Like I say: another planet.
Make it public! Go on! It’s fun!
29/01/2012
Sharing. Now there’s a basic social concept that has somehow got all out of whack. The idea behind sharing is simple. Let’s say I’m a caveman. I hunt and slaughter a bison, but I can’t eat it all myself, so I share the carcass with others, many of whom really appreciate it, such as my infirm 86-year-old neighbour who hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks because he is incapable of killing anything larger than a woodlouse. Have you tried grilling a woodlouse? It’s scarcely worth the effort.
But it’s not all bison meat. Let’s say I am still a caveman. The other thing I share is information: the thoughts inside my head or stirring tales of the things I have done. I grunt a hilarious anecdote about the time I dropped a huge rock on a duck and an egg popped out, and mime scandalous gossip about well-known tribesmen. I’m the life and soul of the cave-party.
All this sharing served a purpose. It kept the community fed, as well as entertained and informed. Now zip forward to the present day and, like I say, sharing has somehow got all out of whack. A small percentage of the population hoards more bison meat than it could eat in 2,000 lifetimes, awarding itself huge bison meat bonuses on top of its base-rate bison meat ‘salary’. I say ‘bison meat’. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m using it as a clever metaphor for money.
The huge salaries and bonuses, we are told, are essential if we are to prevent this tiny percentage of selfish, hoarding arseholes from moving overseas. Imagine if they flew to Singapore and started selfishly hoarding things over there instead. Drained of their expertise and reassuring presence, how would Britain cope? Within days we’d be walking on all fours and devouring our offspring for food.
I don’t want to panic you, but that’s the reality. Never mind weeping over the size of their bonuses: we should be dropping to our knees and giving them blowjobs, tearfully imploring them to remain seated each time we come up for air. Treble their wages. Form a human ring around Britain’s airports to prevent them from leaving. And for God’s sake don’t ask them to share anything. That kind of talk merely angers them.
Sharing is for the rest of us. Not sharing money or bison meat, but personal information. Where we are. What we’re doing. Share it! Make it public! Go on! It’s fun!
Increasingly, I stumble across apps and services that expect me to automatically share my every waking action on Facebook and Twitter. The key word here is ‘automatically’. Take Spotify, the streaming music service. I have written before about my admiration for Spotify, about what a technical marvel it is. A world of music at your fingertips! Incredible!
The love affair was doomed. Spotify recently reinvented itself as a kind of adjunct to Facebook and has subsequently adopted some truly hideous ‘social features’. For instance: it will tell other people what you’re listening to, live. Yes, you can switch this feature off. That’s not the point. The point is that it does it by default. By default. IT DOES IT BY DEFAULT.
When Sony launched the Walkman back in the late seventies, its main appeal was that for the first time in history you could stroll down the high street listening to Neil Diamond belting out ‘Sweet Caroline’ and no one could judge you for it. It made you the master of a private world of music. If the Walkman had, by default, silently contacted your friends and told them what you were listening to, not only would no one have bought a Walkman in the first place, its designers would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for sharing thoughts, no matter how banal (as every column I have ever written rather sadly proves). Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can’t decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies. People already create exaggerated versions of themselves for online consumption: snarkier tweets, more outraged reactions. Online, you play at being yourself. Apply that pressure of public performance to private, inconsequential actions – such as listening to songs in the comfort of your own room – and what happens, exactly?
It’ll only get worse. Here’s what I am listening to on Spotify. This is the page of the book I am reading. I am currently watching the forty-third minute of a Will Ferrell movie. And I’m not telling you this stuff. The software is. I am a character in The Sims. Hover the cursor over my head and watch that stat feed scroll.
You know how annoying it is when you’re sitting on the train with a magazine and the person sitting beside you starts reading over your shoulder? Welcome to every single moment of your future. Might as well get used to it. It’s an experience we’ll all be sharing.
Yes, sharing. A basic social concept that’s somehow got all out of whack.
A chimps’ tea party of the damned
05/02/2012
There was a minor kerfuffle a few weeks ago when the Daily Mail website overtook the New York Times to become the most popular news site in the world. Liberals can whine all they like, but that’s a formidable achievement, especially considering it’s not really a conventional news site at all, more a big online bin full of pictures of reality stars, with the occasional Stephen Glover column lobbed in to lighten the mood.
The print edition of the paper is edited by Paul Dacre, who is regularly praised by media types for knowing what his customers want, and then selling it to them. This is an extraordinary skill that puts him on the same rarefied level as, say, anyone who works in a shoe shop. Or a bike shop. Or any kind of shop. Or in absolutely any kind of business whatsoever.
Whatever you think about Dacre’s politics, you can’t deny he’s got a job to do, and he does it. Like a peg. Or a ladle. Or even a knee. Dacre is perhaps Britain’s foremost knee.
