Hypothetical journeys to real islands, with apologies to Umberto Eco.
The internet broke us in two ways. First, it presented us with an easier global alternative to forming a local community, and second, it provided us with a million easier alternatives to boredom. No-one could say that the volume of art has gone down – in fact, it has exploded – but the internet has made it impossible to have a movement, to be united, to find a commonality. Movements elevate art’s diverse voices into an unignorable choir, a gang of sodding carollers who refuse to leave your doorstep, and they give it power, volume, a possibility for art to enact its finest aspect: to change a mind. No, we are now reactionary, hiding in self-burrowed niches, two-faced, insincere without anyone around to really hold us accountable, and finally driven mad by a cacophony of competing distractions. It’s no coincidence that Berlin’s scene was hollowed out at the same time the internet became commonplace, and it’s no surprise that its putative successor, Belgrade, was stillborn in a blizzard of TripAdvisor reviews, 5€ Ryanair flights, Airbnb “experiences”, and Instagram reels.
Sometime in the late 2000s, drug smugglers realised it would be more profitable routing their cocaine shipments to Australia and NZ through the Pacific islands rather than South and South-East Asia. Logistically it was a more difficult route, and not one that could take in the markets in Europe along the way, but the far more relaxed control points in the South Pacific, as well as an abundance of unpatrolled and overlooked stopover islands along the way, made it so they would lose far fewer shipments to the authorities.
Of course, there was always nature to consider, and sometime in the 2010s a smuggling boat sunk off an island in French Polynesia (I can’t remember which one), breaking up and sending hundreds of kilo bricks with the tides to land on their shores. The chief of the island tried his best to recover the bricks and offload them to the police, but the youth of the island had other ideas. To this day, roughly half of the coke that washed ashore has never been accounted for, buried like nest eggs by the locals under the banyan tree in their front yard or disappeared up the noses of excitable teenagers, hopefully in the service of a sleepless pastel sunrise or two, holding hands with their lovers.
I still think about this island, and I still calculate that somewhere – somewhere – at least one kilo of the stuff remains, no more than a foot under the sand. This little island, with its unreliable satellite signal and completely wonderful lack of things to do, with a near-limitless supply of stimulants, enough to sharpen a generation of ADHD-addled minds, mine included, this little island could be the new hub, drawing in not just one but a whole gang of nouveau Gauguins and leaving them with no choice but to give up their stockbroking jobs, take up whatever tool uncorks their long-cellared keg of communal creativity, and finally make a goddamn difference.
I will be the first there, a whispered prophet that brings in the new age of art, an eager movement. I just need to remember the name of the island, but I’ll google that as soon as I’ve finished watching this Twitch livestream.
