This month marks the 50th anniversary of the essay that observed the moment when all of this began: Tom Wolfe’s August 1976 cover story for New York, published under a headline that lodged itself permanently in the language: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” It was Wolfe at his most gleeful and profanely merciless, a 10,000-word safari through Human Potential Movement talks, encounter groups, Aquarian communes, and the new therapeutic religions, which pointed toward a single insight. Americans had discovered a subject more absorbing than God, country, or class: themselves. The great national project of the age was self-actualization. “Let’s talk about Me,” Wolfe wrote, and he meant it as the era’s Lord’s Prayer.      

Fifty years later, the Me Decade is best understood as more than just a diagnosis for the 1970s, that itchy, sweaty waiting room wedged between the revolutionary ’60s and the acquisitive ’80s. The essay now feels like a Rosetta Stone for understanding the shift to permanent navel-gazing that followed the collapse of the postwar order. The ’60s promised to remake the world, and when the world declined to be remade, the great “we” of the New Left splintered into 1,000 private quests for meaning. In the mid-2020s, after the hyperpolitics and populist moments of the late 2010s and early 2020s burned out, Wolfe’s Third Great Awakening has returned in the form of self-care and therapeutic identity on the Left; and looksmaxxing, longevity, and personal sovereignty on the Right.

Rereading the essay now, it’s clear that Wolfe, the thin white duke of New Journalism, wasn’t simply mocking the narcissists. Across his books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the author, who died in 2018, had watched the New Left and the counterculture at close range and seen the dream of political revolution giving way to the search for private revelation. By the bicentennial of the United States, he was performing what he called a “social autopsy” on the ’70s. Wrote Wolfe: “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).” 

Wolfe’s deeper claim was that this was something genuinely new under the sun. For most of human history, he argued, ordinary people had no self to speak of — not in the way we mean it. They understood themselves less as sovereign individuals than as a link in what he called the “great biological stream,” living not only their own lives, but those of their ancestors, their children, their neighbors. The self was a vehicle, not a destination. What changed, he believed, was money.

America’s postwar bargain between capital and labor had handed the working and middle classes — unevenly, and with enormous racial exclusions, but on a mass scale — more leisure, privacy, mobility, and bodily freedom than their grandparents could have dreamed of. The great question posed by midcentury American abundance was: now that the masses have security, leisure, and disposable income, what would they do with it? 

The hope, Jefferson’s hope and the labor movement’s hope and the hope of every civics teacher who ever lived, was that they would use it to become enlightened citizens. Some did, perhaps, but the rest — Wolfe said — bought ranch houses, ever-larger televisions, diet books, and the right to be left alone. “Once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s,” he wrote, “they did an astonishing thing, they took their money and ran … they discovered and started doting on Me.”

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Wolfe called this the Third Great Awakening because the self-serious seminars and encounter groups and Diet Coke Buddhisms had the structure of religion but had inverted its ancient formula. Where the old faiths began with self-abasement before something larger — God, the congregation, children, the dead — the new religion began, in his phrase, “with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short.” The sacred object was the self. You did not join to submit but to be affirmed or, as the kids say now, to be seen. It was the miserable little Protestant sinner reborn as buried treasure.

Denominations appeared across the ideological spectrum. On the Left, the energies of the ’60s diffused into the human-potential movement, mass-market psychology, communes, feminism, gay liberation, racial identity, and a boutique marketplace of occult and imported spiritualities. Among conservative Americans came charismatic Christianity, born-again politics, and the Jesus People, movements that spoke the language of salvation but placed enormous weight on personal testimony, personal crisis, and personal rebirth. For yuppies and upper-middle-class strivers — on both the Left and the Right — came the cult of the body: dieting, jogging, aerobics. These groups often hated one another, but all shared the belief that the inherited self was inadequate and the chosen self might be glorious.

By the end of the decade, Wolfe wasn’t alone in sensing that something had cracked in America. In mid-1979, Jimmy Carter delivered what history lazily remembers as the “malaise” speech, although the 39th president never used the word. Officially an address on energy, it became a diagnosis of a country losing its appetite for sacrifice, common purpose, and the future. That same year, the heterodox historian and social critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, which offered a darker, Freudian analysis of the Me Decade. 

Lasch’s narcissist wasn’t simply vain, because vanity is almost too healthy a word for the creature he described. Lasch’s American, rather, was psychically dependent on recognition, terrified of aging, suspicious of the future, estranged from the past, and unable to locate himself inside any stable order beyond therapeutic self-preservation. Carter, Lasch, and Wolfe differed enormously, but all three understood that the old postwar world was giving way to a society in which the individual self would become the central arena of politics, religion, consumption, health, and meaning (as it happens, Carter staffers hosted Lasch at the White House to discuss his runaway best-seller; to have been a fly on the wall!).

What none of them could have known was how durable — and how renewable — that hyperindividualism would become. The obvious objection is that the ’70s ended, and the ’80s, ’90s and everything since have looked rather different. The hippies got haircuts and jobs. Reagan arrived to explain that the void in your private life was actually a tax problem, and “Morning in America” turned a spiritual crisis back into a consumer proposition. The yuppies swapped mantras for corporate mergers. Conservatives found purpose in the flag after 9/11; liberals found purpose in Obama. The inward turn looks, from a distance, like one phase among several.

But ultimately, what the last 50 years have proved is that freedom from society — freedom from the human chain, from the obligations of the democratic experiment — has only been part of the ideal. What people also wanted was recognition — to be seen not by the neighbor or the congregation, whose gaze came bundled with obligations, but by the only thing that now seems to confer reality: the spectacle, the media discourse, the national screen. 

That craving for recognition found a perfect delivery mechanism in the smartphone and social media. Your phone’s central demand — the thing it asks of you dozens of times a day — is that you perform, curate, optimize, and, above all monitor, the self. And while “phones bad” may be the most exhausted take in America, the point isn’t that social media rotted our brains. It’s that social media offer the infrastructure the first Me Decade lacked: continuous self-regard with measurable feedback that’s always on, where every injury becomes content, every hobby a possible side hustle, and every political position both an opinion and a costume. It even swallows its own antidote: log off, move to the country, bake bread, cultivate the simple, local life — congratulations, you’re making content about the moral superiority of not making content. The exit door opens into the gift shop.

You can measure the deepening in the negative space left by everything Americans have quietly stopped doing. This is the story Robert Putnam told in Bowling Alone, published in 2000, and every line on his chart has kept sliding. In 2020, membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque fell below half of American adults for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade series. Barely 1 in 10 workers belongs to a labor union. Each week, two local newspapers stop publishing; a quarter of adults told Pew they hadn’t read even part of a book last year; off-cycle municipal elections draw a rounding error of the electorate. The Rotary Club, the Girl Scouts, the precinct meeting — the dense mesh that, for Tocqueville, sustained American democracy — has thinned to gossamer.

The present looks more like Wolfe’s 1976 than we care to admit. The engine of the ’70s was the failure of the ’60s. Fast-forward, and you can see that the years from roughly 2016 through the early 2020s were America’s most feverishly political stretch in generations, an instance of what the historian Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics”: intense politicization without durable organizations or proportionate consequences. On one flank stood a populist insurgency that promised to burn down the establishment and drain the swamp. On the other, the Great Awokening, a convulsion that swept through universities, newsrooms and corporate America promising a national reckoning. Both were maximalist, and both failed to build the transformed society their rhetoric advertised.

And what does thwarted revolutionary energy do when it has nowhere durable to go? As it did after 1968, it goes toward the one realm that still seems transformable, the self. It splinters into private quests for meaning — the pattern documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis keeps tracing in his video essays such as The Century of the Self, and the one Bono identified back in 1981 when he sang, “I can’t change the world / But I can change the world in me.” 

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You can see it split down the familiar seam. On the Left in the late ’70s, disillusion flowed into the New Age and the human-potential movement, into a rediscovered occult, modern art, and academia, and a smorgasbord of invented and imported religions. Today, it flows into many of the same things but rebranded as “self-care,” a term associated with Audre Lorde’s 1988 description of caring for herself during cancer as “an act of political warfare,” and since domesticated into a marketing category for Johnson & Johnson and expensive spas. It now flows into astrology, which is newly commercialized through subscription apps and personalized notifications, and into the figure of the witch reborn as a political identity with the imagined power to “hex” Trump. A generation that lit a candle for George Floyd in 2020 now lights a scented candle in the bathtub.

And on the Right, we see the mirror image. The ’70s had the cult of fitness, the sudden national mania for jogging, aerobics and dieting, the body as a project to be perfected. The overlapping worlds of MAHA, the manosphere, and Silicon Valley have looksmaxxing and testosterone infusions, ice baths and the carnivore diet, along with the tech billionaire spending millions to reverse his own aging and streaming his blood work to the world. It is the cult of the body again, but now with the promise cranked up from mere fitness to immortality — forever youth, death itself reframed as a solvable engineering problem. 

For all the tedious arguments about who is and is not woke, both sides now qualify in Wolfe’s older and more useful sense of the word awakening: each is trying to fashion a self strong enough to survive the collapse of everything the self was once supposed to belong to.

This is also why so much of our politics feels counterfeit even when the emotions appear sincere. In the Me Decade, Wolfe sardonically noted that journalists of his own time compulsively applied the F-word (fascism) to hippies, Scientologists, and Moonies, then reminded them that the term derives from the fasces: sticks bound into a single, unbreakable bundle. Whatever else Trumpism may be, including a movement with real authoritarian appetites, it isn’t fascism. It doesn’t ask its followers to dissolve their personalities into a common national will. 

Trumpism offers almost the opposite fantasy: national restoration through the elevation of a man who appears gloriously free from every obligation, inhibition, and shame that binds ordinary people. It is cheap, televisual, consumerist, and American — and it demands no genuine self-abnegation. It is Spirit Halloween nationalism, a longing for the symbols of midcentury cohesion without the institutions that made such cohesion possible. Trump himself is perhaps the purest Me Decade product America has elevated: a man of appetites, brands, and grievances whose supporters love him precisely because he appears unbound, unashamed, and entirely himself.

Likewise, much of what passed for radical Left-wing politics in the last decade consisted of locating yourself on the grid of identity and curating a public self certified as virtuous. It offered the profoundest pleasures of the Me Decade — the look inward, the moral distinction, the separation from the unenlightened — while allowing the seeker to experience all of it as selflessness. 

None of this is a forever destiny. There is a backlash now, a genuine one. You can feel it stirring in the emergence of in-person reading clubs, and the sudden fashions among Zoomers for organized religion, “third places,” and “touching grass.” It’s also visible in the small revolt against phones, AI, and the data centers that power them. I have written in praise of it in these pages. But it is worth being honest about the scale of this counter-movement: withdrawal from society is the mainstream, and the return to it is still a hobby. 

We are now half a century into the inward gaze, and we are not climbing out. We are, at most, coming up for air. Wolfe’s cruel joke was that Americans had discovered Me. Our problem is that, 50 years later, we haven’t found a reason to drop the mirror, and we’re more than ever transfixed.

My interviewee is explaining Costco’s appeal. It’s convenient: everything is in one place, and since you have to buy in bulk, you don’t need to come often (the store is meant to supply small businesses, though everyone I talk to here is shopping for personal consumption). Then there are the deals: even for electronics, it often has the best prices and warranties. It all sounds like a perfect exercise in prudence, getting the most out of your time and money. Except, did he really mean to buy all of this? Does he really need quite so much salmon? “That is the drawback,” the man says ruefully. “You see things as you walk around, and you end up spending a lot. I came here just to buy some chicken, some meat, and I’ve just spent £360.” I point to a pair of olive-green chinos recently added to the trunk. “They’re nice,” he objects. “I thought I could wear them for work.”

It is not the only time I will hear such a tale of accidental indulgence. In fact, it almost becomes a running joke during my afternoon at Costco. Everyone says they are here to save money, before acknowledging that they treated themselves to something they couldn’t resist. “The problem is you get carried away,” says an elderly woman who comes with her neighbor to stock up. A builder eating pizza in his van tells me, as though I’m an idiot for asking, “it’s cheaper. You buy in bulk.” Then I raise the matter of spontaneous purchases, and he goes quiet. “Yeah, that does happen,” his friend chimes in. One man who complained of being broke was nonetheless leaving with a liter of Jack Daniels and a crate of Nigerian Guinness. These were, he assures me, excellent value for money.

Costco has, it seems, cracked the secret of selling to a population which is increasingly concerned with belt-tightening, as living standards are ground down by taxes and inflation. It lures people in with the prospect of cheap stuff in large quantities, and then overwhelms them with temptation. And frankly, there is such insane abundance here that I struggle to believe anyone could avoid this trap. Fancy three liters of vodka in a glass skull? Australian abalones? A “giant treat tower” comprising “3kg of festive treats”? And while you’re here, what about a 10-player poker table, or an oriental rug?

Everything about Costco is big: the stores, the products, and the money. It is currently the third-largest retailer in the world by revenue, behind only Walmart and Amazon. Much of its success comes from its membership model, whereby you pay £42 annually to access its stores (or £30 if you run a business), allowing it to operate with smaller margins on its products. The company came to Britain in 1993, a decade after it first opened in the United States, and has been steadily expanding since. Long ago, when my parents first got hooked, they made pilgrimages to Costco in Watford two or three times a year, but with each decade another branch has opened closer to home. There are currently 29 stores in Britain, and more than a dozen new ones at various stages of planning and construction. Last year, Costco managed sales worth £5.3 billion in the UK, almost double its turnover in 2019.

