy, society, and politics, that can’t happen overnight, but do need to be profound and radical – and sustainable in the long-run.  There will be no ‘after’ – only an endless ‘during’.  We need a slow riot.  

The (re)gentrification of cycling

A striking image occupied two full pages of the Evening Standard last week.  It featured a cyclist adorned with every possible ‘cycling visibility’ bauble you could imagine, and then some.  It was reminiscent of a cartoon I once drew to illustrate the proliferation of bike safety merchandise – except that this photograph managed to contain accessories that didn’t even feature in my exaggerated doodle, including some contraptions I’d never seen before.  

Marketisation

The piece brings into the mainstream the idea of cyclists as a new consumer market – and a high-end one at that.  The subtleties of different types of bike lights are no longer the sole domain of backroom bike-shop geek-talk:  57 varieties are now brought to us alongside a column that compares youth-restoring face creams. 

This reinforces the idea that hi-vis bicycle clips are no longer enough.  High-end bike clobber is no longer the preserve of the elite lycra-clad men who think nothing of cycling 80 miles on a Sunday afternoon.  It has now become a staple for anyone who wishes to use the roads.  A minimum requirement to avoid moral opprobrium for endangering your own safety, both in conversations with friends and family, and collectively in the popular press.

Furthermore, this marketisation of bike gear means that – as with all other consumer markets – the bar is continually being raised, with an ever-increasing diversity of products that must be purchased, at increasingly high costs.  The expansion of the range of products also means that an increasingly outlandish culture is being created, which moves potential riders further and further away from appearing ‘normal’.  Who wants to go around looking like Robocop, with the weird head-torch bike helmet in the picture above? 

Part of me even feels that the spectacular nature of the appearance of the modern biker-rider shares something with the ever-more sinister uniforms of police forces and armies.  Seeing the terrifying pictures of the Taiwanese army’s new Hannibal-inspired autumn range, I couldn’t help but think they resembled a cross between a BMX-er and a bike courier, only wielding a gun.  

Outsider clique culture and professionalisation

But more subtly, this entry requirement also manifests itself by making people feel that they just ‘don’t belong’ on a bike or on the roads.  That they lack some kind of ‘official’ status, which would presumably arise from some combination of experience, skills, expertise, or simply ‘looking the part’.  Rachel Aldred, a sociologist of cycling, found in her research that many cyclists she interviewed stated that although they regularly ride a bike to get around, they don’t identify as ‘proper cyclists’. 

The group of people who are perceived as holding this ‘official’ status themselves end up representing a psychological barrier to others joining their gang – rather than cycling being perceived as something anyone can do.  This isn’t helped by the stereotypical image of the cyclist – reproduced in the Evening Standard image above – which is that of someone young, athletic, attractive, affluent, and usually white.  (Though adverts in recent years do at least seem to be moving away from the assumption that cyclists are all muscular, lycra-clad men.)

As well as informal pressures on cyclists to conform with trends in clothing and equipment, there are calls for helmets to become mandatory, for some minimum level of training, for all bikes to be insured, and even for bicycle number-plates. 

A culture of increasing specialisation, professionalisation, and bureaucratisation of cycling mirrors trends in many other areas of society.  Professionals such as lawyers and doctors used to practice over a whole range of areas;  it’s now extremely rare to find ones who work on more than one highly specific field.  It’s become a cliché that journalism used to be a trade you could enter after leaving school at 16 and making the tea at a newspaper;  these days, hacks pretty much need an Oxbridge degree and a trust-fund.  And speaking of making tea, it’s increasingly difficult to even find work in cafés without having formal barrista training. 

So, as cycling becomes increasingly marketised, its visual culture becomes increasingly alien from ‘normal’ people;   those who are considering starting have an increasingly large gap of knowledge and equipment to overcome;  and those who already participate in it and want to continue must turn over an increasingly amount of their attention (i.e. time and money) to keeping on top of developments in the field.

Cost and inequality

The problem isn’t just that the culture of cycling is being made more cliquey.  The rising financial cost of keeping up with all the necessary apparel is also creating a very real barrier to participation.  A bike light that costs £125?  Seriously? 

The cultural and financial burdens of modern urban cycling are surely no coincidence.  The link between the recent modishness of cycling among the young professional classes descending upon Britain’s metropolitan centres has played a large part in the ability of manufacturers and retailers to bump up their costs so drastically. 

I recently bought a new bike for £850 (which I couldn’t have done without the government-subsidised cycle-to-work scheme my employer fortunately participates in).  This is almost double what the same model cost about four years ago, and almost triple the price my housemate recently paid for a small second-hand car.  Even old second-hand bikes now command £150 - £400, particularly if they have desirable ‘vintage’ (meaning ‘made in the 1980s’) steel frames.  About 8 years ago, they’d have cost more like £30.

Contrast this with the bike’s image in Britain until recently – the means of transport of the person who can’t afford a car. 

Another recent article in the Evening Standard featured a former gang-member slamming the lack of government investment in youth services in working class areas.  He strikingly singled out Boris bikes as emblematic of the state prioritising middle-class interests.  Boris bikes were cheaper than buses until January of this year, and could in many ways be portrayed as a great leveller of access to transport, and cycling in particular (albeit their condensed distribution in central London and its most affluent suburbs caters towards the city’s wealthier inhabitants).  However, cycling has now become so strongly associated with middle class culture that for many it has come to represent a source of tension between the perceived interests of the political classes and those of the disenfranchised urban populace.

