There’s a lot of REALLY great points raised in this article here, by a Georgian journalist and media scholar, but unfortunately I disagree with most of the author’s conclusions. She claims that noise (ie everything from clickbait to fake news – all the bullshit online, basically) is the new censorship, because it’s drowning out the signal, ie all that is truthful.
Let me clarify. Noise is a major problem, but it’s still not the new censorship. The old censorship is very much still censorship (just ask Chinese people, or North Koreans, or indeed any citizen of a nation propping up the Global Press Freedom Index, or indeed a few near the top too.)
And new forms of censorship are the new censorship – ‘cancelling’ people for holding different opinions, ‘deplatforming’, boycotting, and so on.
This article blames Big Tech for the logarithmic rise in noise online. But to my mind, journalism has only itself to blame for the endless acceleration of the noise-to-signal ratio. In the democratised field of modern tech-enabled communication, journalism could and should have thrived as the pure signal offering. Instead, it allowed itself to become (even more) partisan, skewed, and untrustworthy than it already was.
The general public are not as stupid as journalists (who aren’t as smart as they think) think they are. They have learned how to ‘read between the lines’ of stories which often make little coherent sense, and glean what the missing data points are.
This has eroded trust in their former gatekeeping role.We’re now in a ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario. The public remember every instance when the media got it wrong, or deliberately misrepresented factuality, or presented partisan viewpoint as objective reportage. So when the media, as it does, presents legitimate and reliable work for public consumption, many people simply no longer trust it.
And so they turn to the charlatans’ parade of liars, cynics, clickbait peddlars, conspiracy theorists and ideologues online instead, thereby amplifying those noises and drowning out what little truth there is.
It’s a shitshow, no bones about it. But it’s disingenuous to put the entire blame at the door of Big Tech, much as I loathe them. Journalism needs to take a long look in the mirror to find the cause of its own woes. And I don’t mean the British redtop.
A staple tabloid story in recent times has been the Only Fans rags to riches yarn, wherein our plucky heroine, often a former cubicle drone or till girl at the supermarket, packs in her life of drudgery for the freedom of posting saucy pics on Only Fans, and instantly reaps lottery cheque money.
However, these almost weekly tales of smut instamillionaires simply don’t add up, despite the ubiquitous pics of lasses in their smalls posing in mcmansions or draped over luxury cars. In fact, the OnlyFans millionaire story is one of the great alternative histories of our times. Or to put it another words, more fake news.
OnlyFans, like most things in the attention economy, functions on a hockey stick graph. A very small number of users make nearly all the money, in other words.
This latest yarn may be a tad more honest than most, claiming to be in the top 2% of earners on the site (as do they all) but only stating an income of approx £1,000 a week, far below the usual footballer salaries claimed by her peers. Interestingly, her testimony matches the analysis done by TSNFA as we can see on the graph.
If this one is remotely correct, we can assume that almost no one other than established porn stars or former Hollywood people are making six figures annually. There have been a few macroeconomics analyses of OnlyFans which seem to concur with this. Here’s the latest.
Which suggests in turn that most of those cubicle-to-camgirls are bringing in a few hundred a week at most, but are prepared to amplify their income a hundredfold if it gets them a mention in the redtops, which they hope in turn might bring in a few more punters. In fact, if TSNFA’s version of the OnlyFans hockey graph is correct (above) then about 95% of OnlyFans users are making less than $1,000 a month.
Also, there’s likely a certain amount of ego protection in this too. If you strip for cameras, you’d like to think that it was worth more than the market may necessarily provide. But you can salve that ego by ‘faking it till you make it’, claiming the money you want to be making in the hope that somehow the headlines make it true. This is somewhere between cosmic wishing and casting spells in terms of career strategy, but doesn’t make it any less prevalent.
All in, I’m unconvinced about the morality of this. It’s just page three without payment. And it’s selling a dream of financial freedom which pretty much doesn’t exist. Journalists ought to be doing their due diligence and demanding to see bank statements before publishing such claims.
