Better content moderation for better discourse: A conversation with Madhuri Rahman of WeLivedIt.Ai

Online discourse has been soured by extremism and hate speech. This is especially the case for marginalised people who experience more abuse online and whose content gets moderated more severely. 

Surely there is a way to improve how we debate online? Maybe AI and large language models could be useful in detecting hate speech? Especially if the communities most at risk from toxic online content were able to use their lived experience to help train the AI models.

That’s what WeLivedIt.Ai aims to do, to use marginalised peoples’ lived experience to improve content moderation. I chatted to Madhuri Rahman, co-founder of WeLivedIt.Ai, to talk about their work, big tech, the current ‘one size fits all’ approach to moderation and The Online Safety Act 2023.

Alastair: What prompted the creation of WeLivedIt.ai, and what gap in moderation and online safety were you aiming to fill?

Madhuri: “My co-founder and I met in the token engineering space. We were looking at voting mechanisms and that led us to think about lived experience in technology development in general. Hate speech and online toxicity being one of those crucial areas within which having lived experience of the problem gives you a unique perspective in designing a solution, because if you've experienced certain marginalisation then you're more likely to receive a backlash and hate in a particular area, and you're more likely to recognise it when it's more subtle. That is what led us to then look at solutions that are AI-driven.”

What distinguishes WeLivedIt.ai from the existing moderation tools platforms already use?

“At the moment, one size fits all moderation only really benefits big tech platforms, and then with servers like Discord, there's a lot of human moderation going on.

“The first thing [WeLivedIt.ai offers] is entering your context to tailor the search. The second thing is being able to collaboratively define what toxicity looks like in your space by voting on real data examples, and then seeing what the consensus has been on different types of comments and speech. The third thing is using [this data] to train the model. What we also want to do then is to have the model training be as transparent as possible.

“What we're trying to do, which is different, is to make it all friendly for the individual user, because all content moderation tools out there now are like: ‘Okay, we'll do more context aware moderation,’ but they're still consultancy firms [where] you have to go through an individual who asks your needs, and the data already comes labelled. So, [there are] biases that exist in these big tech models. We're working towards moving away from that once a community puts in the work to labelling the training data that is filtered out from their online space. So, it's not random data. It's their lived experience, which is why we called it WeLivedIt.ai because we're trying to connect lived experience to this development of a big tech solution that could help lots of people.”

How does the lived experience of marginalised people online inform the tool?

“We’re trying to focus on people that experience hate speech directly to start with. So, you've got death threats, violence, demonising and dehumanising language, like negative character; rhetoric that just calls people crazy, for example, or aggressive. These are the different intensity levels, and we're starting with that first one, death threats, the kind of hate speech that's about online safety.

“This is hate speech identification. We're not stopping anyone from posting anything or saying anything, but the person that has lived experience of the problem has a choice as to whether or not they want to see that.

“Then you've got things like: “make me a sandwich.” Which of these categories would this fit into? The connotations around that kind of thing, these large language models in general won't pick up, because that's really nuanced, it's a trending piece of hate speech, but if you're aware of Andrew Tate and the misogynist rhetoric that is going around online, then you can submit that [and] the community can vote on whether they want that there or not.”

How are you making sure you are getting a broad representation of lived experience of all different areas of hate speech?

“That's an ongoing challenge, but our approach differs significantly from existing moderation tools. We're not trying to create one-size-fits-all solutions, which inevitably struggle to represent everyone. That means we don't face the same pressure to build a single, universal dataset that works everywhere. The question isn't 'have you represented everyone perfectly?' - that's impossible. The question is: 'When a collective representing a marginalised community joins your platform, can they teach the system about their toxicity patterns better than they could teach Twitter or Meta?’

“We think yes, because:

• They control the configuration directly

• They provide examples from their lived experience

• They can correct the AI when it's wrong

• They're not competing with billions of other users for the platform's attention

“We're also realistic: This requires communities to have the capacity to onboard, configure, and maintain their models. That's a significant ask, especially for already-marginalised groups. That's why it's important for us to ensure that we acknowledge and centre mental wellbeing and digital agency in the work we're doing. People aren't just involved to take on the labour of fixing a system that works against them. They're accessing community and people-power to reclaim online spaces from the toxic minority.

“We're trying to build a system where representation can happen bottom-up rather than top-down. We'd rather launch with transparency about limitations and improve through partnership with communities than claim we've solved a problem we haven't.”

Minority content is often over-moderated. How do you deal with that challenge?

“There's a lot of research which still shows that marginalised communities get over moderated, which is crazy because they're the ones that are experiencing a lot more of the online toxicity, but because, for example, LGBT content is more likely to be historically seen as sexual and adult, there's been a lot of over purging of that content online.

“We're starting at the safety level, but when I talk to a lot of people and we talk about hate speech, they will then talk about politicians [and] hate speech in terms of divisive speech in the way people talk about others, like specific identities or communities. It's similar rhetoric when a new kind of identity becomes the target for the divide and rule political strategy that uses the same kind of language. It's always ‘they're inherently violent’ ‘they're unnatural’ ‘they are a danger to children, to women’. All the same kinds of narratives come out and that is something that I'm exploring. What [we’re doing] right now is we're looking at filtering out pure hate to keep people safe.”

Are you seeing new forms of hate speech with generative AI, such as deepfakes or bots?

“We haven’t focused on that yet, but I am having a call with the LGBT Foundation because they recently ran a national campaign called ‘This is what a woman looks like’ and it was a trans positive campaign, and it ended up being derailed. They [the derailers] used certain pictures that were nasty and then were posting them to disrupt the campaign entirely. It was definitely bots. 

“I want to talk to them and understand what specific patterns they saw during the campaign, and what they did, how they responded to it, and whether that's something that content moderation can do more to catch and deal with.

“In fact, I think it would be easier if you know what your campaign is and what you're going to post, having the context, being able to engage in data training for the model earlier, would be easier. It's just about whether the organization wants to engage in doing it or not.

“That's definitely a big, I was going to say, upcoming risk factor, but it's already really quite nasty for some of the deep fake videos that's coming out. It's something that content moderation definitely should be flagging.”

The UK’s Online Safety Act has just come into effect. How do you see regulation shaping your work?

“Tech companies will now have to assess the risk their platforms pose of disseminating the kind of racist misinformation that fuelled last year’s summer riots. The fact that there is something that now says that tech companies have to do that is good, it just doesn't really solve the issue that these content moderation tools don't work.”

Looking ahead, what’s your vision for the future of WeLivedIt.ai?

“At the moment we're working with journalists, but we want to expand to people who are visible online. That is because people who historically have faced a lot of toxicity are really good at identifying it.

“[We’re] also trying to capture more research and data around what the problem of online toxicity looks like, but also how we can improve the way AI is trained to solve that problem as well. We want to do a lot more.

“With the Online Safety Act, by 2027 the part of it that will come into effect is the part where platforms will have to report on disinformation. At the moment, the part that's come into effect is in relation to child safety, but in 2027 they'll be reporting on the risk that their platforms pose in disseminating misinformation. So, we would like to be able to contribute to that conversation, whilst also helping people that have lived experience of the problem.”

“Also, we will lay data to train the model on catching [hate speech] better. That's something that then we can also work with platforms and organizations, so they can see what the level of misogyny is on their platform by accessing that data. We want to create an ecosystem and try and contribute to improving regulation. It's a whole new minefield anyway, with tech regulation, but what would be the ideal is completely shifting the way tech platforms are regulated while keeping people safe online.”

You can find out more about WeLivedIt.ai by visiting their website or following them on LinkedIn to keep up to date with their mission to protect marginalised communities from hate speech online.

Why social media platforms spread the worst political messages

There’s a quote I keep coming back to whenever I think about online political discourse: “All the world’s a stage,” wrote William Shakespeare. What the Bard didn’t foresee is that the stage would one day be run by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and littered with algorithmically selected hot takes, clickbait headlines, and QAnon memes.

Today the theatre of politics isn't Westminster or Washington, it’s TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter, still tragically named). This is where the stories get told and politicians’ actions in legislators exist only to trend on social media platforms and raise their profile. This is where most of our attention is focused, however “focused” we are when we doom scroll.

Theatre of retention

Technology platforms don’t just facilitate the spread of political narratives; they shape them. These are not neutral tools. The medium is not just the message, it’s the producer, the casting director, and the lighting technician. When we debate policy, news or conspiracy online, we are performing inside a theatre whose architecture was built not for reasoned argument, but for retention metrics.

If you’re crafting a narrative in 2025 and you’re not thinking about how it will play - how it will be clipped, quoted, memed, dunked on, or algorithmically elevated - then you’re not in the political conversation. This leads me to ask: is the way we consume politics shaping the politics we get? Also, are the wrong narratives winning?

Take QAnon. Or the idea that vaccines are a secret form of population control. Or the increasingly popular belief that central banks are a satanic cabal in disguise. Or scepticism about climate change. These narratives didn’t go mainstream because they were true. They went viral because they were sticky. Catchy. Shareable. Especially amongst bored Boomers spending hours on Facebook on their smartphones. Facebook, and other social media platforms elevate the sticky over the true.

Down the rabbit hole

We’re all living on the timeline now, and most of us aren’t choosing the stories we see. We’re being fed them, passively, in the gaps between emails, while queuing for coffee, or waiting for sleep to arrive. The hardware and software feeding them to us are not neutral broadcasters either. They are dopamine slot machines, calibrated to hijack attention and convert it into advertising gold. They’re not here to inform you. They’re here to keep you looking.

So, what happens when these systems encounter politics? You go down a rabbit hole without much of a say in where you end up.

Recommendation engines, particularly YouTube’s, don’t just give you what you asked for. They give you what will keep you watching. Sometimes, that’s another Mitchel and Webb Look sketch, sometimes it’s a video about distant galaxies, sometimes an interview with Florence Pugh. However, sometimes it’s “The TRUTH About the Deep State (They Don’t Want You to Know)” given the same level of prominence as legit news reporting and trailers for Marvel films. From there, it’s just a few clicks to flat Earth, climate change denial, or white genocide.

Fear works

The kicker? You didn’t even search for this stuff. You didn’t have to. The system knew you’d bite, because someone like you - same age, same job, same fears - already did.

This isn’t a system that pushes everyone into their own bespoke dystopia. It’s worse. It amplifies the most engaging narratives - the ones with moral panic, emotional simplicity, and good enemies - and after the most attention grabbing narrative of all has been found it’s fired at everyone. It turns out the same things hold most people’s attention, and that’s fascism. It turns out fear works. Anger works. “They’re coming for your kids” always works.

It’s bad for business

So, if narratives shape politics, and platforms shape narratives, then who shapes the platforms? Capital. That’s who.

These systems are designed to maximise ad revenue. That’s the logic of surveillance capitalism: capture attention, model behaviour, feed stimuli, and then sell that attention - that’s your attention - to advertisers.

Truth, nuance, and boring-but-important policy details don’t trend, so they don’t get a look in. It’s bad for business. The tech billionaires and the Wall Street types who fund their projects might nominally care about abstract things like truth and democracy, but they care about concrete things like revenue, market share and time on site much more. This means they will continue to aid the spread of narratives that are false or enrage people until they vote for reactionary politicians. Now tech billionaires must bend the knee to the monster they created.

Changing the record

Can we change this?

Yes, but that’s political. It would take a movement, an electoral coalition, which is hard to assemble. The people most harmed by this system are too fragmented, too polarised, or too doom-scrolled to organise. Real change would mean confronting the wealth and power of tech billionaires.

We have done it before. We regulated cigarettes. We demanded seatbelts. We could ban certain algorithmic features, restrict attention-hacking designs, or break up tech monopolies. We could treat tech platforms like we once treated cars: useful, but too dangerous to go unregulated.

There is still time

To do this we have to be honest. Social media didn’t invent the business model of using outrage to get attention and then selling that attention to advertisers. Fox News and tabloids like The Sun have been at it for years. The difference is now it’s in your pocket, and it never turns off.

So yes, technology matters. Yes, narrative matters. However, it’s the design of technology platforms, optimised for surveillance capitalism, which determines the political narratives we are exposed to. If democracy is a battle of stories, then it matters who controls the stage of this world. The good news is that there is still time to change it.

TikTok has many problems, but the hysteria around this app distracts us from the larger problem of unregulated tech companies

As a society, our distrust of social media has never been higher, but right now most of the ire is directed at one app: TikTok. Last month, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell the platform to a non-Chinese company or be banned in America. This is the latest round of moral panic about TikTok, where everyone from Donald Trump to Real Clear Policy has criticised the app.

