Photo realist

As part of a general clear out I have been going through all my photos, the physical ones. I'm throwing a lot of them away, I mean obviously the destruction of hundreds of photos of unknown people's feet in unidentifiable locations will be a tragic loss to the world, but in the name of space saving, they have to go. The sorting process has been a trip down memory lane for me, at least when I come across a photo of a person. It turns out that I am actually not that fascinated by all the unidentifiable buildings ("erm... another cathedral... Bourges?"), forests, hilly landscapes and urban wastelands that I have visited in my life. It turns out that all those photos are just a needless byproduct of being a pretentious tit and they're going in the bin.
Of all the photos left, all the wheat in this sea of chaff, Miss P was heard to comment that "photos from the 90s are so grungy", and on both a conceptual and visual level I guess she'd be right. She clearly saw this as a big minus. Me, not so much. That is my past, it is filled with memories (mainly happy - who takes photos of unhappy events? Christmas excluded of course*) and they are not diminished by the fact that many of the photos are out of focus, or badly framed, or the fact that I (and almost all of my male friends) have long centre-parted curtains in many of them. That is how we were, and close enough to how we looked to aide the recollection of the events documented. When we took photos and then put them in albums or boxes, or wherever, that was all they were: an aide memoir, a register of the highlights of our lives.
Photographs obviously still serve the purpose of capturing memories, indeed I think I may have previously argued that we are in some way outsourcing our memories to social media via the images that we store there. However, the other aspect of this method of storage changes the images and their purpose significantly. I read recently that the average young person takes 20 versions of each selfie before deciding which one to share with the world and presumably delete the rest. This must consume a hell of a lot of time, presumably making selfie taking and editing an activity in itself.
"What did you do at the weekend?"
"Oh, mainly selfies."
Not that all the hours of my youth were gainfully employed. I've been thinking about this recently and marvelling at the amount of time I spent basically doing nothing. What luxury. The internet basically allows people to socialise these periods of doing nothing, to rebrand them as productive periods, because god forbid we should be idle even in our leisure time. Everything must have a product, we must always be promoting ourselves at the very least; winning at the game of life and that means being seen to be winning at the game of life. The photos of my youth are largely dull and inconsequential, but then so are most of the photos on most Instagram accounts, it's just that they are presented as having significance. And if we start to believe that presentation is significance, then we stop bothering to look for significance or meaning in anything else.
I am old enough for many of my friends to be managing 'millennials', and there is a constant refrain that they are obsessed with position and promotion without really understanding the need to become expert (or even competent) at your current job first. Whilst the ambition is impressive, the lack of understanding of the substance that needs to back up that ambition is worrying. I'm probably being alarmist and massively out of touch and I'm sure I'm the mug for working myself to the bone in the hope of (relatively) meagre reward. In all likelihood work itself will change massively and sooner or later the only requirement for a management position will be an impressive portfolio of photos of you looking managerial.
To the outside observer, most of the activities of my youth were dull and inconsequential, but to me they were significant and life affirming. We took photos of them occasionally to remember the event, not to present it to the world. Indeed we often worried that the 'world' (and especially our parents) might see them. Of course, all the statistics seem to suggest that we had better reason than any other generation to be wary of sharing details of our leisure activities. We were so busy doing things our parents wouldn't approve of that we forgot to get identified as a generation (for the last time we are not generation X, they were older and more boring). Of course it's hard to know if the suspicion over sharing our lives came from the nefarious nature of the activities themselves or whether the lack of an easy platform to share meant that we tried more nefarious activities out of boredom. Either way we grew up less scrutinised and less polished. The photos prove it: they are terrible. With no concept of needing to present, there is no need to conform to a definition of good presentation. If you are not constantly subjected to the image of conformity, you are less likely to feel the need to conform. My generation consumed only the media they deemed fit, not the media that was deemed fit for them. As a teenager, my worldview was formed almost exclusively by the NME, Melody Maker, Select, the Word, Naked City and Eurotrash. It was a very narrow worldview, but equally it was (relatively) distinct, it was not informed by a standardised aesthetic or dictated by the tyranny of the majority. Your teenage years are the time when you are allowed to experiment, to find your place in relation to society. By definition social media require that place to be somewhere inside of society, a society defined and regulated by its media. Is it surprising then that the youth of today confirm so neatly to what society expects as good behaviour when they consider every aspect of their lives in terms of it being submitted for review? Orwell's dystopian vision was of a malevolent state judging its citizens' actions against its own interests, but perhaps just as frightening is an extra-national, extra-governmental entity judging all citizens actions against an ever shifting set of criteria based largely on commerce and prejudice. Even more scary is its citizens' willingness to submit to the scrutiny and to conform. God help us if someone does work out how to control all those criteria, especially if that someone is Robert Mercer.
Obviously I'm biased, my generation had freedom from the tyranny of internet judgement and we did what we pleased; we liked the idea of sticking it to the man or changing the world, but were largely too wasted to actually get round to doing it. Many millennials seem genuinely motivated to change their world and appear to have at their disposal a fantastic tool to do so. But I can't help but worry that internet activism ends up being just another one of the criteria of conformity: with your 'cause' being simply another aspect of your online identity, just as subject to the judgements of the moral majority as your selfie haircut. There is no doubt that the photographs of my youthful activities are not pretty, indeed they could accurately be described as grungy, but they recorded the activities that me and my friends chose, not those in which the rest of the world expected to see us engaged.

