To Europe

Billions of pounds have been spent on networks, servers, databases, computer equipment, satellites, cloud storage, web services and labour power.

And yet due to a fire at Rotterdam station, no-one at the Eurostar check-in can tell me if there are any trains going to Amsterdam.

I am presented with a vague, semi-apocalyptic vision which suggests everything north of Brussels is a grey-haze. Trying to go further is considered a great risk, with no guarantee of success. The recommendation is to wait four days before attempting the journey. Whatever I decide to do, it is clear that no external authority will take any responsibility.

It is when real-time accurate information is most needed that over-engineered and badly designed information systems break down.

Systems have system thinking cooked into them. A great deal about the ‘purpose’ of digital information systems is to save companies money, to enable efficiency savings and exert greater control over the remaining labour.

Systems are sold to commercial organisations and public sector authorities by silicon snake oil sales reps. Managers go to conferences and are impressed by a PowerPoint presentation. Their minds are turned. They should have bought the PowerPoint version because that’s the one guaranteed to work.

The intensification of the digital automation of data now continues with the addition of Ai being deeply embedded into functionality and technical specifications. Now there are data layers on top of data layers; transmission layers, transmission control protocol, internet protocol.

Network speeds determine all interactions; the capture and collation of all personal data. What you click, what you don’t click, how long you browse, when you browse, what you browse. Packet data switching with messages about operating systems, exact location, type of device, details of all the software versions that your using.

This system doesn’t integrate with that system so you now need to download another app and put yet more personal data into the matrix.

This is the real purpose of the system, to create vast digital personas of the users, to feed into marketing campaigns, to track your every movement, to sell, sell, sell, offers and commodity-image-objects, to draw you into the digital net from which it becomes impossible to escape.

And yet nothing can measure how a layer of opinion in England is being consumed by hubris and the echoes of the arrogance of Empire.

Cities, countries, individuals can make catastrophic turns from which there is no return. All the lessons of history are written in the stones of time but so often ignored and neglected.

And no one can tell if there are any trains from Brussels to Amsterdam.

We are surrounded by wifi networks and yet it is impossible to connect. The information super-highway chopped up into thousands of dead-ends, cul-de-sacs, back streets, dirty alley ways and b-roads, a digital feudalism where each corporate fiefdom exacts a data toll as we try to move through cyberspace.

Flash back dreams return during daylight hours. The sense of living through time that has happened once before. Flag psychosis hanging from lamp posts, a new nationalism of drip-drip poison.

Faces now appearing in the streets etched with insanity and visceral hatred, madness in the eyes, distortions, lies, the misinformation machines with rabid funding from ultra high net worth individuals. Here the local ideologies merge and blend into one big international idea of hate and war. The power over other people, without any authority.

To break the civic, to break the rules and regulations, to dissolve the social glue, to eradicate the social anarchism that’s often to be found at ground level. This is felt instinctively, not through theory. This will enable a new form of capital to push through, unleashed, a monster that breathes poison gases and lashes out with claws tipped with glass cutting diamonds.

Each new phase of capital with ever more dreadful terrors. The willing executioners drink foul water and fry small live creatures in pans of boiling fat. The organisation of the psychic vampires.

Deep under the sea as the train goes through the tunnel.

There is an animation being shown on the monitors in the ceiling of the carriage. A cartoon woman in a green jacket has picked up a hammer and is smashing the window. That’s how to escape. When all the glass has fallen out she climbs through the space. The land through that broken glass looks like a good place to be.

It is not under the sea that we now travel. That was a trick, a misdirection on the ticket. We are travelling through space, now faster than the speed of light. When we arrive at the destination there will be seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls of wrath, seven spirits of God, seven lampstands, seven golden candlesticks and seven stars.

And after one thousand years all will merge into cosmic consciousness.

The train comes through the tunnel into France. A parked army truck, soldiers with machine guns, long lines of fencing topped with rolls of razor wire.

The train crosses a canal on a box grid bridge and nearby is a hill that I climbed one day and sat near the ruined abbey and looked out across the countryside. The sea was a faint haze on the horizon the port buildings and cranes of Dunkerque still and statuesque, hiding the labour activity within it.

The countryside rolling green with tan-coloured brown fields and verdant collations of trees. The whole infrastructure of production was revealed, linked together with electricity pylons and train freight lines and motorways and the scattered housing where the workers live.

The four women of the train crew who have been serving up food and coffee and small bottles of wine are standing in what passes as the kitchen area. They look tired. I had asked for a one of those bottles as they went through the carriage; she handed me two.

Production and distribution and consumption are scattered through the countryside. There are concentrations of capital here too, including those of the agri-business industries.

The steel box factories and warehouses in the French countryside are exactly the same as the steel box factories and warehouses in the English countryside.

The labour processes are similar too; stand by this machine, type these specific characters on the keyboard in this particular way, load that van by lifting the boxes and stacking them just so; erect the steel frame of the building in such and such a way.

Same as in England, France, the USA, Japan and anywhere else that can be named.

And yet this unity of labour process and this unity of what the workers do and how the workers are organised constantly fails to bring about any meaningful unity of the working class at an international level, or national level, or even local level.

The growing of crops, rearing of cattle, the building of houses; much the same.

Two young Indian women with large rucksacks get on to the train at Antwerp. One has gold tinsel wrapped around the top of her backpack.

A painting of a Dutch peasant woman of the seventeenth century on the side of a block of flats.

In the Waterland and sitting in a garden enjoying the experiencing of dusking. The light of the day fades with gentleness and bird song and church bells.

Swifts dip and dive. An owl swoops over the garden. Bats zip through the air in complex patterns.

Stars and satellites, meteors and comets. The milky way becomes visible in the night.