SIG News 5 Manifesto: A Friendly Deconstruction

SIG Manifesto 

(SIG News 5: September 2026)

 

 

I.

 

The new, bumper edition of SIG News (#5) is out now - arriving two months ahead of its cover date and two weeks ahead of its public launch at the Mausoleum - sorry, Museum - of Youth Culture (see below). Edited by the established team of Russ Bestley, Tim Gibney, Kevin Quinn and Roger Sabin, it assembles an eclectic mix of articles by a disparate group of authors from both within and without the University of the Arts London (UAL). 

 

By deliberately choosing the inky medium of an old-school, limited-run newspaper, SIG's explicit aim is to thumb its nose at mass circulation and the algorithmic curation of the online world. Anyone interested in the history and practice of music- and style-based subcultures is guaranteed to find something to excite them in this issue. 

 

However, it is the ever-changing SIG Manifesto, printed boldly on the back cover, which I invariably read first, and it's this ten-point text that I'd like to discuss - by which I mean deconstruct - here. Let us begin by looking at each point in turn, offering a brief response before building towards a critical overview of a text that functions as a public declaration of the Group's ideology. 

 

Ultimately, we are obliged to ask: does this text genuinely rally readers to radical action, or does it risk encouraging mere repetition of the same old inauthentic busyness [1] and the restless pursuit of novelty? 

 

II.

  

1. We at SIG News decree that the high-street purveyors of plainstream bad dreams dispense nothing more than tribal whorefare. A cavalcade of copycat caricatures and clone-clowns cascade across mediascapes devoid of depth and bereft of breadth.

 

Point 1 playfully, if somewhat aggressively, sets the tone: mock-authoritative, mock-confrontational, and mock-avant-garde, delivered with an over-reliance on alliteration and Situationist-style wordplay. 

 

Strip away the performative hostility, however, and it's a bog-standard critique of the Mainstream Media (MSM). It accuses the latter of lacking both substance and diversity whilst actively exploiting social divisions for profit (tribal whorefare), manufacturing systemic anxiety (bad dreams), and recycling formulaic content (copycat caricatures).

  

2. Scenes should be heard, not spread. 

 

Point 2 of the manifesto posits that for subcultures to remain authentic and flourish, they must foster local, organic connections through live performance, material publications (such as fanzines) and word-of-mouth, rather than engaging in global, digital dissemination. In line with subcultural theory, the statement also suggests that exposure via modern media causes rapid commodification and the loss of a scene's underground edge.

 

Ultimately, there's nothing virtual or viral about SIG News: it demands physical presence. Ironically, however, by demanding scenes remain localised, it inadvertently privileges those living in metropolitan cultural hubs whilst excluding the isolated, provincial outsider, i.e., the sort of poor sod stuck in the sticks or in some shitty seaside town that SIG often seems to champion.

  

 

3. Within the suffocating technological netweb 'DIY-bother' has become the despairing mantra of an autonomous muddleground desperate for something 'more'. 

 

Point 3 suggests that within a restrictive digital infrastructure, autonomous DIY culture has devolved into an exhausting, ineffective, and futile struggle - hence DIY-bother.

 

Whether we like it or not, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have successfully co-opted, neutralised, and commercialised creative independence, transforming the radical punk ethos of Do It Yourself into a neoliberal chore that demands constant content creation, algorithmic self-optimisation, and endless self-promotion.

 

Independent creators are left confused, isolated, and trapped on a digital muddleground - profoundly exhausted by the machinery of the burnout society [2], yet desperate for an authentic path forward that doesn't involve feeding the algorithm.

 

 

4. Be impossible, demand the unrealistic.

 

By reversing the famous Situationist slogan from May '68 - Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible - this point serves as an update appropriate to the age of capitalist realism [3]. It is a potent mix of defensive absurdism and revolutionary desire for alternatives in an era dominated by the mantra there is no alternative.

 

By becoming-impossible, one becomes capricious and unclassifiable and thus useless to systems that rely on reliable data and predictive modelling. By demanding the unrealistic, one asks for the very things that consumer capitalism cannot commodify or deliver: silence, secrecy, and stillness.

