That this clash of earthy charm and trendy crowd is now a common sight in London is thanks to the likes of Jimmy McIntosh (AKA “London Dead Pubs”). It is a combination that could have been created only by the internet. McIntosh is a “pubfluencer”, one of a host of TikTokkers introducing Gen Z to London’s historic pubs. Pubfluencers talk seductively of a prelapsarian age where there was a “proper boozer” on every street corner, without food, exposed lightbulbs, or bespoke “apps”, where everybody knew your name and could understand your job title. Their short-form videos pitch the last of the capital’s authentic drinking spots as living museums where, if you are really fortunate, you might even see a real-life Cockney.

More from this author

Bowling alone in Finsbury Park

By Miles Ricketts

The desire to retreat into our drinking past has never been stronger, all while our pubs face armageddon: 161 pubs closed in the first three months of 2026 (that’s about two a day), and only last week HMRC ordered officials to levy higher business rates on pubs based in “attractive locations” or “character properties”. At the same time, an £8 pint of Cruzcampo means that, in many town centers, drinking on a Tuesday can feel like everyone but you has been warned of an imminent earthquake. In London, however, that is exacerbated by a lack of true locals, with a transient population moving between expensive pubs for their weekly extravagance. Perhaps it is asking for too much to allow us to take our heritage for granted, but in London, we have done something deeply un-English to our national pastime: we have made it a treat.

Amid all the fuss, it’s no wonder that young people have started seeking out a bit of old-fashioned London character on Instagram. McIntosh boasts 100,000 followers and (in a neat example of nominative determinism) a capacious Mackintosh coat. He has earned a cult reputation for producing articulate and thoughtful videos about old haunts, aided by surreal humor. In his scrutiny of the city, he has been likened to Ian Nairn, the boozy architecture critic who railed against half-witted postwar town planners. McIntosh similarly bemoans threats to cherished venues, but the usually exasperated Nairn was fighting when all was not lost. Making social media content about the state of London’s pubs in 2026, all McIntosh can offer is nostalgia for how they used to be, and recommend a few that still carry the torch.

Niall Walsh, one of McIntosh’s rivals in the nostalgia game, straddles old and new just as awkwardly. An Irishman with an account called “Proper Boozers”, he celebrates the right things, even if he could be more subtle in his working-class bingo: horse racing on the box, tat on the ceiling, cheap pints at the bar. In each video, his disembodied voice judges the pub on whether it meets his threshold of authenticity with the simplicity of a Roman sparing or condemning a defeated gladiator. Turner’s Old Star in Wapping, with its scratched wooden floor and fizzing Fosters? Proper boozer. The Blackfriar on Queen Victoria Street, with its pretty murals and overwhelming food? Not a proper boozer. “Maybe that’s nostalgia,” Walsh laments of his ideal pub. “Maybe those pubs are disappearing.” If they are, they are doing so slowly enough for Walsh, who has created a handy interactive map of London’s authentic hostelries, turning previously rough dives into the Bermondsey beer mile.

Given Gen Z’s inclination to nostalgia (one recent survey said that 47% of adults aged 18-29 would rather live in the past), they were clearly ripe for the taking as an audience. Each generation covets something of the previous, of course, but Gen Z’s obsessions seemingly slip into envy. It may be because they are fed images of the past every day; without the internet, of course, previous generations could live in relative ignorance of what their parents got up to. The past should seem quaint, yet it appears increasingly normal — more normal than the present.

The pubfluencers know that, repeating the phrase “bygone era” to death, sending a shiver down the spines of those who want what they have never had. The pub slots neatly into an imagined history of simpler, slower times, with images of grizzly regulars and sticky carpets providing an antidote for our characterless age. Yet if the ceremony of past pub going clearly appeals to young people, with all its etiquette and icons, so too does its sense of opportunity, of what might happen and of whom you might meet. As Gen Z envied previous generations their music, their Saturday jobs and their houses, now they envy them their carefree nights at the pub.

To be fair, pubs, as with all weighty traditions, have long been associated with nostalgia. In his quietly irritable essay “The Moon Under Water”, George Orwell described his ideal pub as “uncompromisingly Victorian” with the “solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century”. Tellingly, though, pubfluencers are more reluctant to put a date on when exactly a pub trip should be harking back to. That may be for a canny reason. Visiting lonely-looking pubs up the Holloway Road, McIntosh talks vaguely of a “fading way of life”, but it is up to the viewer to work out whose way of life is fading. It is useful to keep the nostalgia in the eye of the beholder, blurry and rosy at the edges, rather than show too much truth about the proper boozer.

It is now acceptable to turn up and order a pint anywhere in London. The “fading way of life” that McIntosh mourns was a socially conservative, white-working-class one, which wouldn’t always have been so eager to welcome a diverse, young crowd. Even 40 years ago, London’s proper boozers had tight clienteles who supported them day in, day out, drinking as routine in a manner now vanished. The establishments frequented by them were not places where today’s hipsters could feel comfortable saying what, or dressing how, they wanted. After all, landlords used to carry mallets. But now that the white working class has largely disappeared from London, leaving only a few of their pubs behind, those who remain will take whatever company they can.

Suggested Reading

Make Soho seedy again

By Howard Jacobson

The wistfulness, anyway, seems rather misplaced: that fact is that the “proper boozer” has never been more pleasant for outsiders. Gone are the days when a young filmmaker zooming in on a chap in high vis at the bar would be gifted a black eye to match his stout. In a bleak financial environment for pubs, he is received with open arms, and so are his followers wishing to sample the Guinness themselves.

Still, if the choice in London is between an expensive treat and a kind of false pageantry, I would rather retreat to the provinces. Nostalgia, it’s clear, can be wearisome, and there is a fine line between treasuring history and living on past glories. In middle England, a semblance of locality offers some contrast to the ills of the capital’s pubs, and it is often pleasant to drink where no TikTokker has been before you. Even if a pint is still relatively pricey, the pub will often be the only place to go for miles around, and so locals will gather as locals do. That might be at an identikit Greene King pub, but you can’t choose your local; the local chooses you, complete with a bar layered with charity collection boxes and grim-faced staff in green-and-black-check uniforms.

Jimmy McIntosh would not be caught dead filming in that kind of pub. Pre-printed chalk boards, fairy lights and, God forbid, some middle-class drinkers would be a tough sell on social media. Yet is not attitude as important as a period carpet? The Camel is a fun yet exhausting place to drink. There is a lot to look at, but it is far from authentic — it feels like TikTok with pork scratchings. Compared that to the average chain pub, a far closer match for our indistinct “bygone era”. You can still find pubs around the country that people sleepwalk into; it is only in London that we set calendar reminders and ask the landlord to see the receipt. At least in an unremarkable, suburban Greene King pub, you might notice the quiet behaviors that really make you feel like another round, where people still wile away a whole afternoon. As an added bonus, you can be sure that you won’t have someone in a large coat rehearsing a script by the jukebox.

Similarly, when we think of historical opposition to the public consumption of alcohol, temperance and prohibition inevitably come to mind — the very opposite of happiness. The people behind these movements, we assume, were rural, reactionary busybodies who hated fun. They were also probably racist. And they definitely had no sense of humour. They were people you wouldn’t want to have a drink with because they wouldn’t want to have a drink with anyone.

Richard Hoftstadter, the influential American mid-twentieth century historian, eloquently expands this characterisation. “Prohibition,” he wrote, was “a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind”. He describes this “crusading mind” as “linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes and cultivated men.” It was a “rural-evangelical virus”, spread around America by “the country Protestant”.

You can picture these people with fine precision: the ideological ancestors of Pat Robertson and every other Christian fundamentalist crank. This viewpoint, however, is a myth. An excellent myth which appeals to our contemporary intuitions about religion and secularism, freedom and authority. But a myth, nevertheless.