The Chinese social media video sharing app is under the US legislator’s spotlight as suspicions over its effects on users mounts. In the UK, government employees are banned from having TikTok on their work phones by order of the Cabinet Office.

This fresh round of TikTok discourse reminded me of this article by G_S_Bhogal, aka Gurwinder, writer of The Prism on Substack. In this blog post, he explores the often repeated idea that TikTok has been designed by the Chinese as a means to undermine the West by destroying the attention span of the youth and spreading mental health problems amongst them.

Fast food, smoking and short videos

Gurwinder’s article makes a compelling case, but I am not convinced that TikTok has been designed to damage the West or is more dangerous than other social media apps, especially short video apps like YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. It’s more accurate to say that TikTok is bad for you, like fast food or smoking. Unlike fast food or smoking, TikTok (and other social media apps) can learn about you to make the product more perfectly tailored to what you will find addictive.

In Gurwinder’s article he said: "Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.” This rapid absorption of users’ data contributes to the platform's addictive qualities.

TikTok (and other short video social media apps) are also on your phone, something you take everywhere with you, check constantly and is essential for modern life. TikTok might break new ground in how to make addictive products, but it’s still just a product that has negative side effects (like alcohol, fast food or cigarettes), not a conspiracy.

Is vodka a bioweapon?

Labelling TikTok a weapon seems akin to claiming vodka was invented by Russia and sent to Britain to poison our livers and cause anti-social behaviour. British people drink too much, especially strong spirits, and this has problems for public health and anti-social behaviour.

Vodka, or any other alcoholic drink, wasn’t invented by anyone to do this. We did it to ourselves because of our own human flaws and a free market that allows dangerous products to be sold (more on that later).

The same can be said of the effect that TikTok has on our attention span and mental health. The reality is, we've known for some time that TikTok, like many other social media platforms, can have negative impacts on users’ mental health. Whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed the harmful effects Instagram has on teenage girls in 2021. TikTok is bad for us, but it’s not been deliberately made to damage Britain or America.

The evidence social media is addictive

A Guardian article by Richard Seymour from 2019 highlighted the addictive nature of social media, drawing parallels to gambling addiction. Seymour referenced the Skinner box, an experiment to control pigeons and rats based on a variable reward mechanism that demonstrates how these mechanisms can lead to addictive behaviours. This is the same mechanism that makes scrolling any social media platform (or flicking through photos on a dating app) addictive, so that we keep coming back for more.

The Netflix 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma also exposed the dark side of social media, revealing how these platforms exploit human psychology to keep users hooked and get us angrier and angrier about politics.

In essence, social media addiction can be seen as a form of gambling, where users chase the elusive reward of virality or validation. Your next tweet could make you famous. The next swipe could be your future wife or the best fuck of your life. The next refresh of the feed could contain anything, something amazing, something that will change your life, or the funniest joke you’ll read today. Keep scrolling. Keep swiping. Keep posting.

The safe amount to consume

I’m not saying that social media is as bad for you as injecting heroin into your eye-balls. There are safe (or at least safer) amounts of vodka or any other amount of alcohol to consume. Anything is poison given the incorrect dosage, even essentials like water and oxygen. There is a perfectly fine amount of social media to consume, depending on who you are. I wouldn’t give vodka or TikTok to an eight-year-old, or someone who struggles with addiction.

Every boozy Brit (and I speak from experience here as I do love a craft beer to go alongside a bowl of Raman at the end of the week) knows someone who has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, if they don’t know an alcoholic. Some things are bad for you. Some things are addictive, which makes it easy to consume too much of a bad thing. Social media is one of these bad things.

There are also concerns about the effects of social media on children, just like there are concerns about underage drinking. Certain products should not be available to children and their use should be restricted for teenagers, whose bodies and minds are still growing. Even industry insiders have criticised the addictive nature of smartphones and social media platforms. Steve Jobs never intended for iPhones to be used in the way that we use them.

The problem is the entire business model

We have known for a while that smartphones and social media are bad for us. They are also addictive, which can make their negative effects worse as users get trapped in a cycle of addiction. They also hook respectable middle-class people, who think that addicts are people drinking in Wetherspoons at 9am or spending all day in betting shops. Not them. Even though they’ve read a thousand tweets using #FBPE today and post a huge overshare on Facebook every day just to see the likes roll in.

Getting concerned about TikTok now is not really concern about the danger of these products, especially for children. It’s concern about China’s growing economic, political and cultural power.

It's not just TikTok that is a problem. American social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter (or X) or Facebook face similar criticisms for their impact on mental health and well-being, especially for young people. The issue extends beyond individual platforms; it's about the entire business model of using addictive products to monopolise our attention to sell us more ads.

Misaligned goals

"We need to have a conversation about what business practices are allowed, like we did with alcohol and cigarettes," said James Williams, author of Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy.

Williams argues that the goals of social media platforms often clash with users' well-being and our own personal goals. While social media companies aim to maximise time spent on the platform, to serve users more ads, users want meaningful connections and genuine experiences. The two are not the same. We seek one but are offered the other.

Supermarkets don’t try to keep us trapped in their stores. Our goals are aligned: we want to buy and they want to sell. Sometimes they sell us extra stuff we don’t need, but generally the experience of visiting a supermarket is a partnership that benefits both sides. The same is not true for social media. No one’s plan for the day is to spend all day staring at algorithmically selected content. We want to connect with our friends, family and community. The platforms want to keep us hooked.

Chinese vs Western markets

The strongest evidence for the negative effects of TikTok lies in different content that is available when using the app in China, where it operates under a different set of regulations and cultural norms. The content is a lot more restricted and a lot less addictive. The reason for this is not that China is protecting its citizens from a weapon it made, it’s that the Chinese government restricts its citizens’ exposure to dangerous products. This is mainly because it wants its citizens to compete with America, but the point about government restrictions stands.

I said above that Brits drink too much. I’m not trying to shame anyone into drinking less. We partly drink too much because of our culture, but also because of our free-market economies overseen by neoliberal policy makers. Products that are dangerous are allowed by free markets as they’re making money for someone, which is considered a higher goal than public safety. 

Thus we get cigarettes, high alcohol drinks, fatty fast foods and addictive attention damaging social media platforms. This is especially true of tech products that are less regulated than food and drink.

 Restrict products that are dangerous

Personal freedom and economic freedom are linked (although they are not exactly the same thing as neoliberals would argue) and people should be given the choice about what they consume. If you want to eat McDonalds for every meal of every day, then you should be able to do so free from interference of the state (although I would recommend against it). I feel the same about injecting heroin into your eye-balls, if you really want to do it then go for it (although I certainly wouldn’t recommend it). 

The state does restrict products that are dangerous. You can’t make cigarettes for children any more or sell alcohol to anyone despite their age. The state has the power to intervene to protect public health, whether that's banning cars that pollute too much or social media products that damage our mental health by monopolising our attention. The state just chooses to exercise that power in some areas and not others due to corporate pressure and ideology.

A moral panic about TikTok being a Chinese weapon is not helping tackle the real issue. What we need is to recognise that many social media platforms create products that are dangerous and then use the power of the state to restrict products that are dangerous, especially for young people.

The youth has bigger problems than TikTok

Also, while we’re having a moral panic about TikTok’s effect on the youth, it's essential to remember the real issues affecting young people today (and by this I mean people under 45), such as a lack of affordable housing, poor rights for renters (and bad conditions in a lot of rentals), high levels of student debt, low wage growth and not enough savings to name a few.

Blaming TikTok for societal ills seems misplaced when larger systemic issues are causing problems for young people. There’s no moral panic to fix the housing crisis to protect future generations. That would involve rolling back neoliberal policies that make money for powerful people.

Trump didn’t get started on TikTok

In the end, the problem isn't that TikTok is a weapon; it's that the under-regulated tech industry churns out products that can harm us. As we navigate this brave new world of social media, it's crucial to remain vigilant and advocate for regulations that prioritise user well-being over profit.

After all, in the age of Trump grabbing attention and power via Twitter, perhaps the biggest threat to the West isn't TikTok or China, but the unchecked power of tech giants.

Yet another tedious Prince Harry hot take shamelessly written to get clicks

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.

Hannah Arendt would be worried about how information technology makes evil more likely

If you looked up evil in the dictionary there would probably be a picture of Adolf Hitler or the Nazis, which is fair enough as they murdered over six million people. Many books have been written trying to understand the evil at the heart of the Nazi regime, but the definitive work was written by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

The book chronicles the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann who, amongst other things, planned the transportation of Jews during the Holocaust that allowed for millions to be moved to camps where they were murdered. Eichmann was not remarkable for a cold calculating intelligence. He wasn’t evil like Hannibal Lecter or Darth Vader. He wasn’t possessed by a fanatical hatred of Jews, beyond the antisemitism that was prevalent at the time. Eichmann wasn’t remarkable at all, really, apart from the remarkably appalling deeds he was a part of.

Arendt wanted to explain how someone so normal could be a key part of such massive evil. Her book also explores how we got to the point where great acts of evil weren’t conducted on the battlefield or in the sacking of cities, but by bureaucrats behind desks. Her book remains the best and most insightful exploration of human evil, and should be read by everyone.

The work of genocide involves a lot of bureaucracy

Eichmann’s job was a senior - but not quite at the top - bureaucratic position in the public sector, but he participated in one of (if not THE) most awful things that has ever happened. Arendt’s book shows that in modern industrial society, the everyday work of genocide is like that of any other office job, and the people most suited to it are the same office drones that are found all over the world.

The book shows how a totalitarian system like Nazi Germany became a part of normal life. The Holocaust needed paperwork. When we think of evil, we think of something abhorrent or something whose every part is disgusting to us as moral human beings. We don’t think of things that are dull, like paperwork. Arendt argues that under totalitarianism, evil becomes everyday. It no longer looks like evil. This allows for great evil to be committed.

Doing evil requires modern infrastructure. It means people doing the office work of evil, the logistics, the memo writing, the planning meetings, the quarterly reviews. Arendt argues most of the people involved in, and necessary for, the doing of great evil are separated from the actual acts of evil: killing people, brutalising them, taking away their homes, forcing them into camps, committing mass exterminations. Most people involved in the process that leads to great evil might not think what they are doing is evil.

One of the biggest changes that has taken place between when Arendt was writing and today is that the kind of office work that Eichmann did has now been digitised. Computers have removed the need for a dystopian society to have legions of people typing out arrest warrants, a la Terry Gillingham’s Brazil. The growth of information technology means that you need fewer Eichmanns, people willing to do great evil but at a distance from it, to do something really terrible today.

Turning people into machines

As much as needing fewer bureaucrats is useful if you want to do evil, there is a more significant change that information technology has brought about that makes totalitarianism more likely. For evil to occur, something needs to happen to turn ordinary people into people like Eichmann. That something is a process that occurs in totalitarian societies, like the ones that Arendt spent her life studying.

Arendt argued that a totalitarian political system, like the one in Nazi Germany, turned people into machines and this allowed them to do the extraordinarily evil things that the regime required. She called this The Banality of Evil. Arendt argued that Eichmann stopped thinking and thus was able to be a part of a genocide. She said we need to watch out for anything or anyone who seeks to subvert our capacity for critical thinking and turn us into machines.

Totalitarian societies turn people into machines and they don’t need machines to do it. However, our modern machines make it easier to turn people into the thoughtless drone that Eichmann became. To see why that is, we need to look at another work by Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

How social media isolates us

Social media isolates us from each other as relations through technology come to replace non-technology-based relations. James Williams explores this in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, in which he discusses how social media and mobile technology change our behaviour. One of these changes is a process that Williams describes as interactions on social media replacing the things we are seeking to achieve by using social media. This means that over time our goals change to be what social media platforms want, instead of what we want.

We might join a social media platform, install it on our phone, take it everywhere with us and check it all day because we want to connect with friends and family, or network with colleagues, but social media platforms are incapable of measuring how many meaningful social interactions we have. What it can measure is our attention to the platform, likes, clicks, video watches, etc. and platforms attempt to monopolise our attention so they can sell adverts.

Eventually, the platforms train us to see a like or comment as a social interaction with a friend or family member when they’re not the same thing. The platforms change our behaviour so that we see what they want, our attention on the platform, as what we want, for meaningful social interactions with others. Williams calls this process tech obscuring our starlight or our guiding principles behind our actions.

Our starlight is obscured

As our starlight is obscured, interactions on technology platforms come to replace meaningful human interactions. This means we become more isolated from each other, which Arendt identified as a precursor to totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism requires people to be lonely in a mass society full of people who are disconnected from each other. When you are lonely in a mass society everyone constantly assumes the worst about each other and people stop trusting each other. This is further aided by social media showing the worst aspects of humanity, from online abuse to petty put-downs. When social media has replaced meaningful social interactions, it’s easy to stop trusting other people.