A little bit of history repeating

This trend of the last 10-ish years isn’t a sudden post-script to a history of salt-of-the-earth working class cycling though.  Carlton Reid has noted that penny farthings in the 1870s were “The red Ferrari of the age”.  It was only later that they became the mainstream, cheaply available method of transport that saw my grandfather ride one each morning to the factory where he worked.

In cycling’s new costliness and social status however, we seem to be witnessing a disappointing return of Victorian-era phenomena to the present day – in common with welfare arrangements, tweed and rickets.

Stand up tall: authenticity, the past, and the future

Dan Hancox’s recent e-book, Stand up tall:  Dizzee Rascal and the birth of grime, uses Dizzee Rascal’s first two albums as a prism through which to explore the history of grime, and the politics that underpinned its birth.  I found it compelling, as Dan Hancox’s approach made me reflect on my own, strange relationship with grime – but it also raised broader questions for me around authenticity and nostalgia. 

Not orientalism

I first encountered Dan Hancox a few years back when he gave a talk at the University of East London about the role of grime in the 2010 student protests.  I remember at the time finding it hilarious to hear someone talk about grime in that accent – this was something I’d never encountered before. 

I had mixed feelings about this.  On one hand, I found something uncomfortably anthropological about his insights and descriptions.  It reminded me of when I used to work in criminal courts, and would hear upper-class barristers trying to ‘translate’ slang used by defendants.  There also seems to be something slightly problematic about the mainstream music media’s attitude towards Hancox, positioning his writing as legitimating a whole culture by virtue of his writing about it as a middle class Oxbridge graduate. 

(Though I’m sure this is a mantle he would never choose for himself, and his genuine joy for the genre and its culture is apparent throughout – not least in his approach to interviews.  The end of the book describes with glee his various encounters with grime artists on their own terms – in the back of cars, in recording studios, in cramped bedrooms.)

On the other hand, I found it positive that here was someone with his background prepared to take the genre seriously, and unironically discuss it in the language you would expect to hear people use when talking about any other art or literature – a far cry from the derisive and smug tones of the TV show Rude Tube, serving up Jaxxor’s ‘Junior Spesh’ to a knowing crowd of chav-baiting hipsters. 

There was a notable lack of sensationalism or exoticism – something missing from most grime coverage.  I enjoyed his analysis of grime’s sense of humour about itself, which can be easy to miss or misinterpret.  I found his attempt to describe the possible joy of screwfacing at dirty basslines reminding me of my teenage self explaining mosh-pits to people who thought they were all about fighting and aggression. 

Rose tinting

However, I did find some of this approach overly rose-tinted.  While a lot of mainstream coverage of grime – and of urban and youth culture in general – focuses too heavily on gang violence, Hancox I feel reacts by down-playing it too much.  He talks about violent lyrics being mainly bravado, and describes the camaraderie of grime artists behind the façade of machismo – with the infamous exception of Crazy T’s murder conviction. 

But this ignores some very real problems, which grime music is famous for documenting – the postcode wars, frequent fights and stabbings, rivalries between estates and gangs, and occasional killings.  As Hancox rightly points out in the book, this doesn’t mean grime caused or was caused by these phenomena, and I’m not locating violence as part of the grime ‘scene’ exactly.  But grime is certainly the soundtrack to all that. 

This brings me on to my own weird relationship with grime.  Growing up as a middle-class kid in suburban East London, grime was definitely on my radar as a teenager.  I had friends that listened to it, and friends of friends who produced it, and who were fully part of that world.  But my response to it was always detached. 

There was something kind of absurd about grime, in the same way that probably most teenage sub-cultures are when you’re not part of them.  I remember sitting in my friend Ben’s car, and him playing me Pay As U Go Cartel on Rinse FM (back when it was still a pirate radio station), and at first being convinced he was listening to it ironically.  I remember us all laughing like drains at an Oxide and Neutrino lyric, “I'll break in your house, strip you naked and take your possessions, now that’s gettin jacked.  I shot myself in the leg, cos I’m crazy like that. ” – how could anyone say that and take themselves seriously? 

Grime was also strongly associated with the kids who’d rob me and my friends on the bus, and start on is in the street.  While clearly not everyone who listened to grime was a potential mugger, grime acquired a connection with something scary.  Going to the Stratford Rex – which Hancox describes as the setting for a bland live-set from Roll Deep – was a genuinely tense experience when I was a teenager.  It was only in my early twenties, when getting robbed or attacked by other teenagers became a much less frequent occurrence, that I actually started listening to grime on its own terms.  From Hancox’s anecdotes, including seeing Roll Deep in 2005, I’m guessing (though perhaps ignorantly or unfairly) that he had similar experiences to mine. 

Creating the past, destroying the past

I read this e-book on the day I returned from heatwave August France, after a fortnight cycling through sleepy rural Brittany, and staying at an anarchist permaculture farming community.   After living in utopia, this was a pleasing way to ease myself back into the grit of the city. 

I enjoyed the stroll through Thatcher and Blair’s legacies on the East End;  the politics;  the architecture;  the history of the Docklands area;  the impact of gentrification and the Olympics;  the relationship between the police and young BME people.  And I enjoyed that none of it was abstract, that it was all told from an intimate perspective.  I also – inevitably – ended up revisiting almost the whole Dizzee Rascal back catalogue. 

But all this created the strange effect of making me feel a glow of nostalgia for something I’d never (at least not contemporaneously) been part of.  It made me think of Mark Fisher’s writings about longing to recreate a nostalgic past that you’ve never experienced.  My friend Ishraaq has often expressed his pain at being in the right place, at the right time, but in the wrong social class, to participate in grime as a teenager.  And that however much he listens to it now, it will only ever be as an outside observer – it will never have been a part of his youth. 

