Open letters claim to restore moral clarity; but too often they spread confusion. Open letters purport to express obvious truths; but recent events have highlighted the worrying tendency of the genre to be hijacked for counter-productive ends: to express obvious non-truths, for example, or — and this can be worse — non-obvious non-truths.

Some of the foregoing dangers are, we believe, inherent in the collective epistolary form itself. The trick, in crafting the perfect open letter, is to give maximalist expression to a minimalist position. Authors of open letters need to be selective enough in relaying the background “facts” of their case so as not to alienate potential signatories: these are celebrities we’re dealing with, remember, and therefore natural free-thinkers. At the same time, one has to give the letter enough moral phlegm to make it worth clearing one’s throat to put one’s famous name to it. 

The result — you might call it Maier’s Canting Theorem — is that the assessable argumentative content of an open letter is inversely proportional to a weighted average of the fame and number of the celebrities whose names are appended to it. In the place of explicit reasoning, in the course of which a position’s flaws and vulnerabilities are all too liable to be exposed, the reader of an open letter is treated to broad moral pronouncement, rendered in a high-committee prose style, and which tends to veer towards melodrama and alarmism. 

Needless to say, we, the undersigned, feel this chilling trend poses an existential risk to democracy, harms the most vulnerable in our society, and is likely to eradicate life on Earth as we know it.

OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for… pic.twitter.com/QLQel0EC7N

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) October 21, 2026

Connoisseurs of the open letter have by now probably seen the above-described defects recently on display in the public tangle that The New Statesman has got itself into. In a letter whose length is robustly predicted by Maier’s theorem — being really more of a tersely-worded postcard with 158 signatures — the magazine denounces as unconscionable the recent “censorship” of the novelist Sally Rooney. 

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The facts of the case are well-known. Among the political causes close to Rooney’s heart is Palestine, and a group called Palestine Action. Rooney has pledged to use royalties to support the group — despite the fact that it was lately sanctioned as a terrorist group by the British government, making funding them an offense. We, the undersigned, cannot help but conjecture that Rooney might have got away with her wheeze — were it not for the fact that she announced her intention to break the law in advance, and in a manner almost designed to attract attention. Given the legal jeopardy, at any rate, Rooney’s publisher at Faber has decided, with the author’s consent, to suspend sales of her novels. 

Now, we do not wish to take a collective stand on the controversial question of whether Rooney’s silencing omens a sinister curtailment of the right to free speech. We only wish to note that, if a novelist’s right to free expression includes a guarantee that others must cooperate in activities which the author loudly declares will be used to raise funds for terrorists on British soil, Rooney may well have a complaint.

It is one of the rhetorical liberties taken by open letter writers that they sometimes pass off caustic jibes as concessive praise. We only wish to add, then, that the Statesman’s own letter exhibits, rather brilliantly, one further trick common of the form: that of smuggling in inflammatory speculations to the extra-epistolary text, which the signatories themselves might have preferred not to be implicated in. In this case, there is a somewhat daring analogy attempted between the fates of Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Just consider, we are invited to reason: both write novels; both have had trouble selling them in Britain at one time or another; both… have the initials “SR”? (At some point, the brainstorming exercise takes a slightly feeble turn.) 

Still, we note that one further peculiarity of open letters is that, once they begin to attract enough ink below the line, they inevitably tend to be judged as much on the basis of those who notably fail to sign as on the basis of those who do. (That may be more a “feature” than a “bug” of the genre: the creation of an implicit cost to withholding assent being part of the form’s coercive effort to organize public thinking). Notably, though presumably he was invited to, Salman Rushdie did not sign.