Arendt wrote that totalitarianism requires people to be isolated from each other, but also be able to connect to form mass movements like the Nazi Party or the Russian Communist Party. Being lonely in a mass society is, ironically, a shared experience. Recruits to the totalitarian movement are both lonely and connected via their loneliness. Social media provides the dual purpose of isolating us from each other by taking the place of human interactions, and by allowing members of a nascent totalitarian movement to connect.

Undermining objective truth

There are other ways that modern technology can aid totalitarian movements, which is that social media, and the filter bubbles they create, undermines our shared understanding of the truth.

Arendt wrote an essay called Truth and Politics, in which she argued that facts are fragile and that organised lying is a threat to facts. She said that we cannot allow those in power to undermine the belief in facts all together. Public institutions like libraries, universities, etc. keep records of facts that can be shared and help maintain the truth. Totalitarian movements seek to attack these institutions.

By now all this should be ringing alarm bells and reminding you of our post-truth social media world where Donald Trump and his supporters attack the idea of objective reality with “alternative facts”. Arendt would have recognised the attack on truth as that of an aspiring totalitarian.

How social media undermines truth

Social media filter bubbles mean people only interact with people who share the same values, which means that a lie that reflects those values can spread without ever being troubled by the truth. Especially if that truth conflicts with these values as it will never be shared into those social media communities, protected by filter bubbles.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter either present all information as equally valid (regardless of its source or validity) or emphasise pieces of information, articles, opinions, posts, etc. based on how much interaction they have had (again regardless of how truthful or authoritative they are). There is no quality scoring based on how true or false information is. A complete lie that generates more interactions on the platforms - as emotionally charged lies are likely to do - will appear more prominently than a mundane fact.

Arendt argued that once the idea of objective truth breaks down, the world can be reshaped to what it needs to be. Anyone can become a criminal. It can be said that a fair election was actually rigged. Human life can be redefined as worthless. These are the tools that totalitarian movements use to turn people into machines. Events like the above made it possible for Eichmann to do terrible evil. Recent technological changes have only made this easier.

Attacks on authority

Adding to the problem is the totalitarian attack on authority. Totalitarians are a subspecies of authoritarians, but at the same time they erode the idea that authority can come from anywhere outside of their movement.

Arendt wrote an essay called What is Authority? In which she argued that we no longer respect authority and this causes problems as authority is necessary for society to function. Arendt says that authority is how we get things done without having to use reason or violence. Teachers and coaches have authority, which is why we obey them. Authority allows things to be done efficiently.

Totalitarians attack other sources of authority whilst making the real sources of authority within their movement opaque. Arendt describes this in detail in The Origins of Totalitarianism. This process keeps citizens in a perpetual state of uncertainty as to who exactly has authority over them and what their instructions are. This uncertainty over authority is the everyday experience of Totalitarianism.

Choose your own authority

One reason totalitarians do this is to remove our capacity for action. Without authority, we cannot act together. The primary motivation for following an instruction is not authority but fear of violence. Arendt says that violence is the opposite of authority. A constant fear of violence is also the everyday experience of life under totalitarianism. This was most memorably captured by George Orwell’s description of Room 101 in 1984.

Social media and modern technology platforms attack authority in the way that they present information, opinions, articles, etc. based on how much they have been interacted with, instead of based on the authority of the author. This is because they want to show you content to monopolise your attention and not authoritative content. This undermines the concept of authority.

Filter bubbles that undermine the concept of objective truth also attack authority. In a post-truth world, authority can be anything or anyone you want it to be. It could be Alex Jones or Trump or someone from your neighbourhood. Why not choose an authority that shares your values? If we all live in a bubble where authority is the people we agree with then our capacity for action is reduced.

The importance of action 

The idea of action is central to Arendt’s thinking and it comes up in several of her works. Arendt wrote about the importance of the Viva Activa or active life in her book The Human Condition. She said life had three elements: labour, which is the biological stuff people need to live, work, which is making things like tools that help us survive, and action, which is the social element of human life. Arendt argues that action is essential to political life. Totalitarianism prevents action.

Totalitarianism attacks action in many ways, which is enabled by modern technology. We have seen how it attacks authority which makes action possible, but tech also makes us isolated from each other. Furthermore, it obscures the starlight of our values changing the action we want to take into one that isn’t meaningful for us but benefits the technology platforms. On top of this, it attacks the concept of a shared truth, which is necessary for shared action.

Arendt’s warning

Action is the essential element of our meaningful social and political interaction with other people. The idea undermines a lot of Arendt’s other writing. Without our ability to create action, we are prey to totalitarian movements. Without action, totalitarian movements can turn us into unthinking machines, capable of doing great evil like Eichmann. 

Arendt described all this in an age before modern computers, technology platforms and social media. None of these processes that Arendt described are new in the Information Age, however, changes in information technology do make it more likely for the processes that Arendt described to arise.

How George Orwell predicted our very online political discourse

In 1945 George Orwell wrote Notes On Nationalism, which describes how “nationalism” makes people impervious to facts. Reading it recently, I was astonished by how little had changed. Memes and Twitter flame wars might be incomprehensible to Orwell, if he were alive today, but the basic way we argue about politics has hardly changed.

In the essay, Orwell describes how nationalism warps people’s thinking. Nationalism was as serious a political problem in 1945 as it is now, but what Orwell described as nationalism is not the belligerent belief in a nation-state to exclusion of all others. What Orwell examines in the essay is better understood as ideology.

Orwell defines nationalism as “identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” He goes on to say: “Nationalism in the extended sense in which I am using the word, included such movements and tendencies as Communism, political-Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacificism.”

Competing ideologies

Why he didn’t say ideology and used the word nationalism instead I don’t know, but his use of nationalism fits the term ideology. Most people think an ideology is having an ‘ism’, such as feminism, socialism, etc. People typically associate isms with the left or the extreme right, although they can be many ideologies that don’t have a handy one-word phrase to sum them up. They can be as all-encompassing as any ism, but are also more difficult to describe, more opaque and correspondingly more difficult to convince someone that they have an ideology. Yet, nonetheless, they are ideologies.

One of the key aspects of nationalism that still applies today as much as it did in the 40s, is that for a nationalist, everything is about the competition of your ideology against others. Orwell wrote: “A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist - that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating - but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations.”

This perfectly sums up the world of 24/7 news and social media discourse, where those who follow politics like it’s a sport constantly keep track of the scores, the owns, the dumps, the who-is-ups and the who-is-downs of it all. Politics isn’t a debate about competing ideas, but about competing scores on who has delivered the most public humiliations to the other side.

Focusing on the dunk

Related to this is that the very online discourse focuses on minor political exchanges, rather than the big issues facing the world. A dunk on an unpopular MP or commentator will be shared more widely than actual news (sometimes even making it to the front page of newspapers). The discourse favours witty putdowns or dumps over what’s happening in terms of legislation, the economy, debates, etc.

The same was true in 1945 when Orwell wrote: “Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory.”

A small victory in Twitter discourse is of much more interest to a nationalist than a substantial news story about rising costs of living or health policy. Also, to nationalists any exchange can be a victory. Hence you can see two different stripes of nationalists tweet the same clip of two people shouting incomprehensible things at each other and both claiming the unintelligible noise is their side is owning the other. As there are a lot of nationalists on social media, our discussion is not engaging in substantive issues.

Double standards

Following on from that, Orwell wrote about something I had assumed was an entirely modern phenomenon: the bold-faced claim that when our side does something (usually bad) it’s okay, but when the other side does the same thing it’s beyond the pale. Orwell wrote: “A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians - which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by our side.”

This double standard appears to be eternal. Witness Remainers deploring the Leave campaign’s underhand attempts to influence the Brexit referendum’s outcome with lies, dodgy Facebook ads and possible Russian interference - whilst also saying without a hint of self-awareness that if there were a second referendum the elderly shouldn’t be allowed to vote, as they won’t experience the long-term consequences of Brexit.

These are both slightly different attempts to influence the outcome of a vote and can be summed up by Orwell saying: “The sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when our side commits it.”

Commentators are like astrologers

Orwell also described the modern social media political talking heads. “Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties,” he said. Commentators can make any number of ludicrous or inaccurate statements on social media and never lose their following of people who agree with them.

From backers of the Iraq war to people who called the Brexit referendum wrong, or who claimed Brexit would be easy, to the million online talking heads who said that all Labour needed to do was get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and put a sensible Remainer with a neat suit in his place and they’ll be 20 points ahead, for a commentator who shares your nationalism there is no amount of mistakes that cannot be forgiven.

People who claimed that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMD and this was a fact, are still political commentators favoured by those who share the New Labour ideology. Have they admitted they got the biggest call of the 2000s wrong? Of course not. There’s no need to. Just keep posting to those who share your ideology, and no amount of mistakes will tarnish your reputation in your follower’s eyes.

The truth is out there, but we don’t care

Related to the endless rounds of ideological dumping is the process of how rhetoric takes the place of truth. Orwell wrote: “What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.”

Did Boris Johnson lie about the benefits of Brexit? Was Jeremy Corbyn in league with the IRA or the SWP? Was Clinton’s email server illegal? What happened when Narendra Modi

was governor of Uttar Pradesh? Was austerity a means to transfer wealth to the rich? The truth of these things are discoverable and many talented journalists spend years writing on these topics, publishing detailed long reads breaking down the facts, and they reach fewer people than a post in a Facebook group or a viral tweet. Posts that are high in rhetoric will be lapped up by the nationalistic supporters of a side over a detailed investigation any day.

Nationalism is escapable

We think that modern politics is conducted differently than it was in the 1940s. We have created 24/7 news, legions of political commentators, the social media dunk, and the viral tweet, but the way we do politics for the nationalists haven’t changed much in the intervening 77 years. What has changed is that all this is inescapable because social media is in everyone’s pocket and the latest bad take is only a twitch away.

There is some hope as not everyone is a nationalist. Even people who are nationalists aren’t nationalists all the time. Orwell wrote: “One has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which attracts him but which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issue is involved.”

So we’re not doomed to forever comment wars and cycles of takes and dunks, but as communication technology brings political debates more constantly into our lives, the problems that Orwell identified have got worse. It’s a shame to think that these problems are worse now than in Orwell’s time, but at least we are aware of these problems. If we can summon the will to change how we do politics, we can make things better.

Branch of the National Union of Journalists (BNUJ)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Does the left live in a bubble?

The day after the 2019 general election, Nick Cohen tweeted: “Never mistake your Twitter feed for your country”. He was implying that those of us on the left, rooting for Jeremy Corbyn to win the election, were out of touch with the average voter as we’re cocooned in an internet echo chamber filled with people who agree with us. 

I don’t make a habit of agreeing with Nick Cohen, but he did have a point. I had mistaken my Twitter feed for my country. I had mistaken my country for one where people cared about other people. A country where we didn’t vote in a posh buffoon simply because it was the fastest way to make Brexit go away, so that most people can go back to ignoring politics while everything else gets worse.

I wanted a Corbyn government that would tackle rising homelessness, child poverty, crumbling schools and the looming environmental disaster. The country (or at least large parts of it) had a different idea. I had made a painful mistake. If I could move to my Twitter feed I would.

Does the left live in a bubble?

It’s not just the day after a general election that I feel like this, although it’s particularly strong on those days. The left is frequently accused of living in a bubble. Another example is this Helen Lewis piece claiming (supported by a lot of evidence) that the Twitter electorate isn’t the real electorate.

Lewis cites the example of the response to Rebecca Long-Bailey’s use of the phrase “progressive patriotism” in her pitch to be the next Labour leader, and how this was seen by some on the left as dangerously close to racism. Lewis states that “to read so directly across from ‘patriotism’ to ‘racism’ is a fringe position.”

I had criticism of the use of this phrase, but as Lewis said: “Some 67 percent of Britons describe themselves as ‘very’ or ‘slightly’ patriotic. Telling two-thirds of the country that they are secretly racist is a courageous electoral strategy.” I guess my dislike of the idea of progressive patriotism is proof, if anymore where needed, that I’m out or touch with the general voter and live in a bubble.

Personal bubbles

I wonder if this is mainly a by-product of the fact that most of our politics is done online? I don’t get my political news, views and discussion from BBC news bulletins. I get it mainly from the internet, and predominantly from what is served up to me by Twitter and Facebook algorithms.