This re-combined especially weirdly with Hancox’s own ideas about grime attempting to escape from a humdrum present into a dream-world future.  Like maybe I’d fallen through a hole into some sort of limbo-dimension, re-inventing a past that denied its own present by looking for a future that has never been. 

Although I’m actually undecided about the claims that grime denies its present (after all, what other genre speaks – in its own accent – about such minute details of quotidian life?), nothing demonstrates more clearly a desire to escape the past than the end-notes about Dizzee Rascal’s refusal to participate in the book, or talk about his roots in grime and pirate radio. 

In an uncomfortably hurt fanboy voice, Hancox talks about Dizzee’s refusal not just to talk to him, but to pretty much anyone about his life and music before a certain period.  (It can only have been these passage that spawned some rather beautiful slash fiction on Twitter:  "I... I... I luv u", sighed the cub journalist as Dizzee's toned arms wrapped around his quivering torso".)

Creating the future

Although it’s a shame that Dizzee sold old (and he definitely has), I can understand why by this point he’d be weary of repeatedly being expected to re-visit his past for the delectation of the mainstream media seeking orientalist thrills, the ‘urban safari’ satirised in Plan B’s Ill Manors.  (Again, I’m not necessarily including Dan Hancox in this milieu).  

Dizzee’s frustrations at this minority-pigeonholing are echoed in Kanye West’s recent interview with Zane Lowe, where talks about the barriers he has come up against as a black artist trying to take his work in new directions.  He finds that he can never simply be an artist, but must always be categorised as a black artist, and one who has a history of talking about the street. 

(As an aside, this explicitly voiced class-and-race-consciousness of Kanye West – rarely seen in modern pop music – is also expressed by Dizzee in Cut ‘Em Off, albeit more romantically, in a lyric that stands out for me above anything else he’s written: 

“Remember this:  I AM YOU.
So if you think you're real, do what you gotta do.
On a level, you’re just challenging yourself.
So if you’re feeling brave, go ahead and hurt yourself.”)

Dizzee himself has framed his new music not as selling out, but as a desire to create a more positive future by singing about subjects other than the negative aspects of street life, and not dwelling on a past that he no longer lives in.  Fair enough, though it’s a pity he did it with James Corden and Robbie Williams, given that he now has the power to pick and choose pretty much any musician in the world to collaborate with.

But there’s still no getting away from Dizzee’s incisive political insight.  Though many took the piss out of his Newsnight interview, his response to Paxman’s question, “Do you believe in political parties” - “I believe they exist, yeah” – was exactly the kind of thing I’d have wished I’d said if I’d been asked that question. 

And, while grime contains its share of political and philosophical and wisdom (though you often have to look pretty hard for it), Boy in da Corner and Showtime contain it in density that is rarely matched in any album of any genre of the last 20 years.  

Which brings me back to my opening sentence.  I found it in some ways limiting that Dan Hancox chose to use just two albums as his focal point – though I had to admire his discipline in not straying into the plethora of other artists he could have brought into the mix.

But it’s a testament to the depth contained in those two short albums that they were able to work as a lens to investigate not just a genre, but a whole era, place, political landscape and culture.

More cyclist victim-blaming

This afternoon I met a friend of a friend, and we discussed her experiences of driving in London, having moved here from China a couple of years ago.  I sympathised with her nightmarish experiences of driving lessons involving the enormous roundabouts in the part of East London where I grew up, and related to her feeling unconfident in navigating London’s often hectic streets.  

She then told me that she’s failed her test four times – but in the same breath, added with outrage that two of these failures had been due to cyclists.  I raised my eyebrows.  It seemed harsh for a driving examiner to fail her for a mistake that was someone else’s fault.  On the other hand, I could imagine a learner driver not having the experience to deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations, and panicking during interactions with other road-users behaving in unexpected or selfish ways, leading her to feel cyclists were to blame for whatever the incident was.  (Notwithstanding the fact that she felt that failing her driving test four times was an injustice against her, rather than an indication of her ability as a driver.)

She elaborated on her story.  The first time she failed, it was because she was asked to pull over when she was in front of two cyclists.  When she indicated and slowed down and, she incorrectly anticipated that they would undertake, and waited in the middle of the road for them to do so.  Instead, the cyclists (correctly) just waited patiently behind her for her to pull in.  She ended up stationary in the middle of the road, for which she was failed. 

I asked what the cyclists had done wrong.  Her response was that if they hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have failed. 

In the second story, she overtook a cyclist on a relatively quiet road.  The examiner soon afterwards asked her to take the next left – which she immediately did without checking her mirrors, cutting up the cyclist who was now just behind her, and who she’d now forgotten about. 

I asked how the cyclist was to blame for her cutting in front of him without looking.  Her response was that he should have used a different road.  I said, ‘What, the other London roads, with no cars on them?’  To which she responded ‘yes’, before going on to say that on a policy level, “They” shouldn’t be permitted on “Our” streets, thus enabling better overall road safety . 

I didn’t ask her any further about why she used the words ‘them’ and ‘us’, or about her use of the possessive ‘our’ – ie why she thought the road belonged to her, but not to cyclists.  But I was quite sarcastic in pointing out that she blamed the cyclist for her own driving test failure, even though it was her behind the wheel, and furthermore it was she who nearly killed the cyclist.  However, she remained adamant that the cyclist was at fault, and that she had done nothing wrong.  

