I can make you hate

by Charlie Brooker

  Google’s final straw

  12/09/2010

  Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band.

  I entered the room at 10.30 a.m. Because I was interested in the phone-hacking story, I’d set up an automatic Twitter search for the term ‘Coulson’ (eavesdropping, essentially: he’d hate it). Whenever someone mentioned his name, a window would pop up in the corner of my screen to alert me. Often their messages included a link to a webpage, which I’d end up skim-reading. This was on top of the other usual web distractions: emails, messageboards, self-deluding ‘research’ on Wikipedia, and so on.

  By 1 p.m. I’d written precisely three lines of script. Yet my fingers had scarcely left the keyboard. My brain felt like a loose, whirring wheel that span with an audible buzz yet never quite touched the ground.

  At around 2 p.m., Google announced the final straw.

  I’m starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.

  That afternoon, it unveiled a new feature called Google Instant. It delivers search results before you’ve finished typing them. So now, if I visit Google and start typing my own name, it shows me links to Craigslist the moment I hit ‘C’. When I add the ‘H’, up pops the homepage for Chase online banking. By the time I’ve spelt out ‘Charlie’, I’m presented with a synopsis and review score for Charlie St Cloud, a film starring Zac Efron. Add a ‘Br’ and Charlie Brown gazes back at me.

  As the name suggests, this all happens instantly. It’s the internet on fast-forward, and it’s aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can’t even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.

  Naturally, Google is trumpeting it as the best thing since sliced time. In a promotional video, a likable codger gives it a spin and exclaims, ‘I didn’t even have to press enter!’ This from a man old enough to remember drying his clothes with a mangle. Google may have released him from the physical misery of pressing enter, but it’s destroyed his sense of perspective in the process.

  But this isn’t just about ease of use: it’s about productivity too. Google proudly claims it reduces the average search time by two to five seconds. ‘That may not seem like a lot at first’, it says, ‘but it adds up.’

  Cool. Maybe now I’ll get round to completing that symphony.

  What with phone calls, texts, emails and Coulson tweets, that two-to-five-second period spent typing search terms into a soothing white screen was one of the only relaxing lulls in my day. I didn’t realise it at the time but, compared to Google Instant, it feels like a slow walk through a calm meadow.

  My attention span was never great, but modern technology has halved it, and halved it again, and again and again, down to an atomic level, and now there’s nothing discernible left. Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100 per cent physically present. I wasn’t using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm. (Apart from ‘enter’, obviously. I didn’t even have to press that.)

  By 5.30 p.m. I’d written half a paragraph. I went home in disgust.

  In desperation that evening, I used Google Instant to hunt for solutions, and stumbled across something called the Pomodoro Technique. Put simply, it’s a method for retraining your attention span. You set a kitchen timer, and try to work without interruption for twenty-five minutes. Then you take a five-minute break. Then you work for another twenty-five minutes. And so on. It sounded easy, so I disconnected my net connection and gave it a try. By the time I went to bed I’d gone through three ‘Pomodoro cycles’ and written 1,856 words of script.

  I’d heard of repentant slobs using a similar regime to ease themselves into the habit of exercise: run for ninety seconds, walk for ninety seconds, then repeat the cycle until your fitness increases and you can run to Gwent and back in time for Emmerdale. I never thought I’d have to do something similar for my attention span simply to maintain my own sanity.

  Just as muscles ache the morning after your first exercise in months, so I can feel my brain ache between each twenty-five-minute bout of concentration. But there’s something else there too: a flickering sense of control.

  So, from now on, I’m rationing my internet usage and training my mind muscles for the future. Because I can see where it’s heading: a service called Google Assault that doesn’t even bother to guess what you want, and simply hurls random words and sounds and images at you until you dribble all the fluid out of your body. And I know it’ll kill me, unless I train my brain to withstand and ignore it. For me, the war against the machines has started in earnest.

  Falling face-first into a meat sofa

  19/09/2010

  What with all the hoo-hah surrounding the Pope’s recent British holiday, the news that Nando’s has bought the Gourmet Burger Kitchen chain for £30m may have escaped your attention.

  In many ways it’s the twenty-first-century equivalent of Little Chef absorbing Wimpy, albeit markedly more middle-class than that. Both chains specialise in upmarket fast food: the kind of place you don’t feel thoroughly ashamed to be seen in, unlike their more established and reviled mass-market competitors.

  One cold morning about two years ago, I sat in the window of a McDonald’s tucking into a sausage-and-egg McMuffin. It was a bit like sinking my teeth into a small, soft woodland creature with a light dusting of flour; one which thoroughly enjoyed being eaten and responded to each bite by gently urinating warm oil down my chin.

  It was a strangely comforting experience, until I realised that some – not all, but a reasonable percentage – of the passersby outside the window were regarding me with a combination of pity and contempt as they scurried past. Sitting in the window of a McDonald’s, I realised, is a bit like self-harming in a glass booth. People judge you for it.

