We disembark in Chinatown and stand under scaffolding for half an hour, watching the lightning lance the sky. It passes slowly. By the time it’s safe to get back on the bus, it’s gone nine p.m. The bus starts up.
“We’re off route now,” Roberto shouts into the microphone, against the gale. “OFF ROUTE. Because of the storm. So—who wants to go to Ground Zero?”
I’m pretty sure none of these cold, wet, late people want to go to Ground Zero—site of the twenty-first century’s worst peacetime atrocity. But the thing about a bus full of people swathed head to toe in yellow-hooded rain ponchos is that it is unlikely you will be able to take an accurate reading of their mood when asking a question in a language they don’t understand.
We circle Ground Zero, at ten p.m., in the rain.
“THAT’S THE PICTURE, THAT’S THE PICTURE! ON THE LEFT! ON THE LEFT, AUSTRIA!” he says. “That was just an EMPTY SOCKET IN THE GROUND ten years ago. The whole of this block was on FIRE. It BURNED, God rest their souls.”
He notes the mood is somber, and tries to lighten it.
“Hey! You know what I drink since they killed Osama Bin Laden? You know what I drink? Two shots and a splash! TWO SHOTS AND A SPLASH! Get it? Get it, London?”
We’re going through downtown now—building after building of sheer, vertical black glass. This part of Manhattan is like a money tunnel, a funnel of souls towards Macy’s. This is Gotham.
“This is where I was born,” Roberto says, sitting at the back of the bus. After no one laughed at his joke, he suddenly looked defeated. He holds the microphone in the same way someone suicidal toys with a gun.
“This used to be all red-brick walk-ups. That was real New York. This new stuff, it just looks—morbid. Like some gloomy Tim Burton movie. I miss the brick walk-ups.”
The bus reaches its stop. A line of yellow-caped passengers exit the bus, shivering. Baddacelli sits at the back of the bus, not moving.
As we walk past, he says: “I just miss the brick walk-ups, England.”
Part Two
So, as discussed in Moranifesto: Part One—in a bold opener for a book that is basically a collection of columns about London property prices and David Bowie—we know a change is coming. That the change is the possibility of upgrading ourselves—as both voters and citizens—now that we are connected by the Internet of the world. Now that we can finally begin to unite as a collective conscious entity and, you know, chat to each other.
But the Internet of the world is a very young invention, and often makes mistakes. We have seen, a thousand times over, how it can run after the wrong enemies—Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed brilliantly highlights people who said something foolish, or were simply misunderstood, and subsequently had their lives utterly ruined.
And—if that wasn’t bad enough—how the firestorm of social media outrage can then rage on, for once news of these hapless Twitter victims’ ruination made it into the media, the “whistle-blowers” who’d first highlighted the stories then had their lives ruined: being fired from their jobs, or socially ostracized, for being the ones that instigated the fury.
If the Internet of the world—social media—really is the awakening of a global consciousness—us all becoming one gigantic brain—then it is little wonder that this birth of a seven-billion-part “us” is, sometimes, terrifying. Like some bewildered Frankenstein’s monster waking up on the slab and lashing out—not knowing the power of its new arms and legs.
In order that this fabulous, awe-inspiring beast might do no harm, we need to establish some rules for global communication and activism so that the same mistakes are not made over and over again. So that going online doesn’t, some days, feel like walking into a zoo that’s been set on fire, with penguins attacking lions, gnus trampling on hippos, and a couple of unhappy llamas in the corner, crying, “I just wanted to show everyone a picture of my lunch! I am excited about avocados! I do not like all this anger! I am going to hide under my table!”
It’s all about how you say it
Fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice
Fortune depends on the tone of your voice
—“Songs of Love,” the Divine Comedy
So much of our political conversation—perhaps the majority of it—happens on social media these days. And so I present to you what is, essentially, A Guide to Discussing Change on the Internet without being burned to death, looking like a dick, offending anyone, or getting in the way of a possible brilliant, bright future for humanity—just because you are peevish after missing out on an Anne of Green Gables mug, mint condition, on eBay.
There are several key things to remember about social media. The first is to bear in mind how young it is. If social media is the long-awaited birth of a collective consciousness, it is now essentially in its toddler phase. It’s still very young. It tends to sudden rages. It repeats itself a lot. It uses the wrong words. It can be easily distracted by a picture of a cat, or a snack. It flings a lot of poo around.
As the years go by, social media will grow up and be capable of much more nuanced conversation—the ability to see both sides of a story, and not to suddenly grow so furious that everything erupts into a massive tantrum. I have no doubt that Twitter will soon be replaced by something with an entirely different atmosphere—where the rat-tat-tat, adrenalized bullet delivery of Tweets will be replaced by something far more relaxed and discursive.
But for now, remember: you’re dealing with a very young, fractious beast that, quite often, clearly needs to be put down for a nap. Don’t take its tantrums too seriously. It has a long way to go, is learning a lot every day, and might have just wet itself and want its snuggle bear.
The second thing to bear in mind is the study that suggested the level of social inhibition on social media equates, roughly, to having drunk two pints of beer. Freed from our physical bodies and eye contact, we become slightly . . . intoxicated. We are drunk on wifi.
