INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES
GQ NOVEMBER 12, 2020 - by Brian Eno
"WE LIVE IN A PROFOUNDLY DIFFERENT REALITY NOW": BRIAN ENO REVISITS HIS DIARIES FROM 1995
In 1995, Brian Eno kept a year-long diary. In it, he wrote about working with U2 and David Bowie, watching the Balkan conflict unfold and shared his thoughts on artistry and music. The result was published in book form a year later, and now, twenty-five years down the line, Eno has revisited it for a new, anniversary edition. Here, the legendary producer exclusively considers just how wildly the world has changed.
Brian Eno wrote A Year With Swollen Appendices in 1995, consciously resolving to keep a diary for an entire year as a matter of discipline, and eventually publishing the result with an attached series of essays, short stories, musings and other correspondence (the appendices of the title). The book became one of the most insightful and comprehensive collections of Eno 's ruminations in any one place and covered his major collaborative projects with David Bowie, U2, James and Jah Wobble. Woven through the everyday record of his work and life, as well as his observations on art and music, was sharp political commentary on the current affairs of the year, including the Balkans War and Eno 's work on the fundraising War Child compilation album, The Help Album, in aid of humanitarian efforts in the region. Now, twenty-five years later, the diaries are being reissued, and here, in an exclusive extract of the volume's new introduction, Eno looks back on the quarter-century since.
• • •
This book was first published twenty-five years ago. What has happened in those twenty-five years?
I started out by making a list of new words [below] - ideas that either didn't exist or weren't in the air when I wrote the diary. What astonished me is how many of them there are. Some of these words - and the ideas and activities they relate to - have become so normal that we forget they're only a few years old.
A friend told me a story that captures how quickly things become taken for granted - indispensable parts of our lives. He was on a flight and, after take-off, the pilot announced that the airline had just introduced Wi-Fi to its fleet of jets, so everybody could now use their phones on the plane. There was delighted applause and many of the passengers immediately took out their devices and began doing all the things we do with them. After about 30 minutes the Wi-Fi stopped working, for some technical reason. Within seconds, people were complaining angrily about the "terrible service": it had gone from miracle to expectation in half an hour.
Looking at this list of words makes me realise that we live in a profoundly different reality now than we did in 1995. I assume new language evolves when there are new things that need to be talked about - so the faster those new things are coming at us, the more new language we need for them. Perhaps we would expect there to be lots of new words to do with the internet and social media, but what's noticeable about the list is that there are some areas of human activity that hardly figure in it at all: for example, art, religion and philosophy. Does this mean that we aren't so interested in those things any more and have stopped talking about them? Could it mean that they just aren't changing so quickly to need new language? Or does it mean that they're changing so much that we no longer recognise them in their new forms? For example, is QAnon actually an emerging religion? Is CRISPR gene-editing technology possibly a new form of art? Is decluttering, à la Marie Kondo, a sort of spiritual discipline that operates in the space where religion operated? Is TikTok a new mass art form that we aren't taking seriously? (Will we, in another twenty-five years, reverently scroll through old TikTok videos, recognising them as the beginnings of a truly universal, democratic art form?) Is binge-watching Netflix the future of art, as galleries and public spaces become more dangerous?
Completely missing from the diary is any mention of climate change, populism, pandemics or China, just to mention a few of the things that occupy a lot of our thoughts now.
Looking at any item on the list I ask myself: "In which category of human experience does this particular phenomenon belong?" It turns out that a large fraction of the new words are, perhaps unsurprisingly, to do with interpersonal relationships - how we relate and present ourselves to each other.
Body-shaming, cancel culture, chatlines, Chaturbate, cisgender, Creative Commons licence, crowdfund, crowdsource, distance learning, DM, dox, emoji, emoticon, follow/unfollow, friend/unfriend, and then all the new language around social media. This category is where there seems to have been most activity. Are humans communicating more than they ever did in the past? Is this process of "community forming" now in hyperdrive because our old ways of making communities (ie, by growing up and living and working with other people, or by engaging with them in common causes) are no longer working? Or do we just need more forms of community? And from whence arises this insatiable appetite for constant conversation? Is it a case of, in Eric Hoffer's words, you can never get enough of what you don't really want?
And what are we not doing when we're doing all this chatting?