The “crusading mind” that characterised the temperance movement was underpinned not by reactionary impulses, but by the principles of social justice. As Mark Lawrence Schrad puts it in his utterly fascinating new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine, “Prohibitionism wasn’t moralising ‘thou shalt nots’, but a progressive shield for marginalised, suffering, and oppressed peoples to defend themselves from further exploitation”.

Suggested reading

What if we were always a little bit drunk?

By Harry Wallop

Consider, for instance, someone like Carrie Nation. Born in Kentucky and raised in Missouri, she became infamous for going into taverns and smashing their windows with a hatchet. She has been described as a Bible-thumping Amazon. Some historians blame her strange behaviour on menopause and sexual frustration. If you search for her name on Google Images, the first picture that comes up shows her holding a hatchet on her gloved right hand and an open Bible on her left. She looks absolutely terrifying; Mary Whitehouse decked in black in Midwest America.

But looks, as they say, can be deceiving. As Schrad puts it: “She was not some Bible-thumping, conservative ‘holy crone on a broomstick’, seeking to legislate morality or ‘discipline’ individual behaviour”. Rather, she was a “populist progressive” who viewed alcoholism as a social evil that, among other things, endangered women.

In Kansas City, she built a women’s shelter. And when she retired, she built an institution called “Hatchet Hall”, which Schrad describes as “part rest home for the impoverished elderly, part safe haven for women fleeing abusive husbands, and part homeschool for their children”.

Crucially, she didn’t view the “drinker as a sinner”, but as a victim, like “prostitutes” or “slaves”. The sinner was the person selling the drink. The same is true of other prohibitionists: they made clear that their objection was not against the person drinking, who they saw as a victim, but the liquor traffic that exploited them. Some people today would say they had a saviour complex.

Nation was also anti-racist. She donated “her lecture proceeds to the black African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. And when she did speak at churches that denied blacks, she demanded that all be admitted entry. If that made racists uncomfortable, well, then they could leave”. Indeed, the relationship between temperance, women’s rights, and black civil rights was a close one. Most abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders in the nineteenth century supported prohibition.

Suggested reading

The English have always been drunkards

By Ed West

William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the influential abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, was also a staunch prohibitionist. In a letter he wrote in 1830, he states his principles clearly: that because “all men are born equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” it means:

“That intemperance is a filthy habit and an awful scourge, wholly produced by the moderate, occasional and fashionable use of alcoholic liquors—consequently, that it is sinful to distil, to import, to sell, to drink, or to offer such liquors to our friends or laborers, and that entire abstinence is the duty of every individual.”

Women’s rights leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were also prohibitionists, and formed together the New York State Temperance Society. There they proclaimed it was the duty of women “to speak out against the liquor traffic and all men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain, or countenance it”. At the women’s rights convention organised by Anthony and Stanton in 1866, Frances Harper, whom Schrad describes as “the most prolific and bestselling black poet and author of the nineteenth century”, spoke. Like “most abolitionist suffragists”, she was also a “proponent of temperance”.

Or consider the more recent example of Walter Rauschenbusch. He was a Baptist minister during the Progressive era — the early decades of twentieth century America — who espoused Social Gospel: a form of Christianity utterly dedicated to fighting against social injustice and exploitation. Rauschenbusch saw the liquor industry as a source of these evils, and was cited by Martin Luther King as a key influence.

So why is he overlooked in accounts of prohibitionism? As Schrad puts it: “Walter Rauschenbusch upsets all of our two-dimensional stereotypes of evangelical Christianity. He was compassionate, not commanding; cosmopolitan, not conservative; socialist, not reactionary”. As a result, “the most influential evangelical of his day almost never appears in traditional prohibition histories”.

Nor was the temperance movement limited to America. To strengthen his point that the movement was progressive, rather than reactionary, Schrad widens his analysis by examining prohibitionism around the world. He points out social democrats like Belgian Emile Vandervelde and Swedish Hjalmar Branting espoused it; Tolstoy and Gandhi, advocates of non-violent resistance and opponents of social injustice, also promoted it.

