The greatest crisis facing the UK today is the mental health crisis. According to one website, “more than one in five adults (22.6%) are being clinically assessed as having a common mental health condition” in the UK. 1

It is important to be specific here. Mental health is a broad spectrum of complex illnesses all of which present with distinctive risk factors that can affect anyone.

Despite the crisis mental health remains a troublingly downplayed topic in everyday British society. Though no way near as bad as it was even a decade ago, citing mental health for explaining certain circumstances is still laughed at. But rather than being derided as a product of weak “wokeness”, growing mental health awareness should be seen as an obvious indicator that something is very wrong. Mental health awareness in the workplace, for example, where employers are all too quick to offer mental health support, is surely evidence of a recognition among ruling and ownership classes that everyday people are under a great deal of stress in contemporary (capitalist) society.

Yet stress-related depression and anxiety barely touches the surface of this crisis.

As of last year, there are over 52,000 people detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. Ask anyone who works within mental health settings and they’ll tell you things that you won’t be able to believe (I’m talking from first-hand experience). Not that I’m going to go into specifics here. I only point this out to nail the point - the average person has little to no clue how broad a spectrum mental health is, how complex its manifestations can be, and of the risks that mental health presents to the general public.

Since working in mental health, and having had periods of poor mental health myself, I’ve become interested in what is driving the crisis. My only way of understanding it is to put the blame on the kind of society in which we live. Capitalist society and its dog-eat-dog nature, as well as the hyper-individualism that supplements it, has had a profoundly disturbing effect on the human being. To understand this, I’d say there is no better place in which to start than with Marx’s theory of alienation.

…

This morning, there has been another attack targeting visibly Jewish people in a predominantly Jewish area - this time in Golders Green, North London. Unsurprisingly, social media has been rife with the kind of knee-jerk pontificating that the terminally online of all political stripes excel at. Of course, much of this has been the typical blaming of Muslims from the Right, accompanied by a more liberal self-righteousness that demands solidarity with Jewish people everywhere (typical of the patronising liberal), and insists that even a mumble of the Israeli genocide in Gaza be shouted down as hate-filled whataboutism (a ridiculous term bandied about by ridiculous people).

Whatever. My argument is not against legitimate concern with a rise in the abuse of Jewish people in the UK. My problem is with the constant simplification of what is clearly an incident that has mental health as its root cause, something that is done time and time again, whenever these incidents occur. The fact that these incidents occur so much tells us that we have a real, serious problem.

…

Not to play down the attack in Golders Green, but it’s difficult not to laugh at one of the videos doing the rounds on social media (in a reasonable world that is, without judgemental idiots waiting for any excuse to self-righteously berate people).

Today’s terrorist, in bad shape to say the least, was the worst person that, say, an Iranian backed terror-cell could choose to carry out such an attack. Despite walking a few streets, the attacker manage to stab two people, both of whom survived. The most serious attack was a point blank one on an unsuspecting 70-year-old man who was waiting at a bus stop. The second victim managed to get away easily, being much more nimble than the attacker.

Again, none of this is to downplay the incident. It could well be that the attacker is part of a cell. He is highly likely to be Muslim, and likelier still to have been motivated by Israel’s actions in the Middle East. But my gut tells me he is a “lone wolf”. At best, any cell he’s part of will be the kind that was satirised in the 2010 film, Four Lions.

…

As I write this, it has already been disclosed by the police that the attacker “has a history of serious violence and mental health issues”.

…

Now for an obvious statement that never gets acknowledged either. If you go on a stabbing spree in broad daylight you are clearly seriously unwell. I’m sorry to state the obvious in such a way. I don’t assume anyone reading this is thick. It just needs saying as, like I say, it never gets said aloud in media coverage. According to mainstream discourse, today’s attacker is simultaneously mentally ill (fact) and agent if a sophisticated network of terrorists acting out of hate-filled lucidity. Of course, this is possible. The racist murderers of Stephen Lawrence in London back in ‘93 acted out of lucid hate. Their attack was carried out at night, by chance (Lawrence was waiting for a bus with a friend when his attackers came across him), on the basis of the colour of his skin.

The contrast between the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the attack carried out in London today, though clearly also premeditated, is, for lack of a better word, irrationality - in the sense that there was no means of escape for the perpetrator, and very little chance of causing significant damage in terms of casualties. For anyone reading this prone to holier-than-thou hyperbole, I am merely stating the obvious, that someone intent on carrying out a terrorist attack is likely to have planned it in a way as to ensure high chance of mass killing.

Consider Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who massacred 22 people, injuring a further 250, on their way out of an Arianna Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in 2017. Though I personally find it hard to believe that a suicide bomber would be of sane mind, everything about that attack, and attacks like it, entailed the long-time, meticulous planning that makes it difficult to point to mental illness as a factor. There is no impulsivity to the act, it was not done on a whim.

Today’s attack screams impulse. Yes, antisemitism is clearly the primary motivation, but as we know, racism, prejudice, and violence are features and products of sane minds.

This is where it gets uncomfortable. Mentally ill people are vulnerable in various ways. It is also true that some people with mental illness, as mentioned earlier, pose a significant threat. The level of threat depends on the degree of delusion, and who is subject to that delusion. This is where self-righteous demands that we don’t mention the genocide because of “whataboutism” disintegrate.

It is easy to simplify acts of violence as seen today in digestible ways. The narrative that a man who hated Jews because they are Jews and killed them on that sole basis is easy to believe because we have seen it in the past. Though this tempts us into dangerous territory.

…

Even those of us in good mental health should restrict our media consumption. It is even more advisable to avoid the overconsumption of media related to the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Some may be able to consume more than others. Personally, I can’t bear sustained exposure to images such as the ones that come out of Gaza, though I fully accept that we need those images as evidence of Israel’s crimes. But sticking to the point, it is foolish and naive to ignore the elephant in the room when thinking about the rise in attacks against Jewish people in the UK.

Again, this is a deeply uncomfortable thing to write about, especially as someone who isn’t Jewish, but it is clear to me that it is highly likely that there is a correlation between poor mental health and Israeli actions in Gaza as a factor in today’s attack. Conservatives, Liberals, Zionists and racists alike appear to accept this in an offhand way, blaming a perceived overexposure to anti-Israel narratives as a contributing factor to the rise in antisemitic incidents. They are not entirely wrong, just woefully misguided by their own prejudice against Muslims.

Unfortunately for them, however, shutting down media discourse on Gaza is impossible for anything but the most fascistic media outlets. Atrocities carried out by Israel and its IDF are now unquestionable. In short, Israel has lost its own propaganda war, going well beyond anything that the media of a liberal democracy can ignore.

So why is it that the Gaza factor is seen as a “whataboutism”? Because these people have no moral high ground, and on some level, they know it.

…

One of the most disturbing things about being a Leftist of Internationalist principle is the explicit hierarchy placed on the value of life based on skin colour and/or cultural background that continues to exist in Western nations. It is beyond reasonable doubt that the lives of Gazans, for example, are of much lesser value to Western minds than Israeli’s. If, god forbid, a Palestinian group was able to carry out a smidgen of what the Israeli’s have dished out on them since 1947 the world would come to a literal standstill. This was proven on 7th October 2023, after which the decades long Israeli aggression towards Palestinians was erased, as if the history of that region only began that day. A similar phenomena occurred after 9/11.

…

Nobody can deny that antisemitism exists in the UK, and the Jewish community is among the most vulnerable. But surely this means getting to the heart of the problem. Rightly or wrongly, the rise in attacks against British Jews is inextricably linked to Israel’s actions in Gaza. That is made clear by the rise in attacks since Israel’s 7th October response. It also means taking seriously the impact of Israel’s actions on people’s mental health. We do have a serious issue here, but it is a multifaceted one, comprising of mental health, a healthcare system underfunded and unable to cope with demand, ignorance and prejudice, and a genocide that far too many people in this country fully support.

Both a product of the Spectacle and a producer of the Spectacle, media continues to function purely in the service of capital and the maintaining of the status quo. In simple terms, or more accurately, as a starting point, we can comprehend this by acknowledging the existence of propaganda in the spaces where propaganda is not commonly believed to exist – within the Western media. Propaganda, we are told, is a strategy deployed only by malevolent dictatorships, such as Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran, among others. Though this is true, to deny the existence of propaganda in the West can only be explained by ignorance, naivety, or cooperation. But such is the sophistication of Western propaganda, cooperation can be knowing or unknowing. News reporters and TV presenters, for example, don’t see themselves as propagandists. Hollywood blockbusters, such as Independence Day, Captain America, etc, etc, etc, are seen as benign entertainment, and are likely to have been produced in that vein. Then there is everything else, the everyday media we consume, the TV shows, movies, talk shows, etc, etc, etc that are, in essence, self-affirmations - outputs that depict our society as we perceive it, as natural and free, without malevolent interferences or apparatus of control. In short, outputs informed by a sense of capitalist realism. Irregardless of genre, topic, or theme, anything that treats capitalism as the de facto social-economic system, as if the natural order of things, is contributing more to the dominance of capital than any overt piece of propaganda could.

This is why the word ‘propaganda’ doesn’t really grasp the actual power of capitalist realist media and therefore cannot provide the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of the media’s service of, and conducting of, the Spectacle. Propaganda is just one way of enforcing a particular message or viewpoint, and it is an increasingly outdated one. At this point, propaganda is barely needed. It has already done the job. Everything now is a corollary of propaganda, where the content of cultural outputs, especially of corporate media, are products of established, internal, worldviews. This is also true when it comes to matters of war, and the type of coverage given to wars depending on whose side we (as in our governments) are on.

Being an essential component of the Spectacle, it is imperative that war is sold perpetually. Even in “peace time”, war is present as a category of media – particularly of Hollywood. Whether appealing to the individuals love of country, invoking a sense of collective identity, sowing fear of an Other, or curating narratives of good and evil, media is the chief producer of that ever-presence, making immense contribution to the normalisation of war and the glorification of the military.

This selling of war as necessity – a fact of life – is far more important for liberal democracies as it is for dictatorships. Criticisms of war and debates on legitimacy are

Read more

Preface

(T)he spectacle has become more all-pervading than ever-to the point that it is almost universally taken for granted. Most people today have scarcely any awareness of pre-spectacle history, let alone of anti-spectacle possibilities. As Debord noted in his follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), “spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation moulded to its laws.”

- Ken Knabb, from preface of Society of the Spectacle, 2014 edition

Nigh on sixty years after Guy Debord’s seminal work, the Spectacle has become infinitely more pervasive than at the time of his writing. This is a disturbing, reality-shattering observation. While the Spectacle was a dominant presence of the sixties, the individual still retained pockets of respite, spaces and times to switch off. The 1967 individual didn’t have the smartphone, the internet, and TV channels broadcasting 24/7. Even advertisements were not omnipresent, as they are now. We can only imagine, then, Debord’s horror at our current enclosure. All we can do is take The Society of the Spectacle and elevate it to the level of atmosphere, as opposed to a social sector infringing on all areas of human existence. The Spectacle has since become much more than an infringement.

This issue of The Existential Reader has been put together with acute awareness of that fact. There is an awareness, also, that even a work that seeks to expose the spectacle, such as this one, can only exist as part of it. As Debord noted back in ’67, we are “obliged…to use the spectacle’s own language” in that we must “operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle”[1]. For this publication, there must be some form of participation in the marketplace of attention. There is branding to consider, an eye-catching cover design to aid visibility, and eventual distribution. Remember, there is no outside to the totality of capital. To critique capital as if from an outside position would be an indicator of dishonesty or misunderstanding of the thing itself. Indeed, we must be careful how we frame our critique, as by allowing criticism, capital legitimises itself in the “freedom” it allows to speak out about it.

We must also be wary of recuperation, the spectacle’s immune-system-like mechanism that neutralises radical thought and ideas, rendering them mere consumable outputs by way of recall - bringing them back into the system itself as the edgy, the political, the controversial, and so on.

To recognise all of this is no concession. Acting from within the spectacle is not defeat because defeat has already, long ago, occurred. Outside of face-to-face communication, which is simply impossible to achieve on a large scale without spectacle participation through which to grab attention, the language of the spectacle is our greatest asset. Looking again, as we will throughout, to Debord for guidance, the term we are looking for here is detournement (rerouting or hijacking) – an act of subverting the spectacle by recontextualising it in a contradictory way. Turning the spectacle against itself, essentially. Or as described by OxfordReference.com – “An artistic practice conceived by the Situationists for transforming artworks by creatively disfiguring them.”[2]

This is something to think about. To me, it has truly revolutionary potential. Though not an original strategy, it is one that could have quite the resurgence if implemented on a wide scale. And let’s be honest, what even is original nowadays anyway? Which is part of the point, I suppose.

By turning artists into celebrity, and building an entire culture around it, we have reached artistic stagnation, or artistic recycling, specifically in the areas of pop music and cinema. Our politics, too, feels as if it is stuck in a late 20^th-century loop, with recurring crises, enemies, and, for lack of a better term, plotlines.

Even an act such as psychogeography, or flaneurship, that entails nothing more than wandering around an urban landscape and observing urban life has become commodified in the age of social media.

All-in-all, life in the spectacle is an experience of (cultural) non-time. Culture has become a feeding frenzy, a constant battle for attention and monetary recompense at the expense of detail and innovation, resulting in the doling out of the tried and the tested, the derivative, and banal.

From “retromania”[3], to reboots and comebacks, the spectacles greatest source of nourishment is the cultural past, specifically the latter 20^th century period. For my part, I trace this back to 1952 and the 1^st UK pop charts, culminating in the dwindling of innovative and exciting cultural outputs in the late 1990s. But considering that much of the 1950s does now feel dated (as it should, being seven decades ago), it is possibly more accurate to place the late 1960s as the beginning of a period that 21^st century generations have so far had obsessively on repeat. If you want a specific moment, you could point to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, or maybe The Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut. Or perhaps it was more nuanced than that. Perhaps it was with the invention of the teenager as a consumer base, an eager market that coincided with the rolling out of television as part of the home’s furniture. Perhaps it was television itself, just television, beaming images into those homes, creating the world’s first cultural megastars in figures like Elvis Pressley and Marlon Brando. Who can really say for sure? All we can point to is the distant past, a past that doesn’t feel so distant in the present’s attachment, or anchoring, to it.

And with these questions, we shall begin.

Craig Snelgrove,

23^rd April 2026

Read more

I was into wrestling for a couple of years when I was a young kid. It was still WWF and WCW back then. Hulkamania and all that shit. Then I matured a bit and forgot all about it.

