Things I would believe if I had the world's largest echo chamber

In many ways this blog is the opposite of an echo chamber. An anechoic chamber, with my thoughts forming a series of angular baffles that deaden any feedback. But what if I always got feedback, and that feedback was overwhelmingly positive? What if I had the biggest echo chamber in the world? What would that do to me? 

I would believe that everything I said was great, because my echo chamber would tell me that everything I said was great. Then, it would dawn on me that everything I thought was also great. It had to be, because everything I said started out as something I thought. 

More than that, if everything I thought was great, then it followed that the thoughts of the few people who disagreed with me were completely wrong. They were the stupid thoughts of stupid people. I would tell them that and my echo chamber would back me up. They wouldn't stand a chance, but how could they? They weren't smart enough to buy something as vastly powerful as my echo chamber. 

At some point I would decide that the optimal body shape is 'mid-century refrigerator'.

I wouldn't use my echo chamber to body shame people. That would be a crass abuse of a force multiplier that could be used to call my detractors paedophiles instead.

As fun as that would be, it's only a fraction of what I could achieve with the world's largest echo chamber. At full strength I could use it to persuade people that it's a very good and sensible idea to let me step over the democratic process like it’s litter in the street. I could be at the levers of government power, and if people didn't want me there they should have said so. Not that anyone would have heard them over the reverberation of things I wanted to hear from my echo chamber.

If that didn't work out I could call the president a paedo and try my hand at strongarming the laws of physics instead. I would decide that orbital data centres are the future and my echo chamber would tell me how terribly clever I am for proposing something which does not currently have a viable solution. I would be a visionary rather than a science fiction writer! I would not tell my echo chamber that the real appeal of space data centres is that space is largely unregulated. Shhh!

Critics of the late Steve Jobs used to accuse him of having a reality distortion field. The projected force of his self-belief was so strong it was as though he defied the evidence of the world around him. Well, that didn't work out so well in the end because he's dead now, but my echo chamber would be his reality distortion field made real. I could use it to project my thoughts into the world so powerfully that people would choose to believe them over the more traditional objective reality. I would tell people that the world they experience every day is actually dangerous and corrupt, even though it's safer than it's ever been. What japes! The irony is that the corruption is actually coming from me. Tee hee! I said that the irony is that, I mean this is very funny, but I'm the one corrupting their reality. Never mind, everyone in my echo chamber will love that joke.

Would I use the world's largest echo chamber to make the world a better place? Most certainly, so long as you understand that I am the world, and by better I mean wealthier. If that makes you uncomfortable, be sure that you are in the minority. Everyone agrees with me because I am always right. As a matter of fact people don't just agree with me, they despise you. I know this because I told them to.

To the Manchester Born

 (Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

I have recently rallied my efforts to publish Cuthers' latest literary efforts. It pains me to say it, but he's beginning to settle into some sort of consistent style. I am a man of my word, so I had resolved to free myself from distractions and find a willing publisher.

However this ambition to hard slog was quickly derailed by the news that the chairman of the club had resigned. His hand had been forced by members of the committee apparently. I try not to lower myself into the vipers' nest of committee affairs, especially since most of them went to the Other Place, but on this occasion there was little talk of anything else at the club, and limb by limb I entered the fray.

The instigating incident had been an argument over the price of a glass of brandy. This had been started by Cuthers, who had been researching the historic bar prices in a rare show of initiative. Bafflingly he had been doing this for his latest novel, yet all that I'd managed to get out of him by way of synopsis is that it was something to do with dogs at sea. And yet again I can hear you thinking, have I lost my marbles? Gone cock-o-hoop cuckoo and far away beyond bedtime? No, Cuthers really has shown some potential of late, and I'm not saying so merely to make my prior actions regarding him look less foolish.

That said, he proved to be numerically illiterate. Although he had access to all the price increases for a glass of brandy since 1888, he had incorrectly surmised that the price had more than doubled in the past couple of years. This led to a bitter argument with Marsden during which buttons were pushed and steam vented in the manner of an angry factory. Cuthers had left the club in first a huff and second a Hackney carriage. Marsden had complained to the committee, but the general consensus of the committee was that Cuthers had a point even if his mathematical precision was lacking. This had in turn led to an argument with the chairman, whose general opinion was that if they didn't like the way he was running things perhaps they should have a go instead.

During all of this hullaballoo I was still searching for a publisher willing to take on a bizarrely researched novel vaguely about dogs and the sea. I wasn't making much progress, but what happened next was the final straw for my concentration. The committee appointed a new chairman. Not from their ranks, but from outside the club. Worse still, not from London. Not even from the south.