 

   

5. It is absolutely normal to be resolutely on the outside of anything and everything. 

 

Point 5 normalises and validates splendid isolation and magnificent marginalisation, asserting that refusing to belong to any mainstream group, trend, or digital network is a completely valid way to live. 

 

This position is arguably more countercultural than subcultural. For in actively rejecting anything and everything one acknowledges that even the most radical subcultural movements will eventually be compromised, co-opted, and commodified. 

 

However, in affirming such an extreme model of individualistic detachment, it becomes politically problematic for those of a more socialist persuasion who believe that it requires collective power (i.e., solidarity with others) to build lasting alternative structures.  

 

  

6. Inspiration + imagination x application = no sweat.

 

Quite possibly, this is the point I dislike the most. It reads like an uninspired motivational slogan dreamed up by some corporation trying to sound knowledgeable about the creative process. Ironically, it undermines SIG's own depiction of cultural production as involving a good deal of sweat (not to mention blood and tears). Only artificially intelligent machines don't sweat.   

 

If I were to be generous, I might accept that the author of this manifesto is attempting to subvert the capitalist no pain, no gain work mantra. In other words, they might be trying to say that when one is genuinely inspired, creative work ceases to feel like alienated, exhausting labour. 

 

However, by dressing this concept up as a reductive, pseudo-logical mathematical formula they have ended up producing a trite, neoliberal slogan that completely devalues the demanding reality of artistic practice.

 

 

7. Omniformed existences expire with no trace. A feast of spectres amasses. 

 

Jesus! Point 7 reads like gothic poetry as much as cultural theory. Nevertheless, the warning here is stark: if you allow yourself to be shaped entirely by the Matrix, your life will leave no lasting legacy; you will expire with no trace and the world will become haunted by the ghosts of mass-produced human entities who failed to realise their potential or blossom as individuals.

 

Put another way, it's arguing that total conformity leads to a form of spiritual and cultural death and what Mark Fisher would term lost futures.  

 

 

8. Humanarchism is the logical evolutionary step away from total disconnection towards renewed social connection. Unplug, turn off, conjoin in. 

 

Is humanarchism a SIG neologism? At any rate, it's a new word to me; a portmanteau blending humanism and anarchism which suggests that in order to survive the isolating effects of modern digital life, society must evolve a new philosophy that rejects technological control in favour of autonomous (and essentially analogue) human community. 

 

There's no point (and no fun) in being connected to networks if we are physically out of touch not only with other people, but with animals, plants, and objects. We need a form of libidinal materialism born of desire, not merely a new idealism. 

 

Unfortunately, whilst I approve of the necessary update to (and inversion of) Timothy Leary's famous countercultural mantra, I'm not sure humanarchism is the best term for this new philosophy. 

 

Also, one must ask how realistic is this as a solution; by simply instructing people to unplug and turn off the SIG manifestoists assume people can easily walk away from the digital infrastructures that control their jobs, bank accounts, and daily communication and make a nostalgic return to pre-internet socialising [4]. 

 

 

9. Renounce the over-the-counterculture. Spurn the splendour-vendors and venal frontiers. Difference is natural indifference.

 

I like that last sentence: Difference is natural indifference (even if, obviously, I think indifference is a highly stylised pose born of stoicism and dandyism and has nothing natural about it). Indifference, along with several other 'I' terms - irony, insouciance, insincerity - is one of my watchwords here on Torpedo the Ark (TTA). 

 

The starry individual does not care about being noticed or need to be validated. They are secure in their own distinctiveness and completely indifferent to mainstream trends, social media metrics, or corporate attempts to categorise them - and, as the rest of the point makes clear, they have renounced the over-the-counterculture too which all-too-often means pseudo-rebellion and commercialised bullshit sold by splendour-vendors (i.e., hucksters working in the advertising business or those in marketing who wish to build and promote brands).    