Croydon offers some insight into this success. Occupying a liminal zone where London bleeds into Surrey, people of every conceivable class and background live or work around here, from gilet-wearing rugby dads to African Muslims, from civil servants to white-van men. And despite the fact that Costco officially restricts its memberships to individuals from certain occupations, I found virtually all of these groups shopping there.

It is safe to say that few people approach this place on foot — one can only carry so many five-kilo blocks of cheddar — but doing so is revealing, if you want to see the hinterlands where retail is migrating. The Croydon Costco, a rectangular fortress, is nestled among acres of dual carriageway and brick warehouses, school sports fields and self-storage facilities. Around the corner is the surreal Grand Sapphire “Hotel and Banqueting” venue, essentially a Travelodge with lots of neoclassical columns and pediments tacked onto it. This masterpiece of banality, I later learn, was due to host a Reform UK Christmas party, but pulled out after a campaign of complaints.

We are a long way from the reassuringly suburban forms of the Tesco, Asda or Marks & Spencer superstore, with their gabled roofs and detailed taxonomy of class signifiers (cheese and onion or cheddar and chive?). These remain a familiar setting for British life, but their position is being steadily eroded by the rise of warehouse shopping. Whereas the traditional supermarkets still gesture towards the ideal of the friendly local community of shops (which they in reality replaced), hiding their brutal efficiency behind a chatty marketing style and an emphasis on British produce, their challengers cut the frills and let the prices speak for themselves. Ikea’s giant edge-of-town warehouse-stores were pioneering in this regard, teaching the middle classes to swallow their pretenses for the sake of a bargain. Lidl and Aldi brought the warehouse onto the high street, their chintzy copycat branding made more palatable by the ravages of inflation. With Costco, the trend approaches its zenith. Retail collapses into logistics and infrastructure; architecturally, Costco stores are cousins of the data center and the Amazon fulfillment hub.

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Look at the trolleys leaving Costco and you will see plenty of evidence of our straightened economic times. The company’s obvious audience in Britain are the comfortable but concerned; natural denizens of the M&S food hall who have been driven in search of bargains by the high cost of everything, and who have the current account balance and the cupboard space to buy several months’ worth of cashew nuts at once. According to market researchers, high earners are more likely to shop at Costco. But most of the shoppers I see at the Croydon store are not in this category. Unlike that gentleman with the green chinos, they cannot spend several hundred pounds on a whim. Rather, many have come to stock up on a small number of products — one family appears to be living off Yazoo milkshakes and tins of baked beans — even if they pick up a few treats along the way. The most common items appear to be toilet paper, laundry detergent, and above all, crates of bottled drinking water. (The people of South London, it seems, do not trust what comes out of their taps. I’m not sure why, though one young woman, a nurse, describes herself as “prone to typhoid”.) No doubt some Costco members like the idea that they have hacked grocery shopping by going wholesale.

Still, we have by no means entered an era of Gradgrindian retail, where enjoyment counts for nothing and all that matters are the numbers on the sticker. At Costco, the sheer volume and variety of products creates its own kind of pornographic spectacle, which is only heightened by the lack of ceremony. Add some promotional giveaways and an in-store canteen, and you get something like an experience. I have barely arrived when I find myself looking at a case of diamond jewelry — placed near the door, along with the fancy perfumes, for Christmas — trying not to think about what I paid for my wife’s engagement ring. Moments later, I am sampling coffee from a ludicrously discounted espresso machine, joking with two ladies in headscarves and their trolley full of young infants. With the aisles stretching ahead of us, there is a sense of anticipation almost like the start of a big night out. I later manage to sample a steak, a chicken Kiev, and a tot of Panamanian rum. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, but by the time I reach the vats of olive oil my resistance is broken and I fetch a trolley.

After 45 minutes in the store, my theory of Costco has changed. I no longer think that people are being seduced into spending more than they wanted to; I suspect that, on some level, they come here to be seduced. The genius of warehouse retail is that it makes shoppers feel like they are behaving as purely rational economic agents, which seems like the responsible way to act when money is scarce. In truth, they are engaging in a kind of leisure, enjoying the chance to browse, fantasize, and buy things that they believe they probably shouldn’t. This is not without social and political significance. It suggests that, for all the manifest anger and unhappiness at our system today, a major plank of capitalist society — the desire to possess and to enjoy commodities — remains firmly in place. On the evidence of Croydon, American-style supersized consumerism is probably a more unifying cultural force in modern Britain than the vague British values which people are always trying to formulate.

Leaving the store, I join a chaotic queue of trolleys as it converges on a handful of overworked cashiers, frantically sifting through the mountains of goods with their barcode scanners. My turn comes and it turns out I’ve managed to spend £100. I check my receipt in disbelief, convinced there is a mistake. Is this actually saving me money? Probably not. Do I regret it? Not really.

We arrived in the evening and went to the El Cortez downtown, where we’d booked a cheap room. I was not prepared. The lights, the noise, the ping-ping-pinging, the fake sound of coins coming down a metal chute, the Ghostbusters theme tune inexplicably clanging out at regular intervals, the gamblers with their plastic buckets of change feeding the machines, the lack of windows and clocks. An image has stayed with me: a woman in a motorized wheelchair wears a credit card attached to her wrist with what looks like an old telephone cord. The card is stuck in the machine like a baby’s pacifier. She is aggressively pumping the arm of the slot machine as money is being sucked from her bank account. There appears to be no end to her losses.

After crossing the casino floor and walking up a couple of flights of stairs, we found our room. The leaking air conditioning unit had left a small puddle in the carpet. The window wouldn’t open and everything smelled of cigarette smoke. But it was the grim yellow lighting that slightly undid me. Normally, I can do crappy hotels — in fact I quite like them — but because this was Vegas, where you are supposed to have fun, I couldn’t do it. I left the room, ran down the stairs, walked through the casino, back to where we’d left the car and collapsed in a sobbing heap. We left the next morning and headed to Los Angeles.

Three years later, Jason got the idea to make a documentary in Vegas and got some backing from Channel 4. In the early 2000s, it was the fastest-growing city in the US. Homes were being built at record speed. Every month, thousands of people were showing up looking for work, mainly in construction and hospitality. Between 1970 and 2000, its population went from 270,000 to 1.3 million, and it looked set to continue rising. It was a boom time, a new kind of gold rush, and Jason wanted to see what this kind of explosive urban growth looked like. I ended up accompanying him on his shoot.

We arrived in early spring. Unlike our previous trip to Vegas, it was chilly when we landed — that night-time desert cold hit us as we stepped onto the airport tarmac. We found a cheap room in an America’s Best Value Inn & Suites. The apartment block was aiming for bland, corporate clientele, but judging from the shouting and the regular appearances by the police, they weren’t hitting their target demographic. In the grounds was a small swimming pool where kids would play in the daytime and where adults would gather to drink in the evenings. The parking lot of the nearby 7-Eleven was where the prostitutes and rent boys lined up under the streetlights. In the darker corners, people bought drugs.

Jason had placed an ad in the local newspapers asking for people who’d just arrived in Vegas to get in touch. He wanted to make sense of this place through the stories of those who were arriving to start a new life. One of the people who called us was a young woman who had escaped an abusive home and had hitchhiked to Vegas from a small town in California. She’d been picked up on the highway by a much older guy called Robert. She ended up moving in with him. They invited us over to their house for a drink so Jason could interview them. The young woman had just found a job in a bar off the Strip. They lived in one of those cream-colored L-shaped bungalows with metal siding, so familiar to me and my Canadian childhood. It was a tract house, a cookie-cutter home, straight out of a Robert Adams photograph. The streetlights, the sidewalks, the rows of tidy bungalows facing each other across a newly paved street — they all just ended where the desert began.

This extreme interface between the built-upon and the wild recalled a passage from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour’s 1966 book Learning from Las Vegas: “Beyond the town, the only transition between the Strip and the Mojave Desert is a zone of rusting beer cans.” Here there were no rusting beer cans. Here there was only air and the lemony-yellow glow of the streetlights in which the wings of tiny moths fluttered.

I did not collapse into a sobbing existential heap on this return trip to Vegas with Jason in 2005, because I was there to be part of his documenting of the city; I was not there to have fun. I was an observer, and through this act of mediation, I was able to see Vegas in a different light. We were not living in the post-modern town described in Learning from Las Vegas, nor were we engaging with the city ironically, as a joke, as a flimsy cardboard cut-out, a Pop Art construction, the wet dream of populist pleasure makers, or a simulacrum of a city. I could and still can appreciate the “messy vitality” of the Strip that the authors of Learning from Las Vegas exalt in, along with their enjoyment of the unselfconscious creation of a popular aesthetic. I was also aware that this city is a place where people live, work, write poems, worry about their greying hair, their lack of exercise and their kids’ college fees. And yet, I simply couldn’t — and still can’t — shake my view of Las Vegas as human folly, a mistake, an aberration, and most importantly an environmental catastrophe.

The spring and summer that Jason and I were living in Vegas coincided with the 100th anniversary of what some referred to as the “founding” of the city in 1905. Birthday celebrations had been brewing for months, culminating in the baking of what would be the largest cake in the world. The seven-layer, 130,000-pound vanilla cake measured 102 feet long, 52 feet wide and contained 23 million calories. On the day of the great cake slicing, Jason and I lined up outside Cashman Center, a large building which looked like a cross between a storage facility, convention center and a high school gym. We were with Matt, one of the people we had been filming with. He was a soft-spoken and thoughtful gambling addict who’d been cast out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for falling in love with a non-Mormon. He was currently homeless and often slept in one of the storm sewers or in the Salvation Army shelter when they had a bed.

Thousands of people showed up for cake. Some clutched Tupperware containers, others cardboard boxes, suitcases, even giant plastic garbage bags to lug their chunks back to their kitchens, offices and rented rooms. The scene was like a demented children’s picnic directed by Tim Burton. The planners of this birthday celebration had wildly overestimated how many Las Vegans would want to queue up in 40-degree heat for free cake. On that evening’s news, I watched in horror as dump truck after dump truck brought mountains of leftovers to a local pig farm and shovelled it into pens for the animals to “pig out” on. If there were ever a film clip needed to illustrate overabundance and society-as-spectacle in the US, this would be it.

Consumption is one of the engines fueling the Vegas that many people come to the city to experience. The year Jason and I were there, the hotels, casinos and restaurants alone were creating over half a million tons of garbage a year — enough to fill an American football field 10 meters high every day.

Like all built environments in the American West, you cannot talk about Vegas without mentioning the element on which its existence depends: water. When I think about Nevada, my mind immediately moves towards that 100th longitudinal meridian first observed by John Wesley Powell in the 1870s. This east–west divide runs from the Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Powell had been commissioned by the government to explore the western territories to see if it were viable to continue carving up and handing out 160-acre parcels for farming and homesteading in the West.

After years of traveling, Powell argued that due to its aridity, it was almost a separate country from the East. A lack of fresh water and rainfall would not sustain high levels of population or intensive agriculture. The government ignored him and, ever since, precious waterways across the West have been dammed, reshaped, exploited and poisoned in the service of progress, development and unsustainable human activity.

The vast Colorado River, the major waterway in the West and Southwest, became the irrigation source for cities and communities springing up in deserts and on arid lands. Its water was so in demand that in 1922 something called the Colorado River Compact was created, which essentially divided the river into two parts, allocating set amounts of river water to the seven basin states. In order for this to happen, the Colorado would need to be dammed. This is where the Hoover Dam comes in, and the creation of Lake Mead. This body of water is called a “lake” but really it acts as a reservoir and a site for recreation. In America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir describes it as

“a large sheet of fake blue water that clashes sharply with the pink rocks. This water is as out of place in the desert as a grove of orange trees on a moor, as a fresh stand of birch trees in reddish sand dunes. It’s an unreal landscape … and it has the deceptive colors of Gauguin.”

Lake Powell (note the ironic name), a reservoir 300 miles away in Utah, is supposed to provide the more northern states with water, but it functions as a holding tank for Lake Mead. No one really understands why we’ve ended up with this set-up. All we do know is that these enormous reservoirs are running out, and at least four million people rely on Lake Mead for their water. There is now a “bathtub ring” running around the rock walls of the lake, showing how much the water level has dropped in recent years.

There is another lake in Vegas that isn’t being drained at such an alarming rate. Lake Las Vegas in Henderson, a well-off southern suburb of Vegas, has its water replenished from Lake Mead. In 2020 it provided 1.2 billion gallons of water to the people of Vegas. Some of this went on golf courses, some for the canals in the Venetian and some went to private residences, like the mansion in Spanish Trails owned by a prince of Brunei, which used 12,327,000 gallons of water in 2020. All this for one single house in the desert.

Back in 2011, after eight years of drought, golf courses started waking up to the problem of keeping their lawns green. In a 2012 article called “Water Hazard” in Golf Course Management magazine, Mark Leslie talks of the water police who can fine you for misusing the precious commodity, and how even watering lawns at the wrong time of day can land you in trouble. He mentions the fact that the evapotranspiration rate in and around Las Vegas is probably the highest in the country and that golf courses in Vegas pay over a million dollars a year for their water. Golf courses are trying to minimize evaporation by making use of the correct nozzles on their irrigation systems and covering remaining bodies of water with something called Aquatain, “a silicone-based product from Australia”. Basically, using Aquatain is a bit like spraying liquid saran wrap onto your pond. According to the company who makes it, it is harmless to people and aquatic life.

