PPP

I have finally found myself at the true arse end of market capitalism. I am a man of privilege, these things don’t usually happen to me, but it is important to realise that the people who pay the people who run my country want this kind of thing to happen more often. It was a relatively trivial incident, but in what it represents it was deeply troubling.

I was stupid enough to go out for drinks with old friends in Shoreditch during the tube strike. When we finally left the pub later than we perhaps intended, my friends instantly got an Uber to their relatively cool bit of southeast London. I didn’t try Uber at first, my prejudice against loss making tech firms hell bent on destroying public transport infrastructure forced me to try another (probably equally exploitative) app. I put in my (still zone 3, but much less hip) destination and watched for a few minutes as the app failed to convince any drivers to drag their arses all the way out to my particular part of north London when there was a tube strike on and there was plenty of rich pickings to be had locally. The app asked if I wanted to go for a more expensive option. Sure I did, but none of the higher paid drivers were interested either. Exasperated, I swallowed my principles and opened Uber. Surely east London would be awash with drivers only too happy for a solid fare to the arse end of somewhere. It wasn’t. Again, various cars briefly flashed up on the display, presumably as drivers saw the route and thought “sod that”. I stared at my phone for several minutes more, but nothing resolved itself. I stared pointedly at the drivers in the parked cars across the road, all of whom I imagined were swiping left on me. No one wanted my fare. I cancelled the request and started walking. This is fine for me, I’m a middle aged white man, waking through the almost entirely gentrified environs of East and North London is an entirely innocuous experience for me. If I’d been a young woman it probably would have been fine too, but it might not have felt it. That is not the whole point though (even whilst being a pretty good one). 

I am an infrequent user of taxis and an even less frequent user of Uber but I still view it as a service. A few years ago, stood outside my hotel at 6am shortly after the T6 typhoon warning had been declared, with the concierge hopelessly waving at all the taxis heading home with their lights off, I turned to Uber. The app duly informed me that surge pricing was in effect, but that was no problem because work were paying. A 20-something local duly showed up in a mean looking Prius (if such a thing is possible) and drove me to catch the last flight out of Hong Kong before they closed the airport. This particular example, where the market triumphed, is the kind of thing Uber loves: I needed to catch my flight, I had the means and someone was happy to name a price for the required service. Market economics in effect, everyone wins, but what if there hadn’t been anyone available to drive me to the airport (unlikely in Hong Kong where people drive for Uber just for the excuse to drive - but still) or what if no one had wanted to ride the fine line around what typhoon rules apply when (again unlikely given Uber drivers in Hong Kong are mainly young men)? The market would have had no answer to that. No amount of money I could have offered would have got me a lift to the airport. Of course it was a much more mundane example that stranded me in Shoreditch on a Friday night a few years later: all available drivers simply believed they could get a better fare. I was not able to offer more money (or maybe I was and I just didn’t have the knowledge of how to game the market) and I was not able to talk to them to discuss terms. The market, mediated in this way, had failed me. I’m sure Uber’s response to this would be to add the ability to up the fare offer as a passenger (enhancing the concept of transport as commodity exchange), but that wouldn’t solve the problem for everyone. At some point the transport market would become unaffordable, or ~ if there is no one available supply side ~ simply unavailable. This is why we have public transport that gets you near to where you want to go for a fixed price: everyone knows how to use it, how much it will cost, when and where it is available. 

Companies like Uber have an open policy of wanting to undermine public transport infrastructure in order to create greater dependency on their products. And we should call them products; we can’t call them services if they don’t provide a service. The problem is they’re sold to governments and authorities as services, they are sold as alternatives to genuine service infrastructure, but they shouldn’t be. Increasingly the Uber model is creeping into all aspects of what used to be service provision. Cash strapped local authorities are presented these products by venture capital backed tech execs with examples of where they’ve delivered alternatives to infrastructure they’ve undermined elsewhere. It’s effectively free! It will cost you nothing (except possibly the increased marginalisation of your most vulnerable communities). The public servants are wowed, the tech bros move in with their heavily subsidised product and smother the existing service. Once they are the only game in town, like my Hong Kong taxi driver, they can charge what they want. And provide ‘services’ at their discretion: there is rarely any kind of agreement or service level expectations for these products. The tech firms have no actual agreements with the local authorities save any licences required to meet minimal requirements (and sometimes not even those - what’s a few million quid in fines to a tech giant?) and a few vague promises in some fancy PowerPoints. 

