Now that’s a revolution I can get behind—metamorphosis. Sea change. A revolution that sounds like the moment The Wizard of Oz goes from black and white into color, Cinderella’s ball gown appearing around her in a blaze of Fairy Godmother magic. Not upheaval, but an upgrade. Even the most entrenched conservative would find it difficult to argue with the idea of a notable upgrade to the way we do things. Capitalism has been the defining political movement of my age—but it’s not really gone through a thoughtful, planned improvement in my lifetime.
By way of contrast, I’ve lived through ten OS upgrades on my Mac—and that’s just something I use to buy playsuits from Topshop.com, and piss around on Twitter. Capitalism is, surely, due an upgrade or two. Snow Leopard capitalism. Yosemite capitalism. Isn’t that the fundamental point of capitalism, anyway? Of competition and markets? Constant product improvement and more choice? It’s kind of weird that, under market-led capitalism, we can get three hundred different kinds of latte but only one kind of market-led capitalism, with all the main political parties save the Greens peddling pretty much the same basic model.
It’s almost as if the current political system doesn’t see itself. It just believes it exists—that it sprang fully formed, via evolution, as the natural way of things. It doesn’t see itself as so many others do, as something that was constructed by human beings—fallible, faulty human beings—and so therefore could be changed by human beings. We don’t even really have a name for this current economic and political system—to call it “neo-liberal capitalism” is seen as an inherently left-wing labeling; it marks you out as, well, a Marxist. And when you can’t even name a system, you can’t have a conversation about it—which is proven by the general confusion, and feeling of being tongue-tied, in most voters when they discuss how things are, and how they’d like them to change. When you live in a social and economic system that is presented merely as the system, you prevent people from naming and inventing new ones.
But we do need to start talking about new systems. This restless feeling—that’s what it is.
So, we’re due an upgrade. What would this upgrade be? Where will this upgrade come from?
Well, it’s us. If we’re talking about a basic upgrade of the operating system of the earth, there’s one huge, untapped resource which would allow a light-speed jump in progress—and it’s us. We are the big, obvious resource of our age.
And we are the key and unique resource of our age—for, in all of history until now, most of our processing power has gone to waste. Unless a brilliant mind was born into the fortunate circumstances of (a) being male, (b) not dying of a terrible disease before the age of three, (c) being able to afford education, and (d) being in a social situation—usually predicated on location and wealth—which enabled him to disseminate these ideas, then, without that, all this potential died with its owner.
This, then, is the ultimate argument for the urgency and necessity of equality. For equality isn’t some fabulous luxury we treat ourselves to when we’re rich enough—the legislation and infrastructure we get round to after we secure our economies, or wrangle our foreign policy. Equality isn’t humanity’s cashmere bed socks. It’s not a present we treat ourselves to, like champagne. It’s a fundamental necessity, like water.
In the twenty-first century, humanity’s greatest resource isn’t oil, or titanium, or water, or gold: it’s brains. It’s people’s brains. The reason the more unequal countries are so troubled is, to be brusque, because they are more stupid. They disregard their female population—thereby halving their potential brainpower—and then limit themselves to a problem-solving elite made up of a tiny percentage of the remaining 50 percent.
And so while we keep these billions of tons of brains offline, we put humanity in an illogically difficult position. By believing some people are naturally superior, we make our species, as a whole, inferior. Weaker. To be frank: stupider.
And this weakness extends into our politics. The “poli” in politics, the “demo” in democracy—they both mean “people,” and that’s what’s currently missing. Us. Despite all the hot talk of revolution, when it comes to voter turnout the problem of apathy is rampant. Even with the highest voter turnout since 1997, over 40 percent of young voters (18 to 25) did not vote in the last UK election—arguably the demographic that should be most politically engaged, as the business of politics is inventing the future they are going to live in.
And just as huge swathes of the population are missing at the polling booth, so they are in Westminster. Out of 650 constituencies, just 191 are represented by women.
Britain’s nonwhite population is also seriously underrepresented—just forty-one MPs to represent 13 percent of the British population. And when it comes to working-class representation in Westminster, 33 percent went to private schools, compared to 7 percent of the population.
Out of 260 new candidates in 2015, forty-seven had previously been “consultants,” twenty-nine barristers, and nineteen journalists. Sometimes, on bad days, it does seem that, if you have the right two hundred people in your social circle, you’ve got a roughly fifty-fifty chance of being the next prime minister.
However you look at it, that’s not a wide, healthily diverse mix coming into Westminster as fresh blood, and bringing in new conversations and ideas.
And little wonder we have such a small, incestuous slice of the population representing us—for politics has been terribly devalued. These days, if your child announced that they wanted to be a politician, most people would react as if they had come down to the breakfast table and said, “Mother, Father—I’ve decided to become a massive pervert.”
Our default belief is that politicians are venal, shifty, double-dealing liars, out to serve the interests of their friends and business associates. It’s hard for an honorable man, woman, or asexual to say that they wish to run for government without instantly being suspected of slight . . . evil. And that is, to use the scientific phrase, balls. There’s no point in us having a democracy if we distrust everyone who wants to engage with it officially. If, in the very act of trying to gain power, you lose the trust of the people you wish to represent. That by wanting to stand for something you are presumed to be standing only for yourself.
