Exploring the Mundane

One of the problems of various web-based services these days is their insistence upon you creating an account and signing in to view content.  The idea being that they can try and harvest your data, but also to 'tailor' content, so that everything you look at is analysed by their algorithm in order to serve you up more of the same.  Of course, in practice this means that, over time, the range of content you get served up narrows significantly, in order to meet your 'interests'.  Conversely, if you do click on something outside these parameters, you end up being served endless similar content, even if that click was merely a one-off on your part and you have no interest in seeing more of the same.  With the result that you don't click on anything different for fear that you'll find your content feed full of videos about Nazis, the joys of naturism or worse.  Which is why, on occasion, I like to look at You Tube, unsigned in, on a different browser than I usually use, in order to see what I get served when I'm just some anonymous mook.  A lot of it is surprisingly similar to what I see signed in - the result of the searches I make in these sessions and the videos I look at while not logged in.  But there's also a load of videos served up speculatively.  These include an alarming number of videos from those 'citizen news' sites that proliferate these days, all of them pursuing far right agendas with varying degrees of subtlety.  Then there are the celebrity videos and worse still, the fake celebrity videos produced with AI.  Not to mention the 'breast feeding' videos which are clearly intended to cater to fetishists who have a thing about women using breast pumps, (it is also a good way to get around restrictions on adult content, as they can claim that the bared breasts are all in the name of education).  

Lately, though, I've been seeing a lot of stuff from 'urban explorers'.  You know, the sort of people who like to 'explore' (or as I like to call it, 'trespass') derelict sites, ranging from deserted buildings, to scrap yards to apparently abandoned private houses.  They wander around with their video cameras desperately trying to convince the viewer that what they are doing is somehow 'edgy', 'daring' and 'perilous', creeping around as if they are in a haunted house, exaggeratedly jumping at supposed mysterious sounds and the like.  It's all utter balls.  The reality, of course, is that there is nothing at all mysterious about the places they break into, (because, let's not be coy here, that's what they are doing), they have simply been abandoned for boringly normal reasons - businesses closing down, institutions moving to new premises, people passing on and their heirs having no interest in the properties they leave, (some might even have been evicted and the property is awaiting clearance before being sold or demolished), or even structural damage which makes them unusable.  I suppose that these videos are a reflection of our increasingly small world:  back in the day there were always new frontiers to explore, places that no 'civilised' man had ever set foot.  But nowadays, everyone has been everywhere, probably on a package tour and posted pictures of it on their Instagram account.  Even the remotest places have now been overrun by hikers on 'gap years' and the like and livestreamed to the entire world.  So, instead, we've been forced to look inwards for adventure, to the new wildernesses which seem to spring up in the midst of our urban sprawls.  Where once intrepid explorers ventured into the 'Dark Continent', braving ferocious wild animals and savage natives, they instead now venture into abandoned shopping malls and factories, braving security cameras and the odd bored security guard.  

The trouble is, though, that none of these venues is particularly interesting, there are certainly no new discoveries to made by exploring them.  There might well be danger, though, if they are derelict and structurally unsound.  There also don't seem to be that many of them.  At least, judging by the videos I've seen posted on You Tube, that is - I've seen the same venues come up multiple times, crawled over by various different 'urban explorers;.  There's a 'scrap yard' full of 'abandoned' old trains, for instance, that seems to have an incredibly high footfall.  In reality, though, and despite the efforts of the video makers to conceal its location, this is actually a storage yard belonging to a heritage railway in the North East of England, where locomotives and rolling stock are stored pending restoration.  Sure, a lot of the stuff there looks in pretty poor condition, but unrestored locos, especially steam locos, always look like piles of rust before being restored.  They have, after all, usually been rescued from a scrap yard, then sat, sometimes for years, in sidings awaiting funding for their restoration.  (As most are either privately owned by individuals or societies, generating funds is a lengthy business and the restoration itself is carried out part time, as funds permit).  So, as ever, the presentation of such sites by the 'Urban Explorers' is highly misleading.  Not that they care - they are just looking for clicks on their monetised videos.  Which is why they keep on 'rediscovering' the same sites and objects, over and over again, pretending each time that they are making some incredible discovery,  (There is, for instance, a Finnish steam locomotive, stranded in a wood in the UK - it was one of a number bought and imported to the UK for unclear purposes as Finland uses a broader track gauge than the UK - which regularly turns up both online and in local newspapers, heralded as a 'mysterious' and 'baffling' find)  But hey, as long as they can make money from these videos, the 'Urban Explorers' will keep on trespassing and 'discovering' these sites, playing on the ignorance of their viewers.