A few years ago, I saw something that blew my mind. I can’t even remember how I came across it. But did you know, dear reader, that Donald Trump had a stint in WWE? Back in 2007, he engaged in a “Battle of the Billionaires” with former WWE owner, serial rapist, sex trafficker and general all-round wrong ‘un, Vince McMahon (another rapist within Trumps circle? Surely not!).

This feud culminated in a bizarre “Hair vs Hair”(????) match at WrestleMania 23 (2009), where the two billionaires chose two wrestlers (a Samoan and a black man – read into that what you will. May be nothing, may be something, I don’t know, just an observation) to fight on their behalf, with the loser losing their hair. Not like any of that even matters. What matters is Trump’s performances in WWE, and how it served the cultivation of a media persona that was primarily being developed on the reality TV show, The Apprentice.

When I think about it, Trump’s WWE cameos (accompanied by young women and beauty pageants that included a “Miss Teen”) actually make a lot of sense. Trump and WWE suit each other. They are the embodiment and promotion of all-American supremacy, what some may call American Fascism, but is really something that, as far as I’m aware, we don’t have a word for yet (empire doesn’t name itself in derogatory terms). But looking at the kind of entertainment that WWE serves, and the ethos of the all-American that is its core, is to expose oneself to the full throttle dumbing down of American, and non-American, audiences, the smashing of cognition that is capitalist entertainment, dished out in the style of the all-American.

Unlike the original fascism of the 1920s and 30s, all-American entertainment goes out to the generally disorganised, undisciplined, slovenly, intoxicated and anti-authoritarian, decadent male. WWE actively manifests itself through the gaze of this kind of guy. Yet it also incorporates the fascistic elements of nationalism, physical strength as demonstrated through violence, misogynistic infused notions of male virility, and rejection of (mistakenly) perceived “elitist” or “establishment” values in the form of, for example, anti-intellectualism.

Let me clarify here, by the way, that I have no qualms about calling the MAGA base an astoundingly stupid one; one that includes the typical WWE audience. I realise this leaves me wide open for accusations of “elitist” style snobbishness. I honest-to-God don’t give a fuck. I don’t think we call out the stupidity of the MAGA base, and it non-American affiliates, enough. I don’t think its even possible to. Being the utter catastrofucks they are, the masses of Trump supporters deserve nothing but constant ridicule and contempt. To not do so would be the real snobbish thing to do. Like the Trumps and McMahons themselves, to let these people off the hook is to belief that their level of stupidity is an acceptable one. It isn’t. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the stupidity of the MAGA adoring Right is a learned one. It is manufactured through the dissemination of visual and auditory content designed to produce brain rot – the smashing of cognition.

I’m not expecting everyone to be an Einstein. I’m not a clever person in the sense that I am useless at Maths and many other things. I’m not especially witty. But I can think well enough to see right from wrong, the real from the fake, the decent and the indecent. I’m also not advocating for a prohibition on anything in particular. My critique is not of wrestling itself. I don’t like it, but what we like and don’t like is subjective. Who am I to say what is good entertainment and what isn’t? My train of thought here is with WWE specifically, and the compatibility of the corporation with Trumpian politics and cultural influence.

It is no coincidence, to my mind, that Trump adopts a WWE kind of performance as President. He talks in simple terms, embraces the simplistic good guy vs bad guy rhetoric that the yanks love to gobble up, and cannot deviate from the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, ableist, and every other kind of prejudice because, at their core, they believe in notions of white supremacy. This belief is, again, not in the unadulterated form of old. It may not even be a conscious one. I suspect for many it isn’t. But it is inherent in their make-up, meaning that, at some level, they have been influenced by white supremacist beliefs and either do not or cannot accept that, for whatever reason.

On a final point, and most interesting of all, is the painfully obvious contradictions within WWE and among the wider all-American mass. Embracive of misogyny and homophobia, WWE, and male American cultural output, has always been, and remains to be, comically homoerotic. So desperate to appear strong and macho, the WWE character, and all-American male, is typically weak of mind (a fact that probably explains why Americans are so quick to start a war, but so bad at actually winning one – an undisciplined idiot is not someone you want fighting your battles).

No wonder the American Empire is such a fragile one.

― Prince

The year 2000, having featured in the public imagination for so long, was ironically anti-climactic, but there is something in that irony that keeps it alive as a seminal moment. A bland and uneventful year, it exists in the memory as an extension of the cultural drop-off of the 1990s, the culmination of a 45-year period of great cultural innovation.

As articulated most brilliantly in the hauntological writings of Mark Fisher, what came after the turn of millennium cultural void was the endless imitations of a “retromania.” For Fisher, “To be in the twenty-first century is... nothing more than to have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens.”

Two songs, separated by 36 years, exist as embodiments of the before and after moment that Fisher identified as having occurred in the early 2000s. The first, by Prince, is probably known by every adult and even most young people. The second, by Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, may not be quite so familiar to older heads.

Prince’s ‘1999’ is an apocalyptic vision of a time that was for him, in 1982, a distant future, whereas for Charlie XCX, Troye Sivan, and for any Millennial listener to their song, 1999 is the not-so-distant past. Far from being apocalyptic, 1999, compared with 2026 (or 2018, when XCX and Sivan’s song was released), was a much simpler, stabler time.

While it’s true that childhood for most of us will be recalled as a simpler time, shielded as we are from the outside world and all of its horror, and that people of all ages pine now and then for childhood, when, with time on our side, the days felt longer and held more promise, XCX and Sivan’s song is nostalgic in a superficial way – a nostalgia infused “retromania” – recalling a world of Britney Spears, Nike Air Max’s and PlayStation 1 graphics.

Looking back to 1999 as only a cultural memory, of the things we were into, the clothes we wore, and the things we owned, is confirmation of the capitalist realism that Fisher spoke so much about. XCX and Sivan’s song associates the happiness of the 1999 youth with the Spectacle – not so much as memories of adventures with friends but of that immersion into the superficial. What’s more, the fact that Max Martin, writer of Britney’s ‘Hit Me Baby, One More Time’ (name dropped in XCX and Sivan’s chorus), contributed to XCX and Sivan’s song adds to the eerie sense of 21^st century non-time – that nothing new, culturally, has really happened, that cultural outputs are nothing more than reclaimed materials, repurposed products, the recycling of images and sounds on a corporate scale.

To put it another way, informed by Fisher, when we think of 1982 and 1999, we see two distinctive moments in time. 1982 and 1999 are two different worlds entirely, as was 1982 and 1965, 1965 and 1948, and so on. But thinking of 2018 and 1999 doesn’t throw up any distinctive cultural differences. Nor does 2026 and 1999. It doesn’t even feel like 27 years ago.

Some clarification may be needed here. Yes, technological advancements made between 1999 and 2026 have been vast and profound. Though not completely unimaginable, the accelerated ascent into the digital age, aided by the “alien lifeform” that is the internet, has changed day-to-day aspects of human existence entirely. But this is largely in communications and means of production. Culturally, we are very much in the same space as we were in 1999. People wear the same clothes, listen to the same kind of music, watch the same kind of movies and shows, etc, etc. I could easily buy a new pair of Nike or Adidas trainers and throw on a pair of trackies, jump into a time machine, rock up in 1999 and fit in seamlessly among the crowds. Same if I

Read more

- Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

Out of the exponential urban developments of the 19^th century emerged a figure that the French poet Charles Baudelaire would popularise as the flaneur. This figure, a romantic one for Baudelaire, would wander purposely aimless through the streets of the expanding city landscapes as a “detached observer” of evolving urban life. An artist “in a very narrow sense,” the flaneur for Baudelaire was a “man of the world,” who “wants to know, understand, and assess everything that happens.”

In essence, the flaneur is an aesthetically minded urban wanderer of great curiosity, “a reporter of street-life,”[1] seeking to explore the juxtaposed states of transience and familiarity with a “gastronomy of the eye.”[2] In the Baudelairean sense, the flaneur is distinctly Parisian, understood to be a bit of a dandy (though we cannot ignore the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd on Baudelaire’s depiction of the flaneur), so it is doubtful that a figure such as Friedrich Engels, for example, would fit Baudelaire’s criteria. Though a wanderer and observer of industrial Manchester, Engels was not entirely detached, and not at all in pursuit of the aesthetically pleasing or the poetically inspiring.

To be a flaneur, then, one must wander under artistic influence. Preferably whilst mildly high (especially in Baudelaire’s case), and always with a sense of the bohemian. There is no political motivation for the flaneur, no set agenda, no direction – just the streets and an artist’s instinct for intrigue.

This makes a figure like Engels a very different kind of urban wanderer, but not a total opposite. What stopped Engels from fitting Baudelaire’s flaneur criteria was, essentially, setting, with 19^th century Manchester being a Parisian antithesis. Whereas Baudelaire’s wanderings would present the observer with as much splendour as melancholy, the Manchester experienced by Engels could only present horror. Though a poet’s eye would no doubt nourish a work of art, it certainly wouldn’t be beautiful, and hanging round long enough, as a total outsider and “detached observer”, would only present risks of being mugged, the contraction of a disease, or worse.

Yet what Baudelaire and his flaneur have in common with Engels is the fascination with, and response to, urban transformation. Because the Parisian transformation differed from the Mancunian one meant that a very different kind of wandering character was formed. Say we put Baudelaire in Manchester with Engels, his “detached observer” would become a very different breed of wanderer, one who’d likely reach for something a bit stronger than hashish to meditate on his surroundings with. Not to say that 19^th century Paris wouldn’t have had its fair share of squalor, but the “Hell on Earth” that was industrial Manchester, as epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, was a much darker, crueller, and infinitely less aesthetically pleasing place than Paris’ “vascular network of imagination.”[3]

Benjamin and the Wanderers of Parisian Arcades

It wasn’t until the following century that a political appendage would be applied to Baudelaire’s model. Using the flaneur as a “starting point,”[4] Walter Benjamin incorporated Marxist interpretations into the act in his unfinished work, The Arcades Project. In noting the department store as “the last promenade for the flaneur,”

Read more

The rightful backlash against Matt Goodwin’s latest idiotic output, apparently containing fraudulent (or AI hallucinated) claims and data, as well as the usual opinionated and misunderstood waffle that is the product of his despairingly simple mind, reminded me of a piece I wrote last year - The Faux Intelligentsia of the Right-Wing Commentariat.

The faux intelligentsia consists of Matt Goodwin types - those conservative or conservative-leaning products of middle-class and upper-class comfort, bestowed with a self-righteous sense of entitlement, informed by a learned air of superiority, who were so psychologically damaged by the largely invented notion of “wokeness” and its threat to them as the dominant member of society (yes, we’re talking predominantly white male above the station of working-class) that they took up their positions within spaces made especially for them (journalism, TV, academia, etc) to moan, whine and screech endlessly.

In terms of fame, Matt Goodwin sits in the middle-ground, probably not well-known outside the UK. But think the Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson types. That’s who we’re talking about with the term “faux intelligentsia.”

At their core, the faux intelligentsia are representatives and spokespersons for the real “snowflakes,” so easily triggered that two of them (failed comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster) were so upset by “wokeness” they set up the podcast Triggernometry - a reactionary title that brings to mind that great line from Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

These, predominantly white male, commentators are paradoxical in that they do have good educations behind them, yet say and do the most stupid things. Some of it is so bizarre that only a conspiratorial mind can make sense of it. Douglas Murray is the prime example here, that quintessentially English prat, whose level of education, and the cost of it, should guarantee at least above average general intelligence. Apparently not, though.

This is the curious thing about the privately educated English. The most famous, contemporary example is probably former PM Boris Johnson, an absolute clown of a man whose existence makes it really difficult to argue against the notion that people can actually be born stupid - that no matter how many advantages you give a child who is otherwise healthy, they could just be natural idiots.

I don’t believe this, of course. But I do wonder, sometimes. Unfortunately, that leaves me with only the conspiratorial for the answer. Eton, and private institutions like it, are clearly the archetypal indoctrination camps, often for boys, instilling our most privileged class of children with all sorts of pseudo-intellectual clap-trap. Pray tell, what other explanation is there?

The other explanation is, of course, conspiratorial as well, I’m afraid. In the case of Murray, his obvious function is propagandist, particularly in his involvement with Israel. From his guided tours of Gaza with IDF, to the awarding of meaningless awards from the Israeli President, Murray is a more than willing Israeli mouthpiece, motivated by a long history of Islamophobia. For Murray, Israel is an obvious ally, a successful ethno-state intent on purging itself of any Muslim population. But this alliance is paradoxical, as Israel is a state that represents Murray’s own scaremongering back home - that the UK is subject to a takeover by immigrants and refugees, that the UK is losing its identity, becoming more and more “Islamic.” In reality, the reversal of this has already played out in Palestine, where actual refugees sought safety from persecution, and ended up taking over the land and expelling the indigenous population.

But enough of Murray, and back to Goodwin, who, as identified, exists in a middle-ground, just above the simpletons of Triggernometry.

In Goodwin we see all the recognisable faux intelligentsia tropes. He is, first and foremost, woefully historically illiterate and culturally impoverished. This renders him incapable of understanding the modern world and the changes he is living through. He is, like his peers, motivated by prejudice, particularly of Muslims, and is aghast at what he perceives is a loss of old England. And though it is his misfortune to not be born at the peak of British Empire, in the England of old, being a throwback isn’t much of an excuse for bigotry.

Most embarrassingly for Goodwin and his peers, however, is the fact that the current state of Britain, and England, primarily, is the fault of the very economic ideology he champions. This is the ultimate irony at the heart of the English members of the faux intelligentsia. They have made this country what it is themselves. Capitalism, in all its incarnations, has led us to where we are now. Many people have said the following in various ways, that the British Empire and its capitalist model of global dominance laid the ground for the modern world, and was a big part in the raping and pillaging of countries that created the global conditions as they are today, that remain the primary cause of mass immigration from so-called “third world” countries. Essentially, and to paraphrase the title of a book by Ian Patel, black and brown people are here because we (Europeans) were there. Furthermore, the welcoming of migrants is itself a form of soft power, and a means of capital in the form of potential cheap labour. Indeed, people from the so-called “third-world” are used to cheap labour, being used on the cheap to extract materials and resources, and paid pitifully for production of products then sold in the West.

Basically, if you want to stop immigration as it is - that is, the migration of poor people from poor countries en masse - then surely you should also be anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. Or would that actually do more harm than good in the eyes of the conservative capitalist?