I am a scholar of dystopia – a dystopian if you will. I am an aficionado of dystopia, a connoisseur of the literary and artistic genre in its myriad of forms and nightmares.
I consider dystopian thinking to be an evolution, or sometimes an extrapolation, from the precautionary principle, which warns against change for the sake of change. Dystopia is a form of negative imagining, an attempt to envision and render in realistic terms a truly ‘negative place’, the etymological meaning of the term.
In this sense, I find dystopian thinking to be significantly more culturally useful than utopian thinking, which to a large extent has been reduced to a singular political ideology derived from a Marxist strain of post 1960s counterculture.
Whereas utopian thinking has devolved to activist academic attempts to plot routes towards one particular ‘positive place’ future, dystopian thinking has instead remained more broad and wide in its purview. After all, there are many nightmares.
If there is a structural flaw to both modes of art and thinking, it is that in practice they generally extrapolate forward to complete visions, the totalising utopia or dystopia. Rarely if ever do we see depicted the many incremental stages between the world as we know it and the heavenly or nightmare future world depicted.
Where utopian thinkers in particular have addressed the explicit or implicit developments towards utopia or dystopia, they have, to my mind, missed the point somewhat. The terms ‘critical utopia’ and ‘critical dystopia’ emerged some four decades or so ago to describe incomplete elements of depicted utopias and dystopias. Thus these key depictions of complexity, nuance and evolution in such literature and art (and philosophy) were reduced to anomalies which could either be countered (in the case of ‘critical utopias’) or fostered (in the case of ‘critical dystopias.’)
This was an innovative way of looking at things then, but it was always reductive, and ideologically driven, and at this point its limitations are becoming quite obvious. Actual examination of how society develops towards utopia or dystopia tends to be quite thin on the ground, despite examples existing all around us.
The exception if there is one is the regularly bruited risk of a return to 1930s-style fascist governance in current democratic societies. The election of leaders with an authoritarian populist rhetoric, be they Trump, Orban or Meloni, is now routinely accompanied by dire extrapolations (and often incomplete historical parallels) which overtly suggest that a slippery slope to neo-Nazi rule is already well underway.
But dystopia as I said takes a myriad of forms, and each form evolves and devolves in different forms and at different rates in different cultural and historical circumstances. As a dystopia thinker, I try to look for patterns, for trends, which suggest dystopian vectors of society, ways in which society is moving towards a less civilised state of being for most people.
In this way, many instances seem to pass under the radar. In fact, very often when they do occur, they are depicted as the opposite of what they are. They are reported as beacons of hope, anomalies which ‘critical utopias’ habitually accommodate in their positivist post-Enlightenment progress ratcheting ever forwards.
These instances are a little like ‘magic eye’ pictures, which were popular a generation back. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, as they say. I refer to them as examples of dyst-hope-ia, as they are fundamentally dystopian developments, though usually incremental rather than totalising, swathed in a good-news suit of hope to make the bitter pill go down more easily.
In this way, a ratcheting towards a more dystopian society occurs in an almost Huxleyan sense, with the passive acceptance and approval of the population who actually are encouraged to associate such instances with hope rather that its opposite.
This is a little difficult to explain in abstract, so let me offer some concrete examples. Many years ago, I noticed a large building being erected in my district in Dublin. Over many months the grand edifice came together. I didn’t pass it often, so didn’t know what the building was intended to be, until one day in the local newspaper I read that it was due to open the following week. It was a new unemployment welfare office.
The local paper depicted this as a good thing. It was reported as a net good that the unemployed of the area now had a better, bigger dedicated office to deal with them efficiently. But beneath this patina of hope, one swiftly discerns that the expenditure of millions of euro in such a building is a commitment to societal unemployment in the area.
It is in fact an admission of failure – the failure to regenerate the area, or to provide employment for its inhabitants. At the time of its opening I wrote in my journalist’s notebook, “who approved this investment in indolence?” (I used a lot more alliteration in those days.)