Curiously, the online version of the Mail has become a hit by doing the reverse of what Dacre is commended for doing. It succeeds by remorselessly delivering industrial quantities of precisely the opposite of what a traditional Mail reader would presumably want to read: frothy stories about carefree young women enjoying themselves. Kim Kardashian or Kelly Brook ‘pour their curves’ into a selection of tight dresses and waddle before the lens and absolutely nobody on the planet gives a toss apart from Mail Online, which is doomed to host the images, and Mail Online’s readers, who flock in their thousands to leave messages claiming to be not in the slightest bit interested in the story they’re reading and commenting on.
Now Mail Online has gone one step further by running a story that not only insults its own readers, but cruelly invites them to underline the insult by making fools of themselves.
In what has to be a deliberate act of ‘trolling’, last Friday it carried a story headlined ‘Rightwingers are less intelligent than left wingers, says study’. In terms of enraging your core readership, this is the equivalent of Nuts magazine suddenly claiming only gay men masturbate to Hollyoaks babes.
The Mail’s report went on to detail the results of a study carried out by a group of Canadian academics, which appears to show some correlation between low childhood intelligence and rightwing politics. It also claimed that stupid people hold right-wing views in order to feel ‘safe’. Other items they hold in order to feel safe include clubs, rocks and dustbin lids. But those are easy to let go of. Political beliefs get stuck to your hands. And the only way to remove them is to hold your brain under the hot tap and scrub vigorously for several decades.
As you might expect, many Mail Online readers didn’t take kindly to a report that strived to paint them as simplistic, terrified dimwits. Many leapt from the tyres they were swinging in to furrow their brows and howl in anger. Others, tragically, began tapping rudimentary responses into the comments box. Which is where the tragi-fun really began.
‘Stupidest study of them all,’ raged a reader called Beth. ‘So were the testers conservative for being so thick or were they left and using a non study to make themselves look better?’ Hmmm. There’s no easy answer to that. Because it doesn’t make sense.
‘Sounds like a BBC study, type of thing they would waste the Licence fee on, load of Cods wallop,’ claimed Terry from Leicester, thereby managing to ignore the findings while simultaneously attacking public service broadcasting for something it hadn’t done. For his next trick, Terry will learn to whistle and shit at the same time.
Not all the respondents were stupid. Some were merely deluded. Someone calling themselves ‘Hillside’ from Sydney claimed: ‘I have an IQ over 200, have six degrees and diplomas and am “right-wing”, as are others I know at this higher level of intelligence.’ His IQ score is particularly impressive considering the maximum possible score on Mensa’s preferred IQ test is 161.
Whatever the numbers: intellectual dick-measuring isn’t to everyone’s tastes anyway. Simply by highlighting his own intelligence ‘Hillside’ alienated several of his commentbox brethren.
‘If there is one person I can not stand and that is a snob who thinks they are intelligent because if they were intelligent and educated they wouldn’t be snobs,’ argued Liz from London. Once you’ve clambered over the broken grammar, deliberately placed at the start of the sentence like a rudimentary barricade of piled-up chairs, there’s a tragic conundrum at work here. She claims intellectual snootiness is ugly, which it is, but unfortunately she says it in such a stupid way it’s impossible for anyone smarter than a steak-and-ale pie not to look down on her. Thus, for Liz, the crushing cycle of snobbery continues.
On and on the comments went, turning a rather stark write-up of a daft-sounding study into a sublime piece of live online performance art. A chimps’ tea party of the damned. The Mail has long been a master at trolling lefties; now it’s mischievously turned on its own readers, and the results could only be funnier if the website came with free plastic lawn furniture for them to lob at the screen. You couldn’t make it up.
You can’t fart a crashing plane back into the sky
12/02/2012
I’m no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is and I’ll emit an unbroken ten-minute ‘um’ through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse. But even an idiot such as me can see that money, as a whole, doesn’t really seem to be working any more.
Money is broken, and until we admit that, any attempts to fix the economy seem doomed to fail. We’re like passengers on a nosediving plane thinking if we all fart hard enough, we can lift it back into the sky. So should we be storming the cockpit or hunting for parachutes instead? I don’t know: I ran out of metaphor after the fart gag. You’re on your own from here on in.
Banknotes aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. If they were, they’d all have identical value. Money’s only worth what the City thinks it’s worth. Or, perhaps more accurately, hopes it’s worth. Coins should really be called ‘wish-discs’ instead. That name alone would give a truer sense of their value than the speculative number embossed on them.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story, or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. It’s certainly nowhere near as well thought-out and executed.
No one really understands how it all works: if they did, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you’ve worked out a system, or open it up when no one’s looking and rig the settings so it’ll pay out illegally.
The chief difference is that slot machines are more familiar and graspable to most of us. When you hear a jackpot being paid out to a gambler, the robotic clunk-clunk-clunk of coin-on-tray, you’re aware that he had to go to some kind of effort to get his reward. You know he stood there pushing buttons for hours. You can picture that.
The recent outrage over City bonuses stems from a combination of two factors: the sheer size of the numbers involved, coupled with a lack of respect for the work involved in earning them. Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they’re doing for the money. If Wayne Rooney got paid millions to play lacrosse in a closed room in pitch darkness, people would begrudge him his millions far more than they already do. Instead there he is, on live television: he’s skilled, no doubt about it.
