aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! The Outsiders Arts Club went so well! I’m so pleased! We had something like 90 ticket-holders attending and we sold 16 paintings, which is apparently incredible for the art world. That’s quite funny and absurd to me because that event was very much Day 1 Of Being An Art World Person, for me. I do think I deserved it though! I worked extremely hard on it and also my last few professional swings turned out to be misses and man, I really needed a win. I’m happy I got it!

If you live in or near London and you maybe want to buy some affordable art and support some early career artists and also generally have a good time and drink some free wine, then I would recommend coming to the next one. It will be in February, I can tell you that now, but I can’t tell you much more than that because honestly I just need a tiny little break before I get back on my art bullshit.

Also I will stop here because the essay below is very long and I mean, there are only so many hours in the day, for all of us. A fun fact is that I feel so strongly about the issues discussed below that I wrote the entire piece in…under 45 minutes? Obviously it needed some editing afterwards but the point remains. I had A Lot On My Mind, as you’re about to see.

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A column

Fundamentally I think the problem is that I keep feeling like I’ve lost my mind. It makes it very hard to write about other things, or to just go about my life like a normal person. Wondering if you’ve lost your entire mind is incredibly distracting and it takes up a lot of brainspace. It’s exhausting. Have I gone fucking mental though? Did I hit my head at some point and none of you told me and I just can’t tell that life is continuing as normal while I fail to tend to my concussion?

I’ve wanted to ask this for a long time but I kept not doing it because I don’t think there’s a way to write about this that doesn’t make you sound like a bit of a prig. Well, a whole lot of a prig. That may be the entire problem, actually.

Take Twitter. It was bought by Elon Musk, the malevolent imp, and Elon Musk sort of let us be on there for a while, or at least it mostly felt like he was tinkering around the edges, or trying to be evil but being so inefficient that nothing was really going on. You may remember that, some months later, Elon Musk decided to hitch his wagon to the Republican candidate we all like to call “Donald Trump”. You know the one, “Donald Trump”, of “being a nightmareish prospect for leader of the free world not once but twice” fame. That one.

Elon Musk allied himself to him and he also kept talking about making Twitter less and less woke. He was very clear about that. It wasn’t some sort of machiavellian plan hiding all the way out in the deep, dark recesses of his brain. He kept saying, plainly, that he wanted to use Twitter as a weapon with which to fight the culture wars, and also the very real war for the White House, and the general war against, say, racial justice, feminism, democracy, things of that nature.

I remember it well because, all the way down here at human level, I started getting quite a lot of racist abuse. That felt noteworthy as I am, and have always been, one of the whitest mixed race people to ever do it. No-one has ever looked at me and guessed that I was half-Arab. Not one person in 33 years. Oh, and the other half is French.

Basically: I could tell things were getting bad on Twitter when people started being violently racist to an extremely white-passing mixed-race French woman. If things were getting bad for me, how bad could they have been for, you know, basically every single other ethnic minority and immigrant in Britain or elsewhere?

I had all these people telling me to go home and using all sorts of fascinating racist epithets I’d never heard of before but which apparently apply to North Africans, and I thought: hmmm. I’d joined Bluesky when it’d launched and it was clear to me that it wasn’t a fully operating life boat yet but, to mix my metaphors, I slowly started moving some of my eggs over there.

After Elon Musk got his friend Donald Trump elected as the president of the United States, I decided to hurriedly carry all remaining eggs in my arms and yeet myself into the rubber dinghy. I didn’t know whether this particular Titanic was about to sink, but I had no desire to hang around and find out.

It somehow felt both poignant yet entirely straightforward. Twitter had been my digital home for over a decade by that point, but Musk had also been toying with the algorithm so much that my house just didn’t feel like my house anymore. Among other things, his distaste for journalists and journalism meant that he’d suppressed all links within the app. Though posting for posting’s sake was important to me, Twitter had also been crucial in terms of getting my career off the ground.

For most of 2024, though, I’d shared links to pieces I’d written and been faced with…nothing. No articles were getting through anymore. Some people managed to work around that by writing these extravagant threads with a lot of screengrabs and a link at the bottom, but I mean: life is short. I didn’t want to do that.