These quagmires give only a merest hint of the varied trouble open letter writing can lead to. Though they pretend to give a voice to suppressed truths, too often they simply echo a preachy moral consensus. Though affecting nuance, their inevitably coarse-grained rhetorical style is a standing disinvitation to detailed engagement. Even well-intentioned interventions — the famous 2020 Harper’s letter championing free speech — can undermine their own cause in subtle ways. Having spent so much time throat-clearing about the threat of “right wing demagogues”, “Donald Trump”, and slavishly assenting to the need for more DEI, the Harper’s letter may have done more to underscore the inescapability of a woke consensus than it did to oppose it.

Or consider — if you can bear to — the glaringly avant-garde approach that Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project takes to his open letters. One recent exhibit, a letter in defense of Jason Arday’s right to evade media scrutiny, was a superficially well-reasoned account made about an utterly alternative reality. Arday, the 21,000 undersigned agreed, was facing “entirely false allegations of plagiarism”. There was “no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” against him. The “baseless allegations” were therefore a “right wing” smear campaign. “Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the color of their skin,” the letter concluded, apparently without irony. If ever it is complacently assumed that the open letter lends itself to the service of clarification, then here is evidence that it is just as easily commandeered as a vehicle for the brazen propagation of falsehood.

The home stretch of an open letter is the time to get expansive; and even in denouncing them we, the undersigned, do not wish to buck the form. Why do people set so much store by open letters? What epistemic authority are these bewildering lists supposed to exert over us? Someone who thought moral opinions more reliable when dispensed by motley bands of intellectuals would seem, on reflection, as mad as someone who thought all songs sound better when performed by Live Aid. Yet the appeal of the genre seems to rest on the strange assumption that when a missive has been jointly audited and solemnly endorsed by a mongrel committee of bewilderingly disconnected names, it enjoys some strange, placeless authority. “If Kneecap, Zadie Smith, and the Chichele professor of social and political theory can all agree on this one”, such letters seem to ask, “why can’t you?”.

Needless to say, in a world without open letters floating about, some might justly worry about where we are to get our opinions from, and how we are to verify that they are in good standing with the moral majority. We acknowledge that this is a serious problem. However, having consulted each other, we believe it best that everyone should think for themselves. 

After passing legislation, you then have to apply it. This duty typically falls to beleaguered police services, who are blamed for laws conjured by their thoughtless political masters. Yet, if the issue at hand is Palestine Action’s proscription, after activists vandalised a pair of aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, the Terrorism Act 2000 is about so much more than the politics of Gaza. It speaks, rather, to 25 years of government failure, and how over-powered laws and under-powered cops collide to push Britain towards all-out chaos.

From a personal perspective, I’m sympathetic to banning Palestine Action. Whichever way you split it, breaking into an RAF base and deliberately disabling military aircraft isn’t just criminal damage, it’s a shameless assault on the armed forces. And besides, June’s attack came before the group’s campaign of industrial sabotage on companies it linked to Israeli interests. Reports suggest the total costs here could hit £55 million.

In practice, however, arresting hundreds of would-be “terrorists” is easier said than done. After all, the sentence for the offence detailed in the Terrorism Act is anything from six months to 14 years. It hardly helps that the police are refusing to back down, simply saying offenders will be dealt with. But even the Met, Britain’s biggest police service, will struggle with 500-plus public-order arrests. There simply isn’t the custody space, without creating emergency holding and charging centres anyway. On the other hand, though, not arresting offenders will invite more allegations of two-tier policing, especially when London’s mayor seems dubious about proscribing the group to start with.

The upshot, then, is that the Met will be made to look impotent, and the law an ass. Such a scenario is every radical activist’s dream, and every public order commander’s nightmare. And that’s before you consider the broader problem. State legitimacy bleeds away when it proves unable to uphold the rule of law. That was clear enough when Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads with impunity — but terrorism? With the Westminster system already creaking, it’s easy to see how the Palestine Action debacle could spiral.

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To understand how policymakers could have ended up in this mess, we must first appreciate how the Terrorism Act appeared. Passed by New Labour in its pomp, it offered the UK’s first statutory definition of terrorism, described as “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public… for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. If that sounds flexible, it’s because the Act was intended to be a permanent solution to older ad hoc legislation.