For her, the idea that the cyclist must have been the one in the wrong was closely tied to the idea that cyclists don’t belong on the road.  This gave her the right to drive exactly as she pleased, as cyclists are only temporarily permitted to ride there by the good grace and patience of the car drivers who legitimately inhabit it (ie her). 

The explicitly espoused views that 1)  car drivers are the natural owners of the road, and 2)  cyclists are in an ‘other’ category that has no rights either as traffic or as human beings, seem to be heavily connected, and apparently remain prevalent among London road-users.

The segregated city - urban taxonomies

The city is full of boundaries.  Messages about the space we are inhabiting, telling us where we are allowed to stay put, and where we should keep moving;  where we can and can’t enter, and under what conditions;  messages about how we should behave once inside. 

Sometimes these signals are obvious – a fence with a locked gate tells us we are not meant to enter somewhere.  Some signals are more subtle – a change in the texture of the paving tells us that we are moving from public space to private property, where our legal rights are very different, dictated by the landowner instead of a democratically accountable council or government.  These messages are sent out by urban infrastructure like radio waves, and continually reinforced in our minds by the behaviours of those we see around us.   

And they are indeed messages:  not accidents of construction, but actions carefully considered  by town planners, architects, corporations, local authorities, etc. 

We now rely on a complex web of signals and signposts to guide our interactions with the city, and with each other.  Road markings, traffic signs, positioning of kerbs and speed humps, bollards, railings, fences, walls, the design of junctions and roundabouts, phasing of traffic lights;  anti-skateboarding devices, anti-pigeon devices, anti-youth devices that emit a high-pitched noise, benches designed to repel homeless people;  anti-climb paint;  positioning and availability of facilities such as street lamps, public toilets;  the design of buses and bus stops, and the layout of their routes.  There is even an example of a town in Essex that painted yellow lines on the pavement to guide where people should walk.

These layers of mediation between our inner thoughts and our external environment have the cumulative effect over time that we stop making decisions and relating our judgements to our direct experiences of the place and our memories.  Instead, we check the signals.  Or rather, we don’t stop thinking altogether – but our thoughts maybe lack nuance, and our ability to critically interpret and respond to new situations is diminished. 

Our diminished ability to think critically about situations leads to our becoming isolated from other people in our immediate surroundings.  People stop being individuals, and become specimens of a given category.  When we drive along the road, we’re looking out for drivers in front and behind us, checking to see if they’re indicating, whether they’re speeding up or slowing down, performing pre-determined movements that imply particular patterns of behaviour.  We’re not thinking about what that person is like;  what sort of day they’re having;  how they’re feeling;  etc. 

And fair enough – if we spent all our time wondering what the driver next to us was going to have for dinner, I’m not sure it would help our driving.  But I still think it’s important to note the trade-off that we make in this process of dehumanisation.

Our removal from other road-users is all the more stark in relation to people in different categories.  People on the ‘other’ side of the boundaries that mark up the city.  For example, if we travel along the road in a car, we are not only bodily separated from the outside world through the physical fact of the car’s shell.  We also a gulf apart from pedestrians inhabiting the parallel dimension of the pavement. 

The visual language of the division between the road and the pavement is powerful enough that we are able to drive along and see people on the pavement in a completely different category to those driving the car directly in front of us.

We’re aware of those pedestrians in our peripheral vision, but as long as their body-language doesn’t indicate they’re about to make a mad dash into the road (into our world, colliding with our reality), we are able to ignore them. 

This isn’t an argument that we should abolish kerbs, and there are many good and helpful reasons that symbolic and physical signs and barriers  – though there have been some interesting experiments in removing these.  But I do think it’s interesting to interrogate the effects of excessively taxonomised mindsets on the relationships between different users of urban space. 

What makes us visible? Perception vs the physical

My friend Katie recently posted a link to a tutorial on how to make your own light-up cycling jacket.  You basically sew a load of LEDs into a(n otherwise perfectly wearable) jacket, hook them up to some batteries, and wire an on/off button into the cuffs. 

This got me thinking about what it is that makes you visible to others on the roads.  Is it simply about some part of you being brightly lit?  Or is there some interpretive element to how we see, and respond to, other road-users?  How does your ‘physical visibility’ relate to your ‘interpretive visibility’?

Katie’s hi-vis jacket provides the wearer with two light-up arrows, pointing left and right, which can be switched on independently, allowing the wearer to signal when they’re about to turn left or right, in the same way as a car’s indicator lights. 

Or does it?  Although the designer and wearer of this contraption knows that the arrows mean ‘I’m turning right’, what does the car-driver see?  I suspect that – at least initially – they’ll just see some flashing lights.  Maybe if the cyclist is slowing down and approaching a junction, the car driver will – in a few seconds – put two and two together, and consciously think “Oh, they’re signalling”.  But this calculated mental reaction is very different to their response to a car’s orange indicator light, which all drivers the world over know – without even consciously processing it – to symbolise ‘I’m turning’.

I think the ‘arrow jacket’ also contains a second barrier to the process of realisation, as the driver has to process the symbolic meaning of the direction of the arrow.  Car indicator lights, kind of ingeniously, don’t require the observer to make this mental calculation – they just rely on the orange light being on the side of the car that the vehicle is about to move towards.  Arrows require an extra layer of decoding – and if the observer isn’t expecting to have to do any decoding of new languages invented by other road-users – which they’ve never seen before – then I wonder what impact it will be on their perception of what they’re seeing.

This is no criticism of the jacket or its designer.  I think it’s quite a clever idea in many ways, and I find something about the craftivist / hacking element kind of aesthetically appealing.  But I do think it raises interesting questions about visibility in urban space.