 Whilst the rest of us gradually fall out of love with the reality of a patchy service delivered by a flashy app, (mainly right wing or at least neoliberal) governments can’t help but keep falling in love with them. It’s only a matter of time before the public service one of these technological ‘innovations’ is more essential than public transport (assuming you don’t think that is essential enough) and people start dying because they haven’t got the money or the supply isn’t there. I’m sure many people think that couldn’t happen because such injustice would not go unnoticed, but it would. Big technology has the ability to deflect the responsibility for events it doesn’t facilitate, even when (according to its publicity) it should have facilitated them. In my case there is no evidence that I couldn’t get an Uber on that Friday night during the tube strike. There is no assessment of the root causes and plan to resolve the issue. As far as Uber is concerned, its product was working optimally that evening: matching available drivers with the customers they wanted to take. In this way, if we don’t stop it, our services will be replaced by products that obfuscate away any requirement to delivery, and public infrastructure as we know it will disappear in a cloud of vapour-service.* 

 *in tech the term vapourware refers to ‘software’, usually built for demonstration purposes, that is little more than a front end. It cannot undertake the genuine operations of the final product, although it can be set up to appear as if it is fulfilling these functions so a client can see what it should do. It seems fitting then to describe these products as vapour-services, as they only appear to deliver the service they intend to replace.

Profusion

For a certain type of middle aged man, what passed as entertainment even before the war in Ukraine was looking up facts about heat pumps on the internet. And so for a little while the suggested content pushed when I opened up YouTube on my phone was videos of heating engineers moaning about how much they hate heat pumps. Whether this is the only video content Google can find on heat pumps or whether this is the content certain vested interests have paid to be pushed whenever someone shows an interest in a profit-damaging shift away from fossil fuels I can’t tell. Either way it was depressingly tedious.  

Of course this way of serving content works and so eventually I found that I had watched the of best part of twelve minutes of some 50-something man in branded overalls listing all his grievances with heat pumps. As most of them seemed to be that they’re a bit of a faff to fit, they were easy enough to dismiss, but one fact stuck in my mind. It wasn’t a revelation to me, I knew it already, but the manner in which it was presented caused me to doubt, to worry, to genuinely reconsider whether I should be aiming to install a heat pump. It was the fact that a heat pump will only heat your radiators to 40-45°c. This is a much lower temperature than a regular combi boiler will pump out central heating. So I wondered, what if that means I won’t be able to heat my house in winter? What if I spend all this money doing the right thing only for my family to spend their winters wearing three jumpers round the house because of the input temperature of the fancy new system? 

Fortunately, I can experiment. My boiler has a temperature setting, so I set it to 45°c to see what would happen. Whilst the heating stayed on for longer each time it came on, it used less power and maintained a more consistent temperature throughout the house for longer. So what was the drawback? On the video, the heating engineer said the lower temperature means you won’t get the instant response of heating your home when you turn the heating on, and I’m sure you won’t, but that’s what programmable thermostats were invented for and also my experiment would tend to suggest that instant response is part of the problem. With the boiler output set at a higher temperature, the house heats up then cools down quickly without ever getting warm. I live in a 140 year old terraced house, it is double glazed and has some loft insulation, but nothing out of the ordinary, so what made this heating engineer believe that this form of heating will be worse for my house, rather than better (as my experiment showed)? 

I’m amazed by the number of pizza/chicken delivery places there are near me. Every week a leaflet for some hitherto unknown purveyor of fast food drops through my letterbox. I can only presume that very few people in my part of London ever do their own cooking. The latest one had the usual offers of increasingly startling quantities of chicken/pizza, but instead of the usual accompanying vat of cola, these came with a free energy drink. Now I’m not an expert, but I don’t think people about to undertake endurance sports are likely to want to consume large amounts of pizza or fried chicken immediately before they start. Also I’m not sure the endurance sport community were the target audience for these leaflets. The point of energy drinks is to provide a large amount of additional energy for high intensity or endurance activities so I really don’t understand why you would want to consume one whilst sitting in your joggers tucking into your bargain bucket. I’m a water, tea or booze kind of guy though so I’m probably not the target market either. Still, I can just about understand drinking a regular fuzzy drink to wash down your fast food, but energy drinks barely function as a drink, there’s not really enough liquid for that. 