I moved to Bluesky and suddenly I felt a whole lot calmer, because it turns out that being an active participant in a blood sport every day of your life is quite anxiety-inducing, especially if the ringmaster of said sport hates you and wants you and all your friends to lose and disappear.

It took a little while but I eventually found that my opinions were getting more rounded as well. I’d spent so much time constantly feeling under attack that most of my thoughts had mostly become both reactive and, for lack of a better word, pre-reactive. I’d see horrible people online all day every day and my thoughts came from those sights, but they also anticipated the fact that those horrible people would probably descend on me once I’d voiced my concerns.

Amazingly, this did not lead to my best intellectual work. What a shame it was, then, to watch dozens and dozens of people I knew and respected just…choose to stay in the arena. Some of them joined us on Bluesky for a little while then they gave up; others didn’t even try and stayed put instead. Soon enough, a number of them ended up mocking us exiles, calling us soft and overly desperate to remain in denial.

Though I usually tend to find domestic violence analogies distasteful, I just don’t know how else to explain this one. It really did feel like listening to someone who’s become so used to the adrenaline of never quite feeling safe in their own home that they could no longer understand what a healthy, stable, humdrum relationship felt like. It was sad and enraging.

More specifically, it made me feel insane because those people I know and hang out with aren’t just anyone. They’re political journalists and politicians and advisers and wonks. They’re the people who make the laws and the people who make the news. They either run the country or influence the way it’s run. Were they in different lines of work, I’d probably find their predicament frustrating but ultimately easier to ignore. As things stand, they’re not merely choosing to drown, but bringing Britain down with them.

It makes me lose my mind, still, a year on, because all of it is so transparent. Elon Musk has only got more and more radicalised over time. He loves Tommy Robinson, for heaven’s sake. Tommy Robinson! He thinks Nigel Farage is too wet and he’s posted things I can’t even bear to mention again on here because typing them would, I think, irretrievably stain my soul.

Elon Musk is a dangerous and evil man and he has stated, time and time again, that he wants to use Twitter to make the far-right win across the world. There are thousands of interesting, clever, otherwise reasonable people who know this and who still refuse to leave his platform. I and countless others have written thousands and thousands of words all saying the exact same thing, and begging those people to leave, but they’re just staying put, and getting more and more radicalised in the process.

I feel fucking mental because I’ve written about it multiple times on here and multiple times elsewhere but it’s not done anything, and yet I feel like I have to keep saying it because I’m watching those people fall further and further down the rabbit hole and I have no idea what else to do. I’m watching the fascists win not by being especially cunning or clever but by instead standing around and holding a big sign that says “jump in this hole if you’re an easy mark!” and somehow guiding around two thirds of our political elite directly into the big hole.

I know it shouldn’t be the worst thing but somehow it is. Obviously I hate that some of the worst people alive are having a great time but what really gets under my skin, what makes me want to fling myself at the wall until I pass out, is that so many people I thought of as “cleverer than a housefly” are falling for it.

That’s also why I kept struggling to write about it so honestly, by the way. I don’t love that I’m essentially arguing that many of my acquaintances are either malevolent or thick as mince - possibly both! - but that’s where we’ve got to. I just can’t think of any other explanation.

Some of them have said that Bluesky is lame and again: how fucking dim and/or devoid of moral fibre do you have to be to look at a tableau with “occasionally tedious” on one end and “actively seeking to destroy the West as we know it” on the other and go hmmm, but I just don’t want to sit with the nerds at the front of the bus? Fucking look at yourself in the mirror for a minute there, jesus christ!

And I mean you know, most of my ire so far has been drawn at Twitter, but that’s just the shit cherry on the revolting cake. Everywhere, you can see formerly normal people on the centre-left and the centre and the centre-right act like the only way to destroy the far-right is to ape it. Every day you see some new inhumane policy being bandied around because maybe it’ll be the one that does it.

Somehow it doesn’t matter that no country that’s ever tried to stop the far-right by embracing its policies has succeeded in the long term, and no-one cares about the fact that these policies, aside from being cruel and vindictive against real, live humans who haven’t done anything wrong will be a disaster for the economy. Somehow it doesn’t matter that every comic book villain on the far-right is currently applauding the fact that the mainstream is coming to them. Somehow it doesn’t matter that the public isn’t even for one second buying the idea that the centre-left has suddenly decided to sound like Nick Griffin, seemingly out of nowhere.