There, the entire notion of being a public servant—a key tenet of the modern age—fails.
So: the problems are, as it stands, who engages in politics and what they do. That the idea of politics has become threadbare and dirty, the debates clownish and off-puttingly pugilistic, the participants limited and lackluster. The system’s borked.
The good news is, we have a billion ways to improve it. Us. For we are the point of democracy. We are democracy. We are the conversation. We are the climate. We set the tone—we make the spaces where conversations turn into ideas, which then turn into action. We are the drivers—not just at the polling booth, every few years, but in the choices we make every day in what we buy, what we eat, the language we use, the ideas we share, the comments we make, and the connections we make across the world.
In many ways, culture and society are a billion times bigger than politics. The coming of the Internet—and the rapid surge towards everyone being connected and being able to talk to each other—means there is a whole other world of power, influence, and knowledge operating independently from the conventional old institutions of power, knowledge, and influence—Westminster, Holyrood, Stormont, universities, the City, the media—and on a vastly larger scale.
In many ways, social media already is the media, and in a way that can only accelerate as the years go on—even the biggest news organization in the world, the BBC, has only 3,500 employees. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, have 1.3 billion between them: 1.3 billion reporters, photographers, hackers, opinion writers. These days, we both receive and broadcast. There is no such thing as a passive audience anymore. We all wish to have our say—whether our “say” is a six-thousand-word blog entry, or just the simple act of intellectual dissemination and approval
that is pressing “Like” or “Re-Tweet.” I enjoy bringing Karl Marx into conversations, so I’ll just point out that, in this respect, the Internet is Marxist: it has seized the means of production—producing news—but only because monolithic capitalistic multinational corporations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have enabled it in the first place. There’s a pleasingly knotty paradox for the next time you’ve had three gins.
Look at one of the biggest stories on social media in the last year: racism in the USA. By all accounts, white cops have been beating and shooting black citizens for years—and the reporting of it by mainstream media was cursory and short-lived. Twenty years after the savage beating of Rodney King, these incidents were still being presented on TV and in newspapers as isolated events.
In 2015, however, social media took on this story and made it huge. It set the climate. Advances in technology mean that people have been able to film violent incidents, and finally show the world what is happening. Activists blog, start hashtag campaigns—#blacklivesmatter, #icantbreathe—and even in the simple act of re-Tweeting these stories, the topic has been pushed to the forefront of the news agenda, and stayed there all year. Questions about racism in America are now being asked in a way that has become pressing and urgent. In a recent poll, 53 percent of Americans said they believed that racism had become worse in the last five years. No. It’s just that we’re talking about racism more. We’re finally seeing it—in iPhone footage posted to blogs of white, armed cops pinning down crying fourteen-year-old black girls in bikinis, crying for their mothers; in Eric Garner in a chokehold, gasping his last words: “I can’t breathe.”
Many of the things I will be discussing under the heading of politics are, in fact, cultural, social, and technological. Society and culture often marches faster, and longer, and harder, than politics. They frequently effect change fastest, and in the coolest way possible.
One of my favorite examples is that of Doctor Who. Russell T. Davies convinces the BBC to revive Doctor Who, because he loves it. Into the first season he writes in a character, Captain Jack Harkness, who is a hot, charismatic, pansexual superhero. Essentially a Han Solo who’ll do it with anyone.
In one episode, he kisses the Doctor, full on the lips. This is a primetime BBC show—screened at teatime—watched by families. Not only was there not one letter of complaint, but on Monday morning, in my children’s playground at school, there were ten-year-old boys fighting to play the role of Captain Jack in their Doctor Who games.
Now, that’s something that, with the best will in the world, no piece of legislation, or equalities minister, could have achieved—making ten-year-old boys think bisexual superheroes are cool. Not overnight. Not without any arguments. Not done entirely with love, and fueled with joy, and almost as a by-product of a show that wanted to entertain, dazzle, make you laugh and cry and gasp.
I can draw a fairly straight line between that kiss in Doctor Who in 2007 and the passing of the 2013 Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act in the UK—for what elected representative can vote against human rights for a section of the population that their children, and grandchildren, totally accept?
So much of the groundwork for change is done simply through human creativity, joy, and a willingness to consider future and parallel worlds. The BBC made that show, and we watched it, and in a small way—while we were at play, while we were happy—the world was changed.
For the first time ever, thanks to the explosion of social media, the world can talk to the world—unmediated. Information known by one person can be shared around the world in less than an hour—as evidenced by WikiLeaks. Voices that previously would never have been heard can lead the debate—as happened in the UK with the Daughters of Eve anti-FGM campaign that led to changes in legislation.
Through the Internet of the world, we have, finally, gained a global sentience that was unthinkable even in the era of the satellite-phone linkup, or the fax. Someone observing the Earth from space would have noticed that, since social media opened up the skies, conversations and introductions and information and networks have lit up the globe with a trillion golden skeins. The whole world is firing up, like a teenage brain—burning neural pathways across the globe, making connections, expanding, leaping. Previous spiritual, or religious, notions of a collective human consciousness now look like simple predictions of the future. We are now in a collective consciousness. That’s the ultimate purpose of the Internet. Oh my God. I’m going to have a fag.
