So it looks like the social media landscape is due to collapse in 2025. It’s probably better for everyone; its corrosive effects are clear to see and it is fairly well understood at this point that the benefits are completely out weighed by its drawbacks.

Like any rehabilitation from addiction the side effects of its demise are, as yet, total conjecture. Personally I am looking forward to a more diverse and curated internet experience free from the puggy machine, doom scrolling which has become so endemic. Though this persistent and heavily weathered behaviour does seem to be entirely symbiotic to the human experience now, much like smoking in the 1970’s, or tulips to the 17th century Dutch. (Tulip mania - look it up). It’s just amazing how much human behaviour and perception has changed over a decade. In the past the only things that created such seismic cultural changes, were political movements, revolution, mass religious conversion, cultism, hysteria, war pandemic or environmental cataclysm. Of course the demise of social media should be the least of our concerns considering the current state of the world. Both natural and human spheres seem to be in complete free fall, the Everyman seemingly paralysed unable to muster any kind of resistance. Largely due to the mental pacification impacted on us by cellular mobile telephony and the infinite mesmericification of awesome everythingness.

I have made no shame of shouting our plight from the highest rooftop, much to most people’s chagrin, the ostrich approach is alive and kicking; it is quite serene with one’s head buried deep in the cool, cool earth. But the ostrich will be woken from its ossified slumber when the feathers on its arse catch light. OSTRICH ON FIRE !!!Startled alive, frantically kicking at the air blinded by the searing white heat of reality; and off across the plain at 48 miles per hour, gangly, long legged buffoon. Head on a swivel, hankering for that next cool hole. Of course the ostrich has survived this way for 21 million years. So perhaps my high brow estimation of societies widespread latency is unfounded and it is in fact a decent defence mechanism that gleans measurable and long lasting, positive effects. Certainly I am keen on the approach often and so I notice are you.

For the last ten years I have been fairly obsessive about documenting the demise of my cherished homeland, though all my pride and affinity with it has been eroded to a bloody stump, I still feel compelled to collect the data in the most beautiful and technically accomplished way I can. Perhaps I am too misty eyed for the distant and out of reach principals of my forebears. But by fuck, Scotland has always punched above its weight in all aspects of technical, intellectual and creative forms of civility. Our people invented *9/12th’s of the modern world.

This year I will be half way to 90 and it is only now, in this tumultuous time of empiric collapse and post truth absurdity that my efforts are starting to come in to some sort of relief. I’m under no illusion that this work is probably not going to ignite the revolutionary, renaissance I so desperately thirst for in the present. (I actually have no idea what if anything could set fire to the ostrich’s bottom at the moment). But this work is important to me and it is (if I do say so myself) important to my country. When someone decides to commit themselves to art, I believe it must be done wholeheartedly and confident in the realism that it may go completely unnoticed forever. This humble vulnerability must be at the core. To create for the sake of it, to create for the self serving pleasure and satisfaction of bringing newness and growth. To imprint your being on your time and your geographic location.

These social media platforms have done more than stupefy us, they have done more than erode our teenagers self confidence and social skills, they have done more than reducing our attention spans to nano seconds. They have entirely and callously reduced our ability to be sincere and balanced, to perceive beauty well beyond the aesthetic, we have fallen victim to a self fulfilling psychological virus that has atomised community, civil discourse and indeed the very fabric of perceptible truth. I post these images on here knowing fine well that artificial intelligence will be trained on them, I post them knowing fine well metacorp can use and redistribute them as they see fit. I post them knowing that most of you will never take the time to type in ‘THE LAIRD OF FCKNG NOWHERE’ and look at what our country is, has been and is yet to come.