So whenever you log on, do so in the knowledge you are essentially walking into a bar or pub at nine o’clock on a Friday night. There’s a lot of people out to either (a) get laid or (b) start a fight. People are horny or lairy. Or both. Your statements are liable to be misconstrued. Sarcasm or irony is often not detected—with fatal results. People will overshare. People will suddenly bond with you, intensely. And, if you’re a woman, someone is probably going to show you his penis at some point. That is inevitable.
Ah, social media. Pissed children in a bar. I love you so.
So, with these caveats in mind, let’s stroll through a couple of handy guidelines for the online citizen, keen to do their bit to change the world by typing out their hopes and dreams on the Internet, and launching them out there, in front of a billion eyes.
1. Getting the tone right
I’ve sat through ten years of online debates, and the one thing I can tell you as a fact is that, if you communicate in anger, 90 percent of the response you will get in return will be just . . . more anger. Directed at you.
It doesn’t matter if what you are saying is true, factual, or reasonable—because the majority of people will not be reading what you actually said. They’re just going to see the emotional pitch of your communiqué and reply in kind, instead.
I’ve seen so many potentially amazing debates go nowhere, because the person starting the debate was rightfully angry—but their tone seemingly worked as a dog whistle to attract a massive online fight. There were a couple of years when online feminism was basically a bunch of hurt, angry women—women who should have been on the same side—communicating with each other only in fury, and creating only fury in return. Every brilliant, bright, right thing they said was ignored.
When you make an initial post, remember this vital thing: you set the tone, and people will reply in kind. If a conversation starts angry, it will almost certainly continue angry, and end up apoplectic, with people shouting, “I RESIGN FROM THE INTERNET,” “EVERYONE GET BENT,” or “YOUR MUM,” to the benefit of
literally no one at all.
There really is no more urgent place to be relaxed and polite than the Internet. It’s a basic survival necessity. If you are to be an effective radical, you must be a polite radical—which is, of course, the best kind of radical. And if you can be gently humorous, you are doing the whole world a favor. Nothing unclenches the angrily clamped-together buttocks of social media in the middle of an outrage firestorm more than someone essentially taking on the posture of the Fonz, and going, “Heyyyyy—wassup?”
The key to all this is to remember that anger is, usually, just fear brought to the boil. And people can hear the fear under your anger, and as they would in the playground, they respond to it. They basically go “RAH RAH NAH NAH NAH” in your face when they detect it. They give you Internet wedgies. Avoid Internet wedgies.
Remember: Internet anger is like your savings account. You only want to break into it in extreme emergencies.
2. Dismissing people who aren’t perfect
Social media has a current, unpleasant hobby: waiting for someone to come along who appears to have captured a mood, or identified a problem, or done something laudable or progressive—then frantically digging in their past to find a mistake they might previously have made, in order to try and totally devalue the good thing they have just done.
I understand where this desire comes from: it’s a fear of being let down. We’ve been let down by a million heroes, at some point—and so, now, in order not to look like fresh-off-the-train rubes, we race to be the first person to unmask this new messiah before we are, inevitably, disappointed by them, at some point in the future.
There is a virtual industry, at the moment, in people mining the pasts of the newly prominent to find an ill-advised Tweet from 2007, a Facebook update where they used a “bad” phrase, or an early stand-up skit where they appeared to say something bad about, say, Mexicans—unless you watch to the end of the clip and realize they’re doing it in the guise of a dumb character.
But part of being a grown-up is to always have the balls to believe. Cynicism is like armor—it will, initially, protect you. But you cannot grow in armor; you cannot dance in armor. Cynicism restricts our growth. Cynicism is, in the end, an act of weakness. We must always have the cojones to be optimistic. To trust people. To forgive them their mistakes if we feel like they are trying to be better people, that they are trying to learn.
3. Getting in the way
Every year, I get some dog tags made up with my new annual motto. Last year’s was “Always ride out as if meeting your nemesis”—i.e., a reminder to always leave the house with your hair looking big, lest you bump into an ex-boyfriend.
This year’s is the more succinct “Don’t get in the way.”
You know how it goes. Some people are discussing something—posting links, proffering ideas—and then some third party will rock up and say—often smugly, I regret to say—“What about blah!”—mentioning some completely tangential but controversial side issue that invariably attracts a whole host of controversy-hungry arguers who will then pile into the conversation, arguing among themselves.
The original posters spend an hour or two fending off the increasingly hysterical whirlpool of demands being thrown at them—before finally logging off, exhausted, and leaving the original debate to die.
The kind of people who parachute into other people’s debates want, essentially, attention. They are acting as if the only way to draw attention to the causes they are passionate about is to piggyback them onto the cause you are being passionate about.
While this passion is laudable, and useful, it is also oddly old-fashioned—a hangover from a time when there was limited space for debating topics. That might have been true in 1600, when you might have had to battle a fellow peasant for control of their woodblock printing press in order to disseminate your idea.