Even Lenin, perhaps the most consequential Leftist of the twentieth century, subscribed to temperance; he viewed Vodka as a tool used by the authorities to stupify and subjugate the masses. (Lenin was also opposed to free love, which he considered a bourgeois rather than proletarian demand. He thought sex had a “social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community”. Shame he was also a mass-murdering tyrant.)

Suggested reading

What Lockdown and Prohibition share

By Mark Forsyth

Closer to home, there was also a temperance movement in Britain and Ireland. Henry Vincent, an influential leader of the Chartists, wanted to connect the Chartist movement with the Temperance Society. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Ireland, under the influence of the Irish priest Thebold Mathew, had a greater proportion of people who followed temperance than anywhere else in the British isles. (Yes, you can read that last sentence again.) As Schrad writes, when mass immigration to the States happened in the wake of the Irish famine, “the Irish Paddy fresh off the boat was statistically more likely to be a teetotaler than the heavy-drinking white, nativist evangelicals in the American heartland”.

Frederick Douglass, the iconic abolitionist leader, was particularly inspired by his friendship with Father Mathew. In a lecture Douglass delivered in Cork, he said: “Seven years ago I was ranked among the beasts and creeping things; to-night I am here held as a man and a brother”. He added: “If I can but forget the position in which I once was, I can turn my attention to teetotalism, and shall be able to speak as a man for a few moments”.

The dignity conferred on him by a teetoller is the same dignity as being a free man — the implication being that slavery and drunkenness are fundamentally akin. Both are ways through which we exploit our fellow man. Douglass emphasised this connection between drunkenness and slavery by stating: “If we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery”. Two days after his speech, Douglass took Father Mathew’s temperance vow.

So why has our understanding of prohibitionism been so distorted? The main reason, I suspect, is because we project contemporary assumptions to the past. Prohibitionism was reactionary because it was led, in our mind, by evangelical Christians — while forgetting or ignoring the fact that the campaign against the slave trade, for instance, was led by evangelical Christians, or that many influential early feminists, like Josephine Butler, were also evangelical Christians.

Yes, abolitionists and early feminists, like the temperance movement, were irritating busybodies. They did often look a bit scary. But they also proudly espoused views — such as the inherent dignity of black people and women — which may seem common sense to us now, but were certainly not back then.

So, strange as it may sound, when we clink our glasses today, let us spare a thought for the temperance movement. Many of the same people involved in that cause were right on fundamental issues. More to the point: the principles that underpinned those correct views were the same principles that animated their prohibitionism. Surely we can all drink to that.

This story isn’t true — most early Chinese history is unencumbered by truth — but it is illustrative of the way that rulers have (almost) always looked at booze. It’s always alcohol and those who provide it who get it in the neck.

Thus Scotland at the time of writing, and, for all I know and dread, most of England soon. All licensed premises in the Central Belt have been closed. Unlicensed premises — cafés, tea-shops, juice bars — are left open, because… well, here the becausery becomes a little indistinct. But it’s something about the behaviour of those in pubs. It’s the kind of people who go to pubs, and it’s the kind of things they do there. Hugging strangers all the time and kissing vague acquaintances.

I have been to pubs in Glasgow. The hugging of strangers is not a major problem there, even after 10pm. The only hugging of strangers I have ever seen in a pub is at the moment of a significant international football victory. This is a reasonably rare beast in both England and Scotland, yet we have this vague feeling that when Other People drink they behave abominably. When we drink, we’re simply lovely.

This was, in essence, the cause of Prohibition in the United States. Very few Americans were against alcohol per se. They were against saloons, and what they were sure people did there. The general idea was that saloons served men, almost exclusively (this was true) and that those men spent all their pay there and then went home drunk and angry and took out their frustrations on their family. Whether this actually happened much is debatable. But it is certain that Prohibition was the first great feminist movement in American politics, which is why it was enacted at the same time that women got the vote.

The cause was helped along, though, by a large section of the American population called the “Drinking Dries”. Where the “Wets” were proud drinkers, and the “Dries” were ferocious teetotallers; the “Drinking Dries” were those who liked a drink themselves, but were very, very concerned about the way that other people drank, especially those in saloons. It is a less ridiculous position than it sounds. If you want to stop football hooliganism once and for all, ban football; this wouldn’t mean a kickabout in your own garden, but the football that happens over there. So the idea was to stop the saloon louts drinking and thus save them from themselves.

