h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...it's not funny

[OK, so this is just one big rambling rant, but its good to get things off your chest every now and then, isn't it? And I do mean what I (try to) say here - have a read, and see what it makes *you* think...]

Every time I go into town lately, it depresses me. I don't know what it is exactly that I notice each time, but the sheer exploitation of capitalism is all too obvious once you start thinking about it.

Everywhere you go there's adverts for credit cards [read: spend more money than you actually have]; there's millions of shops selling mobile phones [yes, they're useful, but who actually gets hundreds of pounds of value out of always having the latest model?]; there's signs everywhere telling you what "you'll love" to spend all your money on... I was amused to pass a 'sports' store the other day which had a line of trainers in the window labelled "Buy One, Get One Free": you mean I can buy a whole *pair* of shoes for £100 now? Bargain!

The shops in Reading are particularly unimaginative as well - for such a relatively big place, I mean. The general rule is that if you name any big national chain, it will probably have at least two stores in Reading: one on the main road, and one inside the Oracle shopping centre. They'll probably be bigger than average as well, but without actually selling any more variety than usual. Try looking for, say, a second-hand bookshop, though, and you might be lucky enough to find a small one hanging on for dear life in the town's most obscure backstreet.

The sad thing is, there are actually three other, smaller, shopping malls in Reading, but two of them are so empty that most people probably aren't aware of their existence, and the other is constantly reinventing itself to remove all traces of character. It used to be called "The Butts Centre", apparently - a wonderful name, if you ask me - but now its the "Broad Street Mall". They've redeveloped its upstairs foodcourt twice in the couple of years I've been here, and this time they're abandoning sandwich shops in favour of Burger King and Spud-u-Like [which I can't help associating with Harry Enfield's Slobs, who called their daughter Spudulika ]. Meanwhile, one of the covered alleyways has an entrance right opposite the Oracle, which has been deserted for some time - but now, rather than regenerating it and encouraging interesting shops, they're knocking down that end of it to build a "Sainsbury's Central Store". That'll be as opposed to the "Slightly Off-centre Sainsbury's" 500 yards away, then - and no doubt a factor in Kwik Save closing down: hooray for consumer choice!

But what makes this all really depressing is that Reading also suffers from a very visible number of beggars and homeless people [no surprise when you realise how artificially high the housing prices are]. And as a student in this wonderful "free and democratic" country of ours, I can do nothing about it, because although not all that poor in general, I have a huge debt and can treat neither myself nor anybody else to any significant sum of money.

Over the last few weeks, I've had to spend money on the dullest of things: pants; renewing my passport; a summer duvet; train tickets; buying lunch when I'm in town... And then I come home and read headlines about poor put-upon multinational megacorporations "protecting their interests" by patenting our lives and then suing us for trying to live them, and it makes me feel . But what can be done? The governments wouldn't last five minutes if they pissed the companies off too much; no one consumer can break the spell of the PR machines; and no one company can change the direction of an industry. Wherever you tried to push, there'd just be a whole world's worth of resistance from the rest of the ingrained system of capitalism.

But maybe there is *some* hope. Music-sharing, for instance, is here to stay - a triumph of what people want technology to do for them, rather than how companies want technology to make money for them. And no, I don't think artists will suffer: the main casualty will be sales of singles, which I've always found an anomaly anyway: you can listen to them on the radio, and get an album if you like them. Now, you can download them, too. Big deal. When I went to see Wheatus live, they *told* us to pirate their music - they didn't want the pennies the media conglomerates gave them, they wanted people to come to their gigs. If the companies want to sell us music, they've got to give us something for our money - make the product something we want to own. As long as CDs come with innovative and satisfying covers, artwork, inlays and extras, I'll keep buying them - maybe not at full price, but I *am* a student...

And funnily enough, I've realised that that is exactly the answer to something that's been bugging me for ages: what's so great about DVDs? I mean, how come people will pay £10 or more for some classic movie on DVD, who wouldn't have dreamt of paying £5 for a VHS copy? And how come there is a market for magazines about DVDs - not about films, but about DVDs? And the most extreme example came in an interview I saw with one of the stars of the new X-Men movie. They said they did all their own stunts because people would be able to tell "now that they can pause it on their DVDs" - I mean, , you couldn't do *that* on VHS tapes, could you? But the point is that people have been sold DVDs as a *concept* in a way that never happened with VHS. Yeah, DVDs can have "extras", and "digitally remastered surround sound" and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day, people buy them because there's something quite about owning a DVD. They're not buying the movie, they're buying the package.

I'm not entirely sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, to be honest. I'm just worried that the whole world will carry on grinding round in circles until it self-destructs. I imagine all-out capitalism will give way eventually, just like tribalism and feudalism in the past. In fact I think maybe we're in the position of Asimov's "Foundation" galaxy: if as a society we make just the right choices now, we can at least minimise the suffering and time before something better takes its place. What those choices are, I'm not entirely sure, but looking around, I don't think we're doing very well at making them right now.