Home-made 3D Microscope

Here is a design for a three dimensional stereoscopic microscope I have just invented. Many people, including scientists, think that bacteria and such only exists in two dimensions when in fact there are at least three. By attaching a microscope at a ninety degree angle and having a cube slide rather than a flat one, viewers can see microscopic objects in three dimensions! Amateur scientists can now see the smiling faces of tape worm as they move in the x, y, z directions we are all accustomed to. To not have a 3D microscope is similar to trying to study sea creatures by looking at them from above. This breakthrough will increase scientific output by a factor of four.

Thatcher's Funeral

After the death of Baroness Lady Margaret Hilda Thatcher on the 8th of April a committee immediately set about planning her funeral, as is the tradition after somebody's death. Thatcher was a controversial figure in British politics, dividing opinion during life and after her passing, though both sides would agree that the late ex-prime minister will be remembered for her actions and fashion sense. Nicknaming herself 'Iron Woman' due to her magnetic personality, Thatcher was an important figure throughout the eighties. She smashed the unions, brought in millions from taxation, saved English territory from Argentinian invasion, allowed people to right to buy their own houses and was an inspiration to a generation of women. She was also an old lady, who had a family, and it isn't fair to speak badly of the dead. Her funeral therefore will try to sum up her life succinctly, referencing the various trials and tribulations she endured in order to make Britain great once again.

The government had ring-fenced 200 million pounds in case of the late lady's passing, suggesting that it would cost more in the long run if they didn't give Maggie a proper burial. I was lucky enough to be invited along to a special preview event that would detail exactly how the two hundred million pounds would be spent in order to make sure that she was treated with the same respect she demanded whilst alive. Liberal Democrat leader Mick Clegg stepped onto the podium at the front of the hall. After the ice-breakers and toasts he began to describe what we could expect next Wednesday.

The funeral will start at 10 a.m in the morning. Thatcher will be contained in a special blue coffin covered in flowers that will be carried through the streets of London in a horse and carriage. Her family will follow behind, each riding a horse, then other various vehicles with important mourners. The prime minister and his friends will ride in a hearse for instance, The Queen will be in a limousine and Boris Johnson will ride a black bicycle. Behind these will be various soldiers and police officers dressed in full combat dress, overhead Prince Harry will hover in a helicopter.

The theme of the funeral will be Margaret Thatcher, as that who is being buried. The first of these special themed segments will begin just a few moments into the parade, with a green grocer holding a baby aloft to represent Thatcher's primordial origins. Milk will be squirted onto the funeral carriage by children picked from local schools who will then take the baby and hand it to Kenneth Branagh, playing Denis Thatcher, her millionaire husband who rescued her from being working class. The baby would then be transformed through a series of short vignettes into the woman who would go on to win the leadership of the country. This position would be played by the famous actress Meryl Streep, who'd act out her life whilst her body continued on it's path.

The first trial of Thatcher is the Falklands War. London Philharmonic Orchestra will provide the soundtrack for this section, in which a boat sculpture sailing away from the procession on the Thames estuary will be fired at and sank. A balloon representing the soldiers will gradually be inflated until it resembles Simon Weston. The veteran himself will then emerge from the crowd and join the procession, playing the saxophone every now and then. Afterwards comes the second trial of Thatcher, the miners' strike. Thick coal dust will be dispersed from the Baroness' carriage, submerging the mourners in a danger smog.

After having emerged through the danger smog, the next step was the way she dealt with the IRA. After a few fireworks being detonated around the horse and carriage an Irishman especially starved for the event will be released and is likely to begin to look for food. Funeral organisers have paid attention to these chaotic characters scattered throughout the parade, hoping that they add an element of excitement for mourners as well as acting as a kind of public arts thing.