Suggested reading

The English have always been drunkards

By Ed West

Unfortunately, Prohibition was enacted in two stages: first, the 18^th Amendment, which allowed the government to ban “intoxicating liquors”; and second, the Volstead Act which defined what “intoxicating liquors” were. It had been widely assumed that the act would only cover spirits, perhaps fortified wines, and just possibly normal wine; very few thought that it would include beer. But, of course, the act was drafted by the extremists — so the Drinking Dries discovered that it applied to them, too.

It’s splendid when other people are banned from drinking, but we are all other people.

Still, Prohibition wasn’t all bad. It meant women got to drink, too. The saloon was replaced with the speakeasy, and as the speakeasy was a brand new thing there was no tradition banning ladies from entering, and no agreed rules on how much they could drink once inside. One upmarket speakeasy in New York had a sign up saying “Through These Portals the Most Beautiful Girls in the World Pass OUT”. Some even installed powder rooms.

There were upmarket speakeasies, and downmarket ones too. A speakeasy could be anywhere and take any form, so long as it sold booze. One of the stranger consequences of Prohibition was that it made Italian food popular in America. This was because Italians with access to alcohol would simply open their apartments up as bars and make some extra money by serving their patrons some fine Italian home-cookery. Food Historians cite this as the great break-out moment for pizza and pasta in the USA.

Suggested reading

The day America went dry

By Henry Jeffreys

But there were other unintended consequences of Prohibition. Obviously organised crime got a fillip, although this can be wildly exaggerated. The murder rate in Chicago is now more than double what it was under Al Capone’s homicidal sway. More insidious was the fact that everybody was breaking the law and nobody cared. In Boston there were four speakeasies on the same block as the police headquarters, partly because the policemen wanted somewhere to drink. A new word was invented: “scofflaw”, meaning a person who flouts the law because they know that almost every else is doing so.

You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to realise that scofflaws are bad for society, but Einstein was actually in America during Prohibition and observed that: “The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”

And this brings us back to our current lockdown. For months everywhere I have gone has had a one-way system in place, and, for months, nowhere have I seen anybody obeying it. Shopkeepers sit smiling next to a sign saying that everybody must wear a mask. At an airport in Italy recently I found myself crushed up against a sign that told me to keep two metres away from everybody — yet none of us could escape. There was also a hand-sanitiser station that we were required to use. The bottle was empty.

When the rules forbid normal behaviour, it becomes normal behaviour to break the rules. Why do other people feel the need to behave like that? Because we are all other people. You can tell a chap’s politics these days simply by asking him which mass gatherings are bound to cause a Second Spike, and which ones are harmless and entirely justified anyway.

Lockdown forbids the little, unquantifiable actions that make a human tick. A drink with friends is an inessential luxury, touching is unnecessary, smiles are masked away. Nobody knows why other people persist in these irrational and unnecessary activities, but we continue with them, because we are certain that we aren’t other people. And so lockdown makes scofflaws of us all.

Suggested reading

Covid has left me alone with my monster

By Tanya Gold

That won’t end lockdown, of course. Lockdown will be ended by the same thing that ended Prohibition: the economy. The Great Crash and the Great Depression meant that the USA could no longer afford to ban an industry that could provide employment to the destitute and tax to the treasury. It was not a yearning for beer and freedom that prevailed, but a yearning for economic growth that accidentally permitted freedom and beer.

Of course, these comparisons with America’s Prohibition (capital P) are imperfect. In America all alcoholic drinks were banned with the exception of communion wine, which I believe is also the personal rule of Mr Trump. In Glasgow and Edinburgh pubs are still allowed to serve drinks outside this October, but given the sadistic Scottish weather gods that is as close to a ban as can be, for now.