My mother-in-law lives in a relatively isolated village on the Welsh border, so needs a car to get about. I regularly apprise her of the advances in electric vehicle technology and she always asks the same question: “is there a four wheel drive version?” Of course there are four wheel drive EVs, but they are universally expensive. By contrast she can get a four wheel drive petrol Subaru for relatively little money. I have repeatedly questioned her need for four wheel drive. Years ago I bought a dreaded SUV after being unable to get through flood waters round to her house in a regular height car, but I have never seen evidence of a need for actual four wheel drive. I have pointed to articles that say for country driving the kind of tires you have makes a much greater difference than four wheel drive, but to no avail. The local Subaru dealer is clearly making a killing by convincing pensioners that their well-being, indeed their whole way of life, relies entirely on four wheel drive vehicles. Throughout the twentieth century, we were wowed with feats that relied on a certain degree of over-engineering: climbing Everest, the space race or Concorde relied on materials and processes that had to operate beyond the extremes that their situations placed them in. Very expensive equipment operating in hostile environments needs overcapacity as a fail-safe usually because someone’s life depends on it. We have taken this necessity from extremes to simply be good engineering sense and ‘just to be on the safe side’ we overpower our central heating, we drive around cities in massive off-road vehicles, we buy extra food that we then throw away. We do it because we are told to, the supposed experts that we rely on to advise us about our heating or our vehicle choice have never questioned this orthodoxy of overcapacity because it has never failed them (and most likely allows them to charge more). No one bothers to find out what the sensible capacity is, so we end up wasting masses of energy and material just to avoid the effort of finding out. 

Like so many things our society currently defaults to, this orthodoxy of overcapacity needs to be challenged.

Patronising

The pandemic turned me into a republican (just to be clear, not the American kind with a capital ‘R’, a weird love of guns and hatred for women). I’d always been monarchy agnostic: not anti them, just, like a lot of people I guess, fairly ambivalent towards them. I supposed they didn’t really do any harm. Now I don’t know how I supposed that for so long.

It was during the first lockdown, if you can remember that weird balmy spring, where the sun seemed to shine every day as we sat in our homes, isolated, unaware of what stresses, strains and sorrows afflicted others in our neighbourhoods. We made a good fist of it, we got food for isolating neighbours, we got tipsy on Houseparty with old friends and those of us with kids and jobs forced ourselves into sleep patterns that we’ve never quite adjusted from since. About six weeks into this elongated pause, the queen made a speech. I didn’t listen to it, I couldn’t see the point. I supposed its intended purpose was to comfort a worried nation, like an animated version of one of those irritating “Keep calm and carry on” posters, but I couldn’t understand how the words of a 90-something aristocrat with what I presume is a limited knowledge of epidemiology was going to comfort anyone. Then I realised that the monarch’s purpose is never to reassure per se, but to reinforce the status quo. If people find that reassuring, that is because they have been trained from birth to seek reassurance in stagnation. The pageantry, the endless images of royals bestowing their presence on worthy, sick or vulnerable people and the speeches are all designed to train us to believe that the wellbeing of our nation depends upon the perpetuation of a system that rewards a small number of people for being born. The fact is that there is no rational or logical argument in favour of monarchy, much like religion, it relies on belief: a belief that some people were born to rule. 

We are told that the advantage of a constitutional monarchy is that our head of state doesn’t represent a particular political party, so can represent all the people. However, simply by existing, the queen is a living embodiment of the core conservative principle that some people just are better than others and therefore shouldn’t have to pay tax. Everything that the queen does is in service to this idea. If a politician visits a hospital, it is in order to infer that some policy they enacted had a direct impact on making that hospital work; if the queen visits a hospital it is in order to infer that the hospital simply wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for her sprinkling of platitudes and inane questions. We have to believe that as a nation we can’t function without a patronising pat on the head from our head of state now and then. And that weird dependence, this strange form of Stockholm syndrome extends to the patricians who rule us, allowing them to lie to us and steal from us whilst we gratefully vote for them time after time. 