No, the only guiding light of the government, the opposition and swathes of the press is this belief, proved by no-one, that you can only beat reactionaries by becoming reactionary yourself. Is it motivated reasoning? Honestly: maybe it is. Maybe all these people genuinely were just racist and sexist this whole time. It is possible that they’re finally coming out as their real selves, and having a ball doing it.

Crucially, I don’t really care anymore. I know I should, because defeating an opponent means needing to get under their skin, but I’ve done that before. I wrote a long essay on exactly this topic earlier this year, and I tried to let my brain do the talking the whole way through. I was pleased with the result.

It just wasn’t all that cathartic, though. This is why I’ve exploded here today, in a way that may seem undignified and will potentially lose me a few friends but I’m just so tired. I can’t bear to wake up every morning and look at my phone and my computer and feel like I’ve lost my mind. It’s torture. It’s torture! I’m not even that much of an idealist but I guess I assumed that people were better than they actually were, for most of my life, and that’s a horrible realisation to come to because I didn’t exactly think humanity was great to begin with.

Turns out I was still being too optimistic! Ha fucking ha! Also, my god: if I’m able to get on my high horse to this extent then we really do have a problem. I really shouldn’t be where the bar is, trust me. I know me pretty well. Although the one thing I will say, I guess, is that I am at least able to rise to the occasion when the occasion calls for “the absolute bare minimum of human decency”. I can manage that, amazingly. How is it that so many people can’t?

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PS: wait, no sorry, turns out I wasn’t done. There are so many reasons why I feel insane right now. I’m not going to go through all of them in as much detail as I did above because I only have a finite amount of time on this planet, but god I’m just so angry and in a state of shocked disbelief all the time.

I read the puff pieces on Olivia Nuzzi and her new book and man alive, they made me feel like I’d gone completely loopy. Before that I saw the news that she’d been appointed west coast editor of Vanity Fair and - wahoo! - something went very wrong inside my head.

I just cannot stop thinking about the number of journalists I know - brilliant, sharp people who are great at their jobs - who are either languishing in second tier staff jobs, breaking their backs freelancing, or who have left the media altogether. I’ve been luckier than most so far but fuck me, am I earning even half of Nuzzi’s salary right now? Almost certainly not!

It just feels so amazingly, richly unfair that she dated her most important source and lied about it to her editor and somehow that’s fine. It’s better than fine, even: she’s written a book about it now. She’s probably made more money out of fucking her source than I did working for an entire year.

Obviously the concepts of “inequality” and “well-connected blondes being easier to forgive” aren’t new to me but come on! I thought we were maybe getting better at this stuff. I thought there was at least a tiny little bit of justice in the world. Apparently there isn’t. Apparently journalism can collapse in on itself but Olivia Nuzzi can keep making bank. Doesn’t that make you want to scream at the top of your lungs until you run out of air?

Maybe it makes me feel like that because it’s a topic close to home - because we’re the same age, and I used to be a bit of an insider/outsider political journalist too, but oh my god.

PPS: don’t even try to get me started on AI. I can’t bear to get started on AI. The fact that it’s out there spewing misinformation to millions of people every moment of every day and that no national government seems to want to do anything about it is so enraging to me that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Several kids have topped themselves because of it and yet no-one’s doing anything about it, because apparently it’s the future. I want to scream. I want to scream I want to scream I want to scream.

I reckon you’d struggle to make the case for the world of ten or so years ago being all that fantastic but there is, I think, a profound difference between “things that are depressing” and “things that make you feel like maybe someone dropped a big rock on your head while you were sleeping and no-one told you about it”, and I actually prefer the former to the latter by quite a wide margin. Right now? I just don’t know what to say.

That’s the crux of it, I think: I’ve just spent 2500 words hysterically going on about this or that but really? I have nothing to say. Nothing I say works. Nothing I say matters. Our world is stupid and hateful and it didn’t have to be this way but here we are. Fucking hell.