Before it goes too far, the government should, perhaps, remember another attempt at prohibition. In 1914 Tsar Nicholas II banned the sale of vodka in all Russia. It was a time of national emergency, there was a war on, everybody had to play their part, and alcohol is inessential and promotes undisciplined behaviour.

It didn’t end well.

Mark Forsyth’s ‘A Short History of Drunkenness: How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present’ is published by Viking Penguin.

When was the last time you heard a politician address social capital inequality? Given the extent to which pounds and pence dominate our understanding of true wealth, I’m guessing not recently.

The American philosopher Michael Sandel has spent much of his career asking what is essential to wellbeing that money can’t buy. Societies in which everything is for sale, he argues, are ones that consistently fail to answer this question. Ours is arguably such a society, where politicians endlessly promise subsidies, tax credits and wage increases without asking what causes people to fall into poverty in the first place.

I’ve long made the case that alleviating poverty requires more than remunerative measures. Poverty is a complex web of addiction, debt, worklessness, educational failure and – most overlooked – family breakdown. These are the root causes of wealth inequality, and as such, none can be solved with money alone. If you want to tackle them properly, social capital is where to look.

Suggested reading

'It's relationships, stupid' – how social capital is redefining politics

By Michael Hendrix

The social scientist Robert Putnam defines social capital as the conditions under which a person enjoys access to face-to-face networks of people. These include access to nurseries, youth clubs, libraries and village halls; places where relationships among local people are forged. Yet this access really starts at home, with family.

Of course, family isn’t a universal state of affairs. The experience of family breakdown is highly unequal in our society. Many families break apart, and there are thousands of children in care, not to mention an even larger proportion of isolated adults, especially the elderly. Polling from the Centre of Social Justice shows that a significantly greater proportion of adults from blue-collar and semi-skilled labour (27%) say they have experienced family breakdown when compared to other social grades. The poll found 87% of mothers with children under the age of five from higher income groups were married, compared to just 24% of those in lower income groups.

When intact, the home is a self-replenishing fund of social capital. It invites people to come together and exchange goods and favours, the value of which is set by relationships rather than by price or labour costs.

Family is the font of all relationships – both the most essential and most formative to the relationships we form in communities later on. The famous Grant Study – a longitudinal study of almost 300 healthy Harvard students – has over several decades produced tens of thousands of pages of data. It concludes:

‘The lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder.  The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this:  Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.’

But beyond family, relationships depend on strong local networks. The key to allowing these to flourish is creating the space for them to develop – from inclusive youth clubs to thriving high streets. Unfortunately, this connective tissue is being eroded as well. In the UK since the 1970s, there have been 28,000 pub closures, and 121 libraries shut in 2016 alone, with further foreclosures of 600 youth centers between 2012 and 2016. And of course, this depletion of social capital is most visible in the country’s most deprived towns.

Suggested reading

What's wellbeing worth?

By Tom Chivers

Part of our failure to take social capital seriously is governments’ exclusive focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP includes the estimated market value of prostitution yet excludes the unpaid work of parenting and community participation. The ONS valued this work around at £1 trillion in 2014, equivalent to 56% of GDP as currently calculated.

So social capital can generate growth, provided public spaces are given their proper role of building communities and those communities are in turn properly represented in economic data.

Another example of the measurement issue is the daily commute.

An activity that is linked to work but which is ignored in the productivity statistics, and of course goes unpaid, it is time where find ourselves alone and disconnected, and provides an example of how people are surreptitiously robbed of social capital and, subsequently, mental wellbeing. Commuting eats into the time we have for our parents, spouses, children, grandparents, leaving many of us struggling with the strain of balancing care with professional performance.

Increased mobility in society widens the geographical spread of a person’s social networks, but it also reduces their presence and participation in the local neighbourhood. Evidence from studies in the US suggests that the longer we spend on the daily commute to work, the less social we become. This includes social engagement with families – the effects are more noticeable among men than among women. According to Putnam, commuting to work alone by car is particularly detrimental to building social capital, because it denies the commuter the interaction and social spontaneity that public transport does at least partially offer.

