Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  So, by implication, the firm is still keen to sell cigarettes in other parts of the world, where the public is perhaps less conscious of their life-shortening effects. But in the UK, the jig is up, and so the company is hoping to find other pointless addictions, about which frightening health consequences have not yet emerged, to shift people on to. Looked at like that, the ad’s claims seem less noble, but also less hypocritical. It’s just a stealthy survival strategy – like the wolf dressing up as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Maybe that was hypocritical, but it feels harsh to blame a hungry predator for not openly admitting that if he stopped killing, he’d die.

  I was even more dubious about the other part of Cancer Research UK’s criticism: “staggering”. Is it staggering? Was anyone at that charity staggered? Did they expect better from Philip Morris International? “What a big advertising budget you have, Grandma!” “All the better to dispassionately address our products’ health implications with!”

  I don’t believe they were staggered, and it’s a mistake to pretend that they were. It’s totally the wrong way to think about a corporation. Everything a corporation says is hypocritical unless it’s “our entire raison d’être is to maximise profits”. They hardly ever say that, and who can blame them? But that’s completely what they exist to do, and that’s fine as long as we’re wary and make sure they observe the law.

  But whenever plcs affect some sort of emotional feeling – like caring about our health or happiness or the softness of our skin or having a lovely Christmas – we just have to so immediately, completely and instinctively know it’s a lie that it’s not even worth the time it takes to express it. Product and price are all we want to hear from them – everything else is deception.

  So when Cancer Research UK describes this transparent and desperate campaign as “staggering hypocrisy”, it depresses me because it implies that the charity would give any statement from Philip Morris International an open-minded hearing. And that would be, at best, a total waste of time.

  What I think Cancer Research UK should have said is this: huge corporations like Philip Morris International spend a lot of money on research, so if they think this tawdry attempt to curry favour will work, then it probably will. Significant numbers of people will be fooled into believing that a company, the main product of which has caused millions of premature deaths, can have its customers’ health interests at heart. Significant sections of the public are listening uncritically to what corporations tell them and taking it at face value. That is nothing less than a national education emergency.

  3

  I Am Become Death.com

  A jaunty glance at the commercial impact of the internet.

  By the time you’re using a password, something has gone wrong. It’s the same as with a bulletproof vest, or a bouncer outside a bar. I’m not against bulletproof vests per se but, if I ever find myself in circumstances where I reckon I should put one on before popping to the shops, something will definitely have gone wrong – either with the neighbourhood or my own mental health.

  Similarly, the presence of a muscly, suited man outside a pub doesn’t make me think that peace is more likely to reign as I make my selection from their wide range of real ales. It makes me think there’ll be a fight and that I shouldn’t risk the seafood. (It’s virtually impossible to maintain high culinary standards when the chef thinks his efforts might get smashed into someone’s face after a goal.)

  Passwords strike me as this kind of precaution. They bespeak danger. They’re the sort of thing that gets used in wars to help spot Nazis in the dark; they’re what thieves come up with to protect their loot-filled magical caves; they’re admittedly also what children employ in games, but these are games about gangsters and robbers and crime, not about shopping, buying cinema tickets or sponsoring someone’s charity run.

  So my concerns about a nightmarish dystopian future were not much allayed by the announcement of a new system whereby you’ll have to provide a password in order to obtain food. I’m referring to the launch of Amazon Fresh, a new grocery shopping service from the tax-avoiding scourge of the world’s high streets. Initially available only in London, the company presumably hopes that it’ll soon be rolled out across the UK, like commerce-smothering death-pastry, and then throughout the world, and that ultimately all other ways of buying anything at all will cease and everyone will stay holed up in their homes in feverish anticipation of the next drone-borne aid parcel.

  But how is this any different, you may be asking, from online supermarket shopping, which has been going for years? That also requires a password. That’s also sitting in your home waiting for the food to arrive. Why scaremonger now?

  The Amazon announcement made me realise how much comfort I derive from knowing the name and whereabouts of the shop from which online groceries ostensibly come. If your online Tesco, Sainsbury’s or even Ocado account stops working – perhaps MI5 has frozen it because it reckons you’re in Isis – at least you can still go to Tesco, Sainsbury’s or Waitrose and buy the food in a password-free, non-identity-disclosing cash transaction.

  With Amazon, you can’t. You can’t go there, you can’t ring it up. It’s some warehouses somewhere, registered for tax purposes somewhere else. That’s altogether too shadowy a set-up to rely on for food. It would be like signing up for a meals-on-wheels service run by a Bond villain.

  The prevalence of online passwords is, when you really think about it, an arresting sign of the malevolence of the environment in which we spend so much of our time. The internet can’t really be policed; its ultra-connected nature means that the goodwill of the majority counts for little, since villainy and opportunity can find each other instantly. If you do the equivalent of leaving your front door unlocked, an infinite number of burglar-bots are immediately trying the handle. Why do we want to be somewhere so hazardous? I wouldn’t go on a cruise if I had to keep a cutlass to hand in case of pirates.

