The term ‘media circus’ seems like an understatement when applied to the week-long carnival of news stories, commentary and social media hot takes that have been unleashed by Prince Harry’s autobiography Spare. He’s up there in the big leagues of the hot air generators, sitting pretty alongside the Greggs vegan sausage roll. He could challenge the reigning champion: Brexit.

The rolling news coverage, digging into every aspect of the book and every anecdote about the Royal Family within it, means this book will be a big seller. It’s the first political/cultural phenomenon of 2023, and thus it is the latest battlefront in our never-ending culture war.

The dividing line of the latest hot take frenzy is simple: Harry is woke, liberal, left-wing, young, rebellious, feminist and post-colonial. The rest of the Royal Family is traditional, conservative, right-wing, old, establishment, manly, orderly. Choose your side, then spend all the hours of the day either praising Harry or damning him. Those are your only choices online this week.

Fanfare for the tedious culture warrior 

Of course, the tedious culture warriors are happy to oblige, especially on the right. There’s good money in being an anti-woke, conservative reactionary online. Like all internet money making hustles, from cryptocurrency to property speculation, there are many people willing to throw their lives into it in the hope of being super successful.

Could you be the next Piers Morgan? You could be. It only takes the right tenor of weariness, outrage and hostile sarcasm. Why not spend all your time performatively dunking on whatever the left-wing hate figure of this week is? Right now, it’s Prince Harry. Next week it will probably be Bluey. I don’t know. I don’t decide this shit.

Too silly to be believed

All this has produced a lot of breathless shouting, occasionally punctuated by moments of surrealism that, had been written as satire in an Adam McKay film, people would have said that’s too silly to be believed. Chief amongst these moments was when The Express praised the Taliban for their response to Prince Harry saying he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. Now that the right has decided Harry is the woke main character of the week, it means anyone who criticises him must be right. 

There is an entire cottage industry dedicated to dumping on Harry - and anyone else who becomes the lefty hate figure of the moment - generating clicks, retweets and shares from the perpetually outraged and perpetually online, all in the hope of one day having a show on GB News. 

This right wing media ecosystem (not too dissimilar from the ecosystem made of compressed vomit and spilt beer in a Wetherspoons carpet) consists of people like Darren Grimes (for those who don’t know, basically the Richard Hammond to Piers Morgan’s Jeremy Clarkson) who spend all day thinking of ways they can be performatively rude about the woke to get retweets from people with Union flags in their profiles and who take selfies wearing sunglasses in their car.

How did we get into this sorry state?

This isn’t the first time this bullshit has been spewed all over our collective consciousness, and the event/hot take process reached absurdity a long time ago, but it’s worth reflecting on why we mainly well--adjusted people have to suffer the Piers Morgans and Darren Grimes of the world. At least so this blog can have some intellectual credibility, and not just a series of rude comments about people with bigger followings than me.

At this point I should include my obligatory nod to James Williams and his amazing book Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, which really is the definitive text on everything that is wrong with social media and the internet. Seriously, if you read one book on this topic, read this. Williams, formerly of Google, details the different ways that social media alters our behaviour by distracting us. Crucial to the Harry hot take tsunami is Williams’s description of how social media obscures our starlight - aka our leading light or our higher goals and values. 

In a nutshell, social media changes our behaviour by altering our goals to be that of social media platform: i.e. time on site, likes, comments, engagements. We have all become convinced (and the very online more so) that loads of retweets or likes are advancing our political goals, which draws attention away from meaningful political action. 

The art of the dunk

This means politics for most people has become less marching and campaigns, and more online dunks on Prince Harry or Jacob Rees-Mogg. Or even dunks on Darren Grimes dunking on Prince Harry, or dunks on those dunking on Darren Grimes, etc. etc. until we are completely removed from the original cause of all this dunking and are lost somewhere in the warren of online discourse, like the people in The Machine Stops whose preferred interaction with the world is reading commentary on commentaries of mediated realities. 

Harry, and the hot take volcano that has erupted around him, is just this effect turned up to 11. It’s the combination of social media obscuring our starlight and our tribal online behaviour.

My hot take (as if we needed more)

For the record, my take in the whole thing is that, yes, the media was racist towards Meghan Markle and, yes, the Royal Family exploited Harry for their brand management, but the idea of a socially just royalty is a contradiction in terms.

Harry may want to reform the institution, but it would be better abolished. Especially, now that the Queen has died. Anyone calling themselves a socialist should think twice before advancing the agenda of someone with a royal title, who will never have to worry about his material needs, and whose stated goal is being accepted back into the world’s most unequal institution. An institution that has at its core the idea that some people, such as Princes, are born better than other people.

Ultimately, I want a world without people of colour being media main characters just for clicks and where families don’t do nasty things to each other, but I also want a world without people being given palaces because their family has an incredibly tenuous connection to Alfred the Great.

And in the end the dunks you take is equal to the dunks you make

It’s the right engaging in the media riot that Harry has unleashed that has made this book (and its likely follow up) a success. So, if the Darren Grimes of this world are really this angry with Harry for disrespecting the Royal Family, they should ignore him so he can’t make money doing what he currently does in books and on TV. I suspect they don’t really want him to go away or else they would struggle to find things to rail against for attention. They would have to go back to manufacturing outrage about vegan sausage rolls.

Certainly, we should all ask: what is the point of endless rounds of breathless hot takes about Prince Harry? What is this achieving and for whom? Is it just providing another Windsor with a new income stream via free publicity for his book? Is it just generating material that the Morgans and Grimes can use to make people even more outraged than they were before, to generate their own income streams? Personally, my politics aren’t a way for someone else to make money.

After we have thought about this, we should then think about what we want to do to make the world a better place. It’s probably not dunking on Darren Grimes, even if he is a dickhead, and making fun of him is fun and writing this has helped me past the time on this train ride to Nottingham. I would rather we all did something to improve this shopping trolley fire of a planet than yell at each other online. I really want people to stop thinking that yelling at each other online is how we make the world a better place.

"Prince Harry at Maxxi Museo announcing the winning design for the UK's Pavilion at Milan Expo 2015" by UKTI [closed account] is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.