I think similar issues are at play in other new lighting contraptions I’ve seen emerge recently.  Revolights insert hoops of LEDs into the wheel rims, which are synched to the speed of the bike to only light up only the front half of the front rim, and the back half of the back rim. 

But what do your eyes and brain do when they see two 2-foot high arcs of light glide along the road surface?  What does it mean? 

More prosaically, a friend recently pointed out how weird it looks when you see orange pedal reflectors bobbing up and down.  Similarly, we’re used to seeing jackets, bags, lycra gear etc, with all sorts of patterns of silver reflective material built in.  We suppose that it makes us more visible.  But when I ride along wearing my black leggings with the silver writing on the calves, what message does it send to someone behind me when they see the disembodied word “Altura” bobbing up and down in front of them?  Maybe they correctly interpret this signal, and perceive a cyclist whom they should treat with caution and respect.  Perhaps they muse upon the spectacle of a ghost whose only connection the earthly realm is a shining brand name? 

Admittedly these symbols are never static – if enough people start adopting these technologies and forms, they will over time become their own visual language.  Perhaps one day everyone will become used to seeing a red and white arc, or a flashing LED triangle, as ‘cyclist’ without thinking about it, just as we see a pair of disembodied headlights and think ‘car’. 

But I think that in the meantime, the cracks in the continuity and clarity of this language can act as useful tools to help us consider what it is about our physical form that allows us to be processed as symbolic forms.  This in turn will help us to think about how we can start to construct cyclists not just as objects that can be seen, but citizens who are treated with respect and humanity.  

Musical alphabet soup

[This post was written back in June 2013 - now less topical, but still relevant]

Comparing this year’s Glastonbury line-up with that of Barcelona’s Primavera festival, I notice an interesting difference. 

Glastonbury categorises the bands by the stage they’ll be playing on (therefore implicitly by genre), and within that, arranges them in order of presumed fame / importance.  Primavera on the other hand just list the whole lot in alphabetical order.

What’s the meaning of these two systems of categorisation / promotion?  And what do they say about the way we’ve started to listen to music in recent years? 

Festivals listing bands in alphabetical order is a relatively new phenomenon.  The first time I encountered it was about four years ago in the Field Day festival, which takes place in East London’s Victoria Park every May.   Until then, festivals had followed the traditional ‘Glastonbury’ approach. 

This was born of the pre-internet era, when people found out about new music through a small number of sources, mainly controlled by a handful of wealthy media barons and music industry big-wigs.  Accessibility of music was also dependent on what was in stock in record shops, so the most easily available records became the most widely heard.

This meant that the size and demographic of a band’s audience was fairly predictably connected to the extent and type of exposure they were afforded by this industry/media partnership. 

It also meant we searched for music not by using search engines, but with magazines and TV shows.  The format of these media is inherently geared to reinforcing hierarchies of fame, with the most prominent bands gracing the front pages of magazines, or the suspenseful finale of the weekly Top 40. 

(Who knows or cares about what’s in the top 40 these days?  Is it even still a thing?  The last time I heard the phrase ‘Number 1 In The Charts’ was when a pub quizmaster bemoaned how difficult it was to set music trivia questions for the last decade, due to the absence of quantifiably ubiquitous songs.)

These days, it’s far easier to find out about new music through peer groups online, and access almost any song in history (for free) on Youtube etc, as recommendations for similar artists.  We also search directly (and actively) for specific songs / artists, instead of waiting to the end of the chart show to be told who’s Number 1 that week.  (Of course there’s still a huge music industry pushing a few major artists on TV, online, in print, etc.  But the context is very different.)

We’re also now accustomed to personalised and self-selected content across many platforms, rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’:  Twitter timelines, Facebook feeds, RSS feeds, Last.fm scrobbling, Tesco Clubcard points for selected items, BBC iplayer, ‘build-your-own’ student prosptectuses and corporate reports – the list goes on.

In this landscape – notwithstanding  the fact that events organisers obviously make curatorial decisions about which bands are playing in the first place – why would it still make sense for them to choose for us which bands individual audience members will want to see?  Why would it still make sense to assume that the organiser has a better idea than the audience of who’s more famous within specific subcultures?  Or how that fame would translate in desirability?  It feels kinda quaint to be addressed in this way.    

Conversely, Primavera’s alphabetised line-up is the closest a poster can get to Google, in terms of how we seek information in the modern age.  So perhaps it’s also fitting that Primavera’s line-up poster is all sexy minimalism – sans serif, black & white, clean backgrounds – while Glastonbury’s graphic design has yet to emerge from the early 1990s.

Democracy 2.0?

However, I think it would be a mistake to view this shift in music consumption as a move towards the democratisation of music. 

Alphabetisation and equal font sizes appear to create a level playing field for artists, and recognise heterogeneity in audience tastes.  They may even indicate a move away from centralised industry control.  However, I wonder if this conflation of myriad artists and styles onto a single continuum also goes hand in hand with the flattening of music into an amorphous mush of commodity. 

The information age has widened accessibility, so everyone has the opportunity to be connoisseur.  However, it’s also enabled the exact opposite: a generation of people with no need or interest in cultural discernment.  In fact, we’re often (myself included) not only undiscerning about what we listen to, but don’t even know what we’re listening to at any given moment, nor would it occur to us to have any desire to do so.   

We have huge swathes of musical material with no barriers to accessing or selecting it.  We can build infinite playlists without taking action in between to change records, and we don’t have a radio DJ between tracks telling us what was just playing, or what they think of it.  (Though we have kept onto the tradition of being sold stuff in between songs.)