The Twenty-First Century, Where We Live
So! Let’s get started. As the philosophers Roxette said, so eloquently, “Don’t bore us—get to the chorus.” Let’s begin with . . .
No One Wants to Go Out
. . . a scientifically provable, universal truth.
We’re sitting on the sofa with the kids, watching You’ve Been Framed. I haven’t seen the show for years. Coming to it fresh, it seems to be an unspeakable montage of horrific testicular injuries, and unstable toddlers being terrified by massive dogs. All I can see is pain, and fear. It’s like some awful illustration of the fragility of human existence. With rewinds. The children are laughing at it, joyously.
“He fell!” Nancy gurgles. “On his head!”
“What time is it?” my husband asks, staring at the screen.
“Nearly six,” I reply. “We should start getting ready.”
The babysitter is due—we’re both going out tonight. My husband is off to see the KPM All Stars Big Band—a collection of TV theme-tune composers who gig four or five times a year, rolling out all their big hits: Countdown, Grange Hill, Dave Allen at Large, Channel 4 News. Apparently, last time they played everyone sang along to the Channel 4 News theme, with the spontaneously composed lyrics of “Channel 4 / Channel 4 / Channel 4 / Channel 4 / Channel 4 / NEWS!”
I, meanwhile, am going to a gay club in Vauxhall, where—if it’s anything like the last time I went—I will end up soaked in sweat, dancing to Azealia Banks with a bearded man in a rubber dress, margined on gin.
We have both chosen our nights out to cater exactly to our interests and desires. These nights have been on the calendar for months. They are our rewards for being hardworking employees and parents.
“I don’t want to go,” my husband says.
“Neither do I,” I say.
We continue sitting on the sofa.
“I’m really tired,” my husband says, piteously.
“Vauxhall is so far away,” I weep. “It’s practically in France.”
There is a pause. A man falls off a chalet roof and crumples his thoracic vertebrae. The kids scream with laughter.
“The thing is,” I say, “no one ever wants to go out.”
My husband nods sadly.
“No one ever wants to go out,” I continue. “At the point when you write down the night out in your calendar, that’s the most excited you’ll ever be about it. After that, every day that passes, you become a little less enthusiastic about the whole endeavor. This reaches its finite point on the morning of the night out itself, when you wake up to find that the engagement is lying across your face like the body of a dead horse. It is like a warning. A terrible, terrible warning.”
“Why have I put something in my life in the slot where I would usually be having a hot bath, and a bowl of cereal, then watching BBC4?” Pete says, miserably. “What was I thinking I would achieve? Something better than that? There’s nothing better than that. I have made a terrible error, viz. the other side’s grass.”
I think back over my social life. One of the most enjoyable drunken nights I’ve ever had with my friend Grace was both of us admitting we’d spent the whole afternoon wishing the other one would cancel.
“I was sitting at home, going, ‘She’s not had cystitis for ages. That bitch must be due a bout by now.’ I was praying you’d got it. Not in a bad way,” she clarified, as we ordered more drinks and stayed out until three a.m.
I found her feelings perfectly understandable. Once, a hen
night I was due to go on was canceled with five hours’ notice. I think it might actually be the best phone call of my life. I spent the evening watching reruns of Come Dine with Me—chuckling in the way that Wile E. Coyote does when he feels he’s got one over on the Road Runner. I felt like a winner. A social-engagement-less winner.
I’m sure that this universal feeling—sleepy four p.m. dread over seeing “the guys” at eight p.m.—is why adults rely on alcohol. It’s not for the booze. We don’t really care about the booze. It’s for the sugar, instead. We need the calories—for energy. City nights are essentially full of massive, tired thirty-something bees drinking shots of boozy sugar for the rush. Until we get stuck against a window, buzzing, and have to be herded into taxis by bouncers wielding rolled-up newspapers. We are bees. And bees should sleep when it’s dark. It’s all wrong.
The babysitter arrives, bang on time. I go, wearily, to back-comb my hair. I should never have said yes to this night out.
Five thirty a.m. I get into bed—hair standing on end, eyes pointing in different directions. I think my nightie might be on backwards. Pete wakes.
“Good night?” he asks.
“Yes!” I say. I am flying. I have laughed so much I am practically mute with hoarseness. “We danced in the pouring rain, I’ve gone deaf, and a gay man pretended to have sex with me while I queued up for my coat. You?”
“They played Grandstand three times,” he says, happily. “We went right down the front and pumped our fists to the brass bits—I think nonironically.”
“I love a great night out,” I say.
“A great night out,” Pete agrees.
I Can’t Stop Listening to “Get Lucky”
I like a binge. I’m a classic binge drinker—nothing for two weeks, then HELLO, GIN. I can get through half a kilo of cheese in an evening; I apply my eyeliner using a roller. And when I like a song, it becomes an almost medical problem.