Despite the pretence that “much of our waste gets recycled”, most of it ends up in landfill. All across Nevada, the stuff we no longer need or know what to do with has been sent into the desert to be incinerated, buried, left to rot, decompose or, in the case of plastics and forever chemicals, left there to sit out the end of time. It isn’t just the “normal” waste — the Styrofoam cups, chicken bones, water bottles and candy wrappers — that are exiled to the desert near Vegas: there is plenty of the more insidious stuff, the stuff which decomposes over hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Mojave Desert has been blown up, blasted and poisoned by the US military since the first aerial atomic bomb was detonated there in 1951 in a place called Frenchman Flat. There are two tourist reviews of Frenchman Flat: “Not the best hiking spot,” one reads. “Felt nauseous for some reason and now I’m slowly losing my hair. Would not recommend.” A more recent review reads, “Nice hiking spot, felt nauseous but later my muscles started to grow and I didn’t need to wear my glasses anymore. Only annoyance, my skin is getting greenish when I get angry.”

The famous Nevada Test Site, in which Frenchman Flat sits, is about an hour’s drive from the Vegas Strip and occupies an area slightly larger than Rhode Island. Over the span of 40 years, almost a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated here. This land belongs to the Western Shoshone — a fact often overlooked when people talk about the atomic programme in Nevada.

Between 1951 and 1992, nuclear testing on Shoshone lands created 620 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout. As a point of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 created 13 kilotonnes. In a 2020 Al Jazeera article, Ian Zabarte, the Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation, lists the people he knows with cancer — some of whom are toddlers. “Every family is affected,” he writes. “I watched my uncle suffer from horrible cancer that ate away at his throat and my grandfather die of an auto-immune disease that is known to be caused by exposure to radiation. They say he had a heart attack, but when your skin falls off, that puts stress on your heart.”

Incriminating documents were discovered in 1978 in the state archives of Utah. These documents revealed that 18,000 sheep were grazing only a few miles to the north and east of the Nevada Test Site in the early Fifties. None of the ranchers or shepherds were alerted to any dangers before bombs were detonated, and their concerns since have mostly been dismissed. In 1979, The New York Times reported that, after grazing in Nevada, “the sheep were returned to Utah in the spring of 1953” where “ranchers noted that many were sick and dying. Ewes had spontaneous abortions and showed burnlike lesions on the face, neck and ears. The majority of lambs were born dead and stunted, and ewes died either during lambing or a few days later, according to the documents.” Two autopsies on sheep showed that the concentration of iodine-131 — a radioactive isotope — in their thyroid glands exceeded “by a factor of 250 to 1,000 the maximum permissible concentration of radioactive iodine for humans”. None of this was enough to convince the US Atomic Energy Commission that these illnesses and deaths were related to atomic testing.

During the Fifties, Vegas promoted what it called “Atomic Tourism”, with one casino owner declaring that the nuclear blasts were the best thing to happen to Las Vegas. Guests would stay up all night to wait for the spectacular desert sunrise and sip their final highball as nuclear bombs were detonated at dawn. Bikini-clad women jostled for the title of Miss Atomic Bomb. The winner modelled a bathing suit with ruffles up the front emulating the famous shape of a mushroom cloud. It is still possible to experience a simulacrum of all this in the National Atomic Testing Museum, where for a few dollars you can experience your very own imitation bomb blast or learn how to survive an atomic explosion by going beyond the basic “duck and cover” position.

Gone are the days when the Rat Pack and fellow cocktail drinkers would watch atomic testing from the roof of a casino as a form of entertainment, but we are still living in the Atomic Age. The fallout is all around us. Those who grew up downwind of the bomb blasts do not need any of this simulated for them because they are living with the cancers, the deaths and the birth defects. For most people today, the Atomic Age is less of a spectacle or a beauty pageant and more of a slow, poisonous drip, drip, drip.

It took my return to Vegas in 2006 for me to unpick my initial reaction to the place, to put it in the context of a kind of ground truth — the reaction one feels to a place based on observable, or sometimes invisible, information. In my case it manifested physically. Riding in a gondola in the Venetian is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from watching atomic blasts from a casino rooftop. They both spring from the human urge to consume and destroy. Sinking a mojito at the Wynne or playing the slots at the Bellagio is an act of participation in this destruction. Having fun in Vegas is a problem for me. None of it should be here. And that includes me.

***

This is an edited extract from Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

My heart goes out to the producers and retailers affected by this scam; I have only made one or two jokes about organised gangs of criminal Labradors. But wherever the stolen cheese has been taken, the story invites questions. How could cheese have come to warrant a sophisticate heist? Is there really enough of a ruthless, well-heeled underground cheese cognoscenti in Russia or the Middle East to warrant sending tons of stolen cheddar there, as one producer speculated?

And yet it clearly is that meaningful. And this is because artisan cheesemaking — artisan everything, really — has become a paradoxical phenomenon, which turns place-bound rootedness and a meaning-rich life into products, which are then sold at a premium to people who got rich by stripping precisely those qualities from their own and everyone else’s lives.

For the cheesemakers themselves, the meaning of cheese seems to be social as well as gastronomic and economic. One of the affected cheesemakers lamented the way the robbery represented a “violation of the atmosphere of good faith and respect that all of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s trading relationships have personified over the years”. Artisan cheesemaking, he said, is “a world where one’s word is one’s bond”. But considered end-to-end, it’s also true that such high social trust and lovingly craft-oriented communities as artisan cheesemakers rely, for their existence, on wealth that’s often generated by parasitising on exactly that kind of trust.

It’s not a coincidence that Neal’s Yard Dairy is in Covent Garden, the high-gloss, brand-heavy cultural epicentre of the great London economic centrifuge. London is more or less the only economic bright spot in a Britain that would, if you subtracted the capital, have a per capita income on a par with Mississippi, America’s poorest state. The capital makes the lion’s share of its money in services, especially finance, IT, management consultancy, and related professional services. It is also, according to Oliver Bullough, epicentre of our national transformation into the world’s obsequious butler and financial facilitator, in which capacity it offers a large and shady ecosystem dedicated to laundering credibility, assets, property, and dodgy money for the world’s criminals, oligarchs, and tyrants.

The sparkle on the surface of this cut-throat, financialised, and often deeply dodgy economy is the many appealing, appetising, and delicious products available for sale in its retail shops. Such products, especially the gastronomic ones, often place special emphasis on provenance and other intangible values. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs with the mix of aesthetic, moral and commercial vision required to bring such products to the lucrative London market are often drawn from a distinctive subset of the creative class: one characterised by social researcher Louis Elton as  “Bopea” or “bohemian peasant”.

Bopeas have opted to leave London’s dog-eat-dog existence in favour of more “authentic” and usually rural lifestyles, characterised by artisan craftsmanship and a turn away from consumerism. Though the Bopeas had forerunners in the hippy generation and Good Life smallholding efforts, it’s a sensibility that began snowballing in earnest with the Britpopper generation.

Small wonder, then, that artisan cheese is Britpopper-coded. For self-consciously attending to the provenance of one’s consumer goods first became fashionable in the Cool Britannia era, in part as a byproduct of the economic changes this brought. It’s clear that we began collectively attending to the provenance and meaningfulness of our consumer products at the very moment Britain’s economy began its long slide toward the contemporary basket-case model of high finance, rentier capitalism and human quantitative easing. Accordingly, the 2000s boom years brought an efflorescence of organic veg boxes, hand-made homewares, Jamie Oliver of course, and – bringing the whole shebang together – the transmutation of Blur’s bassist Alex James into an artisan cheesemaker and (latterly) creator of a sparkling wine called (what else) Britpop.

Oliver himself is one of the most well-known individuals to have turned this kitchen-table sensibility into a commercial sensation. No wonder, then, that he was first off the blocks condemning the heist, in terms seemingly custom-tuned to the leaden humour of those centrist dads who did well under Blair, and are now approaching retirement with cash to spare for Neal’s Yard cheese: Oliver’s warning to his fans about the robbery cautioned them against taking up under-the-counter cheese deals that seemed “too gouda to be true”.

Nor is Oliver the only such Bopea success. The fashion brand Toast, for example, was started out of a Welsh farmhouse in 1997 by two pioneer Bopeas, emphasising natural fibres and small-scale artisan production. The clothes themselves (full disclosure: I’m a fan) are pricey, and — we might say — pair well with Neal’s Yard cheese. And the brand’s success in turn reveals the bigger paradox: the website celebrates craftsmanship, “slow” production and a “circle” ethos, and there are free repairs and clothes-swapping services. Meanwhile, though, 75% of the company’s shares are now owned by Bestseller, a conglomerate that also owns Vero Moda, a “fast fashion” brand whose ethos is, to say the least, the antithesis of the Toast sensibility.

None of this is a criticism of Toast per se, or any other Bopea lifestyle brand. Nor is it to be the gotcha guy in the Matt Bors webcomic, insisting you can’t critique the social order while also participating in it. It’s simply to observe that the ostentatious accretion of “ethical” credentials for real-world products tends, in Britain’s postmodern economy, to be offset by the strip-mining of those values for profit in other domains.

Everyone is familiar with the experience of returning to a familiar, trusted brand — say, a high-street pizza chain — only to discover that what used to be a great middle-class product has become rushed, overpriced, and shoddy. The usual culprit is private equity: predatory firms that will acquire a brand, cut costs ruthlessly, usually to the detriment of whatever made the products popular in the first place, and then sell the hollowed-out shell on a few years later having trousered the difference. High-end brands are often better placed to survive this phenomenon; trusted mid-tier ones are regular prey for this kind of looting. And the aggregate effect is a thinning of the middle ground, between high-end brands for the wealthy and shonky ones for everyone else.

For every Toast, there’s a Vero Moda; the cheese equivalent is hand-made small-batch Britpop cheese on the one hand, and on the other the Plasticine bricks you get in your local Londis. Those scouring the mid-range for reliable quality, meanwhile, find the field increasingly bare.

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Does it matter? Well, everyone still gets cheese, of one kind or another. But what grates is the hoarding and artful aestheticisation of “meaning” itself as a consumer product. If we take “meaning” as a crude shorthand for a nexus of goodwill, effort, commitment, and interpersonal relationship that adds up to basic good-quality products and services at a reasonable price, in effect this productisation of “meaning” and “authenticity” as consumer goods comes at the cost of its draining away from the rest of the world. The real cheese robbery already happened, some way upstream of the scam that defrauded Neal’s Yard last week.

But again, perhaps this is all just revealed preference. Britain’s food chain industrialised a long time ago, and while commentators may lament the loss of localism and meaning and so on, if more of us really wanted to be involved in that kind of production we’d already be doing so. In the meantime, I’m glad someone is hand-milking rare breed herds and doing regenerative farming and organic batik and all the rest of it. The world is surely a friendlier and more interesting place for all the Bopeas doing cheese deals on trust; maybe the best we can hope for is their continued patronage by the meaning-hungry private equity class.

So perhaps the meaning of artisan cheese is simply that it exists at all, as a flavourful monument to Britain’s refusal to give in to nihilism. However ambivalent the larger economy that enables it, what it stands for is little slivers of meaning: those aspects of life that people actually care about. Qualities such as belonging, craftsmanship, skill, tradition, and trusting relationships may all have been transmuted into products, to be sold in slices or stolen by the truckle. But we don’t really need to know what the cheese means, to know it matters.

I was not a child, they said: I shouldn’t be playing with toys. But they eventually relented, handing me the amount they would have spent on presents — $200 — and telling me I could do whatever I wanted with it. So off I set for my spree, taking my six-year-old sister with me. We circled around the store again and again, arrived at a provisional list, deliberated carefully over what might be substituted for what, mystifying the employees — upon whom it slowly dawned that the pile of toys growing on the counter was intended not for my sister but for me. I asked for each one to be wrapped individually.

I have such a vivid memory of this experience — the avaricious thrill of thinking that almost anything in the store could be mine, the absurd freedom to possess things of which I had absolutely no need — but I do not remember what I ended up buying. I cannot name even one toy I purchased that day, and I do not know whether any of them are still with me. It was on this day, on the eve of adulthood, that I approximated the ideal of consumerism, the frenzied mania that is the pure joy of shopping.

Much later, I read some books by social scientists that sought to explain this phenomenon. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, for instance, Thorstein Veblen explains that “conspicuous consumption” is a way of signalling that one is above engaging in productive labour: “A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort.” In The Affluent Society, Kenneth Galbraith lays out what he calls “the dependence effect”, which is that capitalism reverses the relationship between production and desire. Instead of producing things in order to satisfy people’s antecedent desires and needs, a wealthy capitalist society has an antecedent commitment to production, which means: “It accords to the producer the function both of making the goods and of making the desires for them.”

All of that made some sense to me, but I was unsatisfied, feeling that phrases such as “conspicuous consumption” and “dependence effect” obscured as much as they revealed. They didn’t explain the powerful drive that animated me in the toy store, versions of which I continue to feel to this day when I shop. But then I read a novel by Émile Zola.