  Not so the Gourmet Burger Kitchen. It has about fifty branches around the UK, but since most of them are in London, chances are you haven’t visited one. It’s a posher, ostensibly healthier Burger King: fresh, chargrilled, 100 per cent Aberdeen Angus patties served inside buns ‘made to a secret recipe by our artisan baker’. But that much you could probably guess from the name. What’s truly shocking, the first time you’re confronted with a Gourmet Burger, is the sheer quantity of food involved. Eating one is a bit like attempting to cram a fortnight’s worth of clothing into a child-size suitcase, or falling face-first into a meat sofa.

  You’ve got two options: tackle it with a knife and fork (the coward’s way out), or dislocate your jaw in the manner of a boa constrictor swallowing a foal, and heave it into your gullet, driving it home like a Victorian taskmaster pushing a buttered eight-year-old into a narrow chimney flue, taking care not to let the top half of the snooty artisan bap smother your nostrils on the way in.

  Order chips, incidentally, and your burger will be accompanied by a generous helping of deep-fried slabs the size and weight of piano keys. Eat there at lunchtime and you’ll spend the rest of the day feeling as if you’re incubating an immense, spherical beef-baby. And caesarean delivery sadly isn’t an option. Before bedtime, you’ll understand how it might feel to give birth to a banister.

  Even though a posh cheeseburger contains roughly 805 calories, compared with 490 calories in a Big Mac, there’s no shame attached to the public enguzzlem
ent of Gourmet Burgers, partly because of the emphasis on fresh ingredients, but mainly because it’s a thoroughly middle-class form of indulgence. (Don’t get me wrong, I like a Gourmet gutbuster now and then – but I couldn’t honestly say I enjoy it more than a Burger King Whopper. Both are definitely superior to the Big Mac, however; to my mind, Big Macs taste a bit like a burger that’s just been sick down its own front on a long car journey.)

  Nando’s, while not as posh as GBK, serves up spicy flame-grilled chicken, which makes eating there feel decidedly less shameful than a trip to KFC (fair enough, since eating KFC is like squeezing a sponge full of poultry-flavoured oil into your gob). But the health benefit of Nando’s flame-grilling technique is perhaps slightly offset by the endless free drink refills; while gnawing at their chicken, your diet-conscious kiddywinks can guzzle as much cola as their guts can withstand.

  So, then. It seems the key to nurturing a successful chain of fast-food restaurants in modern Britain is to provide a less reprehensible version of something popular (burgers for GBK; chicken’n’chips for Nando’s), while still enabling your customers to indulge in potentially ruinous gluttony.

  It’s a simple formula, and I think I’ve spotted a gap in the market: fry-ups. Everyone loves a full English breakfast, but the traditional greasy spoon has an image problem. I propose a chain of health-conscious caffs where the eggs are free-range, the tea and coffee are Fairtrade, and the sausages and bacon are cooked on George Foreman grills, right there at the table.

  Oh, and the meat in the sausages and bacon comes from the customers themselves. Your first cup of tea contains a local anaesthetic; while you read your paper, simply slice a thin rasher of thigh off your leg and pop it on the grill. Two rashers if you want to lose weight. It’s the ultimate in locally sourced produce: 100 per cent organic, extremely environmentally friendly, and, if taken up by large numbers of people, it will go some way to solving the global food crisis.

  The only downside I can think of is the blood leakage, although I’m sure, given time, I’ll think of a solution. Probably involving vinyl seats and black pudding.

  I only need a couple of million to get going. Who’s in?

  Fuck sport

  27/09/2010

  Ministers are concerned that Britain’s schoolkids aren’t doing enough team sports. Good for them. The kids, that is. Not the ministers. I’ll dumbly and instinctively side with anyone trying to bunk off games. Apart from preventing obesity and heart attacks and diabetes and high blood pressure and premature death, what exactly is school sport good for?

  The benefits aren’t merely physical, grunt the experts, through their thick, sport-liking mouths. Team games build character. I can’t argue with that. They certainly helped strengthen the more cunning and resentful elements of my personality.

  Yep, like most dweeby types, I hated having to ‘do’ games at school, mainly because of an inherent physical laziness, but also because of the psychological challenges involved. In my eyes, PE was a twice-weekly period of anarchy during which the school’s most aggressive pupils were formally permitted to dominate and torment those they considered physically inferior. Perhaps if the whole thing had been pitched as an exercise in interactive drama intended to simulate how it might feel to live in a fascist state run by thick schoolboys – an episodic, improvised adaptation of Lord of the Flies in uniform sportswear – I’d have appreciated it more. But no.

  It goes without saying that the vast majority of sporty kids weren’t bullies at all – but like a bigot blaming anyone vaguely brown for the actions of nineteen arseholes on 9/11, I developed my prejudice long ago and still enjoy feeling it fester.

  Thus I harbour a deep and unwarranted suspicion of anyone with the faintest interest in sport. If you can glance at a shuttlecock without being sick, I will never truly like you. That’s what school sport did for me.

