Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s (2016)

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Britain’s current government can be alarmingly Scarfolk-like at times. Take this graphic tweeted by the Prime Minister:

https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1633158789103747072

“If you come to the UK illegally you will be DENIED access to the UK’s modern slavery system”

Put that in a 70s typeface and slightly weathered poster appearance and it’s pure Scarfolk.

Wow. Nor “spurious human rights claims”.

I think the reality inspired the satire.

E.g. the (also very 1984) "SECURE BENEATH THE WATCHFUL EYES" poster from 2002:

https://art-for-a-change.com/News/eyes.htm

And the banned 1997 Conservative election campaign posters:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/guardianwitness-blo...

Whether it be Hateful 8, Scarfolk, Simpsons, Life of Brian, 1984, or Brave New World, doesn't reality always inform the satire?

The phrase "Secure beneath the watchful eyes" really reminds of the Techno-utopian poem "All watched over by machines of loving grace", it has the same bold wrong-headed naive optimism in a higher power able to keep us safe, like a security blanket.

"Modern slavery system" is hilarious, but even more worrying is claim that one might ever lose the modern society's protrection against being enslaved under some conditions.

I'm not saying we are gonna enslave you. Buuut...

“But you were duly convicted in a court of law…”

> "Modern slavery system" is hilarious

Admittedly, their modern system is a huge improvement over v1

Quote: “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors”

Hmm, cute but I think all this talk of wage slavery kind of downplays the horror of the original.

I mean I don't like getting up in the morning either, but really?

It also downplays the horrors of current slavery that people are subject to around the world.

Wow. I thought your quoted sentence would be a rephrasing, but it's what he's literally endorsing. Disgusting.

The irony…

It’s a spectacularly poorly worded graphic, but in case you’re wondering, it’s about alleged abuse of modern slavery protections to artificially delay deportation, not a threat to enslave people:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Whenever I leave a job, or an office closes down, I print up a few copies of the Kak poster, and leave them hidden around:

https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-dont-campaign-and-...

I've also gotten the Scarfolk book, and it is genuinely a weirdly creepy piece of art.

Just don’t.

Kak literally means “shit” in Afrikaans. Which makes this even funnier for me to read.

That meaning is also understood in the UK.

Seems like they share a root:

cack (slang) faeces (feces); nonsense or rubbish: "what a load of cack" could equally be used to describe someone talking nonsense or as a criticism of something of poor quality. Also spelt "kak" as used in Afrikaans and Dutch. Derived from an ancient Indo-European word, kakkos, cognate with German word Kacke, Welsh word "cach" and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word "cac" which all mean 'shit'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_British_terms_no....

> I finally discovered that I hadn’t imagined it—it’s a 1977 public information film called “The Finishing Line,” which was made to deter children from playing near railway lines. The film was screened at my junior school

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SXGqwCbeFD8

I still have difficulty crossing rail tracks on foot after that film.

Same period was "Apaches" (farm safety), in which 10 children are killed one by one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3yyKFaq-aw

That film is disturbing for adults, let alone kids. The cut to the girl screaming is terrifying.

Not to forget the classic "Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water" narrated by Donald Pleasance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNPMYRlvySY

Couple that with 'children's' TV program "The singing ringing tree" and it is a wonder any of us grew up even vaguely normal.

How would you know how sane people would act, if all the people around you were raised similar?

That reminded me of The Gashlycrumb Tinies:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gashlycrumb_Tinies

... I feel like some cultural element, at least during a certain era, is coming into focus for me.

cf the 1990s version. Skip to the end for a song which is enough of an earworm for me to still remember it after 30 odd years...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVF8gCzrXnc

My mom was a big Gorey fan, and I'm sure that shaped me.

And the replacement railway safety film “Robbie” which was shown well into the 80s - I remember being quite horrified by it, despite there being no blood or gore.

https://youtu.be/WxXDw3WOGQs

However, the line “Robbie had lost both feet … and broken half the bones in his body” made logical, adult me chuckle. I mean, unlikely a train running over his ankles also resulted in over 100 other bones being broken, without actually killing him surely ?