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The Ladies’ Paradise — Au Bonheur Des Dames — is named for the department store that is the novel’s true protagonist. It is described alternately as a monster, a machine, a colossus, a cathedral, and over the course of the novel it grows — in power and influence, in financial success, and in physical size, as it expands along the street to swallow up the small businesses that had flourished in the neighbourhood for generations. The fictional store and its fictional owner, Octave Mouret, are based, respectively, on Le Bon Marché, one of Paris’ first department stores, and the businessman Aristide Boucicaut, who grew a 3,000 square foot novelty shop with a handful of departments — buttons, lace, ribbons, umbrellas — into a 55,000 square foot colossus that sold everything. Zola carefully researched the business practices detailed in the novel: the replacement of haggling with fixed prices, the use of advertising, the introduction of returns and sales and discounts, the giant displays to encourage window-shopping, the routine rearrangement of the store to confuse customers into spending more time within its walls. The author’s journalistic eye for detail takes the reader back in time to watch something new coming into being — a new type of desire, a new set of human relationships, a new form of life. We witness the birth of shopping.

It is very hard not to be a moralist about capitalism. Veblen and Galbraith fall into the trap: one can hear the distaste in a phrase like “conspicuous consumption”. And these days, we are so accustomed to the word “capitalism” being followed by moralism that it comes as a shock to encounter Zola, who wants to talk to us about economic growth, about the lust for luxury goods, about the power of advertising and the many guises it can take, about the mannerisms of rich shoppers and the working conditions of the poor people who serve them — and yet doesn’t want to preach to us about any of those things. He wants to show you the splendours and the horrors of something; he wants to help you understand.

The novel is filled with lavish descriptions of stuff, ecstatic prose poems to fabric — silk, in particular — to colour — white, in particular — that awaken the reader’s own acquisitive impulses. These encomia are so compelling that I found myself thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to have those buttery soft gloves, that colourful parasol, some Alençon lace! And so, when one reaches the descriptions of the heated frenzy of the crowds that descend on the store to strip it of its wares like locusts, one doesn’t view these people from a refined, superior, judgmental distance; one locates oneself among the throng, having become, alongside it, one of the store’s fervent admirers.

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But of all the novelists I have read, Zola is least likely to hide the ugly truth. He is brutally direct in showcasing the damage wrought by The Ladies’ Paradise. You are introduced to the artisanal work of the umbrella store owner, who carves handles into animal shapes by hand — only to be forced to watch him squeezed out of existence as Mouret’s shop surrounds him. In a different subplot, a generations-long tradition of handing a shop down from parents to children is suddenly and permanently severed, and you see the violent effect on all those whose lives were predicated on its continuation. One by one, such people try to “stand up to” Mouret; one by one, they fail. One person attempts suicide; a second wastes away from sheer sadness, which causes a third to waste away, too. Even those shopkeepers who escape the net of death manifest such a strong insistence on “going down with the ship” that one cannot help but conclude: their lives are over.

If we turn our attention inside the store, to those who “benefit” from its existence, the horrors are equally many. The saleswomen are trapped inside it, forced to eat the terrible food offered in the cafeteria and sleep in unheated rooms where they nearly freeze to death in winter; if they wish to leave, even on a day off, they need permission. These women had few employment alternatives, so apart from room and board they were at first only paid on commission, and lived in terror of being fired — turned out onto the street, with nowhere to go. The result is a cut-throat, competitive atmosphere among the sales force, which contrasts sharply with the atmosphere of the small family shops, where the good of one is the good of all. When it comes to the customers, Zola shows you how the store’s irresistible attractions inflame their greed, inducing them to spend more than they can afford, and driving even “respectable” women to shoplifting.

For all the suffering it causes, the Ladies’ Paradise is a place of passion, filled with energy. The people inside of it may be a bit crazed with the desperation to buy, or the desperation to sell, but they are noticeably alive, when juxtaposed with the surrounding neighbourhood, which reeks of darkness and decay. And this, in the end, is the sharpest contrast in the novel: between the lively, colourful world of the department store, and the stagnant and despondent world outside of it. As much as you empathise with the umbrella store owner, there is no question as to which way the future lies. What Zola showcases about capitalism is that it is a powerful source of optimism, of momentum; and that people, once they become wealthy enough to attend to something other than survival, need some such engine. The difficulty that he implicitly raises for any alternative to capitalism is not the usual one, about efficiency: how will the system be organised in such a way as to avoid poverty for all? It is instead a motivational difficulty: assuming it does avoid poverty for all, what will move and inspire and incite those people?

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Zola wrote the kinds of novels critics love to trash, which is to say, the kinds of novels people actually enjoy: a contemporary journalist described him as “the most violently attacked and the most widely read author of his generation”. Zola understood that ordinary readers read for the plot: for romantic tensions, reversals of fortune, character-testing crises. The Ladies’ Paradise comes complete with a plucky heroine — and a will-they-or-won’t-they love story that keeps you turning the pages.

Nonetheless, all of that is secondary. Zola, who lived at the time when social science was beginning to come into its own as a field of research, could be described as the novelist who moonlit as a social scientist. This is why Havelock Ellis, a pioneer in the study of sexuality, wrote: “To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint is scarcely to see him at all.” When Zola is telling a story, he’s not only telling a story. While he has your attention, while you’re held in suspense over the heroine’s fate, you find yourself examining the inner workings of this colossus, this department store; you become captivated by its power. And slowly, over the course of the novel, you find yourself confronted by an uncomfortable thought.

The thought is precisely what the TV adaptation of the novel steers you carefully away from. The BBC’s attempt is remarkable chiefly for how systematically it erases the brutal truths that saturate Zola’s text. The store is a fraction of the size depicted in the novel; we never see frenzied crowds; there is no shoplifting, no seasonal firing of employees; no one is driven to purchases she cannot afford; apart from a few “bad seeds”, the employees are loyal and friendly to one another; and when the neighbourhood shops stand up to Mouret (here renamed “Moray”), they retain their dignity and achieve some measure of success. The show is set not in Zola’s rapidly changing world, but our fantasy of the time that preceded it.

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We are living in the world Mouret made, but we don’t want to accept it. We like to imagine ourselves surrounded by hand-carved umbrella heads; we continue to find the image of that artisanal old world comfortable, appealing and familiar. In other words, we find the real world — the one we actually live in — somewhat terrifying and alien. We don’t have an intuitive understanding of capitalism, of the desires it creates in us, of the relationships it throws us into. We don’t understand why we like shopping, and often pretend that we don’t. We will come up with an excuse as to why we “have to” buy something. Dating profiles tell us that people love to travel, or read, or hike, never that they love to shop. When a hobby requires expensive gear, this often makes it secretly more appealing — a reason to shop! — not less. The fact that these secret urges are now driving the show: that is the uncomfortable thought.

For all the imaginative pleasure we take in the reassuring smallness of Moray’s shop, when it comes to actual shopping, we choose more and more of Mouret. After rejecting the small store in favour of the department store, we rejected the department store in favour of the shopping mall, and the mall in favour of Amazon. We willingly move deeper and deeper into a world that doesn’t feel like home, that maybe never will. And it is Zola who offers us a front row seat to the opening act of this drama, a chance to watch the new world rising from the ashes of the old, a chance to come to terms with the creatures that we have become.

A glance at the Radio Times schedules at the time of writing demonstrates the hegemony: a daily array of mostly quiz-based formats, running from lunchtime onwards: Countdown, The Finish Line, Tipping Point, The Chase, Pointless, Richard Osman’s House of Games, Popmaster TV. Of these, only House of Games is celebrity-only. TV quizzes are apparently democratic: civilians get to appear on the screen. We can all access our 15 minutes on a quiz show. They are a spectacularised form of open combat for the age of the knowledge economy. And the apogee of the form is that great British export, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 25 years young this month and the quiz-show-format-colossus. Bestriding the globe, it is made in 107 different territories and in more languages besides (there have been nine different language versions for Indian audiences alone).

I must confess an interest: over two episodes broadcast on 31 July and 7 August 2021, I appeared in series 36 of Millionaire, winning £64,000 — 20% above the average, which is £50,200, but that doesn’t account for those who don’t make it into the chair. Much too late for an evening with Chris Tarrant, I was instead interrogated by Jeremy Clarkson, who seems self-referentially informed by this sense of zero-sum competition. Who better to test contestants than a presenter who has nurtured a pugnacious, gloves-off public image, a Seventies denim dream of unleashed masculine libido? In deference to the high-capitalist information economy that governs its mechanism, he’s encased in a suit for this gig. Plus, it helps that he increasingly resembles an Easter Island statue reimagined as a totem to Mammon.

But, for those who have experienced Millionaire, the Clarkson face-off is the last round in a long process. And perhaps one of the most under-sung aspects of the show, and certainly its most ruthlessly competitive, is the fastest-finger-first round, in which contestants compete for the opportunity to play for money by being the fastest to correctly order four options, hitting buttons on a keypad. Of six contestants per episode, only a maximum of three make it into the chair. The most likely outcome is that you go home with your travel expenses in a brown paper envelope. Millionaire is, like most TV quizzes, a game of chance, jeopardy structural to its success.

It represents the perfect distillation of the quiz form that was honed over the 20th century. The whistle-stop history is that it transferred from radio to TV in the early 20th century, with the first quizzes being BBC spelling contests for school children. Unconstrained by such Reithian ideals, the commercial US market rapidly developed new formats geared towards prizes which, with the creation of ITV in 1955, were copied over here. The $64,000 Question, adapted for the British as The 64,000 Question, crossed the Atlantic in the Fifties, awarding a carefully rationed top prize of 64,000 sixpences.

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Postwar consumerism, of course, is the economic base to this cultural superstructure. Goods and cash have not only formed prizes, but also the content of the knowledge required. Think of the memorisation conveyor-belt round in The Generation Game or the explicit consumer-good valuation games Sale of the Century and The Price is Right. As this indicates, one key to the success of the quiz format is its ability to hybridise, most obviously by combining the requirement for knowledge with elements of chance, but also with other, more atavistic forms of competition. Take The Krypton Factor, which required contestants to be able to complete assault courses and challenges of co-ordination as well as answering questions. Or Blind Date which, despite its entertainment window-dressing, was a competition for a partner. Should we ignore the evolutionary resonance? I think not.

As has been argued since Joseph Huizinga’s influential thesis Homo Ludens (1938), play is a constitutive aspect of human society. “The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”

Competitive play is, in short, an essential human activity, predating civilisation. Despite the fact that its rewards, in strictly economic terms, are minimal, we take time off from more materially-rewarding activities to play, and always have. But what is curious about TV quiz shows in their contemporary manifestation is that they don’t completely satisfy Huizinga’s description. They are materially rewarding. Indeed, they’ve given rise to an entire professional class of “quizzers”, people like the cool-as-ice Judith Keppel, the first million-pound-winner on British Millionaire, who subsequently enjoyed an extensive career as a chaser on The Chase. Far from idle play, perhaps we should recognise appearance on quiz shows as a form of labour. Certainly in the context of the TV quiz, trivial knowledge is not simply cultural capital — a form of capital which values knowledge accrued in categories admired by bourgeois society — but the key to delivering actual capital.

It’s no coincidence that the quiz show format has grown in parallel to the development of tertiary economies in the developed world, as post-industrial nations have increasingly traded in and valued information as opposed to goods. The skills required by quiz shows are information-economy skills — quite literally hitting keypads fast, being able to calculate approximate probabilities on the fly, a working knowledge of game theory, co-operating with others. Until co-operation is no longer required, of course, at which point clear decision-making and/or ruthlessness might be required. The Weakest Link made this process structural to its gameplay, as contestants were required to identify the poorest performer for expulsion and use the elimination mechanism for pruning the competition. Millionaire is similarly a perfect reflection of its time: a game for the individual, with some concessions made to co-operation in its lifelines.

The most exciting of these is the phone-a-friend lifeline. Believe me from experience when I say that this is also the most fraught — who of your network of acquaintances would you trust not just to know an answer you don’t, but not to over-estimate their knowledge? Who would you forgive if they lost you half a million pounds? Since the advent of the internet, the phone-a-friend lifeline has also become a significant logistical undertaking for the show. Typically, each contestant has two phone-a-friends. With two shows filmed a day, six contestants for each, at any one time there are 24 security guards at residential addresses around the UK watching assorted acquaintances and soon-to-be-disowned friends who may or may not receive a 30-second phone call. And the possibility of cheating is in fact the single-most co-operative aspect of Millionaire history. Ruthless competition for large sums has prompted a number of collaborative efforts to win, most famously Major Charles Ingram, convicted in 2003 of “procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception”. But there are also syndicates that have formed to provide professional quizzers with phone-a-friends in return for a share of profits.

Millionaire is, then, the exemplary manifestation of late-capitalist economic ethics, a product of the deregulation of prizes in the late-Nineties, which had previously been limited by the Independent Broadcasting Association to the “value of a small car”. As the number of millionaires in Britain exploded, making money quick on the markets or online, every pub-intellectual wanted a shot. And Millionaire displays an aesthetic that perfectly reflects this new political economy. Think gladiatorial arena for the computer age: the circus maximus via Tron. The contestant and quizmaster sit on three-foot-high Pietranera Arco All chairs, an LG computer monitor before each, in the pit of an amphitheatre which houses the audience in seating high above. The colours are black and neon blue, with shards of blinding silver and gold. Contestants have to wear bright colours so that they don’t disappear into the background, and zany patterns fritz the cameras.

This aesthetic is now ubiquitous across prime-time TV, having been imported into the high-octane Syco world of talent shows and idols by British-born set designer Andrew Walmsley, who designed sets for the illusionist Paul Daniels when he was 15. Walmsley, who now lives in Vegas, wanted to shake up the staid appearance of previous quizzes: “They were still using video walls made out of plain glass TV screens, instead of the flat plasma screens. It was so Eighties-looking.” A doff of the cap also to the composers of the music beds, father-and-son duo Keith and Matthew Strachan. The sound is designed so that its rhythm mimics a heartbeat, while the pitch increases by a semitone for each subsequent question, the music getting higher in line with the stakes. A pyramid scheme of sound and fury and trivia.

