In June, the London Review of Books published a superb article by the academic and writer William Davies, referring to this phenomenon as “Faragist TikTok”. He described opening an account and sampling what then poured into his “for you” feed: “Clips of masked men cutting down ultra-low emission zone cameras with angle-grinders. Clips of supermarket shelves displaying inflated new prices. Clips of fights breaking out in the street.” More than anything else, he said, he was presented with footage that constantly conveyed the same flailing fury: “Clips of men and women addressing their phones while sitting in cars or out walking, lamenting the state of ‘Starmer’s Britain’, their words appearing in TikTok’s distinctive pink-highlighted font.”
Ah, yes. Of course. It's all the fault of social media. Not government or organisations that have failed the people, and not the people's wishes for a change to their lives and the way they are governed themselves.
That's not a reality people like this ever want to face.
When I read this, I instantly recognised what he was talking about. On the occasions I had tried to digest what Musk had done to X, scenes of that kind were exactly what I had found. Scrolling through Instagram was sometimes similar. I then did the same thing as Davies and got half-immersed in TikTok (at 55, I had previously assumed it was not for me). Soon enough, what I was expecting materialised: a disused warehouse in Manchester that had been set on fire, a group of hooded youths being arrested by a gaggle of cops, and a crowd of neo-Nazis, marching in front of a union jack and joylessly reciting the chant that echoed around the capital at the weekend: “Keir Starmer is a wanker.”
Do you think he isn't, then, John? You didn't seem too keen when he was threatening to get your hand out of the taxpayer's pocket.
What does this do to people? Where you live might seem stable, uneventful and full of people who are law-abiding. Most places, after all, are like that. But if you are one of the social media users in Britain who spends mind-boggling amounts of time on TikTok (on Android devices, the average was recently put at 49.5 hours a month), the spectacle that erupts on your screens might suggest that venturing outside will soon plunge you into disorder, crime and chaos – and that those things really do define life elsewhere. This, I think, at least partly explains the place of the archetypal city in some people’s modern paranoia: the idea that multiculturalism has turned London into a crime-infested no-go area, or that Washington DC, Chicago and Los Angeles are in such a state of social disrepair that Trump has no option but to send in the national guard.
All social media accounts do is give people a voice, John. Why is the Left always so agin that? Is it because they know what they'd say?
In 2008, Gordon Brown attempted a rebuttal in the speech he made at the Labour party conference. “The Conservatives say our country is broken – but this country has never been broken by anyone or anything,” he said. “This country wasn’t broken by fascism, by the cold war, by terrorists. Of course there are problems, but this is a country being lifted up every day by the people who love it.” When I read those words and thought about that great ocean of online video, a thought came to mind: these days, could anyone imagine a Labour politician saying anything similar? And, if they did, would they not look like the epitome of complacency and denial? And then I once again realised how absurd all of this is, and how much the supposed reality that politicians have to deal with is now confected, overblown and often completely illusory. Such is life in the modern society of the spectacle, and such is the huge change in how people understand the world and their place in it that it starts to look like a sinister kind of magic.
Yes! It must be the technology that's wobven its sinister spell over the populace! It can't possibly be that eventually, they realise what the Left's gameplan is and reject it, can it??
