It is a hair before midnight and frost is furring the road. Outside, there is the local homeless guy of indeterminate accent who thinks Superman: The Movie bubblegum cards from 1978 are legal tender and yells at old ladies to “show us yer Hampton”, the five cars that haven’t yet been stolen or burned out, and me. I’m outside because I smoke and it’s now only legal to do so if you’re standing in the street completely naked and visible to police helicopters.
I’m waiting for whoever’s stealing my Wi-Fi to quit it. Which means I'm waiting for them to finish downloading Ukrainian porn, a cinematic form that appears to consist entirely of cold-looking men in Vladimir Putin masks feigning angry sex with gas pipelines. I’m told these videos, torrented off The Pirate Bay in Sweden, are popular in San Francisco. But, then, so is dressing up as a nun in a cling-film habit, smearing yourself in soy bacon and allowing starving dogs to violate you while sucking an Obama-shaped “pleasure toy” (RRP $34.95) so deep into your gullet that his ears tickle your lungs from the inside.
We are, frankly, living in the last days of the Roman Empire once more, and it’s entirely typical that I’m pissed off that I can’t use my Wi-Fi to investigate current trends in jenkem use on the Ivory Coast instead of, I dunno, planting food or fomenting revolution or something.
These are truly the last days. How else can you account for Britain being ruled by an unelected leader who is also Scottish? Who saw that coming when William Wallace was having his bowels hacked out and incinerated in front of him at Smithfield seven centuries ago? Bloody nobody. This is the problem with writing fiction in the early 21st century: the real world outdoes you for madness every day. You’d be overdoing it, as a fiction writer, if you had Congolese bushfighters eating their enemies’ flesh during an ebola outbreak… except that it’s happening as I write.
It’s a serious problem. A couple of years ago, I wrote a scene into an early part of a novel wherein the protagonist is faced with a group of middle-aged men who get together to have exotic sex with ostriches. That is, opposed to plain old vanilla sex with ostriches. It only took a few years before Swedish authorities found a group of middle-aged men who got together to have sex with a variety of animals. Wonderfully, when confronted, one of the zoophiles said the dog had forced him into it. Sometimes I suspect the real function of communications technology is to illustrate, frostily and nakedly, just how frightening the details of life on Earth are. There was a time when it would have been hard for a writer to discover that, in New York, 129 paramedics have been implicated in investigations of sexual assault inside ambulances, with side dishes of child porn. In fact, the easiest way for a writer to find that out in the past would have been to stand on a Manhattan street corner, fake a seizure and wait. With legs firmly crossed. Correctly tuned, the internet brings a staggering volume of detail about every moment on the planet right to my desk.
For someone who earns a living through consideration of outbreaks of The Future, it’s all useful information, but that’s all it is. For the parsing and condensation of that information into knowledge, it seems we still need the structure of print publishing, a form that insists on time to think, digest and present. While I will write about things that relate to Wired UK’s fields of interest in the coming months, for this first issue it’s worth standing outside in the cold away from the internet and consider why print and newspaper/magazine structures still exist. Because reporting and editing are honest-to-God actual fucking jobs that don’t get taught at the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, and because all those faceless blog-networks infesting the Bay Area like tongue herpes have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount. These things are fun and great for finding out about paedo-paramedics and Ukrainian porn, but they shouldn’t be confused with informed reportage and actual thinking. My name’s Warren Ellis. I’m a writer of fiction struggling with a world that’s getting stranger faster than I can make strange shit up. I work for Wired UK. Nice to meet you.
MicrobiographyWarren Ellis is a prolific comic-book writer for Marvel and DC, as well as a novelist and socio-cultural commentator, based in Southend-on-Sea. You can read his blog at warrenellis.com and follow him at Twitter.com/warrenellis
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
