Category Archives: Digital Culture

Martyn Bennett, 1971-2005

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Martyn Bennett’s anthology will be released in March. Martyn died 7 years ago   – 30th January 2005. This piece was written by Sue Wilson and commissioned by the Martyn Bennett Trust. It is the sleevenotes of the album, written by Sue after long chats with Kirsten (Martyn’s widow) and lots of other people. It acts as an appropriate appreciation of Martyn and places him in the context of evolving Scottish music scene. For more got to Martyn Bennett here.

The sheer, breathtaking brilliance of Martyn Bennett was the shot in the arm that Scottish music needed to send it rocketing, supercharged, into the 21st century.” (John Byrne)

It’s a poor, pale substitute for his still being here, but as the years pass since Martyn’s untimely death, his seminal, seismic impact on our contemporary cultural landscape grows progressively more apparent.

If he were still here, on the one hand Martyn might well have laughed at such lofty language; on the other he’d have seen it as no more than his due. He relished puncturing pretension just as he espoused the grandest artistic ideals; was as capable of deep humility as he was of audacious ambition.

This Sunday afternoon dub tune is how I see life sometimes – a walk in the park and a piss in the duck pond. (Sorry if you thought that sound at the end was a cute little Scottish burn.)”

Schooled from childhood in both traditional and classical music, before diving head-first into rave culture, Martyn was the right man, in the right place and time, to make the quantum creative leap his music represents. His twin gifts of rigorous, restless intellect and profound spiritual consciousness, allied to his musical mastery – and his brilliantly mischievous sense of humour – enabled him to achieve a radical new synthesis of ancient and modern, local and global, rural and urban, that both embodied and advanced the fast-evolving culture he inhabited. Keenly media-savvy, in pursuit of often unworldly objectives, he crossed and transcended boundaries at many different levels, from that of image – as ‘the dreadlocked piper’ – to those of genre, art-form and audience.

“Try and find those things that make us Scottish. They are not necessarily tartan, but are no less colourful. They are in the sound of the kick drum, the bass line, the distortion, the punk guitar, the break-beat. Try and see the old ways in new surroundings.” Continue reading →

Why have the Greens Disappeared from the Independence Debate?

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By Justin Kenrick
Great post Clare – many thanks. It points to the liberating possibilities that accompany recognising what holds you down, and the creativity and responsibility that comes with recovering hope and refusing to blame others any more. This post is absolutely great.
But it is also far harder than that for (at least) three reasons:
(1)  there’s a need to recognise the forces out there (and habits in here) that disempower, unless you do that you can’t be free of them, but paradoxically you also can’t be free of them until you stop blaming the forces out there, and instead insist on taking the blame for going along with it, and so reclaim the power to change it

Scotland 3.0

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By Mike Small

As the date for the liberation poll is announced the need for clarity is needed. Liberation from what, for what? A replica mini-state is not what we need from this process. We need a new operating system, not a new computer. What social software do we need? What political apps are required? What could Scotland 3.0 look like?

Number one on my list – and I suspect the vast majority of us, is a response to the crisis in child poverty outlined yesterday as figures suggest 13 Scottish councils have wards where more than 30% of children live in pockets of severe poverty. Equality needs to be hard-coded into the new Scotland. The ‘worst areas were in Glasgow, the west of Scotland, Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife, Aberdeen and Stirling’, in other words right across the country. Continue reading →

For a New Scottish Democracy

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By Gerry Hassan

The concurrent Scottish, British and European debates go on as mostly separate, but interconnected conversations; political and economic parallel universes often seeming oblivious to the existence of each other.

The British state sovereigntists wax lyrically as if their moment has come, the Tory Party, in David Cameron’s once revealing remarks, returning to its comfort zone of ‘banging on about Europe’, while Labour slowly shift away from two decades of pro-Europeanism, and the Lib Dems and SNP fall nervously silent. Continue reading →

Leaving Leaving, Left

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Robin McAlpine, editor of Scottish Left Review, who have just published their ‘Independence issue’ on stepping into the debate and enhancing the discussion:

After largely ducking the issue for almost a dozen years, we at the Scottish Left Review finally tried to get to grips with the issue of independence. And I think we learned some things.

But why more than a decade of ducking the issue? Well, the easier answer would be that the SLR has always tried to focus on current, relevant, active issues and until now the independence debate was ‘one for the future’. That, however, wouldn’t really be true. In fact, it was one of two subjects we avoided because we try very hard to maintain a cross-party space which does not exclude or alienate people on the left by pushing at agendas they find hostile. (The other issue we avoided was the Sheridan trial and all the detritus around that.) Bluntly, it is a constantly tricky balance not to be seen as ‘secretly’ on one side or the other.

