Newsletter

Plus some big news

So first, the news: I’m joining the Wall Street Journal as a weekly opinion columnist! Starting later this month. The MMM podcast will remain the same, but you’ll be able to find all of my writing at the Journal – and lots of it.

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A few new interviews from me in November. I went on the First Things podcast to discuss cockney London with Rusty Reno. I also appeared on Modern Wisdom again, alongside Mary Harrington:

And here is the footage from an event I did in Vancouver at the beginning of October, hosted by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute:

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Now for some of my favourite recent writing. First up, in The New York Times, friend of the pod Katya Ungerman has written a beautiful defence of the internet:

At some point, we have to accept that we will neither quit the internet nor live in a world untouched by it. Ban phones from every school, movie theater, library and third space you like — we will never be able to travel back in time, or to an alternate reality, where this technology was never created, where it was never put in the hands of every person on earth. Before long, we’ll have to accept that the same thing is true of artificial intelligence.

Refusal isn’t an option. Adaptation, however, is.

Adapting begins with seeing the internet for what it actually is — not a drug, nor a set of behaviors, but a place we travel to, with its own geography and customs. It’s not a physical place, but it’s no less real. Anyone who came of age online knows the feeling of crossing that threshold: When you log on, time runs differently, the body slips away, and, as one early inhabitant put it, “the selves that don’t have bodies” step forward.

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I also urge you to read literally anything written by Chris Bayliss at The Critic. Here’s one recent piece in defence of cynicism:

In our current era, we grow accustomed to “consultations”, in which the state goes through the motions of engaging with bodies that were created or directed with the purpose of advising it to do things it already wanted to do. We see “inquiries” established, which give the appearance of a legal process, complete with the right to summon and question witnesses, yet which in fact simply launder a pre-existing consensus or narrative into an official finding. Most gruesomely, we see the habitual ventriloquisation of innocence and victimhood; the use of individuals to front campaigns or statements who cannot be argued back with or disagreed with — at least not without looking a bit of a cad, or a “troll” — by virtue of their youth, or something that has happened to them.

Perhaps the most nauseating example of this in current public life is the Prime Minister’s selection of Kim Leadbeater to sponsor what looks very much like Government legislation on the legalisation of assisted suicide, under the guise of a Private Member’s Bill. It seems very possible that Leadbeater was selected for this controversial role because of her political naivety, and because her sister was a prominent murder victim, and as such she could draw on natural reserves of personal sympathy (now exhausted). As such, she has been induced to assume unquantifiable levels of personal moral responsibility, as she took upon her own shoulders the burden of being seen as the person who drove the Bill through the committee stage, with legislators never being made aware of specific hazards by individual specialists.

But we see the same logic played out far more regularly in the aftermath of atrocities or terrorist attacks, as survivors and bereaved relatives are wheeled out to urge us not to look back in anger, or to front absurd campaigns such as the one to blunt the tips of kitchen knives. As with state-mandated demonstrations in communist Europe, it doesn’t matter how transparent the illusion of spontaneity is; it is the fact that it is controlled that counts.

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Speaking of which, British pop icon Morrissey has still not released the album he says was canned by his record label because they didn’t like this controversial song:

‘Bonfire of Teenagers’ is about the 2017 bombing of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena which killed 22 people and injured 1,017 more, mostly adolescent girls and their families.

It’s not widely known that the Manchester Arena attack was (inadvertently, I suppose) financed by the taxpayer, since the bomber, Salman Abedi, bought the components using his mother’s bank account, and she – having previously been granted asylum in Britain – had returned to Libya in 2016 and yet continued to receive tax credits, child benefit, and housing benefit of about £550 a week.

In the weeks following the attack, the Oasis song ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ became an unofficial anthem for a grieving Manchester. This in the context of a concerted effort by the British government to manage the public response to the atrocity through the use of so-called ‘controlled spontaneity’, as described in this 2024 book:

In 2019, it was revealed that the UK government actively prepares hashtags and ‘spontaneous’ commemoration activities, in advance, for future terrorist attacks. Speaking with insiders on contingency planning teams within government, the journalist Ian Cobain unveiled that—since the administration of Theresa May, which saw rioting in British cities—government has taken interest in pre-planning PR responses to disaster events so that public reactions can be ‘nudged’ away from anger and blame, towards ‘Princess Dianaesque grief’. This is referred to in Orwellian terms as ‘controlled spontaneity’.

To direct public opinion, contingency planning teams pre-design imagery (such as the ‘heart’ backdrop used on banners and posters commemorating the Manchester and Plymouth attacks) and hashtags— around generic, imagined, future events. When a disaster event occurs, the team needs only to fill in details of the location. After the London Bridge attack in 2017, a team of men arrived in an unmarked van and were admitted behind the police cordon. They began to plaster the walls with images of London as well as hashtags that were circling on social media like #lovewillwin and #turntolove. Cobain also notes that these men did not answer questions from journalists about their identities; nor were the men challenged by the police—who stood by and allowed the flyposting (a minor offence in British law) to continue. When the area re-opened to the public, passers-by found themselves surrounded by apparently spontaneous calls for solidarity, public defiance and unity.

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These interventions are informed by behavioural science and aim to covertly manage public reactions in desired directions. They are, effectively, psy-ops used upon a domestic population by their own government.

This is all very much in keeping with the late-Soviet style of state control that Bayliss so eloquently describes in the piece above. I agree with Morrissey:

And the silly people sing: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
And the morons swing and say: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
I can assure you I will look back in anger ‘till the day I die

Until next month –

L