*I think I count Christmas as a neutral mainly

Plane Privilege

I have always loved flying. From the first time I got in an aeroplane age 9 to fly to Majorca, I've loved it. I find take off thrilling: the momentary sense of falling when the plane first leaves the ground, everything rapidly shrinking to model then map scale, the clouds flicking past, the guaranteed blinding sunshine. I love it. I never ever get tired of looking out of aeroplane windows (unless it's nighttime and cloudy below). It is a massive privilege that no human ever experienced until about 110 years ago and, if we carry on the way we're going, no human will be able to experience in 110 years time.
In the last 18 months I have flown over 130,000 miles for work and that is not a brag, I am slightly ashamed of that fact. I'm going to spend the rest of my life working off my carbon footprint. Most of the time when I fly back home, my flight is the first to land in Heathrow and I always think about my friends who endlessly tweet about plane noise from Heathrow early in the morning. Sorry guys.
Such a ridiculous amount of flying inevitably brings with it 'rewards': I have fairly rapidly climbed through the ranks of the frequent flyer programme of a well known airline and have recently reached 'the top' (although people who care about these things assure me that there is a special club for people who presumably rarely actually ever get off a plane) only to discover that the first class lounge seems designed solely to hide all the total pricks who think that flying a lot makes them automatically superior to everyone else, so that you good people don't have to put up with them striding around and bellowing into their phones anywhere else in the airport. In my limited experience of them, first class lounges are barely any nicer than their business class counterparts. They always have champagne, but often less choice of other things. What pervades in all that I have encountered is the overwhelming sense of entitlement emanating from their occupants. There is a feeling that  being afforded the massive privilege of being able to travel vast distances comfortably and quickly, whilst being plied with free booze and food in some way renders them übermensch. Once you begin to believe this fallacy, there is no end to the shitty ways you think it is acceptable to behave. I have seen a man sit in his aeroplane seat and watch whilst a member of cabin crew picked his work up from the floor and put it away in the overhead locker. He did not thank her. He was not busy doing anything else, he was simply sitting there watching, being fat and self-important. No one in business class ever seems to look out of the window. No one ever seems to gaze down at the world in wonder. I'm sure there are others, but usually it feels like it's just me who stares out of the top deck of an A380 and wonders how the hell it's going to get off the ground.
This a shame, but I guess it is the shame of all privilege: that those party to it will rarely take the time to appreciate it. They are either too accustomed to it to understand that it is a privilege or too busy worrying if someone else has more. That is most notably the case when you are able to fly in comfort, but to some extent all flying is a privilege that will always be afforded to only a minority of humanity past, present and future. Maybe remember that next time you get the opportunity to gaze down on your world from 30,000 feet. 