 

Of course, again, this sounds good - but it involves the same naive romanticism as we have encountered already; just because you choose to ignore the Matrix it doesn't mean you are outside of it; in capitalist reality, modern data tracking doesn't care if you are indifferent to it; the system still tracks your habits and monetises your lifestyle; it might frame your structural isolation and indifference, for example, as the adoption of a zen attitude (Would you like to buy a yoga mat?)   

  

 

10. Fashion is no more than a fleeting fad. Follow nothing except your shadow. Go forth and amplify. 

 

The SIG Manifesto ends with a tripartite series of slogans intended, one assumes, to inspire readers and incite them to acts of defiant rebellion. 

 

The third - Go forth and amplify - is simply a play on the biblical injunction given initially by God to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28) and then later repeated to Noah and his sons (Genesis 9: 7). I suppose it's encouraging us to find our own voices and to speak up (so is again at odds with the ethos of silence and shutting the fuck up promoted on TTA). 

 

The first sentence - Fashion is no more than a fleeting fad - is one that I'm astonished to see in a manifesto born of a university which includes the London College of Fashion as one of its six constituent colleges. Also, as the author of Philosophy on the Catwalk (2011), I am very much of the view that in fashion we can discover "all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [5].

 

As for the fleeting character of fashion - or what we might term after Barthes the logic of fashion - isn't that its beauty and philosophical importance? Lars Svendsen is spot on when he writes: 

 

"Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." [6] 

 

This is why, one might suggest, the most interesting writings on fashion have tended to come from our poets and novelists; for "they alone are sufficiently free from its perceived triviality" [7]. 

  

As for the second sentence ... ironically, despite speaking of shadows, it's another essentialist injunction; for it is saying, is it not, be completely self-reliant and look only to your own true self for direction. One of the problems, however, is that Baudrillard powerfully illustrated how in an obscene hyperreal world and an era of total transparency, we have no shadows!  

 

So that's another issue - one of many - for the signatories of the SIG Manifesto to address ...

 

 

III.    

 

We are told to memorise the ten-point SIG Manifesto and ignore it at our peril. 

 

Obviously, this is said humorously - but, somehow, the text doesn't leave us smiling and I suspect that's because it functions primarily as an academic pastiche rather than a viable blueprint for contemporary cultural resistance. 

 

Whilst it accurately diagnoses the exhaustion inherent in a hyper-commodified digital landscape, its structural utility is limited by an outdated binary framework. It posits, for example, an enlightened avant-garde operating from an imaginary external position that ignores how modern capital functions through decentralized, participatory networks. 

 

Consequently, directives to unplug (Point 8) or remain on the Outside (Point 5) overlook the material reality that economic survival and communication are fundamentally embedded in digital infrastructure. Further, by framing resistance as a personal lifestyle choice, the manifesto risks falling into bourgeois individualism and what theorist Mark Fisher termed the privatisation of discontent, effectively atomising opposition rather than fostering collective solidarity.

 

Aesthetically, the wider SIG project draws heavily from historical precedents, specifically 1970s punk fanzines and 1990s culture jamming. The decision to print SIG News as a physical newspaper highlights a deliberate engagement with obsolete media forms, positioning the work closer to an archival art project than a contemporary subcultural critique. 

 

However, viewed through the lens of radical graphic design and visual history, the SIG Manifesto might be said to succeed on its own terms. For while it lacks a coherent political strategy for navigating an algorithmic mediascape and, theoretically, it has more holes than a proverbial piece of Swiss cheese, it functions effectively as a stylish conceptual provocation, illustrating the profound difficulty of offering meaningful resistance today. 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Heidegger terms this Geschäftigkeit - a key concept introduced in Sein und Zeit (1927) as a structural component of Dasein's everyday manner of existing; i.e., constantly occupied with the immediate tasks at hand and numerous daily distractions. 

      For Heidegger, this relentless busyness is a coping mechanism; one that allows us to avoid confronting the deeper questions of our existence, including our own mortality. It is closely connected to his concept of Verfallen, wherein the individual tumbles into superficiality and evaluates their life simply by how much they are doing, losing their authentic self in the process. 