The ‘shuffle’ function blends all of our music collection into a morass of ‘stuff’.  Instead of selecting a song we want, we simply listen to ‘some music’.  The Schrodinger-esque iPod Shuffle takes this one step further, by allowing us to listen to a load of shuffled songs without even displaying what’s playing – so you can quite easily own and listen to a whole load of music without ever knowing what it is.  We’ve moved from a Newtonian musical age to one where our tastes are probabilistically distributed along a Gaussian bell-curve of Heisenbergian uncertainty.  (Physics fans:  yes, I know this is a crap analogy.)

The phrase ‘one-hit wonder’ used to be a derogatory phrase applying to bands with only one famous song, rather than a whole well-known body of work.  But nowadays it wouldn’t even make sense to deploy such a term, let alone as an insult (“You had a hit?  Well done, you’re famous and talented!”), because we recognise the complex and arbitrary way that information, fame and memes spread, and how short our attention spans our.  (On a related note:  music is still written and distributed in the album form, but rarely listened to in the same format – when is the mode of music production and distribution going to change to reflect this?) 

This isn’t an old-person call for a return to the days of John Peel and Melody Maker.  But I do think that the connotations of the alphabetised playlist has some liberatory potential, whilst also conversely embodying the commodification and homogenisation of culture in late modernity. 

Watermelons and apolitical politics

Politics and the climate debate

James Randerson’s recent Guardian article discussed the public suspicion of ‘watermelon’ environmentalists – people who are ‘green on the outside but red on the inside’, ie who use climate change as an excuse to advance a socialist political agenda. 

During the debate that followed, some commenters accused leftists such as George Monbiot of being ‘watermelons’, whilst others, including Bob Ward, conversely accused right-wingers of doing the same thing.  (Conveniently for conservatives, no one has yet identified a fruit that’s green on the outside and blue on the inside.  Except maybe a mouldy blueberry, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.)

Randerson himself argues that climate change has been seized on by people from all across the political spectrum to suit their own, pre-existing, ideological standpoints.  To address this problem, he urges that “the political poison be drawn from the debate”, adding, “the reality is that atmospheric physics does not care which party you vote for.” 

Not all carbon is born equal

This appeal to an incontrovertible ‘reality’ is appealing, and at first glance seems straightforward.  If the problem is too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, all we need to do is get rid of the CO₂, right?  However, framing the issue in this way masks an important debate about whose interests are being prioritised by different policy options to manage climate change. 

Larry Lohmann argues that by focusing our discussions too heavily on carbon itself – an inanimate molecule – we run the risk of imagining that all policies to reduce carbon are equivalent to each other, and that their success can be measured purely by how effective they are at minimising atmospheric carbon – regardless of their social and economic implications. 

Can we really equate petrol consumption by American SUVs with, say, planting eucalyptus monocultures in Indonesia that will (temporarily) absorb CO₂ but which may have undesirable impacts on the way local people can use their land?  Is funding a windfarm in Kent the same as funding biofuel crop production in developing countries, which may restrict local food production?  Is (fossil-fuelled) economic development in Britain equivalent to that of developing countries whose own development has been harmed by Britain’s own history of colonial domination? 

I’m not disputing that CO₂ is indeed causing climate change, and I agree that the atmosphere doesn’t care which political party we vote for.  But I also think we need to pay close attention to whose interests are served by particular policies, and the processes that shape those policies. 

Whose interests get heard?

For example, Private Eye reported in August 2013 that a group set up to advise the government on fracking – the ‘All-Party Group on Unconventional Oil and Gas’ – was funded by a number of fracking companies, and receives admin support from Edelman, a lobbying firm that represents frackers. 

The Group does include a range of (non-paying) stakeholders including environmental NGOs – as was clarified in the following edition of Private Eye (#1348), following (tellingly) a joint complaint made to the Eye by MPs and Edelman.  But do these stakeholders have as much influence over policy makers as the companies that are funding the Group?  Indeed, why would Cuadrilla et al fund the Group if they didn’t think it would buy them influence?  And whilst the fracking companies undoubtedly have a wealth of valuable technical expertise to contribute, with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine them as neutral, unbiased observers.

Apolitical politics

However, Randerson’s injunction to ‘draw out the political poison’ suggests to me a desire to make decisions that are somehow the logical result of rationally evaluating evidence of a range of social, political, economic and environmental factors, and then agreeing on an objectively optimal course of action.  This implies that political disagreements have the potential for a ‘correct’ or ‘neutral’ solution, as long as we have an honest debate about the issues at play. 

My own feeling is that politics is messier than that.  The very essence of political debate is that different individuals and social groups have directly conflicting interests, and people have vastly differing opinions, and yes, ideologies.  Although we try to debate, compromise, agree on solutions to problems, these underlying tensions will never go away.  For every policy decision – whether it relates to housing, transport, or chicken-farming – some people will think it’s too right-wing, and the other half will say it’s too left-wing.  The climate change debate is no different – and we should embrace that diversity of opinion, not try to ignore it. 

I admire the consensus-building impulse implicit in ‘removing the poison’, and share the wish to honestly debate politics, and dispassionately weigh up evidence.  But I think that this will only be done by openly acknowledging and discussing the intersections between science and politics, and negotiating ways to make them work together – not by trying to separate them.  