Those politicians have shown us daily for innumerable days that they do not represent us, they represent the interests of themselves and others like them: a very small minority. It is this minority that our monarch’s patronage favours, and it is this minority alone that she represents: the international elite. Indeed, until recently the European monarchs had to breed amongst themselves in order not to sully the blood line. It is only in the last 40 years that they allowed selected commoners to join their ranks. Like Margaret Thatcher allowing people to buy their council houses it has been a PR coup: adding only a tiny number to the ranks of the elite whilst convincing the rest of the great unwashed that ‘happily ever after’ was within their grasp if they just played the game right. Kate was allowed to marry her Prince Charming because she played the game right: her parents had earned enough money to send their child to a good school where she had learned to be a good proto-aristocrat. She was perfect: ‘common’ enough to show how modern and diverse the monarchy was (having once bought a dress at Primark or whatever) whilst still being elite enough to show the people who really deserves a happily ever after. Meghan was an even greater gift: she was allowed a glimpse of her happy ever after with the coaches and horses and waving crowds, but when it turned out not to be happily ever after, she left. This allowed the constant stream of racist articles about why she was not fit to be royal to pivot to vindictive racist articles about her lack of gratitude for the crumbs that had been brushed her way from the royal table. She has become the establishment’s daily illustration of why the undeserving are undeserving, even if they have money. These stories  have been a valuable addition to the daily rounds of propaganda aimed at ‘proving’ what passes for our constitution is based on something more mysterious and intangible than inherited wealth, institutionalised corruption and systemic racism. 

As we all build up the the Jubilee ‘celebrations’ and the bunting is hung out, the jingoistic rhetoric seems to get ratcheted up. People will tell you that those who don’t want to celebrate the queen mustn’t love their country, but this is the kind of absolutist argument employed by those who fear genuine debate. The monarchy is just another cabal of rich people who have successfully managed to weave this unquestioned absolutism into a complex pageantry. They are no different from any other rich people who wish to retain family wealth, they have just convinced us that they are. I really love my country and I want a sensible debate about what is best for it to include whether unquestioning worship of inherited wealth and power is a good basis for a functioning democracy that (cl)aims to be meritocratic. I want to be able to sing a national anthem that celebrates my country, rather than droning on about keeping an old rich person alive. I have no objection to the royal family as people*, they can keep their wealth (as long as they pay inheritance tax) they can keep the properties (as long as the same rules apply to them as to all other property in the country), but they should have no constitutional role in this country. Until that changes we cannot say we live in a fair society. 

*apart from the fact that they seem like fairly objectionable people, but that is just a standard trait of privilege as far as I can tell. 

Predictions

I love a bit of futurology as much as the next geek, so when this came to my attention, I was happy to read. Buried amongst all the talk of freezing your poo and the lack of any mention of planning for environmental catastrophe was a very interesting point about the future: be prepared to learn for your whole life. The pace of technological change means that none of us, regardless of our occupation, will reach a position where we have learnt it all and are experts. In reality this has always been the case, but the difference now is scale. Whereas before CPD might involve reading a few articles and attending a few seminars a year, now a whole new language can spring up in a year. No one is going to have time to learn a whole new language each year whilst also working with the existing ones they know, so a new approach is required.

A few times recently I have heard some of the older developers at work complain about people who ‘code from Stack Overflow’. This is meant as a snub, an illustration that these people don’t know their field and somehow lack the knowledge to be ‘real’ developers, but this is an increasingly outdated idea of what it is to be a developer. Stack Overflow is just another tool, no different in essence to those giant thick books that still sit on the desks of some of those same colleagues, except that it takes seconds to find what you’re looking for on Stack Overflow and it is the equivalent of having a desk piled high with those massive books, leaving no space for a laptop. Even in the ‘old’ days, people didn’t retain the knowledge about every single function in their head, hence the well guarded wedges of paper that held all the secrets to SQL or C or whatever, it was just you were a more efficient coder if you retained most of the details of a language in your head rather than spending half your time leafing through a telephone directory. Now, as long as you understand the core concepts of a language, you can work the rest out as you go. Of course the more you code, the more you learn; it’s just that you don’t have to wait to lean so much before you start to code.

