John Harris - In this grim age of Trump and Brexit, online fury is a dead end for the left
if swearing, Nazi
analogies, decreasing interest in other sides of the argument and a tendency to
get lost in explosive rows now define an increasing share of political
discourse, we all know where that change is fundamentally rooted. It begins and
ends online
Along with international
football, brown grass and flaming
hillsides, political swearing has been an integral part of the summer’s
zeitgeist. The protests against Donald Trump’s visit to Britain were exactly
the carnivals of dissent that they promised to be: I went on the march in
London, and had a great time. But the subsequent media coverage also brought a
pang of ambivalence about a seemingly endless array of slogans that mixed
profanity with what the modern vernacular calls virtue signalling, and looked
like they were unwittingly playing the president’s game: “Piss off you orange twat”, “Fuck off
Trump”. One particularly subtle placard simply read: “Prick”
The word twat became a
signifier for the insane mess of Brexit when the actor and Wildean
raconteur Danny Dyer
used it to describe David Cameron, and was temporarily honoured as a
remainer hero. (By way of an example of the kind of nuance we no longer seem to
have time for, he actually
voted leave.) When news first broke that MP Margaret
Hodge had
confronted Jeremy Corbyn about Labour’s failure to meaningfully get to
grips with anti-Jewish
prejudice, initial reports – which she denied – said she had called him “a
fucking antisemite and a racist”.
A few days before, a
woman called Becca Harrison had found herself in the same cafe as the TV
presenter and two-bit provocateur Piers Morgan, not long after his latest
encounter with Trump. She consulted Twitter about the best course of action,
and then told him that he was “a fascist-enabling cunt who’s doing serious
damage to our country”. Morgan tweeted back at her with his customary charm
(“I’d update your profile pic – been a few years hasn’t it ... ” he said),
before she recounted the episode via the obligatory
online article. It was Morgan, of course, who had co-interviewed Dyer,
which highlights the strand of the supposed mainstream media that now runs on
the basis of wind-ups, provocations and endless shouting. What is going on here?
One explanation might be that as a sizable part of the western world tumbles
into crisis and serial assaults on basic liberal values, eloquence fails us,
and an entirely justified rage takes over. But the story surely runs much wider
than that, into a whole attitude of mind founded on the platforms via which we
not only communicate but also understand just about every facet of our
collective existence. The only beneficiaries of online discourse are the
billionaires who have built empires on annoyance and misanthropy
Put another way, if
swearing, Nazi analogies, decreasing
interest in other sides of the argument and a tendency to get lost in
explosive rows now define an increasing share of political discourse, we all
know where that change is fundamentally rooted. It begins and ends online –
where, as the US
tech pioneer Jaron Lanier puts it, the algorithms that decide whether
something gets pushed towards prominence or is buried in the digital
undergrowth are “neither liberal nor conservative … just pro-paranoia,
pro-irritability, and pro-general assholeness”. (He swears, too.) The only real
beneficiaries are the northern Californian billionaires who have built
advertising empires on annoyance and misanthropy... read more:
