‘WEIRD’ – A Free Range Journal, Issue No.1, Beltane 2020
The Lockdown Edition
How do you talk about freeing ourselves from the gadgets that define our lives, when the way everyone communicates these days is defined by those gadgets?
Download this edition
1A4 PDF – for printing at A4 single- or double-sided; or
2A3 PDF – for printing landscape A3 double-sided to create a folded/stapled brochure.
‘WEIRD’ is designed to print at A4, but will reduce to A5 and be about the same size as small newsprint. The A3 PDF will scale for double-sided A4 landscape
Issue No.1 Contents
- A ‘WEIRD’ Introduction
- How do you talk about freeing ourselves from the gadgets that define our lives, when the way everyone communicates these days is defined by those gadgets?
- ‘Progress’ is not a copper-bottomed certainty
- Copper is an amazing metal!
- The problem is frozen oven-ready chips
- The economics of ‘fast’ food are not based upon the ingredients, but upon the business model of mass marketing via superstores. Creating a different way of living means confronting the absurdities of that system.
- History File: ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’
- Written by William Morris in 1888, this essay outlines how society reduces people to mere ‘occupiers’ of time in toil. The original version of that article is available here.
- The Elimination of Cash
- Cash has been in general use for 2,600 years. Now we're handing control to a handful of technology and finance companies. Think that’s a good idea?
- Demise of the Totnes Pound
- A realisation that, when push comes to shove, everything that has a beginning has an end.
- We need big giggly land occupations, where people do nothing more than sit, cook food over fires, play acoustic music, and simply enjoy a more simple “disconnected” time together
- Consider this title both the introduction and the conclusion of this piece!
- ’Corona Virus’ versus ‘Universal Basic Income’: Twin Failures of Modernity
- In the wake of the pandemic, as in the wake of the 2008 Crash, neoliberal capitalists have become socialists. However, does the great idea of the left, ‘Universal Basic Income’, represent anything better?
- Numerical Ramblings: Lockdowns, Pandemic Trends, and Political Reality
- A statistical editorial, presenting the trends relating infection, to death, to the current political messages on the pandemic – and what follows.