These algorithms look at the things that I read, the post I interact with and the people I follow to build up a picture of me. They then filter the content that Facebook or Twitter shows to me to reflect my interests: i.e. left-wing politics. This personalisation of content is done to keep my attention focused on Facebook or Twitter for longer so that they can show me more ads, which is how they make their money. 

This all seems harmless until a general election rolls around and I’m left bewildered by the fact that everyone didn’t vote for the party offering more money for schools, hospitals and homelessness prevention, despite the fact that all this was very well received by my Twitter feed.

“The common ground of news”

Adrienne LaFrance said, in an article for Nieman Reports: “The fear that personalization will encourage filter bubbles by narrowing the selection of stories is a valid one, especially considering that the average internet user or news consumer might not even be aware of such efforts.” 

LaFrance interviewed Judith Donath, author of “The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online” and a researcher affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, who said: “You may have friends or colleagues, and you read the same things in common. You may decide different things about it. Then you debate with those people. If you’re not even seeing the same news story, it leaves you with a much narrower set of people with whom you share that common ground. You’re losing the common ground of news.”

This is what happened to me. Twitter wasn’t showing me the posts from the people who thought that all the nice things that I wanted from a Corbyn government were a waste of money, or posts from the people who wanted to “get Brexit done”, or the people who thought Corbyn was insufficiently patriotic to be Prime Minister. If Twitter had shown me these comments I would have logged off in a sulk and they wouldn’t have been able to show me more ads for hotels in Croatia.

Techno-fixes

There is a technological fix to this, as explained in this Ted Talk on filter bubbles by Eli Pariser. He said that the issue is that Twitter and Facebook give their users an information diet consisting of only things they like, which he calls “information desserts”. However, as any parent knows, it's best to give your children a balanced diet, not just what they like.

Sometimes children need to be given things they don’t want to eat for their own good. I’m referring to us all as children because that’s how the tech platforms treat us and it’s also, frankly, how we act online. According to this idea, it would be good if Twitter showed me some posts of people yelling about how immigrants are stealing the country and we need to vote Tory to stop it, even if I wouldn’t like it.

In principal I’m in favour of this, as long as there's a Daily Express reader somewhere having videos by Hbomberguy dropped into his timeline after he tweets “Get Brexit done” a certain number of times.

Would this work?

I can see the benefit of a varied information diet. According to Pariser it’s a diet of: “Some information vegetables. Some information desserts.” Vegetables, in this case, being people saying that Corbyn is a softy, unpatriotic, metropolitan, immigrant loving liberal and desserts being people saying that maybe the government should do something about all the people sleeping in the bus station every evening.

I’m a little skeptical if this would work. There is lots of evidence that facts (or other people’s opinions) don’t change our minds. Although I am heartened by this story of a young man who fell down a YouTube hole, became alt-right and then changed his views when he encountered left-wing YouTube.

Is this a left-wing problem?

The Facebooks and Twitters of this world might be creating filter bubbles through personalising our timelines, but that’s not specifically a left-wing problem. Everyone is on the internet, even my 69-year-old mum (hi mum, I’ll reply to your email about socks after I’m done writing this).

The accusation of living in a bubble is mainly levelled at the left, specifically the radical left. You don’t see Brexiter, Tory voters being accused of living in a conservative bubble where everyone is frothing about immigrants or Cultural-Marxism destroying Britain. No one says they should be given information vegetables in the form of Owen Jones or Laurie Penny columns.

The views of people who complain about immigrants or metropolitan elites are taken to be common sense. Occasionally, people point out that common sense can be wrong, but that still accepts right-wing views as the default position of most people. I guess if right-wing is the default position then the fact that I disagree means that I do live in a bubble and I’m disconnected from reality.

Centre or right?

Maybe the majority of people in the country are conservative. The evidence for this is a few minutes looking at the supposed “centre ground” of British politics. In January this year, former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron wrote an article in the Guardian about what “progressives” need to do to win. In this he said: “At present, Labour’s brand is so terrifying that it pushes voters into Conservative arms.” From reading this you would think that 2019 Labour manifesto includes pledges for a massive war to liberate Palestine, the abolishment of prisons and gender, and confiscating all money above what the average Labour voter earns.

I can see why most people might find that programme a bit too spicy for their bland British sensibilities. However, only the most brain-dead, Daily Mail mainlining, Little Englander would think that’s what a Corbyn government would have been like. Then again, it’s probably what Tim Farron, supposedly in the centre of British politics, thinks a Corbyn government would have been like. Apparently, money for teachers and nurses, helping the homeless, cheaper public transport and green jobs is “terrifying”.

My bubble is my happy place

If you haven’t guessed from my tone so far, I’m not happy with the world outside my bubble. I don’t think most British people are Nigel Farrage, but if this is Tim centre-of-politics Farron’s reality then I don’t want to live in it. So, I’m currently looking at moving to my Twitter feed and I must say that, judging by the pictures, some of these flats in Animal Crossing are very nice.

I don’t know where this leaves the Labour Party. The sad truth is that we do have to win over some people who think that Tim Farron is right and thought Corbyn was so scary that they had to vote Tory. I don’t like saying it, and I’m going to wash my mouth out with soap afterward, but after two defeats for Corbyn I’m starting to think that there aren’t enough craft beer drinkers in Britain to vote in socialism.

That doesn’t mean Labour has to give up on socialism and spend their time chasing some hypothetical centre ground voter. There are stories that can unite the country and break the left out of our Twitter bubbles. Next time I’m going to look into what these are.

What are the limits to free speech online?

What are the limits to freedom of speech? Almost everyone believes in some limits to freedom of speech, unless you think that currency forging or child porn should be accepted as self-expression. You would have to be a psychopath to think that it’s acceptable to scream racial or sexual abuse into someone's face. What about the nuance beyond these extremes examples? Where is the line where free speech stops? 

The case of online social network Gab is instructive in this debate. The website was shut down after the Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting in which 11 people were killed. The perpetrator had posted on the social network before committing his crimes, which was a notorious gathering space for neo-Nazis, the alt-right and conspiracy theorists. It was filled with racial hatred and anti-Semitism; the sort of speech that most people think is completely unacceptable, but many argue should be allowed under free speech protections. 

Gab's homepage (before it was shut down by its hosts) described it as: "A social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online. All are welcome." The community certainly believed that there should be very few (if any) restrictions on speech. However, this led to it becoming a safe space for the worst speech and that ultimately contributed to a mass shooting. This implies that no limits to speech is the wrong approach.

The makers of Gab certainly leant to the right politically, but we'll assume that in creating a free speech community they didn't set out to create a safe heaven for hate speech, Nazis or the people who want to do a mass shooting. The problem is, that is what their web site became. The question is: why didn't Gab's community of free speech prevent this? They had unlimited free speech too, but they didn’t use it to prevent Nazis taking over the website.

If I was at a gathering of my friends, and someone said something hateful, then we would make it clear that wasn't acceptable and the person who said the awful thing would have to apologise or leave. Most people and most social gatherings are like this. Why wasn't it like this on Gab? Why isn't it like this so frequently online?

You could argue that Gab was an extreme case where free speech got out of hand and led to a mass shooting. Drawing up a framework for the limits of free speech is complicated. There is a difference between what speech I think should be legally tolerated by the government, and what speech I tolerate in my presence. There is a lot of stuff I don't want to hear that I think should still be legal.

Online it gets more complicated. Are social networks private or public spaces? They are the largest gatherings of people in the world, but they take place on platforms that are the private property of the companies that own them. Are they public squares, or private members clubs? The rules that gather what you can say or do in each is quite different.

I think that social networks (especially the large ones like Facebook and Twitter) should be treated more like public utilities than private spaces. This means users should have the same rights as they would have in public and the same recourse to appeal against decisions, however, it also means that there should be greater public scrutiny of what goes on on these platforms.

You may have a different view to me as to whether these are public spaces where and users should have the same rights as someone in the street or if they are private members clubs where the club gets to set and enforce the rules. If you think that these online spaces should have no restriction on them whatsoever, then remember the case of Gab.

So why did Gab become overrun with Nazis and people spreading racial hatred? Partly, it's because Nazis gravitate towards free speech zones the same way that weeds grow in unattended gardens. Nazis are everywhere online, but they get be weeded out by effective moderation. If your policy is no moderation, then Nazis will grow. Partly, it's because Nazis are leveraging the issue of free speech. Most people agree that free speech is a good thing (which it is) and that it shouldn't be restricted. If you believe this absolutely then it follows that Nazis should be allowed the same freedom of speech as everyone.

Nazis don't care about the free speech of people they hate - Jews, people of colour, usually women and LGBTQ people as well - but they are clear about their right to freedom of speech and use it to drive a division between leftists, who they paint was opposed to freedom of speech, and everyone else whose view of free speech are less nuanced. Nazis are leveraging this to their advantage and using it paint those who question the limits to free speech as worse than themselves and thus making their hateful views more palatable than questioning free speech.

This is feeding a popular conservative narrative that snowflake leftists (usually young people on campuses) who don't want to listen to ideas they disagree with are the real threat to free speech. The truth behind this narrative is several things coming together: an important debate about the limits of free speech, the legacy of no-platforming the far right, and a long overdue recognition of the different effects that hateful speech can have on different people. Conservatives aren’t interested in the nuance of these debates and are also attempting to leverage free speech for support.

What conservatives are frankly overreacting too (and in their overreaction they are giving an opportunity to the far-right to seize the issue) is a discussion amongst the left about what are the limits of freedom speech. This debate is important to prevent every public square and social network becoming the Nazi ridden hellscape that Gab became.

If we aren't going to have rules about what speech is and isn’t allowed then it's up to everyone to stop Nazis openly recruiting, which the example of Gab shows we are really bad at. This is my main concern. Clearly free speech communities have a problem with preventing Nazis, people who want to do commit mass shootings and other disgusting Internet bottom feeders from taking over. If there aren’t rules about speech then how do we stop the whole world becoming Gab?

If free speech communities cannot police themselves then we need stronger rules about what the limits of free speech is. Remember it isn't left-wing students who don't want Germaine Greer or Jacob Rees-Mogg on their campus who are shooting up synagogues. It's Nazis organising in free speech communities.

I am not saying we need to get rid of free speech. I am saying we need to know what the limits of free speech are. I think that the limits are threatening violence against people and spreading racial, sexual, gender, religious or other hatred. Are these limits accepted by everyone? Clearly not by the users of Gab who were happy to tolerate people saying they were going to commit mass murder.

We cannot afford to be blasé and say that anyone is allowed to say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nothing bad will ever happen. Discussing the limits of free speech is not the same as threatening it. It’s trying to find out the best way we can all live together, safely.

Nathan Barley is standing in our light

The Internet is totally Mexcio, but in a bum way. This is how Nathan Barley, the "self-facilitating media node" and eponymous protagonist of Channel 4's 2005 sitcom would describe the net today. The show was famously ahead of its time, in how it portrayed Shoreditch hipster culture, but one thing it didn't predict was how the internet went from a place of amusement to the location of information warfare between nations and the most powerful tool for empowering the far right. All of this would be much too serious of Barley.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it focuses on the hyper-cool, hyper-annoying Nathan Barley who runs the "urban culture dispatch" TrashBack.co.ck (registered in the Cook Islands). He spends every second of his existence promoting his website which, as far as we can tell, hosts monkey animations, endorsements from celebrities and pranks on Barley’s long-suffering techy Pingo. So far all very YouTube, but it captured the innocence and pointlessness of the net in the early to mid-2000s.

If you were to remake Nathan Barley today, it would be a horror show, more like Black Mirror than a surreal comedy. The Internet had gone from a place of idle fun to something that could be quite dangerous. Concerns about its effects go beyond worries about how easy it is to find porn or far-right content. Many criticisms of the net are focused on the design of the platforms that make up the modern Internet.

In the time since Barley has been on our TV, the Internet has come to be dominated by what former Google employee and author James Williams calls the "attention economy". We often refer to the current structure of the Internet as the information economy, but as Williams points out, when data is as abundant as it is online, it is attention that scarce. Thus platforms from iPhones to Facebook and Twitter are designed to capture as much attention as possible. This is the nature of the attention economy, something that is new since Barley's day.

The negative effects of the attention economy are becoming very clear. News has spread that even the people who work for net’s big tech companies, who described them in utopian ways in the past, are limiting their own exposure to the platforms of the attention economy and are preventing their children from using them.  Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee, said to the Guardian last year that “our minds can be hijacked.”

