The Hyperreality of London 2012

As the Olympic Games draw to a close it seems important to mark the way in which they have become an extraordinary national festival. Living in Stroud I have plenty of friends who have seen and heard nothing, since the excitement has been entirely mediated and virtual: a culmination of a life where what happens on your television feels more real than what happens outside your front door. London 2012 underlines the insightfulness of Baudrillard's concepts of hyperreality and the simulacrum. The mediated appears more real than lived experience; the articifial has more power than the authentic.

So how green were these games? To what extent has the claim to be the greenest games ever been fulfilled? The job of monitoring this claim was passed to the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012, led by 12 commissioners. The focus of their activities is clarified by the range of 'experts' they chose to involve: in the areas of biodversity, waste, sport, and standards and ethics. Nobody was considering the amount of energy used in flying the millions of spectators around the world. The work of the Commission is typical of the way action on sustainability often ignores the wood to focus on a few whimsical trees. It is of some interest that the cauldron uses less gas than the cauldron in Beijing, and that the lighting system for the stadium was most out of recycled gas pipes, but these design features are farcically insignificant compared to the massive CO2 emissions resulting from the travel of the spectators.

This takes me to my most fundamental criticism of the games: they were planned to be and inevitably were a games for the elite. The people who live, work and run businesses in London were frightened into leaving their own city, turning it over for three weeks to be the playground of the world's rich and famous. This is what the Olympic games have become and it is symbolic of the displacement of citizens from all positions of power within the global economy, which is now similarly dominated by corporations and elites.

I may only be seeking to recoup my share of the investment in the games (which is now estimated at some £11bn, so slightly under £200 for every UK citizen), but I like to think that, in spite of all the focus on individual achievement it is we, the British people, who have actually won the games. Both Olympic bureaucrats and athletes have commented most on the warmth, enthusiasm and sheer niceness of us Brits. If the games have proved to us that we are a nation of kind and helpful people will it be worth my investment? I think only if we use that knowledge to spend more time getting to know each other and co-operating to achieve something real in our communities, and less sitting in our own homes, absorbing the messages of media elites about business elites celebrating the performance of sporting elites.
. Tweet

Vote for Baudrillard

Electoral politics has been moving along the path towards Baudrillard's simulacrum for a number of years, with a growing sense of unreality and the increasing resemblance of party leaders to characters from Thunderbirds. We have now reached the final stage where, as Baudrillard put it, the simulacrum masks the absence of the reality. The more we hear about choice and change the more we know that things will stay the same and that the distance between the parties we see performing is smaller than ever.

What the Nick Clegg phenomenon demonstrates is the way that the forces of the corporate media totally control our political system.* I have seen this impact in a devastating fashion on my own party, so that we tailor our message and our internal structures to fit into the corporate vision of Britain. It was the decision to include Nick Clegg in the TV debates, so that voters finally learned who he was, that caused the increase in his vote. Had Caroline Lucas or Nick Griffin been given airtime the effect would have been the same.

And what about the policies? Listening to the election coverage is little help in working out which party is proposing the sorts of changes that you might actually wish to vote for. When they are given that opportunity, as in the Vote for Policies website, their selection is quite distinct from what we see in the closed, forced-choice questions of the pollsters.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that our democracy is now little more than a sham is the way that the forms of democracy we impose on Iraq or Afghanistan are designed to more accurately link the wishes of the people of those countries with the political power exercised on their behalf than is the system we labour under here.

The Wikipedia entry on Baudrillard's work refers to a story by the superb Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges called 'On Exactitude in Science'. An oppressive and obsessive empire decides to map its territories at an exact scale, so that the map becomes as large as the territory itself. When the empire crumbles only the map is left. In a similar way, a closer look at our self-proclaimed mother of parliaments reveals it as a crumbling ruin.

*An article in today's Guardian suggests that the Murdoch strategy of deliberately sidelining the Liberal Democrats may backfire Tweet