Divide and rule

Urban cycling has become perceived as a politicised act.  That’s not to say that cycling is necessarily radical – indeed, many of the most high-profile supporters of cycling are conservatives (with both big and small ‘c’s).  Only that current debates around cycling are politically contested in a way that, say, doesn’t apply to discussions of the cultures and infrastructures of waste disposal.  One aspect of this debate being somewhat heated is that a narrative has arisen in which cyclists are pitted in opposition to other road users, in an antagonistic struggle. 

In any shared public space, there will be balancing acts to resolve the different needs of the various groups who use the space.  Usually these compromises are absorbed as part of daily life without it even registering that there is a conflict of different interests.  For example, most of us don’t begrudge giving up our seat when a pensioner gets on the bus – it’s just the natural thing to do.  It doesn’t occur to us to decry the war on the buses between pensioners with their special seats, versus the ‘rest of us’.  (Though no doubt George Osborne would find a way of doing so if he thought he could blame them for the recession.)

In debates about road-use, cyclists are usually cast as a group of outsiders, posed antagonistically against the remainder of (presumably ‘normal’) society.  In doing so, cyclists have become subject to the same ‘divide and rule’ tactics that are familiar to so many marginalised groups across society, whereby ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sub-groups are established and played off against each other by those with power.    

Women ("Is she cooking her family's dinner, or is she a slut?");  Muslims ("Are you an extremist, or do you support the government?");  political activists ("People have a right to peaceful protest, but those violent anarchists deserve all the police beatings our taxes can buy"). 

By accepting the legitimacy of these distinctions, we give the green light not only for the supposed 'bad' sub-category to be vilified, but for society as a whole to be manipulated into submission to the powers seeking to divide us in the first place. 

In the blue corner:  cyclists who wear hi-vis apparel and helmets.

In the red corner:  those who ride on the pavement and jump red lights. 

Members of the blue camp are exhorted to shun those in the red, whilst being encouraged view themselves as 'ambassadors', in order to collectively appease some unseen but omniscient arbiter of public decency; an Aztec god of public highways.

The self-policing ‘ambassador’ complex also reflects the double-standards by which marginalised groups are judged.  When one member of a minority group commits a transgression, they are perceived as doing so as part of that group;  are seen as an anonymous member of a collective entity;  a manifestation of a stereotype.  When members of a majority groups transgresses, they are treated as individuals with their own life history and personality, and their belonging to any particular group is rarely mentioned. 

For example, when newspapers report crime stories, they will frequently publish the race of the perpetrator if they are from a minority ethnic background, thereby linking the whole social group with the offence itself.  Conversely if a white person commits a crime, it would never occur to anyone to point out that the offender is white, or connect this to other crimes committed by white people, or ponder how the crime reflects on ‘white culture’ or collectively held ‘white values’. 

Even Anders Brevik’s crimes, which were inextricably linked with his white identity, were never described as ‘white extremism’, ‘European fundamentalism’, ‘Christian terrorism’, or similar.  Instead, the predominantly white British media distanced themselves from him by using terms such as ‘neo-nazi’.    

I was once approaching a set of red traffic lights at a busy junction, when a pedestrian ran out into the road about 5 yards in front of the pedestrian crossing, straight into the path of the cyclist in front of me, who was just pulling up to the lights.  The pedestrian screamed at the cyclist for driving into the crossing;  the cyclist pointed out that the crossing was several yards from where the man was, and that he’d basically just walked out into the road.  The man turned round to glare at each of the cyclists at the lights (there were about 8 of us), and snarled “You’re all just so fucking charming, aren’t you?” before storming off.  I find it difficult to imagine a situation in which 8 car drivers are all abused simply for being in close proximity to a driver who has behaved inconsiderately.

Interestingly, the only time motorists are referred to as a category – as opposed to just being the normal way that people get around – is when motoring lobby groups wail about the ‘war on the motorist’.  This reminds me of amusingly named “men’s rights” groups, which complain about how men are structurally disadvantaged by a cruel matriarchal society. 

Treating cyclists with collective contempt rather than identifying the specific misdemeanours of individuals, and maintaining this power dynamic through a divide-and-rule culture, will only change when cycling is perceived as simply a normal means of getting from A to B, instead of an outsider activity.  In the meantime, cyclists must collectively reject the ‘ambassador’ millstone, or risk perpetuating their own marginalisation.

Visibility and victim-blaming

The early days – the car as a dangerous oddity

Traction engines are like steam trains that drive on roads.  They became available in Britain during the 1850s, when they were mainly used to transport heavy agricultural loads.  In 1861, in response to this new menace, the Locomotives on Highways Act was passed.  It set the world's first ever speed limit, at 10mph. 

Four years later, the Locomotives Act 1865 set the speed limit at 2mph in towns, and 4mph in the country, and required a minimum driving crew of three - one to steer, one to stoke the engine with coal, and one to walk 60 yards ahead waving a red flag or lantern.  For this reason, the law became known as the 'Red Flag Act'.

These laws were passed because, since driving was considered to be a dangerous thing to do, drivers were seen to have a duty to the public to announce their presence.  The burden was on them not to injure anyone during the course of their imposing and outlandish activities, by making themselves highly visible to other, more vulnerable, road users. 

Fast-forward 150 years, and the motor vehicle is seen as the rightful heir of the highway.  Pedestrians and cyclists are permitted to be present only by the good grace and magnanimity of motorists, and on the understanding that they are temporary visitors – outsiders.  They enter at their own risk – and indeed there is a constant and high risk presented by vehicles moving at 30pmh and faster.

The double-whammy of automobiles’ presumed right to the road, and the physical danger they present to the human body, is set against the backdrop of an increasingly risk-sensitive society.  One consequence of this is that cyclists are required to take increasingly burdensome precautions to make their presence on the roads socially acceptable. 