At this point the coffin will be removed from the horse and carriage. The horse itself will be lead slightly away from the rest of the festivities and put onto a bus heading for Oldham. Meanwhile in a startling twist the coffin will be opened and Margaret Thatcher's dead body will be hoisted out by leading politicians and walked up the front steps of the cathedral. At the top of the steps will await David Cameron who will accept the body into his arms and give her a final goodbye before she is taken inside for the final stages of the funeral.

Inside the cathedral will await Jeremy Clarkson, Ben Milliband, Tony Blair, Prince Will, Kate Middleton, Jim Davidson, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nancy Reagan, David Beckham, Theopold LeStranz, Walton Goggins, Clint Eastwood, Paul Merton and other famous celebrities. All of them are encouraged to cry as Thatcher is taken through the central aisle. Prayers, songs and quotes will be played for guests as Thatcher is brought closer towards the front of the cathedral where a small crucible will await her. The head of the church will say something before Thatcher is delicately lowered into the pot at her feet. Inside contains ethically sourced molten iron for her body to be dipped into, creating a Thatcher-shaped statue made of rapidly cooling metal surrounding a core of biological matter. It is thought that her tomb will remain safe for the next one thousand years.

The Ministry Of Beige

Recently I attended the Leeds University degree show, the culmination of three years of study from art students from around the globe that had gathered in one building, as it makes it easier to teach. I usually made a point of visiting the various degree shows up and down the country in order to spot the next hot talent I can ear-mark for future reference, able to say in future conversations that I saw their early work and perhaps make a snide comment about it. As I walked those sanctimonious galleries that smelled slightly of emulsion and cheap wine, I examined that year's students suggestions as to what the best piece of work they had ever made was to be. There were abstract paintings, stuffed animals, a couple of rocks, photographs of topless women, bits of string, some sort of rusted bicycle, coloured tape, triangles and a few videos of students staring at the camera whilst things happened to them. Work like this happened up and down the country, though one of the slight differences was that every single piece here had a little red sticker on it, marking it as sold. I grabbed a student by the arm and demanded to know what was going on.
"Someone bought everything. I made a hundred quid on my crypto-vintage screen prints based on the works of Miguel de Cervantes recontextualised as a parody of social media." they uttered. I pushed them to one side as I made my way to the refreshments table, thinking that something was amiss. It was rare for anybody to sell work at these things, let alone for every single student to make a sale. I needed to track down this art enthusiast, although first I needed to make sure I capitalised on the refreshments.

Several refreshments later I was none the wiser. In fact I hadn't moved from the table. But as is the case at these events, sooner or later everyone needs a drink. I noticed him by the stream of whispers he left in his wake. Dressed in a sharp suit and pointy shoes, the figure of Miles Burgeaumont blends in like a black moth against the night sky. Though there is something different about him compared to a moth. He has genuine joy in his eyes. I go forward to apprehend him, to ask him if he is the enthusiast that has bought all the work, though I am intercepted by a proud parent who asks the questions for me.
"You bought my daughter's work!" cried the father.
"Indeed I did! I was surprised at the...suggestions it made. I needed to have it." said Mr. Burgeaumont.
"I'm glad. The thing is, it wasn't for sale. You see, she used several pieces of my late mother's jewellery in her collage and I'd like them back."
"But I paid a fair price. Don't worry, they will be looked after, even displayed in a gallery. In London."
"Oh London! You should have said!" squawked the father. They made idle chit-chat whilst I began to make some notes and did a few drawings. London. The land of the blind. And the one eyed man could be king. But why? Surely the one eyed man would never be able to prove that he could see. I then noticed that the work was being taken off the walls and taken outside.

