“I don’t believe in what you have to say. I don’t believe in any of it; endless rhetoric and construction, a malaise of misinformed monotony, or perhaps a monologue of misappropriated mirage. A litany of lies spread-eagled on the desk of a powerful politician. Smiling as his intern unbuttons his fly. Get it on camera and stream it round the globe. A multitude of morons will watch agog, mechanically maniacally pulling at their penises. Powerful men telling lies in ivory towers, white pillars of phallic power baring down on a land of cowering idiots. Sucking up the spewed syntax through their Internet garblers. Their eyes fused to the white scroll.

You’d say I was a conspiracy theorist right? I’m there chattering about the tensile strength of steel in construction girders. I’m there tracing the lines between Saudi Princes and influential senators of southern states in America. But my approach is more holistic than that. The belief that any kind of control is being exerted is the myth. The desire is to let go and drift, to allow the rhetoric to become a sentient beast, a deity that we obey. It is through the act of trying to control, we assert the illusion of impact and reaction onto people.

The thing is growing in power and force, spiralling through its arc like a canon ball through the sky. Smashing through the castle walls as we all become increasingly embroiled in the monstrous whole.”

He steps back from his screen and observes what he has written with a flat gaze. The cold room around him seems to expand and retract with the juddering of his breaths. The clock ticks on to 12:01 and he knows that he must go to bed, but he wants to finish this post. The forum he is logged into is for Veterans of the Iraq war. This particular one is populated by mostly American men from the 1991 conflict, they are struggling with post traumatic stress disorder. He has read their posts about how the current imagery in the media that permeates their screens is bringing back the feelings of isolation and fear that they have struggled with for over two decades. His polemic is designed to make them feel better but he feels that he has not expressed himself correctly. Some people would call him a troll, an agitator who is deliberately mocking those who have served their country in the name of global stability. Others might call him a lunatic, or an agitprop activist. His posts very rarely received any kind of reaction at all. Simply blocked or deleted, more vitriol poured onto the endless flames of the Internet. A troll perhaps but he felt there was an oblique message hidden amongst his postulations of a grander narrative at work behind the seemingly random conflicts that engulfed their working lives. Perhaps if he could insert some level of awareness at the level of data correction he could feed those anomalies back into his calculations in the broader data set. This was not skewing the statistics, this was the creative element of his role, at this level it was important to throw in indicators so that you can ascertain the level of exactitude that you are feeding up the chain.

He lent back from his computer, the light of the monitor lit his small room and the traffic outside seemed distant. He saved his post and backed it up to a document as well. Normally he felt confident to post without any kind of reviewing or editing process but something about today made him feel hesitant. He had moved to this one bedroom flat to give himself space to focus but found increasingly that the four walls were closing in on him. He felt like he should paint them black, the ever decreasing confines as he metamorphosed into Adrian Mole, a sexually frustrated teenager trapped within the body of a sexually frustrated twenty something trapped within the body of a sexually frustrated thirty something; A Russian doll of repression pawing at his keyboard as he allowed his work to spill over into his free time.

Later he is away from his laptop and watching television with the volume turned down. The images of a TV chef spatter across the screen, cutting through fatty meat in close up. He turns it off and goes to bed.

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