[internautica]

“But what will you do with the lazy man, the man who does not want to work?” inquires your friend.

That is an interesting question, and you will probably be very much surprised when I say that there is really no such thing as laziness. What we call a lazy man is generally a square man in a round hole. That is, the right man in the wrong place, And you will always find that when a fellow is in the wrong place, he will be inefficient or shiftless. For so-called laziness and a good deal of inefficiency are merely unfitness, misplacement. If you are compelled to do the thing you are unfitted for by your inclinations or temperament, you will be inefficient at it; if you are forced to do work you are not interested in, you will be lazy at it.

In Strategy Room #2 we had whiteboards going, big rolls of paper, Zoom calls to assistants out in the pool going nuts creating moodboards and decks and a bunch of kids coming up with prompts for AI pictures to see if any of it got the juices flowing and unblocked the dam creativity wise so we could ideally step outside our preconceived ideas of "good", etc. On the largest and most central whiteboard were big, glossy letters that spelled out "HOW DO WE KILL CHILDREN?" which, while abrupt and perhaps slightly untoward in its immediate implication, was easily contextualised. Easily. Firstly, they were big and glossy because we had had them printed, because we had originally written the question in pen which felt almost glib in an inappropriate way. "The optics," one of us, doesn't matter who, had sighed, considering the possibility of a leaked photo which painted us as flippant or dilettante or naive. So we replaced them with better letters. It was that simple. Secondly, the message deserved to be considered in the full context of history. Let's leave it at that. Plenty to work with there: just Google it! You'll be reading a while. Thirdly: once history's factored into the equation, the only remaining question is how you kill kids and get away with it. At the start of the session 8 months ago we'd been different-looking cats, believe me. Neat, kempt, sane. Now messy, unkempt - still sane! Still sane and looking the real world right in the eye. Now we were drinking coffee and ordering takeout poke bowls for, if not every meal, then most meals. Did we enjoy it no. Not at all. "Bombs", we'd underlined first. Run a cost benefit analysis and bombs are essentially free after adjustments. And boy do they kill a bunch of kids. We looked at the numbers on that and nearly took the afternoon off. But then someone - not naming names - pointed out that bombs are a little stinky, branding-wise. Bad optics on bombs, we all agreed, even if they were so cheap after adjustments - and so effective! And then we put "bombs" out to the focus groups and they came back "criminals", "murderers", "wrong", "evil". We wanted to shake these focus groupers by their collars and say what the HELL is wrong with you, do you know how harmful it is what you're putting down on these forms, have you ever seen the clean pure fire that is unleashed by a bomb at the moment of ignition? Do you know how ignorant it is - to say that LIGHT ITSELF is somehow EVIL? Crazy - so we said, hey, put bombs down anyway. So cheap when adjusted. And after that someone underlined "Guns", and again that had got us all going - "an unimpeachable good," someone had said, "just look at cops, quite literally the good guys - quite literally paid to be the good guys." And that had been a breakthrough. And someone else - and they said this in confidence, so don't ask - had said - "and the kids we're looking at killing - these are standard fit out kids? Like little, short, small muscles - kids?" And we went yep. One and the same. And then someone was like "Isn't it crazy that we're trying to kill as many of them as possible?", which was a real pinch-me moment. Like, yeah. Sort of crazy, but then they obviously needed to die, and that's why we were here - to focus on ideating and iterating and not getting our hearts and our heads mixed up. And then it was like the floodgates were open, and we were talking about airdropping poison toys, about thin wires stretched across alleyways at child neck height, about radioactive pellets to give them leukaemia. Couldn't have been more proud of the team. Shivers. We ran it all up the chain and the bigwigs told us "love the creativity, keep it coming, we're at bombs budget-wise" - so we sent bombs down to fulfilment. And the boys from fulfilment shipped 'em off and we stood around the warehouse with a glass of whatever and watched the sunset and someone said "The kids will die, right?" And we said sure. The kids are gonna die. Don't sweat it.

I started to notice more graffiti above street level, on other train bridges, on rooftops, on high walls and car flyovers. How had those writers gotten there?

Soon, wherever I went, I saw less the cold iron-and-brick brutality and more the masked persons climbing nimbly down the crosshatchings of the pilings, sprinting across the gravel, spray-painting the walls; less the steel girders and I-beams, and more the running and jumping and climbing and the thrill of hanging above the bustling road.

A well-placed piece of graffiti, I realized, meant that someone had actually been there and written it—which suddenly meant that London, which is covered in graffiti, was way more open than all the CCTV and fences and walls suggested. Here’s how to look at London. Here’s how to live in London. Here I am, the writer says, in this place I can’t be.

At the poets’ panel,
after an hour of poets debating Ezra Pound,
Abe the Lincoln veteran,
remembering
the Spanish Civil War,
raised his hand and said:
If I knew that
a fascist
was a great poet,
I’d shoot him
anyway.

Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.