Everyone was at the front of the university, looking at Mr. Burgeaumont standing by the pile of artwork. He began to speak.
"Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for attending the Leeds Art School Degree Show. As you may or may not know, my name is Miles Burgeaumont. I am an art collector and have bought every single piece of work at this event. You may wonder why I have bought all of this work, and I am telling you now that I wish to display it in London at my very own gallery." said Mr. Burgeaumont. Some people began to cheer.
"Before doing so it needs a slight modification. You see, I represent the Ministry of Beige. The ministry represents everything mediocre, bland, sexless, boring. We have identified that certain works of art do not meet a standard of quality that will in anyway increase the culture of society. They are required to be unmade. To be beigeified." said Burgeaumont. Men emerge from the back of a van and begin to pour gallons of beige paint over the work. The thick gloss falls thickly across paintings and sculptures, erasing all detail. Some students laugh, some are shocked, some rush forward to try and rescue their work, though members from the ministry block any attempts to save the work from being covered in litre upon litre of beige.
"I have bought the work. It is mine to do with as I please." said Burgeaumont.
"But your idea itself is bland and boring. Anti-art is nothing new and has been done better a hundred of times before! Some of the work you're destroying is itself anti-art!" shouted a tutor, making their way forward. A bucket of beige paint is thrown over them.
"This isn't an artistic statement. I am just pouring beige paint over your work." said Burgeaumont. He continued to answer questions and protests as more and more beige paint was poured, it began to ooze out onto the street, onto the pavement, it was splashed up the trees and smeared along the walls. I am unsure as to what happened next as I went inside to make use of the refreshment table, but by the time I left the university there wasn't anybody around, though beige paint covered every surface like a wet snow. I walked over to the pile of art work that was the nucleus for this rearrangement in colour and knelt down, picking out a painting at random and wiping away some of the beige with my sleeve. It was a portrait of David Cameron with a Hitler moustache. I dropped it back into the pile with disgust and began to walk along the empty roads of Leeds, everything was beige. Everything.

Echo Tone

Turbo Bully And The Infinite Sadness

I am sitting in the back seat of a stolen car, on both sides of me sit teenagers smoking spliffs. The driver, who says his name is Mike, is also smoking a spliff, though I would consider it to be more of a 'blunt' or 'doob'. The air in the car is thick with delicious smelling smoke, my head is becoming heavy with the illegal atmosphere. Hard techno music is thumping the subwoofers behind my seat as the car zips along the M25, I do not know the precise location of our destination though I can hazard a guess that there will be no wi-fi hotspots. The conversation in the car is minimal. I can't help but be reminded of the beach landings on Normandy in 1942, the sense of ritual quiet as each soldier prepares for the coming onslaught. Not that I was there, but I have seen Saving Private Ryan which I was told by film-makers to have been an accurate representation of the event. The lads in the car smoking cannabis could have potentially fought on those lousy beaches themselves had they had the poor luck to be born eighty years earlier. Instead it was the twenty first century and the war being fought was to get out of your head at the weekend. Are these drug taking youths any less brave than the soldiers of world war two? I was about to find out.

The car rolls to a stop in the darkness. Mike and his friends get out, I follow a few steps behind, not used to tracking across the slippery night soil in my Armani shoes. We are heading towards a forest. Up ahead I can hear crazy music and the laughter of young people. I ask Mike how often he comes to these parties.
"All the time, yeah? Even when I'm not here, I'm still here. Just in my imagination, yeah?" He says, offering me the drug spliff. I take a few drags and pass it back, holding the smoke in until we reach the edge of the clearing. In front of us are perhaps a hundred or so teenagers dancing in the darkness whilst a DJ plays white label bootlegs from the back of the van. The only lighting emanates from mobile phones and cigarettes. I ask Mike what happens now.
"We go find the man." He says, leading the way through the throng of people. It isn't long before we find a drug dealer. I stand awkwardly a few feet away, I am at least ten years older than most people here. Mike returns with a smile on his face and small bags of powder in his hand.
"Let's get stupid." He hands me a gram of the new drug that is popular with teenagers nowadays. I lick the back of my hand, gently tap out some powder and proceed to snort it up my nose. I have just taken about a third of a gram of 6-2sb monosulphoboridium diemthlamide. Otherwise known as 'turbo bully', or 'turbs' for short.