Novelty in the world isn't the only thing that spurs new language. New people want new language because it's a way of distinguishing themselves from old people. This driver of linguistic evolution has to do with another kind of communication. It's often not about saying new things but about saying the same things differently and, in doing so, indicating which tribe you belong to (and which ones you don't). Language is a badge of membership or affiliation, and sometimes that's most of what it's saying. Language of that kind is designed to tell you more about the speaker than of what is being spoken.
One of the things that seems to have happened in the last twenty-five years is that the distinction between these two kinds of language has blurred in the public sphere. This era has been called post-truth because language is increasingly intended to be instrumental - that is, intended to bring about an effect - rather than accurate. There's a difference between shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre that is actually on fire as opposed to doing so in one that isn't. Increasingly the role of the media - particularly in England, Australia and America; the Murdoch constellation - has become to trigger volatile public response by shouting "Fire" almost all the time. When it's all about clickbait - grabbing attention - it turns out you don't actually need much news. Just a flood of red flags will do the job.
This confusion - between language as the articulation of meaning and language as trigger or mood music - has now penetrated thoroughly into public discourse. Twenty-four-hour rolling news and the internet have created a demand for content that apparently can't be met with actual news and has to be augmented by opinion columnists, shock jocks, influencers and Twitterati. Churnalists, freed of the need to actually conduct research and fact-checking, trade in recycled "news" about as substantial as smoke. But if you know that people are inclined to believe there's no smoke without a fire, then all you have to do is keep producing more smoke.
Many of these new words suggest the dissolution of a certain quality of public discourse that we have taken for granted since the Enlightenment, which hinged on the possibility of reaching evidence-based consensus - albeit even temporarily - about what constitutes reality. The post-modern scepticism of any distinction between ideologically derived value systems and evidence-driven science is now grasped at gratefully by libertarians, populists, identitarians and tax evaders the world over: "Why shouldn't there be a special reality just for me?" they demand. An early warning sign of this attitude creeping into politics was when a member of Dubya's entourage, questioned about the veracity of some claims he'd made in support of the Iraq war, said, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
It's interesting to watch that kind of hubris crash up against a little strand of RNA - and conspicuously lose the battle. As I write this, we're five months into the Covid pandemic, and it turns out that even an empire can't change biological reality. I wonder if it will make any difference to how we view the role of leadership in the future, when we evaluate the various national responses to Covid and notice that the people who dealt with it more successfully were not the macho braggarts, not the "we-make-our-own-reality" brigade, not the "man-up" populists, not the Panglossian libertarians, but the people who had the humility to listen to the science and the humanity to care enough to act upon it.
3-D printer
4chan
9/11
AI (artificial intelligence)
Airbnb
Alexa
algorithm
alt-right
alternative facts
Amazon
Anonymous
Anthropocene
anti-natalism
Antifa
apps
Arab Spring
ASMR
augmented reality
avatar
B2B (business-to-business)
bank bailout
Bank of Mum and Dad
barista
Belt and Road
bendy bus
bestie
big data
billionaires
binge-watch
biodiversity
biosphere
birtherism
bitcoin
black hat
Black Lives Matter
bling
blockchain
blog
Blu-ray
Bluetooth
body-shaming
boogaloo
boomer
Border Force (UK)
Botox
bots
box set
Brexit
BRICS, the
bromance
butt lift
buzzy
cancel culture
cannabis stores
carbon footprint
carbon-neutral
CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy)
CDO (collateralised debt obligations)
CDS (credit default swap)
chatlines
Chaturbate
chav
China
chip and PIN
churnalism
cisgender
Citizens United
cli-fi
clickbait
climate crisis
