A startling number of the most vicious messages seemed to come from angry Justin Bieber fans – people who actually enjoy listening to the dickless mewlings of this quasi-sentient boy thing.
STILL: Justin Bieber.
CHARLIE: Just to be clear, a Justin Bieber fan moaning about a banal pop song is like someone gargling a mouthful of skunk piss complaining that the dog’s blown off in the corner. Anyway this high-tech hate mob did affect Rebecca – as an illuminating interview on Good Morning America made clear.
VT: Rebecca Black on Good Morning America explaining that the messages made her cry.
CHARLIE: Impossible not to feel sorry for her. Still quite an annoying voice though. But to address the members of the Rebecca Black hate mob directly for a moment –
CB turns to camera two.
CHARLIE: Dear imbeciles – thanks to your hard work, Rebecca Black, who you dismissed as a hopeless wannabe, is now a bona fide megastar.
Shots of Rebecca Black on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
CHARLIE: Look! Here she is on an edition of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, just like you’ll never be. See? She’s famous. Perhaps you’d like a picture of that image …
CB holds up a screengrab of Rebecca Black on The Tonight Show in a golden frame.
CHARLIE: … to hang it on the wall of your home so you can look at it every morning before going to work in the shitty megachain burger outfit you’ll be trapped in forever – selling Happy Meals with Rebecca Black’s face on them …
CB holds up prop burger box: the Rebecca Black Happy Meal.
CHARLIE: … like this, because of you – and as you pass these to customers who, accurately, look at you like you’re nothing, you’ll hear Rebecca Black’s song looping on the in-store Muzak system, while you slave away behind the counter five days a week, from Monday through to Friday, Friday: you gotta get down on Friday – because that’s the day you mop the fucking floor.
The occasional kick to the face
03/04/2011
So a few weeks ago I was on television, doing a little comic ‘bit’ about unfocused online haters, the climax of which involved me going into a diatribe wherein I angrily imagined one of them toiling away behind the counter of a fast-food restaurant. And shortly after it aired I received tweets and comments from people complaining I was a snob: that I was in effect saying anyone who works in a burger bar is a scummy non-person; a grunting subservient ape-slave deserving nothing but open scorn and the occasional kick to the face, provided it’s their birthday.
That hadn’t been my intention, but I can see why some people interpreted it that way (thanks to some clumsy writing on my part, and an absent ‘qualifying’ section, which got excised at the last minute). Anyway, it bugged me. It bugged me because although I’ve never worked in a fast-food restaurant, I did spend several years working as a shop assistant – and during that time I learned, as anyone who spends their week standing behind a counter quickly learns, that the worst kind of customers are the ones who think they’re automatically superior to you just because you’re serving them. The ones who pop into Debenhams and suddenly think they’re Henry VIII inspecting the serfs.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one. The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.
The first surprise is that when it comes to arrogant customers, class isn’t as big a factor as you might assume. True, I’d occasionally get a stereotypical ex-public-schoolboy blurting requests in my direction as though addressing a programmable service droid, or openly scolding me as if I was a failing member of his personal waiting staff – but the most overtly boorish behaviour came courtesy of people who weren’t posh at all, but seemed to want to increase their own social standing by treating the person serving them like scum.
Then there were the people for whom even basic civility was an alien concept. I vividly recall one guy who sloped in wearing a loose pair of tracksuit trousers, absentmindedly playing with his own bollocks as he entered. He stood at the counter, scanning the display behind me and obliviously juggling his goolies – at one point literally reaching inside to re-arrange his collection – and then wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sucked the slime off it, pointed at an item he was interested in and said: ‘Show me that.’ Moments later he started an argument about how much it cost, demanded a discount, and, when I refused, called me an arsehole and knocked a load of boxes off a shelf by the door as he left. Based on that one five-minute encounter, more than seventeen years ago, I’d be prepared to bet that man is today either dead or in jail. And probably still playing with his nuts.
But incidents like that were few and far between, partly because there was one major difference between the shop I was working in and almost every other shop in the world: you were allowed to talk back to the customers. In fact a certain level of sweary piss-taking was actively encouraged. It gave the place character, made the working day more fun, and reminded the frazzled shopper, on autopilot after several hours on Oxford Street, that they were dealing with a fellow human being.
Everyone who works in a shop should be allowed to openly take the piss out of their customers. It’s far more British than the strain of imported corporate civility-by-numbers that megachain staff are sometimes forced to recite: the robotic ‘How can I help you?’ mantras that only really make sense in America, because they’re so friendly they actually mean it. The words don’t feel false in their mouths. If I ran a national burger franchise – which I don’t – I’d make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words, and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.