Potholes in my lawn

When I get to the end of my life, one of the only concrete achievements I will be able to point to is the fact that I was once in a band that released an album. We even got a single of the week in the NME the week of my 21st birthday, which was back when the NME was still cool. I know, right! Occasionally, when I'm worried people see nothing but the middle aged professional systems geek me, I wheel out these facts to prove that I was once marginally cool. If my guests are particularly (un)lucky I'll wheel out the album at a dinner party, or at least queue it up on Spotify (I don't actually own a physical copy).
It was on just such an occasion that I went searching for our album on Spotify and came up blank. It wasn't there. It had disappeared. I looked in a playlist where it had been (not that I listen to it all the time mind you) and found that it wasn't there. Some time later I found an option in Spotify that shows or hides 'unplayable' tracks and when I changed this setting, the album reappeared although only as a set of greyed-out tracks that were no longer playable. As the days went past, I noticed a whole bunch of tracks by other (more significant) artists were also greyed out. For whatever reason some music had simply been removed from Spotify. I had no way of knowing if that is because of licensing issues, artist refusal, administrative incompetence or some other reason entirely; all I knew was it was no longer available. I only knew this because I went looking and changed the default settings on my account, had I not been such a vain tosser I might never have noticed that music disappears off my playlist all the time. In effect Spotify has final say over what music I listen to. Obviously with music, there is a simple solution to this: buy CDs or at least mp3s that are not then at the mercy of the whims or licensing negotiations of an Internet music provider. With other things it is not so easy. In the 19 years that it has been in existence, we have become very reliant on Google; we trust it to tell us everything that is out there, but how can we be sure that what google tells us is everything is everything. The truth is that we can't.
One of my favourite albums growing up was De La Soul's '3ft High and Rising'. I know every word of that album because I practically wore out a tape copy I'd borrowed off a neighbour when I was 13. I have a vinyl copy, but I never listen to it because my record player has been unplugged for 3 years (and also because I am extremely precious about it). This means that I never listen to that album, because it does not exist in the digital world. I have looked: it is not on Spotify, Apple Music or any other digital service that I am aware of. I'm reliably informed that this is because it doesn't have clearance for the myriad famous samples that appear on the album, samples that if you love that album are an instant hook into the original the first time you hear it: a pre-vetting of some great music, expanding the horizons of young hip hop fans the world over. Unfortunately the shortsighted commercial imperative of absolute copyright enforcement overrides any consideration of longer term financial gain through association and '3ft High and Rising' remains unavailable in any digital form. This means to all intents and purposes it no longer exists; as how much of our reality is defined by its online identity? The kids could go looking for it in record shops, but they're unlikely to do so in any numbers as there is no awareness of it. Some might see the vinyl revival as a sign that the kids are turning away form the digital world, but mainly they are buying novelty vinyl versions of digital tracks, or popular classics on reissue. Vinyl records look retro cool above all else; an instagram fad for a generation of image collectors.
 In the pre-digital world there was always a popular version of the cultural truth that was occasionally contradictory to, and occasionally complimented by subcultures. Now there is no 'subculture' that can exist without the validation of the popular cultural truth, as this is defined. Really there is no subculture, because all culture is validated and defined by the framework of the digital hegemony. Furthermore, cultural history is filtered through that same framework: there are many albums from my youth that I cannot find online and so do not really exist in cultural fact any more. Whilst some people will fight for the right to be forgotten online, there will be vast chunks of late 20th and very early 21st century culture that will be forgotten simply because they never existed online in the first place. Im sure it was always the case that chunks of cultural history just disappeared, but at least in the past they would have been forgotten due to any number of random factors, not just the binary dead hand of digital commerce.
 This week Google and Microsoft announced that they will put illegal file sharing sites further down the rankings of their search results. We should note this, because this is how your reality is now defined: extreme right wing organisations can make up anything and remain right at the top of search engine rankings, but if someone wants to share music without paying for it, that's too morally repugnant for us to be exposed to. I am not a defender of music piracy in particular, but its singling out for banishment from search engines certainly speaks to the priorities of the companies who govern what form of truth we are exposed to. Unfortunately, we don't know what else we are being 'protected' from. We don't know what reality they have decided for us.