Of course, this will no longer do. Independence is the talk of the steamie and it was high time we engaged. But as always we tried to find ways to add to what is rumbling about in the mainstream media and not just extend the space dedicated to name-calling. We tried to do two main things. Firstly, we wanted to hear positive cases – reasons to do something, embedded in a realistic view of what independence could mean or what the union can deliver. None of us are well served either by the argument that independence will deliver our own utopia ‘just because’ or by the claim that independence would result in Armageddon ‘just because’.

How does independence make things better? The ability to lower corporation tax and build windfarms surely can’t be the end of the story. Do people really believe that a referendum will be won on the basis of the sort of agenda which appeals to Edinburgh-based bankers? When are we going to hear about what independence can do if we don’t happen to be shareholders in a big utilities multinational? The EU-elite won’t let Greece hold a referendum because they realise that they won’t win on a ‘this one is for the rich’ agenda. So how is a referendum in Scotland going to be won on the same basis? Continue reading →

Braehead Big Brother

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Given that we live in an era in which, as one politician once claimed- ‘it’s your duty to shop’ and at which time that civic duty of consumption increasingly involves buying cheap hi-tech equipment for domestic use, usually a smart phone or iphone – with a hi-def camera, one would assume that the natural thing to do as an honourable consumer would be to shop in a shopping centre and photograph your family enjoying the pleasures of retail.

New Organisational Forms

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A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:”The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.”

— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people’s assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

This interview with David Graeber expands on this simple idea.

“One thing that helped a lot was a smattering of people from Spain and Greece and Tunisia who had been doing this sort of thing more recently. They explained that the model that seemed to work was to take something that seemed to be public space, reclaim it, and build up an organization headquarters around that from which you can begin doing other things.”

EK: This movement is organized rather differently than most protest movements. There isn’t really a list of demands, or goals, or even much of an identifiable leadership. But if I understand you correctly, that’s sort of the point.

DG: It’s very similar to the globalization movement. You see the same criticisms in the press. It’s a bunch of kids who don’t know economics and only know what they’re against. But there’s a reason for that. it’s pre-figurative, so to speak. You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.

EK: So if you say, for instance, that you want a tax on Wall Street and then you’ll be happy, you’re implicitly saying that you’re willing to be happy with a slightly modified version of the current system.

DG: Right. The tax on Wall Street will go to people controlled by Wall Street.

EK: By which you mean government.

DG: Yes. So we are keeping it open-ended. In a way, what we want is to create spaces where people can think about questions like that. In New York, according to law, any unpermitted assembly of more than 12 people is illegal in New York. Space itself is not an openly available resource. But the one resource that isn’t scarce is smart people with ideas. So we’re trying to reframe things away from the rhetoric of demands to a questions of visons and solutions. Now how that translates into actual social change is an interesting question. One way this has been done elsewhere is you have local initiatives that come out of the local assemblies.

EK: It also seems that the tradeoff here, from an organizational standpoint, is that if you say you want, say, a tax on Wall Street, then the people who aren’t interested in a tax on Wall Street stay home. So remaining vague on demands can make the tent bigger. But it also seems that, at some point, people are going to need to be working towards concrete goals and experiencing dicrete successes in order to sustain the energy of a movement like this.

GB: As the thing grows, new organizational forms will develop. At this point, the New York occupation has 30 different working groups for everything from handling sanitation to discussing labor issues and tax policy. So we’re trying to set up ways that people with different interests can plug into the movement. There’s even a newspaper. The ‘Occupied Wall Street Journal.’ Of course, this is nothing compared to what happened in Tahrir Square, where they even had dry cleaners…

Read the full interview here.

Is Ed a Robot?

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Those of us who watched Red Ed celebrate Thatcherism and denounce ‘benefit scroungers’ might be confused about the much heralded ‘transformative speech’. Ed claimed all parties had to be pro-business and revealed he believes the legislation in the eighties that saw Unions neutered was correct before confirming Ed Balls announcement that Labour would do nothing to reverse the Tory-Liberal cuts programme. While other Scottish blogs give platforms to the Labour candidates it’s a bit odd that they are not addressing these more fundamental issues. Scottish Labour can call itself the Bay City Rollers and operate from the Wallace Monument if it likes but if British Labour has these policies they are a disaster for progressive Scotland.

Ed Miliband’s brave new dawn turned out to be a regurgitation of Blairite orthodoxies. But a more worrying issue about our Cicero Rouge is the fact that he appears to be a robot. Do not adjust your sets… Continue reading →

Program or Be Programmed

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Douglas Rushkoff expounds on his new book “Program or Be Programmed’. Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist,  graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.