Drafted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the end of the Cold War, legislators identified the old Prevention of Terrorism Act as ripe for replacement. Introduced in 1974, in the aftermath of the IRA’s Birmingham pub bombings, the PTA was annually renewed by Parliament. From its introduction, indeed, it was always known as “temporary provisions”, such was their severity. Fair enough: it permitted the state to detain suspects for up to a week longer than usual before charging them, while also allowing for the proscription of Irish Republican and Loyalist terror groups.

Crucially, the term “terrorism” was never defined in the 1974 Act. At the time, it seemed quite obvious what terrorism was: blowing things up, especially people. That, of course, still left other radical groups, not of the bomb-making variety but still skating the edges of legality. Prior to 2000, the Government again preferred a fairly impromptu approach. Echoing the tactics of communist groups during the Cold War, it tolerated, engaged and influenced fellow travellers while disrupting hardcore activists. This lead investigators, eventually, to genuine terrorist suspects.

The period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was pivotal here — existing laws were piecemeal and besides framed around the sensitivities of Irish terrorism. Especially with the rise of international jihadism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.

The 2000 Act was passed just seven months before 9/11. Since then, it has been continuously amended, introducing new laws responding to the ever-evolving chimera of terrorism. That encompassed everything from banning the glorification of terrorism to creating Prevent, effectively replacing the traditional police monitoring of extremists. And, up to a point, this proliferation makes sense: who, in the naive digital world of 2000, could have predicted the vicious intersectional politics of today?

All the while, the thrust of the Blairite legal revolution was distinctly European, favoring statute over common law. Slowly but surely, with its focus on procedural fairness and (ironically) human rights, the law shaped the police response to terrorism and extremism. Many of the practices resulting from this approach, from Control Orders to Prevent, have subsequently been found wanting. Extremism as a shared social problem, rather than one of law enforcement, saw the police withdraw from swathes of counter-extremism: the sort that often presages actual terrorism.

No wonder, then, that the Terrorism Act 2000 is today the legislative equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, applied to a dizzying range of social and technological problems. Deployed on the margins of extremism, it targets those shadowy slices of the Venn Diagram where radical politics, criminality and disorder all intersect. Indeed, had the often-violent Animal Liberation Front (ALF) not lost momentum by the late 2000s, it would almost certainly have been proscribed.

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Why, then, wasn’t Palestine Action banned sooner, especially when the list of proscribed organizations reveals any number of neo-Nazi grouplets which exist mainly on the internet? Whitehall’s slowness here arguably hints at another issue: Labour’s confusion over Palestine. The party’s Left flank, especially in seats with significant Muslim communities, is under siege by “Gaza Independents”. Its grassroots are instinctively sympathetic to Palestine too. The party’s Right flank, however, is painfully aware of its funny bone around extremism: hard on what it considers the “populist” Right, but fuzzy around progressive protests over environmental issues, trans rights and Palestine. As and when a radical anti-immigration group appears, I predict it will receive harsher treatment.

This will simply accelerate our seemingly unstoppable cycle of discontent, one in which the Government finds itself increasingly trapped. It isn’t often I feel sorry for Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper — but on this issue they’ve tied themselves into something of a Gordian knot. Arguably, they would have best been served by tackling Palestine Action as the Blair-era authorities dealt with the Animal Liberation Front. But that would have involved intrusive intelligence-gathering and Cold War infiltration. Instead, and especially given policing’s retreat from the wider field of extremism, anti-terrorism legislation is all that’s left. As the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Today, the police face 500 potential nails, from retired clergymen and elderly librarians to bright-eyed students, marching on the side of the angels. I’m not sure this was the intention of the Terrorism Act’s centrist architects, during those long-lost Blairite days. But policymakers’ errors are bread and butter for riot cops. And, if the proscription of Palestine Action tells us anything, it’s that our strange new world, one of endless, inchoate rage, defies containment by conventional politics. Only totalitarian regimes try to arrest their way out of social atomisation and dissent, and even if our Government wanted to try this, it’s unlikely to succeed. Yes, Whitehall needs hammers — but also other, subtler tools.

