Admittedly, the title is a little hopefull right now…
Not wanting to get peoples hopes up too much, but according to the Daily Mail Rider could be getting out in just a few weeks:
The 43-year-old is included on a list of possible pardons which will be dealt with during Ramadan, which falls in September. A spokesman for the DJ’s management said: ‘He’s bearing up but desperate to get out.’
Fingers crossed, stay tuned for more.
I was kind of intrigued earlier this week, while reading some of the pre-release hype around Pixar’s new, highly acclaimed CGI flick WALL-E. For those of you that have managed to miss it all, the film is set in a future where humans have been forced to abandon Earth due to pollution and environmental breakdown.
I was intrigued, because in a couple of interviews I read director/writer Andrew Stanton seemed to be going out of his way to play down any environmental message the film might have:
The most I do is recycle, and sometimes I’m even pretty bad at that…I don’t have a political bent, I don’t have an ecological message to push….I’m not stupid, I started to notice as this film was getting closer to being done the sort of issues that were out in the zeitgeist, but they were certainly not my intention. The last thing I’m gonna do is try to make a message movie.
At first I guessed (like Devin over at CHUD) it was just the Disney/Pixar spin machine whiring into action; while a kids film with an environmental message would actually attract audiences in Europe and Japan, in the neo-conservative US it’s a big no-no, where suspicion about the pinko liberal-media is rife, and most people seemingly still believe global warming is some kind of hippy propaganda.
But then, as I was walking to work this morning, I passed a massive billboard that made things a little bit clearer….
(I couldn’t find an image of the billboard…the above is a screen-grab from the Suzuki website)
Yep, that’s right – Disney/Pixar have signed an deal to use WALL-E in advertising for auto-manufacturers and CO2 enthusiasts Suzuki.
For fuck’s sake.
I’m a little lost for words, and hugely disappointed. I’m still looking forward to seeing the movie, but this has left a slightly nasty, petroleum flavoured taste in my mouth. At least Ghibli, who don’t shy from corporate sponsorship in Japan, and whom Pixar staff always point to as one of their main inspirations, would never try and play down the environmental messages that are apparent in pretty much every single film they make.
Shame.
Whilst surfing over the weekend, I stumbled over a quote from sci-fi author Ken MacLeod. Now, I haven’t read any of MacLeod’s stuff for years, and it never struck me as being amazing, but this quote (apparently from his novel ‘The Cassini Division’) hit a chord with me.
(The technological singularity)…is the rapture for nerds.
Genius. I’ve been searching for a way of summing up my discontent with contemporary singularity theory, and all the time MacLeod had hit the nail right bang on the head.
For those of you not familiar with the concept of the rapture, it’s a fundamentalist Christian belief that at some point in the future Jesus will return to the earth and transport all true Christians up to heaven to leave in immortal, eternal peace with the Lord.
It’s the perfect get out clause. Belief in this happening means that Christians don’t have to deal with everything that challenges their world-view; homosexuality, the internet, women’s sexual liberation, stem-cell research, the pro-choice movement, rival religions, Darwin…all of this can be just dismissed as sin, and left to perish, when God comes down to save them.
What MacLeod is saying, is that for a large tract of the geek community, the singularity is filling the same role. It’s the perfect get out clause. Belief in this happening means that geeks don’t have to deal with everything that challenges their world-view; ecological break-down, global warming, digital rights management, the hypocrisy of being a corporate IT professional but hating anything not open-source, global poverty, the high price of oil, obesity and heart disease….all of this can be just dismissed as Luddite heresy, and left to perish, when the AI Gods rise up to save them….uploading their brains to immortal digital shells, using nanotechnology to clean up the environment, giving everyone fusion powered flying cars and lots of free cybersex with VR constructs of Kristen Bell.
Of course not all geeks think this way, just as not all Christians blindly believe in the rapture.
And me? In case you haven’t guessed already, I’m a fucking atheist.
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