Another example comes in today’s news from Britain, which in recent times can be relied upon as a stable and consistent source of examples of dyst-hope-ia. The emergence of a social charitable phenomenon called ‘warm banks’ (though the term is never used) is a classic example of dyst-hope-ia.
The welcoming warm bank, depicted as a jolly public community space – image courtesy of Getty Pictures.
Surely the hopeful depiction is legitimate? After all, the idea of the community rallying around to offer protection and support to the most vulnerable among them is a supremely positive and human thing. This is the hope in dyst-hope-ia, the positive cloak in which the nightmare clothes itself, the sheep’s clothing on the dystopian wolf.
Because, under this surface reaction is the initial action causing the need for such support – the vastly and rapidly escalating food and fuel costs which have left many vulnerable people in Britain with a choice between eating and heating.
And as with food banks before them, warm banks will function not only as a precarious safety net for the vulnerable, but also as a creeping normalisation of a more dystopian society, one in which it is normalised for people not to be able to afford food or heat their homes.
What dystopian thinking teaches me is not to dismiss this patina of hope cynically, nor to be seduced into thinking of the overall scenario as a positive development either. It allows me instead to see through the sheep’s clothing to the wolf beneath.
I suggest always lifting the surface of the good news story to check what might be smuggled into normality underneath. I admire the efforts of each and every person who contributes their time or money to keeping their community warm. But I refuse to allow that kind-heartedness to obscure the fact that the government is attempting to normalise the concept of citizens who cannot heat their own homes.
The media is increasingly giving up all pretence at reportage in relation to the conflict in Ukraine. So immersed in propaganda are we now, that the media are now offering us cathartic dreams to resolve the anxieties they themselves fostered and promoted.
Let’s ignore for the moment the lack of grammatical punctuation and acknowledge that at least the key data is presented in scare quote marks, indicating that this is opinion of some kind and not factual assertion. That doesn’t always happen, so kudos for remembering to do that.
So, whose opinion is this? “Former British officer”, Dr Mike Martin of Kings College London, is who. Dr Martin is a visiting scholar at KCL, which means that he borrows their name in order to publish academically. In return, he provides some PhD supervision for students. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and I’ve done it myself incidentally.
He appears from his KCL profile to be very interested in an evolutionary psychological approach to understanding warfare. It’s a little difficult to gauge his quality as an academic from a paperchase, as he’s not published a lot academically. By far his most impactful work was an oral history of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, where he appears to have done his own tours of duty as a soldier. Some of the other things listed on his Google Scholar page, such as articles on leaf-cutter ants, may not be his at all.
So then I looked at his own website, which seems primarily aimed to promote himself as a public speaker and commentator to the media. There we can see that he’s written two other books as well, one on his interest in evo-psych and war, and the other on an adventure he had crossing the Congo river in a landrover.
A lot of his work looks back to, or builds upon his experience as the British Army’s first ‘cultural understanding officer’ in Helmand. There’s a Sunday Times article about that here. I’m not going to dwell on how poorly the British Army’s cultural understanding went in Helmand.
Nor will I dwell on the many narratives of British and American success in Afghanistan that the media published adoringly. Nor will I dwell on how the minute Western military forces, exhausted by conflict, decided to pull out of Afghanistan, it reverted immediately to the Taliban once more.
I will solely point out that the conflict was a huge waste of resources and lives, and had also been the subject of an enormous and persistently reported lie in the media in the West.
Let’s return to Dr Mike Martin. He is a former British Army reserve officer who, after leaving the army, embarked on an academic career. He’s formulated a theory about war’s evolutionary origins and now researches that at KCL. Good for him. It’s an intriguing question, how hardwired the lust for war is.
What he’s not, is any kind of expert on Russia, Russian history, or Ukrainian history; nor has he any expertise about the Kremlin or Russian politics; nor on Russian military forces, on Ukrainian military capacity, or any on the ground knowledge of the current combat theatre.
So what is this story, this headline? Dr Martin likes to see his name in the media, and it helps promote his own work, so he appears more than happy to speak to the press about issues like this where he has no apparent expert knowledge whatsoever. His opinion, based on zero knowledge and expertise, is then inflated by judicious reference to his academic credentials and military background by the newspaper.