Who is and isn’t a terrorist isn’t always clear. The Nazis regarded the French Resistance as a terrorist organization, but the British begged to differ. Was the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa a bunch of terrorists or freedom-fighters? Terrorism, according to the OED, must be “unauthorized”, but it’s not clear who might legitimately authorize it. “The state” is the usual answer to the question of who has the sole right to inflict violence, but many a government, from imperial Rome to the modern United States, has engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians, which sounds pretty much like the use of terror. Were the bombing of Dresden and Coventry during the Second World War acts of terrorism, or simply the inevitable consequences of war? Yet being at war is no defense against committing abominations. On the contrary, it’s when you’re most likely to perpetrate them.

Not all unofficial or unauthorized violence is to be condemned. What if a crazed gunman breaks into a school classroom and prepares to pick off the children one by one, while you are standing behind him with a revolver in your hand? Not many people would argue that you shouldn’t shoot him in the back, and certainly not because you’re not “authorized” to do so. There just wouldn’t be time to get the Met Police or the Ministry of Defense on the phone. I say “not many” people would be against killing the gunman because some pacifists would refuse to do so on the grounds that the use of violence is absolutely wrong. Leo Tolstoy was one of them. (“Absolute” here, by the way, needn’t mean “very very wrong”, just wrong despite any set of circumstances you might think up to try and justify it.)

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The only problem with this kind of pacifism is what you say to the bereaved parents at the next meeting of the PTA. Not trying to kill the gunman is obviously a mistake, which is to say that literal pacifism is untenable. There are situations in which killing someone isn’t only permissible but obligatory. Not shooting the mad gunman would be immoral. But these situations are mercifully rare. Moreover, they almost all concern the right to self-defense against an act of unjust aggression. What you can’t do is commit an act of unjust aggression while claiming that it’s in self-defense, as the Israelis are currently doing in Gaza. Violence used in self-defense must be proportionate. You can shoot the crazed gunman in the back, but you can’t roast him slowly over a fire. You can take out Hamas operatives known to be intent on murder, but you can’t turn their country into a wasteland in order to do so. Besides, the gunman in the school is guilty, which is a judgment on the act he’s about to perform rather than on his moral character, whereas the vast majority of those slaughtered in Gaza are innocent. This, once again, isn’t a judgment on their moral character but on what they do (or in this case don’t do, i.e. murder people as members or supporters of Hamas).

Terrorism, however, is supposed to be for a political purpose, which isn’t the case with the crazed gunman. Think, however, of someone intent on assassinating a president (let’s not make it Trump) when you’re the only person who can stop him with a well-aimed bullet. Some pacifists claim that in this situation they would shoot for the legs but not the head. They aren’t absolutely opposed to injuring people, just to taking their lives. This isn’t a pedantic distinction, since there’s quite a difference between being crippled and being turned into a corpse. But what if the head is the only bit of the assassin you can get in focus? In this case you can kill justly for a political end — but if you’re an ordinary citizen, the act isn’t either authorized or official.

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So the dictionary definition of terrorism is fairly incoherent. An act of violence can be legitimate without being part of your professional duty or endorsed by the state. Or it can be ordered by the state but be in every other respect indistinguishable from terrorism. In any case, it isn’t always easy to distinguish political motives from more personal ones. A disaffected youth from an ethnic minority may kill in the name of a warped version of Islam, but also because he feels alienated and aggrieved. Or you may kill someone simply for the hell of it, like the Moors murderers in the Sixties. There’s a vein of anarchist thought in 19th-century Europe which believes in destruction for the sake of it. If you can bring nothingness into being with the flick of a finger, then your powers must surely rival those of the God who created the world. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, as every child with a balloon in its hands is aware.