When I began a four-hour round trip from the Midlands to London each day, my work ticked over, while my own social capital eroded. If my board and my friends hadn’t urged me to physically move home, I doubt there would be any of it left. There are millions of stories like mine, but they make no difference to the way we measure the nation’s wellbeing.

Some countries are making strides in putting social capital on the map. This year, the New Zealand treasury announced plans to produce a Wellbeing Budget with which to incorporate non-monetary analytics into its fiscal policy. Both Scotland and Wales too have devised national frameworks that place wellbeing at the centre of any act of government, from healthcare to procurement.

Suggested reading

Can books save a dying town?

By Josh Adams

When a library gets closed down, governments talk about ‘making a saving’, as if we were getting richer, rather than destroying our social and cultural capital. Financial capital enables people to seek and act on meaning in life, but it cannot provide them with meaning. By pegging our very lives to the pound, we are ignoring the gold standard of wealth. It’s time we remind ourselves that social capital is that standard.

To read the rest of the Riven Britain series, click here.

I’ve counted down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 – the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.

Today, numbers 40 to 31:

#40

America’s Amish future

“Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms” – that was the motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and arguably we’ve been conforming ever since.

But not the Amish. What they do is get together as communities and decide whether particular technologies suit their chosen way of life or not. According to Michael J Coren’s interview with Jameson Wetmore for Quartz, different Amish communities come to different conclusions – but there is a common thread:

“It’s interesting that the Amish have different districts, and each district has different rules about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Yet it’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile.”

By the way, the Amish are thriving. Their numbers double every generation and of the 500 or so Amish settlements, about half were founded in the 21st century.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Religion

#39

The Internet of Bodies

I’d imagine the Amish would take a dim view of the notion that people should be microchipped like dogs. In a story for the Guardian, Julia Kollewe reports that microchipping is on the brink of going mainstream:

‘The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.”

Kollewe adds that one microchipping provider “is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips.”

With these implants we wouldn’t have to bother with security passes and passwords anymore. In theory, we’d be automatically, perhaps permanently, interfaced with the corresponding digital networks – creating a so-called Internet of Bodies.

It would be quick, convenient and deeply, deeply sinister.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#38

Your local branch of the Chinese Communist Party

Did you know that the Communist Party is setting up branches in the West? I didn’t until I happened across Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian’s report for Foreign Policy:

“Party cells have appeared in California, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, North Dakota, and West Virginia. The cells appear to be part of a strategy, now expanded under Chinese President Xi Jinping, to extend direct party control globally and to insulate students and scholars abroad from the influence of ‘harmful ideology’, sometimes by asking members to report on each other’s behaviors and beliefs.”

And it’s not just America where the CPC is organising. Other countries mentioned by Allen-Ebrahimian include France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

These cells appear to be for Chinese ex-pats only. But perhaps they should be open to the local population too and even put up candidates in elections. The CPC doesn’t have much experience with democracy I know, but a platform combining rapid economic growth with a strict approach to law-and-order would definitely find support.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Global Affairs

#37

The big problem with tall buildings

With sky-high property prices in global city centres, developers can only make a profit by building sky-high. But as Travis Barrington argues in a piece for Propmodo ageing skyscrapers can be very expensive to maintain, while being impossible to upgrade:

“Built in an era of cheap energy, many post-war Manhattan towers have facades of single-glazed glass, and structures that can’t support the weight of additional insulating glass. Many have low ceilings, tight column spacing, and inefficient heating and cooling systems. Often these have become even more cramped by having to accommodate the infrastructure of modern information technology.”

We could tear them down and start again, but that isn’t easy either. The tallest building ever (peacefully) demolished was the 41 storey Singer Building in 1968. With towers going up that are twice as tall or more, we’re bequeathing yet another head-scratching problem to posterity.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Capitalism

#36

The eugenicist at the royal wedding

The wedding of the year was, of course, that of Harry and Meghan. For many people, Bishop Michael Curry’s passionate sermon was a particular highlight. However, it did feature a quote from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the philosopher and Jesuit priest whose unorthodox ideas made him a favourite with liberal Christians and those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category.