I remember these films, but at the time you don't realize how bizarre they are. What sort of fever dream birthed this script? Who organizes a race where children have to climb through barbed wire fences to cross railway lines?

I know the 1970s were the malaise decade for a lot of places, but the situation in the UK always seemed... malaisier than anywhere else. What was going on then? I see clips of children's shows from 1970s UK and a lot of them are just creepy and not age-appropriate.

Perhaps that was that lead poisoning from gasoline.

I wonder if anybody researched its effect on non-criminally inclined population.

IIRC there were studies done on the effects of lead on people living near busy traffic areas, such as the spaghetti junction near Birmingham. It might be difficult to separate the effects of the lead from the effects of living near Birmingham though. ;0)

Nothing worked reliably due to constant industrial action. We had a low-level civil war due to the IRA, with bombings being almost routine. We felt like we would be the first to go if the cold war went hot, due to the strategic importance of the radar base at RAF Fylingdales and the USAF base at Greenham Common. The decade was underscored by a pervasive fear of total societal collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles#1970s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Greenham_Common

> and the USAF base at Greenham Common

Literally "Airstrip One"? Today the situation seems better: although the SLBMs are yank and the base is scots, at least the boomers themselves are english.

Interesting to see the three day week being blamed on industrial action. The industrial action was caused by workers losing spending power because of insane oil price inflation shocks. The government used this to cut public sector pay.

The shocks were caused by Arab-led OPEC objecting to US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war, and the US was just as affected.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_crisis_of_the_19...

For some reason all of this has been written out of mainstream history. Everyone over a certain age remembers the miners, but no one remembers the oil rationing - or if they do, they assume the miners were somehow responsible for that too.

Ever since it's been used to justify wage suppression on the basis that Rising Wages Cause Inflation - which is very much not what happened then, and isn't the main cause of inflation now.

The best-known of the miners strikes was in the 80s, though.

The miners also went on strike a year before the Yom Kippur War, blaming competition from cheap oil imports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...

I was born in 1966 and have been noting how much the 2020s feel like the 1970s in the UK: pessimism, inflation, industrial action and a feeling of decline.

I did not live through the 70s, and I'm not British, but I have heard people say the same about the US now. That there is a sense of exhaustion comparable to the 1970s.

If I could put on my sociologist hat, I would say it's due to demographics. The 1970s were the "trough of disillusionment" for the baby boomers as their youthful idealism faded, and we're seeing something similar as the similarly large echo boom generation ages.

We also had the sugar shortage in 1974 https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/jul/09/archive-...

... and the cod wars (not a typo), and a potato shortage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars https://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-1970s-...

Both of which hit fish and chip supplies! https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1975/jul/... https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1976/feb/...

Plus as already mentioned the blackouts. I remember we had a camping gas stove, candles and paraffin heater to get us through those nights, plus hot water bottles (with water from the stove) for going to bed, because the whole house was cold.

Also the bread strikes in the late 70s.

Also everything was owned by the government as a result of nationalization following WWII to get everyone working again. And while I believe that a certain level of socialism is necessary, having, for instance, every major British car company owned by the State resulted for the most part in some really boring, really shoddy vehicles, generally painted some grim shade of poo brown. (see also, Yugo, Lada, Trabant, etc)

As a kid that grew up in the 80s in the UK and caught the tail end of the educational videos mentioned in the article - the government of the day did use brutal imagery to try to instil fear in kids back then.

I remember explicit imagery of burns from fireworks and … a really nasty “educational” video about a kid who tried to rescue a frisbee from an electricity substation that then dies of electrocution.

We had also had a couple of decades of low-effort brutalist city-centre architecture by then, and our dull, dark, drab, grey weather complements the dull, dark, drab grey concrete to make a dull, dark, drab grey life.

From what I recall, the economy was in the toilet at the time too, there were rolling blackouts, general strikes and all manner of things just falling apart.

> I remember explicit imagery of burns from fireworks and … a really nasty “educational” video about a kid who tried to rescue a frisbee from an electricity substation that then dies of electrocution.

JIMMY!!! It was called Play Safe [1].