It is a most frightful conundrum, one could say.

The following text was originally published in the 1st issue of The Existential Reader. It makes my point, I feel, though possibly could have been written better. I was, and still am, I suppose, a novice in writing non-fiction. But I can hardly re-write it now. So, here it is:

The Faux Intelligentsia of the Right-Wing Commentariat

In a cultural landscape marked by crisis, fragmentation, and disillusionment, a group of self-styled intellectuals has emerged to position themselves as the vanguard of common sense, truth, and anti-establishment critique. Figures like Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Matt Goodwin, and one half of Triggernometry duo, Konstantin Kisin, present themselves as heterodox thinkers bravely taking on the so-called “liberal elite” and radical leftism that they claim dominates cultural institutions. Their central thesis is deceptively simple: that the West is in decline because it has been captured by a progressive, postmodern, identitarian left obsessed with race, gender, and censorship. Oh, and Muslims.

While it is difficult for thinking people to understand the resonance of such narratives, I would argue that the appeal is in the offering of simplicity in a time of systemic instability, and the invitation to disaffected people to be part of a suppressed intellectual resistance against authoritarian “wokeness.”

What’s Actually Happening

In reality, the forces they critique are not radical leftist but the predictable consequences of a neoliberal project that has systematically disempowered the working class, hollowed out public services, financialised everyday life, and intensified alienation. The irony is that the very policies that have decimated communities, engendered cultural disorientation, and atomised individuals are the ones championed by the economic right and accepted by centrists over the last forty years.

Essentially, the faux intelligentsia, who are all in favour of capitalism, somehow misidentify neoliberal destabilisation as being caused by policies of a radical left-wing. Take for example the rise in identity politics or the proliferation of therapeutic discourse: these are not Marxist incursions but symptoms of an era in which collective struggle has been dismantled and replaced by personal branding, self-help, and an internalised need to perform rebellion in a hostile economic system.

As Naomi Klein demonstrates in her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), this reactionary thought thrives in the cracks left by neoliberalism, creating a funhouse logic where up is down and left is right. The individuals mentioned operate in this mirror world, often speaking from elite platforms while claiming marginalisation, casting themselves as rebels while defending the structural status quo. They construct a fantasy in which social justice campaigns are responsible for social decline, obscuring the role of austerity, deregulation, housing crises, and extractive capitalism.

Why This Misdirection Serves Capital

The result is a politics of misdirection. By framing cultural shifts and social discontent as the result of leftist ideology, they divert attention from the economic systems actually responsible for inequality and despair. In doing so, they act as ideological middlemen for capital, translating material alienation into culture war anxiety.

Worst still, and most infuriatingly, these commentators speak nonsense about political history or theory as if they were actual authorities on the matter. And this is where the danger lies. By speaking with authority but with very little knowledge or understanding, the faux intelligentsia of right-wing commentariat create a paralysing echo chamber where every social problem is blamed on a cartoonish, non-existent left (non-existent in the fact that what is deemed “radical left” is often “progressive” Liberalism).

Reclaiming Critical Thinking

If we are to navigate this terrain with clarity, we must reclaim the right to think critically outside of the reactionary trap. This means refusing the bait of manufactured outrage, interrogating the class dynamics behind cultural shifts, and recognising that the most dangerous threats often wear the mask of intellectual respectability.

The faux intelligentsia do not challenge power, nor do they seek to. Their fight is with a liberal movement that advocates for equality and empowerment of marginalised groups, something that is shared broadly across the centre and left of the political spectrum. And even on the right, in some cases. It is in this area where confusion arises, and where nonsensical terms like “cultural Marxism” and “post-modern Marxism” arise. Though in reality, just because someone supports gay marriage or trans rights doesn’t mean they are a full-blown communist intent on abolishing private property. They just have a moral compass and a healthy sense of right and wrong.

Yet paradoxically, the confused logic of the faux intelligentsia is their greatest appeal. Their inaccuracies and misunderstandings, presented with a confidence that implies they are, in fact, accurate assessments, offers simple answers for non-simple issues. While they provide us with lots of laughs, there is a tragic truth - that many of their opinions are now extremely popular. How such a dumbing down of our society has happened can be explained in various ways, but the concerning element is that the dumbing down has been so acute as to allow the elevation of a faux intelligentsia of middle and upper-class simpletons, who know very little about very much, in the first place. Due to its broad implications on issues such as climate change, responses to novel viruses, vaccines, geo-politics, history, immigration, and the catastrophic failure of capitalism as a sustainable and efficient model on which to organise society, as many other things, reversing this dumbing down is proving to be one of the great societal challenges of our time.

Because this text supplies the central theme of the upcoming 3rd edition of The Existential Reader, I though I’d seek feedback and general insights from my paying subscribers. This is for reassurance as much as it is for the opening up of discourse on the topic.

This particular piece has been chosen for its complexity. It is essentially a train of thought that I’m following. I do believe I’m on the right track, but it would be very useful to have outside input.

…

The totalisation of human existence into the spectacle has blunted our emotional response to graphic and catastrophic violence. Not to say that we feel nothing when

Read more

Other pieces will look at the emergence of the social media “citizen journalist”, the incorporation into the Spectacle of graphic and catastrophic violence, and the TV show Traitors.

“It’s important to understand how nobodies see celebrities. These people aren’t real. They don’t flush the toilet. They don’t have bad days…those pictures of him (John Lennon) at the Dakota made him, somehow, even more unreal to me…John Lennon was not a person…”

“He told us to imagine no possessions and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music.”

“…my mind was going through a total blackness of anger and rage. So I brought the Lennon book home (Anthony Fawcett’s John Lennon: One Day at a time), into this The Catcher in the Rye milieu where my mindset is Holden Caulfield and anti-phoniness.”

The celebrity is the ‘spectacular representation of a living human being,’ so wrote Guy Debord in his phenomenal 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. At the time of his writing, among the most prominent of these representations were The Beatles. Such is their enduring level of fame, no introduction to them is necessary. But what we do need to remind ourselves of, for the purpose of this piece, is the kind of fame they attained. Though The Beatles weren’t the first human beings to trigger mass-hysteria among admirers (before them was Elvis, Sinatra, and even way before that, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, whose concerts prompted the writer Heinrich Heine to coin the phrase Lisztomania, some 120 years before Beatlemania – credits for the invention of which vary), theirs was still very much an out of the ordinary phenomena, one historically reserved for Royalty and prophets. Through a combination of talent, likeability and sex appeal, the fame of The Beatles was curated around musical respectability and carefully managed images designed for the new medium of television. In the bands early years, many of the images were the design of their manager, Brian Epstein, but as the sixties progressed, and after Epstein’s untimely death from a drug overdose in 1967, the band were able to evolve their image in accordance with, and as a precursor to (at times) emerging trends.

Much of Beatlemania was trivial by today’s standards. Mundane, even. The long hair is a primary example, the fixation on which began when it wasn’t even that long. Dubbed the ‘mop-top,’ the reaction of American journos to it was bizarre. Sure, there were opinions back home in Britain, but the yanks would speak of these four lads from Liverpool as if they were from another planet, inclined to gawp at, gossip over and objectify as they would exotic animals in a zoo (which is bad enough when it is actual exotic animals being gawped at in a zoo). Some quotes to prove the point:

Their appearance, to judge by photographs of them in the English press, is distinctive, their getup including identical haircuts in dishmop—or as one London newspaper put it, Ancient British—style, and lapel less suits patterned after a Pierre Cardin design.

They look like shaggy Peter Pans, with their mushroom-haircuts and high white shirt collars.

British parents do not mind their offspring’s mania because Beatles lyrics are clean and happy. As one critic observed, ‘Their hair is long and shaggy, but well-scrubbed.’

This ridiculous style brings out the worst in boys. It makes them look like morons.[1]

Ironically, considering the manner of gossip and insistence on “the boys’” look, the hairstyles adopted by The Beatles were observed as being overly feminine. These “long manes of hair” and the “tossing” of them were, according to American psychologist Joyce Brothers, exactly the kind of mannerisms “which very young female fans (in the 10-to-14 age group) appear to go wildest over.”

Looking back at this early response to The Beatles and that initial Stateside Beatlemania, we see how the categorisation of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as a manufactured, consumable pop group contained (for all the talk about Epstein’s influence) many inadvertent, organic almost, elements. That overly curious, voyeuristic fascination of The Beatles was significant in the generation of a self-reinforcing entity – The Beatles as a brand, as well as a band - that can be understood through both Marx’s fetishised commodity and Debord’s spectacle (itself a 20^th century update on Marx’s commodity fetishism). And as with all the biggest brands, The Beatles name alone was a signifier of value. That name, and the faces of those associated with it (John, Paul, George and Ringo), were plastered on everything from lunchboxes to alarm clocks and ashtrays, all of which were aimed at young people.

Throughout 1963 and ’64, The Beatles brand was sold to the youth culture that had been emerging since the early 1950s, incessantly. And because young people were now shaping their identities around pop culture artefacts, the pop star and their dress sense, for example, identity began to be entwined with the ‘spectacle’ as something of social value.

In fairness to The Beatles, there was an awareness of this, and a profound sense of alienation about it, though this was never, I believe, fully comprehended by them (as in the kind of alienation they were experiencing or as a direct disavowal of such an alienating culture and their functioning within it). For them, it was just disturbing and, at times, terrifying. A prime example of the terrifying nature of their celebrity we can point to is the “more popular than Jesus” moment – the furore caused by John Lennon’s off the cuff, half-arsed comments on Christianity, made in March 1966, that included the comment, “We’re more popular than Jesus now.”

Such is the irrational nature of a great many religious nut jobs, and because of their large number, this was turned into a very big thing that ended up with The Beatles being dragged out before the world’s press so that a very overwhelmed and dumbfounded Lennon could explain himself. Like there was anything to even explain. But whatever, it happened, and it was significant because a young pop group in it, at that time, primarily for the laughs, were deemed to be of such importance, holding such influence over young people, they were effectively treated as statesmen or political leaders, as if they had some kind of responsibility over millions of young people. The flipside of this implied they were a potential contaminant of a young person’s mind, especially in the eyes of Bible freaks fearing a general decline in the younger generation’s adherence to the Christian faith.

On a more general level, the media obsession with, and intrusion into, the private lives of the band members had long become unbearable by ’66. So too had the concerts in front of screaming crowds. Unable to even hear themselves play, and likely feeling objectified, The Beatles stopped doing live performances, becoming an exclusively studio-based band (and all the better for it) from that time onwards until their break-up in 1970.

For John Lennon, Beatlemania had become a “nightmare,” and his relationship with the media would be a complex one for the rest of his life. Whilst on one hand having a visceral dislike of fame, celebrity and media intrusion, he also courted it – partaking in interviews to promote an album or to just talk about his life and voice his opinions, even inviting the press to the apartment he shared with Yoko Ono during their largely ridiculous “bed-in for peace” gimmick in 1969.

But behind these gimmicks, and my facetiousness, Lennon’s fame triggered intense existential questions for him. In an interview conducted towards the end of his life, he would say this:

“I was stuck in the feeling that one did not…was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people’s dreams or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am.”[2]

Remember, also, what we established at the beginning – that Lennon’s fame was still, as the sixties came to a close, a novel one. Though many more musicians had attained “superstar” status, Lennon was one of the first to encounter it and attempt to manage a life with it. Like other 1950s and ‘60s cultural icons, Lennon had little to no precedent to look to, and it is quite understandable for him, and anybody else who reaches that level of fame, to at one point or another believe their own hype. Which is the nicest way of me saying that John Lennon the celebrity was at times a bit of a preachy, pretentious bastard, who, like so many celebrities before and after him, wanted the best of both worlds – the limelight, the voice, the insistence on his own opinions, but the privacy of a regular person as well.

But John Lennon wasn’t a regular person. His level of fame stripped him of that. He was what he said God was – a concept – and his appearance to the world, the Lennon people got to know, was a media induced perception. Whether it was the cheeky and witty scallywag who first appeared on TV and in newspapers in 1962, or the hypocritical, self-important hippy of 1970, the entity people saw on stage and on talk shows was that “spectacular representation of a living human being.” Yes, Lennon was representing himself, but, as he acknowledged, it wasn’t really him. Not all of him, at least. Just a segment, shared through an opinion or a thought, broadcast to spectators as content. You could change your life with it, adopt it into your own identity or persona, or you could hate it. But no matter what, you’d consume it.

One person who consumed a lot of John Lennon throughout his life was Mark David Chapman.

Read more

On 30^th April 2011, Barack Obama stood before a room of politicians, journalists and celebrities and gave a now infamous stand-up comedy routine as part of his speech for the White House Correspondents Dinner. Some in attendance were given the special treatment, singled out for a good, old-fashioned, roasting. Amongst them was real-estate scion and self-made reality-TV star Donald Trump.

This was Obama at his peak, seemingly universally popular, on the cusp of overseeing an operation that would lead to the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. An assured, charismatic leader, Obama is still the only US President in my lifetime (41 years) who has been able to speak coherently and intelligently. He really did fit the part as Head of State of a liberal democracy. As an added bonus he was also of a good age, had his mental faculties fully intact, and came across, refreshingly, as perfectly sane. To a man of this stature, and so popular, roasting someone like Trump was as easy, at that time, as swatting away a fly.

But as satisfying to watch as his roasting of Trump was (and justified considering Trump’s very public promotion of the “birther” conspiracy), there is an element of cringe to the spectacle he produced that night. The crowd, fawning over Obama with overly-enthusiastic laughter, cheering, and applauding, visibly rivetted by the man’s very presence (remember, they had never had a coherent, intelligent President before, so the sight of one must have been quite exhilarating), and Trump’s stony-faced, unflinching look, eyes fixed on the man roasting him, feels like a seminal moment in US political history. It is no wonder, when beholding such a scene, that notions of a liberal established order were beginning to take hold, exacerbated by early social media conspiracies circulating about secret societies, primarily the Illuminati, which were dominated by Democrats such as the Clintons, the Obamas, and Democrat voting celebrities like neoliberal power-couple Jay-Z and Beyonce.

