3rd of January 2016

... Leaving Scotland, I headed back down south to London, my home town.
My mission was to start a social activist group called 'Culture Jammers 'R' Us', based on the action of Culture Jamming - the process of interrupting the mainstream cultural flow of ideas (AKA the consumer trance) - by using art, performance and the cultures own evil tool of advertising to jolt people out of the consumer routine.

 A few years before The Dream, before my light awakening, I'd begun the process of a dark awakening. A dark awakening is when you realise that not everyone in power has your best interests at heart and some may even go out of their way to harm you. If you stay stuck in a dark awakening it can lead to paranoia and crippling fear of super-powered Freemasons or Illuminati hoards hiding around every corner. However, I do believe it is a vital stage to go through, a stage of questioning that cracks open the assumed power of authority which we are led to believe is infallible through our years of state schooling.

My own dark awakening began when I wrote to my MP for the first time on a matter concerning my Student Loan. As a student at the beginning of the 21st century I was one of the first young people who were asked to pay for their own education through a loan rather than a grant. Luckily for me, I came from a single parent family, and so was offered the full loan and had my tuition fees paid for. Even so, I left university with £12,500 of debt, perhaps starting me off on the right foot in a credit/consumer society. With promises of low interest rates and an eternity to pay it off it wasn't too much of a bother.
However, when I started working I discovered that I was being charged £30 interest a month, but that I was also only covering half of that interest with my automated monthly payments from my pay check. Of course, I could have added more to my monthly payments but I was 21 - and paying off my eternal student loan wasn't a priority, and anyway, I had a £1500 overdraft to pay back, that the bank so kindly offered my 18 year old self as I stepped into adulthood. I did care about the fact that this interest rate had not been properly explained to me and so I did what any good law abiding citizen would do - I wrote to my MP.

When I received a two page response basically saying 'this is how it is and we actually don't give a shit' I was shocked and dismayed that the person who was meant to be representing me seemed more interested in representing the student loans company. Naively, I had truly believed that politicians wanted the best for me and that any problem I had would be met with useful suggestions or help. My reality took a huge blow when I realised this wasn't the case.

This realisation happened to coincided with the beginning of the truth movement. Films such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 were pricking my age groups interest and after reading The New Pearl Harbour by David Ray Griffin I fell deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of uncertainty and 'conspiracy'. As this was the time before the internet had really taken off as our sole point of reference I'd pour through subversive magazines, such as Ad Busters, and great books like Gerry Mander's 'The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television' or 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman.

By the time I came back to London in 2008 I was neck deep in 'conspiracy theories' and very aware of how much we were slipping into a surveillance society and being bombarded with suggestive propaganda on a daily bases. This was the time when Zeitgeist The Movie was being shown in little dingy cinemas down back streets. It was the time of the great awakening and I wanted to do my part...