This blog would like to make it clear how very proud it is not to be an Olympic sponsor for the London 2012 games this summer. Following what must surely become known as chip gate the level of paranoia exhibited by the official sponsors turns out to exceed that of our security forces. Though of course they haven’t tried to put missiles on to nearby tower blocks to pre-emptively remove any unauthorised advertising, t-shirt, snack. The 300 purple capped brand police will be enforcing special legislation brought into protect the corporate interest of the big sponsors making sure no small business can benefit from having their usual trade disrupted by the games. If you object to their entering your business to enforce the banned words including “gold”, “silver” and “bronze”, “summer”, “sponsors” and “London”, one has to wonder if they’ll be calling some of the thousands of troops drafted in or copying most private security forces and calling the police. Anything that could be associated with the games is verbotten so who knows what that will actually cover, guess it’ll depend on what the enforcement drone decides on the day after all who knows what might be “effectively depriving the Games of revenue”.
IT may turn out that the longest lasting legacy of these games is the reduction in freedom resulting from the creation of numerous free speech exclusion zones, which would seem likely to hasten the erosion of our our public spaces. Sadly it’s probably far too late in the day, but is there any project to record what ‘s been shut off from the public for the Olympics so we can spot which bits they “forget” to re-open?
Given the paranoia of these Olympics the all seeing eye of the much loved Wenlock starts to seem an inspired choice.