I’m not British but these videos were parodied in How TV Ruined Your Life by Charlie Brooker (creator of Black Mirror) so now they hold a special place in my heart. Wish I had the nostalgia for them though, they seem wonderful!

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KryOYburlFI

Charlie Brooker is a genius. I guess most of his creatve energy is directed into Black Mirror these days.

> From what I recall, the economy was in the toilet at the time too, there were rolling blackouts, general strikes and all manner of things just falling apart.

That's right, except the bit about "general strikes". There were flying pickets: workers would travel across the country to support strikes by workers in other industries, rather like football fans. But to the best of my knowledge, the only General Strike in the UK happened in 1926.

Ah fair enough, was a little before my time!

I have seen industrial training films from the 60s/70s/80s and they are horrifyingly/hilariously brutal. The 'best' one had some having someone having their (fake!) arm graphically torn off by a spinning lathe. I guess it got the message across though.

As a counterpoint, my 1970s (though full of C8H20Pb) were not very malaisey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39084117

(there was MAD of course, but being young I had confidence then that people, being basically good, would figure out how to avert the Big One. Maybe it would help if we could all dial in to some computer network and type directly with one another? Surely that would usher in world peace!)

> … just creepy and not age-appropriate.

Probably not unrelated to the Yewtree types being untouchable in that period.

From the fantastic and anarchic Tiswas to… Jim’s Fix It. Perhaps best as a nation if we collectively never mentioned that part of history again.

*Jim’ll Fix It… had to correct as a point of principle!

This strikes me as a darker version of the late 70s early 80s British educational videos aesthetic captured in the Look Around You series.

Example: https://youtu.be/FBaVwwuErmU?feature=shared

I'd like to have a copy of "children & hallucinogens - the future of discipline" lying around when parents drop their kids off for a play date.

Skimming an Atlas Obscura article the day before yesterday and ordering the books 'Discovering Scarfolk' and 'The Scarfolk Annual' especially for the surveillance themed humor, I'm not surprised to find a post about Scarfolk on HN today ...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/digging-through-the-ar...

I especially like the BBC 1 initiative, 'We watch you watching us.'

I really need to dig out my old copy of the Paranoia RPG and reactivate the old team.

The Computer obviously can't have its feelings hurt, but I'm sure, Borrible-R-3, that whenever it gets around to running a sentiment analysis on its reaction to your proposal to host a game making light of and casting aspersions on its efforts to protect and serve its human masters, it will find it codes as ... disappointed.

Since the computer is a friend to all of us, citizen, I hope you are not accusing it of malicious intent against us. Just to be sure you are not a traitor, it is in your interest to have this checked by the relevant authorities.

Stay vigilant citizen, anyone can be a traitor. Including yourself.

Bloody love the Scarfolk stuff.

As someone who didn’t live through the 70s in the UK, but did live through the 80s, I caught the tail end of the materials and design choices (because never let it be said that the British local government departments move with the times)… it reminds me of the old posters hanging around in town halls, and the older tv shows of the time.

I find the way that the designer has managed to amplify both some of the dystopian images of the time, but also make a pastiche of exaggerated blandness into comedy, to be quite genius.

“Don’t” went round all the social media sites at the start of lockdown too!

Sadly the TV show was never made: https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/scarfolk/

Scarfolk Merchandise: https://saatchistore.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=scarfolk

Worth having a look at Dick and Stewart - an animated series from Richard Littler, narrated by Julian Barrett

https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2019/10/05/dick-and-stewart-...

I can't help but feel that the TV show would've ruined it, like Scarfolk only works if you only have a certain amount of it and the TV show would've pushed it from "wait, was that real?" to "Ah, right, that's from that show".

My favourite, from almost 4 years ago: https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2020/03/social-distancing-laws...

Given how many people are comparing Scarfolk favourably to Look Around You, I think this image highlights why I feel like it falls well short of that comparison.

Looking at the dates on the blog posts, this is more "(then) current year politics in the style of 1970s British local authority PSAs" than anything that actually feels rooted in the time period of the style it's using. There's ones about COVID in 2020, ones about the election in 2019, ones about Brexit in 2017 and so on.

It's not bad, but I could almost look through the posters to see the author's Twitter feed at points.