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Where does the viewer sit in all of this? They are a voyeur. For an essential element in the playing of the quiz — the jeopardy of getting an answer wrong — has its obverse in the voyeuristic mockery of failure. We experience this most keenly in the reality hybrid game shows that have flourished post-Big Brother. But it was a phenomenon noted as early as 1962 in the Pilkington Committee Report which described watching a quiz as like “watching one man in a large arena being baited”. It’s something we like to watch, just as the Romans liked to watch the circus.

However, the baying mob at the contemporary circus are not in some Colosseum, but safely ensconced in their isolated homes, the spectacle a media-networked communion between siloed viewers gathered at an online water-cooler. As Guy Debord’s fourth thesis informs us: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Those images — chains of ones and zeros — become the units of exchange in a spectacularised society. The producers duly pump them out as gifs on social media, and I treasure mine. I read the Twitter comments responding to my appearance with wry amusement (“the poundshop John Barrowman” is a moniker I’ll happily have etched on my gravestone). And is there a German compound word for being nevertheless flattered by obvious catfishing?

The quiz show viewer can mock the contestant, participate in the quiz with none of the jeopardy, or even roll the dice themselves. Without even leaving the comfort of their sofa, they can text to enter one of the many prize lotteries that proliferate around ITV quizzes. Because what is being a participant in late-capitalism other than taking part in an astronomically high-odds lottery? Perhaps they might even sign up for a 3000:1 chance of participating in the spectacle of Millionaire, momentarily seizing for themselves the means of information.

That isn’t to say that it has been an easy ride. Britain’s first lockdown seriously dented drug dealers’ freedom of movement, and their supply has been hit by a number of significant domestic and international drug busts. In the world of narcotics, at least, the past year will no doubt come to be remembered as an era of stockpiling, increased prices and lower quality cocaine as dealers “trod” heavily on their wares with more cutting agents — not to mention the resulting boom in the cannabis market.

Yet in many ways, today’s itinerant drug dealers, able to roam from door-to-door, are perfectly suited to life in lockdown — and that’s a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Once upon a time, punters, users, abusers, junkies and “nitties” (those itching, scratching, semi-feral addicts) had to venture out of their homes and scurry off into the night in search of a little dope.

In the early eighties, when I was barely a teen, I had a friend who wanted to score some weed and made me traipse with him to a “shebeen”, or illegal drinking club, operating out of a dingy squat in Stratford, East London. The place was occupied almost exclusively by Rastas who were either smoking big fat spliffs or selling tiny bags of weed. My pal, despite still being in his school uniform, scored a £5 bag containing a few buds, twigs and seeds and rolled a crappy joint. I took a puff of it, coughed my guts up, pulled a “whitey” and ran out of the gaff as paranoid as hell to the toilets in Stratford Shopping Centre, where I locked myself in a cubicle until I calmed down.

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The Mafia is thriving in lockdown

By Tobias Jones

In seventies and early eighties London, Rastas were to selling weed what the Royal Mail was to postal delivery services; they had a near monopoly on the trade, certainly at street level. In the absence of hydroponic technology, globalisation and, it must be said, what would become the British public’s penchant for exotic and eclectic highs, weed was a cottage industry with deep roots, and routes, to Jamaica. Anything stronger was the preserve of bohemians, the clubbing elite and the rich and famous. Even then, unless you were well-connected or in the entertainment industry, if you wanted drugs you needed to go out of your way to get them.

But in the decades since, Britain’s love affair with narcotics has taken on a whole new meaning. According to the Home Office’s latest figures, roughly three million people took recreational drugs in England and Wales last year, with around 300,000 in England opting for opiates and/or crack cocaine. In terms of valuation, the illicit drugs trade is worth an estimated £9.4 billion a year — which makes it larger than the UK music industry (£5.2 billion) and gaming industry (£2.9 billion) combined, and with an annual turnover bigger than several major high street chains, including Boots (£6.7 billion) and Primark (£5.9 billion).

Given that chronic weed, amphetamine and cocaine use appears to be as British as a Sunday roast, it’s no wonder that, in recent years, enterprising foreigners have moved into the UK drug market, “sniffing” easy money to be made. Indeed, thanks in part to the EU’s obsession with freedom of movement, its porous borders and, it must be said, our police forces’ flawed racial profiling which dictates that only black people sell, buy and consume drugs, Eastern European dealers have been able to force their way into a lucrative market.

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Eastern European dealers sussed early on that consumption is Britain’s metier, and they made hay with it. While scrawny British inner-city “hood rats” thought riding around on stolen scooters selling crack was a major step-up from dealing on street corners and council estate stairwells, Serbian and Albanian dealers were taking orders on WhatsApp and Telegram encrypted messaging services and delivering to punters’ doors in modest, but comfortably air-conditioned saloon cars. These dealers innovated the use of social media, with many advertising flash sales and “buy two, get one free” offers to regular clients, using price differentiation to offer “standard” and “premium” cocaine. Most importantly, they offered a reliable, consistent and relatively risk-free service.

In other words, they run their “phone operations” like businesses, rather than trap house outtakes from Top Boy. This contrast in modus operandi between Eastern European and native drug dealers is down to what you might call a differing account of “psychological subjectivity”. In other words, if you don’t think and act like a drug dealer, you won’t get caught like one.

Only last week, for instance, the Metropolitan Police publicised an operation it led which resulted in 154 arrests in London relating to County Lines activities: Officers “were also proactively on the look-out for suspicious activity in their efforts to tackle violence, the Met’s top priority,” it added. Two operative words here, “suspicious” and “violence”, provide a clue as to why Eastern European dealers have been so successful; they were, for a long time, absent from their crime narrative in Britain.

Just as with stereotypes surrounding the Italian mafia, Jamaican Yardies and Chinese triads, the image of the black-clad Bond-villain Russian invariably springs to mind when we talk about any criminal east of Berlin. But while Eastern European gang members are no strangers to violence, many of the dealers I’ve spoken to are singularly focussed on doing their job, and therefore distance themselves from any violence which may attract unwanted attention. Our conversations are usually prosaic: about football results, their children back home and, increasingly, how the traffic congestion caused by the closure of some bridge over the Thames is affecting their delivery times. If anything, Eastern European dealers in London operate more like Uber than the Barksdale Crew from The Wire. 

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Drugs and the Celtic dysfunction

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And since lockdown, this work ethic has made it easier for them to adapt. One dealer I know is pretending to be a more orthodox “essential worker”, wearing a hi-vis jacket and driving around in a van as a cover. Others have changed their shift times, now usually working from just 4pm-6pm or weekends only. Some have even upped sticks and left the UK altogether, putting their phone operations on a skeleton staff until the much-anticipated summer boom.

One of the savvier young London dealers I know — who recently escaped a county lines operation after a “nitty” held him up for his stash with a hypodermic needle, and was then nearly stabbed to death by the gang he now owed money to — has gone “freelance”. He bought a scooter and uses a Deliveroo box as a cover story to sell crack, a move that’s become so common that the Met have started to randomly “stop and search” delivery bike riders.

More recently, though, the Met — perhaps realising that it could prove more fruitful — has decided to target the middle-class drug trade. When I worked as a producer on the Channel 5 documentary series Gangland, a constant refrain I heard from dealers was that gentrification is contributing to Britain’s ever-expanding drugs market. The Government certainly agrees; last week, it was revealed that it plans to launch a middle-class “information campaign” to make “snorting cocaine as socially unacceptable as drink-driving”.

Certainly their value to dealers cannot be underestimated. Aside from being spendthrift, reliable and creditworthy, middle-class punters are mavens when it comes to spreading the word about who’s got A-grade cocaine or ecstasy. If you’re a dealer, being able to boast that you have doctors, lawyers and media types in your contacts book is certainly a nice marketing touch. After all, the bourgeoisie love nothing more than knowing they’re in good company, even if they are contributing to a trade that results in Mexican gang members being decapitated every now and again.

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Lockdown won't end the war on drugs

By Anthony Lowenstein

I learned just how valuable middle-class coke users are during the 2019 general election. Having got wind of a high-profile political client who was being “served up” by the friend of a source, I attempted to broker a deal with one of Fleet Street’s finest for the story. But at the last minute, the drug dealer baulked at my offers of fame, fortune and the opportunity to change the course of British political history. “Bro, it ain’t worth it,” he told me. “He’s my best customer.” When it comes to middle-class dealing, discretion is key; another reason why the professionalism of foreign dealers sells itself.

Just days before lockdown, The Sun reported that “London has become a hotbed of international criminals – from Albanian cocaine kingpins and African street gangsters to Turkish Cypriots”. When I asked an old source in the East End scene if this was yet more tabloid bluster, he simply said: “I moved to Essex to get away from that shit. Now they’re moving in here. You can’t compete with them.”

In some ways, I suppose it’s to be expected that a capital city of nine million people has its fair share of foreign dealers — just as it has its fair share of foreign businessmen. And with the UK bracing itself for the end of lockdown restrictions this summer, no doubt these “essential” workers are already preparing for the inevitable narco-bonanza that will follow.

Thanks to the publication of a new, tightly-argued and rigorously theoretical study from the University of Chicago Press, I now have a word to describe the contents of the kitchen drawer. “Crap,” writes Wendy A Woloson, “is not a particular object but an existential state of being.”

Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America describes how we have learned to endure, accommodate and sometimes cherish the shortfall between our desires for slackly manufactured objects and the limited satisfactions they provide. “An object’s relative crappiness,” Woloson argues, “lies in the extent to which it offers false hope, was produced to hasten its own obsolescence, has no clear purpose, and/or has no emotional, utilitarian, or market value.” Her prose forms a Generation Game conveyor belt of tat: boob-shaped mugs, Hair-in-a-Can, chipboard bookcases, ceramic tributes to Princess Diana in gold vermeil and dishwasher-proof porcelain.

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Enough with the crazy talk, Eamonn Holmes

By Matthew Sweet

The success of such products can sometimes be a mystery to its manufacturers. I once interviewed the exploitation film-maker Herschell Gordon Lewis, a mild-manned mountebank best known for Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), a stalk’n’slash version of Brigadoon. In the early 1970s he left the movie business to make a proper fortune selling collectible souvenir crockery. “They are my natural bastard children,” he told me. “First we did a 12-plate series based on the Book of Genesis. It was so successful that in six months we were on to Exodus.”

The power of the object is outré and mysterious. During lockdown, it compelled me to blow the cost of a good night out (remember those?) on a successful auction bid for a box of Peter Wyngarde’s cufflinks. It has driven me to preserve a Doctor Who chew bar from 1982, which has now entered a state of deliquescence that could only be remedied by Lenin’s embalmers. It is the reason why I can spend a good hour hunkered over a penny falls machine, rolling dirty tuppences in the hope of dislodging a gonk.

Such acquisitions would make Marie Kondo jump on a chair and scream, but I think Karl Marx would have understood the impulse. “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” he wrote, in the first volume of Capital. “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

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By Polly Mackenzie

It may be getting queerer. Marx’s commodity fetishism — the idea that manufactured objects carry an occult charge — thrives online. Wish.com, founded by the Warsaw-born billionaire Peter Szulczewski, is its temple of doom. Here, users can scroll through images of three billion reasonably priced but mysteriously unknowable objects, many of which seem to be the product of some as-yet-undeclared school of avant-garde art. A five-foot long bolster in the shape of a pig’s trotter. A sunflower-seed dispenser with a slot for your mobile phone. Pastry cutters that would allow the gingerbread man Kama Sutra to be your Bake-Off showstopper. Plastic earthworms that smell of fish. Penis shaped wineglasses. Penis-shaped anything. All for a few dollars each, plus postage and packing.

Who buys this stuff? Who makes it? Having no need for a bumless mankini or an $8 angle grinder, I’ve never used Wish. But I did once order some T-shirts from a pop-up ad on Facebook. They looked great on the catwalk model in the picture, but when they arrived, three months later, they turned out to be made of a vinyl material that smelled like a tent from the Early Learning Centre. They are, of course, under my bed in the original wrapping. Posting them back to China and trying to extract a refund would only extend and complicate the misery of the original transaction. It may be that such objects only exist because their sellers have made a calculation about the appetites and apathy of their buyers. Perhaps, in a re-education camp in Xinjiang province, Uighur inmates are breaking their fingernails stitching these garments, which will never be worn, but are mailed west and then despatched to landfill as part of a mechanism for converting clicks into cash.

Its sound like capitalism’s final and most grotesque mutational form, but it has a precedent. Woloson traces it back to the burgeoning consumer culture of the 18th century, but she also finds commerce of this kind where I first encountered it — the back pages of 1970s American superhero comics. The strip stories at the front offered colourful adventures involving radioactive spiders and invisible planes. But the weirdest weirdness happened in the small ads at the back, where boy voyeurs used X-Ray Spex to undress the lady next door, and Sea-Monkeys — pinkish, smiling creatures with crown-like antennae and fan-shaped tails — sported in front of their underwater castle home.

