Diary.

I haven't read any blithe rationalisations yet as to why the latest plotters arrested on 21st December 2010 tried to blow up targets in London.

The idiots who plotted the Christmas Terror attacks on London didn't seem to see any contradiction between their targeting of the London Eye and the Church of Scientology and finishing a reconnaissance mission with... a McDonald's meal. So they hate consumerism and "meaningless freedom" enough to pay cash for junk food whilst plotting to kill consumers.

Another terror plot was foiled in Copenhagen yesterday. I await the latest attempt to blame the attacks on foreign policy, as merely a desperate reaction against "our" injustices in "the Muslim world" being the cause of it. Yet I'm still waiting for the Serb terrorist attack on the UK in revenge for Kosovo...Though Jill Dando was cited at the time as a murder committed by Serbs without much evidence.

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The developed world is now dominated by the forces of money and those peddling delusions to too many people locked into a meaningless system of total consumerism, one brought through Chinese labour and capital and, in the UK, through servicing their supereconomy so as to fund the purchase of increasingly banal packaged pleasures that bring barely any additional happiness.

I felt ill when I looked at the sales yesterday. More and more junk. Endless circulations of junk....Junk culture, jobs flogging junk, all contributing the more to the junking the earth which is itself encircled in space by satellites beaming down messages to sell more....junk. Junk that nobody needs being shifted from one warehouse in a floodlit wasteland to another distribution depot and to large out of town retail centres. That look like depots.

It's impossible to know what can be done and yet more and more people know we cannot keep going on like this.

"The system" preys on people's every little set of weaknesses to turn them into profit for themselves. The job of PR reps, advertisers and so on is no longer just to make a set of goods attractive and to inform the public. Instead the aim is in creating new beings, kitschenmensh unable to see their lives beyond the fantasy world the ad men create for them.

Every facet of public life has become driven by profit targets and relentless marketing so that few feel secure any more and we know the true value of nothing beyond consumption. It is increasingly difficult to survive without comprimising personal integrity. The whore and the beast rule without control.

The most depressing thing is that this is an oppression colluded in by people who act only as consumers and no longer as citizens. Much of the tedious search for "identity" is about trying to find oneself in a world that externally means nothing, that is a deracinated legoland of supermarkets, brands, mini-roundabouts, boxy housing, motorways and "heritage".

Lonely people plugged into a virtual reality through the box whilst living in a box and driving bubbly cars or hulking SUV's to assert their being in the world.....

There seems to be no way this system could ever be changed from within. It's a period of total torpor induced by consumerism which is the only reality left and that is one based on a series of fictions. Including the idea the recent student protests over the privatisation of further education funding could actually achieve anything.

For a start nobody is actually that sure what the exact purpose of university is any longer other than offering three years where people "network", get drunk, "have sex", get depressed, sometimes care about their subjects. You then end up with a piece of paper that acts as a potential signal in the labour market in which the degree is valuable to prove generic skills of data analysis, communication etc in addition to psychometric tests, gap year experience etc etc.

It seems most of these protests were just pure kitsch, just a way for young people to express themselves "creatively" before the "real world" hits them and they drop it all. There were no constructive proposal, no noticeable leaders, few who had thought hard about the society they have lived in at all.

After all, it is kitsch. Protest and 'uni' life as a mere rite of passage into the eternal world of infantile consumerism when the slogans are ability to mint a phrase are use to coin in the money in PR jobs. And if so is Ballard right that the only way to escape this fix might be out and out psychopathological violence ?