  And I wasn’t even bullied on the pitch myself, not being quite wimpy enough to be the very last pick (towards the bum of the list, yes, but not the absolute final quivering cheek hair). But I watched the more hopeless specimens being shoved around, threatened, and insulted simply for being ‘bad at games’, and understood I had more in common with them than their aggressors. If – as seemed likely – the big kids finally managed to kill their prey, they’d start on me next. And what then? How could I avoid a thumping? What did I know about bullies?

  Not much. My only significant run-in with a bona fide thug occurred during an entry-level metalwork class, when a rough and intimidating boy demanded the immediate use of a lathe I was operating. Having been taught by every children’s TV show ever made that the best tactic with bullies is to stand up to them, I gruffly told him to wait his turn.

  He stared at me with a sort of bored, affronted blankness for several seconds before hitting me unbelievably hard on the arm with an iron bar.

  As I rolled around on the floor in agony, watching him blithely operate the machine, I decided it would’ve been far smarter to meekly relinquish control of the lathe, then get revenge twenty-nine years later by paying a henchman to burn down his house while he and his family slept inside. Not that I did that, you understand.

  I have absolutely no conception of how exhilarating that might feel, nor do I know whether you’d victoriously punch the air upon receiving an emailed cameraphone snap of his terrified wife leaping from an upstairs window with her hair on fire.

  Anyway: back to the football pitch. Standing up to the bullies was no longer a viable option, but nor was magically becoming brilliant at sport. So I quickly adopted a cloaking strategy. Like any nerd worth his salt, I’d spend entire matches psychically commanding the ball not to roll anywhere near me – but whenever it did, I’d do my best to appear willing to participate by 1) charging straight at it, and 2) pulling a disappointed expression when I inevitably failed to do anything worthwhile. Incredibly, this half-arsed pantomime was enough to let me off the hook. The kids who did nothing to mask their terror were the ones who got belted.

  From within my protective pantomime bubble, the self-defeating stupidity of the bullies became fascinating to behold. I realised that, in a sense, their motives were pure. They genuinely cared about the outcome of the game, the idiots. Hence their rage at being forced to work with substandard squad members.

  But they had no grasp of basic psychology. They couldn’t see that each time they monstered a wussy team-mate, they merely reinforced the role of the ball as a harbinger of terrible consequences, thereby increasing the likelihood that said wuss would continue to shy away from it, subsequently causing more frustration for themselves.

  I tried politely explaining this to one of the boot boys once, during a brief fit of self-righteousness brought on by the sight of him booting a mute, shivering weakling hard up the arse. I pointed out that they both looked equally unhappy, and that he was essentially kicking himself. He contemplated this for a moment, then flobbed at me and kicked the weakling slightly harder. I’d have been a crap Jesus. But at least he didn’t have an iron bar, thus unwittingly sparing his family from an inferno decades later.

  All of which means the sole concern I have regarding the current enfeebled state of competitive sports is that fewer school football matches means fewer boys learning how to outwit dunces or feign rudimentary competence in the workplace.

  On the flipside, apparently more kids are doing weird non-team sports such as archery and golf. Yes, golf. Sixty-six per cent of boys get to play golf at school these days. Striding around the wilderness wielding a club? On school time? Never played it myself, but God I envy them.

  MORE HEADLINE TO GO HERE

  03/10/2010

  Messing up in the workplace is never a pleasant sensation, but the very worst kind of boo-boo is the silent-but-deadly variety: a dizzyingly serious error you realise you’ve committed long before anyone else.

  First comes the awful moment of realisation. In this instant, you’re the loneliest person in the world. As the scale of your cock-up sinks in, you fee
l a cold egg of dread being cracked open over your skull, its chilled albumen seeping down your temples, the icy yolk quivering atop your crown like the frozen cherry on a tortured metaphor. This is followed by a brief period of indignant disbelief: how dare the Gods of Fate allow such a terrible thing to happen to a nice person like you, the idiots?

  This defensive psychological distancing lasts about nineteen seconds, before being swept away by a burst of intense self-recrimination, during which you feel like pulling your own brain out and spanking it over your knee. And then finally, an unreal calm takes hold while you weigh up your options: will you immediately own up (the honourable thing to do, although you could get fired)? Or will you slyly wait, you snake, to see how things pan out, in the hope that maybe – just maybe – you’ll dodge the culpability-bomb when it all comes to light?

  Maybe they’ll mistakenly blame Tom. You know Tom. Nice bloke. Works hard. Keeps his head down. Recently became a dad for the first time. Hope they sack the fuck out of him.

  Presumably, a similar scenario played out in someone’s mind last week, when it transpired that 80,000 copies of the wrong draft of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom – a 576-page whopper, hailed by some critics as a masterpiece – had inadvertently been printed, bound and distributed. Someone, it seems, had picked up the wrong digital file of the book.

  At first glance, this looks like an almighty disaster, albeit an understandable one. Like anyone who’s ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I’m writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as finalscript2a.doc and finalscript1b-ignore-all-others-and-use-this.doc and finalscript1c-i-am-spartacus.doc.