But it’s 2016! The Internet is a literally limitless space! Be passionate about your passion in your passion area—do not try to infiltrate my passion area! It is one of the key hindrances to things getting done on the Internet—loading down one conversational donkey with a million other conversations, until its back breaks, and a whole area of conversation is avoided because it smells of dead donkey. Don’t piggyback on someone else’s mission, man. Have the balls to start your own. Spider-Man never rocked up at Batman’s house when he was in the middle of battling the Joker, and said, “Dude—you’ve got to go and sort out the Green Goblin, man! He’s seriously fucking my shit up!”
You’re Spider-Man. You go and sort out the Green Goblin. Leave Batman to sort out the Joker in peace.
One of the key drivers of the “getting in the way” crew is the feeling that if someone is talking/campaigning about something, they must talk/campaign about everything. The subconscious belief being that, at some point, someone will come along—some Campaign Jesus—and he will solve everything. He will compile a complete and perfect manifesto with solutions to everything, and until that person comes along, everyone—and everything—is, essentially, useless.
This fundamentally misunderstands several things—the key one being just how likely this is to happen. (Zero percent. This is 0 percent likely to happen. Even if we look at the most inspiring and astonishing people to ever come along—Gandhi, Mandela, Sir Alex Ferguson—they didn’t do everything. They had a couple of areas in which they were incredibly visionary, powerful, and determined—decolonization of India, the end of apartheid, winning the treble—but they weren’t also tackling FGM, climate change, sex trafficking, and the World Cup. They specialized.)
All the answers will never come in one person. The future is a communal effort—like a patchwork quilt. Everyone interested in forming our society takes a square each—a square they have chosen according to their interests, knowledge, and ability—and sews it, and then we join them together to make a fabulous quilt. That’s how things get done.
Essentially waiting for some perfect mummy or daddy to come along and do everything in one go is a terrible psychic hangover from feudalism, the patriarchy, or just watching too many episodes of 24. In real life, maverick loners tend not to change the world. What you’re looking for is a lovely collective of specialists all tending their patches with love, instead.
When you get accosted by someone going, “You cannot talk about BLAH unless you also talk about BLAH,” the best response is “I know—you do BLAH and I’ll do BLAH, and then the world will be twice as improved! Thanks for volunteering! Amazing! Check in with me every couple of weeks—let me know how BLAH is going! I can’t believe you’re doing this! You’re a total mensch! On behalf of the rest of the world—thank you!!!!”
4. Dismissing people as “champagne socialists”
You know how this goes. Bono, or Russell Brand, or Emma Thompson, or Charlotte Church speaks out in defense of welfare, or the working poor, and they are immediately derided as “champagne socialists” by the professionally snide.
The denouncing of champagne socialists always follows a strict format—mentioning the price of the house the champagne socialist lives in, their income/net worth, whether or not they went to public school, if their children do, and accompanying it with a picture of the champagne socialist either (a) dressed up to the nines on a red carpet (how can they attend a movie premiere when the poor cannot attend a movie premiere!) or (b) looking angry and shouting at a demonstration (this person is crazed with socialism! Look at them snarl! Socialism is the ultimate Bitchy Resting Face! You will need Botox now, for sure!).
The demented logic seems to be as follows: That you cannot stand up for the poor unless you are poor yourself. That if you have managed to accrue any wealth and security, unless you have subsequently given away every penny of it to charities for the poor, you are a hypocrite to speak about the poor. Only the poor can speak about, and for, the poor. Poverty is only the concern of the poor. Other people must not comment on the poor. Poor people’s business is strictly for the poor. So, if you are a real socialist, you must yourself stay
poor forever.
Of course, there are several very obvious logical flaws in this argument. The first is a fundamental misunderstanding of socialism.
There are many misunderstandings about what a socialist is: primarily that it’s someone who wears a donkey jacket and lives by a brazier, possibly in 1979, and listens only to Billy Bragg.
Well, I know loads of socialists like this, and they’re ace. They get shit done. But that’s not socialism. That’s people. People who like old coats and Billy Bragg.
Socialism is just a single simple idea: the belief that the necessities for the functioning of a society should be provided without profit. It’s such a lovely and simple idea that I want to say it again: socialism is the belief that the necessities for the functioning of a society should be provided without profit.
So that’s health, education, welfare, transport, the emergency services, the prison service, and the justice system, paid for by taxation and available to everyone, regardless of wealth. No paying Serco millions for running overcrowded jails. No G4S—the guys who fucked up the Olympics—still being paid by the government despite being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for massively overcharging. “The necessities for the functioning of a society should be provided without profit”—that’s socialism.
As you can see from that description, there’s nothing in socialism that prevents Charlotte Church from living in a nice house, walking a red carpet, and, after paying her taxes, earning millions a year. If she were a champagne anarchic communist—who believed that all property is theft, and that money should be abolished—then she would be a hypocrite. Anarchic communists don’t believe in individuals working to accrue wealth, living in a nice house, and wearing faintly impractical shoes. Champagne anarchic communists would, indeed, be ripe for pillory. I think we can agree that champagne anarchic communists—all twelve of them—are hypocritical bastards.