Yes, laughing staff. That’s the other irritating assumption people make about working in shops, especially burger bars – that the job must be so dismal, every single employee shuffles about in a perpetual state of misery, actively welcoming death. That only the utterly desperate or dumb could possibly stick it out. These characteristics could apply to almost any job, of course. What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn’t the occasional snooty customer, or the shop, or the hours, but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant – their automatic assumption that I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t particularly enjoy my life at the time, but I did enjoy the job. Not every day, not constantly – but I liked it more than I disliked it. Maybe I’m odd. Maybe I was lucky and had unusually entertaining co-workers. Or maybe there are far, far worse things you could do.
Like judging people.
Unless you’re a judge.
In which case, continue.
The imp of the mind
10/04/2011
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we’ve grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester. VHS, the Walkman, fax machines, CD-Roms, pagers, dial-up modems … all consigned to the same wing of the museum housing the mangle and the horse-drawn plough.
The junk mountain grows by the day. If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen. Everyone’s opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.
Now it’s almost time to hurl another outmoded device down the historical garbage chute: your body. Last week, researchers at W
ashington University unveiled a new mind-control computer system. Traditional mind-control systems – and the fact that any mind-control system can be referred to as ‘traditional’ shows you how nuts-deep into the future we already are – require the user to don an EEG skullcap before thinking very hard about specific actions. The resultant brainwaves are then crudely interpreted and the device reacts accordingly. But practical use is severely restricted thanks to the human skull, which muffles some signals and amplifies others. It’s like trying to work out what your neighbours are up to by pressing your ear against the wall: fun, but often wildly misleading.
Which is where electrocorticography comes in. Electrocorticography basically means ‘sticking sensors directly on to the surface of the brain’. Once you’ve done that, you get a far more reliable signal. Already they’ve had volunteers controlling an onscreen cursor by imagining different vowel sounds. As soon as they refine it further, giving the user the ability to steer the pointer around and click on things, the days of mass-market Wi-Fi mind-controlled iPads will be upon us before you can smother your kids in their sleep to protect them from precisely such a future.
But is this really so sinister? All computers are mind-controlled already. My hand may steer the mouse and my fingers may punch the keys, but none of this takes place without my mental say-so. My brain runs things round here. Surely all a mind-controlled interface does is cut out the corporeal middleman, leaving your fingers free to do something more useful, such as plugging your ears so you can’t hear the horrified screams spontaneously exploding from your facehole? What’s the problem?
The problem is that the body is the final, crucial buffer between the skittish human mind and the slavish machine servant. Think of how many furious email responses you’ve composed in haste, only to halt and reflect at the final moment as your finger hovers over the ‘send’ button. The simple fact that a small physical action is required to actually deliver the damn thing is often enough to give pause for thought.
When mind-controlled computers become a commonplace reality, you’ll have typed and sent that message in the time it takes to stub a toe; as quick as pulling a facial expression, but more detailed, and full of swearwords.
And while your brain might be great at controlling machines, how great are you at controlling your brain? What if, ten years in the future, you’re watching a cartoon on your futuristic 3D computer television, and the cartoon’s got a rabbit in it, and the rabbit’s slightly coquettish and flirty, and the knowing way it flicks that cotton tail as it hops makes you think about sex momentarily, and before you know it, your brain’s retrieved some disgraceful bestial rabbit porn from the very worst corners of the Ultranet, and is relaying it on the display in lurid ninety-six-inch holographic guttervision just as your wife and kid come back from the shops? And then, drunk on self-destructive power, your computer-mind takes a four-second video-snapshot of your own child’s horrified gasping face and mischievously scribbles a load of penises and swastikas all over it, and uploads this vandalised looping portrait to your 3D holographic Facebook page accompanied by a headline screaming ‘WITNESS MY NADIR – JUDGE ME! JUDGE ME! JUDGE ME ONE AND ALL!’
Let’s face it, if you’re honest, there’s a whole world of shit routinely fizzing and popping around in your head that you wouldn’t want a computer to unquestioningly act on. Remember: when they triumphantly unveil an iPhone that lets you dial your sweetheart simply by thinking about their face, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s wonderful. It’s a slippery slope. Resist the mind probe. Thicken your skull. Staple a doormat around it if necessary. Keep those thoughts trapped inside where they belong. Because if the imp of the mind ever sidesteps the body and gets its hand directly on the steering wheel, humankind can look forward to six months of unpredictable chaos, then doomsday.
PART SEVEN
In which tabloid journalists make the world worse, Ed Miliband tumbles into a vortex, and cars are driven too quickly.
Making the world worse
17/04/2011
Week 396, and the phone-hacking affair continues, prompting onlookers to wonder how much more pus can possibly seep out. Rather than lancing the boil, the official apology seems to have pricked a hole in an entire dimension of fetid, boiling pus, and sent it belching and bubbling into our world.
