‘The sky above the port was the colour of
a television, tuned to a dead channel.’
I read these words, the opening sentence from
William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer,
as I am stood on the superhighway connecting
London City Island and the Lower Lea Crossing.
Straight over the wharf is the O2 Arena, and
if I crane my neck North: I can see the Queen
Elizabeth Olympic Park, somewhere beyond the
East End plexus and mesh.
In the same year Neuromancer was published,
GEC Mowlem signed the contract to build the
initial Docklands Light Railway system.
The automated system was built as part of
the East End’s regeneration project: billboard
slogans from the time claimed the Docklands
would soon ‘feel like Venice and work like
New York’.
Both Neuromancer and the DLR are more than
thirty years old now. In that time, we’ve
assimilated into the cyberspatial reality
Gibson envisioned – able to jack in and
out of any informational matrix as quick as
we can think.
However, where Gibson’s console cowboys
gamed this phenomenon to traverse the Sprawl’s
anarcho-capitalist landscape to their own
fortune, our relationship to the city - and
its financialised superstructures - runs on
a much duller asymmetry.
One might consider the use of contactless
debit and credit cards on TfL networks, in
which a consumer appendage passes through
a superstructure of control.
Whilst initially appearing to be designed
for the sake of convenience, reducing the
number of operational cards necessary to go
between work and home, and incentivising its
usage through a weekly price cap,
the interoperability between bank account
and travel card means that Data on both ends
can be stored and used in surveillance.
For Gilles Deleuze, in his Postscript on the
Societies of Control, this makes us no longer
individuals but dividuals
‘undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.’
With our movement reduced to Data, both the
bank and travel network gain sovereignty over
the flows of information within this exchange.
Or we might think of the free WIFI available
across the TfL network, in which our Data
is used to streamline a market for advertising
within the stations. Even if you don’t connect
to the WIFI, your smartphone’s presence
is registered in the station.
Borders become immaterial and ubiquitous.
We have become nomads, restlessly wondering
about, even if our wonderings consist of scrolling
through constantly refreshing social media
feeds
These small conveniences offered up in exchange
for Data are minimal. The train stations have
become what writer and artist James Bridle
calls code/spaces.
A code/space is when technology’s interweaving
with a space becomes so essential that they
cease to function without it. Bridle suggests
that these opaque computational processes
spread themselves across all platforms within
our lives, and in this way - culture itself
has become a code/space.
The predictive algorithms that run these spaces
structure themselves so that things will not
radically change or diverge from previous
experiences in order to maintain regularity
and an appearance of order.
Spotify’s London mood playlist puts Burial’s
Archangel next to Elton John’s Tiny Dancer
and shoves Estelle and Kanye West’s American
Boy between impotent indie fodder and Grime’s
mainstream crossover hits.
In effect, it doesn’t matter if playlists
like this on massive streaming platforms are
made by humans or machine learning algorithms.
Some artists will be pushed up the algorithm
for ad bucks, some artists will adapt the
music they make to prioritise their tunes
in the genius-queue of immediate-chorus hit
after hit, and some artists will steep their
work in esotericism, desperate to have their
radical sonic frequencies picked out and prized
from a homogenous, empty sea. All artists
on streaming platforms are renting listeners,
and listeners are renting the music they choose
to listen to.
Taking away this level of ownership from our
everyday consumption of music removes agency
from the artists as they are absorbed into
the terms of consumption set out by the streaming
platform. Of course, the more music that’s
streamed, the more sophisticated the platform’s
algorithms can become, and the less control
music producers have over their position in
the network.
But that’s all it is, a network - the efficacy
of which is decided by how much it’s used.
The only service streaming platforms offer,
then, is the extraction of the flows within
that network, but somehow the impact they
have on the shape of music as a cultural object
at large stretches far wider.
Descending into the deep level platforms completed
in 1999, a tube carriage pulls into Westminster
station. Whether they know it or not, the
customers onboard this Jubilee Line service
are communicating with the machinic rhythm
of the underground. The notional void takes
detailed notes of all our friends’ journeys.
Going east, with each static wall we stop
at, life expectancy drops off by a year. I
keep my headphones on, I’ve had a busy day
and I’m very tired by now.
At the same time, it’s hard for us to imagine
a radically different way of piloting the
city.
When the French poet Paul Verlaine moved to
London in 1872, the Metropolitan railway was
expanding across the city.
The Jubilee line heading Eastbound towards
Stratford, at 8am. It’s parked in the darkest
point of the tunnel between Canada Water and
Canary Wharf.