climate refugee
cloud, the
command and control
conflict minerals
contactless
content farm
Cookies
Creative Commons licence
Corbynista
Covid
CRISPR
crowdfund
crowdsource
cultural appropriation
cyber attack
cyber crime
cyber warfare
daisy-cutter
dark money
dark web
data-driven
data harvesting
data point
data set
Davos
day trader
declutter
deep state
deepfake
denialism
derivatives
digital audio
dirty bomb
disaster capitalism
disinformation
distance learning
DM (direct message, Instagram)
DMT (drug)
dox
drone warfare
doomscrolling
dot com bubble
drones
dubstep
e-bike
e-cigarettes
eBay
ecocide
egg donor
electric cars
embedded (journalists)
emo
emoji
emoticon
end of days
end times
end-to-end
encryption
enhanced interrogation
entitled
essential worker
ETF (exchange-traded fund)
facial recognition
factoid
fake news
false flag (attack)
fat finger
fat studies
first responders
fit (attractive)
flash crash
flash mob
followers
flat-earther
follow/unfollow
FOMO (fear of missing out)
foodie
football mum
friend/unfriend
garage (music)
gaslighting
gated community
gender-neutral
gender studies
Generation Z
generative
ghost (as a verb)
gig economy
glamping
global warming
globalization
gluten-free
goji berries
goldilocks
GPS
graphene
Great Awakening
grime
ground-source heating
grunge
hacking
hands-free
hashtag
hive mind
hooking up
helicopter parenting
Homeland Security
hotdesking
hotspot
housing bubble
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, USA)
iconic
identity theft
ifpology
impostor syndrome
inbox
incel
influencer
information warfare
intersectionality
iPod
Islamophobia
isolation
Jägerbomb
'jump on a call'
Jungle (refugee camp), the
Karen
ketamine
Kindle
lab meat
labradoodle
laptop
Leaver (cf Remainer)
LGBTQA+
libtard
localisation (cf globalisation)
location services
lockdown
LOL
machine learning
malware
mansplain
Matrix, The
MeToo
Melissa worm, the
MERS
microaggression
microdosing
milk substitutes
millennial
mindfulness
Minecraft
minger/minging
mission creep
mood music
MSM (mainstream media)
muted
nanotechnology
Napster
Netflix
news threads
NLP (neuro-linguistic programming)
non-binary
nose to tail
noughties
Occupy
oligarch
OMG
one-click shopping
one per cent, the
online banking
online shopping
open-source
opinion columnist
optics
Oyster card
page view
palimony
pandemics
parkour
PayPal
paywall
peng
Pepe the Frog
Periscope
phishing
photobomb
Photoshopped
'ping me'
Pizzagate
platform
pocket call
podcast
pop-up
portrait mode
post-Internet
post-truth
POV
PPE (personal protective equipment)
preprint
privately owned spacecraft
pronouns
QAnon
QR code
quantified self
quantum computing
quarantini
queen bee
ransomware
rapture
reality TV
reboot
recycling
red-pilled
Remainer (cf Leaver)
Remoaner
renewables
retweet
rewilding
robotics
router
routine mass surveillance
SARS
satnav
screen time
Second Life
Segway
self-isolate
selfie
selfie stick
server
sexting
Shazam
shielding
shock jocks
shrooms
SIM card
singular they
Siri
SJW (social justice warrior)
Skype
slacktivism
smartphones
SMS
snowflake
social capital
social distancing
social media
sockpuppet accounts
Soundcloud
spam
spear phishing
speed dating
spice
stan
Stans, the
starchitect
staycation
streaming
Stuxnet
subprime mortgages
sudoku
super PACs
Superfoods
surrogate parenting
sustainable
swipe left/right
tablet
targeted killing
teabagging
teardown culture
telemedicine
Tesla
texting
Three Percenters, the
TikTok
Tinder
top-down/bottom-up
trans
trending
triggering
trillion-dollar companies
tripcode
Trojan horse
troll
truthiness
tweeting
twenty-four-hour rolling news
twerking
Twitterati
Twittersphere
Uber
uncanny valley
two-factor identification
universal basic income
universal credit
unplug
upcycling
upload (to the cloud)
USB
vape/vaping
viral
vlog
vulture capitalism
waterboarding
wealth management
web surfing
wellness
WFH (work from home)
whole face transplants
Wi-Fi
WikiLeaks
Wikipedia
woke
women's studies
workstation
Y2K
zero-hours contract
zero-tolerance
Zooming
zoonotic
(Thanks to Kevin Kelly, Peter, Ben and Cathleen Schwartz, Karl Hyde, Dom Theobald, Leo Abrahams, Roger Eno, Mary Evers, Leon Sealey-Huggins, Rick Holland, Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis, who contributed to this list.)
A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary (25th Anniversary Edition) by Brian Eno (Faber) is out on November 19. His new album, Film Music 1976-2020, is released this week.
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