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:


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