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Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

Those who actually sent their money discovered that X-Ray Spex contained feathers that made the viewer see blurry black lines that few would mistake for the real internal structure of the lady next door. Sea-Monkeys were brine shrimp mailed out in their dormant stage, from which, if you were lucky, they would revive, and go skittering about in a little tank. The man who patented both these products was Harold Braunhut, a former stunt motorcyclist whose other lines included the invisible goldfish — which was an empty glass bowl marked “invisible goldfish” — and a telescopic whip that he direct-marketed to the white supremacists of the Aryan Nation. There’s crap, and then there’s racist crap.

Is it possible to wash it all away? To live a life unencumbered by trashy, dubious and flimsy objects? In 2001, the artist Michael Landy performed a heroic and punishing experiment upon himself. The cataloguing and destruction of all 7,227 of his possessions. He shredded his passport and birth certificate. He broke down his clothes, an artwork by his friend Tracy Emin, and assorted kitchen drawer flotsam — batteries, copper coins, key-rings, plastic cutlery, felt-tip pens. A few years later, his appetite for divesting himself of objects not quite sated, he kindly gave me a copy of the inventory — a bound volume with the heft of a mid-century experimental novel. Along with most of my books and papers, its in the lock-up where I keep all the things I don’t have room for in our flat. There it sits, in storage, waiting to be part of a comfortable, book-lined life that, like most unpensioned participants in the gig economy, I’m pretty sure I’ll never be wealthy enough to have.

“Crap,” writes Wendy A Woloson, is “deeply revealing, laying bare in ways that nicer things cannot some of our deepest desires, drives, and anxieties: our crap, our selves.”

My access to the kitchen drawer remains unimpeded.

In 2017, Theresa May interrupted her enemies by calling a snap general election. And, yes, they were making a mistake at the time. Mrs May even said what it was when she made her fateful statement to the nation: the determination of the Remain parliament to block Brexit.

As we now know, the attempt to overturn the referendum would bring together a new coalition of voters in 2019. But in 2017 it was still too early to bring matters to a head. The hardcore Remainers had yet to fully demonstrate their contempt for democracy. The snap election diverted the public’s attention to other matters that had very little to do with Brexit — and on which the Conservatives were ill-prepared. The Government lost its majority, and the PM her authority.

But then something extraordinary happened. Almost as soon as the election campaign was over, the Remainers resumed making their mistake! Instead of seeking to influence the terms of Brexit, they went all out to undo it. That gave Boris Johnson his opportunity. Far from interrupting his enemies, he allowed them to advance — moving further and further away from ‘respecting the result of the referendum’. By the time another election became inevitable, it couldn’t be about anything but Brexit.

The result was an interruption that the Conservatives could benefit from — an interruption not to the enemy’s mistakes, but to something much more important: the underlying pattern of British politics.

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Did this election change anything?

By Peter Franklin

As I’ve argued before, the British party system is unusually stable. In every election for almost a century, the Conservatives have come first or second, and Labour second or first. Every Prime Minister has been either a Tory or a Labourite. For all the complications, the fundamental choice (in England at least) is red or blue. For a lot of the electorate that hasn’t just meant picking a side, but also sticking with it — in many cases from generation to generation.

Hence those seats — especially along the Red Wall — that demographically should have gone blue long time ago, but which stubbornly stayed red. Until, that is, Brexit pushed a new choice — Leave or Remain — to the front of voters ‘ minds. For the first time in generations, the red/blue pattern of politics was interrupted, creating the space in which people could do something new.

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We tend to think of political change as being either evolutionary or revolutionary. In fact, the same mechanism is used to explain both: the dialectic. This is a repeating three stage process consisting of the thesis (the established way of thinking), the antithesis which the thesis comes into tension with, and the synthesis which is the outcome of that tension. The synthesis then becomes the new thesis and process starts again. Various ideologies have dialectical accounts of change, not least the dialectical materialism of the Marxists — in which different class interests come into conflict, producing revolutions that push history to next stage until communism is finally achieved. Then there are the fuzzier, non-Marxist versions of the dialectic that are more about resolving conflict, achieving justice or advancing knowledge than revolutionary struggle.

Either way, it’s all about the new challenging the old and thus propelling history in some sort of forward direction.

Even conservatives can find themselves accepting a dialectical view of change — seeing their role as being to slow things down so that we don’t charge off in the wrong direction. Or, as Bill Buckley put it, a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling ‘stop!'”.

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But what if that’s not how it works? What if the real force for change in history isn’t revolution or progress — but interruption?

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To understand why this might be, we first have to understand that old, established ways of doing things are actually much more dynamic and powerful than new ideas. That might seem counterintuitive — and certainly not what we’ve been led to believe — but think about it: continuity over time depends on some sort of forward momentum.

All sorts of things can give the established order the power to persist. Most obviously, it occupies and follows the path of least resistance — people tend to do things that they’re used to doing. Compared to doing something different, it requires less thought — and sometimes no thought at all.

But there’s may be more than mere inertia at work. A tradition is a living thing, animated by custom and practice to preserve, propagate and elaborate the collective know-how of an entire society. That’s powerful stuff and it actively resists disruption — using shame, ostracism and taboo just like an immune system uses antibodies to defend self against non-self.

As human beings, we’ve also developed the ability to invest in a long-term course of action. We defer gratification and avoid distraction, because to change direction could mean losing our investment or at least putting it at risk in ways that were never planned for. This is another force for continuity.

Indeed, the interest that people acquire in a course of action isn’t just limited to the hoped-for end result, it’s also present in the activity itself. To be the one who sets something in motion and keeps it moving along is to establish one’s relevance. It is you who becomes the story. It is for you that other people work. It is through your hands that money flows — and information, influence and patronage.

While ideologues may seek power in order to ‘do something’, the reality of politics is more often one of people doing something in order to gain power. Which is why governments keep on doing the same old thing whether it works or not; as long as it keeps on delivering power to the same old people, the other outcomes are secondary.

Finally, I’ll mention what may be the most powerful force for continuity: copying. We may like to think of ourselves as innovators, but most us of us are imitators. It’s what makes us so successful as a species, we don’t have to individually and independently invent each and every new thing — we just copy from the creative minority.

As René Girard taught us, copying is also competitive — we want things for no better reason than that other people want them. In a world of scarcity, success therefore means having — and being seen to have — more than what other people have. Thus imitation as competition is not just a force for continuity, but hyper-continuity — of things becoming more exaggerated versions of themselves, even to the point of the absurdity. Nowhere is this more amply demonstrated than in the world of fashion. Consider, for instance, the periwig.

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Test article

By Jack Hutchison

Have you ever wondered why it was that European men in the 17th and 18th centuries wore wigs? I don’t mean wigs as in the surreptitious concealment of hair loss (which continues to this day), but as an adornment for its own sake. It all started in the early 17th century, when it became the fashion for young men to sport long curly hair. The ageing process does terrible things to the male hairline and so artificial substitutes were adopted by those whose natural endowments had let them down, but who could afford the services of a wig maker. The periwig thus became a symbol of wealth and status — which may endure longer than fleeting youth. In which case, the more obviously wiggy the wig the better. Over time, these constructions became increasingly elaborate (as satirised in William Hogarth engraving The Five Orders of Periwigs) and also involved the use of special powders to whiten or colour the hair.

It seems extraordinary to us today that people should have gone to these extremes of unnecessary effort and expense. But such is the self-propelling force of the established order. Even the most bizarre and frivolous concepts can generate overwhelming momentum once they become rooted in the soil of practice and precedent. In comparison, a new idea is an insubstantial thing — a dandelion seed floating on the wind, unrooted in anything that might nourish its development. 

Being sold on notions of progress and enlightenment, we imagine that history proceeds on the basis of a battle of ideas — of thesis and antithesis. But the struggle between old and new is not between one idea and another, but between solid practice and vapid theory and in most cases that’s no contest at all.

Even the best ideas — that is to say, the true ones — can go ignored. We love the story of the emperor’s new clothes — because it tells a  story in which truth triumphs just by being told. But the bitter irony is that this is a fairytale. In reality, the truth can be told, and heard, and yet make no difference. The Five Orders of Periwigs, published in 1761, was truth in the form of satire — and yet wig-wearing would go on for decades longer.

New ideas that succeed on their own merits, challenging and changing the old order by virtue of their content alone are exceptional. As Tom Holland shows in his masterwork Dominion, Christianity is one of those rare examples — changing societies long before (and after) the ruling class claimed the Christian faith as the source of their authority.

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But apart from these occasional bolts from the blue, what changes history is not the old order challenged by the new — but the old order interrupted so that something else can take root in the space left behind.

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Looking back over history, these interruptions often take the form of war or natural disaster. For instance, the Great Fire of London allowed a new London to rise from the ashes. The baroque splendour of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, as we know it today, replaced its gothic predecessor. (However, it’s also worth noting that the city’s medieval street plan was retained — and not for lack of contrary proposals from eminent persons. But what were these mere ideas compared to the practice of established property rights?)

The destruction wrought by the Second World War is another example of how interruption can bring about change — though, in this case, not for the better. The postwar planners and architects transformed the urban landscape, but that wasn’t just down to the force of their ideas. In fact, their schemes — such as Le Corbusier’s plan to rebuild Paris — were thankfully frustrated before the war. But, afterwards, in those cities where bombing had destroyed the old order, the modernists finally got their way. It wasn’t long before we realised what a horrible mistake that was, but that’s the thing about interrupting the old order — it gives new ideas their chance, including really bad ones.

That was certainly true of the First World War — which brought about the end of empires. We retrospectively edit history to present the successor regimes as the inevitable embodiment of challenger ideologies whose time had supposedly come. But the reality was messier. In Russia, for instance, the Tsarist regime was brought down by crushing military defeat — allowing a wide variety of revolutionary movements to contest for power. It was certainly not all about the Bolsheviks. In the elections of 1917, they won less than a quarter’ of the vote. Nevertheless, Lenin seized power because, amid the chaos, his forces happened to be in the right places at the right time. Other communist revolutions — for instance in Germany and Hungary — did not luck out and were soon defeated.

War can bring about peaceful change too. There doesn’t even have to be a power vacuum for someone to step in to. The interruption of the normal routines of life can be enough for people to re-think what it is they actually want. That was certainly the case in the British general election of 1945, whose 75th anniversary was last week. Winston Churchill offered continuity, but Clement Attlee offered a New Jerusalem. Labour had offered radical change before the war too — but at no point was that enough to deliver them a majority let alone a landslide. The War, however, was a sufficient interruption to how things used to be as to make change inevitable. Labour, as the party that recognised that fact and offered a coherent vision as to what that change might be, was thus ideally placed at war’s end.

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All of our most important elections have followed significant interruptions. Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in 1979 followed the Winter of Discontent. The New Labour landslide in 1997 was made possible by Black Wednesday, which had ended the Conservative’s reputation for economic competence. And, then of course, there was 2019 — an election won on a promise to complete an interruption (“Get Brexit Done”).

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And so we come to 2020, where we find ourselves living through a much bigger interruption than any of us could have imagined. Whether things return to normal is a matter of if not when.

Having had our habits broken for us, we’ve been given pause for thought. And that’s allowed us to ask ourselves that most dangerous of questions: ‘what’s the point?’

The point of work, of course, is obvious. The point of commuting, though, the point of the office — well, that’s a different matter. We went through the motions, conformed to the pattern because that’s what everyone else did. Lockdown, however, showed us that another way was possible.

Indeed, we may be surprised by the extent to which some things change. Universities, for instance, are under threat as young people — and especially overseas students — wonder if there’s not something better and less expensive they could be doing with their lives. Not even schools can assume their indispensability. In America, there are signs of growing interest in alternative ways of educating children. The teachers’ unions are quite properly concerned for their members’ safety, but they shouldn’t play too hard to get. Interrupting established ways of doing things can have unintended consequences.

The most dramatic transformations may be to our culture of consumption — and hence to our basic economic model. 

While some people still struggle to cover basic necessities, it’s also the case that we’ve never consumed so much that we don’t need. This an era of luxury and not just for the very rich. Millions of households have a second or third car… or take two or three foreign holidays every year. It’s become unexceptional to spend £1,000 on a mobile phone, when a £100 would be sufficient; not everybody does of course, but there’s enough who do to support a mass market. 

From fast fashion to McMansions to long-haul flights, our excessive consumption sits ill at ease with our green pretensions. But we didn’t think about the contradictions, because we were too busy copying what everyone else was doing, wanting what they wanted. 

But having been taken off the hedonic treadmill by lockdown, we now have a chance to wonder whether it’s worth the bother and expense. Like our wig-wearing ancestors, we might just conclude that, no, it really isn’t.

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Have I become a bourgeois cliche?

By Giles Fraser

Scylla was a absolute horror who lived on one side of the Strait of Messina. With six heads, each on a long neck, she’d reach down and pluck unfortunate sailors from passing ships. Charybdis lived on the other side of strait, but underwater. She really sucked — generating a whirlpool to capsize entire vessels.

The gruesome twosome feature in the Odyssey. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, has to navigate the strait — twice — and only just survives.

Like all myths, the story works on a number of levels. There’s the story itself, of course — and monsters are always good for a ripping yarn. Then there’s the super-naturalisation of things in the real world; in this case, the two fiends personify the shipping hazards of razor-sharp rocks and treacherous currents. Most important, though, is the deeper meaning — the moral of the tale.

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By Daniel Kalder

Scylla and Charybdis — ‘the devil and the deep blue sea’ — symbolise the complexities and dilemmas of risk. In life, there’s often more than one danger to watch out for. Veering away from the first can take you too close to the second.