Turbo Bully was first synthesized in 1996 by scientists in Botswana in order to try and increase libido for animals in captivity. The drug itself didn't have this affect, though it did make the animals act strangely. It wasn't until Turbo Bully was accidentally taken by humans that scientists knew exactly what it did. The drug first dilates the central nervous system, engorging areas of the brain that lie beneath the neocortex. It quickly increases libido and relaxes the muscles, whilst inhibiting emotion and cognitive functioning. As well as this are feelings of euphoria, dipsomania and mild panic. All of these combined have made Turbo Bully into the ideal drug for partying youths trying to get high on their own supply! The thing that seperates Turbo Bully from cocaine, ecstasy, methadrone and other amphetamines is that it's effects last for four days, making it an extremely cost effective way to get off out of your head for a bank holiday weekend. I can already feel the effects of the drug taking hold as I wade into the crowd.

Bodies, faces, light, music. My own body and mind is rolling along at a frantic pace, as if fat snakes have replaced my skeletal structure so that I writhe like some subterranean thing burning in the sunlight. My awareness is fleeting, sometimes moment of extreme lucidity take over only for my consciousness to return into the drug fuelled nightmare of the night. I find Mike again at some point and ask him how much I was meant to take. He laughs when I say I have took the whole gram, which begins to send me into a kind of panic. By that point I had been trying to dance for a while and failing miserably, barely aware at the disgusted looks of the teenage faces that surrounded me as I rolled in the dead leaves and mud, groaning. I black out. It is morning and I am walking alone down a country road, unable to remember how I got there. The drugs effects are still powerful, my brain feels as if it has a direct connection to the internet, but the internet of the late nineties. Things take on a slight 'geocities' aesthetic, all I can think about are gifs of screaming skulls and wireframe models. I try to rest in a field but find that sleep is impossible. I am more wired out of my mind than I have ever been and only eight hours have passed.

I find myself at a motorway service station, I must have walked it. In my hands I am holding a copy of the radio times. I open it up and see doctor who smiling at me from the glossy page. I tear his face out and stuff it in my pocket. It may be useful later. There is a loud ringing in my ears.

Somehow I have gotten onto a coach. I do not know it's destination and feel too scared to ask anybody. I push myself as close as I can into the chair I am sitting in and look in awe at the traffic speeding past, unsure as to what I was doing. It is too much for me and so I go and sit in the toilet located at the rear of the bus. I look in the plastic mirror and see myself, pale, gurning, pupils dilated, a cut above my eyebrow. The visage of a rave maniac. I decide the best thing for me to do is to try and get home.

I'm unsure of the next sequence of events exactly, but I have tried to piece it together from various notes I had made on both my arms, answer phone messages to my friends and family and my credit card statement. Somehow I had ended up in Glasgow and decided to get a train back home. I must have gotten on the wrong train or forgotten where I had lived as I ended up in Blackpool. From here I travelled down the coast until reaching Wales, where things get strange. Though I do not remember what happened to me in Wales, I have the feeling I may have engaged in some sort of animal combat, perhaps against pigs or cows, though I'm unsure exactly. By the time I got back to England I was dressed in some clothes I had found in a bin bag outside a charity shop doorway. Using a combination of taxis, public transport and a rented motorbike I finally reached my house. After checking the date I had found only two days had passed, I still had another 48 hours left in the narcotic adventure. I cannot properly convey the feeling of dismay I felt at that moment, though it seemed to me that the effects were less strong and at least I was home. I had also gone deaf in one ear. I spent the next two days between my bed and my bath, listening to radio four and drinking herbal tea. There were occasions where I wondered if I had gone insane and that maybe there was no such drug as Turbo Bully, though I dismissed these ideas as ridiculous. Of course it existed. How else could I explain the nose bleeds, the tinnitus, the fidgeting, the jaw clenching, the constant sweating, the hallucinations, the discolouration of my glans? As the fourth day started to end I reflected on the question I had posed earlier, if taking drugs in modern Britain was in any way similar to WW2. And I can safely say after my experiences that not only is taking drugs more challenging, it is also more worthwhile.