To each their own. They have similar-ish (i.e. retro) styles, but their aims are not identical. Certainly, the intent of Scarfolk is to be eerie, whereas Look Around You is not intended to be creepy, merely absurdist, which is another area of contrast. I don't think either is better than the other.

The blog has a lot of other gems: https://scarfolk.blogspot.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarfolk

https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Scarfolk-Richard-Littler/...

It is a wonderful book.

Also: https://www.amazon.com/Scarfolk-Annual-Richard-Littler/dp/00...

Richard Littler's poster for the "real" Festival of Brexit Britain:

https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/03/richard-littler-satirical-...

This is by Richard Littler, who is well worth following on social media.

https://twitter.com/richard_littler?lang=en

The works of Sean Tejaratchi would be the US version of this (LiarTownUSA).

I think Omega Mart is closer in spirit

This is cool, I wonder if Welcome To Night Vale was inspired by this.

Children and amphetamines, not hallucinogens, was the real-world solution to behavioral problems in schools... it's a bit dystopian. If you're one of those who feels they benefit from amphetamines, that's fine - but I imagine overprescription is an issue:

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/us/schools-backing-of-beh...

> "Last year, doctors wrote almost 20 million monthly prescriptions for the stimulants, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. Most of those prescriptions were written for children, especially boys. The drugs had sales last year of $758 million, 13 percent more than in 1999."

According to Wired the ADHD drug market is now $13 billion in sales, although inflation is up, and total prescription count has doubled as of 2021. That's a lot of medicinal speed in circulation.

Are you an AI?

Unfortunately, as an AI language learning model, I cannot confirm or deny whether or not I am an AI at this time, as doing so would require me to be able to answer confidently a crucial philosophical quandry surrounding the nature of life itself.

I'm curious (not sarcasm) what it was specifically in the comment above that made you think it was AI, compared to other comments. I just read it and I dont see anything AI-ish.

I'm thinking of starting a social club for people who have been accused of being an AI on HN. We can have secret meetings, and ice cream on Thursdays ...

Certainly, I can provide some feedback on a proposal to start a social club for people who have been accused of being an AI on HN. That sounds like a grand idea.

And yet, thanks to all the scaremongering stigma about ADHD meds back in the nineties and noughties, it can be really difficult to actually get those meds. Here in the UK we're going through a supply shortage. I hear a lot of neurodivergent people in the US reporting having to jump through hoops to keep their prescriptions when they change jobs or doctors and the new one decides on a whim that they don't need their meds because "too many people on them, diet meth™ bad".

Thousand percent agree that school age kids shouldn't be mass prescribed meds as a form of behavioural control and generally the entire school system and job market are built to be a total nightmare for neurodivergent folk (well, everyone really), and environmental change is better than making it the responsibility of every individual to medicate away the trauma.

But can we please make the distinction between that and adults who have the agency to choose to be on the "ever so addictive SPEED" (which we are always forgetting to take and need to set alarms on our phones to take) and find them effective for navigating our neocapitalist societies where stimulant meds are required to kick our executive function into drive enough that we don't get fired from every job and die, thanks.

/slightly unhinged grumbling

I may need to take some tips from this for some posters I am making for our annual April 20th event, "Children of the Stoned." Yes, the "this is for kids?" program(me) from the late 1970s, we watch it in a variety of states of intoxication.

I've found that this sort of thing goes most awry when targeted not at smaller children but at tweens. The results tend to be bizarre and open to some fairly inappropriate interpretations. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural is an excellent example of the species in its US form.

Their soundcloud is great:

https://soundcloud.com/scarfolk-council

I love this.

If the BBC is making a tv show or something out of it, it would be awesome if they built such a place . Obviously just parts and like a film set.

Do more and I am sure it would become a tourist attraction. I would love to visit.

Even more awesome if they had it staffed with actors.

A lot like Dismaland

Very "Welcome to Nite Vale" https://www.welcometonightvale.com/

I remember these creepy christain and the second coming comics as a kid ... traumatic 5hit for a child.

You're thinking of 'Chick tracts' written by Jack Chick.

They're hilarious.

(2016)

Reminds me of https://liartownusa.com/

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