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Island Machine 23 Dec 2010

The Christmas card below is a reflection on the current state of affairs in Brand Britannia. A hollow, bankrupt ‘island machine’ where the majority increasingly subsidize the lifestyles of a small super-rich elite— as one of the banners in parliament square read: ‘we are not your slaves’. Brand Britannia is neo-liberalism ‘ruined abstraction’, a hyper-banal entity fashioned by the ever-spinning government-media-corporate loop. The ensuing wasteland is the inevitable result of a life solely administered by commodities. The royal wedding and Olympic games are spectacle writ large, Brand Britannia’s dazzling poverty. As economic ‘macguffins’ they fuel the self-referential circuits of power, as follies or points of contradiction they potentially offer sites of resistance— arenas for refusal and disavowal.