Pelican

I'm forever amazed by people who stand at pelican crossings waiting for the lights to change, but not pressing the button. They appear genuinely ignorant to the fact that the lights will not change if they do not press the button. Eventually, many just cross the road in exasperation,  tired of waiting for lights that appear to be never going to change. I find this astounding because it hints at a lack of understanding of the world that I couldn't bear to live with. I realised the other day that I know the phases of all my local traffic lights. I imagine that this is not unusual, but maybe it is. Possibly many more people know the phases of their local traffic lights without realising it, but I'm not sure how many people actively consider this knowledge to be something that contributes to their sense of place or identification with their local area. It is entirely possible that I am what would these days be described as 'a little bit on the spectrum', that this would account for some of how I familiarise myself with an area being about a high level familiarity with the basic mechanics of that area. I'm not saying I stand at road junctions and learn the phases of the traffic lights, I too am barely consciously aware of the process of gaining this knowledge. I just realised it for the first time the other day. I guess the difference comes at the point when one is assessing an unfamiliar road junction, which one does based on an accumulated knowledge of all similar or comparable road junctions. However, if we assume this approach is common to all, there are a startling number of people who have not yet established that where a set of pedestrian lights are not at a road junction, they will not change to favour the pedestrian until the button is pushed. There are a startling number of people who don't press the button when it's there, just in case. There are a startling number of people who have no active or intuitive understanding of even the most basic technology in their environment. I personally find this worrying.
 As we increasingly rely on technology to make decisions for us, the idea that we may not have even a cursory understanding of how those decisions are made is deeply troubling. I'm not saying that I am fully aware of the intricate workings of the Google algorithms, but I understand the broad principles behind them and I think about the rules that they operate by. Not all the time, not when I'm looking for a single piece of information that I am in little doubt will have a single answer (or am aware of the context that will confirm that piece of information for me). But when I am looking for more subjective information, I will know to filter the results, which I will do based on my own bias rather than any knowledge of how to account for algorithmic bias. Quite often I'll filter based on a single news agency, sometimes before I even search, so I'm not necessarily even exposing myself to all the options before limiting them. This is possibly because I am a old enough to approach information on the World Wide Web with with the pre-web view of single source news from a trusted source. Of course this allows for an understanding of the bias at work; I often find the opinions in the Guardian infuriating, but at least I understand the context in which they are generated; if I were to read a piece in the Times about the BBC I would understand the context that it is only ever viewed as a limit to potential revenue for News International. I know that the facts presented will be as accurate as they can be, accounting for the omissions of each bias, because a newspaper trades on its reputation as a purveyor of truth and so must be wary of straying too far from it. Google and Facebook actively avoid any claims to be a source of truth, yet that is how we think of them and they certainly don't discourage that view. As consumers of news, information or facts we need to be aware of the source; the 'delivery platforms' - the new intermediaries of news - can obfuscate source whilst fooling us into ascribing the trust that we would normally reserve for a news agency to the information that they deliver unvalidated, unverified and seemingly unfiltered. Of course we should also be aware that this last is not true: in an attempt to tailor our experience, to make the data we receive 'more relevant' (mainly in order to determine what advertising we will respond to best) the delivery platforms do filter our data, heavily. They give us the information they think we want, regardless of its source or veracity. This distinction is important: the delivery platforms tell us what they think we want to know, whereas a traditional news agency will tell us what they think we ought to know. When approaching information from each of these sources we don't need to know anything more about the process involved in delivering that information as long as we are aware of the principle that underpins it.
We don't need to know the details of the wiring of our local traffic lights, but it helps to know when to push the button.

