THIS FUTURE SUCKS

I saw a Pierre Novellie show recently. The whole set was a riff on his own Kids These Days tendencies but there was one bit about how it’s hard to do observational comedy when everyone is being force-fed content from an individualised algo. It’s hard, he said, to make pop-cultural reference that everyone in the room will get when the steaming crap coming out of my phone has a different blend than whatever rolls out of yours. He has a point: mass media is dying, and the marketing departments know it. The goal is not to rake in the Everyone Dollar, but rather to make viewers feel special, like it’s an achievement to [click thumbnail]. ‘Normie’ has become a greater insult than ‘hipster.’ We use ‘co-worker’ as shorthand for ‘boring and too easily accessible.’ To be a fan of anything is to feel like we’re down our own greasy little rabbithole, with our own hyper-niche interests. ‘Resistance’ is used as a buzzword by deer-shooting patriars, who grumble about it being ‘co-opted by The Other Side.’ Everyone hates it here.

Everyone indeed. Looking a little closer, the atomised media trough is a bit of a myth. I tested this with a co-worker, an actual one. This guy is a bit younger than me, likes darts, football and pornography, let me flick through his YouTube shorts. Nothing alarming jumped out: some streetrace helmet cam footage, Band of Brothers clips, a Hot Ones promo, a cat. Then it was my turn, and I got exactly the same shit, from different channels. Then we tried Facebook – we both got some local news, an ad for The North Face, clickbait headlines about transgender people and Israel. Both of us had to scroll a little way to see a post from an actual person we knew. I asked him if he was interested in any of those topics, or if he’d chosen to follow any of those pages. He shrugged.

Of course, the algorithm exists as perpetual stew, murky and layered, and there’s a skill to getting your nuggets to float to the top. Some parties are just playing the algo well, driving engagement and shares and clicks or whatever. Occasionally they do it by making genuinely good, funny or interesting work, but often not. Others are simply paying for it. There’s no difference between either, and no point in getting precious about people buying bot farms versus ‘organically’ playing the algorithm — neither is significant to the value of their art — essentially celebrating people’s algorithm knowledge rather than their actual work. We know that popular art has always been a balance between artistic quality and mass appeal, but it’s never been so heavily weighted in the direction of gaming the reach (not even necessarily the affect) within a system, to the point that artistic expression is actively punished.

My point is this: if we can’t control what information we’re being fed, we’re back to mass culture again, but with a new, more polarising flavour. Coworker Ken is forced to have a take on subjects he’d happily remain ignorant, and whichever take finds his thumb first will only be reinforced, in a cycle of capslock castigation and impersonal division. His critical skills are left to vestige because no-one ever has a nuanced conversation in the comments, or a watercooler moment around a 90-second video we watched while waiting in the queue at the garage.

There’s a conversation to be had about Metacorp/Muskite collusion to fundamentally destabilise western democracy, but we’ll save that for when we write our prison memoirs.

So far, so Cyberpunk, right? Now look at this:

In 2022 Priti Patel pushed through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and effectively criminalised wild camping in a way that goes beyond England’s trespass lindyhop bullshit. So much ink was spilled over the Darwalls’ legal challenge to wild camping on dartmoor because it makes a plucky, ‘grammable david/goliath story for journalists’ school friends to get involved with, but the newspapers aren’t giving word one.

The text on the .gov link above reads like erotica for suburban curtain-twitchers. The result has been aggressive relocation of travellers. People are being evicted by false testimony and moved to sites where they’re not allowed water or electricity but still have to pay council tax, for no crime other than living in vehicles rather than bricks. Literal ghettoisation. What else can you call it when the places one is permitted to live are shrunk so drastically in so short a time? If this happened to any other species it would be an ecological disaster. That’s what your government thinks of you, then: lower than fucking animals.

By the way, this affects everyone. These laws serve to tighten our reins and remove freedoms, to force people into buying subscriptions for living. You can’t just use the sun for lecci, can’t go fill a tank at the public water point in the cemetary, can’t just live without the council making you pay, so they build in restrictions to force you to go to them for your stuff-so when you depend on them, they have an additional locus of control (ie they can threaten to turn off your water/power).

They built and fired up a machine that immiserates and disenfranchises people and you can’t even hear it running over the Jet2Holidays Tiktok Sound. The same thing is happening to anyone not performing Gender correctly: the creeps in power will tell you that it’s only to protect women and children from ‘predatory men,’ but by sheer fucking statistical probability (0.5% of the UK population is trans), it’s going to impact cis women far more heavily. It already is (source). Transphobia is coming for your friend who is tall, your friend who works a manual job, your friend who doesn’t like to wear makeup, your friend with PCOS and your other friend who had the temerity to survive cancer without her tits intact. All of them are cis, but they aren’t doing ‘woman’ correctly, which means some fuckhead in a shopping centre is going to chase her down and post her picture on twitter. Laws are being passed to remove her protection and all she’ll gain in return is a bouncer outside the ladies who’ll say ‘sorry love, you’re not coming in unless you can prove those are real.’

Consent is manufactured through media manipulation. Everyone is fed what they already think is true and nobody is having a discussion about it, asking whether it is. We’ll apologise for the Guardian link above but it serves the point. The rope is pulling around our necks and we’re being lead down the merry path to the abattoir. You’ll own nothing and be angry at someone else who owns nothing, someone you’ve never met and is just trying to live somewhere, piss in peace, drink clean water, whatever.

It should be enough that this law criminalises travellers. You ought to have enough empathy that seeing transgender women hung out to dry makes you sick. If you can’t see that women have value as people until you have a daughter of your own, then how the fuck are you looking at her mother? The ‘leopards eating faces’ thing is played out. The system is killing and eating people.

I’m still not apologising to Nick Lamnd Land. Fuck you.