What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in a jaw-dropping article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches. Quote after quote shows that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others.

Furthermore, he was a raving eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution.

Teilhard rejected the idea that we’re all inherently imperfect (i.e. the doctrine of Original Sin) in favour of that old lie: that at least some of us can perfect ourselves.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Religion

#35

The infinite screen

In 2018, we found out that smartphone sales for 2017 were down on 2016 – the first year-on-year decline. Is this the beginning of the end of the smartphone and, if so, what might replace it as the core technology of the digital age?

Benedict Evans makes a strong case for AR (augmented reality) – a wearable device that allows you to see what you want to see – not as a distracting image hovering in your face, but as an apparently real object at an appropriate depth and location within your field of vision:

“Your glasses can show you the things that you might look at on a smartphone or a 2000 inch screen, but they can also unbundle that screen into the real world, and change it.”

Evans calls this the “infinite screen” and it would replace all the finite screens that we currently use.

He compares the development of AR to that of the multitouch smartphone, and suggests that the stage at which AR is now is equivalent to where multitouch was in the run-up to the 2007 launch of its breakthrough commercial product – the Apple iPhone.

We’ll see.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#34

Pub culture versus cafe culture

According to John Harris in the Guardian, British pubs are closing down at a rate of 18 every week.

But for every pub that closes down, a coffee shop seems to open. But for Harris these are no substitute for the loss true community institutions:

“If our era has a pre-eminent gathering space, in both its chain and independent forms, it is surely the modern cafe – where most people seem to be hunched over their laptops, transfixed by their phones, or huddled with friends and oblivious to everyone else. This is the opposite of the places where the best kind of chaotic, unexpected experiences can happen and you might end up falling into conversations with complete strangers.”

Pubs and churches may seem poles apart in purpose and atmosphere, but both are shared spaces that aim to appeal across the community. They have much more in common with each other than what Harris sees as the 21st century culture of “ever smaller social niches.”

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Flyover Country

#33

The end of reading

In an article for The Conversation, Jean Twenge has bad news for booksellers:

“…In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school… By 2016, only 16 percent did.”

One doesn’t have to look far too find the culprit:

“By 2016, the average 12th grader said they spent a staggering six hours a day texting, on social media, and online during their free time. And that’s just three activities; if other digital media activities were included, that estimate would surely rise.”

When you hear that ‘young people these days’ are doing less of X, Y or Z it’s because they don’t have the time.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#32

The great scientific slowdown 

How many discoveries made since 1990 have been honoured with a Nobel Prize in Physics? The answer, according to Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen in a fascinating essay for the Atlantic, is just three.

It’s not like we’re starving science of funding. Quite the opposite, in fact – there’s been a ramp-up in resources since the 1960s. Even if scientific progress isn’t slowing down, it’s not keeping up with what we’re investing in it:

“When Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom in 1911, he published it in a paper with just a single author: himself. By contrast, the two 2012 papers announcing the discovery of the Higgs particle had roughly a thousand authors each. On average, research teams nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that increase continues today.”

Even if science isn’t slowing down, it is having a productivity crisis. The big question is whether that’s because we’ve discovered all the easy stuff or whether we’re looking in the wrong places.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#31

How to build more houses in global cities

Why don’t global cities build more homes? Clearly there’s the demand, otherwise they wouldn’t be so expensive.

Is it just too difficult? No, Because as James Gleeson explains on his blog, there’s one global city that’s getting on with it:

“Tokyo’s housing stock is growing very fast – roughly 2% a year, about twice as fast as that of Paris, London or New York…”

What’s more they’re not doing it through sprawl or by packing ever more people into each dwelling. Indeed, Tokyo is getting denser in terms of dwellings per hectare, while providing more living space per person.

The secret of their success is demolition: It’s much easier in Japan to knock-down old development and start again. That doesn’t mean that London and New York have to bulldoze their most beautiful neighbourhoods. There’s plenty of post-war rubbish to get started on first.

Suggested reading

Proof that a global city can build enough new housing

By Peter Franklin

Now read The Year UnPacked 30-21