Protest

Living in London and working in Surrey (mainly), I have the dubious honour of getting stuffed by both the train and tube strikes. As a hangover from my 'radical' youth, I default to unfettered support for anyone sticking it to The Man, even when they are making my life measurably more shit in the process. However, after several months of this fun and games, I am still not entirely sure what it is all about. I mean I understand the fundamental beef is about doing away with certain roles: manned ticket offices in the case of the tube and guards on trains opening and closing doors in the case of the trains. I think in both cases, the unions see these changes as the start of the process of getting rid of the staff associated with those jobs entirely. They're probably right: the companies involved will swear blind that they want to keep all the jobs, but if they make the job so meaningless that no one wants to do it, they will probably be able to get rid of the staff without firing most of them. This is a variation of the approach to privatising public services, where you starve it of cash, then complain that it's failing before selling it off to a company who can miraculously make a profit out of it with increased investment. However in this context the company are already making a profit, they just want to make more of a profit by getting rid of costly people. Helpfully, in the case of Southern Rail, they don't even need to risk their profits, as the government underwrites the franchise and pays all their fines. Fundamentally, the rail companies' mates in the government are using taxpayer money to break the unions on the this 'test case' so that when it happens on other franchises that they don't bankroll, the precedent has already been set and the unions have no support. Next time a Tory tells you they're all about competition and free markets, maybe explain this little bit of government intervention to prop up monopolies at the expense of the taxpayer.
However, whilst the process is unquestionably wrong and indefensible (unless you think that the purpose of government is to siphon taxpayers money straight to shareholders), I am less sure about the rectitude or otherwise of the outcome. In this instance probably only a little uncertain: having more human beings on trains and in stations is clearly preferable, as people are helpful in a range of situations. Also removing people from the service will not result in a cost saving to the consumer, as nothing ever does: train fares seem to be the one product that have an automatic increase built in, so cost savings are simply passed on to the shareholders as profits, along with a whole bunch of your taxes. So as a commuter, there is clearly no benefit to me in the changes that the unions are resisting.  Of course the train operators will argue that the changes are merely a result of progress, of new technology etc. That may be so, but it doesn't necessarily equate to something better. It is not like there is a clear environmental impact of sacking railway workers. It's not like there being job losses in North Sea oil because the energy companies had finally decided to take renewables seriously. It would be hard to argue against that, although doubtless some unions would. The problem for the left is that increasingly  workers' rights to remain in their jobs might well conflict with other concerns that impact humanity.
The labour movement was built on the assumption that, whilst the power structures that ruled heavy industry were wrong, the existence of that industry itself was unquestionable. Now that there is so much more to question about the industrial process and its impact on our world, a movement that defends employment at all costs no longer rules the moral high-ground. The automation of increasing numbers of jobs raises questions about labour as a concept, let alone as a movement. The left must think about how it protects workers' rights when traditional concepts of work are being deconstructed. Our value as data points in the information system will gradually overtake our value as more physical cogs in the machine. As companies look to exploit our data instead of our labour, we need to consider how we take back ownership of that means of production. At the moment there is no union defending those rights.

Piority

The I'm of an age where a lot of my friends have small children. Some of them are learning to share right now, which is an odd thought: that we need to learn to share. Although I suppose it's not that odd. When a child is born it knows only that it is awake, hungry or uncomfortable. The solution to each of these states is provided by the child's carer (usually a parent) quite often at the expense of the carer (monetary or otherwise). A baby has no concept that its need for comfort or sustenance in the middle of the night has a detrimental impact on the health of its parent, it simply knows that it is hungry or uncomfortable. It is utterly selfish, but we forgive it because it is also ignorant to the impacts of its selfishness. By and large as a child gradually becomes aware of the world around it, then of itself and finally of others, it learns of the consequences of its actions. As its needs are augmented by a plethora of wants, it discovers that there is a finite limit to the provision of those wants. It may not understand the logic or rationale behind that limit, but it eventually comes to understand that there is a limit (even if that understanding comes after many tantrums). The understanding of the logic and rationale behind those limits is pretty much the whole of the process of growing up, from learning to understand the impact of sharing, to understanding the ways in which all our wants and needs are satisfied, to understanding the complex consequences of attempting to satisfy all those wants and needs. The latter, of course, taking up basically a lifetime, assuming we ever get out of the first stage. Some people never really get to understanding sharing, seeing it as something they simply had to do as a child, and they certainly never get to attempting to understand the consequences of satisfying their needs and wants. They effectively remain in a state of arrested development, but because they are full size, we assume that they are adults. We often give credence to their demands because people have given credence to them in the past and they have been successful in accumulating credibility for their demands. Do we ever question whether demanding people understand their high expectations, their requirements and consequences, or are just massive babies in suits*? 