Advertising 2.0

You turn on the television. An advert is on. You put the television on mute.
You go on the internet. You see a banner advertising a free ipod if you can shoot three ducks. You ignore it.
You are walking around in a city. You see a perfume advert on the side of a bus. You can't remember what it's for.

Welcome to the modern world. Media has never been so prolific in everything we do. Your fridge can download bread, you can watch films on your trainers and stream music that hasn't been performed directly into your pillow. In theory the advertising revenue from these services should be in the billions, perhaps even the trillions. Yet day by day advertising firms are failing, the men and women who write slogans line the walls of job centres across the country thinking of ways to rebrand themselves. The jingle writers have switched to making dub-rave subtunes. Celebrities offered millions in endorsements quickly falter on their contracts, such as Tiger Woods having sexual intercourse or Brad Pitt having a facelift. The adverts are there but nobody is watching. Some say that advertising as we know it will cease to exist ten years from know. Others have slightly different ideas.

Enter Tukanov Imaging, the brain child of Wanda Bellahyde. Her PR company is just a few years old yet is quickly climbing up as being one of the big hitters in advertising.
"One of our bigger problems came from Mad Men. All of a sudden everyone wanted to be an advertising exec. You'd see all these bright-eyed kids come straight from college willing to do work for free. It fucked up the whole system." she says, drinking from a glass of wine. We are sat in her company headquarters, the London skyline beyond the window is blocked by a slightly larger building. Though at just the right angle you can see through the windows across the road at parts of the cityscape. I ask her what made Tukanov Imaging so successful.
"It's all in the advertising babe. Any five year old can install adblock on his dad's pc, half the people nowadays would rather look at youtube for a funny video than watch a lager advert. It's awful. Well, at least for the other dinosaurs. At Tukanov Imaging we're rebranding branding. We're looking into the future, y'know?" she says, leaning forward slightly. I ask her what that even means.
"Advertising 2.0. Though now I'm saying it out loud I'm wondering why the .0, it's not like there's going to be advertising 2.1 or 2.6 is there? Whatever babe, the point is...well it's people, right? You walk past a restaurant, you see a lot of people inside you think 'Oh, that's a good restaurant.', but it might not be, right? You don't know if the food's good or if the service is nice, you're only going because other people are there. People like conforming. So I'm thinking, what's the biggest window in the world?" she asks me. I think for a minute then say there's probably one in a cathedral somewhere. She shakes her head.
"No. Windows. Y'know, Bill Gates? Those are the biggest windows! And sitting at all those windows are people just like you and me, talking to each other on social media. So what we're offering to users is an interactive advertising opportunity. We pay people to say things for us." she says, leaning back and stretching her arms far apart. I nod in understandment.
"Why spend fifteen million on an advert with Clooney when I can pay one of your friends a dollar to say 'Oh I like this thingy-majig' or 'Hey I just saw the big summer blockbuster it was awesome!'." What she's saying is grounded in hard scientific fact. It has been proven that the number of tweets regarding a film before release is in exact correlation to it's box office success. I ask her if she thinks people would be willing to sell their personalities for such a small price. She laughs loudly.
"You remember that guy in America who had the casino brand tattooed onto his forehead? We organised that. We offered Felix Baumgartner the opportunity to fulfil his lifelong dream of breaking the world sky diving record as long as he would say 'Mmmm, red bull gives me wings.' just before jumping. We brought together Adidas and the United States Army so that every soldier is now required to wear Adidas footwear. Everything is advertising. People are going to be saying it anyway, why shouldn't they get paid for it? And chances are they're going to spend that payment on whatever we're advertising anyway. It's a win-win." she says. I look through the window, then another window and another window, at the London skyline. The sun is setting. I think it a worthy metaphor for something, though I'm not sure for what. I try to speak but for some reason my tongue feels bulbous and disproportioned suddenly. I merely make a sound. She continues anyway.
"We're working on text messaging in the next quarter. After that, who knows, maybe use alternative reality or something. Pay people to say things in real life. Current technology opens up new avenues for potential advertising opportunities as well as new challenges. You speaking my lingo?" I walk over to the window and open it, letting the stale London air enter the room.
"What are you doing?" she remarks incredulously. The wind blows through my hair and at my cheap suit. I turn to her and try to talk again, though all I seem to manage is a strange sort of groaning noise. I run over to her desk and throw her laptop out of the window before running out of the room, clutching at my mouth. I continue groaning as I stand in the lift and walk out through the reception. After walking just a few feet on the pavement I throw back my head and begin to shout.
"I just want to watch a funny advert with a catchphrase that everybody repeats like the one from the compare the market advert or perhaps even the go compare advert. But even those are changing and becoming more ironic, more self aware. Advertising companies know they are just making shit but they think that if they make fun of it it makes it okay! But it is not okay! It is all fucking bullshit and I am sick of it!" I say. By the time I have finished my voice has been reduced to a whisper. I continue walking, thinking about where film posters fit into the advertising landscape. Is a film an advertisement for itself? Are clothes real? Can I rest between the shelves of a supermarket, dreaming of my softs, fearing nothing?