Even more cringe and ominous than Obama’s roasting of Trump came Seth Myers, who gleefully took the opportunity to poke fun at Goldman Sachs, FOX News, and a host of other organisations present that night, before directing a stream of jokes and one-liners at Trump himself. As the more liberal associated corporations laughed along, even, to be fair, when at their own expense, jokes about Goldman Sachs, FOX, and Trump were not so well received by the targets. As he did through Obama’s set, Trump stares straight ahead at Myers, barely moving, not even a hint of a smile. Weirdly, Myers almost predicts what a Trump Presidency would sound like, albeit putting Trump, in his imaginary scenario, as White House Spokesperson. But the manner of speaking, the use of language Myers employs as Spokesperson Trump – that would soon become very, very real.

Scrolling down the comments on the YouTube page I watch this roasting on, one account cries “THIS IS WHERE IT ALL STARTED”, while another asks “Was this Trump’s rejected from art school moment?” Not a bad shout.

Of course, this wasn’t the only White House Correspondents Dinner, or the only time the US establishment has come together for a jovial knees-up with some mild, light-hearted piss-taking. And the piss-taking was indeed mild. This one stands out purely for the reaction of Trump, and how the story played out. Trump has, without a doubt, had the last laugh, thanks largely in part to knowing how to appeal to a mass-audience of everyday, working people (something that Obama and the liberal band of Democrats and Democrat supporting celebrities have been proven to lack), how to brand himself, and, crucially, in the way he has utilised social media. Trump, more than any other public figure, has mastered the art of the tweet. The format’s short, limited space is perfect for Trump, a man of few words but who knows how to use them in order to make a straight, matter-of-fact comment, statement, or soundbite.

But for all these qualities, the man has innumerable flaws. Most of all, and on top of all the other things that make Trump a terrible pick as a Head of State - a life of wealth and luxury, a devout belief in free-market capitalism, a lack of care for anyone or anything other than himself - is the man’s epic, operatic snowflakery. From that 2011 night in Washington, to his outbursts over “fake news,” to his current victim mentality, Trump’s political journey has been beset by an aversion to mockery and criticism. In 2011, he appeared unable to take a joke, in 2016 he decided the media couldn’t be trusted, not because of corporate interests, but because they weren’t behind his bid to be President. And now, after refusing to accept defeat to a geriatric Joe Biden in 2020, a monumental embarrassment for anybody, and having been taking through the courts for all sorts of things, Trump is now as embittered as he is sensitive, as demanding as he is needy.

It is this, more than his obvious qualities and intelligence in certain areas (former Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar recently described Trump as “intelligent but not knowledgeable”, which does seem to sum up the walking, talking contradiction that is Donald Trump), that makes Trump, and his MAGA brand, such a perfect figurehead for a movement built on grievance, projection, and for those who are unable or unwilling to accept anything other than traditional social hierarchies and the one interpretation and understanding they have of the world.

I. The Performance of Injury

Though Obama’s roasting of Trump in the late Spring of 2011 was emphatic, life has a funny way of smacking you in the face every now and again. Not many people, Obama included, I’m sure, would have predicted a Trump Presidency five years later. But as those YouTube comments made out, Obama’s roasting could have been the catalyst, or origin story, for Trump the politician. Yes, Trump has spoken about running for President for decades, but it was never really said with any conviction, just vague claims on policies, of America being “ripped off,” and of a need for “one proper President.”

For every political statement on talk shows and in interviews, Trump had always denied having any interest in running, describing the life of a President as a “mean” one, subject to intense media scrutiny, as if a Head of State shouldn’t be scrutinised minutely.

Yet Trump would never rule it out, once hinting to Oprah Winfrey (who he had once identified as being his ideal Vice-President) that “if it got so bad” he would put himself forward. Such tact when discussing politics before large audiences bely an arrogance in Trump, a sense of entitlement that tells him only he can properly manage the world’s biggest superpower.

This entitlement, however, does not appear to be enough. Trump needed a bit of get up and go to spur him into action, some added incentive. Turns out, going off the timing of Trump’s eventual turn at politics, that incentive comes from wounded pride. Being publicly humiliated, by a black man no less, who beat away the flimsy, desperate “birther” conspiracy Trump clung to with such ease, seems to have been the final straw for him. Not the economy, not immigration, not crime. It has, at the end of the day, always been about one thing – Trump’s fragile ego. That matters more than anything else.

Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Trump utilised his realty TV persona to perform the spectacle of the wronged man. Tapping into the conspiracy theories rife on social media, Trump would cast himself as the outsider, silenced by the liberal elites (specifically the Clintons and the Obamas), the truth-teller censored by political correctness. The irony, of course, was that Trump was neither marginal nor silenced. He was, and remains, the archetype of privilege - male, white, rich, and unaccountable. Yet it is precisely this contradiction that animates what we might call victim capitalism: a political economy in which grievance itself becomes a most valuable commodity. And in this world, it is the rich and powerful figures on the Right of the political spectrum who are the oppressed. It is, in essence, a most perverse reversal - an ideological Upside Down - where reality has been inverted to cast lies as truth, where the monsters feeding on social resentment are the same ones insisting that it is they, as white people, as conservatives, as Christians, as working people who live by “traditional family values”, who are under attack.

In the end, the power of victim capitalism meant that every journalist who challenged Trump, every protestor who protested against him, and every social media user who mocked him became evidence of an imagined tyranny suppressing the “real people,” feeding this growing monster a rich and steady diet.

II. Free Speech as Shield and Sword

Looking beyond Article 10, the historical conception of free speech is a long one, going all the way back, as far as we know, to the Ancient Greeks at least. I say as far as we know, as we are dealing with the concept of free speech in a political sense – the right to express opinions, to speak out against the power, to criticise our leaders. And in reality, we can only ascertain the facts of ancient history to a certain extent. We are limited in what we know as, for one reason or another, much has been lost. We know little to nothing, for example, of the very first human societies and civilisations. If I were to speculate, and this is only my personal speculation here, the need for a defined free speech would have developed out of a response to power, and the abuse of power. As with the issue of property, the concept of free speech probably has its origins in a single instance, sometime 200-300,000 years ago. This, to my mind, is the real original sin – the first human being who pointed to a piece of land, or a group of people, and said, “This belongs to me.”

You could say that this is stating the obvious. Human beings most likely crawled out of the slime fighting one another. Violence in humans is so frequent as to be innate. The practise of non-violence is, if we are being honest, an ideal to aspire to. We know it is the right thing to do, yet all of us, at some point or another, would have had that ideal tested.

Non-violence in humans could be said to have been a learned behaviour, a response to the trauma of the extreme violence early humans are said to have inflicted on one another. Or maybe not. Maybe there was one man, or woman, who took ownership of land and exerted dominance over a people who had hitherto lived in peace and harmony. We’ll never know, and it is largely superfluous to ponder over for long.

What is important here is the establishing of free speech as a means of speaking against power, and of every person having a say in political and public affairs. As we know, human history, ancient and modern, is bloody. For most of recorded history, about 5,000 years or so, emperors, pharaohs, kings, queens, prime ministers and presidents have all, to one extent or another, sought to suppress freedom of expression. Many have chosen violence to protect themselves, their bloodlines and their empires from rebellions and revolutions, seeing themselves as the ultimate authority over a society (as decreed by a higher power in most cases), and therefore entitled to inflict extreme violence on anyone who challenges that authority. In recent times, more subtle tactics have been deployed, such as shaming, harassment, propaganda and censorship. But whether violent or non-violent, those who seek to suppress free speech and expression are motivated by a need to retain an authoritative power, a status quo, perceived social norms, religious dogma.

Furthermore, for all the talk about the role of the Ancient Greeks, English Parliamentarians, and the American Founding Fathers, as just three examples, and their role in the establishment of free speech, it wasn’t until very recently (50 years or so) that free speech was extended to everyone. Slaves, women, working people and ethnic minorities have all had their freedoms of speech and expressions suppressed for many, many centuries. Looking at the French, the English, and those European offsprings who would call themselves Americans, free speech was not a universal, basic right for all. And in cases where they stated, “for all”, the “all” meant one specific group of people – white men.

It would be naïve, and dangerous, then, to examine the debates around free speech in our time without considering who the concept of free speech has, until now, been afforded to. It is, after all, that group predominantly (but not exclusively) who are claiming free speech suppression now. This same group, the only group to be afforded power, or a say in power, for so long, is now the same group claiming that their freedom of expressions are being suppressed.

Again, looking specifically at the modern notion of free speech, developed during the Enlightenment, we find a bourgeois public sphere that was, in practice, male, white, and property-owning. Crucially, and despite those false claims of universality, free speech was considered a mode of civic responsibility rather than personal indulgence. Freedom of expression implied an ethical commitment to reason, truth, and the common good. It was, in essence, a license to debate, to be entitled to debate, and to express one’s views and beliefs freely, within reason – emphasis on within reason. Even the most ardent advocates of free speech, then and now (including myself), recognised the need to protect people from libel and slander. And that is why free speech always comes with a “within reason”, as there is a greater responsibility in relation to others. Anyone who denies this, or disagrees with this, simply does not understand the concept of free speech. So-called “free speech absolutists” who deny this responsibility are not actually free speech absolutists. They are either simply selfish individuals asserting themselves over the interests of others or acting with malicious intent in the name of another agenda.

Jumping back to the present day, rational exchange has been replaced by emotional spectacle. The cause of this is more or less exclusively the human being’s over-enthusiastic embrace of the novel form of communication that is social media. Essentially, the kind of speech that is natural to us, that we practice in private, is now playing out in the “digital town square’s” of cyberspace, where the autonomous but responsible citizen has been supplanted by the neoliberal subject - uber competitive, self-promotional, and perpetually outraged.

In our digital spaces, each speaker has a diminished sense of moral responsibility – diminished to the state of non-existence for many. As we have touched on, there are two major forces at play when using social media. The first is the sense of detachment. Though we are putting our thoughts out to thousands upon thousands, perhaps even millions, of people, these are just numbers. The people seeing these, in our minds, are not really there in the sense of being an inhibiting force. Imagine for a second that you have written out a tweet, but instead of pressing send and seeing the message disappear from screen and mind, you are put in front of a large crowd of people, on a physical platform, and have to speak those thoughts instead. Depending on the content of the tweet, many people would struggle to replicate the tone and, indeed, restate the words themselves.

Take for example the case of Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Tory councillor who was sentenced to 31-months imprisonment for inciting racial hatred, or in full:

This applicant, Lucy Connolly, was charged on indictment with an offence of inciting racial hatred contrary to section 19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986, the particulars of the offence being that “on 29 July 2024 she published and distributed written material on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) which was threatening, abusive or insulting with the intent thereby to stir up racial hatred or whereby, having regard to all the circumstances, racial hatred was likely to be stirred up thereby”.

Connolly’s offence was committed in the aftermath of the horrific murders of young children in Southport on 29^th July 2024, an event that was shamelessly hijacked and politicised by racists and grifters on the Right. Understandably after such a sickening act of violence, many people were in a state of shock, disbelief, and disgust, and knee-jerk, emotional reactions were shared and reshared across all social media platforms. Many of these were irrational in the blaming of the attacks on “illegal” immigrants, and what ensued in the following days was akin to a medieval witch hunt, with baying mobs attacking mosques and hotels housing these “illegals.”

The number of posts shared across all platforms that could have been read as an incitement to violence or racial hatred is probably innumerable, and again, the majority of people would have been in an understandably heightened emotional state, looking for answers, and finding only a plethora of finger pointing, conspiracy theories, and misinformation. The great majority of these people have since carried on with their lives as they would normally do after a social media post. It’s just a social media post, after all. What’s there to think about? But Lucy Connolly was, in a way, unlucky, as what she called for ended up taking place.

Connolly’s tweet is as follows:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it”

Connolly published that tweet on the day of the murders at 8:30 pm, deleting it around three and a half hours later (in itself an indication that she may have fucked up). By this time, however, the tweet had been viewed 310,000 times. It is unlikely, I imagine, that Connolly’s general, everyday tweets would gain such traction.

At some point between then and her arrest on 6^th August 2024, Connolly had deleted her twitter account, and messages sent from her on Whatsapp on 5^th August show evidence of an awareness of her tweet’s consequences:

“raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse lol”

Connolly also remarked that if enquiries were made she would play “the mental health card” (another ill-informed, generally stupid understanding of those who hold the kind of views Connolly holds).

Maybe I’m too soft, but reading the judge’s sentencing remarks, I find myself feeling a little sorry for Connolly. Her depiction is that of a normal, everyday person with no prior criminal record, and as a caring mother. She had also lost a child 12-years prior. It is also quite clear that, as with anyone holding her views, and to speak bluntly, she doesn’t have a fucking clue about what’s actually going on in the world.

Yet it does become hard to keep up this compassion for Connolly in the face of her subsequent doubling down upon her release from prison. Ludicrously, and to back up my claim that she doesn’t have a fucking clue, she has referred to herself as “Sir Keir Starmer’s political prisoner,” going on to say:

“I think with Starmer he needs to practise what he preaches. He’s a human rights lawyer, so maybe he needs to look at what people’s human rights are, what freedom of speech means and what the laws are in this country.”

Such comments, made after a stint in prison, and long after her charges, and legal justification for them, were clearly explained, are just mind boggling. But maybe they weren’t explained sufficiently enough for Connolly and her supporters.

The first thing that Connolly needs to acknowledge, to my mind, is that she is blaming the wrong person. Her anger should, if anything, and if she is adamant on not blaming herself, be towards the people who did indeed set fire to a Holiday Inn in Rotherham, that was rightly or wrongly being used to house “illegal” immigrants, on 4^th August 2024. Pay attention to that timeline, by the way. Connolly’s tweet is sent out on the 29^th July. There is almost a week between that tweet and the arson attack on the Holiday Inn in Rotherham. Connolly messages someone on Whatsapp about her tweet “biting her on the arse” the day after that attack, on the 5^th August, and is arrested the next day on the 6^th.

Now, questions do arise here. You could ask how did the police have a random woman’s tweet that had been deleted almost a week prior? Well, deleting a tweet doesn’t make it disappear if it has been retweeted thousands of times. It’s also likely that someone brought it to the attention of the police. Secondly, it doesn’t appear to have been established how much influence Connolly’s tweet actually had. As said, there was almost a week between the tweet being published and deleted, to the arson attack itself. Also, Connolly lived in Northampton, with the attack taking place some 103 miles away in Rotherham. Of course, Connolly, like all of us, would have been following and had followers from all over the place, so yes, someone in Rotherham could have seen the tweet. But the likelihood of Connolly knowing any of those involved personally is unlikely.

Then there is the factor of Rotherham being a town as likely, or more likely, to see these kinds of incidents as any other, being the centre of the grooming gang scandal. Consequently, it is hardly likely that the racists of Rotherham would need that much encouragement from anyone outside their community.

