'South Korean companies are sending employees on "fake funeral" courses to help prevent suicide. The "well-dying craze" has become an integral part of training at Samsung, which has built its own fake funeral centre'

Mute's Feeding Frenzy

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Confirmation that 'Stewart Home' is not alone (so to speak) in populating (anti-)social networking sites with pathological quasi-doubles, incubi, revenants or whatever else.  Cornwall police claim that schoolchildren have been 'impersonating paedophiles' on MSN and Bebo chatrooms in an evil plot to scare 'rival'[sic] kids.  Are these the same chatrooms that the ever-vigilant, Hardworking Families-friendly Guardian recently warned have had their Family Filters hacked to pieces by precocious but somehow still defenceless infants?  And how, exactly, doe

Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

Over the past couple of months We Are Bad's invectives against sport as class-cleansing have been appearing on the notorious blue fence that runs around the site of the London 2012 Olympic games. Mute made contact with this shadowy underground organisation and can now present the first in a series of specially commissioned posters, made available here in hi-res for home printing

Looks like the 'Your Park' brochure inviting community participation in the London 2012 Olympics which I received through the post yesterday has already drawn an enthusiastic response from some denizens of the O-Zone....

WE ARE BAD.

The WE ARE BAD collective has made it’s first incursion into the Olympic zone .The blue perimeter fence has been lacerated with a howl of denial.

In Mute 2.6 fictitious capital collided with hypermetrical verse distemper[*].  What follows makes matters worse by further entangling these things with forthcoming Mute subject matter: baby biometrics, tax credit tagging for Hard To Let Families, etc.

[* See also: QUID 18: créateur d'intérieurs (£4 incl. P&P, from Keston Sutherland, Arts B, University of Sussex, Flamer, Brighton BN1 9QH, or http://www.barquepress.com/quid.html)]

Soft hands from Baby Bonds

Mikhail Epstein’s essay ‘Charms of Entropy and New Sentimentality’ shoehorns the memory of the Russian poet Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990) into a simultaneously deconstructive and annunciatory treatise on mythmaking and historical times - past, present and future. In the process, he tells us more about contemporary myths of subject formation, but who are we to complain?