Nothing Has Changed Since 1989

The world wide web has caused a time fracture to occur, causing the last ten years to repeat at varying tempos since 1989. I propose that nothing has changed for the last twenty three years. You may be reading this and thinking 'of course it has', though I ask you to think again. Has it really? I'm not arguing that new events haven't occurred or that time hasn't advanced, rather that nothing has changed in particular.

So let us first consider what change is. You may look at yourself and maybe even provide that as evidence. You may say "I have aged by twenty three years or even have been born in that time.", though I would then suggest that there was somebody your age at any particular time in the eighties. Not only that, but they had as bigger impact on world events as you currently have. Even individuals that have the potential for enormous change, such as the important politicians, remarkable scientists and artists or particular daring revolutionaries exist at all moments. They do not produce something radically different but build upon previous events. If Albert Einstein had been born a hundred years earlier would he have proposed the theory of relativity or perhaps the theory of electricity? If it had been the former he wouldn't have been understood, if it had been the latter he'd have been just as remarkable had he been born at any particular point in history. Of course I am not suggesting a literal reincarnation of Albert Einstein, though rather the concept of Albert Einstein. At any one time there are only a certain number of influential people on the Earth yet the population increases significantly every year. Either way a decent proportion of individuals have little impact on history, and even those that do are remembered more for their actions than how they were as people. If something is due to happen it will.

Which takes us to events. You may argue that the world trade centre attacks significantly changed culture in the west, or the financial crisis of the late zeroes, or various natural disasters over the last two decades, though humanity has been in a consistent state of crisis since the first humans left Africa. Events themselves may have massive impact on your personal life, society or entire ecosystems, though on a personal level a person will still go to sleep at night, work so that they can eat and enjoy the company of others. From the shamans of the Amazon to the American soldier fighting in Iraq, both are human beings that would have done the exact same thing if born to each others mothers. The cultures may differ, either geographically or temporally, but people are people. Wars happen, things are made, the sun goes down and so on, but there is nothing significantly new about any of these things at a fundamental level. Even with specific events that may have changed cultures at a massive level, such as world war two or the civil rights movement, directly involved less than one percent of the entire human population on the planet. And if an individual was involved in these changes, chances are that they would not be conscious of the impact of the event during the event.