The present Home Secretary appears somewhat insensitive to these distinctions, having recently placed spraying paint on aircraft in the same category as burning people alive. One consequence of this absurdity is that it devalues the significance of burning people alive. But then terrorism has always been too easily expanded a concept. It has its origin in the French Revolution, the event which gives birth to the modern era, and more precisely in the so-called Reign of Terror to which it gave rise. Terror becomes for the first time a specific form of politics, as though it was an alternative to neoliberalism or social democracy. It also begins life as a state-sponsored programme, not as a strike against the state. The way to govern is to scare one’s citizenry almost to death all of the time, as opposed to boring them to death all the time like the present prime minister. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that some of those who emphasize the cruelty and bloodlust of this episode seem rather less outraged by the French state’s suppression of the Left-wing Paris Commune eighty or so years later, which resulted in the slaughter and imprisonment of far more people than died at the hands of the Jacobins. The Commune, the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked, was crushed by massacres of Parisians on a scale which would normally have been inconceivable in civilized 19th-century states.

There’s a case for arguing that the idea of terrorism was invented as a kind of joke. The Revolution was an age of –isms, and the word “terrorism” can be seen, somewhat fancifully, as a satirical smack at this use of language, indicating a bankrupt philosophy which consists of nothing more than spilling guts and hacking off heads. In a darkly ironic gesture, “terrorism” raises these depraved acts to the bogus dignity of a political theory. It’s no longer a question of using violence to enforce your kind of politics. Instead, violence is a kind of politics — a politics beyond politics, in the same way that some avant-garde art represents an art beyond art. Rather than persuading people to act in a certain way, you prevent them from acting in any way at all. The distinction between war and peace can no longer be sustained. From the terrorist’s viewpoint, the social order is itself a form of violence, so placing a bomb in a crowded café is just a more spectacular version of what goes on all the time.

Alternatively, of course, you can wrap the bomb around your body and combine murder with suicide. Suicide bombers usually see themselves as the humble instruments of a noble cause, but this contradicts the fact that the act of suicide is one of supreme self-sovereignty. A character in Dostoevsky remarks that in taking your own life you become for a moment divine, since you exercise the kind of dominion that is supposed to be reserved for God. It is the ultimate state of autonomy, even if it lasts no more than a few seconds. Behind this autonomy lies a vital notion in the Western philosophical tradition, namely the idea of self-ownership. My body belongs to me rather as a piece of property does, and as with a piece of property I can dispose of it as I wish. It’s true that I can’t leave my body in a pub as I can my umbrella, and it’s not clear what it is apart from inside my body which is doing the owning; but this dream of self-possession has been a potent force in European bourgeois thought. I can own my body pretty much as I can own the bodies of others, traditionally known as slaves; and just as I am free to kill them, so I am free to kill myself. In fact, doing so is the ultimate act of freedom. One response to this lethal way of seeing is to argue that we belong not to ourselves but to each other, which sets certain constraints on what we can do with our bodies. It’s important to point out, however, that the last thing people desperate enough to kill themselves usually have in mind is the doctrine of self-ownership.

The problem with violence is that it was there at the beginning, which is one reason why it’s so deep-seated. In order to create a civilization you have to dominate your environment, and that dominion doesn’t just go away once a civilized society is up and running. Instead, it is “sublimated” (in Freud’s term) to a higher end. This is known as the political state, which has a monopoly on the use of force. It turns that force outward against its enemies, as well as inward against its various domestic adversaries. But this means that violence is built into civilization, and is not just a regrettable aberration. That is at the heart of the social order which is profoundly at odds with it. And if that isn’t a gloomy enough reflection, there are also those who feel that they are unrepresented by that order, and that they can only draw attention to their plight by blowing other people to bits.