One of the key problems from these platforms is how they distract us from what is important by monopolising our attention. Williams described how this happens on a political level in his book Stand Out Of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. In his book, Williams argues how the platforms that make up the attention economy are obscuring the light of our attention. The distraction caused by the attention economy is more than just push notifications and the allure of the red dot above the Facebook icon meaning we can’t concentrate for long enough to write a blog post. It’s much deeper than that.

In this book, Williams describes two, more insidious, ways that that platforms distract us from what is important. The first is that we focus our attention on the metrics of the platforms themselves, instead of our higher goals and values. For example, we all want to connect with our friends and family, which these platforms are supposed to help us achieve, but instead of spending our time on these platforms doing this, a focus on likes on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has taken the place of meaningful interactions. Likes are our goal when using these platforms, not the intangible, empirical connection with other human beings. This is because likes can be measured by the platforms and genuine moments of human connection cannot. So the platform's design pushes us towards what it can measure. Our goal has changed from what is important to us to what is important to the platform.

The other way these platforms distract us, identified by Williams, is that by continuing hold our attention they don’t give us time to reflect on what our goals really should be. Is it our intention to connect with the people who follow us on Facebook and Twitter? Or would we be more fulfilled if we spent more like with people off these platforms? Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t, but it’s impossible to grapple with these questions while we are being constantly distracted by more likes and updates.

This is a very brief summary of one aspect of Williams's analysis of what is wrong with the attention economy and the whole book is really worth reading. For our purposes here, what is important is that these platforms distract us from our personal goals (and from knowing what our goals should be) and give power to those who are best at grabbing our attention. The design of the platforms give power these people through the design choices the platforms’ engineers made as their goal is to hold our attention (and then, usually, show us advertising). This is where Nathan Barley comes in.

Some of the people on these platforms are able to grab our attention by being really shocking. Donald Trump is the king of this, but vile creatures like Milo Yiannopoulos and others of his ilk use the same approach. Some people are good at grabbing attention through comedy, such as the rise of Twitter comedians like Cluedont or whoever is behind Mum’s Net Madness. Some captured our attention through a combination of hyperactivity and easy answers to complicated questions. An example of this is the travel vlogger Nas Daily who grabs people’s attention with footage his amazing travels and inability to keep his arms still while talking to camera.

Nas Daily reminds me of Barley, as he’s basically harmless but really annoying. Nathan Barley (the show, not the character who once thought it was cool put paint caps in his hair because he saw someone else do it) predicted a lot about culture (as well as casting actors like Ben Whishaw, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Ayoade and the members of the Mighty Boosh before they were famous). However, where the show was most ahead of its time was in its predictions about how powerful the ability to get attention will be in the future.

Everyone in Nathan Barley is constantly competing to get attention. From shock merchants like 15Peter20 with his art depicting celebrities urinating, to the staff of Vice-esq magazine Sugar Ape who are constantly loud, brash and irreverent, to the man at one of Barley’s Shoreditch club nights constantly pointing to a photo of himself and shouting “this is me!” That man seems especially prescient.

There are other characters who predict modern online dynamics, such as Sugar Ape’s editor Jonathon Yeah? (he had the question mark was added by deed poll). Yeah? seems to know how stupid all this is but is making a killing out of it all taking place on his platform. Would he rather be editing the Guardian, but this pays better? Does he just want to burn the world to the ground to see what happens next? Hard to tell, but it reminds me of a lot of the people behind the net’s platforms.

There is cynical Dan Ashcroft, who sees that the world has gone mad but is too self-absorbed to do anything about it. There’s also his sister Claire Ashcroft, whose serious documentary about drug addiction and homelessness in London is ignored amongst everyone else’s aggressive, but ultimately empty, self-promotion.

Barley himself is a constant disruptive presence. His goal is to maximise his own exposure and that of his website by getting as much attention as possible; he doesn’t want to achieve any higher goals for himself or anyone else. In the show, no one reflects about this or whether this is the world they want to live in. They’re all distracted by Barley’s latest antics.

In one way, Barley and his world is better than the world we have built for ourselves. Barley doesn’t have any negative intentions. He is very annoying, stupid and disruptive, but he does what he does out pure love for it. Barley is not motivated by a desire to enrich himself or cause harm. Online today, many people are using the platforms of the attention economy to enrich themselves and cause harm to others. Trump and Yiannopoulos are notable examples.

This shows how the net has changed since Barley’s time. From people messing around for pure anarchic fun, to very serious business. Now the usage of the Internet in certain ways is considered an act of war. Barley and people like him (Nas Daily seems like a good modern analogue for Barley, with his attention-grabbing videos and lightweight politics) aren’t seeking to do harm. Even if they are eroding our attention faculties.

The problem is not the Nathan Barley’s of the world, but the companies that own the platforms Barley and his ilk use to grab our attention. They are the ones whose design and business decisions brought us to this point. It is they who are making money out of attacks on our attention and the spread of far-right politics. They are like Jonathon Yeah? who might not agree with all this madness but are willing to make money out of it. Maybe the real villain of Nathan Barley is the long-suffering Pingu, who gives Barley the platform to do what he does.

The fact that money can be made from attacking our attention, to giving a platform to extreme right agent-provocateurs, is why we need better regulation of these platforms. There are certain design aspects of these products that should be restricted, just as we decide that there should be restrictions on products with tobacco in them.

We need to have a conversation about whether we want all our politics to flow through platforms that reward attention monopolising behaviour. We need genuine space free from distraction, to reflect on what our goals from these platforms should be and how we can achieve them, rather than allowing their metrics to dominate and dictate our lives. As James Williams says, we need to think rethink advertising, which is how Barley gets the money to do what he does.

Nathan Barley may be the one standing in the light of our attention (shouting about two people jumping from the Twin Towers on 9/11 and fucking on the way down) and distracting us from what is important, but the real problem are the platforms that give him his power. The future doesn’t have to belong to Nathan Barley, if we are willing and able to reflect on what we want it to be.

What would William Morris think of the modern work place?

A man wakes up after a sleep of 122 years into a world that has changed entirely. A world of thinking machines and a glass skyscrapers taller than the world’s tallest cathedrals. In this world, the middle classes no longer want mass production of standardised items, but handcrafted goods. This is a world where we drink locally sourced craft beer and lovingly stitch our own quilts.

The man who awoke would be forgiven for thinking that while he was asleep a revolution occurred that change the country. The people of Britain don't perform backbreaking Labour in filthy factories or mines anymore. We now have clean, bright officers which are ergonomically designed and have free tea and coffee for employees. The dehumanising working conditions of Victorian Britain have been conquered by technology.

If this man was William Morris, would he believe he had awoken in his book, News From Nowhere? Would he think that that the working class had cast off the oppressive factory conditions that horrified him in his life? Would he think people aren't exploited anymore?

Well that would depend on how much of the world he saw. Morris would probably be horrified in how we have moved production so far away from consumers that we don't think about it anymore. The industrial working class of today still eek out a wretched existence in dangerous factories, but these are in huge Chinese cities that we don't know the names of. Our world is not Morris's ideal of people working with their hands to make beautiful, high-quality objects, as they did in the imagined medieval Britain he idealised.

I can see Morris being fascinated by craft breweries and artisan bakeries, which are in many ways his spiritual successor. He would also be interested in the tech industry, where lavish perks are bestowed on highly paid workers. Is this the closest we have come to the ideals that William Morris wanted from production?

In the tech industry, people work in beautiful offices with lots of flexibility to explore projects that interest them. They have high-quality food and entertainment provided by their employer. Workers are not regimented into performing repetitive tasks over and over by harsh bosses who watch them hawkishly.

These offices are a million miles away from soul-crushingly oppressive factories of Victorian Britain. Many tech companies have a flat (or flatter) management structure like the Medieval Guilds that Morris thought were greatly superior to Victorian factories. The products that tech companies produce are high quality and lovingly worked on (or at least have many hours poured into them) by the startup employees. Is this what Morris thought work would be like in the future?

Morris said: “That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in Labour.” I know from when I worked in a tech company that people take real pleasure in writing code and creating high-quality products that their customers (or fans) really appreciate. Their work environments and products are beautiful, as was Morris's ideal. Of course, many of the products of the tech industry can only be afforded by the wealthy, but the same can be said for Morris's furniture. The iPhone today serves much the same purpose as owning a William Morris chair. They don’t buy them for the functionality or the beautiful design, but to make a statement that they are the type of person who buys such as thing.

The big question for Morris would be: whether these tech company workers were connected to what they worked on. Morris believed that the best way to work was with your hands, creating something. This is why he was interested in the violence of Medieval Knights, as it was hands on. This is why he placed a high value on handcrafted products.

There is a degree to which tech workers are removed from what they make by virtue of working with machines rather than a saw and plane. However, if Morris's ideas about what work should be like are to be anything other than reactionary and anti-modernity (as the Soviet constructivist critic Boris Arvatov thought Morris was) then they need to take into account that almost all work today is done with machines. Morris himself was not against machines, he believed they should be used to free workers from menial or boring tasks, which is one way they are used today.

The aspect of the tech industry that Morris would find most distasteful would be the difference between the working conditions of the employees of the tech companies and the army of self-employed "platform users" that they rely on. The difference between the pay and working conditions of the average Uber driver and the average Uber engineer is huge. The same is true for platforms from Deliveroo to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which rely on low paid, insecure, arm's length, non-employees to do a lot of the important work. If Morris was horrified by the conditions in Victorian factories then he would probably be horrified by Uber drivers having to pee in bottles to maintain their driving schedules.

What would Morris think of our world? Would he think it glorious compared to his own or morally bankrupt? This question relates to how people in the future might see us. Will they look at us with the same disgust that we look at the Victorians with for their use of child labour?

Morris might think that not a lot had changed. Britain is still a place where the labour of many enriches a privileged few. A place where a few get to work in beautiful workshops and many more toil in terrible conditions. The only difference is that we have got better at hiding the truth. 

One thing is for sure and that is that Morris would need to sleep for many more years to wake up a world like News From Nowhere. A world free from exploitation and misery.

"William Morris wrap 3" by Mmm...Fiber! is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Bercow scandal shows that Remain fake news is a problem

If you have been following the news this week it has been impossible to miss the scandal enveloping House of Commons Speaker John Bercow. For those not aware, an independent House of Commons inquiry has found that accusations of bullying and harassment of Parliamentary staff are not being dealt with due to a culture of "acquiescence and silence".

Just to remove any doubt that it is The Speaker’s office is responsible for this culture. The following paragraph from the report is quite damming:

“Almost all the allegations of bullying by members of House staff in this inquiry were made against someone in a more senior position, consistent with the typical pattern of bullying cases. Management style is closely linked to organisational culture, and there were many examples of behaviour described that would fall within the category of workplace bullying. A single incident of some of these may be unlikely to be characterised as such, but a few incidents taken together or occurring repeatedly over time can indicate a pattern suggestive of unacceptable bullying.”

What I have found most shocking about this has been the response from Labour MPs, who I had naively assumed would want to stand for the rights of workers. As journalist Stephen Bush said the Party’s "literal name is about workplace rights.” 

The reason for Labour MP's failure to stand up for these peoples’ right to safe working environment is Brexit, or as I prefer to call it, the root of all evil. As speaker, Bercow has defended MPs’ desire for a meaningful vote on Brexit when Theresa May's deal comes before the commons, and what's a little workplace bullying next to the future of the nation? Dame Margaret Beckett went as far as saying that Brexit “trump bad behaviour”.

This is all disgusting. Bercow has to go, no one should be allowed to preside over a climate of bullying and harassment and be expected to keep their job. Labour MPs should stand up for workers’ rights, be the workers in a coal mine, a call centre or the Palace of Westminster.

The response from soft left, Remain MPs has been shocking and I have lost a lot of respect for some MPs. The response from Remain Labour supporting groups on social media has been similarly awful. The way people have closed ranks around Bercow reminds me of, and it pains me to say this, Donald Trump’s supporters and how they brook no criticism of their President. The rhetoric reminds of how the US right rallied to Bret Kavanagh when he was accused of sexual assault. It was pure tribalism and based on a complete refusal to believe that any higher moral standard has been transgressed. I thought that the point in opposing Brexit is that the EU protects workers’ rights. Well there is no point having rights if they aren’t respected.

Remainers have even engaged in spreading elaborate conspiracy theories as to why this has happened. Naturally, the hand of the Brexit ultras appears in all of these. Like the conspiracy theories that infest the American right, these are spread on social media via rage shares and filter bubbles. I saw this happen in real time as the Bercow accusations came out. I haven't repeated what I saw here as I haven't asked permission of anyone involved to share their words, but if you're doubting my veracity then this stuff is easy to find on Facebook.

