The Great Race

[cue alluring background music]

A few years back some people sold a bigger bunch of people a load of populist crap to initiate the greatest socio-political upheaval of recent times (any UK or US readers, you can pick your own spot). The rest of the world looked on in sheer bemusement as it all unfolded. This piece is not written to give those shit-shows oxygen, it got done and sooner or later we’ll know the implications. This one is to recognise that in politics (and global leadership), there is a general lowering of standards happening across many aspects of our life, and it’s hard to see how it will end any other way but badly...

Education, like healthcare is something we should all have an equal right to, right? And without the need to sign up to the Communist Party. Until you look deeper. In the UK a wide range of public services are strategically eroded so as to make way for the private sector ‘cavalry’ to come in and save the day. Because, of course, these noble, economically savvy saviours have such a great desire to prop up our poor, failing social systems. A desire drenched in massive, shameless public land grabs, resource purging and general selling off of the family silver. It’s not very imaginative, but it works and one is left to question how such poorly performing state entities go from being in crisis to paying shareholders the dividends they expect for their philanthropic endeavours. All feels a little bogus, contrived. That’s me being diplomatic…  

Neatly sidestepping the vast void of inequality (hey hey US!) and incompetence (UK NHS leadership) and many other ‘ins’ that surround healthcare, something more on education (as it supports the wider aspect of this piece). Did you know that many private schools (the expensive ones that political leaders attend) enjoy a tax free, charity status and are deemed ‘independent’ schools. Whilst interesting in itself, they are also exempt from OFSTED teaching standards and the national curriculum the rest of us plebs are made to follow. The schools are therefore free (by design?) to deliver lower (easier?) learning outcomes, whilst at the same time providing smoother (old boy network) access to the best universities, which by default, enable better career opportunities (just don’t kill anyone or bugger the wrong sort). There's no need for a GCSE in Sociology to see how fucked up that is and why members of our political class remain so blissfully unaware of the price of bread and milk, but could order them in Latin.

Moving on... Principles and general social intelligence have suffered under the second (third?) wave of the Internet Revolution. Hail the rise of the Keyboard Warrior, along with other cute web phenomena such as Twitter storms that do suggest we, (Mankind) give a shit. Until you see what the rants are all about and quickly realise the shits we give, ain’t worth shit. We live in a unique time folks; the vast wealth of Human learning is available for all to see. Well, learning that is deemed harmless for the masses to access when preserving the ‘greater good’. We have this incredible tool for information and knowledge sharing and we use it to spread misinformation or watch porn.

Oh, ‘what a piece of work is man’?

And of course social media, whilst tracking your daily decisions and preferences to monetise its own existence, is all to happy to publicise the stupidity of the species to millions. It’s proving to be car crash TV gold! In this rampantly changing, and somewhat devolving world, screen legend Morgan Freeman (or was it Abraham Lincoln?) famously posted that people would rather spend 10 minutes finding out what kind of potato they are than do a quick fact check an important article before sharing it out across their network. #truestory #FML

Misinformation, a lack of credible sources and all manner of dark communicative arts are at play, 24/7. Drip fed to you in easy to swallow bite-size chunks. There used to be a phrase, ‘no news is good news’, but now, especially for hit-hungry advertisers, any news is good news, if it drives traffic. I long for the days when the news agencies just reported on what happened. Now it’s all opinion based* and veracity relies more on who has a bigger following (influence now being the new prerequisite for insight, knowledge, and credibility). 

In a click-bait world speculative / sensationalism pieces get under the skin and often ease in much worse news further on down the line.

*I am of course aware of the irony of my slagging off opinion pieces with an opinion piece…

There are many ways in which the world and the people in it are getting shittier, and more stupid. From supermarket checkout-time targets that put hapless shoppers under pressure, to the millions being displaced by war and then made into villains, savage marauders, to feed the xenophobic tendencies and political agendas of the very warmongers that displaced them. Aside from Man being a migratory animal, Europe appears to have conveniently forgotten the brutality of the Crusades and Colonial years and simply shut up shop. Nowhere is this more ironic than the good ole US of A, a country built by immigrants, whose (apparent) wealth drips with the blood of slavery, who's industry is driven by infectious wage-slavery to this very day. (Too much?)

But coming to terms with the past is the least of our worries, getting a grip on the future is much more pressing. I’ve always felt technology would be our undoing, a position clearly reinforced by Wall-E and the Terminator franchise. From the pod coffee machines and remote controls to drones automated cars and A.I. The phrase 'Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?' has been superseded, upgraded if you will, to, 'Why even do it at all?'

The tech love affair is reaching a pivotal point, Big Data now overshadows Big Oil and Big Pharma as a money spinner. A handy pandemic will surely help the latter recoup its losses and the former can still rely on friends in high places to dole out subsidies in the foreseeable future. That said, a current wave of woke investment funds are starting to see the light and profits from the destruction of the planet may soon be as unfashionable and as unpalatable as drinking a cup of the black gold itself. I'm mindful of how ludicrous these last few statements sound and so, whatever side of the climate change argument you are on, it's clear things are changing. OK, it took some time (and a teenage girl) for us to respond. As to how (or if) the response will have any value remains to be seen…

Which brings me neatly back to social media, the zenith of human idiocy. Being far more insipid than 'hang in there' kitty posters, fake news spreads 6 times faster on Twitter that the truth. Consider that for a moment, on a scale of 1000s, 100s of 1000s, millions of views, likes and shares etc. What social media alone is doing to our collective perception, mental health, sense of self (esteem), no to mention our actual, physical social networks in the last decade is scary to comprehend. It’s worth watching The Social Dilemma to understand how feed algorithms fine tune our attention spans in perverse and counterproductive ways. The ethical issue of A.I. developing beyond our so called human strengths is now coming in a distance second to what is already happening, that of it dominating our human weaknesses.

Making life easier by shaping inbound information to our preferred world-view (as perceived by the data we give) isn’t making our lives better. It simply distorts and disrupts, allowing for a more continuous flow of even more information to support where you are (or have been), over what you may wish to do or be. The longer term implications of this for the future of our species (and by default many others we lord over) are endless, and truly terrifying.

Populist politics continues to feed our egos, telling us what we want to hear and suggesting we are all divine social architects. But, as many great leaders would attest, keeping a society on the straight and narrow is far from being an easy or exact science. Our modern-day, intense scatter-gun style of media speculation is not helpful and whilst ‘you can’t teach stupid’, you can most definitely feed it and watch it grow to become some mammoth clutter-fuck of ignorance and dismay. 

If you really want to make the world a better place, three simple things; know more about who you are voting for, stop propping up unethical businesses and quit shit-posting (or at the very least, read it before you share it).

In part two of the great race, I’ll explore a wider commercial picture and how the shape of earning a living is mutating, in particular the field of freelancing.