Similarly, it may be tasteless when a rapper pops up on MTV wearing so much bling he might as well have dipped himself in glue and jumped into a treasure chest full of vajazzling crystals, but at least you understand how he earned it.
RBS boss Stephen Hester, meanwhile, earns more than a million pounds for performing enigmatic actions behind the scenes at a publicly owned bank. And on top of his huge wage, he was in line for a massive bonus. To most people, that’s downright cheeky: like a man getting a blowjob from your spouse while asking you to make him a cup of tea.
But Hester earned his wage, we’re told, because he does an incredibly difficult job. And maybe he does. Trouble is, no one outside the City understands what his job actually consists of. I find it almost impossible to picture a day in Hester’s life, and I once wrote a short story about a pint-sized toy Womble that ran around killing dogs with its dick, so I know I don’t lack imagination. Class, yes: imagination, no. If I strain my mind’s eye, I can just about picture Hester arriving at work, picture him thanking his driver, picture the receptionist saying ‘Hello, Mr Hester’, and picture him striding confidently into his office – but the moment the door shuts, my feed breaks up and goes fuzzy. What does he do in there? Pull levers? Chase numbers round the room with a broom? God knows.
Maybe if all bankers were forced to work in public, on the pavement, it would help us understand what they actually do. Of course, you’d have to encase them in a Perspex box so they wouldn’t be attacked. In fact, if the experience of David Blaine is anything to go by, you’d have to quickly move that Perspex box to somewhere impossibly high up, where people can’t pelt it with golf balls and tangerines. On top of the Gherkin, say. If Hester did his job inside a Perspex box on top of the Gherkin for a year, this entire argument might never have happened.
The row over bonuses has led some to mutter darkly about mob rule and the rise of anti-business sentiment. Complain about mobs all you like, but you can’t control gut reactions, and you can’t dictate the mood. And when you try to fart a crashing plane back into the sky, you only succeed in making the atmosphere unpleasant for everyone. And spoiling the in-flight movie. And making the stewardess cry. Looks like I’m all out of metaphor again. Time to end the article. Article ends.
Which Witch Hunt?
Broadcast on 10 O’Clock Live, C4, 15/02/2012
CB is seated at the desk.
CHARLIE: Ever since last July’s phone-hacking revelations, the press has been in the hotseat, most notably with the long-running Leveson Inquiry into Media Ethics, an event so star-studded it resembled a kind of anti-BAFTAs, featuring glamorous actress Sienna Miller, seething funnyman Steve Coogan, dreamy-eyed whorefucker Hugh Grant, and seedy tabloid un-bassador Paul McMullan, better known as TV’s Roland Rat.
They were there, as was voice-of-an-angel Charlotte Church and voice-of-one-ankle Heather Mills, all swapping light and often harrowing anecdotes with your host: cuddly faced Lord Leveson, Chatty Man.
The major draw was the scrap between Hugh Grant and shadowy Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who isn’t shown on TV very often, because of fears he might slither through the screen and stop your heart by whispering in Latin. But nevertheless here he is …
CB talks over VT of Paul Dacre arriving at Leveson.
CHARLIE: … temporarily adop
ting human form to pass through our realm. Look, there’s a rare sight: he’s touching a bible without it bursting into flames. And there he is sitting down to fume about Hugh Grant.
Comparative stills of Hugh Grant and Paul Dacre appear in split-screen.
CHARLIE: I don’t know what it is about witty, handsome, sex symbol Hugh Grant that annoys purple-headed fuming pepper-pot Paul Dacre so much, but they’ve been trading insults for weeks, after Grant implied the Mail hacked his phone and Dacre said that was a ‘mendacious smear’.
ON SCREEN: Mock up of ‘Love Hacktually’ movie poster.
CHARLIE: Things seem a bit tense between them really, although I’ve seen enough Hugh Grant films to know how it’ll turn out: they don’t get on at first, but by the end they’ll be hungrily kissing to the sound of Wet Wet Wet – until Rhys Ifans walks in wearing a pair of funny pants with a mendacious smear down the arsecrack.
As well as the Leveson chatshow, there are three separate police investigations into the press, and on Saturday five Sun journalists were arrested …
CB talks over VT of Rupert Murdoch.
CHARLIE: … raising fears that Rupert Murdoch, seen here looking like the Emperor from Star Wars on a golfing holiday, might swoop in and destroy the Sun, like a demon from a Mayan prophecy.
Amongst the usual hate and tits, Monday’s Sun also included a powerful column by Fleet Street legend Trevor Kavanagh in which he thundered that Sun journalists were being subjected to a ‘witch hunt’.
Some say it’s hypocritical of the Sun to complain about witch-hunts because it’s conducted plenty of those itself. But that’s not fair: the Sun has never once conducted a witch-hunt against actual witches.
I can make you hate Page 33