I want to say at this point that I am pro-Remain and really wish this whole Brexit shitstorm would go away. I want Britain to stay in the EU so that we can reform it. However, the cause of stopping Brexit is not served by sharing conspiracy theories that see shadowy Brexiters behind everything. Unless your goal is just to project rage at the current state of politics, instead of, you know, change things.

This type of behaviour is what allows fake news or conspiracy theories like Pizzagate to spread. The latter nearly resulted in deaths. Fake news is lies that serve someone's political goals and imaging that Brexiteers are responsible for the Bercow scandal to stop parliament having a meaningful vote on Brexit is fake news.

So-called sensible liberals are no different than Trump supporting sharing Pizzagate stories, or the far left sharing fake news about Portland Communications. I support Jeremy Corbyn, but that story is made up. I have seen a lot of pro-Remain Fake News shared over last two and half years. Most of it revolves around Sinn Fein taking up their seats in Westminster to stop Brexit. The stars in the sky will grow cold and dead before Sinn Fein MPs swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen so that they can sit in the House of Commons.

There is a sad side to all this, which is that this debacle is stopping justice for the people who have been bullied and harassed. It means that this kind of behaviour can continue. It means that Westminster is not a safe place for people to work, especially for women, and our politics is poorer for this. It shows the rank hypocrisy of Remain supporters who claim to stand up for the vulnerable, except when it is politically inconvenient. Having principles isn't principled when it doesn't cost anything. 

This whole shitshow also illustrates that fake news and conspiracy theories are not just for the far right or the far left. They're for anyone who believes anything hard enough to stop thinking. This includes passionate Remainers.

John Bercow image created by National Assembly of Wales and used under creative commons.

What can the British left learn from Russian propaganda in Germany?

Yeah, it’s wordy title, but Russian propaganda is complicated issue that affects the left globally. I have been thinking about this a lot recently and what follows are some conclusions I came to with the help of some clever people who study this sort of thing.

Being, in many ways, between the USA and Russia, the British left has had a complicated relationship to Russian foreign policy. Many view it as a necessary check on American Imperialism. In some instances, hostility to American foreign policy has muted into support for Vladimir Putin and his own brutal Imperialism.

I have criticism of any left wing politics that involves support for a brutal authoritarian who surrounds himself with, and represents the interests of, billionaire oligarchs. Until recently, I thought that this flirtation with Putin (usually expressed as sharing Russia Today news posts that support the Kremlin's line in left wing Facebook groups) was a peculiarly British thing.

I had assumed that things were different in Germany and that the German left would be united in their opposition to Putin. This is because Germany is the major player in the two institutions that are the most effective check on Putin, the EU and NATO. Britain is trying desperately to walk away from one and austerity is testing its commitment to the other. During this period of national navel gazing, we are leaving the crucial work of standing up to Putin to Germany.

This neat assumption that I had made was shattered recently when I read a paper called Make Germany Great Again by Anne Applebaum, Peter Pomerantsev, Melanie Smith and Chloe Colliver and published by Arena, based at the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) within the LSE.

The paper looks into the Kremlin's attempts to interfere with last year's German Federal Election. The paper’s authors (who shall henceforth be referred to as Applebaum et al to save space more than anything else) look at the Kremlin's attempt to use online propaganda to influence the far right in Germany and the Russian-German community. However, the sections of the paper I read with the most interest were about the Kremlin's attempts to influence the far left in Germany.

The German left is a not the single monolithic institution I had naively assumed it was. Applebaum et al say that several groups on the Germany left are critical of Putinism, usually those who support feminism, environmentalism and human rights. There are also left wing groups that flirt with Putinism - as some elements of the British left do. These tend to be anti-Imperialist, anti-Zionist and against US hegemony.

I was surprised to learn that there are significant Putin-sympathetic groups on the Germany left. Applebaum et al say that the main German radical left party, Die Linke (literally The Left) has: "grown closer to the Russian government in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine." This is characterised by following the Kremlin's line on NATO, the US and Syria.

Some groups have a more complicated relations with Russia, such Alliance 90/The Green Party who criticise Russia as being undemocratic, but in the words of Applebaum et al: "occasionally portrays the Kremlin as the victim of the West." There are also groups on the German left that are strongly opposed to Putin, such as the anti-fascist movement.

After reading the work of Applebaum et al, I felt that this divide between pro and anti-Putin left wing groups in Germany is not a difference in ideology per se. It's not about different outlooks on the world or different thinking about the Putin regime. I believe it shows the differing media diets of different left wing groups.

Applebaum et al talk about how in Germany: "the far left users in our network map showed far less reliance on fringe outlets as top sources of information than those in the far right." Applebaum et al also state that the German left as a whole is less likely to share disinformation and more likely to debunk fake news.

I believe that this will be reflected in the German left wing groups that are anti-Putin. Certainly, what I have seen in Britain is that the left wing groups that are the most scornful of mainstream media are the ones that are most likely to be sharing Kremlin propaganda. British left wing groups with a varied media diet, are generally more hostile to Putin.

Applebaum et al talk about the: "rapid expansion of transnational networks of information and toxic speech." It would be wrong to see Putin as the spider in the middle of this web or as some kind of sinister puppet master of online hatred. Nationalists the world over, from Donald Trump’s supporters to Britain First, have been effectively organising online either with or without any aid from Putin. It would also be wrong to think that the infiltration of Kremlin propaganda into political debate is exclusively a right wing problem.

Applebaum et al have recommendations for the media in Germany to tackle the problems of pro-Kremlin propaganda. I think we need to take on these recommendations as a project for the left and not to leave it up to Western governments that have their own agenda to push - or might just do a terrible job of implementing the recommendations.

For example, Applebaum et al recommend that Germany: "invest in sustainable digital literacy programmes" and that "critical thinking skills need to not only be taught in schools, but also delivered via media and public awareness campaigns for adults." I can imagine this being done terribly. Imagine government infomercials telling worried parents about the signs that their child is reading Russian propaganda. Then imagine this ad campaign designed by a committee in the most centrist dad way possible. Noble as at intentions of this campaign would be, the state does not have the ear of the people the campaign needs to reach.

The left needs to tackle on this important work of teaching critical thinking and digital literacy so that well informed citizens can spot media propaganda, whether it's pro-corporate, pro-Russia bombing whoever they feel like this week or pro-America bombing whoever they feel like this week.

Applebaum et al also talk about the need to: "reduce the financial incentives for disinformation." As social media sites monopolise and sell our attention, and are more than happy to spread Russian propaganda or extremist content in the process, then a left wing critiques of these media companies and why they care more about making money than protecting their values of our society is necessary. We can’t talk about financial incentives for disinformation, without critiquing capitalism itself.

At the end of reading Make Germany Great Again, I was aware that the issues I thought were local to the British left are global. There are many similarities between Britain and Germany. How "wedge issues", such as immigration, are exploited by the far right or how a loss of trust in the mainstream media is creating gaps in the media diet that pro-Kremlin news sources are happy to fill.

The changes to media and technology of the last ten years present a global challenge to the left and to the Western governments. The left needs to globally rise to this challenge and offer a means for people to understand this brave new world that we live in. If we don't then the vacuum of media authority will be filled by authoritarians of one stripe or another. We need to be critical of Putin, and of our Western governments, and of the media companies that are "disrupting" how politics is done with new technology.

There is a lot of passion on the left right now and a lot of good new ideas. There has never been a better time to be on the left and there is a huge need for a prominent left wing narrative in our politics. I believe that we can make the difference the world needs.

Are other governments lying to us worse than our own government lying to us?

Whilst bouncing around left wing Facebook groups I came across this article by Caitlin Johnstone. It makes the argument that we cannot discuss Russian disinformation on social media (the stuff that may have helped get Donald Trump get elected) without talking about how Western governments lied when making the case for the invasion of Iraq. Johnstone says:

“Any argument about the truth of what’s happening with regard to Syria or Russia which does not begin with an explicit and thorough explanation as to why this is completely different from Iraq should be instantly rejected as illegitimate.”

This made me think that we often talk about the propaganda spread on social media by Russia as inherently bad, whilst failing to explain why it is worse than the lies told by our own government or our "free" Western media.

I am not naive enough to believe that our government doesn't lie to us. I believe that blind and uncritical faith in your government is a bad thing. I am also not naive enough to believe that Russia doesn't have a geo-political agenda in spreading its own media narratives via social media. Russia Today is not criticising the monarch on the weekend of the Royal Wedding because it stands for making Britain a more egalitarian society.

I thought about the issue Johnstone raised and realised that the whole thing boils down to one question: "Why are other governments lying to us worse than our own government lying to us?" Answering this question took a considerable amount of thought. Below are the conclusions I came to:

Firstly, let's take the instances of Russian disinformation spread via social media. By disinformation I mean stories that challenge or contradict the accepted narrative of our domestic media.

I believe these are a bad thing. Not because I believe our Western governments are paragons of truth and virtue, but because I believe that this disinformation is not spread with the aim of building a fairer and more just society in the west. Disinformation that helps advance the cause of Vladimir Putin is not good. It needs to be said to everyone on the left, loud and clear, that Putin is not our friend. He may oppose Western foreign policy that we also oppose, but that doesn't make him one of the good guys.

Putin is an ultra-capitalist, supported by billionaire oligarchs. He suppresses free speech and opposition in Russia. He throws around his military weight as much as America does, and he has allied himself with very conservative factions in his society that attack the rights of LGBTQ people. He has people he doesn’t like killed.

The disinformation spread by Russia is not designed to educate people, but is designed to turn us against each other. It exploits the divisions in Western society (young v old, town v country, rich v poor, conservative v liberal, etc.) to make it difficult for our society to function because we are constantly fighting each other. Look at how well Russia was able to use social media to exacerbate the divisions in American society before the 2016 election. America is more divided now than ever.

This hostility and suspicion of each other cases us to lose faith in the institutions of government and democracy. Not just faith in one government, party or leader, but faith in the entire political mechanism. This will make it harder to change society for the better - something I very much want to do - via democratic means.

It must be said that the above also happens when Western governments abuse their power and/or lie to their citizens. Again, the Iraq War is a good example of this, as is the expenses scandal that has shaken faith in democracy.

Stepping aside from the all the bad effects of Russia lying to us, is it harder to address the question of whether a generic foreign power's lies are worse than our own government's lies? All lies undermine faith in the idea of an objective truth. I am critical of the idea of objective truth; what is one person's objective truth is another's subjective opinion. Again the war in Iraq is a good example. We were told an objective truth, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and this turned out to be just the subjective opinion of the establishment with no basis in fact.

After a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that the answer to the above question is no. Devoid of context, all lies are equally bad. However, what I also decided is that the question of whether generic country X lying to us is worse than our own government, misses the most important thing about disinformation.

We are lied to all the time: by Russia, by our own government, by newspapers in our own country. Pro-Brexit newspapers and politicians lied when they said that Brexit would be easy. Pro-Remain politicians lied when the said voting to leave the EU would trigger an instant economic meltdown. There are lots of lies out there, but the key question is why do we believe them? Also, why do we believe specific lies and not others?

The answer to these questions involves digging into the key issues in politics today. The answer is that because we are divided society, suspicious of groups who think differently to us. It’s because of rising inequality, which means that people in the same country, even the same city, live in vastly different economic worlds. It's because of the fragmentation of news media caused by technology and the rise of filter bubbles on social media sites. It's because we are becoming increasingly partisan in who we associate with and talk to.

If none of this were happening, then it wouldn't be so easy for either the Daily Mail or Russia Today to lie to us. Fully explaining these issues is too big a job to get into here, but I hope to dive into them in following blog posts. I will say that you need a leftist political framework to get to grips with them. You need a left wing political view to understanding rising inequality, social strife and the problems of big tech companies.

After all this thinking, and I like nothing better than having a good deep think about politics, I have determined that all of us on the left should be against Russian disinformation aimed at undermining democracy, but also have a healthy scepticism of our own government. To get to the truth of the big political issues, that disinformation exposes, you need to tackle them from a left wing perspective.

How the far right is using anger on social media to change politics

Restaurant reviews aren’t something that I read. Occasionally one, such as this, pops up in my Facebook or Twitter feed. So, according to Facebook or Twitter, I am only interested in especially bad restaurant reviews.

I know that I’m not interested in particularly good or bad restaurant reviews, but the really bad ones (especially for a high profile restaurant) get a lot of shares and thus reach a wider audience. I am part of that wider audience for bad reviews that get shared a lot.

Film reviewer Mark Kermode has said that his worse reviews are more widely shared and travel further than his more positive ones. I can remember his rants about terrible films such as Dirty Grampa or Entourage: The Movie, but I can’t remember any of his glowing reviews off the top of my head.