*with no tie because they demanded that too 

Polar

The social media have been full of witticisms concerning the pace of news of late. Starting with a seemingly unusually high number of celebrity deaths at the beginning of the year, we do appear to have crammed an awful lot of (mainly bad) news into 2016 so far, culminating in the few weeks that followed the referendum on whether the UK should leave Europe. The odd thing about the major news items in that period was, that although they seem wildly different, they all point to a world moving in the same direction: away from each other. 

The attempted coup in Turkey was perhaps the most extreme example, but it is really no different than the leave vote or the popular support for Donald Trump. President Erdogan has massive popular support in Turkey, with over 50% of the vote in the last presidential election. However, given Turkey has locked up more journalists than any other country in the world, you might expect that the odds have been stacked slightly in Erdogan's favour. When the only voices you hear are affirming a single viewpoint, why would you consider any other? Unfortunately it would appear that the coup attempt demonstrates that not everyone in Turkey believes what they're told in the news. Worse than that, it shows that some people felt so divorced form the message they were presented, so detached from Erdogan's status quo that they felt the need to take violent action to overturn it. I am not saying that a military coup against an ostensibly democratic government is right, I am just saying that you need pretty good motivation to want to stage one in the first place, especially if you're not even top brass; this was effectively a mutiny. Anyway, it failed, and rather than see it as a worrying indicator of the deep divisions within his country, Erdogan has taken it as an excuse to get rid of everyone in public life who might disagree with him. Going on the numbers so far dismissed or detained, this is quite a lot of people, which is as it should be in a healthy democracy. Unfortunately despite what he says, Erdogan isn't massively interested in democracy, but rather appears to be on the verge of going full Pinochet, which is something neither his country or nor either of the continents it straddles needs right now. 

Of course Erdogan creates his echo chamber of opinion by removing opportunities for contradiction in the mass media, but with no conventional means for expressing their opinions, his opponents must have found other outlets. Such outlets most likely coalesced around social media which as we all know (theoretically) assist in creating their own echo chambers. Many of the mutineers must have been surprised to find that many of the Turkish people did not exactly welcome them with open arms. They probably had months of convincing each other that theirs was the only reasonable cause of action and that its justification was as plain as day to any idiot, only to find out that most of the idiots still bought the line fed to them every day by a cowed media. In the aftermath of the attempted coup Erdogan and his supporters are even more convinced of the rectitude of their cause and course: the enemies of democracy have shown themselves, so more can be done to rid the world of them. Anyone questioning the actions of Erdogan can be shown to be wrong, because such people have been shown to be enemies of democracy, willing to kill civilians. It is an absolutist outlook that gives one a simple way to discredit all dissent. 

We in the west can comfort ourselves that we are not so blinkered as all that; we understand democracy, we are measured and reasonable, yet we are as polarised as we have been at any time since the Second World War. After the war, there was an understanding that  extremes had led to destruction and death on a scale that severely traumatised those it did not kill. The response was a kind of truce, an agreement, not to agree, but to respect each other's point of view; this may have been easier with the USSR as a constant reminder of the alternative. However, after failure of the radical movements of the 60s, the world gradually began to drift away from this compromise: the right wing elites, paranoid about what popular support for any left wing ideology could do for their wealth and power base, started the campaign to label anything vaguely progressive as dangerously revolutionary and therefore just dangerous. This worked well for them whilst they had broad control of the popular press and therefore public opinion, and whilst the dismantling of the state had some demonstrable financial benefit for those who bought shares or council houses. However, the advent of the social media complicated matters: the temporary rage that the popular press whips up to push a particular agenda (or just to sell more newspapers can get caught in little social media eddies that turn into whirlpools of discontent. Currently, the perception is that this can be to the advantage of these press organisations, especially as they no longer have to rely on anything approaching factual journalism, but can allow entirely made up headlines create a furore (and click-through) based on nothing more than their own momentum. The danger for the popular press is that the credulous who form these waves of wrath find some other source for their outrage - social justice for example - so in order to retain their interest, ever more sources for 'moral' outrage must be sought, or the same groups of 'culprits' must be targeted repeatedly, reinforcing dangerous stereotypes. 