I suppose, in the end, I do consider Connolly’s sentencing, in context, to be a little harsh. Though she clearly holds racist views, it is difficult to say with any certainty that she actually would, in the real world (she was not, remember, in the real world when using twitter to vent her rage) advocate for an arson attack on a hotel that had people living inside it. That is a serious thing to do, after all, and the consequences for the arson attack in Rotherham should lie with the actual culprits, not with some right-wing loon on twitter.

This brings us back to the point – would Lucy Connolly, when put in front of a hotel housing “illegal” immigrants with a baying mob point to it and encourage them to burn it down? It really is impossible to say. And again, the influence of her tweet on the event is difficult to prove.

But, having said that, and contrary to what Connolly and her supporters believe, the law is clear on this. Taking the position that social media platforms like twitter are digital town squares with real world implications, Connolly’s tweet went well beyond the limit of free speech. In fact, Connolly could have been rightly arrested the very next day. The fact she wasn’t, and wasn’t until AFTER the arson attack in Rotherham, tells us, or at least anyone who is unbiased and who has the ability to think for themselves, that her arrest was tied in with that event. In short, she called for it, they did it, and therefore she is liable as if she was involved in the planning for it. Again, I personally don’t think she should be imprisoned for what she did, but under the Law, she simply had to be. The Law, as it stands currently, doesn’t take into consideration the fact that it was not said aloud or written down in a conventional way, that it was probably hammered out on the screen of a phone whilst sat on the sofa in pyjamas. What she said, unequivocally, classifies as incitement to violence and incitement to racial hatred. The fact that an arson attack occurred a week later in a town far away was to her misfortune, and there is a strong argument to say that she was simply made an example of. Many would say rightly so.

This case is so important, though, as it encapsulates the problem we now have. Should we or should we not extend the laws of free expression into social media? It is clear to me that we must, considering the undeniable evidence that proves real world implications. So, if Elon Musk wants X to be the digital town square, then let him have it. But don’t cry about it when people are arrested for something they said as if they said it in an actual town square. Nobody, I would imagine, would have been surprised if Connolly had talked openly in public about burning down a hotel with people inside and arrested after a baying mob attempted to do it. So why should we be surprised when she is arrested for tweeting it? There really is no argument here. No conspiracy theory that makes sense. Unless, of course, you have a racist agenda.

As for the second major force dictating the mindset of social media users, prolonged time spent in these digital spaces, arguing, “debating”, and pontificating, has the potential to create an acute sense of victimhood, where any criticism in the form of a block or suspension equates to censorship, and where demand for accountability becomes persecution. In such a way, digital spaces are similar to the reality inhibited by Matthew Rose Sorenson in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, with the “consequences of lingering in this place” being “amnesia, total mental collapse, etcetera, etcetera.” There is a profound distortion of reality that afflicts those who neglect the real world, and real pursuit of knowledge and understanding, in favour of the quickfire soundbites and rage bait they endlessly consume on social media. And how can pursuit of knowledge thrive in an environment that is designed for quick and easy engagement – for “likes” and “content” sharing. With the aim of the social media game to get as much attention as possible, making a point about something political or cultural has the ego behind it – “I am saying this because I am right, listen to me, I am teaching you something, I am speaking the truth, like me and follow me.” But this ego is a fragile and hypersensitive one. And whilst it is detached from the thoughts and feelings of others, it is acutely aware of its own.

Big social media players are far from immune from this. On the contrary, they are more susceptible, and more likely to cause damage, than the rest of us. Journalists, political commentators and celebrities are bad enough, but unhinged Presidents? That’s a sure recipe for disaster.

As established, Donald Trump is the ultimate social media snowflake. Not only is he completely ill-equipped for his job, he is also, like all of the worst leaders, too thin-skinned for it. But, shrewd operator as he is, Trump recognises the power of the tweeted whine.

A similar tune has been played by many reactionaries on the Right, including Nigel Farage here in the UK. But why are the Right winning this game of who can cry longest and hardest online when there are many reactionaries in the Liberal centre and on the Left? Well, as we have established, those whining longest and hardest right now are white Conservatives – and they are the base of both Trump and MAGA and Farage and Reform UK.

III. MAGA, Brexit, and the Marketing of Belonging

In the years preceding Brexit, Farage cast himself as the voice of the silenced Englishman, “the bloke down the pub,” whose views had been banished by multiculturalism and Brussels bureaucracy. Like Trump, Farage’s power rested on contradiction: he was both elite and anti-elite, both insider and outsider, a tactic deployed to perform authenticity. Their shared genius in this area lies in the converting of impunity into victimhood, and in translating privilege into persecution.

Essentially, both Farage and Trump operate in the politics of resentment, and an economy that holds outrage as a valuable commodity. In this economy, the more a statement offends, the more valuable it becomes; the more one is “cancelled,” the higher one’s stock. Nothing exemplifies this more than Trumps banishment from Twitter after the riots at the U.S. Capitol on 6^th January 2021. This banishment, a decision made by a private business in accordance with its own rules and regulations, became more than what it actually was. In reality, being booted off a social media platform is the digital equivalent of being barred from a pub, but in the realm of the digitally insane, this was the silencing of a U.S. President, and worse still, a U.S. President illegally stripped of the Presidency in a rigged election.

As we have seen with the Lucy Connolly case, the logic of right-wing victim culture falls apart when put under the scrutiny of the very legal systems and national values those on the Right claim to defend. To argue against Trump’s Twitter ban from a place of grievance and with a claim of censorship is to ignore what actually was a remarkable event. No government in the world, democratic or otherwise, would have tolerated what happened that day. And whether Trump intended to incite the riots or not is largely irrelevant when who took part and were convicted of involvement emphatically state that their actions were based of his words. In such a scenario, no government would tolerate anyone who, whether intentionally or not, was spearheading such a movement, for the simple reason that such an event, and any repeats, could constitute a national security threat.

Let’s be real here, if the shoe was on the other foot, the same people on the Right who defend Trump and those who took part in the riots of 6^th January would be calling for the heads of anyone who attempted such an assault on the State itself. And they know it. This is why Trump’s innocence, his victimhood, is so important. It also allows him to take his wronged man persona to a much higher level, which, if successful (has it has been), will afford him even greater power.

This is why the Twitter ban was a miscalculated one. Yes, the justification for banning Trump was a straight-forward one. A significant event had occurred, a genuine national security threat was foreseeable, and the man most responsible, whose followers had committed the acts, was tweeting like a deranged lunatic about voter fraud and rigged elections. Again, such a thing goes beyond the limit of free speech. Trump wasn’t just voicing an opinion, he was distributing misinformation that was a threat to the State itself. All any self-respecting individual on the Right only has to imagine the same scenario being played out by the other side to see the lunacy of all this. And as President of the United States, whether sitting, incoming or outgoing, Doanld Trump isn’t a random guy caught up in a viral conspiracy theory. There isn’t a problem if a regular person posts content supporting conspiracy theories, no matter how ridiculous or current, but when it’s a man as powerful as Trump, then something has to be done. Yet again, if you’re against Trump’s Twitter ban, you’re more or less okay with any outgoing President attempting to instigate a coup.

I cannot overstate, however, the fact that Trump was not silenced in any way, shape or form. He was simply barred from a pub for causing a ruckus that in itself caused physical harm and posed a danger to others. What landlord would tolerate such a person frequenting their establishment. After his ban, and as with anyone barred from a pub, Trump set up elsewhere. More than that, even, Trump, being far from a regular guy, was able to build his own pub, implement his own rules, where he could drink as much as he wanted and say whatever he wanted. And nobody stopped him. Why? Because nobody could stop him. And why could nobody stop him? Because of his right to free speech (and his vast wealth and establishment credentials).

Setting up Truth Social, and being banned from Twitter, gave Trump a platform and victim status far bigger than anything he had before. It also negates entirely the possibility of him being barred from any other digital pubs. He didn’t have to go over to Bluesky or even take to ranting down his phone for TikTok (something that would have been hilarious and dangerous in equal measure), he just set up his own house in the knowledge that no one could touch him.

Such a sequence of events makes a mockery of any claims of censorship. His subsequent re-election also offers further proof of this. If Trump was truly silenced, we simply wouldn’t hear from him, ever. But the fact is we did here from him. We always heard from him or of him. His trials and tribulations were daily news. We never heard the end of it. Much to our despair now. What we all should learn from this is that online victimhood is incredibly powerful, and that the tribal nature of political discourse on social media platforms does not make for sensible politics but instead exacerbates a politic of grievance and the treatment of free speech as commodity.

But media corporations, social platforms, and political commentators have all long understood this - that outrage drives engagement, engagement drives profit, and profit reinforces the very systems that produce grievance. Victim capitalism thus becomes self-sustaining: the marketplace of resentment masquerading as a movement for freedom.

MAGA embodies the logic of free speech as commodity fetishism with near-perfect purity. It is not a policy, nor even an ideology, but a brand, and to wear a MAGA hat is to participate in a ritual of consumption that masquerades as rebellion, where the wearer feels part of a movement while the movement itself remains but a simulacrum of collective purpose. Trump’s genius here lies in understanding that the disaffected are not seeking recognition over justice.

This is commodity fetishism in its purest expression: social relations replaced by relations between things, such as the red hat that represents solidarity among the oppressed of white, Conservative, Christendom. As Marx might have put it, “the social character of men’s labour appears as an objective character stamped upon the product” - in this case, the product is identity itself.

IV. Brexit and the Replication of Outrage

In the UK, the language of “taking back control” mirrored the American cry of “Make America Great Again.” Both slogans articulate loss as nostalgia, and both offer emotional resolution without rational, logical analysis. Like Trump, the Brexiteers identified a wound but misdiagnosed its cause, seeing that the pain of deindustrialisation, austerity, and precarity was real, but placing the blame onto the misplaced, the “woke,” bureaucrats, and imagined cosmopolitan elites.

Nigel Farage, standing before his “Breaking Point” poster, enacted the same moral inversion as Trump. Here again, privilege was disguised as persecution, with the banker-politician claiming to speak for the dispossessed, while pointing the dispossessed in the direction of those below them rather than those above, all while armed with the rhetoric of free speech - “we must be allowed to talk about immigration.”

Though such a tactic on the Right is old hat, social media has no doubt amplified this spectacle. Algorithms, indifferent to truth but attuned to outrage, have elevated populist content precisely because it provokes the strongest emotional responses. “Engagement” is now the new measure of legitimacy and lies outperform facts because the lies are more digestible, and clickable. The fact that Trump’s revenge on Obama and those pesky Liberal elites coincided with the roll-out of social media is one of histories strange events, a simple matter of chance and luck. But credit to Trump, he hasn’t wasted the opportunity.

John’s phone pinged with notification of movement coming towards the building and sure enough, somebody pressed the buzzer.

“Ah, nice one”, he said, jumping out of his chair, “I’m starving.”

Bryan barely mustered up a grunt in acknowledgement, concentrated as he was on Market Street. John glanced at it, the busy high street, dotted in a plethora of white squares over each citizens’ head. All good. He checked the intercom, seen the delivery guy was a 32-year-old heterosexual man called Zeeshan, who had voted for the right party in the last election and who held a respectable personality rating of 87.3 %. No problems. He buzzed down to say he was on his way then dashed off out down the corridor towards the lift, glancing in each of the rooms he passed. All white squares on all screens. Nice. The lift gave his face the green light and swiftly shot him down the three floors and once down he hurried his long legs over through the grand sunlit foyer to the entrance and grabbed the food of Zeeshan.

“Nice one, Shanny”, he said, “that’s at least 10 points for good time.”

“Cheers, boss”, Zeeshan replied through the closing door, “enjoy your food, yeah.”

“We better had do”, John shouted, practically running now back over to the lift before it left him grounded. In total he was out of his surveillance room for 6 minutes and 22 seconds. Not bad but too close for comfort.

“We still all good, Bry?” he asked as he swooped in.

“Aye”, Bryan grumbled, “still all good. Lots of mild point scoring and no misdeeds about.”

“Crackin’”, John replied, plating up the food in the modest kitchen enclosure that was built into city centre surveillance rooms where the watchers were placed on the long shifts. John had gone for a chicken tikka masala, Bryan the lamb vindaloo. Both earned ten points for presentation. John served up Bryans plate to him, then cracked open the cokes. Good times. Cushy work the long shift, if you can stand the hours that is. John dug in ravenously.

“Hmmm”, he enthused through rapid chews, “I tell you what, this is getting’ full marks from me, Bry. How’s yours?”

Bryan scooped in another mouthful, chewed gently, eyes scouring Market Street for anything, nodding in approval. “It’s good”, he said, “it’s bloody good. Have to say, they can cook up a good curry those boys”. He looked at John, wide eyed, chewing with approval. “We can go there again, son”, he told him, and then looked back onto Market Street, bustling with correctly behaved life. Perfect. Perfect world with perfect food.

Bryan always says it’s good to live in a world with only well cooked, non-processed food. Keeps everyone in good shape and in good morale. He’s right, of course, and John was glad Bryan liked the place he’d chosen; it was the first time in months he’d been allowed to choose. Last time he chose a chippy that seemed to stain the oesophagus in grease and affected their bowel movements for a couple of days. Bryan was outraged and had the chippy marked down to a zero rating, summoning the food safety and hygiene lot who promptly shut the place down and had the proprietors and all their staff banged up for the week. Obviously, they can’t run a chippy anymore. Which is a good thing. But still, John was embarrassed about it for ages, and was fuming with the lad who recommended it. He had him marked down to a 10% rating, wanting to have him put down to zero but was told by one of the gaffers that it’d be too much to do that to someone just for having bad taste. Wasn’t the lads’ fault, apparently. Part of the process, reattuning the taste buds.

Bryan is a fascinating fella, fascinating to anyone who does the long shift with him. He’s incredibly meticulous, in an arrogant kind of way in the context of his work. I mean, what could it possibly be that he can spot out there that the system can’t? What is he searching for? He’s the only fella John had seen scour Market Street in such a way. Some serious dedication that, scouring Market Street constantly on the long shift. John often wondered how he wasn’t plagued by headaches. He probably is. Probably works on through them. The boring old bastard, he could probably put a brain tumour to sleep.