  Even those who represent law and order in the virtual world aren’t very reassuring. Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, gave an interview at the Cheltenham Science Festival last week in which the most consoling phrase he could conjure up was “not yet”. “That apocalyptic vision, we are not quite there yet,” was his response to a question about a lone hacker wiping out a whole city. “It could be 10 to 20 years off,” was his view on “quantum computing”, which would be powerful enough to crack all currently available forms of encryption, wiping out privacy for ever.

  He complemented this deferred doom-mongering with the familiar blaming of “80 to 90%” of cyber-attacks on people who had easily guessable passwords, and the classic security service chief’s nebulous allusion to potential loss of life if they don’t get their way. On the Edward Snowden leaks and subsequent reporting, he said: “We do know that terrorists we were tracking before Snowden disappeared after … It’s possible people died as a result …” This strikes me as an odd combination of blaming private citizens for failing to be zealous enough in keeping their own secrets and also blaming private citizens for failing to be zealous enough in keeping the state’s secrets.

  I think he’s wrong on both counts. I don’t fundamentally object to the government having official secrets – I reckon it’s probably a necessary evil – but if the secrets get out, surely the blame lies with the government agencies? If they take someone untrustworthy into their confidence, it’s their fault. On the other hand, web-based institutions’ insistence that we all hold dozens of unguessable streams of letters and numbers in our heads, or else risk haemorrhaging cash and privacy, seems a heavy yoke for us to bear for those companies’ trading convenience.

  After all, the online world isn’t necessarily that convenient for the general public. Granted, it makes it easier to get things delivered, but at the expense of shops where you used to be able to go and buy those things that day. It streamlines correspondence, but often in a way that makes the companies we work for more efficient, rather than improving our own quality of life. It
facilitates some chat and fun, but often in environments that are prey to bullying, grooming and fraud, and are an unsatisfactory substitute for real-world human interaction.

  These are flimsy advantages to set against the widespread debasement of intellectual property and the facilitation of terrorism and sexual crime. The fact that it’s too late to go back now doesn’t mean there’s no point asking if it was worth it. Speaking personally, and selfishly, I’d have to own many more shares in Amazon and Google to feel that it was.

  * * *

  Here’s a tip for the dynamic go-getter on a time and money budget who’s determined to live the luxurious dream: when eating your lunchtime Pot Noodle, try putting on a CD of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. It’ll make everything seem so posh. Just close your eyes and each chemical forkful will be transformed to caviar as it crosses your tongue. Or, if not quite caviar, maybe a high-end ready meal. Or some toast made from expensive bread. At the very least, it’ll elevate your perception of the quality of any jam you happen to be eating. How much probably depends on you, but on average it’s 5%.

  This is one of the key findings of a recent survey: classical music isn’t just good for discouraging teens from loitering around tube stations, it also makes shoppers overrate a product’s quality by about a twentieth. The purpose of the study was to find out how our purchasing choices are affected by sounds.

  That’s actually not true: the real purpose of the survey was to point out to everyone that eBay UK is 15 years old. I doubt whether, deep down, anyone much cares how our purchasing choices are affected by sounds (unless your drug dealer’s use of Elgar has made you mistake normal cannabis for skunk). But some people do care that eBay UK is 15 – mostly because it’s their job to try to keep everyone perpetually mindful of eBay UK’s existence, and an anniversary provides a very-slightly-more-interesting-than-usual angle on their Sisyphean awareness-maintaining task.

  (By the way, I’m sorry I have to keep saying eBay UK, rather than just eBay – but that’s because eBay, the American bit, isn’t 15, it’s 18. It’s 19 next month, in fact. So it’s not like the whole of eBay is 15 – that would obviously be massive news.)

  In honour of this divisible-by-five birthday of a subsidiary, the people at eBay UK decided to pay some other people to care about how our purchasing choices are affected by sounds – just to show they can; to demonstrate the awesome power of money, like the son of a plutocrat making a nun do a striptease in exchange for a massive orphanage-saving donation.

  The Mother Superior in nipple tassels here is Patrick Fagan, an expert in consumer behaviour at Goldsmiths, University of London, who headed up the survey, and who had the support of a convent of a further 2,000 metaphorical gyrating nuns. These participants were monitored as they engaged in simulated online shopping while various noises were played around them, and then analysis was done on how the different hubbubs had affected their eye for a bargain.

  Like classical music, the burble of a restaurant made them more spendthrift, while football commentary and pop music increased the canniness of their decisions. So Beethoven makes things seem classy, and Girls Aloud makes them seem cheap. Cheap as in shoddy, not cheap as in inexpensive – that’s the sort of cheap Beethoven makes them seem. The survey provided no insight into people’s reasons for buying a budgie.

  The clever thing about the study is the implied dig at high street retailers. Only when shopping online – or onphone, ontablet or ongamesconsole – do people have any control over the ambient noise amid which they make their purchases. If you’re shopping in an actual shop, the management decides what you hear, and this survey leaves them with a stark choice: play classical music and come across as profiteers, or play pop and make their wares seem shit. Those horrible, physically existent shops are the manipulative ones, the survey is saying, impoverishing you with their piped-in Vivaldi. You know where you are with the internet – it’s clean and modern and honest, and not just a bunch of amoral data-pillagers denuding our city centres of commerce.