From there, it gets promoted to headline, and suddenly a readership fed on months of existential fear of Putin has hope. The hope of his overthrow. This is wishful thinking, it seems to me. After all, Putin’s popularity has actually risen in Russia since the invasion.
Why then is the Express printing this? Because it’s the narrative they want to promote. It’s the narrative they want their readers to experience. It builds on the existing narrative that they and the rest of the media have been assiduously creating since the start of the conflict.
How does it build on it? Well, having created a monstrous, satanic image of Putin, it is now essential to offer their readership some catharsis – specifically that he can and will be defeated in some kind of moral justice. We’ve seen other iterations of this in the Western media recently, mostly speculating about his health and possible imminent demise.
In reality, there’s nothing there. This is the opinion of one guy who has zero expertise in any relevant topic, inflated into a headline by a newspaper which is cheerleading this war endlessly. I don’t mean to pick on this particular paper, or this particular talking head. I understand their various reasons for doing this. I could have chosen so many others.
This example is merely symptomatic of the sick and sickening media environment we now find ourselves in, one entirely divorced from reality and endlessly blaring in favour of war.
As Orwell once wrote, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” Too much of our media would drive anyone mad, and indeed already appears to have driven much of the population mad.
This alternative history was written at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, which had led ultimately to both Irish independence, and partition.
It was published in the 16th April 2006 edition of the Irish Mail on Sunday newspaper, where I was a staff journalist. I expect they might hold the copyright, but I wrote it and I think it’s fair of me to reproduce it here as I suspect they’re unlikely to reprint it anytime soon.
THE TRIALS of the trenches seemed a long time ago now. On Sackville Street, in glorious June sunshine, Prime Minister John Dillon and his guest, David Lloyd George, led the cheering thousands who saluted the returning Irish troops who had defended their nation and empire so valiantly against the Germans. It was a time of celebration, even if the seditious activities of the once-respected lawyer, Edward Carson, were beginning to cause unrest in the north of the island.
And for the joyous crowd, their Union Jacks held proudly aloft, it was the achievement of the soldiers in the trenches that had helped bring about Home Rule. There might always be the odd crank for whom self-determination was never enough, like the wild-eyed MP for East Clare, Mr de Valera. But the vast majority of the Irish citizenry as the recent landslide election victory for Dillon’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had indicated were delighted to have their own parliament and saw no need to reject the monarchy or sever the brotherly bond with Britain.
Of course, things could have been so different, as one Rathgar schoolteacher noted sullenly. Had the Irish Volunteers’ chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill, not learned of their plans to strike for Irish independence three years earlier and immediately countermanded them, then PH Pearse and his comrades in the Irish Republican Brotherhood might well have obtained complete independence for Ireland while England was embroiled in a foreign war.
Or so he believed. But the arrest of the former diplomat, Roger Casement, and the scuttling of the shipful of arms he was bringing to Ireland had made their plans for an uprising pointless, as Mr MacNeill had argued. The rising had evaporated before it had even begun.
By 1919, Mr MacNeill was prominent on the opposition benches in the House of Commons on College Green. Sinn Féin, led by the irascible Arthur Griffith, still argued for absolute independence but its minority status in parliament proved that desire was not shared by the people in general. Casement still languished in Kilmainham, and the IRB had withered away to an irrelevant handful of dissidents. With Home Rule now a fact, their role seemed increasingly defunct.
After decades of trying, the late John Redmond had finally secured Home Rule from Britain as a reward for sending the National Volunteers to the trenches. The humourless poet, Pearse, had returned to teaching Irish to sour-faced lads and dreaming of fomenting revolution. The radical Scot, James Connolly, was still preaching the gospel of socialism from his trade union headquarters in Liberty Hall. But few listened to them.