It makes sense to put city centre watchers on the long shift as there’s always something going on. Isn’t like that on the residential watch though, you fall asleep doing that for too long, no matter how many streets you get given. Home watch is the best though, that’s when you get all the juicy stuff. Not just the shagging, like, but actual misdeeds or incorrect sayings. Home watch isn’t public knowledge, you see, well shouldn’t be, anyway. There are grumblings that word is beginning to seep out, much to the gaffers disliking. What’s the point in having a home watch if everyone knows they’re being watched? They’ll all be putting on a show all the time, won’t they? And it’ll ruin the shagging. No, best kept as it is that one.

“You done, Bry?” John asked after he scooped up the last of the vindaloo.

“Well there’s nowt left on there, is there?” Bryan curtly replied through the food.

“Haha, no, none left on that plate”, John said, “Glad you liked it, Bry”, and he took away the plates and gave them a wash, glancing up at Bryan and Market Street as he did so, noticing a square turn gold with a plus 10%. “That’s what we like to see, eh Bry?”

“Oh aye, that’s it. Getting better all the time this, yer know. Hardly any misdeeds these days. I actually think its beginnin’ to work.”

John walked back over to the desk, drying his hands. He stood over Bryan, flung the tea towel back over to the sink. “That implies you once had doubts, Bry”, he pried, “didn’t think you’d be one to have doubts about all of this.”

Bryan scoffed and shooed him back, eyes down on desk in a moment of broken concentration. He pointed his finger down at it, as if he was speaking to the desk and not to John. “I fuckin’ do not and have not, ever, not had any doubts about this great system that those men and women of far superior intellect and genius to you and me have developed these last decades. I have nothing but admiration for this system and sit here on all my shifts humbly in awe of such a system, with undyin’ and unyieldin’ gratitude for it. And you can piss off for puttin’ it in such a pissin’ questionin’ tone. You snoopin’ cunt”, and with that he looked up at John, dead in the eye, until they both couldn’t hold it any longer and burst out laughing, John patting his hand down on Bryans shoulder for support, collapsing back into his chair when he regained some composure.

“Fuck me Bry you nearly had me then.”

“Aye, well, I do mean it. Every word of it. But it’s alright, yer a good snoop, you should ask those questions. But that’s not what I meant. Of course I’ve always believed in this”, he waved his hand across Market Street, “but you have to understand, when this system first came in…there were just…there’s just so many people to watch.”

John looked at Market Street like he’d never seen it on the big screen before, never seen the system at work. He looked at all those squares with all their information just a click away. Almost everything you could know about a person.

“Look at ‘em though”, Bryan said. “Christ, they have changed.”

John turned his eyes towards him. “What’s on yer mind, Bry?” he asked. Bryan sighed, eyes following the unceasing movement, unable to settle on any one person. After a time he stopped, glanced at John, seen his stares, sat back into his own chair, matching John’s demeanour. He looked to Market Street, absently, then began to speak, delicately.

“Have you ever noticed”, he said, “or rather, have you ever taken the time to watch the pigeons?”

“The pigeons?” John asked.

“Yeah. The pigeons.”

“No”, John said, “can’t say I have, Bry. Have you?”

“Yeah”, Bryan confirmed, “I often zoom in on ‘em. Can’t help it, son. Can’t help but notice how…natural it all is…yer know, the movements. Instinctive, reactive, controlled, but unmanaged. Free.”

“I think”, John began, stretching his arms and feigning a yawn, “it’s time for a break, Bry. Eh? What you reckon? Why don’t you go stretch your legs along the corridor?”

Bryan shook his head, wagged his finger in the air. “Sometimes John”, he said, “sometimes you need to take the time to stop and take it all in. To appreciate the scale of it. Don’t you think?” He looked to John, gently now.

“To be honest, Bry”, John cautiously began, “I’m not sure we should be doin’ that.” He looked about him, peered out into the corridor.

“Don’t worry”, Bryan told him, “The watchers only watch themselves. And besides, we’re not doing anythin’ wrong, son. I’m merely stopping in admiration, catching my breath, lettin’ my senses take it in.”

John sat back into his chair, sank into the dim red light of the surveillance room, contemplating the situation, wondering to himself what rating he would’ve given Bryan if they were out in the world. He probably would have docked him ten points for soliciting negative and inappropriate thoughts and another ten for shit philosophy, though that last one he’d have made up, so probably would’ve been rejected. Bryan looked back to Market Street and continued to air his thoughts, freely.

“Next Tuesday will be my five-year anniversary. Five years watchin’. I like what I do, I like watchin’. When I was a young man, I liked to sit in a busy town square and watch. For most people it was just something that would ‘appen accidentally. Yer know, you just stop for a rest somewhere and look about, and before you know it yer gawpin’ at someone.” He chuckled at this reminiscence. “This was, mind, back in the 80’s, way before we had all this technology on such a scale. If you would’ve told me then what I’d be doing 40 years later, I’d have thought you were mad. That’s how much things have changed, son. It’s all ‘appened so fast.”

John felt himself being drawn in, could feel the desire to contemplate the effect Bryans words were having. There was no doubt he was verging on a misdeed now, no doubt Bryan was speaking incorrectly. But for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to stop him.

“Five years ago,” Bryan went on, “it wasn’t so…controlled. Nowadays we know, and accept, accept without any concern, without any grievance, that we are being watched on an almost constant basis throughout the day.”

“Erm, yeah, to ensure public safety and security”, John pointed out, “and for public guidance.”

“I know that”, Bryan shot back, “I don’t need remindin’.”

“Well what are you on about then?” John demanded.

Bryan lurched forward, pointed at the screen they saw Market Street through. “Do you ever actually watch this?” he asked. “I mean, actually watch, properly, attentively?”

“Not like you do”, John replied, “all mesmerised and…hawk like. It’s what the system is for, isn’t it? The system sees all the misdeeds and hears any incorrect speakin’. You know that. We’re not gonna pick up on anythin’ it won’t, Bry. Our job, as far as I understand it, is to call for assistance when needed, and to monitor the records. Like now look”, he pointed at a person whose square flashed gold with a plus 10 points, grabbed at the mouse, clicked on the square and read out the name, KATE HOLDSWORTH, and the last input, PICKED UP BANK CARD DROPPED BY OLD MAN IN WHEEL CHAIR IN ORDER TO RETURN SAID CARD TO SAID OLD MAN. He jumped on the laptop, searched Kate Holdsworth, seen a slight adjustment had automatically been added to her personality rating, taking it up to 95.5%, a real high-class citizen.

“So you see”, John said, “how cushy this job is, thanks to the tech. All done automatically. Ultimately Bry, we’re here for the misdeeds and the incorrect speakin’, to get any bastards dealt with as fast as possible. Other than that, just chill out and watch the world go by.” And with that he closed the laptop and arched back into his chair, placed his hands behind his head and stretched his long legs out along the table, waiting for Bryan, who was shaking his head, to reply.

“If you were to watch attentively”, Bryan began, “which, in my humble opinion, you should, you’ll pick up on the small details that I’m trying to allude to, the details I’m trying to alert you to. These small details can be indicative of somethin’, son. Somethin’ bigger and unseen to the system. That is what we’re here for, as well as, as you rightly point out, to provide a high-speed response to any misdeeds or…incorrect speakin’.”

John bent forward and rested his elbows on his legs, leering over to Bryan. “Ok”, he said to him, “I’ll allow this to happen, because my interest in this…speakin’…you’ve engaged me into has peaked.”

Bryan turned to him, hands clasped together, like one of those criminal masterminds in old spy films, only a boring, northern one. It was ridiculous. John wondered if he was taking the piss but no, he went on with his speech.

“This speakin’, son, is no cause for alarm. Yer a watcher, and are entitled to observation, within limits, as to what you are seein’ whilst watchin’. Now, what I am seein’, and have been for around 6-9 months now, is a change in the collective movements of this specific group. I have also noticed the same subtleties on the residential watch, and I believe the same phenomena is occurrin’ elsewhere, in other populaces. I believe, that what I am seein’ is a positive step towards a well secured and guided society of collective individuals. It is a well-informed collective, enjoyin’ the freedoms given in a well-managed society. They eat well, buy in accordance with the guidance given by their social media recommendations, and they interact in a civilised way. All vast improvements. But, I’m curious as to what’s going on in the minds. The collective movements are almost mechanical now, like the collective are conscious of the fact they are monitored for safety and guidance, which they are, but it is put so far at the back of the mind, it’s almost as if a cycle has been completed, and they are in fact, unaware they are being monitored. It’s become second nature, and this is where we may be presented with a new danger.”

“Like what?” John asked, his brain beginning to sizzle. “It all seems good to me.”

“Watch with me. I’ll show yer.”

John turned to Market Street to watch, but his phone pinged with notification of movement outside. He swung round and stared down the corridor. “You expectin’ anyone, Bry?” he asked.

“No, John”, Bryan replied, “I’m not expectin’ anyone. You know how sensitive the security is, it’s probably a cat, or the wind.”

“I’ve never known the wind to trigger the alarm, Bry.”

“Well, regardless, it’s not for us.”

“Nobody else is respondin’ to it.”

“Because there’s nothing to respond to, John. Now come on, watch.”

John left it a moment to see if anybody left for the entrance, but it remained as quiet as it should be. He was worried about what Bryan was saying, this outpouring of thought and speculation, it sounded to John like he was speaking incorrectly, questioning things. He just had to see this out to the end of the shift, to keep his mouth shut, manage what was being said to him, then he’d seek advice from a gaffer. He went back and sat in his chair to watch with Bryan.

“Ok, so let’s start at the bottom end of Market Street”, Bryan advised, deploying a frontal view, enabling them to look straight ahead into the crowd, people coming in and out of view at the bottom corners of the screen. “See how controlled everyone is, almost in sync with each other. The steady pace of the crowd, no rushin’, no huffin’ and puffin’, smiles on everybody’s face. I know it’s all very subtle, but if you watch long enough over a period of time, you begin to see that there is some musicality to all of it, like a composition, or, in another sense, choreography. Only it’s not, it’s not composed, choreographed or directed in any way, it’s simply people on their best behaviour, wanting those ratin’s and the rewards those ratin’s give. Ultimately, John, it’s the God effect. Yer know, like when people used to say that God can see everythin’, God is always watchin’. That had an influence on some people, the people who truly believed it. They stopped themselves doing certain things, didn’t act on certain urges, impulses or desires. But not everyone believed it, but everyone now believes, everyone now knows, that they’re being watched at all times when out and about. So it’s not God the people are afraid of anymore, it’s the system. But the system does see and hear everythin’. The system is, almost, omnipotent. So you see, the knowledge of being watched by the system is akin to believing you are being watched by God, only much more effective. And on that note, let’s look at the God view.”

Bryan changed the view to an ariel one of the crowd, and this is when John began to see it, the synchronicity.

“You can see from the God view that there’s a pattern to the movement of the crowd. It’s almost snake-like isn’t it? That winding path of bodies. See the constant curves, always in the same places, this is people thinkin’ in the same way, and always on their best behaviour, movin’ in consideration for other people, aware of the benefits for doing so. No longer do people suffer from knobheads hurtlin’ themselves through the crowd, bargin’ people out of the way and actin’ in a generally cuntish manner. But it’s the roboticness of it that gets me. I never would have predicted it.”

“What do you mean?” asked John. “It’s just people walkin’ about.”

“No, it isn’t. And people aren’t doing this freely, son. They’re being guided into this behaviour by the promise of rewards, and for fear of becomin’ a low-class citizen. We are successfully eradicating free will, and consequently, they are becomin’ a well-mannered and socially efficient collective. But not a free one.”

John looked at Bryan, watching him as he shifted the view back to ground level, flicking between cameras and angles. With Bryan now thoroughly immersed in watching, John was able to unlock his phone and start recording the conversation. “Ok, Bry”, he said, “so what are the dangers then? What are you gettin’ at, exactly?”

John sat back again, hands clasped, ready to continue the sermon, eyes not leaving the screen. “We’ll soon reach a point”, he began, “in my humble opinion, where the collective become so used to the system, that it hardly becomes a deterrent, therefor rendering its purpose obsolete. More or less. If a person no longer cares about being watched in public, they may begin to regress back to old social behaviours. Sure, it will cost them ratin’s and rewards, but what if that is no longer an incentive? What if some wayward notion creeps into the mind? The questionin’ of the system, for example. The desire for freedom, for more autonomy. That desire for freedom, as history has taught us multiple times, will stir up inside the collective again. It must be treated as inevitable. I mean, the freedoms they are now given are only illusions, and someone, some people, those who take the time to stop and think, will already know this. And who on earth doesn’t want to be free? It’s why it’s so essential that this illusion of freedom is ever present and well thought out. Ask yourself, John”, he turned and grinned at him, slyly, “would you prefer to be free, or would you prefer a well-managed, well-mannered, safe and secure society?”

John didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what would be the correct way of speaking on the issue. Bryan watched him stammer for words. “I-I-am-obviously I-only want to-I prefer the society we have made to the one we had.”

Bryan nodded, vigorously, removed his grin and with it the context of the conversation. “Good enough for me”, he said, “and with that, I’ll leave you in charge while I go for a piss.” He got up, patted John on the shoulder on the way out, stopping to look back at him before closing the door, seeing him with his head bowed, in thought.

John had at the most eight minutes to be alone, but most likely it would be between five and six. He stopped the recording on his phone, checked he was definitely alone, and played it back for a second to make sure the recording was good. Satisfied, he got out the laptop, wiped away a drip of sweat that had seeped out of him, cracked his knuckles, bit his lip, mumbled “Fuck it” and brought up Bryans details on the database. He needed to check the man’s history, to look for any other abnormality, but found a faultless personality rating of 100% and a record clean as a whistle. Maybe he was overreacting, maybe he hadn’t been speaking incorrectly at all. John decided he’d still seek out the advice of a gaffer. He searched for the recent updates but was interrupted by another pinged notification of outside movement on his phone. He slammed the laptop shut and pulled open the door, slightly. No movement, no sound. He checked the time, Bryan had been gone just over two minutes, then he looked at Market Street, seen nothing irregular, then turned and watched the corridor, another trickle of sweat seeping out of him. He carefully stood up to peer across the corridor into another surveillance room, seeing the top of a watcher’s head and St Peters Square on the screen. It was forbidden to leave a surveillance room unattended and forbidden to enter any other surveillance room to which a watcher is designated. With that thought in mind he closed the door, sat back down on his chair and put his eyes on Market Street, expecting Bryan any second. His phone pinged again. Just the wind, he assured himself.