 

[2] The phrase Müdigkeitsgesellschaft was used by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han as the title of an essay first published in German in 2010 (the English translation by Erik Butler was published by Stanford University Press in 2015). 

      It might be noted that the term literally translates as fatigue society, but the word burnout - coined in 1970 by the German-born American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to refer to a state of mental and physical exhaustion - arguably has greater contemporary resonance.     

      Readers who are interested can find a two-part post published on Torpedo the Ark back in November 2021 discussing Han's text: click here to access part one.  

 

[3] The phrase capitalist realism is, of course, forever associated with Mark Fisher; see his book of this title (Zero Books, 2009). The first of a three-part post written on this work published on Torpedo the Ark earlier this year can be accessed by clicking here. 

      In brief, capitalist realism refers to the fact that capitalism is more than an economic arrangement of society or a political ideology; that it has become a singular reality that is so all-encompassing that we mistake it for the natural order or inevitable way of the world. This, in turn, makes alternative models either unimaginable or seem foolish and utopian: 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' as Fisher famously puts it. 

  

[4] It must also be pointed out that in demanding that people gather and collaborate as what D. H. Lawrence would term a democracy of touch, point 8 is at odds with point 5 - remain a singular individual on the outside of everything.

 

[5] Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 57. 

      Admittedly, this novel derides those who would make of fashion the basis of all human experience, but, contrary to his own idealism, Carlyle is obliged to concede that clothes do play a crucial role in materially constituting the self.  

 

[6] Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons, (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.

 

[7] Roland Barthes, 'Language and Clothing', in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, (Berg, 2006), p. 21.  

 

On the Politics of the Skirt and the Rise and Fall of Hemlines

Six young women model six classic skirt lengths 

ranging from micro-mini to maxi

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things that Roland Barthes doesn't like is women wearing trousers: and he's not alone in this; many men prefer to see women in skirts. But it depends on the woman. And it depends on the skirt or slacks in question ... 

 

For some skirts are very ugly, whilst some trousers - such as a classic cut pair of Capri pants as worn by Grace Kelly - are very beautiful. 

 

Indeed, some women look so sexy and stylish in trousers that this is how they are best remembered within the cultural imagination; Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn are very obvious examples - and who can deny that Sydney Sweeney has great jeans? [1]

 

Here, however, we're going to briefly comment on the rise and fall of hemlines during the last 125 years or so and say a bit about the politics of the skirt. 

 

 

II. 

 

According to the Cole Porter song, in olden days even a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking [2], but now, for better or for worse, most people prefer bare limbs to old hymns [3] and don't want dress codes to be enforced by the morality police (or even the fashion police).  

 

I don't know when exactly the sun set on the olden days, but we should probably mention the introduction of the rainy daisy skirt in the 1890s, which had a significantly raised hemline - as much as six inches off the ground - and would later influence the introduction of ever-shorter skirts in the 20th century [4] (although it should be noted that, up until 1914, most skirts still touched the ground, including the infamous hobble skirt that had its brief fashion moment in the Edwardian period).  

 

Before we continue, it's important to remember that there's no progress in the world of fashion; a short skirt is not an improvement nor an advance on a long one. And fashion is not even a striving after beauty. The logic of fashion - if we may call it such - isn't tied to aesthetic criteria, but to an obsessive desire for novelty, innovation, and constant change as a value in and of itself; there is no goal or ultimate look [5].

 

Thus, what we witness throughout the 20th century is hemlines going up and down like a whore's drawers: fashionable skirts were short in the Roaring Twenties (at or just below the knee, thereby allowing flappers [6] greater freedom of movement on the dance floor); long again in the more austere - but also more sophisticated - 1930s (typically reaching mid-calf) [7]; and shortest of all in the Swinging Sixties, when bright young things favoured the mini-skirt (6" above the knee), although some hippie chicks preferred to wear long flowing bohemian-style maxi skirts as the decade drifted toward and into the 1970s.  

 

 

III.

 

And today, in a post-Covid era; "skirt styles are more varied than ever, reflecting a world of interconnected cultures which can no longer be defined by a single  [...] narrative" [8]. 