Instead, the general election held in late December 1918, while many of Dublin’s tenement poor were wracked with Spanish flu, was heavily influenced by two factors. One was David Lloyd George’s firm commitment to Irish Home Rule, made in his Armistice speech only weeks earlier. ‘This is no time for words,’ he had declared. ‘Our hearts are too full of gratitude to which no tongue can give adequate expression. We especially pay tribute to our Irish brethren, in return for whose valiance long-promised Home Rule is the least reward we may grant them.’
The other factor that swung the election so forcefully in the IPP’s favour was the introduction of universal suffrage. The radical Countess Markievicz was elected to represent Sinn Féin but most Irish women who voted for the first time were much more conservative and rallied to Dillon’s paternal leadership. A State visit in 1921 by King George V helped to shore up the popularity of the monarchy but, throughout the ’20s, the popularity of Sinn Féin seemed inexorably to rise.
Sinn Féin, led by a younger generation than the increasingly tired IPP, by now renamed the Irish National Party (INP), were making huge inroads into the working class vote. Sinn Féin’s charismatic young leader, the Corkonian Michael Collins, made a series of angry speeches in Dublin’s House of Commons calling on the government to deal with the increased sectarian rioting in Belfast.
Unionist Party leader Edward Carson, by now deputy prime minister in the ruling coalition with the INP, denounced the activities of his former colleague, James Craig, a stockbroker turned terrorist. In 1926, under pressure from Sinn Féin, the INP pressed to have Ireland included in the declaration made by the Earl of Balfour at that year’s Imperial Conference. Prime Minister Kevin O’Higgins triumphantly returned from London to an Ireland now officially considered independent within the British Empire, sharing only a monarchy with Britain.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, left wing governments swept to power in Britain and Ireland. With the support of Jim Larkin’s Labour Party, Sinn Féin at last made it into power, despite the recent split in their ranks (Eamon de Valera had formed his own party, named Fianna Fáil, after a bitter row with Michael Collins over devolution for Ulster).
The following decade was a dark one for the nation. While membership of the British Commonwealth continued to encourage trade and helped to grow Ireland’s economy, the dark spectre of fascism was spreading across Europe. General Eoin O’Duffy attracted many disaffected soldiers to his quasi-fascist National Guard movement quickly named the Blueshirts in recognition of the traits they shared with Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain.
By 1933, the fascist salute could be seen in every town and village in the royal dominion of Ireland. Clashes between O’Duffy’s paramilitary organisation and the RIC became a weekly, almost daily occurrence. O’Duffy announced a major rally for Dublin in August 1933, to be held in the Phoenix Park. Fearing a coup, since O’Duffy carried much support in the Irish battalions, Prime Minister Collins banned it and announced martial law. The Irish civil war had begun.
Troops loyal to the House of Commons moved to secure the capital, while O’Duffy’s men marched through Cork, Belfast, Londonderry and Limerick. James Craig’s Ulster Volunteer Force, a heavily armed terrorist organisation responsible for sporadic bombings and murders in the north of Ireland, declared its own ‘war’ for independence in Ulster.
Collins moved quickly against O’Duffy and Craig. With the help of troops provided by Ramsay McDonald’s national government in Britain, both rebellions were quickly suppressed and their leaderships interned in The Curragh army camp. Before restoring democratic government, Collins approved the executions of O’Duffy and Craig. He told Deputy Prime Minister Jim Larkin later that day: ‘Early this morning, I signed my own death warrant.’
However, Collins’s decisiveness contrasted with Britain’s dithering. Westminster moved to ban the fascist Blackshirts only in 1937 but, by then, the world was lurching towards another world war. The first had brought Ireland Home Rule; the second would prove devastating. Accused of dictatorship by the leader of the opposition, Eamon de Valera, Collins formed a government of national unity on the eve of German hostilities breaking out. Only William Cosgrave’s Irish National Party, where many former blueshirts had found a political home, refused to take part, arguing instead for peace at any price.