Bryan pushed it close. Seven minutes and 51 seconds. John had never known him to take so long. “Jesus, Bry”, he chuckled, “did you forget where we were?”

Bryan sat down, eyes on Market Street. “No, I didn’t forget”, he said, without taking his eyes off the screen, “had to see someone at the door.”

“What?” John asked. “Who? You said you weren’t expectin’ anyone.”

“I wasn’t”, Bryan replied, still not taking his eyes off the screen, flicking through cameras and angles, “just had to deliver a message that’s all.”

“What message? What’s goin’ on?”

“Shut up”, Bryan commanded, “look at this guy.”

John looked at the man on the screen who Bryan was zooming in on. He was sat on a bench, smoking a cigarette. There was something about him that didn’t sit right.

“I tell yer what, John”, said Bryan, “he’s not a face in the crowd is he? Look how angry he looks, watchin’ everyone goin’ about their business like that. Look how ‘ard he’s tokin’ on that fag. What’s his fuckin’ problem, eh?”

“I don’t know, Bry”, John said, anxiously, “he’s definitely got one though.”

Bryan clicked on him. Carl Clayton, 40 years old, personality rating of 53%, just above the threshold of low-class citizen.

“That’s not good, is it?” Bryan stated. “See this is what I’m talkin’ about, John, the point I was tryin’ to make. This is what we need to concern ourselves with. What’s on this cunts mind? What’s he broodin’ about? I want in his ‘ead, John, I want to know what malicious thoughts are runnin’ through his big, bald, ‘ead.”

They zoomed in more, to the point where the man called Carl, his scowling face, filled the screen. He looked dead ahead, like he was staring down the camera, could see John and Bryan staring back. John felt his blood run cold, Bryan sniggered. It was unlikely that Carl was really looking at the camera, they’re so small and difficult to spot, but the image of that face, those eyes peering in, seemingly, as if he could see them too, was watching them back, chilled John to the bone. The man called Carl took another drag of his cigarette, stood up, disposed of it, then walked into the crowd, merging himself into the steady movement of people. Bryan zoomed out but locked onto him, keeping his record open on screen, familiarising himself with him, checking the recent activity, getting a good opinion of the kind of person Carl Clayton is in minutes; a heavy drinker, failing in marriage and parenthood, discontented, and now, from just the week before, a jobless citizen with falling levels of consumer activity.

“That, son”, Bryan said, “is no good.” He took hold of the laptop and added an update to Carl’s record, advising concentrated surveillance.

John’s phone pinged again, notifying of movement outside. He didn’t react this time, just kept his eyes on the screen, watching Carl Clayton make his way through the crowd, hands in pockets, head down, exiting Market Street and out of their sight, to be picked up by another team of watchers.

“That’ll be for you, son”, Bryan said.

John snapped out of his thoughts. “What d’ya mean?” he asked.

“My phone”, Bryan sighed, “notifies me when someone goes into my file.” He let his words linger for a moment, gave John time to compose himself.

“Look”, John said, “I can explain…”

“You don’t have to explain it to me, John. You can talk about it in Education.”

John shook his head. “No”, he asserted, “I don’t need Education. You were the one goin’ off on some weird tangent about freedom and the faults with the system. The system is flawless! If anyone needs Education, it’s you! You were speakin’ incorrectly to me, yer bastard!”

Three men entered the room. “Evening, sir”, the youngest said to Bryan, and then to John, “I would like to report for duty. Mr Dunne, please be advised that I will be replacing you on shift. You will now be escorted by my two colleagues to Education, where you will remain until you have developed the necessary understanding of our modern society. I must at this point inform you that your contract with us will be terminated with immediate effect, but you will be given the opportunity to re-apply after you have completed your education.”

John, floundering in his chair, tried to reply but couldn’t think of the correct words.

“It’s alright”, Bryan told him, “yer a youngish man, you can come back. Just listen to what they teach yer.”

“But why?” John was able to ask, “Why have you done this?”

“Because you don’t believe, son, everything you do and say is motivated by fear, fear of the consequences. I told you we weren’t doing anythin’ wrong; we’re entitled to our observations and encouraged to share our ideas on ways to improve things for the good of society. If you truly believe in what we’re doin’, you’d know that there was nothin’ to be afraid of. Yet you are afraid, and to my mind, that leaves you vulnerable to those desires we’ve been talkin’ about. I don’t want to see that happen to yer, yer a good snoop, but there are doubts in yer, buried away in that mind of yours, I can tell, can read it in yer face, even if you don’t, and that’s why I’m ‘elpin’ yer, sendin’ yer to get yer mind right. ‘Onestly, don’t worry, we’ll soon ‘ave yer thinkin’ correctly.”

Article 10 of the Human Rights Act (1998): Freedom of Expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

This section of the Human Rights Act (1998) establishes the legal foundation for “free speech” as a qualified right within a framework of duties, responsibilities, and democratic accountability. Yet in recent years this understanding has become disjointed. The concept of free speech - contextualised within the parameters of the freedom of expression principles laid out in 1998 - has been taken from its social and legal reality and turned into something else entirely. That “something else” has been created via reification, a product akin to what Marx referred to as the fetishism of commodities, or commodity fetishism.

Commodity fetishism, Marx explains, is the process by which social relations between people come to appear as relations between things. Labour, exploitation, class antagonism, all of these vanish, leaving the illusion that commodities possess intrinsic value. Or in Marx’s words:

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour… This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour.”

In the digital economy, this fetishism extends beyond material goods. Attention itself becomes the commodity, while our emotions - outrage, envy, belonging - serve as the raw materials extracted, processed, and sold back to us through algorithmic systems.

While billionaire-owned platforms pose as neutral guardians of information, they profit from outrage and disinformation. Their algorithms, as we shall see, simultaneously suppress some voices while amplifying others, shaping discourse according to what generates engagement and, therefore, profit.

Politicians, political commentators, journalists, and others with vested interests, predominantly from the political right, exploit these same platforms to invoke “free speech” as a means to defend racism or conspiracy, while enforcing censorship in classrooms, libraries, and protests in the real world. Meanwhile, media grifters cultivate a lucrative sense of victimhood around “cancel culture,” paradoxically broadcasting their supposed silencing to millions. Even “celebrities” accused of crimes including sexual assault have been able to reinvent themselves in an online space, portraying themselves as anti-establishment victims of conspiracy, as opposed to the self-entitled opportunists they are.

In effect, the digital universe has tangled up the real with the unreal. Paradoxes, ironies, misinterpretations, miscomprehensions and speculations run wild in this environment. The concept of “free speech” is one such topic that has been swallowed up in the noise. Once an accepted principle with basic limitations, “free speech” has become devoid of nuance, rationality, or responsibility to objective truth, with historical grounding in struggles against censorship, authoritarian power, or state violence effaced and replaced by the illusion that “free speech” exists not as a value, but something of value, circulating as currency within what is known as the “attention economy.”

But before we expand on this economy, and the thriving culture wars that make it so profitable, we need to ask why this is. What is it that makes us so susceptible to sensationalism? And why is this susceptibility exploited by media platforms and outlets?

Various studies in this area have shown that emotional arousal, particularly emotions such as anger, fear, and moral outrage, significantly increases the likelihood of engagement and information sharing. This emotional arousal is triggered (“triggered” being the apt word here, being used as an online slur for those who show high levels of emotional responses to content they find provocative in some way) by dopamine and oxytocin releases and heightened activity in the amygdala - the brain’s emotional centre - which enhances memory formation and motivates further engagement with similar content.

Because of the competitive nature of media companies, battling for supremacy of a specific area of capitalist economy, traditional media headlines have, for a long time (as far back as the Penny Press publications of the 1830s), typically been designed to grab attention, or “to evoke strong emotional responses,” with sensationalism used “as a strategy to maximize attention and reader engagement.”[1]

Social media’s amplified replication of this strategy is an extremely curious one. Whereas traditional media has been developed to grab attention by design, in order to sell more copies of a newspaper or pull-in larger audiences than newsroom competitors, social media algorithms have actually learned, by way of their design, to promote content that draws in the most engagement, or in other words, that provokes the strongest emotional responses.[2]

Let’s be clear here, I’m not saying that tech bros sit in a room with their subordinates and say, “Design our algorithms to maximise outrage,” but they do talk about maximising user attention, engagement, and ad revenue. The algorithm’s goal, then, is to garner the most engagement possible – likes, comments, shares, time spent scrolling. These are all key metrics in the attention economy, with algorithms designed to be adaptive to user behaviour. Their core function is to learn what users do, what they like, and what they don’t like, to personalise a user’s feed in order to keep them “active” for longer. Effectively, algorithms are designed to study human behaviour, for the purpose of predicting, influencing, and ultimately monetising their attention.

For a number of years now, it has been apparent that algorithms have learned, as humans did centuries ago, that the way to maximise media engagement is to sensationalise content. The more sensational the story, the more emotional the human (consumer/reader/viewer/user) response. Because of this, social media algorithms seek to solicit emotional responses, not knowingly, of course, as sentient beings, but as processes designed and put in place to maintain platform usage. Any pattern of behaviour will therefore be optimised to increase engagement, encourage repetition, and reinforce the kinds of emotional responses that keep users returning, making outrage, fear, and moral panic the most profitable forms of content circulation.

The culture wars, and the broader fixation on cancel culture, are both amplified and monetised by algorithmic reinforcement, which rewards those who perform grievance most convincingly. To be “cancelled,” in culture war logic, is to be punished for telling an unpleasant truth. There must be something about the “cancelled” that a perceived established order doesn’t like, which therefore must be hidden, or banished, from mainstream discourse. As we know, the reality is very different. A person, generally a “celebrity,” is “cancelled” for being caught up in a scandal, or for being booted off a private company’s platform for violating said platform’s rules.

In essence, this culture of performative grievance is, as Sartre might put it, an act of bad faith - a refusal to acknowledge freedom’s accompanying responsibility. The obsession with free speech, particularly as invoked by the political right, is a purely dishonest one, driven by a sense of entitlement that demands the right to speak without consequence, and to dominate public discourse without critique.

The ultimate embodiment of this entitlement is found in the politics of Donald Trump, who has, as we shall shortly see, demonstrated an acute understanding of what sells in political discourse. On the back of its enormous success, this brand of politics has gradually been adopted by seemingly everyone on the political right as a weapon with which to fight the culture wars. A crucial addition in recent years in the arsenal of the political right has been free speech, utilised to great effect across all forms of media by representatives of those who five, ten, or fifteen years ago began to notice what to them were significant social and cultural changes, who perceived themselves as a result as being part of a group with less of a say at the expense of people who, previously less visible, were now very much visible. More and more, ideas, opinions, and people they didn’t agree with were being heard through mediums hitherto dominated by the ideas, opinions, and people they did agree with, or at least could abide or cope with in small doses. The sight of black people in adverts, storylines in TV shows centred around gay people, the growing awareness and challenge to false narratives of colonial/imperial pasts, and, of course, the big one – the existence of trans people and the diminished capability to hide them away from public view.

Though most people narrow this base of support to middle-aged and older white people, the reality is far more nuanced and complex. Amongst the bigots and the prejudiced, there does exist legitimate voices seeking to understand a shared sense of loss. The problem here is that the sense of loss is diverted away from neoliberal/capitalist polices, the selling off and privatisation of all public services and the commons, the dismantling of community and solidarity as a collective, and towards the bogey men of immigration, “wokeness,” and various other distortions of truth related to mainstream media biases, the threat of communism from, of all places, the U.S. Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party. At a basic level, there is a large number of people in the Western world who have been convinced their enemy is the immigrant and the woke, not the billionaire. These are, beneath it all, the fragile and the in denial, whose anger is easier to harness than their ability to accept everything they have known to be a lie.

In figures like Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, Javier Milei, and, most of all, Donald Trump, they see a reflection of their own insecurity, able to dish out petty vengeful acts, to unleash an unhinged form of politics, who have the gift of the gab, the ability to make people believe that a declining cultural experiment (neoliberal capitalism), that has been proven to be an unsustainable model for human living, would work perfectly if only done without the annoying voices from all other areas of the political spectrum and their concerns about, say, equality. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same logic has been for decades brazenly used as a stick with which to beat the left.

But it’s not as if Trump et al. are peddling a lie they don’t believe. Focusing on Trump specifically, there is nothing to suggest, from what we know of the man, and how the man has behaved in public for the last 50 years, that he doesn’t believe in the MAGA ethos. Trump’s ultimate weapon, the reason why he embodies his base, is because he is, in some ways, them. Of course, his base does not consist of billionaires born into wealth, but they are all believers in the American Dream, in capitalism, and who all feel hard done by, that America, and working, family-oriented people in general are getting ripped off, ridiculed, and disrespected. But the source of this disrespect, for both Trump and his base, is not the capitalists or the rich elites, of whom Trump is a prominent member, who dictate global finance and the economic states of countries. It is, rather, those bogey men - the immigrants, the liberal leftists, the “alphabet mafia”, Muslims, communists, socialists, the Chinese and etc, etc, etc, each being pointed to depending on the circumstances. Trump articulates the presence of the bogey men better than any other politician or public figure. He does this because he believes that they not only exist but are to blame. He isn’t a conspiracy theorist per se. He doesn’t create the theory; he hears about it and learns more about it from the source (usually a source of misinformation or disinformation).

What’s more, Trump has an instinct for peddling bullshit, developed over five decades of selling a brand of himself to the world. While politicians know they are, in effect, selling themselves as a product when courting public favour, Trump has done it better than anybody else. The man has been around the block, dabbled in various areas, picking up and developing ways of dealing with people on a transactional level. This experience and knowledge are key.

The greatest example of Trump’s ability to peddle bullshit is the “Make America Great Again” brand, which is actually second-hand usage, being originally associated with Ronald Reagan. But Trump’s adoption, and trademarking, of the “Make America Great Again” slogan, and it’s acronymization into MAGA, has been a stroke of marketing genius. Like all great marketing, MAGA has emotional framing. In this example, Trump is selling a fix to an America that has lost something vital. This loss is so great that it demands a sense of grievance and urgency. But, despite being so great, there is a quick and easy solution that can restore greatness. Trump, so the ad would go, is that solution.