Why do bad reviews travel further? It’s because there’s something satisfying about sharing an especially bad or angry review. A powerful sense of social media schadenfreude. There is something satisfying about saying, “take a look at this guy get taken down a peg”.

The same applies for political stories. It is cathartic to share an especially angry comment piece, that really lays into a politician or party that we hate. It’s much more cathartic than sharing a piece that celebrates someone we love. Most cathartic of all is sharing a piece expressing how angry we are about a snub or injustice aimed at a politician we love. Those pieces are shared more widely than the worst restaurant reviews.

This mechanism is essential to how social media platforms work. Stories that inspire an emotional reaction get more shares and find their way into in our time lines. By showing the most shared content - along with a few smart design tricks - platforms like Facebook or Twitter keep our eyeballs on their apps. There is even evidence this might be addictive.

Angry content seems to get the most shares and engagement, much more than anything positive, so social networks are designed to bring angry content to millions of people. This has not escaped the attention of the far right who are using this mechanism to reach a bigger audience via Facebook or Twitter than ever before. We thought Nazis were a thing of the past. Now they’re in our timelines recruiting people, getting stronger.

In the news this week has been data firm Cambridge Analytica, the information warfare mercenaries for hire connected to everything from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump. Angry shares on Facebook are Cambridge Analytica’s weapons in their electoral battles. Their “psychographics” are just clever ways of finding out what will push different groups of people’s rage buttons and how to target them on social media.

What Cambridge Analytica and the alt-right have in common is that they are taking advantage of how angry content is shared on social media platforms to reach a wider audience. They are using their intelligence to engineer the spread of their propaganda via our cathartic rage-sharing.

Social media platforms have an important role in this. We get most of our news via Facebook or Twitter but they don’t make money by providing quality news, social media platforms make their money by selling advertising to engaged users. They need the engaging content to keep users hooked and angry content is the best hook. By supplying users with a constant stream of rage-shares, they are keeping us hooked and consuming more adverts.

All this has an affect offline. What goes on online is no longer a separate world. Nazis openly marching in Charlottesville, attacks on refugees in Italy or the far right making noises in the UK is all possible because of the exposure these groups are getting online. They are growing, recruiting more members and getting stronger. We should be very worried about this.

What is the solution to all this? Better regulation of social media platforms would help. Facebook and others need to recognise their obligations as a media company not to spread hate speech and to provide an informed discourse to their readers.

We have a role too as social media users. We need to be responsible social media users. If we carry on constantly being angry we are just fueling the rise of hate preachers or the far right. We need to think before we rage-share. There is real world consequences for creating an atmosphere of constant rage on social media. One place to start would be to share reviews of places we like to eat. Bon appetit.

How is what Cambridge Analytica did different to selling mattresses online?

A lot of the discussion of Cambridge Analytica obscures what it does with fancy language such as “information warfare” and “psychographics”. I think what they do is digital marketing, not too different to what agencies all over the world do to sell everything from flights to car insurance.

The data that Cambridge Analytica has (not just from Facebook), and the sophisticated understanding they have of psychology from Cambridge University academics, means they can do very detailed segmentation, targeting and positioning work on populations the size of the entire US electorate. STP is the bread and butter of what digital marketers do.

Cambridge Analytica work on a scale much bigger than what most digital marketers are capable of, (it’s easier to do this sort of thing when you have Robert Mercer’s checkbook) but it’s not radically different in approach to techniques used by the Obama campaign - or online mattress sellers.

Cambridge Analytica’s segmentation of the US electorate are very detailed and their political understanding means they know exactly who to target to have the desired effect and they know what messages these people will respond well to, (that’s positioning) but this is what digital marketers around the world are doing. Information warfare, whether it’s by Cambridge Analytica or Russia’s Internet Research Agency, seems to be little different to the process that made me a customer of Beer 52.

There are question marks over whether Cambridge Analytica is effective; most digital marketers are keen to demonstrate that their methods are effective. It’s difficult to say what got Donald Trump elected. His Tweets, false equivalence of both candidates’ flaws, Russian interference, dislike of Hillary Clinton, democrats being incumbents, the FBI email investigation and a vacant supreme court seat where certainly factors, along with fake news made by Macedonian teenagers and the general left/right cultural divide in America. It’s hard to identify the precise impact that Cambridge Analytica had amongst all of this.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie implied that what Cambridge Analytica did went beyond digital marketing when he exposed their activities to the Guardian. He said that there activity was “worse than bullying,” because “if you do not respect the agency of people, anything that you’re doing after that point is not conducive to a democracy.”

This implies that Cambridge Analytica are doing goes beyond marketing for politicians and is against democracy. It implies that Cambridge Analytica took the data they had from Facebook (and other sources), put it through standard digital marketing processes and created weapons. If you can use your digital marketing to bring down a government then it’s a weapon. If you can use your digital marketing to prop up a tyrant then it is a weapon. What is a Kalashnikov, but a weapon to overgrow a government? The same can be said of digital marketing that destabilises democracy.

What I find most scary about Cambridge Analytica and what they can do is that its segments are so detailed, its targeting so sophisticated and their positioning so subtle that it would allow politicians to speak in very different ways to different audiences. Using this, politicians can safety identify people who would respond positively to racist messaging, exploit those prejudices and it be so subtle that other supporters of said politician or party, who would be horrified by racist campaigning, would never find out about it.

What has stopped politicians from appealing to our most carnal hatreds is fear that they will be found out. Very detailed segmentation, targeting and positioning makes it possible this would go unnoticed.

If this scares you as much as it scares me, then that’s good as it means we can do something about it. This could be the moment that people wake up to the risks of social media firms and big tech companies, just as they woke up to the problems of big tobacco firms in the 1960s.

We can pass laws that regulate these firms. The complete absence of regulation that they have operated in so far has led to this scandal, but we can prevent worse abuses of data in the future. It used to be possible to advertise cigarettes as healthy, now we are aware how bad such advertising would be and we don’t allow it. Maybe soon everyone will be aware of how bad digital marketing for politicians is?

“Launching the new Geoloqi website” by Aaron Parecki is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The rise of alt-left news sites

The business model for news organisations is fundamentally broken. Sales of paper newspapers and magazines are collapsing. Every week there is another story about an established (usually local) newspaper going out of business. Now that our news reading has shifted online, there is simply less money in news than there used to be.

A business model based on online advertising does not provide enough income to sustain large news organisations such as the Independent, which ceased its paper copy last year. This business model does favour smaller, online-only organisations that have lower overheads and don’t mind putting large amounts of adverts on their sites. They get most of their traffic from social media sites and write for this audience. Their output covers a broad spectrum. At one end are important stories that would not find a place in a traditional newspaper, but do have an audience online. At the other end are clickbait stories that demand the user’s attention but provide little of value to them.

Recently, I have written about the deficit in self-criticism on the far left. This, combined with the fact that social media sites filter back to users more of what they like (and don’t challenge them), and the collapse of the business models of the established bugles of the left, has created a space for smaller, leaner, less critical left wing news sites. These sites take advantage of social media’s algorithms to drive traffic to them, where they sell adverts. All this means that left wing click bait has become the order of the day.

What does all this mean for the left, the far left and media in general? Firstly, it has meant a growth in websites that are very pro-Corbyn. Sometimes embarrassingly so. I am pretty sure that is not the cutest video of the summer as I found this after about 30 seconds on YouTube. Even so, a news site fawning over a politician is not new, and unless you think that Corbyn is as bad as Stalin, then this sort of thing is just a little silly.

It should also be said that some of these sites do write good content aimed at informing people who don't like the way things are going and think that Corbyn is the person to sort it out. This is a general feeling a lot of people have and educating these people about the social problems in Britain faces can only make the left stronger. Novara Media is a website that I would put into this category. It has interesting articles on diverse topics on the far left or about politics such as this one about cuts to BME refuges.

Some of these sites are bad for the left in general. They spread conspiracy theories (such as the idea that Portland Communications had a role in the resignations of Corbyn’s cabinet in 2016) and outright lies - such as one website accusing Owen Smith of beating his wife. Sites such as Squawk Box have made up stories about gag orders and spread paranoia on the far left. A lot of their content is read very uncritically.

Worse still are news organisations directly aligned to totalitarian regimes, such as Russia Today (a pro-Putin news source) and Press TV (owned by the Iranian government, fined for broadcasting an interview with a journalist conducted "under duress" and banned in the UK for breaching the Communications Act). These sites distribute their content to far left or pro-Corbyn audiences on Facebook or Twitter (sometimes using the cover of social media accounts supposedly affiliated with the hacker group Anonymous - remember, anyone can claim to be in Anonymous as no one knows who they are really are).

These arms of totalitarian regimes intend to undermine western governments by seeding content that paints them in a positive light and is critical of our governments (usually our government's policies towards said regimes) through social media to audiences that are pro-Corbyn or on the far left. Many people in these audiences are not critical of a news source that supports their beliefs and backs up their emotional view of what is wrong with the world.

Aside from the sites that are actively pro-Russia or pro-Iran (I hope that we can all agree that those are bad) what is wrong with all this? Isn't this just another echo chamber, a left wing Daily Express or Daily Mail? Yes, the right does this at least as badly, but I had hoped that on the left we would be better. I had hoped that we would be interested in serious debate and not just want propaganda that backs up our worldview uncritically.

This hyper-partisan content is also contributing to the divide on the left. We have enough splits between pro or anti-Corbyn, town and country, etc. This echo chamber, only reflecting a narrow sub-section of the left that we already agree with back at us encourages us to be suspicious of people who think differently and divides us off into our own little cells.

Above all, the spread of lies and conspiracy theories will undermine us in the long run. I have no interest in reading propaganda. We’re not children who cannot handle an opinion that is critical of our worldview. I expect better than this.

It's good to read a wide variety of different news sources and not always rely on the output of a few well-established media brands. It is also good to be critical of the media you consume and think about its biases. However, I feel that on the left we fail to consider the biases or flaws in stories that broadly agree with our worldview. There are plenty of news organisation out there that are willing to exploit this. Some simply to take financial advantage of the changes to the media industry from digitisation. Others have much more sinister motives.

I am not trying to say that we shouldn't read alt-left or new independent news sites. I am just concerned about how uncritically this media is consumed. We can be better than this. We can engage with complex problems and political debates, not just have what we believe filtered back to us. It is important to always be open minded and to always read from a variety of sources that get every side of a story.

“Launching the new Geoloqi website” by Aaron Parecki is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Is capitalism destroying journalism?

Sales of print newspapers are collapsing. The Sun has seen an 11% year-on-year fall in sales, the Daily Mirror 12%, the Daily Mail 7%, and the Guardian 3%. However, in their recent online subscription drive, The Guardian claims that: “more people than ever rely on The Guardian to keep them up-to-date, but far fewer are paying for our journalism”. The Daily Mail also has more than 200 million monthly online browsers. Yet the industry is still in trouble, with widespread losses and staff layoffs reported.

Established newspaper brands, such as the Guardian or the Daily Mail, have had massive success using Facebook, Twitter, email newsletters, YouTube, podcasts and a host of other online channels to get their content in front of people. This is not covering their costs as less revenue is made by this form of distribution.

Clearly the business model of free content supported by adverts is not working. The Economist has already predicted the end of online display advertising by 2025. Deputy editor and digital strategy head Tom Standage said to Press Gazette: “Video advertising, native advertising and other forms of advertising provide only small incremental revenue streams for publishers.”

Standage goes on to say that a different model is needed. This could be paywalls (like the Times and Financial Times use) or partial paywalls, where the user can read a few articles a week, but must pay for everything else (like the Economist). Being part of a larger conglomerate that cross-subsidises the losses of a media organisation is another option, or selling additional services to readers such as dating, consulting or premium paid-for content (Slate in the US is an example of the latter).

The online publisher Medium recently ditched its ad-based model, because, as Frederic Filloux of the Monday Note, says: “there is absolutely no correlation between editorial quality and the revenue it brings”. Despite having a premium audience - of mainly start up/tech people - and lots of high-value content, Medium was unable to make money from ads. This led Lucia Moses of Digday to say: “The ad-driven system is broken”. The question is, now that Medium have moved away from ads, can Medium or Medium’s high-value bloggers charge for the content? Is there another way to cover their costs?

The news industry lacks a business model that will make it profitable to create journalism and distribute it online. Technological change has destroyed the business models of print news and made “fake news” more profitable. By fake news, I do not mean the spuriously sourced claims about what causes cancer that you might read in the Daily Mail; I mean out right falsehoods spread by sites like Breitbart. These sites are able make a profit online as they do not have the same overheads as the Guardian or the New York Times, but they are able to capture vast amounts of traffic on social media by writing content with outrageous headlines, that is easily shared. Websites like Breitbart can turn a profit from the ad based business model that is currently failing the Guardian or the New York Times, hence the proliferation of fake news.