Once again, British troops flooded into Ireland, and were stationed on the Allies’ westernmost border. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Collins used Radio Eireann to inform the people that little Ireland was at war with Nazi Germany. The western seaboard was prowled by ‘ wolfpacks’ of U-boats and patrolled by the Royal Irish Air Force. German nationals were interred in The Curragh camp recently vacated by O’Duffy’s and Craig’s followers. Rationing began. Dublin and Belfast were devastated in the Blitz. Carpet bombing reduced many historical buildings to rubble. The key ports of Derry and Queenstown, where convoys from the United States came to dock, were blockaded by U-boats.
In 1941, as the dogfights of the Battle of the British Isles raged, a plot was uncovered. William Joyce, like his party leader, Eamon De Valera, was an American of Irish heritage. It soon emerged that he was in secret negotiations with the Nazi regime to provide a ‘backdoor to the British Isles’. Together with some extremist republicans, who espoused an independent Eire free from the monarchy, he planned to smuggle Nazi troops into the largely unguarded southwest of the country.
De Valera, who personally espoused neutrality in the war though he sat in Cabinet, was appalled at the treachery and exposed it to Collins. Not for the first time, Prime Minister Collins was forced to sign execution orders. Hundreds of thousands of Irish troops fought valiantly on the African front under Allied General Richard Mulcahy, who later played a major role in the D-Day landings. For many Irishmen who had been conflicted by their republican sentiment, the discovery of the Nazi death camps seemed to vindicate the decision by de Valera to expose Joyce’s treachery.
In the post-war elections, Fianna Fáil swept to power, backed in coalition by William O’Brien’s Irish Labour Party. Collins’s Sinn Féin was reduced to a fraction of its former power. Basil Brooke’s Unionist Party boycotted the Commons in protest and again called for a regional parliament for Ulster. Returning soldiers in the North were dismayed by this lurch towards republicanism, and the Ulster Volunteer Force attracted many of them into its fold.
The assassination of Collins by an unknown UVF man while driving through remote north Antrim in 1952 is believed by many to have sparked the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Ulster. Collins had never been forgiven for ordering the execution of William Craig. Collins’s State funeral was the biggest ever seen in Ireland. It was attended by dignitaries from around the world including US President Harry Truman and the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Prime Minister de Valera gave a valedictory speech, in which he said: ‘History will record the greatness of Michael Collins.’
By the late 1950s, an economic revival was under way. As the population edged towards seven million, Ireland joined other European countries in inviting foreign workers to its shores. The first wave of ethnic immigrants, from the Caribbean, docked in Queenstown in 1958, and black faces were soon commonplace in Ireland’s major cities. The call also went out to Irish descendants in Australia, North America and even Argentina to return to help build up the economy of the motherland.
By the mid-60s, the so-called ‘Celtic Boom’ economy was in full swing. Ireland and Britain were invited to join the EEC. But Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was appalled by the loose morals and drug-taking of young Irish people in the swinging ’60s. In 1969, firebrand Ulster preacher Ian Paisley, whose fringe political party, the DUP, had been linked by some to the ongoing UVF terror campaign, helped to negotiate a Unionist ceasefire and the ‘Troubles’ finally came to an end.
Se·n Lemass’s Sinn Féin government agreed to devolved government for the nine counties of Ulster, within a federal Ireland. The oil crisis of the following decade led to years of stagnation, and Sinn Féin finance minister Charles Haughey famously warned the people to tighten their belts. The ’80s was a period of unstable coalitions. Haughey-led Sinn Féin twice entered coalition with Gerry Adams’s Fianna Fáil. In between came the so-called ‘rainbow government’, in which INP Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald led four parties, including Dick Spring’s Labour Party and David Trimble’s Unionists.
But in 1996, following the election of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin again, the radical government called for a referendum on an Irish republic within the British commonwealth. The proposal was passed by a narrow margin and, in the subsequent presidential election, INP veteran John Hume became the Irish Republic’s first president, 80 years after an abortive rebellion in Dublin now almost forgotten by the history books.
Timeline:
1926: Irish PM Kevin O’Higgins gains Dominion status
1933: Michael Collins tells Jim Larkin ‘I’ve signed my death warrant’
1945: U-boats fight the Royal Irish Air Force off Queenstown
1958: first shipload of Caribbean migrant workers arrives in Ireland