Did they triumph? Certainly, such politicised “raids” on cherished artistic artefacts and spaces seem evermore common today, from statue topplings to Old Masters splattered with soup. Last weekend was no exception: at Trinity College, Cambridge, an activist protesting the Israel-Palestine conflict destroyed a 1914 Philip de Laszlo oil painting of Lord Balfour using red spray paint and a box cutter.

Much has been written about how this represents an attack on the West’s values and legacy. But surely, if this were what we believed, the response to this vandalism would be swift and punitive. And yet no such response was forthcoming: Trinity College managed little more than a limp expression of “regret” and an offer of counselling to anyone affected. At the time of writing, no arrests have been made. A cloud of official forgetting seems already to have settled over the event.

This is less bewildering, though, when you understand the “intervention” by Palestine Action not as an attack on our artistic heritage, but as a profoundly conservative expression of that heritage: in particular, of the modern legacy of permanent revolution, inaugurated by 20th-century radicals such as the Situationists.

For this group, the 1958 art critics’ conference was just one more deplorable iteration of the “society of the spectacle”, a pervasive form of capitalist tyranny propagated by mass media and consumerism. Here, image-making takes precedence over material reality, while obedience is ensured by dissolving organic social relations. Needs are replaced with commodified desires, consumers become purely passive, and capitalism becomes inescapable.

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The Situationists set out to break down this regime by challenging “the spectacle of a false encounter”. They developed disruptive forms of performance, participation and collective authorship. Cultivating randomness, they sought everywhere to re-invigorate the masses by disturbing the manufactured consumer spectacle.

Did it work? Well, yes and no. The Situationists were certainly influential. And their legacy has spread well beyond the art world: the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, for example, were explicitly inspired by the Situationist International. Was it radical, though? Again, yes and no.

In one 1966 manifesto, the Situationists decried “the bygone excellence of bourgeois culture” — a legacy they believed had already given way to ugly managerialism governed by “the rhythm of the production line”. In this context, “the university is becoming”, they argued, “the honest broker of technocracy and its spectacle”. Within this flattened, hollowed-out infrastructure, the Situationists argued that “the banality of everyday life is not incidental, but the central mechanism and product of modern capitalism”. And, they argued, to resist it “nothing less is needed than all-out revolution”.

This would, they imagined, free the entire accumulated legacy of the now-defunct bourgeois order for revolutionary purposes, enabling radicals to “destroy the spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of commodity society”. This “liberation of history” would spell the end of all repression, in favour of “revolutionary celebration” and “untrammelled desire”.

Or so they hoped. The manifesto heavily influenced the Paris ’68 riots: Situationist slogans were distributed by the “Occupation Committee of the People’s Free Sorbonne University”. Half a century on, though, re-reading the Situationists’ declarations evokes a sense of both admiration and tragedy. Admiration, for how prophetic they were; tragedy, for how partial their revolution turned out not to be.

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Given now-common complaints about universities enabling the spread of technocratic managerialism, it’s hard not to see the Situationists’ critique as prescient. And in this context, taking a box-cutter to a 1914 oil painting might make sense — for the world that painting depicts has already been emptied of meaning, and there’s no legacy to protect.

Except there is: the legacy of the ‘68ers themselves. Today, just over half a century on from the riots, it’s the inheritors of the Situationists and ‘68ers that command the heights (such as they are) of contemporary culture. Radical critique is the default mode of the modern academy; you’ll struggle to get funding for research that doesn’t set out to problematise, deconstruct, decolonise, queer or otherwise liquidate the last moribund fragments of the bourgeois culture Debord was already pronouncing dead in 1966.

The art world, meanwhile, has comprehensively re-institutionalised the once-revolutionary style of Situationist intervention, via an often publicly-funded infrastructure whose default stance is also — within certain limits that artists violate at their peril — radical critique. And across academia, the arts and the rest of the progressive consensus, untrammelled desire is so unchallengeable a good that those trying to restrain their own masturbatory habits are traduced in the press as fascists. Meanwhile, respectable academia and publishing knocks ever louder on once-forbidden sexual doors, such as bestiality or paedophilia, while government-funded quangos dole out hundreds of thousands in grants for hardcore sex films masquerading as “art”.