I have been talking in terms of pure programming, but as the digital realm comes to dominate all aspects of our lives, the same principle will apply to all work. Beyond an understanding of the core principles, what will shape our careers will be how we react creatively to our work. In adults creativity has a certain mystique about it, as if it is some special gift bestowed upon a lucky few. I’m sure some people are more naturally creative than others, but that isn’t to say the others aren’t creative at all. As children we all create, through play, but traditionally we were taught that growing up was about putting such ‘childish’ things behind us. For children, play allows them to explore the boundaries of the possible and even to imagine the impossible and enact it. By attempting to reach beyond their existing reality through play, children at least establish what the limits to that reality are, and at best expand them, not necessarily as far as their imagination, but further than they previously knew. This is really just experimentation that leads to discovery; it is learning. As adults we dismiss it because the majority of discoveries that children make are about things that are commonplace to us, but this is only because we familiarised ourselves with them through such learning. As we outsource the retention of knowledge to the digital realm and accumulating reams of knowledge becomes a pointless exercise, we will need to rediscover playful experimentation as at least an aspect of our work. I am not talking about the gamification of work, as gamification is too often a reductive and patronising exercise. It is the kind of nudge nonsense promoted by tories who think that ‘small government’ means not making the rich pay any tax whilst keeping the plebs anaesthetised enough that they don’t mind generating wealth for their masters.

Talking of games, another complaint old people like me can be heard to make is that computer games are too easy these days. “Manic Miner, that was a proper game. It required real skill and dedication, not like games today. Anyone can finish them.” Is the sort of thing you hear. Now whilst I honestly can’t remember the last time I played a computer game, I can’t help but observe the games people play on public transport. Whilst many of these are brain training type puzzle games (especially those played by older players), I am surprised how many these days (especially those played by younger players, especially in East Asia) appear to involve no discernible on-screen action. They are games that involve lots of decision making, essentially management games. In the medium term future, whilst most AI remains essentially dumb, some form of decision making management role will probably remain a key human job. Requirements for this job will be the quick absorption of information and the ability to make decisions based on it.

The kind of Victorian-style wrote learning favoured by the reactionary elements in our governments of late do nothing to nurture and support either creativity or management-style decision making. Defenders of this type of curriculum will say “look at China, it works for them.” I would argue that China succeeds despite its education system. There are a billion people in China, so some creativity will surface however poorly it is s but China’s success has mainly come not from creativity, but from management decision making: they have gathered the evidence of products and services created elsewhere and made the right decisions about how to manage them better. China’s youth are learning effective management not from school, but from computer games. They will succeed despite their education system not because of it.
Our education system in the UK is preparing our children for the 19th century and current computer games may help to prepare them for some part of the 21st century. However, unless we change our approach to creative play, we’ll be creating the managers of the future, but not the leaders.