It is technological change that is behind the squeeze on established media brands, but behind this change is an economic process that is as old as capitalism itself. In his book Postcapitalism, Paul Mason says that: “The 250-year history of capitalism has been about extending market forces into sectors where they did not exist before.” We saw this when the railways destroyed the business model of canals; we see it now as AirBNB threatens hotels by creating a new market in sharing private property; and this what we are seeing in the news industry.

The internet has made it possible to distribute news to millions of people. Now that the news is available online the market for print has gone. New markets have been created in online ads, however, these do not produce the same amount of profit. This is a feature of this process. Despite the success of AirBNB, it produces less profit than the hotel industry whose market is disappearing (and AirBNB employees fewer people). It is the process of capitalism itself that is threatening the future of established news brands.

In the long term this means that traditional news organisations (which value things like facts and balanced reporting) will find it increasingly difficult to compete with fake news that costs less and can survive in this leaner profit environment. The solution is that we need to evaluate the worth of a news brands by more than the profit they make. We need a system that recognises the value of high quality journalism as a good in itself, not just a means to make money.

This is not just a problem in the news industry, but a problem with capitalism as a whole. Capitalism only has a use for goods and services that create profit; goods and services that do not, but may have a social value, are set aside. High quality journalism that informs the public is an example of this. In his book, Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt identifies this problem in what neoliberal capitalism considers to be useful. He said: “If we confine ourselves to issues of economic efficiency and productivity, ignoring ethical considerations and all reference to broader social goals, we cannot hope to engage it.”

The changes going on in the news industry are not novel and are not confined to this industry. Journalism is changing because of the process in capitalism that destroy markets and replaces them with ones that make less money and employ less people. Quality, independent journalism will never be more profitable than fake news. We need to think about its real value, not just its use for making profit. This is something we need to think about across our economy from hotels to taxi firms, or else profits will be squeezed, employment will fall and socially valuable goods and services will be lost.

Newspaper image created by Yukiko Matsuoka and used under creative commons.

The end of the high street: not with a bang but a whimper

It's easy to live in a left-wing bubble: between organic toiletries, pubs with locally-sourced food and shopping on the internet, sometimes it is easy to forget there are High Streets where a large number of people do the majority of their consuming. A few days ago, my delicate shield of ethical consumption was smashed when I spent a few hours inside the Westfield Shopping Centre near Shepherd's Bush, west London.

The phrase 'fish out of water' does not cover the experience that I went through. I assumed that Westfield employed people specifically to keep dirty lefties like me out of their palace of consumption. Much to my surprise, I was welcomed in and dazzled with the bright lights and the range of shiny baubles available for me to purchase. I had some time to waste, and decided to find a music shop to pass the time in. I briefly considered unraveling a thread from my shirt and attaching it to the door so that I could find my way back later, but then I noticed the handy maps available from an information stand. Armed with a plan of the place, and mentally comparing myself to Livingstone, I set out to explore this strange and unfamiliar land of retail.

As I walked past the juice stands and Sky TV sign up booths, two things become almost immediately apparent to me: firstly, that there were no music, DVD, books or games shops anywhere to be seen, and secondly that the shops which did make up the Westfield were almost exclusively either clothing or jewellery shops. This confused me, for surely the main point behind a large-scale retail development is to get as much diversity of shops into as small a place as possible, thus allowing consumers to satisfy all their needs at once. Apparently not, as the Westfield caters to a very small section of consumption, mainly high-end up-market deeply personal. For those who shop in the Westfield, the particular boutique they frequent is a statement about their individuality made through mass consumption, the triumph of late-stage capitalism. In short, I discovered that the Westfield is the last bastion of the high-end High Street retailers against the advancing tide of internet shopping.

Later in a gastro-pub serving organic, locally-sourced pies, I was firmly back in my element and discussing my afternoon with a friend. I said that clothes and jewellery were one of the few areas where internet shopping and has had little impact. My friend informed me that he purchases T-shirts and shoes online, to which I agreed. The internet's particular brand of culture is very suited to the T-shirt business and allows the consumer to seek out designs which speak to them. Here the internet has had success in breaking the High Street's stranglehold on fashion. I asked my friend, however, if he would consider buying trousers online and we both agreed the idea seemed somewhat perverse.

The internet has taken over from the High Street in areas where it does best: bulk selling of goods, mainly entrainment goods, where the major factors are price and range. The last time I went into HMV to purchase a DVD, a friend told me not to bother and that it would be 'cheaper online'. He did not specify a website or have any data to justify his claim, which was built on a cultural understanding that this variety of shopping is simply better on the internet.

So where does this leave the High Street, other than with pound shops and clothing outlets? Some things have to be brought in the flesh, and the time delay involved in internet shopping means some goods will always be purchased in meat-space. However, with the rise in smart phones, tablets and app stores, immediate entertainment purchases online are a reality. All that is needed is a shift in social conventions, to make the giving of online content an acceptable present, and there will be no need at all for High Street entertainment retailers.

The High Street is certainly in a bad state, and a simple Google search for 'the end of the high street' returns thousands of blog posts and broadsheet articles bemoaning the end of face-to-face retail and making lazy observations comparing the closure of Game to the rise of Angry Birds. The truth is that this is hardly a recent phenomenon. It was nearly two decades ago that Amazon's diversification into VHS selling meant that Saturday afternoons were no longer spent wandering into the city centre to buy the latest Simpsons collection. One article I read claimed that 2012 was the year the High Street would end, as if most people had only just discovered the internet. In fact, most High Street retailers discovered the internet a long time ago and have also moved into online shopping.

Most likely the current process will simply continue. Places like the Westfield will hold their own in certain sectors for a while, but eventually changes in technology and social conventions will move our lives and consumption almost entirely online. If the High Street does end, it will be slowly over many decades, and not because everyone turned exclusively to online shopping over one Christmas period. If the High Street does end, it will not be with a bang but with a whimper, and one which is already well underway.

Facebook’s IPO: Are those adds worth $100bn

In the eight years since Facebook first appeared online, the site has gone from a way to waste time to a social necessity. Today (especially for younger users) not having a Facebook account is akin to not having a mobile phone, in that you are likely to be left out of the loop by friends and work colleagues. Now the internet giant’s recent IPO suggests that this social necessity could be worth up $100bn as a company.

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard University undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg, and since then has taken the internet by storm. First it became the world’s largest social network with over 800 million users. Then the site replaced Google in its position as the internet’s most visited site. Now Zuckerberg and his team have earned a new record after raising over $5bn from an initial public offering, the largest ever for an internet firm. More than just a commercial success, Facebook has added new terms to the popular lexicon such “to friend” and has redefined the use of the verb “to like” online. Brands large and small have rushed to establish fan pages on the website and entire real world conversations focus on events which took place in the entirely virtual social network.

What is interesting about Facebook’s petition to be partially floated on the Stock Exchange is that the information they have released has given us a rare glimpse at the numbers behind Facebook’s success. Facebook and other internet companies that offer a free service lack a traditional revenue stream upon which to draw. Most fall back on the tried and tested method of advertising. The value of an advertisement on a website is determined by the “click through rate” in other words the percentage of users who click on an advertisement to be taken away from the page which they were browsing to one which they had not intended to visit, prior to seeing the advert. Research has suggested that click through rates for most websites are very low as most users are resistant to the idea of following links online. This is partially due to a legitimate concern about internet security but also a response to the degree to which users are saturated with banners and links tempting (often unsubtly) users to leave behind what they were interested in the first place. This has prompted concerns that that this revenue model has become out dated and that many internet firms might be overvalued.

Facebook has relieved that a substantial amount of their $1bn annual net revenue comes from advertising, leading to speculation that intelligent internet advertising is having a degree of success in tempting users. Firms like Facebook use the personal information supplied to them to customise their advertising space to a user’s tastes, and thus boost the click through rate. This in turn makes advertising space on Facebook more valuable, not simply because of the larger audience but because of a greater degree of success. Try, for an experiment, changing your relationship status to “engaged” and witness the barrage of wedding goods and services that will come out of Facebook’s proverbial woodwork to tempt you to their pages. Often the advertising is more subtle than this, and usually it is from a trusted website. It is this clever use of Facebook’s greatest asset (its members’ data) which makes it a viable company.

However, all is not rosy in Zuckerberg’s world. Internet users are becoming increasingly aware about how their data is being used. The wealth of information which Facebook has built up is also a liability as the public demand restrictions on how this data is used. Facebook’s privacy settings are becoming increasingly complex, which is creating an incentive for uses to switch to a network that is more mindful of privacy.

For now Facebook retains its dominant market position, and the necessity of having an account means this situation is unlikely to change soon. The site has seen off competition from a variety of other social networks seeking to challenge its dominance, and even Google entering the fray with their Buzz and later Google+ services have had little effect on the state of the market.

Facebook should be applauded for changing the way we relate to one another. Upon meeting a new friend at a party it is easier (and seems less forward) to connect with said person via Facebook than to ask for a phone number – mainly because it is also easier to remember a name rather than an 11 digit number.

However, Facebook would do well to consider an alternative revenue model as users become more concerned about privacy. It is also worth considering that the click through rates of intelligent advertisements will eventually fall as users become tried of their saturation, just as we all became tired of banners atop websites in the early days of the popular internet.

This week Facebook’s founders and executives will be congratulating themselves after their IPO sets another record for the company – but if the site’s meteoric rise proves one thing, it is how quickly the internet can change and how complacency is severely punished. For further proof of this, simply ask anyone who still has a MySpace account.

Steve Jobs: An obituary

"It was sponsored by that guy from Apple computers." - Homer Simpson, 1996.

Today the word of Information Technology mourns the passing of a giant in the field, Steve Jobs. The Apple logo, and technical innovations such as the iPod and Macs, have become synonymous with the information age and the very idea of western capitalism. No one more than Jobs incorporated the ideal of the capitalist system. Adopted by a working class family, Jobs grew up to co-found the world's largest technology firm and amass a personal net worth of $8.3bn. He also embodied a middle-class aspiration of incorporating creativity and design into his firm's USP. Apple's innovations were as much artistic and design triumphs as they were technical and financial successes.

It is difficult to overstate the influence Jobs has had. His early Macs where the first computers to use a mouse and the Graphical User Interface (GUI), which allowed them to move away from the previous Command Line Interface and bring personal computing to the less technically minded. It is very telling that Apple's OS operating system has the most logical names for features (Finder and Trash versus Explorer and Recycle Bin); this is because they were the first into this brave new territory and were able to coin the names. As well as defining the personal computer, his firm still sets the benchmark in modern computing. All modern smart phones are modelled heavily on the original iPhone design, and the iPod is the baseline by which all personal MP3 players are measured.

Jobs' financial successes are also many. When he returned to Apple in 1997, he took the firm from being literally a joke (see the 1996 Simpsons episode Homerpalooza for proof how much of a joke Apple was before Job's return), to eclipse the behemoths Microsoft and IBM and become the world's largest technology company, with a market capitalisation of over $350bn. More than any other CEO, Jobs led from the front, his personality being inseparable from the brand and his trademark keynote addresses a defining feature of their new product launches. Apple more than any other technology company has fans as opposed to customers, and devotees would queue for hours to see the man in person and catch a glimpse of the latest products.

Tributes to Steve Jobs outside the Apple Store on Regents Street, London

Under Job's leadership Apple have become a powerhouse of creative and technical accomplishments. The brand has a reputation for being original and for being the best choice for digital artists, graphic designers, and many others in fields where computing and creativity go hand in hand. Always with a keen eye for good business ventures, they have sponsored smaller firms to great technical innovations. It is telling that it was Jobs who first saw the possibilities that Pixar offered when he bought the company in 1986. It is difficult to say which direction the company will move in now, but it is clear that the new CEO, Tim Cook, has some very large shoes to fill.

I started by saving that Steve Jobs epitomised a western capitalist ideal and I will conclude by returning to this point. The foundation stone of western capitalist society is the belief that personal individualism can be expressed through mass produced consumer products. Apple is the pinnacle of this, as being an apple customer makes a statement about you as a person. No other innovator or company has been the alternative, rebel in the market (against the mainstream Microsoft) whilst being the larger, dominant, top-dog firm. The mark Steve Jobs left behind will be felt by his firm and his fans, and his accomplishments will belong to the ages. Truly today we have lost a great innovator and businessman.