The automated voice rises over the swarm,
crackling like a thousand bed-bugs fucking
and killing through the signal failure. Currently
being held at a red light. The Crypt exists
from before the origin of time, but it begins
with Year Zero…
If Verlaine was to look up to the sky in 1872,
that’s all he would’ve seen. It wasn’t
until the Shard contravened the ‘protected
views’ law at the beginning of this millennium
that London began to indulge
in Manhattan’s vertical inclinations.
This project to Americanise East London coalesced
with a perennial shift in night life. In 1998,
as the Jubilee Line extension through Canary
Wharf to Stratford was built, Some Treat released
their UK Garage classic ‘Lost in Vegas’.
Garage detangled the collectivity of jungle
and rave. The acid flourishes and abstracted
cartoon figures on the posters were to be
replaced with faux-slick champagne flutes
and silhouetted female figures. Mandatory
entrepreneurialism had infiltrated youth culture;
conjoining flows without the mediation of
codes. The stylus descends deep into the grooves,
and then the bass arrests you.
Songs from the rave generation tended to détour
pop samples longing for lost lovers into longing
for a collective consciousness
You look like you’re in another world, I’ll
meet you there
It’s 4 o’clock in the morning, and it’s
starting to get light
I’m right where I wanna be, Losing track
of time
Meanwhile, Garage assimilated catchy hooks
for club currency. The promise of playing
top 40 tracks in the club exhilarated bar
sales for a generation steeped in the capitalist
realism of a New Labour government who cemented
the idea that nightlife should be measured
in its economic not its cultural worth. 20
years on, the highpoint of a night in a London
bar for many is the nostalgic drop of a garage
classic.
Esteemed Labour/Change UK/Lib Dem politician
Chuka Umunna used to be a UKGarage DJ, he
pronounces the genre as if it were to rhyme
with Nigel Farage.
Of course, it must be taken into account that
before the Garage scene could be assimilated
fully, it had to be whitewashed first. Young,
black MCs looking for careers beyond the nightclub
claimed an angular mutation of Garage - Grime,
as their own sound. In 2005, the London Metropolitan
Police introduced Form 696, a risk assessment
form that was required to be filled out by
promoters a fortnight before their events.
As part of this Form, promoters had to declare
the style of music that would be played on
the night, and all too often Grime nights
were barred in this process. Venues and nights
that offered crucial agency to these marginalised
London groups were taken away.
By the time the Form was finally scrapped
for good, at the end of 2017, a different
sound was fizzing through London. A new generation
of young MCs had imported a sound that originated
in the south side of Chicago to capture the
way their London sounded. Unlike the glitchy
dada of Grime, Drill prefers the martial roll
of deep kick drums atop hazy halftime synthetic
textures. The Harlem Spartans crew from Kennington
brought London into the mix with thick and
punishing dubstep basslines, and hi-hat patterns
akin to Grime. This version of drill would
become most prominently associated with New
York’s late, great Pop Smoke. Behind the
decks of Pop Smoke’s most iconic songs is
808Melo, a producer from Ilford in East London
that the drill rapper found looking for beats
on YouTube.
The austere urgency of UK Drill is not interested
in what Mark Fisher called depressive hedonia;
an idea best described sonically by the hip
hop sound present in the white-adjacent nightclubs
of Mayfair and Piccadilly. In artists like
Drake or Post Malone, we hear a melancholy
that’s not rooted in the inability to get
pleasure, but an inability to do anything
besides pursue pleasure.
Recalling Deleuze’s essay on control societies,
Fisher suggests that we as subjects are trapped
between the dispersed network of control structures
and a social imperative to be consumers of
services.
An almost essential feature of UK Drill music
videos is the establishing shot of a drone
flying over the musician’s estate. The artist’s
gaze becomes sovereign, absolute – Drill’s
machinic impulse is to search for an exit
from a matrix that insists it stays at the
fringes of its gridwork. In 2019, UK Police
forced Youtube to delete 130 Drill music videos
and say they’re monitoring 2000 more. Some
rappers have even been banned from performing
without police permission.
The temptation for drill is to allow itself
to be absorbed into the formalised nostalgia
of the pop machine, in the same way that Skepta
achieved mainstream acclaim for Grime with
the wistful That’s Not Me; as if his genre
hadn’t been fighting for recognition from
an industry pedalling an eternal rockist vacuum
throughout his whole career.
Headie One’s recent single Ain’t It Different
sees him spit atop a beat made up of noughties
pop samples and the classic Garage vocal hook
from bump n grind, relegating his iconic flow
and drilly hi-hat patterns to the background.
