Apocalypse July 2020

United Kingdom

No traffic. Shouting into the v —

Individuals, shouting into the collective space. Individuals, bad listeners. Everyone has said all this already. Everybody has their bubble they’re living in now. Floating in space, individuals stuck in time loops. But together is the only way to make it to any future. Population united. The virus is not an adversary. This is not us waging courageous battle. The virus simply happens, multiplies. It doesn’t think, it doesn’t want. It doesn’t know how we react. It doesn’t care how we observe it, each peering through our individual window.

Nick Clegg says platforms like Facebook hold a mirror up to society. Like maybe if society is the fairground then Facebook is the house of magic mirrors, all warped and hideous and disingenuous, surrounding, multiplying, pervading and saturating consciousness with anger and paranoia and division. Making people less resilient. Social media denies the gestation time for nuanced ideas. All the perspectives are already flagged and shared and crystallised by the time they occur to you, by people faster and more partisan than you. According to their own research, 64 percent of people who find extremist groups on Facebook are invited to those groups by Facebook’s own algorithms1. Meanwhile, electoral meddling by Russia is a clear national security threat by an actual adversary. Brexit is Russian Foreign Policy. Corruption is measurable. As a point of fact. The Union, the United Kingdom, the economy, all our Great British institutions (the best!), parliamentary sovereignty, the judiciary, the NHS, were supposed to mean something worth fighting to defend but that got lost and it all feels flimsy now.

But Boris Johnson wants optimism! It doesn’t occur he should actually have to make us optimistic with his actions. His decisions, indecisions. Starving the arts, opening the pubs at six a.m. for SUPER SATURDAY. Rushing workers back to offices, could be because those big (Russian (money-laundering)) Tory donors are commercial property owners. But please, avoid the rush hour. People have to behave responsibly! Slack Johnson wants us to be optimistic without us seeing him. He wants us to take in only the reality they present us with. The government is desperate to show people that it is actually doing something tangible… The government has a job to do to shift opinion… Keep telling Britain how Great it is (the best!). Policy by focus groups, leading by following, daily reactionary symptom management. No apparent upstream thinking. We are stuck in a loop that takes one day to go around. We observe and try vainly to understand. Johnson commits to an inquiry, in the future. We wait for it to be past. A story of delay that sadly cost lives2.

Is our future the United States of Wangland? Indyref2, Ireland, will all of it have been inevitable from the beginning? Empire legacy (denial). Our inevitable tragic fall. Grin and bear it. Deregulate everything and let the market game go unleashed. Some people win stacks of money and immunity. Some people unfortunately lose the game and starve or are shot dead by police officers. Dominic Raab pops into East Elmbridge Foodbank for a photo op and of course no one is wearing a mask. (I can’t see wearing a mask… I can’t breathe wearing a mask… I can’t breathe…) We rush to tell the internet about ourselves. The attitude I feel now is the attitude the world displays. I’m not feeling British, not feeling like the next generation of anything.

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1 Jessica González, Stop Hate For Profit

2 Professor John Edmunds, SAGE