the one where we realise we don't exist

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! So as you know I wrote about Hot Ones a few months ago, and I feel like the new little show currently having its time in the sun is Subway Takes. The format is silly and simple but it works so well, and the host is so charming. His laughter is so infectious and delightful.

The reason why I believe they're thriving is because I mentioned it in passing several times last week, to various people, and all of them had not only heard about it, but they instantly mentioned either their favourite episode or the take they would debut if they were asked. Subway Takes has formally entered the zeitgeist.

It seems unlikely that I would ever be asked to do it, because I'm not famous and I'm not planning to be in New York again anytime soon, but I did want to have A Take ready, just in case, and it is this:

The headline (which needs to be snappy and controversial! you want him to have to stop and think for a split second before he tells you whether he 100% agrees or 100% disagrees!):

actors should be uglier

The take (which is where you set out your case in more detail, and reveal yourself to be more reasonable than previously assumed):

I think that Hollywood now values pure looks over charisma and that's a bad thing. It feels very jarring to watch a movie and notice that absolutely everyone in it is basically attractive.

It's bland and boring, and cheapens the actual hotness of the characters meant to be hot. Give us more freaks! Give us people with great voices and facial expressions and stares and mannerisms! That's way more interesting than having endless rows of plastic, interchangeable "beautiful" faces. We need weirder, more compelling actors, otherwise what's the point.

(I will say, humbly, that I reckon Kareem would laugh, then he would 100% agree. It would be a delight.)

Anyway that is all for the intro this week as I have had SO MUCH TO DO before heading to Morocco later today and I am quite stressed and also, crucially, the essay below is pretty long so you know, I felt that was enough for one newsletter.

If you want more, however, I can offer you Emma Garland’s Dazed essay on horniness coming back into mainstream culture, which is great because everything she writes is great.

That is all. Thank you.

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A column

I've spent a lot of time over the past few days wondering just how much of it was our fault. Donald Trump is in the White House and Elon Musk is one of the most powerful men alive and everything good feels like it's collapsing, and every bad person seems to be having a great time. We've talked about anger against incumbents and about the economy and about pure, bitter hatred, but I now wonder if they're only part of the story. I wonder if we may be the ones to blame, at least a little bit.

We just had too much fun at the start, is the problem. Social media came onto the scene and it felt exhilarating, because we suddenly gained access to everyone. We made friends with people from across the world who shared our beliefs and our values, and wasn't that neat? All those important people were there as well, and we got to hold them accountable, whatever that meant.

Sure, they had the money and the influence and whatnot, but we could yell at them if we wanted to. That felt good. Those people couldn't just get away with doing whatever they wanted without having to suffer any consequences anymore. The internet had become this great, big democratising machine, and the future felt exciting.

In time, we realised what it meant to truly bring everyone into the same spaces. As I wrote in Escape, and countless people wrote in countless other places, even the racists and the sexists got to meet each other, chat and create communities. A lot of them ended up building entire identities around those prejudices, because we all yearn for a sense of belonging.

As a friend put it to me once, it becomes easier to understand the trolls if you start comparing them to, say, Wario and Waluigi. They're bad guys, obviously, but they're out there hanging out with their friends and having a great time being evil. That's what online villains spent the past decade and a half doing. I know this and so do you: it's been discussed ad nauseam.

I'm sure it's a dynamic that's helped reactionary forces gain more and more ground in recent times, but I'm not convinced it's the only one. What I'd like to talk about here is two-fold, but I'll start with this: I think this bullshit version of "accountability" we sold to ourselves ended up coming back to bite us in the ass.

We - I'm using "we" here mostly as a shorthand, because it's easier to write that way, but I'm not implying that all of us did it, or at least that we all did it all of the time - yelled and yelled and yelled, and what did it achieve? The rich people with the powerful jobs are still rich and powerful, because no amount of yelling can change that, and now a lot of them are really pissed off, and some of them have gone quite mad.

You see it in Musk but you can also see it in Kemi Badenoch, or in JK Rowling, or whatever other celebrities and politicians have taken a turn for the worst. They're still them, but they now really hate and resent the people who spent years shouting at them on the internet. They also hate and resent the views those people hold, and you can really tell that a lot of them have become more close-minded over time. No more "listening to the other side" or "engaging in pleasant conversation with people you politely disagree with". They're in the trenches and when it's their turn you best believe they're going to shoot.

To be clear, I'm not pretending that they were all fine and dandy all along but we, evil progressives, broke their brains and now they've all gone mad because of us. That would be too much self-flagellation even for me. Instead, my concern is that everyone is fundamentally malleable, because we're a deeply social species, and there's a world in which many of those powerful people - tech bros being another good example - would have turned out a bit better if we'd left them alone a bit more.