More arrests. More searches. More claims about who was hacked – celebs, sportsmen, politicians all had their privacy invaded. But let’s not forget the real victims here. What about the tabloid journalists? Not just from the News of the World or the Sun. All the tabloid journalists. Spare a thought for them.
Because it can’t be easy being a tabloid hack at the best of times. Sure, there’s the camaraderie, the sense of power, the rush of skulduggery, the thrill of feeling like one of the chosen few who can see through the Matrix, but these are illusory compensations, sweatily constructed by your quaking, sobbing psyche in a bid to counterweigh the cavernous downside: the awful knowledge that you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse.
Chances are you’re quite smart. And you probably love to write – or did, once, back then, before … before the fall. Now you’re writing nothing but NYAHH NYAHH NYAHH ad nauseam. You use the only brain you’ll ever have to puke out endless gutfuls of cheap gossip or crude propaganda. Half the time you’re wrecking lives and the other half you’re filling your readers’ heads with nakedly misleading straw-man fairytales. Every now and then something might come along to temporarily justify your existence: a political scoop; a genuine outrage … but do you build on it? No. You retreat to the warm cave of your celebrity chef shag-shocks and your tragic tot death-porn double-pagers: wasting your life actively making the world worse.
I suppose the best way to cope with the dull, constant, pulsing awareness that you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse is to somehow bewitch yourself into believing you’re actively making the world better. That by writing about a footballer’s bedroom exploits you’re fearlessly exposing the ugly truth behind the wholesome public image and blah blah role model blah blah fans’ hard-earned cash blah blah sanctimony blah. Hey – whatever works for you, yeah? Dress as a priest if it helps. We all know you’re just grubbily recounting a sex act for our fleeting amusement, like a radio commentator describing two pigs rutting in a sty.
Another strategy, I guess, would be to focus on the fun of the job, to see it as one long naughty jape. To swap tales about Fleet Street legends of yesteryear and consider yourself a fellow swashbuckling pirate. Hey, what about the time you disguised yourself as a doctor tee hee and the time you blagged your way on to the Emmerdale set ho ho and the time you spent three hours rooting through a dustbin hurr hurr. No, please, please, don’t tell us now – save all this for your memoirs: MY LIFE AS A NON-STOP TITTERSOME RAG WEEK PRANKSTER.
Successfully forging the belief that tabloid journalism is a worthwhile use of your brief time on this planet must require a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo. This is one reason why so many tabloid stories are routinely peppered with lies – if their staff didn’t continually flex their delusion muscles, a torrent of dark, awful self-awareness might rush into their heads like unforgiving black water pouring through the side of a stricken submarine, and they’d all slash their wrists open right there at their workstations. The newsroom hubbub would be regularly broken by the dispiriting thump of lifeless heads thunking on to desks. Each morning their bosses would have to clear all the spent corpses away with a bulldozer and hire a fresh team of soon-to-be-heartbroken lifewasters to replace the ones who couldn’t make it, whose powers of self-deception simply weren’t up to the job. Who couldn’t cope with the knowledge that they were wasting their lives actively making the world worse.
And now – on top of all of these trials and indignities, on top of the harrowing leukaemia-of-the-soul their career choice inflicts upon them – now their job has got even harder. Because for a while, at least, wasting your life actively making the world worse was relatively easy. You
could pay someone to root through someone’s dustbins. Then, when the early mobiles arrived, you could get a £59 frequency scanner and sit outside a soap star’s flat, surreptitiously recording their calls. And when phones went digital, there was the voicemail wheeze, which made life even easier. You could sit at your desk illegally invading the privacy of strangers just by pushing buttons.
But now, having abused all those tricks, like they abused their talent – not for any noble cause, but to find out which girlband member snogged which boyband member – those easy games are up. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time: with plummeting sales, the need for sensational stories is higher than ever. All of which means all those people wasting their lives actively making the world worse will now have to expend colossal effort in order to do so: like prisoners forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves – but with a rubber shovel.
There is no fate more tragic. Pity them. Pity them hard.
*
After the piece above was published a former editor of the Sun emailed me to say, ‘How I don’t miss the leukaemia of the soul. Very perceptive observation.’ Yet despite this ringing endorsement, the article didn’t go down too well with some journalists, who found it unfair, sweeping, accusatory, over-simplistic, one-sided, abusive, lofty, self-important, histrionic, condescending, inaccurate, and many other things tabloid journalists clearly aren’t. In fairness I should’ve specified ‘some’ tabloid journalists in the second paragraph, not ‘all’ tabloid journalists. But that wouldn’t have been as funny.
I can make you hate Page 23