I saw a tweet in response to some new Trump nonsense that was simply this: "DONT BELIVE THE MEDIA LIES, REAL AMERICANS SUPPORT TRUMP." What struck me most about this was not the fact that its writer felt the media (presumably all of them) lie, but the idea that somehow those who don't vote for Trump are not true Americans. This in itself is not a new concept, Americans love to call each other names and claim that only they and not their opponents understand the true nature of what it is to be American, but the fact that it was shouted made it feel like it was a conviction rather than a belief. 

Jeremy Corbin is very much presented as a conviction politician, a man who sticks by his dogma in the face of the grubby compromise of modern politics. This is presented as very noble, and I'm sure it is, it's just not very practical. I agree with many of Corbyn's principles, but I am beginning to understand that he has no idea how to enact them. Principles and beliefs can be good, but they are not the same thing as policies. Where principles have the advantage is that they are easier to articulate and delineate. It is easier to define a person by their principles than by their actions; easier to label them. This labelling works well for creating binaries: this is what/who I am for and this is what/who not. Hence why so many of Corbyn's supporters see enemies everywhere and every criticism as a personal attack on their principles. Like everyone else, their beliefs in these matters are simply amplified by the agreement of everyone around them; everyone in their social echo chamber sees the world as they do, that is how they first came to be connected, so it is no surprise that these people reinforce the view that the dogma is right, indeed unquestionable. Perhaps more worryingly though, they reinforce the idea that anyone else is universally wrong. 

Donald Trump has no obvious ideology, but he does offer principles. The fact that these principles are based in the reality of neither his life, nor America, nor the world is immaterial; he offers principles unsullied by the dirty compromise of politics. There is no argument against this because all alternatives are establishment lies, created by a shady elite who serve only their own interests. The truth can only lie in the hands of Trump and his supporters. 

It is not surprising that this concept of a monopoly of truth works so well for Trump, Corbyn and Erdogan alike: in a society where we use hashtagged words or phases to define whole concepts, it is not hard to define all others as #wrong, especially when the algorithms associated with those hashtags will tend to seek out only those who agree with us or the most deranged of those who don't. In each case, there is a kernel of truth to the messages presented: the Turkish coup was essentially anti-democratic; Erdogan is essentially anti-democratic; the right wing media and establishment do have it in for anyone who runs the Labour Party; the vested interests of a moneyed elite do damage American democracy. Unfortunately in each of these cases, the observers of these facts have taken them and made them the tennent of an anti-ideology that only their principles can overcome. By reinforcing and amplifying the messages from their personal echo chambers, each moves the world a bit further away from the messy compromise it needs in order not to slip into chaos. Unyielding ideologies cannot coexist and yet they seem increasingly to be the only thing we are wiling to consider. 

I had an argument with a friend recently* where I accused him of spouting empty rhetoric (because he refused to be drawn on the practicalities of realising his ideals). He retorted that only politicians can spout empty rhetoric, people like him just have opinions. This is fine, we are all entitled to our opinions, as we are entitled to be disappointed when the actions of our politicians don't coincide with those opinions. What we should perhaps be more wary of is when the rhetoric of our politicians simply echoes the opinions of everyone else in our little echo chamber: it is then that we need to take a look outside. 

*we're old fashioned enough to be able to argue about politics and still remain friends