It's not a pleasant thought to entertain, because it makes us partially guilty, and only goes to show just how powerless we are. If I'm right, our two options were only ever "make things worse" or "keep things exactly as they were". On top of this, it shows those people to be quite unbearably thin-skinned, susceptible and disgustingly, weakly human. Your politics shouldn't be influenced by who you like and who you don't, who shouts at you on the internet and who pats you on the back, but maybe that's just expecting too much from people. We're apes who want to befriend other apes. As it turns out, it's not that hard to negatively polarise us against stuff.

On a similar point, I wonder if there's something people discussing the "anti-woke backlash" have failed to take into account. On the right-hand side, you usually have people saying that god! It's all too much! These killjoys and harridans want us to change our entire way of life in one go, like the petty tyrants they are! Give us a break! Then on the left-hand side, people will scoff at this idea that there's some sort of woke mob, having shadowy Zoom meetings every other Tuesday and lengthening the list of words we Just Don't Use Anymore.

I was a part of the latter for a long time, because of course I was, but I'm now wondering if we didn't get it slightly wrong. We got offended, as progressives, because the right kept treating us like malevolent overlords, descending from the bien pensant heavens every once in a while to issue a new diktat on what is or isn't the right word to use for this or that person. Naturally, that was bullshit. We didn't actually have power in a meaningful way - even left-of-centre governments, when they did get elected, tended to act quite meekly - so why were we being treated like we were?

It's something I kept coming back to for a long time, because I found it frustrating. It wasn't that I disagreed with them; I couldn't even really see where they were coming from. Something clicked recently though, and I may be wrong! But I wonder if I'm onto something. I'll try and set it out now, and you can judge for yourself.

So, here goes: I reckon that "we" don't exist. I know, I know, I said earlier that we were a thing, or a group, or at least ought to be treated as one, for convenience's sake, but that's the whole problem. If you look at it from the outside, you could probably argue that we asked for too much, too quickly. We wanted more fairness and opportunities for trans people, for disabled people, for women, for old people, for young people, for non-white people, for fat people, for gender non-conforming people, for gay people, for bisexual people, for immigrants, for intellectually disabled people and…well, you get the gist.

From the outside, that probably looked overwhelming, especially if you were a conservative, with a big or a small c, or if you were maybe a bit older and already struggling to keep up with the world as it was. Again, I'm not really showing any sympathy to those people here, but I do think it's worth trying to understand where they're coming from, seeing as we're going to keep beefing it if we don't at least attempt to do that.

The "we" is the problem here. What happened wasn't that there was a single group who decided to make all these demands in one go. Instead, the internet and social media meant that every marginalised group was able to start advocating for themselves, loudly and firmly, all at the same time. This wouldn't have been possible to do in an offline world, where campaigns relied on staff, and organising, and a press willing to cover them.

Describing it as "one problem at a time" is a slight oversimplification but, to an extent, it was what happened. There were groups and organisations and they would discuss their short, medium and long term goals. There were journalists who would latch onto an issue for a while, then perhaps move to another one after that. In the era of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, however, anyone hoping to shake things up was able to try and do so.

There was no-one there to say "hey champ, wait for your turn, won't you?", which definitely was a good thing in some ways, as no-one wants to be told that their problems matter less than other people's problems, but it's worth wondering if it didn't screw us all over instead.

Faced with what felt like a deluge of comments, campaigns, demands and paradigm shifts, a number of people decided to shut down completely, and go backwards instead. It'd be impossible to figure out just how many people this happened to, but you can't really look at the state of the western world right now and argue that those people don't matter. Clearly they do. We can't ignore them.

How do we go forward though? Well, there's that problematic "we" again. There's no way to answer that question because, at risk of repeating myself, there's no true "we". Having a living, breathing woke mob would be useful because at least we could have one large meeting, or maybe some weekly sessions over a few months, and try to figure out what to do next.

Because the mob only exists in its enemies' imagination, this piece may have to end quite abruptly. As I worry I often do in this newsletter, I've come into your house to tell you that I've figured out what's gone wrong, and am now about to get my coat and leave again, right as you ask me about solutions. I don't have any of them right now! I wish I did but I don't.

I don't think we can go back to telling people to wait in line before their humanity gets recognised, because that's a lousy way to think about the world, and the toothpaste is out of the tube anyway. I don't think we can keep trying to fight for every single thing at the same time because it's quite clearly not working for any of us. Is there a secret third way? You tell me! No, really, please do. I'd love it if the third way existed. I dearly hope it does, and we're about to find it.