An added level of mythic meaning is that the two monsters are not mirror images of each other. The danger posed by Scylla perched high upon her rock is much more obvious than that posed by Charybdis submerged beneath the waves. This too is of contemporary significance.

Take, for instance, the extremes of Left and Right in modern politics. There are many asymmetries between the communist and fascist systems. Both are essentially totalitarian, with a blood-soaked history, but some of the evils of one can appear to have no parallel in the other. This is a reason why those repelled by the most characteristic features of communism have sometimes veered too close to fascism — and vice versa.

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Politics is full of bad ideas that come in pairs — to navigate our way between them we need to be aware of both. An increasingly important example is that of workism versus a tendency which I’m going to call anti-workism (though you could see it as a kind of consumerism).

In a brilliant essay for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson provides the following definition of workism:

“…the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

Examples of the workist policy framework include the push to get people off welfare and into the labour market, the raising of the retirement age, state subsidies and tax breaks for childcare to get parents (especially mothers) of young children back into paid employment ASAP, and the expansion of the workforce through large-scale immigration.

Even policies that, in the short-term, shrink the size of the workforce, such as the expansion of higher education, ultimately serve a workist purpose — i.e. supplying the so-called knowledge economy with a steady stream of suitably qualified new recruits. Of course, there’s plenty of talk of education for its own sake, but the cost of tuition and the accompanying burden of student debt is sold on the basis of the ‘graduate premium‘ — a thoroughly workist proposition.

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Freud would know why we're all workaholics

By Giles Fraser

Workism may go hand-in-glove with hyper capitalism, but it cuts across political lines. Left-leaning Millennials and Post-millennials flock to global cities because that’s where the best employment opportunities are. For some, opportunity equals money. But for many others ‘meaning‘ is equally, if not more, important; which is why employers, especially in the creative industries, can get away with unpaid internships and other forms of exploitation. Alternatively some industries, such as management consultancy and corporate law, will pay top whack for the brightest new talent, but will use that money to own their employees’ lives, insisting on long hours in the office plus the electronic leash of the smartphone.

Of course, technology can be used to exploit low paid workers too — digital platforms serving to control a workforce without the responsibility of formally employing it.

*

I don’t want to overdo the dystopianism here. Workism works out for a lot of people and not only those at the top of the tree. It’s certainly preferable to mass unemployment. Nevertheless, our economy, society, culture and politics have become so centred around workist ideas that it’s not surprising that we see a reaction in the form of anti-workism.

This has several strands. There’s the obvious-because-it’s-true argument that there’s more to life than work. If family and community life are being sacrificed to the demands of the labour market — or even basic needs like sleep — then clearly that’s not good.

Then there’s the Marxist critique — which views wage labour in a capitalist society as exploitation. More recent intellectual developments on the Left, such as accelerationism, anticipate and advocate a post-work society in which machines replace workers and a benevolent state meets our material needs — leaving us to occupy our days with macramé or something.

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By Peter Franklin

This fever-dream isn’t exclusive to the Left. Ideas such as a universal basic income paid by the state to every citizen are finding favour among centrists too and even a few conservatives.

The problem with the idea of a post-work society is that despite all the automation, globalisation and immigration we’ve already experienced, most western countries (excepting the victims of the Eurozone) are at, or close to, full employment. Some, like the UK, are experiencing record levels of job creation.

Therefore, a more mainstream form of anti-workism forgets the science fiction and concentrates on present-day issues such as stagnant wages, low pay and poor working conditions. One might think that the obvious solution to these problems is a programme to boost wages and opportunities in the workplace. For instance, through investment in productivity-improving factors like skills and infrastructure.

But instead of emphasising work, the contemporary Left in Britain and America emphasises consumption. Labour’s 2019 manifesto was a case in point — with its high profile offers of state-provided free stuff, like free broadband. (Significantly, the most notable work-related policy was for a transition to a four-day work week, the priority being placed on less work not better work.)

The Right has its own version of enhanced consumption as compensation for rubbish jobs. Unlike the Left, however, the Right’s consumerist offer relies on the market to (literally) deliver the goods. It’s all about cheap stuff, if not free stuff, and nothing must stand its way: domestic markets are left unprotected; offshoring is encouraged; infrastructure spending subsidises global supply chains; the embedded carbon in imports is left unaccounted for; and the tax avoidance of the tech giants is ignored while they disrupt the economy. As long as we get our smiley cardboard boxes, everything’s fine. So shut up about that pay rise, peasant, and enjoy your flatscreen telly.

*

So there you have it: workism and anti-workism — the Scylla and Charybdis of the 21st century economy. Because they present conflicting narratives — work-is-everything versus work-is-for-robots — it is easy to recoil from one and fall into the grip of the other.

How then do we navigate between them?

Firstly, we need to move beyond the idea of work-life balance as if work and life are entirely separate things. They ought not to be. Yes, the potential exists for work to crowd-out the other parts of life but it can enrich them, too — and not just materially. For instance, places of work have a vital role to play as generators of social capital. They ought to be, and often are, community institutions — which is why the damage done by the collapse of industries isn’t only economic.

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Secondly, we should reject the compromise position that divides society between people who ‘live to work’ (and therefore might benefit from workism) and people who ‘work to live’ (and therefore need anti-workism). With very few exceptions everyone needs a life outside work and work in their lives. We must not allow work to become a positional good — a blessing only to a lucky few.

Thirdly, we need to be aware that while workism and anti-workism appear to be opposites, they actually feed off one another. Tech lords such Mark Zuckerberg may flirt with the idea of Universal Basic Income, but until that distant day comes they need us in jobs earning money so we can buy their stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the knowledge class and thus supposedly about to be replaced by a robot, you must work to consume.

If, however, you are in the knowledge class, then it’s the other way round: you must consume to work. That’s because you can’t devote every waking hour to your job without buying support services that free up your time (e.g. taxis, restaurants, childcare, cleaning and laundry services, to-the-door deliveries and all rest of it). To maximise this capacity, service workers need to be cheap and plentiful, which in turn requires the state to provide enough free stuff to make their low-paid, unsatisfying jobs bearable — and their lives in overpriced global cities feasible.

*

Scylla and Charybdis always were partners in crime. But somewhere, beyond their reach, there is the prospect of a very different society.

Whether it would be richer, in aggregate, I don’t know. But it might be happier.

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How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

All year, we’ve had striking school children and Extinction Rebels tell us that time is running out and that we must take radical action now. They’ve made themselves heard and the politicians are pretending to listen: “OK, Zoomers — we’ll stick up a few more windmills — now, run along back to class.”

But according to environmentalists like George Monbiot, that’s not nearly enough. Clean tech alone won’t save the planet — we have to drastically reduce our consumption too. That way we can kick our fossil fuel habit much sooner, plus all the other ways in which we mess up our world. In short, our lifestyles are unsustainable, no matter how we power them. It’s an argument he sets out in his compelling Confessions interview with Giles Fraser (he also makes his case here).

What would 'living with less' actually look like?

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OK, let’s assume that things are every bit as bad as Monbiot says they are. Let’s also assume that people would vote for the radical reduction in consumption that would be required to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. You may think that deadline unrealistic, but it does allow us to ask an interesting question: what would living with less actually mean?

Extinction Rebellion swerves the question by referring it to the ‘citizen assemblies’ they want established. Other campaigners, including Monbiot, focus on the extravagantly wasteful appetites of the wealthy — whose private jets and grotesquely oversized yachts have got to go. Then there are the full-on Savonarolas, who look beyond the lives of the rich and famous, to humbler folk. They want us to give up our cars and stop eating meat, pronto. As for all of our stuff — the gadgets, trinkets and fast fashion — that too can fuel a modern bonfire of the vanities. (Though not literally, considering the emissions.)

In short, living with less means minimalism, veganism and bicycle-friendly cities — plus a hefty dose of egalitarian politics. From a youthful, Left-leaning, metropolitan point-of-view that doesn’t seem too bad. Rather agreeable, in fact.

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Who will ride the Green wave?

By Peter Franklin

Except that actual de-consumerism would be a lot harder. We know this because we’ve done it before. Go back 50 years and we were living with less; and a hundred years ago, even less than that. So, let’s use the past as a rough guide to the future.

The first thing worth noting is that a lower level of overall consumption does not require economic equality. Quite the opposite in fact. Rich people tend to spend a lower proportion of their money than the rest of us. Indeed, that’s one of the problems with the current age of inequality: because they tend to sit on their cash piles, millionaires and billionaires act as a drag on consumption and therefore economic growth. The conventional Left argues for more redistribution on the grounds that it would boost consumption. However, that goes against the logic of radical environmentalism. A seriously green agenda wouldn’t just need to re-invent capitalism, but socialism too.

In any case, it’s not the Gulfstreams and Daimlers that are making all the difference. It’s the era of mass mobility that’s put such a burden on the planet — all those millions of cars and billions of air miles. Lifting that weight from the world means rolling back freedom of movement for the many, not just the few. Access to affordable air travel and the private car would have to be heavily restricted.

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As well curbing emissions, this would change society. The history of liberalism goes hand-in-hand with the history of transport — specifically the individual’s ability to physically escape the ties of family, community and place. We wouldn’t have to sacrifice all our gains, of course. There’d still be room in the new dispensation for bicycles and buses (indeed a great deal more room, with cars off the streets). Nevertheless, by limiting our options for getting around, we’d be shrinking our horizons.

“Think global, act local” is an old environmental motto. But in a less mobile society, would we continue to think globally? After all, it’s hard to be a citizen of the world if you can’t get there. We’d have to forget foreign holidays, wave goodbye to the gap year: luxuries that our ancestors couldn’t imagine would become unimaginable again. Moreover, what applies to tourism and travel would also apply to migration. A globalised economy that depends on millions of workers moving back and forth across continents doesn’t fit with a living-with-less regime.

There might, however, be a new source of labour. Or, rather, a return to an old one as colleges and universities were emptied of their students. That so many young adults today can study for so many years is a sure sign of our great wealth, but would it survive the economics of ‘de-growth’? I doubt it.

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Who gains from the great university scam?

By Mary Harrington

Another relevant pattern from the past concerns family structure. One of the reasons why people were able to live with so much less is that social bonds were stronger and a whole lot more restrictive. The only welfare state was the household and, perhaps, the immediate community — which is why our forebears couldn’t afford to be as socially liberal as we are.

Some environmentalists see fit to lecture people on the number of children they have. And, fair enough, each extra mouth places an additional burden on the environment; but then so does living in ever-smaller households so that the same population requires a greater number of resource-consuming homes. Learning to live with less would mean learning to live together — at the expense of personal autonomy.

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How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

It’s hard to think of a single stable society that lives with much less than we do that isn’t much more conservative than we are. Take attitudes to crime and punishment, for instance. These are typically harsher in places and times where the impact of theft and vandalism is more deeply felt. A simpler, less consumerist society may appeal in theory to the green Left; in practice it may prove more pleasing to the reactionary Right.

But, hang-on, a de-consumerised future wouldn’t have to mimic the pre-consumerist past, would it? Though we’d need to make difficult choices, we could prioritise the things that mattered most to us. Indeed, part of the attraction of this whole agenda to radicals is that the process of priority-setting would allow society to be reordered in keeping with their values.

Perhaps, but if the climate emergency does compel us to change our ways, democracy won’t allow one side of the cultural divide to load most of the pain on the other side. We saw what happened in France when President Macron tried to introduce a fuel tax that hurt the left-behinds more than the well-connected. So if we do need to radically cut our consumption, those in the forefront of the cause are going to have to accept that the sacrifices will be as painful to them as to anyone else.

For an example of the latter, you could do a lot worse than read a recent Morgan Housel essay for the Collaborative Fund. In a mere 5,000 very accessible words, Housel offers his hot take on the last 73 years of American economic history – diagnosing the ills of contemporary capitalism along the way.

In the first two or three decades after the war, he says it was all going rather well:

“The defining characteristic of economics in the 1950s is that the country got rich by making the poor less poor.

“Average wages doubled from 1940 to 1948, then doubled again by 1963.”

Housel puts this success story down to the combination of a “hidden productivity boom” dating from the 1930s and a consumer boom following the war – neatly matching demand to supply as production switched back to peacetime needs.

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By Charlotte Pickles

It is true that credit greased the wheels of the postwar economy, with the government keeping interest rates low (and interest on borrowings tax deductible). However, a lot of that easy credit went into expanding home ownership. Moreover, with healthy wage growth, debt levels did not rise beyond manageable bounds:

“Household debt to income today is just over 100%. Even after rising in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it stayed below 60%…”

But it couldn’t last. The inflationary shocks and rising unemployment of the 1970s derailed the old model, clearing the way for a new kind of economy. There was an apparent return to the good times from the 1980s onward, but with an all-important catch:

“The biggest difference between the economy of the 1945-1973 period and that of the 1982-2000 period was that the same amount of growth found its way into totally different pockets.”

In the first period, the proceeds of growth were evenly shared across society, but not so the second. Housel quotes figures from the Atlantic:

“Between 1993 and 2012, the top 1 percent saw their incomes grow 86.1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent saw just 6.6 percent growth.”

Curiously, slower wage growth did not stop ordinary consumers from continuing to consume. As before, credit bridged the gap – only this time pushing up debt levels without the counterweight of rising incomes or the spread of asset ownership.

The build up of unsustainable debt is a familiar criticism of this period, but Housel links it to another fundamental difference between the two models of post-war consumer capitalism. What distinguished the two eras wasn’t just the sustainability of household debt, but what it was used for.