  Facebook is also jumping on to the Rapacious-Internet-Giants-4-Transparency bandwagon. It’s trying out a scheme whereby spoof or humorous articles will automatically be tagged with the word “Satire”, like in the Monty Python Architect Sketch, but this time not as a joke but as a joke killer.

  The joy of websites such as the Onion is that the daft, surreal or satirical is presented as if it’s news. Like The Day Today on television, it deports itself in a parody of the vanity and hyperbole shown by the institutions with which we keep ourselves informed. This gives its satire another dimension, which would be completely undermined if all its items were pre-labelled by Facebook. It would be like watching a sitcom during which the caption “This programme has been created in an attempt to amuse” perpetually flashes. If you tell someone something’s supposed to be funny, they’re much less likely to find it so, because a large part of what makes people laugh is surprise. This scheme has all the humour-sapping banality of a continuity announcer putting a chuckle in his voice when referring to the zaniness of the comedy show he’s introducing, and doesn’t even carry the same implication of approval.

  And why is Facebook doing it? To help people so thick that, if they’ve got internet access, they must surely be beyond saving – it can only be a matter of time before they take out huge pay-day loans and put all the money on red – or those so voracious in their thirst for outrage that they won’t allow a synapse beat of thought between reading something and typing a crazed response. It’s the witless pandering to the thoughtless.

  In fact, it’s more sinister than that. This is being done so that Facebook, like eBay UK, can come across as safe and reliable. Comedy and nuance are just collateral damage in the corporation’s ploy to try to look like it doesn’t wish to deceive you. The “Satire” label is designed to make you think that Facebook has your (rather than its) best interests at heart. It’s trying to create a pervading false sense of security in which to make us all its data bitch. That’s a far more ambitious scheme for inducing imprudence than piping in some Mozart.

  eBay UK turned 20 this year. I hope you at least sent a card.

  * * *

  “In the UK, we are spending £97bn of public money on treating disease and only £8bn preventing it,” says health secretary Matt Hancock. “You don’t have to be an economist to see those numbers don’t stack up.” But Matt Hancock actually is an economist, so how does he know? I suppose he might have canvassed the views of some non-economists, but I’m sceptical about how rigorous that survey can have been.

  “Hi Chris, Linda …” (good to get a gender balance) “… have you got a second?” Hancock may have asked his aides. “Of course, minister.” “You did classics and history respectively, right?” “That’s right.” (Chris is doing all the talking – come on, Linda!) “Great, so we’re spending £97bn on treating disease and only £8bn preventing it. Can you see that those numbers don’t stack up?” “Oh yes, absolutely,” says Chris. “Yes indeed, minister,” adds Linda.

  It is possible that on such flimsy evidence rests the secretary of state’s claim that “you don’t have to be an economist to see those numbers don’t stack up”. And obviously they do stack up. As in, you could stack them up – you could add them together. They probably are stacked up in various summaries of government spending: stacked up under the heading “Health”. You don’t have to be an economist to see that, if you stacked them up, that would make £105bn.

  I don’t think he means that, though. I think maybe he means that £97bn is much more than £8bn. His point may simply be that you don’t have to be an economist to see that 97 is a larger number than eight. If so, I heartily agree, and my only quibble is why, even with Britain’s rising life expectancy, for which Matt Hancock is doubtless keen to take credit, he considered that assertion worth the time it took to express.

  To be fair, I think what he’s getting at is that, if we spent more than £8bn on preventing illness, maybe we wouldn’t need to spend
as much as £97bn treating it. Unfortunately, though, you don’t have to be an economist to know whether that contention stacks up. In fact, you have to be something else. You need a completely different type of expertise.

  And, in an ideal world, you’d want every extra pound spent on prevention to save more than a pound spent on treatment – otherwise you’re just swapping money about. Matt Hancock clearly reckons it would, and it seems plausible up to a point, but it’s not as obvious as knowing that 97 is more than eight, and the naughty man is trying to make us think it is.

  What I don’t believe, by the way, is that, if you spent £97bn on prevention, you’d hardly have to spend anything at all on treatment. And, even if that did happen, it would be a disaster because it would quickly become impossible to defend the £97bn. It would look like it was being frittered away on nothing. People hate spending a fortune on fire prevention unless they can see that lots of things are on fire.

  This is a problem constantly faced by those who seek to justify counter-terrorism spending. If they foil all the plots, no one appreciates them. So they keep the alert level scary and bang on about how many plots they’re foiling. I’m sure they’re telling the truth (by which I mean: they may be telling the truth), but there’s no doubt that it’s failing to foil terrorist plots, rather than foiling them, that has the greatest government-purse-string-loosening effect.

  This isn’t a problem for Matt Hancock, because I don’t think justifying greater health spending is his primary aim. So what is his aim? The context for his remarks was the launch of a Department of Health “vision document” entitled “Prevention Is Better Than Cure”. No one could argue with that idea. But when politicians go around saying something with which no one could possibly disagree, there’s usually something with which millions absolutely would lurking beneath it. And so it proved.