These precautionary measures come in two forms:  physical protection in case they’re hit by cars, and equipment to make themselves more visible to drivers.  We’re going to investigate the latter.

Hi-vis culture

There’s a huge variety of visibility apparatus on the market, and it seems to grow every year.   It includes hi-vis bands, ankle-clips, bag-covers, vests and even whole jackets, and tape stuck to bike frames;  reflective silver patches on trousers, tops, jackets, shoes, gloves, and bags;  plastic reflector panels on the front and rear of the frame, on pedals and on wheels;  lights on the front and rear, and integrated into bags and helmets.

It can be argued that these are simply common-sense measures;  that indeed provide valuable protection, by making it easier for cyclist to be seen. 

However, hi-vis and reflective materials are not designed to protect cyclists from some neutral, abstract danger, or even a danger that is inherent to cycling.  (Unlike helmets are – at least to some extent.)  They are specifically designed to make cyclists visible to motorists.  

Most bike lights used in cities are for being seen by others, not for lighting the road ahead.  More strikingly, reflective material is only activated by the presence of headlights – the passive cyclist is involuntarily 'switched on' at the behest of the motorist. 

Reversal of responsibility

Furthermore, wearing hi-vis is frequently not a precautionary choice made on the part of the individual cyclist, but an imperative imposed by car-driving (car-driven?) society.  Indeed, by failing to adopt the designated prison-uniform of the highway, cyclists are increasingly accused of recklessness with their own lives - and even endangering others'.

Extraordinarily, there was a recent court case involving a child who was hit by a car when walking home along a country road.  The insurance company involved refused to pay compensation because she was not wearing hi vis clothing, and was hence to blame for her own injuries.

This is a reflection of a perverse situation, where the onus of responsibility is on cyclists and pedestrians to ensure that they are not injured, as opposed to the responsibility being on the motorist not to cause injury to others.  After all, the motorist is the one doing something dangerous:  driving a big, heavy, hard, object at high speeds - and is the one who causes injury to cyclists, and not vice versa.

This is a perfect reversal of the logic of the Red Flag Act, in which the individual creating the danger was responsible for mitigating the hazard they posed.  The point here is not that there's anything especially great about preserving arbitrary mid 19th century legislation.  It simply illustrates how the power of the motor industry is so strong, and so pervasive, that it has not only repealed a law, but utterly reversed social expectations. 

It also highlights the unreasonable nature of the demands of hi-vis culture;  the logic is that of a stab-victim being accused by the perpetrator of not ducking fast enough.

Victim-blaming

Here there are strong parallels with misogynist victim-blaming culture, where women who have been sexually assaulted are accused of having brought violence upon themselves by their clothing or behaviour, rather than the blame being laid at the feet of the actual perpetrator of the offence. 

Of course I’m not equating the experience of sexual assault with traffic accidents, and of course the types of trauma involved are very different – I just want to note certain similarities in cultural responses to them both.

Victim-blaming in sexual assault cases is often justified by framing it as ‘common sense’ that women who dress in revealing clothing should anticipate the unwelcome consequences of doing so.  This is often equated with the argument that you’re at greater risk of being robbed if you flash your valuables about in the street. 

One reason that this argument is nonsense (as well as grossly offensive), is that there is a deeply rooted culture of shaming and stigmatising women who are deemed to have dressed ‘provocatively’ (an ugly and topsy-turvy turn of phrase), in a way that simply doesn’t exist for people who leave their wallet poking out of their back pocket. 

Furthermore, despite precautionary warnings to potential victims, victims of knifepoint robbery are unlikely to be asked if the robbery was their fault after the event (at least not immediately).  Contrast this with the response to victims of sexual assault, who are routinely asked by police about their dress, state of intoxication, etc, when reporting crimes.  The same response is encountered by cyclists, who are frequently interrogated about what they may have done to cause a collision, rather than being neutrally asked “What happened?”. 

I was once knocked off my bike in broad daylight by an oncoming van that swerved into my side 

of the road at 20mph without indicating.  I hit him head-on, went over his bonnet, and headplanted onto the road.  (His first comment was the immortal line:  “Sorry mate, I didn’t see you.”)  He admitted immediately that he was entirely to blame, and when we met weeks later so he could pay for the damage to my bike, he was clearly relieved he hadn’t killed me, and that I hadn’t gone through his insurance company for full compensation. 

When I returned to work, the first words from my boss’s mouth were “So, was it your fault?”  When I mentioned it to my mum, she asked if I’d been wearing hi-vis clothing before she even knew the circumstances of the collision.  It’s problematic to directly compare road traffic incidents, where joint liability is much more at issue than in more straightforward ‘perpetrator / victim’ scenarios such as most robberies.  However, I would still argue that cyclists are regarded with undue suspicion of guilt, even when they are blameless victims, due to being unfairly stigmatised as a collective category. 

*           *           *           *           *

Clearly all groups that use public space must make certain compromises in order to cohabit our cities.  If cyclists are to use the roads they must be visible to other road users. It’s not sufficient to critique victim-blaming whilst overlooking the need for all road-users to be able to see and interpret each others’ presence. 

But how visible is visible?  Is visibility in the eye of the beholder?  What level of precaution is it reasonable to expect people to take?  How can we achieve a fair but meaningful balance of responsibilities for seeing and being seen?  When we consider these questions, we must take into account the underlying imbalance of social and physical power on the roads, and the imbalance in the expectations placed on different road users in our general culture.