The other artists featured in the song include
AJ Tracey, who made his name with the Garage
throwback single Ladbroke Grove, and Stormzy,
whose most recent album includes a cover of
the Tracey Beaker theme song.
Ivorian Doll, on the other hand, subverts
Drill’s hypermasculine engine into a declaration
of feminine emancipation.
The Northern Line is being extended to new
stations Nine Elms and Battersea, where the
US Embassy is the epicentre at the next site
of Americanisation. The Northern quarter of
Wandsworth becoming the Lexington Plaza, the
old power station becoming new age office
spaces. Frank Gehry designed ‘prospect place’
and its surrounding developments have been
sold on the market before even being built,
but how many will be lived in?
Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick, came under
fire after quietly approving a deal with billionaire
developer and Conservative party doner Richard
Desmond that meant his five new blocks in
the Westferry Printworks area along the curve
of the Isle of Dogs would only need to be
made up of 21% affordable homes instead of
the original 35% minimum target, saving the
developer more than £100m in the process.
The agreement came out the day before a community
infrastructure levy came into place – a
tax that would have required Mr Desmond to
pay £40m to Tower Hamlets Council, the city’s
poorest borough. A text to the housing minister
from Desmond said “we appreciate the speed
as we don’t want to give the Marxists loads
of doe for nothing!”
The other part of the deal, was that the Printworks
wouldn’t need to be part of the Canary Wharf
“step down” which preserved the financial
skyscrapers as the only tall buildings in
the area. The Millharbour area north of the
development site is the most densely populated
part of London, with nine out of ten of the
tallest residential buildings in the city.
At the same time, Jenrick has introduced new
laws extending permitted development rights
minimising planning permission required for
housing from converted shops, warehouses,
and offices. With no specific rules on adequate
lighting, shoebox studio apartments could
be entirely lit by a small window borrowing
all its light from an internal atrium - leaving
nowhere else to look towards but the consensual
hallucinations of the information superhighway.
When the Situationists imagined a new model
for Paris, they understood that ‘you can’t
take three steps without encountering ghosts
bearing all the prestige of their legends.’
When we look at all these sites of regeneration,
their fear of frigid architecture leading
to boring leisure has come true. Massaging
the history of these zones into thin air serves
only to reify their present landscapes; radical
new futures erased before they can even form
themselves. Suffocated by battery proximity
whilst simultaneously desiring to worm our
way to the heart of the crowd. Alone together.
The hacienda must be built – Becoming imperceptible
in order to be seen
The Long Good Friday is a film made in 1979
about East London businessman, Harold Shand.
The Stepney geezer wants to turn London’s
deflated Docklands into a hub of global commerce;
authenticated by hosting the 1988 Olympic
Games. Shand is convinced he will be able
to achieve this by going into business with
New York mafiosos. His plans seem to be going
so well…on his beautiful yacht he puffs
out his barrel chest and tells his friends
and family
Written shortly before Thatcher would’ve
taken the stage to call Mr Shand a model Brit,
The Long Good Friday encapsulates all of the
UK’s defining shifts under neoliberalism.
Unfortunately for Harold Shand, a series of
mistakes from his underlings leads him to
war with the IRA - one he inevitably loses.
Initially, the film was deemed too risky for
the cinema – a flick in which capitalism
is defeated by terrorists could only cause
trouble, right? 40 years on, and 10 years
after the financial crisis Canary Wharf was
built to produce, the likes of the Spectator
see The Long Good Friday as the first truly
Thatcherite film.
I’m reminded of the HSBC ad campaign that
went something along the lines of
We are not an island. We are an American movie
watching, Tikka Masala eating, wonderful little
lump of land in the middle of the sea. We
are part of something far bigger.
The IRA may have taken down Harold Shand,
but in his wake lay an entire generation of
assiduous individuals looking to continue
his work regenerating the Docklands in the
same way, and a government agenda that was
very happy to accelerate the process.
As the place of the city becomes more and
more of a traffic nexus and gateway to virtuality,
fuelling ecological collapse, it’s vital
that we consolidate the fact that even though
we will never understand the blackboxed new
technologies that control so much around us,
they will always work within the ideological
framework of the people that build them. An
ideological framework that continues to hijack
new technologies into condensing wealth by
any means necessary.
We will never be defined by ‘global citizen’
PR campaigns that romanticise universal data
commodification as a form of liberal humanitarianism.
An overload of prediction and categorisation
serves only to sterilize and domesticate the
crucial subcultural blossoms that emerge from
the unique lives lived within a city. The
sky above the port was the colour of a television
tuned to a dead channel. In Neuromancer, the
future is merely an atemporal digital now,
but that doesn’t sound very futuristic.
