Boy, what a screwed up lot We are – and that’s the royal, collective We. Our priorities are so self-centred, that even when we think of others and our effect on them we add the caveat – albeit perhaps subconsciously – ‘how can I benefit from this?’ Image and money are everything and screw the consequences.

Money: how many of those involved in the scrum for the Anya Hindmarch ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ bag were there thinking about the environment and the secondary purpose behind the bag (the primary one, of course, being a publicity stunt for Anya) – reducing the use of plastic bags? Very few, would be my guess; did you see the photos of the amount of garbage left afterwards? And a quick check on eBay saw more than 100, almost 10%, of the $120 bags available locally, up for sale at prices ranging from $1,000 to $5,500. Yes, we truly care about the environment here. Maybe environmentalists and governments could learn something from this: people will only care when they see a benefit to themselves. So make being green worth gr$$n and then you’ll see attitudes change. Think how effective it would be in reducing the number of plastic bags used if shops paid you $5 if you brought your own bag. But then, what would be the point of going to an obscenely expensive designer boutique if you can’t walk down the street with a gi-normous designer shopping bag flaunting your affluence to one and all?

Image: Orwell was wrong, it won’t be Big Brother who will do the watching, it will be ourselves watching each other and trying to profit from it – the UK, the country with the most cameras watching its population, has turned the vast majority into revenue generators – here it’s cam phones, blogs and paparazzi all with their cameras clicking to capture, at a profit, your loss of face. It’s hard not to feel sorry for Chu Pui-hing, whose 36-year tenure at RTHK came to a close courtesy of a few photos taken before he’d even consummated the evening with his extra-marital shag. But then again, do we really want as Director of Broadcasting of our taxpayer-funded RTHK a man so naive and stupid as to walk down the street hand-in-hand with a girl he just paid a rumoured $10,000 to leave a karaoke bar and go to a hotel with him? And who was there on the front cover with another in the long line of ki$$ and tell exposes – Coco-the-working-girl – and didn’t we just lap it all up? Sociologists here must be having a field day. Money and image: in Hongkie town we’ve sold our souls, and none of us have even noticed.

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