The Iceland Notes

Not sure if I’m going to get around to finishing these for a few weeks yet, so I thought I’d post what I have. I was in Iceland from the 7th-19th September, in a half-assed attempt to avoid the psychic whiplash that would have resulted from me moving straight from postgrad halls in London back to the fields of rural Sussex. As a travel experience, it defied my expectations in all kinds of strange and unexpected ways. Here are some of my reflections:

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The Iceland Notes, or What I Did On My Holidays

(Part One of Several)

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So, you say you want to understand the emerging contours of the twenty-first century? Look to Iceland.

Fingers on keyboard. It’s 11.20 on a Saturday in mid-September, and there’s a small beer on the table – sitting unobtrusively to the right of my Chinese-made, grease-caked Lenovo ThinkPad. I don’t remember buying it. The beer that is; not the laptop.

Tomorrow afternoon, I take a bus to Keflavik and, from there, fly back to the United Kingdom in a half-empty plane, held together by insulation tape and Icelandic bloody-mindedness. The United Kingdom: a polity which, in a strange echo of the Holy Roman Empire, is anything but. The United Kingdom: a body politic with its collective breath held in anticipation of a socio-economic buggering – delivered enthusiastically by a coalition government of an entirely novel and interesting shade of malevolence.

Muted by my body’s desperate attempts to metabolise last night’s tidal swell of Viking beer, this nevertheless stands as a partial, halting answer to the eternal question; usually delivered with a near-imperceptible tilt of the head – ‘So, what are you doing in Iceland?‘

I take a quick swig of the beer. Though not overtly horrible, drinking-before-lunch and drinking-to-stave-off-a-hangover align in a way that floods my spine and stomach with a powerful sense of foreboding.

So, what am I doing in Iceland?

Ultimately, it all comes down to TINA – that lynch-pin of the Thatcher-Reaganite consensus and, later, of neoliberal globalisation: ‘There is no alternative.‘ My hypothesis: Iceland offers an alternative: albeit muted, partial, and – for the most part – virtual. But however much it is limited by the shrink-wrap legalese of Iceland’s IMF loans, there’s definitely something going on. Others have tasted it on the air; finding themselves lured as if by a siren to this volcanic outpost populated by knitwear hipsters, trolls, and abnormally small horses (not ponies). Though they would surely deny it, these exiles are the collapsitarians, and, for now, this is their Big Rock Candy Mountain.

However hungover I am currently, there’s a woman to my left who is surely an order of magnitude more so. She stirs beneath her jacket, shuddering slightly. I take a second mouthful of beer as a gesture toward focus.

Failure.

Bear with me; I’ll return to you later.

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photo credit: jfpickard

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Time passes and the hangover fades. I’m now at Keflavik – Europe’s most beautiful airport – a full 30 minutes before my flight departs. I’ve stocked up on natural bath products, Nordic t-shirts, and dried fish. Starting to sense that this trip might be what games researcher Jane McGonigal refers to as an ‘experience grenade‘: the fuse is lit, and I’m working through ideas, keeping them circulating until the explosion.

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Since that last asterisk, two weeks have passed. I’ve been back in the UK for roughly the same length of time as I spent in Iceland. 1% of Iceland is forested, as a result of the early settlers’ total ignorance of then-far-future institutional economist Elinor Ostrom. Upon my return, I’m suddenly conscious of the UK’s arboral plenitude.

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Observation: the Mayor of Reykjavik is a self-described ‘anarcho-surrealist’. Give that a moment to sink in. Now, read it out loud: ‘The Mayor of Reykjavik is an anarcho-surrealist.’ Mayor. Anarchist. Surrealist.

This is he:

photo credit: jfpickard

However you look at it, the 2010 Reykjavik City Council election was strange. Protest vote in the wake of scandal and widespread political apathy? Or part of something more significant? The jury is still out.

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Iceland may be broke, but it has bucketloads of symbolic capital. At the level of public discourse, we have a strange convergence of #collapsonomics, futurity, and the natural sublime. Everyone speaks English. The outpouring of art/music/film is totally disproportionate to the size of its population. Check out the country’s social media campaign. Simple, straightforward, but extremely effective – inspiring near-fanatical outpourings from Iceland enthusiasts near and far. Collating holiday photos and diaries as social objects, it gives the contributors an affective link to the place.

On the futurity front, Iceland feels like the 2010s. Somewhere along the line, the country became a byword for creative destruction. After the storm, let a thousand flowers bloom. Is your crazy scheme incapable of gaining traction elsewhere? Try Iceland!

See also – debates on energy independence and the ownership of natural resources, biodiesel pumps at the petrol station, international newspapers printed on-demand:

photo credit: jfpickard

Charging stations for electric cars:

photo credit: jfpickard

Having read a genuinely remarkable magazine feature on UK electric car start-up Riversimple on the flight out – written by Chris Finnamore (one of the people I dogsbodied for as part of my Jan 2009 internship with Wired UK), and with a slightly dodgy reproduction available through the company’s website – it was strange to see that Iceland is already there. Again, where Riversimple will, to begin with, be limited in its operations by the accessibility of charging infrastructure, Iceland’s comparatively small size (with one ‘proper’ national road) plays to its advantage. Low cultural inertia; (comparatively) low capital outlay; low barriers to entry.

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More to follow – including: Icelandic property law, citizens conventions, hackerspaces, anarchists, WikiLeaks, angry protests, life expectancy, paranoia, alcohol, global warming, and geothermal energy. Watch this space.