So why has time repeated from the eighties exactly? I concede that certain world changing events have occurred in the past as life has significantly differed from Ancient Egypt to Modern Tokyo, though I believe the nineteen eighties to have been the pinnacle of human progress. Is Tokyo in 2013 so much more different from Tokyo in 1989? Perhaps on a cosmetic level, though all it is is cosmetic. If looking at a photograph of Tokyo from the last twenty three years the only real notifier of when it might be would be if the cars were new or if people had mobile phones. The models of the cars are unimportant, people have been using them for the last century to get around in rather than the train or the horse and cart. The mobile phone is the only notable change, though we had those in the eighties anyway. Which brings us to technological change, which I suggest is also inconsequential. In the last twenty years we have had theoretically world changing inventions being made yet none have been implemented fully enough to differ the current time to that of the eighties. Advances in communications, medicine, physics, computing and energy have had little, if any, impact on the way we live. We still put petrol in cars. We still meet our friends face to face. We may be able to live longer and healthier lives, but all this does is allow an individual to survive old age for longer rather than have the abilities and appearance of a younger person. The internet could be argued to have had changed the way we live, but all it is is a faster way to access information. I can find out almost any known fact I want by searching for it on the internet, or I could read a book that would have taught me other facts around the information and perhaps allowed me a deeper knowledge on the subject. I can talk to almost anyone, but I can in real life. And even if I was to make friends with someone on the other side of the world chances are that I would one day want to meet them without the internet to separate us, negating the usefulness of the internet in that sequence of events. Otherwise I can write letters, send faxes or phone people if I want to talk to them instantly. Other uses such as online gaming, social media, downloading files and so on have an analogue counterpart. The internet has replaced this analogue counterpart, as less people may play sports or be part of clubs or rent videos, but that we still undertake these actions is a sign that we haven't changed as a society. A person might be watching films on a television or on their mobile phone, but they are still watching films. Couples might meet at a nightclub or over the internet, but they still will have sex. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to film it then put on youtube for people to comment on does it still make a sound? 'How' people do things isn't as important as 'why' people do things and why we do things hasn't and won't change since the beginning and end of humanity.

The eighties in particular marks the beginning of this loop for a few reasons. Part of the major stagnation has to do with the advanced form of capitalism put into place in the eighties. The economy has always been a significant force in shaping society, though this particular type of economy has made it so that the rich get richer and the poor to feel as though they are through selling them various gadgets to make their lives lazier. Any resistance to this idea has little chance in succeeding as Capitalism has been effective in absorbing counter-culture in previous decades, first by first appearing hostile to an idea before cashing in once enough people are aware, such as the sixties free love movement, gangsta rap, the rave scene and so on. Using this makes it difficult for anything considered dangerous to society to remain so for any length of time whilst allowing those in marketing to appear as if they have a sense of humour or that they support these concepts, even though some of these go entirely against the ethos of the concept they are attempting to sell. A majority of those that are in these subcultures are often young at the time of their conception yet will often grow older and calmer as time increases. Children also became a viable market in the eighties as they began to have their own money as well as changes in parenting. The advent of cartoons such as He-Man and Transformers tied in with toys turned a good profit, and these children have grown up to have their own children who also watch remakes of these cartoons and also buy toys and so on. Advertising often aims to recreate nostalgia in some way in order to revert people back to how they were in the eighties, when things appeared better, though this goes hand in hand with the infantilization of the work place and amount of entertainment technology on the market. If it wasn't for larger televisions, new computers, games and DVDs people would spend their money on other things that would expand the mind differently, such as travelling, hobbies or socializing. The last notable pop culture icons that have remained over the years were from the eighties, like Michael Jackson or Madonna, rather than ones that have come and gone, such as Kurt Cobain, The Spice Girls, Eminem etc.

And what of the future? Will we ever end this ten year loop of celebrities, junk food, international warfare, dance music, political scandal, mobile phones and silly hair? I'm unsure. Technology has the potential to change the world but only if we use it correctly. Ideas are only important if people act on them. The outcome only changes significantly if you significantly alter the variables. Will things like ordering your shopping to your door or wearing a camera on a pair of glasses or having a robot drive your car around change our concepts of society, politics, relationships, gender, race, age, work, leisure, life or death at all? Or will it just be like the eighties forever.