In the first period (i.e. before the crisis of the 1970s) credit-fuelled consumption was about universalising access to a mainstream, modern lifestyle. Housel emphasises the equality of postwar “lifestyle and consumption expectations” and sets it in contrast to the consumer culture of more recent decades (i.e. the 1980s onwards). This was, and is, shaped by a stark inequality of expectations. Instead of promises of a home everyone can afford, our gaze is drawn to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Of course, such lifestyle are ultimately unattainable for the great majority (which is what makes them so tantalising), but we can be sold tokens and approximations, designers labels and fakes. We may resent the social stratification of it all, but we also buy – and borrow – into it.

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Housel is surely on to something here, but I’d add another big difference between the two eras. The consumer culture of the 1950s and 60s is notable for the sheer usefulness of the new consumer items on offer. Together they enabled a productivity revolution in the home, which, among other things, allowed many more women to take up paid employment. The advertising of the period – the pristine housewife showing off the sparkling new household appliance – is today a cursed image, an icon of sexism. The irony is that these mod cons liberated people – and women in particular – from the drudgery of life before the fridge, the washing machine and central heating.

Unlike the must-have items of the post-war period, the geegaws of our own era are notable for their uselessness. It is the bling of luxury, not the sparkle of modernity that is dangled before us. With the very partial exception of some IT products, there’s been no equivalent to the domestic productivity revolution of the 1950s and 60s. Instead we’re buying stuff we really don’t need. Of the many killers facts that pepper Housel’s essay my favourite is that the “average new American home now has more bathrooms than occupants”.

In fact, in buying into the semblance of privilege our capabilities have been diminished. Junk food has made us fat and unhealthy; smartphones distracted and lonely; credit cards anxious and broke.

Ultimately, there are limits to how much debt we can shoulder, which is why in 2008 the whole system crashed. And yet instead of ushering in a new model of capitalism (as was the case with the crisis of the 1970s), we appear to be repeating familiar mistakes. I wonder if that’s the pattern we’re now stuck in: envy-borrow-spend-crash.

I wish I could share Housel’s tentative optimism when he says that “economics is the story of cycles. Things come, things go.”

But how do we shift into a new cycle? Without the return of sustained and widespread wage growth, and, just as crucially, the breakthrough products actually worth spending money on, how does consumer capitalism start working again?

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Who will take on the undeserving rich?

By Deborah Hargreaves

When it comes to what the Millennial generation are doing with their cash, there’s a lot more than bland commercial interest going on. Indeed, there’s a touchiness to the whole subject – indeed, implications of economic, cultural and political disruption.

This stems from the likelihood that many, if not most, Millennials will be poorer than their parents and already are poorer than their parents were at the same stage in life. It’s an unsettling development for a culture that had taken it for granted that each new generation would be richer than the last.

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Another great driver of change is technology – if economic insecurity provides the reason for a radical shift in consumption patterns, then digital goods, services and markets provide the means. Many sectors have been disrupted already, not least the media businesses who publish anguished articles about what young people will and won’t pay for.

With so much at stake – and such obvious tension between the generations – it’s not surprising that silly stories, like the one about Millennials not saving because they spend too much on avocado toast, blow up into major controversies.

But when not being accused of extravagance, Millennials face charges of miserliness – indeed of opting out of previously normal features of adulthood such as buying a house, starting a family and even sex. If the first duty of the capitalist citizen is to consume and produce new consumers, then Millennials are going AWOL.

Writing for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson says there is a reason why 20 and 30-somethings are holding back:

“…the fact that young people are buying fewer houses and cars doesn’t prove that they want fewer houses and cars. It might mean they simply can’t afford them. That latter conclusion is now supported by research from the Federal Reserve.

“Fed economists found that the depressed rate of homeownership among Millennials was entirely about income and affordability… controlling for income and employment wiped out all generational differences.”

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By Peter Franklin

Let’s start with the most obvious squeeze on Millennial living standards – the cost of housing:

“According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, the typical sale price of an existing single-family home in 2017 was 4.2 times greater than the median household income; that’s 30 percent higher than in 1988. It’s even worse in some cities. “

Over much the same period we’ve also made it much more expensive for them to get an education:

“Millennials are the most educated generation in U.S. history to date. They bought into a social contract that said: Everything will work out, if first you go to college. But as the cost of college increased, millions of young people took on student loans to complete their degree. Graduates under 35 are almost 50 percent more likely than members of Gen X to have student loans, and their median balance is about 40 percent higher than that of the previous generation.

“And what has all that debt gotten them? ‘Lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth,” according to the Federal Reserve paper’s conclusion.’”

How’s that for a double-whammy?

So the reason why Millennials aren’t saving and/or splashing the cash isn’t because they’ve combined the worst habits of the spendthrift and the skinflint, it’s because they’re too busy paying the rent and paying off their student loans.

Noting the markedly Left-wing politics of this generation, Thompson asks “is it any wonder that Millennials are eager to overthrow a system that has duped them into a story of permanent progress, thrown them into debt, depressed their wages, separated them from the trappings of adulthood…?”

An excellent point, but I wonder if there’s that much of a difference between the neo-socialist promise of more free stuff from the state – and what neoliberal politics has offered to older, richer voters.

Think about the huge and lightly-taxed accumulation of property wealth – or the inflation of asset values caused by easy credit policies and quantitative easing. That too is ‘free stuff’ for those old enough and fortunate enough to hold wealth.

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By Charlie Pickles

The great achievement of neoliberalism, globalisation, automation and all the rest of it has been to lower the costs of production. Stuff has become cheap and a lot of digital stuff is free. Capitalism has produced abundance beyond our ancestors’ dreams. Unfortunately we’ve allowed those who control economic bottlenecks like land and educational accreditation to extract far too much of the value that capitalism creates.

The next generation of consumers have been left with too little to provide the demand that is the essential counterpart to supply.

“Outstanding household debt in China equalled 45.5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the first quarter, according to the Bank of International Settlements, compared to 27.9 percent five years ago.

This understates the growth of household debt, because the figures don’t include loans from online providers – a big deal in China:

“Online consumer lending in China, of which cash loans are a significant portion, dwarfs similar activity in the rest of the world combined, accounting for over 85 percent of all such activity globally last year…”

To make matters worse “nearly 40 percent of Chinese households lack savings”. This, puts China in the same providential league as America, which, as Megan McArdle explains in a piece for Bloomberg, is not a good place to be:

“The number of people scraping along from paycheck to paycheck is astonishing; surveys routinely find that somewhere between a third and half of all Americans don’t have the savings to fund ordinary emergencies – a moderately large repair, a month with no income. These are not the kind of astonishing runs of bad luck that no one could realistically expect to cover, like a $100,000 medical bill, or a multi-year illness that makes it impossible to work. They’re just the normal vicissitudes of regular life, and somehow, Americans are unprepared.”

America’s wage stagnation doesn’t help, yet previous – and much poorer – generations seemed to manage. Arguably, that is because they lacked the financial alternatives that are available to us now:

“…it’s a lot easier not to save than it used to be. The refinement of credit rating and the relaxing of state regulations that often made it hard to extend credit has resulted in much greater access to borrowed cash than my parents had when I was born… widespread credit has certainly made it somewhat easier for people to scrape by without a rainy day fund, or even any cash in their pocket at all.”

As McArdle points out, that’s fine until you run out of credit – or find yourself forced to pay the sky-high interest rates of the sub-prime credit sector.

Still, it’s interesting that in countries as different as America and China, the growth of household debt appears to be a supply-led phenomenon – i.e. if you offer people credit, they will take it (despite being richer than their parents or grandparents).

McArdle blames a consumerist arms race – most households borrowing not to fund basic needs, but to keep up with the Joneses (or the Changs). She especially blames parental spending on children – e.g. by paying for expensive hobbies, for private tuition or to move to the best school districts. This is a waste of money, she argues, because “bright, motivated kids” are going to do pretty well for themselves anyway:

“Yet parents can convince themselves to spend near-infinite amounts seeking marginal improvements.”

Smarter parents might realise this, but they don’t want to be seen as doing without the things enjoyed by other families:

“It’s the mother of all collective action problems: If all the parents agreed at once to stop this mad arms race, everyone could breathe easy and have a more secure life.”

It’s almost as if some form of community institution is required, one which brings families together outside of a commercial environment, and where non-materialistic values come first.

I wonder what sort of place that could be?

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By Michael Burleigh

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” [1.  This and other quotes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, helpfully curated by Jane Carruth at goodreads.] – Alice in Wonderland

The market economy did pretty well for us in the 20th century. Companies produced stuff from cars to record players, and consumers got increasingly savvy about quality and price. About our rights. And about shopping around among competing products. We read Which? (UK) and Consumer Reports (US) and consumerism the movement was born.

Then something weird started to happen: the digital revolution.

We fell down the rabbit hole with Alice into Wonderland, and everything started to look weird.

In the beginning was Kindle

Amazon suddenly started offering us digital books – no need to trek to the bookshop, just buy and download!

But “buy” needs to be in quotes. A Kindle book won’t fill your bookshelves, but there are other things you can’t do with it. You can’t sell it, you can’t even give it away, because of course it isn’t really “yours.” You’ve really just borrowed it – or, rather, the right to read it. OK, you’ve rented it. While it looked as if Amazon had come up with a new way to enable you to buy books, what it had really done was re-create something from the 19^th century – the lending library where you have to pay.

Curiouser and curiouser

While you have to pay to rent books on Kindle, there are plenty of digital goods for which you pay nothing at all. That seems wonderful. Something for nothing! But, as the old saying goes, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. (An old saying we could do with reviving in the digital era.)

The biggest problem is this: when it comes to “free” digital goods and services, because you aren’t using your credit card or getting monthly bills you tend not to think of yourself as a “consumer” at all. You’re just a “user” – a word the digital industry likes –or a “member.” To be a consumer you must buy things, don’t you, with money?

Actually, no. All it takes to be a consumer is to make an exchange, a transaction in the market-place. One of the curiouser ironies of the digital industry is its core business model, which takes us back to the days of primitive societies. They didn’t have cash, yet they still had transactions. We’re back in the history-book concept of barter. I’ll trade a dozen eggs for your chicken.

Barter is trading that doesn’t involve money. Its revival lies at the heart of the digital economy. And it’s one reason barter-based companies like Facebook and Google and many smaller ones are so hard for governments to regulate. Or for consumers to take seriously as companies.

What’s the trade-off?

So, users of Facebook and Google rarely sit down and ask themselves “how much am I paying to post these pictures, or ask these questions?” We just fire up our browsers and jump in. Of course, there are costs involved in our doing so – we pay for broadband cable or some other access to the internet. But we know we aren’t paying for the services we use. Are they some sort of charity?

What we need to be asking ourselves is, Where do these huge corporations make all that money?

There are three kinds of answer. One is simply advertising. Facebook and Google are sucking up more than half the ads on the internet, and the internet is steadily sucking ads from print and other real-world locations. We see ads and we assume this is how we are paying – and we may also know that for a century and more this is how newspapers have operated: the cover price has only covered a fraction of the cost; the rest comes from ads.

But here it’s a lot more complex. Because this is less about ads than about data. Everyone opening the New York Times sees the same ads for Macy’s department store and BMW and Givenchy. No two people using Facebook will ever see the same ads. Because these companies are sucking up enormous amounts of data about their users, analyzing it in ever more complex fashion, and using or selling it to shape our purchasing decisions. If you ask Facebook for all the data they have on you and you’re a typical user, it will run to well over one thousand printed pages.[2.  A well-known case that brought this to light is that of Austrian law student Max Schrems. Kevin Parrish, “User’s Facebook Data Request Produces 1222 Pg PDF on CD.”]

As Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jeff Hammerbacher famously put it, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” And that’s why mathematicians, who write the formulae that turn your raw data into ads that will make you buy, are in such demand.[3.  Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different” Bloomberg, April 14, 2011.]

But there’s a third way to answer the question, and it’s even more disturbing: If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. That is, the service you are using is profitable because it sucks up your data and uses it to target ads at you and everyone you have ever known.

Put it like that and it’s a bit more obvious that these really are big businesses, and we really are consumers who pay for what we get.

Alongside the “free” stuff like Google there are also many digital goods and services for which we actually do pay – for example when you buy software like Microsoft Word or download Apple music or movies from Netflix. In many of these cases we’re doing both: paying cash, and also paying in data.

Those “privacy” statements

If we’re paying in data, do we have any say in how much data they take?

Those “privacy” statements that we sign giving permission to companies to search our phones and sell our data are the key. They’re separate from “privacy” settings – on Facebook and other sites – when you can decide how much of your stuff you want other people to see. These are take-it-or-leave-it contracts that rarely give you any choices and hand over your data to the company.

What’s a consumer to do?

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
– Alice in Wonderland

There’s one obvious change in the law that could turn the weird world of digital goods into something that better resembled the consumer market-place we understand. We could require companies who seek our data – either as the price of service, or as part of it – to offer a cash alternative. We could require them to give us a consumerist choice.

Facebook for $10 a month – and all your data stays with you? Google for $20, same conditions?

Suddenly we’d all realize we were dealing with huge corporations that make money off us. And we’d be free to make a choice – as to whether we want to buy the product or be it too.

***

READ MORE: Ashlee Vance’s Bloomberg article from April 14, 2011, gives a brilliant insight into the data-ad process by telling the story of a mathematician who started early at Facebook.