Hot bath and a cup of yogi tea coming. It’s eight and if I play my cards right I’ll be asleep by ten. A new adventure into routine for a while. As yet an unbeaten track to the rehearsal rooms in Clapham. I could walk there in an hour though, and if the weather is nice I have a feeling that’s what I’ll do. If it’s shitty there are all sorts of options, and I’m tempted to look into electric scooter offerings in the area as that was an elegant solution at Halloween up in Hampstead.
Today I sat with the play. I still don’t think it has been announced even though I found my name on a publically available brochure online. But until it is announced I’m holding back on identifiers. I write a daily blog, it’s helpful for people to be satisfied I’m not going to blab things. Not that there’s much to blab really. David Beckham won’t be making a cameo. As with the plant medicine, where it was blindingly obvious what it was but I never named it, so I’ll have to be with this play until I get the official all clear.
It’s an interesting one though. As I’ve read that extraordinary old play, I’ve been thinking about misinformation, which is at the heart of it. With the tools we have these days, people can create evidence to back any number of half arsed theories. In politics, in history, in science, the internet is driving towards misinformation backed by forged evidence, knowing how easy it is to trick even reasonably clever people with a bias. And most people have biases – inclinations to believe certain narratives. And you can tip people’s biases too, with the right falsification at the right moment. Show a Mulder (I want to believe) the right forgery and they close the door to discussion. It backs up what they suspected all along. It’s easy to call them idiots, but they aren’t. Yes they’re dupes. But it’s a pandemic of dupes. More and more people are attaching themselves to made up stories that help make order out of a world that is so much more random and chaotic and ugly than we would like it to be. And because history and the mainstream narratives are peppered with expedient lies and bent optics, it is easy to substitute another lie to seeking minds without much critical capacity. “They’re lying to you man. They want you to believe what they want you to believe so they can manipulate your actions. I’m showing you the definitely actual truth thing so you aren’t a sheep like them and you can follow me blindly instead and do what I suggest.”
This play digs through these mind games, shows how trusting we can be of the wrong things, how evidence can be falsified, how we can be so easily misled.
Bath is run. They’re playing Graceland in the park over the road. I’m gonna wind down.
AlBarclay 