Petition priorities

One thing that seems to entertain my colleagues no end is how averse I am to getting in a taxi. I'm not a big fan of taxis, the only reason I can think for this is that I don't like being beholden to a single stranger on a one-to-one basis and being forced to spend my time in what is essentially their space. In a train, the driver has their own personal space and they are not there solely to transport me personally. I don't have to have an awkward conversation with a train driver, I don't have to quietly ignore the fact that I disagree strongly with many of their views for fear that disagreement will stop the train from reaching its destination. If the Brexit vote has shown me anything, it is that I am generally happier being ignorant to what most of my fellow citizens think, and fortunately what's left of British reserve still displays itself on public transport where I may remain essentially anonymous and untroubled by the opinions of others. Also I like driving (although this may have something to do with how infrequently I actually do it), so having to pay someone to do something that I'd rather be doing myself - my way - seems fairly masochistic to me.
So you can probably guess that I'm not the biggest Uber fan to start with. I mean it's like someone looked at all the things I don't like about taking taxis and thought "how can we make him just a little bit more uncomfortable?" The answer of course is:
a) make it clear that you really are just sat in someone else's car
b) make it explicit that your driver is judging you and that judgement has consequences beyond the current journey.
That is not to say that I haven't used Uber at all, I have the app and in an emergency I'll use it. About a year ago I was stood outside the lobby of my hotel in Hong Kong at 5.30am waiting for a taxi to take me to the airport. A typhoon was heading for the city and the T8 (the point at which you are not supposed to travel - the signal everyone wants before office hours, but not during) was expected just after 6am. It was already getting wet and pretty windy and all the regular taxis were heading in the opposite direction with their lights turned off. After a few minutes of the porters trying in vain to flag me a taxi, I turned to Uber. Of course the app dutifully told me that due to demand the price of my journey had doubled, but I wasn't that bothered: free market economics, supply and demand, and (ahem) it was going in expenses anyway. So five minutes later a Prius turned up with a young driver only to happy to race a typhoon to the airport. The T8 was raised about halfway to the airport, but we made it fine and my plane left on time (one of the last to do so that day I believe). In such circumstances I couldn't help but be grateful for the pure market force that Uber unleashes, regardless of the potential risk the driver would be taking on his return journey, a risk he essentially balanced against a reward of effectively an extra £20. Of course you can't rule out the possibility that he was doing it for the kicks. People in Hong Kong often drive for Uber as a hobby, meaning that it's not uncommon to hail a regular Uber and get a ride in a Tesla. I guess it's an excuse to do more driving in a car that is unlikely ever to leave the city, plus it earns them a little petty cash. I can't imagine that, in a city that expensive, many people earn their primary living driving for Uber.
In London, of course, is is a different matter and there are plenty of people who now rely on Uber to make a living. I'm sure many of them are thankful for many of the light touch aspects of their relationship with their employer, although obviously Uber would argue that it is not their employer, so as not to have to take responsibility for their welfare. Indeed Uber seemingly doesn't like to take responsibility for anyone's welfare, as it turns out they've been a little sketchy about doing their drivers' background checks, and perhaps more disturbingly about reporting incidents in their drivers' cars to the police. Basically they're not keen on dealing with anything that would involve taking responsibility for the processes that generate their revenue in the way that a normal company would have to. Uber is like the teenage younger brother of the tech giants, it sees that they get away with dodging taxes and not taking responsibility for nazi propaganda on their servers and thinks "the world owes me a living for my genius, I basically don't have to do anything in return, they should thank me for making the world a better place." And this is the problem, tech companies are so pleased with themselves for changing the world that they think that means they don't have to think about the consequences of that change. Of course the biggest problem is that we don't expect them to.
Uber have famously run into problems in London, with TFL refusing to renew their license. This seems fair enough to me. We wouldn't allow an airline to fly planes if they didn't comply with CAA regulations, so why would we let a taxi firm operate in a city if they don't conform to the local transport regulator's guidelines? Of course Uber would argue that they are not a taxi firm, but a platform that allows individual taxi drivers to connect with customers. Be that as it may, to the user it is Uber that offers the service and it is a regulated seruyvice. Even if they treat both their drivers and passengers as customers (which they don't) they are still the company providing that service within a regulated space. Just because they have managed to find a way to avoid paying most of the costs of operating a taxi firm, doesn't mean that they can avoid the responsibilities. Of course this being the internet age, Uber instantly set up an online petition and half a million people were only too happy to sign it, because never mind a government selling arms to repressive regimes or a thousand other things you could add your digital signature to petitions against, never mind the fact that regulations around transport are designed to keep people safe (just like regulations around fire safety in buildings), people want stuff that's cheap and convenient, and that's what they'll sign a petition for. So if you signed that petition and your Uber catches fire and burns you to death, or your Uber driver attacks you because he's a psychopath and his background checks were incomplete, or your Uber is involved in a crash in which you're injured but you have no recourse to compensation because it turns out it wasn't properly insured, just remember that's what you wanted, you signed a petition asking for it. Well done you.
I am not saying any of these things will happen if you get an Uber, but without proper regulation, there is no way of knowing they won't. Increasingly companies rely on us prizing convenience over pretty much everything else to justify a world in which they have no responsibilities. Every day we sacrifice a little more of our privacy, our safety or our children's future for a marginal increase in convenience and large corporations use our ambivalence to the consequences to justify taking no responsibility. Indeed it seems they can rely on us rallying to their defence when upstart public bodies try and do something in our better interest. It turns out that we'll do more in the name of convenience than we will in the name of safety, social justice or humanity. Not only do we ignore things that may be in our best interests, but we resent them, we actively work against them. When you think about it, it's hard not to conclude that we deserve whatever is coming our way in the near future, when we've become utterly infantilised fat blobs staring at our phones, waiting for our pizza/taxi/blowjob to turn up whilst the forest fires/hurricanes/floods carry off our worthless, useless bodies.

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.