To my astonishment, the new chairman was a businessman from Manchester. What could he possibly know about running a club in the great metropolis of London? I have nothing against northern cities and have even spent time in some. They are also grand in their own ways. The same sun shines upon them, albeit much less often.

I steeled myself for sweeping changes in the running of the club. Would we all be forced to drink pints of bitter? Would he adopt the pigeons which infested the roof instead of culling them?

In short, no. He marginally reduced the price of a glass of brandy, which seemed to placate everyone for the time being. Cuthers returned to the club and apologised to Marsden. I managed to wheedle the first few chapters of Cuthers' new book. It is about a dog rowing across the English Channel using a list of bar prices as its only means of navigation. It is unpublishable gibberish that could only be the product of a deranged mind. I discussed this one evening with Marsden and shared a few pages of Cuthers' ravings with him. Although we could find nothing wrong with them, we both agreed to pour the rest of the case of brandy down the drain and remove it from the menu.

A Ramble Through the Apocalypse

I'm writing this on my phone because annoyingly I left my notebook at home. My notebook is one of the small Molekine ones. I like how solid they feel when new and how the pages almost spring apart when full. I always buy the red ones, not because I particularly like the colour but much like with modern cars, there isn't a great deal of choice. I feel Moleskine could up their game here. 

Writing in the notebook is part of my editing process. I can scribble away in it without worrying too much about the style, since I will be typing it up on a PC later and wrangling it into better shape while doing so. Ironically I'm writing this now in the mobile version of the software I would normally edit it in, which is the deeply unsexy Microsoft OneNote. Over the years I've become reliant on OneNote, using it for everything from day-to-day reminders to planning holidays. Its lack of enforced structure is its strength. It's the nearest thing I've found to scribbling in a notebook, which is why I'm using it now. 

I'm writing this, as is sometimes the case, in the members bar at the Barbican. I had to run some errands in town earlier, which was made more complicated by the parts of the tube I needed to use being closed for engineering works. This is fairly normal and not a harbinger of the apocalypse, but the weather very much is.

I'm lucky in that not only can I afford to twat around writing blog posts that nobody reads in the Barbican, but I can also afford to run a portable air conditioner in my living room. The rest of the flat however, hasn't dropped below 32°C all week. That means my bedroom is 32°C when I go to bed and 32°C when I wake up. My flat is a new build - I am its first occupant and moved in back in 2015. It's always been crazily hot in the summer but every year seems to be worse than the last. I'm also old enough to remember the often mentioned summer of 1976. I don't remember it being so relentless, and it's also telling that nobody mentions any other years in the past fifty as evidence that the current trajectory is normal and nothing to worry about. 

There's more, of course. The war in Ukraine is taking place on the edge of Europe, yet it occupies the same mental space as dystopian science fiction. We see clips of drone attacks on social media and file them alongside that episode of Black Mirror with the definitely not Boston Dynamics dog robot. This could so easily be our reality, but because we witness it through the same lens as our entertainment, it may as well be happening on another planet. 

I won't even get into the situation in the middle east. I can be more forgiving with popular fatigue over what's happening there, because for most of us there's always been something going on there. As a Doomsday scenario, it's quite nostalgic. 

Then there's Miner Willy from the '80s home computer games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. He had for a while lived on in the childhood memories of people of my age, but now we're starting to die off, his 8-bit spirit is restless. Last week I caught him collecting empty bottles from around my flat. As disconcerting as it was, I have to admit it was quite helpful, but his leaping from the sofa to the coffee table was irritating and beyond the stresses IKEA had considered for either of them. You might have woken up in the middle of the night wondering just who the hell is playing the Hall of the Mountain King over and over in such a screechy fashion? That would be Miner Willy, created by our collective imagination and now abandoned to fend for himself.

So why do I scrawl away in my notebook when the world's outlook is so bleak? Well, partly to entertain, and I count myself as the person being principally entertained. I like the process. It feels like I have organised my thoughts. The former is definitely the truer of those statements. A lot of what I write down I never read again, but in the process of writing my ideas down I refine them. It's some further iteration that gets typed up. Sometimes that knocks the sharp corners off, so this time I'm presenting this post with my insecurities about the state of the world unironically unredacted.

I also quite like having a glass of wine at the Barbican and seeing where my mood takes me. After all, how long can all of this last? It's important to make the most of what we have. Aside from the aforementioned mortal perils, there's also the danger that we'll end up like Miner Willy, desperately attempting to complete a task that everyone stopped caring about a long time ago. Except instead of collecting post-party bottles around a mansion, we're trying to sell copies of our books from an overheated one-bedroom flat. Oh dear. Maybe time for a second glass?