 

In other words - and returning to the Cole Porter song - anything goes ...

 

Because of this, some commentators are suggesting that the asymmetric hemline is the defining style of the decade, "while others believe the rise in sheer and lace maxis is emblematic of our increasingly obfuscated society" [9].  

 

As we move into the second quarter of the 21st century perhaps the only thing that can be said for certain is that the skirt "is no longer simply rising or falling with GDP, but splintering and mirroring a world of fragmented economies, aesthetics and identities" [10].

 

In an age of chaos and diversity - when no one really knows what the fuck is going on and no single style dominates - we find skirts of every shape, length, and material appearing side by side on the catwalks and in highstreet stores.  

 

Now, of course, some think this a good thing; either a triumph of individualism and the freedom to wear whatever one wants; or of multiculturalism - the great ideal of the motley-spotted who pride themselves of the fact that they have embraced all peoples and value all customs, beliefs, and outfits equally.     

 

Others, however, of a more Nietzschean bent who don't wish to skirt around the issue, see in this barbarism of tastes and fashions a type of systematic anarchy and the destruction of genuine culture, which requires unity of style in all the expressions of a people - including hemlines.       

  

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written two posts on women in trousers; one discussing the case of Katharine Hepburn (9 May 2018) - click here - and one outlining a brief history of Capri pants (featuring Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn (10 May 2018): click here. 

      And for my tuppence ha'penny's worth on the case of Sydney Sweeney (31 July 2025), click here and/or here (the latter giving a Nietzschean take on the controversial American Eagle campaign featuring Miss Sweeney).  

 

[2] Cole Porter, 'Anything Goes', from his 1934 musical of the same title. Click here to play the version recorded by Sinatra for his 1956 album Songs for Swingin' Lovers (remastered in 1998).   

 

[3] This is an extremely anti-Lawrentian position. For Lawrence not only loved old hymns, but he hated bare arms and legs. 

      See the essay 'Hymns in a Man's Life' (Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press, 2004), in which Lawrence writes how the hymns he learned as a child have more value to him than the finest poetry. 

      And see 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' (published as one volume with Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, Cambridge University Press, 1993) in which he writes disapprovingly of the half-naked women of the 1920s who think it very chic and a sign of their independence to expose their limbs in public, describing it as a form of cynical vulgarity. 

      Ironically, when in the Cole Porter song referred to above he writes of good authors who once knew better words, now only using four-letter words, he is very likely thinking of Lawrence and James Joyce.   

 

[4] A rainy daisy is a style of walking skirt originally designed in the United States for use on wet days and was usually just two or three inches off the ground. The origins of the name are uncertain, but it has been suggested that they were named after the flirtatious fictious figure of Daisy Miller, who features in the short novel of that name by Henry James (1879).  

 

[5] As Lars Svendsen notes: "Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." 

      See Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.

 

[6] For a post written in praise of the flappers (1 January 2016), please click here. 

 

[7] Interestingly, economist George Taylor noted in a 1929 book entitled Significant Post-War Changes in the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Industry, that following an increase in sales of fine silk stockings, skirts got shorter (and, presumably, as skirts got shorter, the demand for fashionable stockings increased still further).

      This contributed to a theory known as the hemline index which posited that the length of a skirt will rise when the economy is booming and fall when the stock market is in trouble - thus helping to explain why skirts were longer in the 1930s, for example.   

      Finally, it might be noted that whilst many economists at the end of the 20th century were sceptical about the so-called hemline index, in 2010, two academics at the Erasmus School of Economics (Marjolein van Baardwijk and Philip Hans Franses) examined data from fashion magazines against measures of GDP from 1921 to 2009 and they found that the hemline lengths were an accurate indicator of economic fluctuation, even if  changing trends in skirt length typically lag three years behind market shifts. 

 

[8-10] 'In History: The evolution of the skirt through the decades', TheIndustry.fashion (16 June 2025): click here. 

      This excellent short piece - which comes with some fantastic photos - also describes skirts in the decades I chose to skip (i.e., the 1980s - 2010s).