This importance of emotional framing is laid out in one of the great TV shows from the noughties – Mad Men. In the very first episode, protagonist Don Draper tells us that “Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness.” MAGA comes straight out of this marketing philosophy, and Trump, having formed himself around about the time Mad Men is set, has clearly learnt a great deal about the philosophy of marketing that was developed in that time. Other Draperisms mirror Trumpist messaging - “You are the product. You feel something. That’s what sells.” - “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” - “Make it simple, but significant.” In these statements we recognise a Trumpian way of communicating with the electorate, with an emphasis on selling back to them a sense of what has been lost, and a need to reclaim what has been lost, diverting attention away from one topic onto another through whataboutisms, and speaking and tweeting in a generally short, to the point, manner.

This is the genius behind Trump’s political success and the MAGA brand. Like free speech, MAGA has become commodity fetishism, a political identity transformed into a marketable object, detaching symbols like the red hat from material realities and class interests, and imbuing them with a false aura of power and belonging.

What makes Trump and the broader right’s success so significant in relation to free speech, as we have established, is not simply that they used it in defence of their prejudices, biases, and general stupidities, but that they recast it as the shield for reactionary grievance and the weapon to attack cultural change. They used it, in short, to play the victim. And in this framing, “free speech” has been utterly bastardised, no longer referring to protection from state interferences, but protection for those in power, and for those who benefit most from the social hierarchies of Western society, from social consequences.

[1] Mousoulidou M, Taxitari L, Christodoulou A. Social Media News Headlines and Their Influence on Well-Being: Emotional States, Emotion Regulation, and Resilience. Eur J Investig Health Psychol Educ. 2024 Jun 5;14(6):1647-1665. doi: 10.3390/ejihpe14060109. PMID: 38921075; PMCID: PMC11202588.

[2] https://workonpeak.org/social-media-algorithms-are-shaping-our-daily-lives/#:~:text=Personalization%20and%20Engagement,the%20visibility%20of%20sensational%20content.

I will serialise this book for free on Substack, with paid subscribers getting a completed copy of the book in ebook format once completed.

The problem I am having is balancing the work I wish to undertake with employment. Writing is incredibly time consuming. Therefore, paid subscriptions will always be preferred. If you would like to support my work, please do consider a paid subscription.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the concept of “free speech” has undergone a profound ontological transformation. Once a juridical and moral principle laid out for purposes of protection from harm and persecution (right to question authority and to express one’s opinions, beliefs, and sense of self freely), it has become, in the digital and neoliberal age, a fetishised object of cultural consumption akin in many ways to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism (as we shall explore in chapter’s one and two).

Across media platforms and political discourse, freedom of expression in our time is invoked as an absolute value, detached from its social and historical foundations, free from any individual responsibility to others or society as a whole. The freedom to believe and promote wild, illogical conspiracy theories, for example, such as White Replacement, or microchips in vaccines, and promote these in private or in public to anyone who will listen, has been elevated to the highest levels of mainstream discourse. This phenomenon, as we shall see, is directly related to the advent of social media, and calls for, I believe, an urgent rethink into how the law should be applied in relation to free speech, as well as an urgent need to remind ourselves of what the concept of free speech means in democratic society.

When I talk of the law here, I’m talking about social media’s blurring between what is real and what isn’t. Or perhaps a better way to understand it is to reframe it into a question – is social media a digital town square, where debate and ideas can be exchanged, discussed, and dismissed, or a private domain where anyone can say whatever they want without any possible repercussions? This will be discussed in depth in chapter five, but for now, we can familiarise ourselves with this line of thought by establishing what goes in public spaces and what doesn’t. This should be pretty straightforward. Incitement to violence, threat of violence, hate speech, and anything that endangers the well-being and safety of the wider public would not be tolerated in public settings – be it a place of work, a restaurant, a theatre, football match, pub, or indeed, a town square. As will also be expanded on, this is a critical issue, as the owner of the world’s largest social media platform, the extremely powerful and influential Elon Musk, has stated that Twitter, or X, is indeed a digital public square. Yet despite this proclamation, Musk advocates for total free speech, as if users were talking in private about anything and everything they like. If this is the case, then yes, they can talk about and say anything they like. But if not, if Twitter is a digital town square, then surely the rule of law applies? This would mean that users must behave in the ways in which, presumably, they would when out in public in the real world.

As well as laws around hate speech, incitement to violence, etc, there is also the application of the fire in a crowded theatre analogy – where false shouts of “Fire!” in a crowded theatre create a “clear and present danger” to others. Though this analogy and similar variants have been recorded as far back as the 18^th century, it was first established in legal form in the Indianapolis Municipal Code of 1917[1]. Contained in this code is the prohibition of “(crying) out a false alarm of ‘fire’ in any church, public hall, theater, moving picture showroom, or any other building of a similar or different character, while the same is occupied by a public assemblage.” This ruling didn’t come out of anywhere, either. False shouts of “Fire!” in public buildings had been fairly common in the US, with some resulting in many deaths. The Canonsburg Opera House disaster in 1911[2] and the 1913 Italian Hall disaster[3] are two primary examples. In both instances, a single shout of “Fire!” had caused a panic, with attendees of the events rushing to nearest exits, trampling over one another to escape. In the Canonsburg Opera House, 26 people died, with 73 being killed in the Italian Hall.

The most famous application of this analogy, perhaps, was in the 1919 US Supreme Court case of Schenk vs United States. Presented by Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr, the analogy was applied against Charles Schenk, who had been charged for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing antidraft leaflets during World War I. According to Holmes Jr, Schenk’s actions had to be considered in the context of wartime - seen as being one of national emergency by Holmes Jr and the Prosecution team. This meant that Schenk was guilty of causing danger or potential harm to his fellow citizens. Laying out his rationale for the crowded theatre analogy, Holmes Jr said that “many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” Essentially, Holmes Jr’s argument differentiated free speech between peacetime and wartime, or national emergency and time of normality. Explaining his judgement further, he says “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

Of course, Holmes Jr’s argument is incredibly problematic. Equating antidraft leaflets to speech that could present a clear and present danger to others feels politically loaded and is flimsy at best. Unsurprisingly, the precedent set in the Schenk vs United States case was limited in scope years later, in the 1969 case of Brandenburg vs Ohio. However, this ‘69 precedent also feels politically loaded. Having invited a Cincinnati reporter to film a Ku Klux Klan rally, leader of KKK Ohio branch Clarence Brandenburg was charged with advocating violence. This charge related to (shock horror) speeches calling for attacks on black and Jewish people, and the forced expulsion of these peoples to Africa and Israel respectively.

Initially found guilty of this charge, Brandenburg’s conviction was overturned in the Supreme Court, who ruled that only speech “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” and that is “likely to incite or produce such action”[4] can only be punished as “inflammatory speech.” In the context of this particular case, and with consideration of how members of the Black Panthers and other groups were treated by the law, make of that what you will.

But still, despite the mental gymnastics and carefully chosen language, a basic principle remains – free speech, as a legal concept, has restrictions. These restrictions effectively revolve around, as mentioned, individual responsibility and the safety and well-being of others. One individual’s right to speech, therefore, is, in specific circumstances, outweighed by everyone else’s rights to live in peace.

This legal framework is laid out clearly in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and embedded within the UK Human Rights Act (1998) as a qualified right. And this is the nuance that has been progressively eroded in public consciousness, reshaped by a more individualistic ethos that tells us our right to express ourselves in any way we see fit, in any setting we find ourselves in, is a sacred right that everyone else has to put up with. Of course, this in itself is not against the principles of free speech, but it does, and has, set us on a path towards our current situation. By using and abusing free speech as we have, we’ve created a political climate where the Vice-President of the United States can lecture the entire European Union, to their faces, on violations of free speech that never happened, using an example he is clearly misinformed on (or lying about), and where the President of the United States can tell pregnant women to avoid using paracetamol to reduce the chance of giving birth to an autistic child because he prefers one particular study over numerous others. In both cases, the responsibility to truth, to only relaying information to large numbers of people that is as factually correct as possible, and to public safety, is of no importance.

As well as JD Vance and Donald Trump, we have figures like Nigel Farage and Elon Musk, who have exploited the aesthetic of “free speech” to brand themselves as insurgent truth-tellers, victims of an imagined elite conspiracy against “ordinary people” (despite being the world’s richest man and a mainstream politician, respectively). Rhetoric such as theirs collapses the distinction between freedom and impunity: the freedom to speak without responsibility, to disinform without consequence. This inversion represents a radical distortion of the liberal-democratic tradition. That right to expression we have reminded ourselves of, that was originally conceived as protection against authoritarian power, has been weaponised as a shield for that power, enabling those who dominate public discourse to evade accountability under the guise of persecution.

This is not merely a political or legal problem. Freedom, in an existentialist sense, is inseparable from responsibility. To act freely is to acknowledge the consequences of one’s actions and their impact on others. As Sartre wrote, “in choosing for oneself, one chooses for all humanity.”[5] The fetishisation of free speech annihilates this moral dimension, transforming freedom into solipsism: a performative assertion of self unmoored from truth, solidarity, or meaning.

Methodologically, this work synthesises perspectives from political philosophy, Marxist cultural theory, and existential phenomenology. It draws on the writings of Karl Marx on fetishism and alienation, Simone Weil on obligation, Albert Camus on truth and rebellion, and Guy Debord on spectacle and the commodification of social life. It also engages contemporary thinkers such as Mark Fisher, whose notion of capitalist realism illuminates how the limits of imagination reinforce ideological control. These frameworks are applied to case studies in political rhetoric, digital culture, and media ecology - from Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into an instrument of political branding, to the algorithmic amplification of far-right narratives under the banner of “free expression.”

What this work isn’t is a mere a critique of hypocrisy or misinformation. What we are talking about here is the diagnosis of that ontological shift referred to in the opening sentence - the reduction of freedom to spectacle, of discourse to data, and of truth to content.

We live, to borrow Derrida’s term, in a hauntological condition, surrounded by the spectral remains of democratic ideals whose forms persist even as their substance decays. The rhetoric of free speech continues to echo, but it is an echo severed from its origin, repeating endlessly across the digital void. The task, then, is not to defend “free speech” as it is currently understood, but to rescue it from its fetishised form, to recover its meaning as a practice of responsibility, reciprocity, and truth.

This book therefore makes two interconnected contributions. First, it offers a theoretical framework for understanding the weaponisation of free speech as a product of neoliberal and digital capitalism - a process of reification that transforms relational rights into marketable commodities. Second, it proposes an existential and ethical reorientation: a call to reconceive freedom of expression not as the absence of constraint, but as the presence of responsibility. To speak freely, in this sense, is not to speak without limit, but to speak with awareness of consequence, to recognise that language is an act of world-making, and that the moral weight of words cannot be outsourced to algorithms or markets.

In reclaiming the meaning of free speech, we are not seeking to silence dissent, but to restore coherence to the very idea of freedom itself. A democracy without truth cannot endure; a freedom without responsibility cannot sustain itself. The fetishisation of free speech represents the triumph of appearance over substance, noise over meaning, and ego over empathy.

[1] https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1748&context=wmborj

[2] https://www.canonsburgoperahouse.com/the-morgan-opera-house-project/newspaper-articles/the-washington-observer/the-washington-observer-august-28-1911-watch-scenes-of-pictured-tragedy-while-friends-perish-nearby

[3] https://northernmichiganhistory.com/remembering-the-italian-hall-disaster-a-christmas-eve-tragedy/

[4] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/

[5] Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946

Foreword

Identity is supposed to be solid. At least, that’s the story we’re sold. The flag we salute, the job we work, the personal brand we sell online – these are, supposedly, things we share in order to inform the world of who we are. But what happens when symbols and titles undergo a change in meaning? When work doesn’t pay, when nationhood is destabilised, when the old certainties collapse?

This issue of The Existential Reader explores the unsettling truth that identity today is unstable. Maybe it always was. We are caught between nostalgia and fragmentation, clinging to a past that feels safer than the present. Nationalism tries to fill the void with flags and fairy tales of a country that was, a country they want back. Capitalism ties our sense of self to the wage slip. Technology threatens to render the whole arrangement obsolete.

The essays and reflections in this edition put these identities under the microscope, dissecting the symbolism represented in the return of the St. George’s flag and Union Jack, and what it reveals about Britain’s fractured psyche. We’ll look at how AI is reconfiguring human worth, not just economically but existentially. And we’ll argue for detaching identity from the tyranny of wage labour, considering what it could lie beyond the question - “What do you do?”

Read more

Foreword

Reading through each of the individual pieces that feature in this first edition of The Existential Reader magazine, I realised that I had, by accident, constructed overarching themes concerned with the distortion of information. Writing on the self-help industry, the justifications used for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the rise of a right-wing faux intelligentsia, have all taken me down a path of misinformation not in the obvious, headline-grabbing sense, but in the subtler, more insidious way of contorted framing, stripped context, and weaponised language. In the tangled reality of our time, where information and knowledge sharing has been reduced to packageable content, dependent on the almighty algorithm, what is truth, and what is right, has become more obscured than ever.

Many thinkers from various backgrounds have commented on this, but perhaps none more so, and with as much clarity, as Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. A long with Graeber and Wengrow’s, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World has had a profound effect on the creation of this first issue.

In her book, Klein writes extensively about what could be described as flipped narratives, or perhaps better yet as an intersect between left and right-wing thought. The fact that accurate descriptions are hard to come by reflects the strangeness of the topic. Indeed, Klein’s book stems from the sense of unheimlich experienced by continually being mistaken for conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, branching out from there into wider explorations of the doppelganger within our culture. This exploration is what leads Klein into the “mirror world,” a warped reality born out of the chaotic landfill for the human mind that is social media.

Such a reality has had many significant effects on how human beings behave and of our general worldview. One of the main reasons of this, I believe, is information distortion.

But you will see, dear reader, information distortion is nothing new. Since the 1980s, the self-help industry, has grown exponentially, having become a valuable component of neoliberal ideology. The narratives put out in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki underwent an Orwellian-like inversion of the actual truth, depicting the perpetrator of such an unimaginable atrocity as the peace seeker.

But it is undeniable that information distortion has evolved rapidly in wake of social media, and the internet in general, and no one group has mastered this art more than the faux intelligentsia of the right-wing commentariat. What makes the influence of this faux intelligentsia so potent is not just their distortion of facts, but their confident performance of certainty in a world grown allergic to nuance. By flattening complexity into culture war binaries and casting themselves as embattled truth-tellers, they offer the illusion of clarity - a seductive fix in an age of informational overwhelm.

To combat this, we could a lot worse right now than heed the words of Simone Weil, who taught us that attention - careful, sustained attention - is a moral act. It is also one that resists distortion. And it is in this spirit of attention that this first issue of The Existential Reader invites you to read, reflect, and look again.

Read more