In other words: everything the Situationists called for is now institutionalised. And the final tragic irony of this partial triumph is the way Situationist-style interventions, staged for the camera, critique “spectacle” through spectacle itself.

For Debord never anticipated the internet. His critique of “spectacle” targeted mid-century mass media: cinema, radio, and television. These forms had one thing in common: they were one-to-many. The effect of such image-making was to impose the synthetic, consumerist fantasy-world of the ‘spectacle’, in a tyrannically top-down way. In response to the autocratic stranglehold this exerted over the public imagination, the aim of Situationist praxis was to jolt the masses from mediated passivity into active, decentralised re-engagement with the world’s strangeness — and its revolutionary possibilities.

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What happens, though, when the media is no longer one-to-many, as it was in the Sixties, but many-to-many, as is the case with social media? Back in the Noughties, when social media first exploded, the leftist arty circles I frequented at the time responded to this new decentralisation of image-making with a revived interest in Situationism. Creative collectives sprang up; performance art and street protest merged; it seemed for a moment that internet-enabled image-making and subversive organising might offer a way out of the deadening passivity of mass consumerism.

How naïve that all seems in hindsight. For these supposedly liberatory new forms were almost instantaneously colonised by the spectacle they sought to disrupt. The interval between the first spontaneous, playful flash mobs and the adoption of this format by marketers was vanishingly brief. And a decade or so on, such content is the bread-and-butter for a new, still more total, economy of spectacle — in which all of us, all the time, are called to be both content and consumer.

Clickbait creators skip from discourse to discourse, spreading discordant viral material; even brutality and horror have currency less for the reality they represent than as the spark for online discourse. Street fights; stabbings; cannibalism; servants falling out of windows: it’s all fodder for the dispassionate-seeming phone camera, and for those farming chaos for engagement. In this economy, too, street protests exist only to the extent they’re represented in the digital spectacle: every such gathering attracts the same complaints of mainstream press cover-up. Smaller-scale protests, meanwhile, increasingly explicitly orient themselves toward the virtual, prioritising not political change but pure virality, whether via soup-based interventions, vandalism, or bodily fluids.

To what extent does any of this transgress anything? Well, some kinds of subversive intervention in the image-making space still incur real-world punishment. Even a regime supposedly ordered to permanent revolution retains some taboos. But the list of genuinely forbidden opinions and acts doesn’t seem to include vandalising paintings of dead politicians. On the contrary: damaging a surviving fragment of bourgeois culture reads less as revolutionary today than as an act of slavish devotion to orthodoxy.

And the only way to make it even more completely orthodox is to stage it for the camera. Today the Situationists’ subversive energy has been re-absorbed by a new orthodoxy — one even more completely governed by commodified “spectacle” than that of Debord’s time.

No wonder, then, that the Trinity vandal is clearly a dutiful young consumer, transporting her vandalism kit in a Mulberry Cara backpack: a limited-edition designer accessory that retailed for £995 when released, and still sells for hundreds second-hand. In the new order she represents, vandalising the crumbling remains of bourgeois culture is less radical than routine: only a slightly more pronounced version of the “queering” and “decolonising” that every generation of progressives has been engaged in since ‘68. And the calculated staging of this act in turn signals the total recapture of Situationist disruption, as merely another form of digital spectacle.

The Trinity event reveals today’s crop of young pseudo-activists as they are: suffocatingly conservative, iPhone-wielding foot-soldiers for the reigning dogma of permanent revolution. Designer backpacks on their shoulders, they dance on the weed-choked tomb of a civilisation their grandparents destroyed: “confused and empty chatter about a decomposed culture” is all they have.