Reading London Riots Through Cosmopolis and DeLillo

Tottenham Burning Building

http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/?ref=spelling   (this link is not working and I bet it is being censored. Just keep fiddling with home, encryptions, etc until you get it)  has the best coverage (images and videos) of the riots and the best understanding of them as post colonial consequences.

http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/london-riots-in-big-pictures/  try this link as I think the servers are crashing. Or censored.

It belongs in this Cosmopolis blog as it parallels the "rat" demonstration in Cosmopolis with Vija Kinski's (Baudrillardian) analysis.

Is this the day the limos disappear in London?

In The Ruins of the Future DeLillo discusses terrorism as the opposing force to global capitalism. Terrorism is going to be with us for a long long time. This riot is terrorism. But is it any more terroristic than state and corporate terrorism?

It is an Event. Coming from elsewhere. No cause. An Irruption, just like Twilight.

The US has exported terrorism to the world, most recently to Iraq, with the help of other western countries  - UK - and now we are importing terrorism as we saw the past few days in the UK. These young people are gaming. They have grown up on Virtual Reality computer games. Their minds and bodies are interfaced with them as Packer's is interfaced with floating numbers and the market (he can't sleep etc) so the riots were really a VR game to them, an excess of reality delivered as a "gift" to the system. The system must respond with a "counter-gift" or commit suicide. This recent riot was worse than the "rat" demonstration in Cosmopolis. IMO at least.

The western world has been handed the "counter-gift" I think. And massive state crackdown will be the result. And it will be permanent against its domestic population.