Digital Politics 2: The Void of Complaint
How the Culture Warriors weaponised the very British art of having a good old moan
The acceptable level of disappointment
Recent policy announcements by Rishi Sunak have been dominated by things he wants to either stop or slow right down.
Small boats, mandatory carpooling, seven bins, meat taxes, energy efficient rental properties, existential AI risk, A Levels, future generations’ smoking, taxing inherited wealth, driving at 20 mph, decentralisation, the northern leg of HS2 —they all need to stop, stop, stop. And those Net Zero targets? We can take it easy on those too.
This is an unusual set of announcements for someone who wants to win an election. This isn’t the Sunak who was cheerfully popping a Twix into boxes for journalists, exporting his signature as a transparent PNG, and encouraging us to eat out to help out; this is Sunak 2.0, who, in the words of Bill Bailey, has adjusted to the “acceptable level of British disappointment”. He’s hopped of the Peloton and he’s shutting it all down.
While some of these proposals may be strategic, others are surely responses to polling and focus groups in which swing voters have been asked,“What would make Britain better for you?” and the answers have been “not so many bins”, “driving a bit faster”, and “fewer bloody vegans”. In some respects it’s the logical end point of an arc that began with the negativity of the Vote Leave campaign and has been mired for the last few years in the thick of the Culture Wars.
Not too bad
There are lots of brilliant things about Britain and British people, but it’s indisputable that our national character can be fairly downbeat.
Perhaps you’ve experienced a British person bat away a compliment – “Oh, this old thing? I got it at a jumble sale in 1993” – or read one of those memes that translate British English into Normal Person Language, where “quite good” means “literally the worst thing I’ve ever seen” and “I’m a bit cross” signals “I’m just on my way to set fire to Parliament”. Or perhaps you’ve asked a British person how they are and they’ve said, “Not too bad” or “Alright”.
Now, of course, this isn’t the case for everyone — some people are naturally very cheerful — but, unless there’s an international sporting event on the cards, our national mood errs on the side of not too bad being good enough, and no amount of watching Ted Lasso will make us say otherwise.
While this might be perceived as pessimistic, I suspect it’s mostly a protective social act: grey clouds, leaves on the line and the need for a decent cup of tea are all third objects, proxies around which we can form relationships without giving away any personal information or demonstrating vulnerability. If Joy Division were right and love will tear us apart, then having a good old moan is the glue that sticks us Brits together.
As I mentioned in the previous post, these low-key collective grievances were marshalled very effectively by Vote Leave. Cummings explained the comms approach in a blog post, published after the fact:
We focused most of this [£7m] on … about 9 million ‘persuadables’ - not our core voters - identified by the data science team from a variety of sources with a variety of methods some very simple and some very sophisticated. That group was on the receiving end of a barrage of £350m/NHS/Turkey1 mostly in a small time window. Contrary to some assumptions, we did not do ‘microtargeting’ by message - i.e. breaking everybody down into small groups and delivering many different messages. We did break the electorate down into small groups for analysis by using new tools not on the market but we discovered that essentially all relevant demographics responded best to £350m/NHS. [sic]
For Vote Leave, the purpose of such messaging was to replace everything we usually complain about – the weather, roadworks on the A34 and those noisy neighbours four doors down – with the letters E and U, for just long enough that enough of us would put the X in the box next to Leave.
Since then, the list of people and institutions that the Culture Warriors have complained about has grown significantly. This has not, of course, only happened online – established newspapers and media networks, and the power interests they represent, have also played a significant part – but the networked nature of social media means more people can now create more messages and more people can see them. TV and YouTube clips travel context-free through TikTok and Instagram, hashtags and memes develop a life of their own, while engagement algorithms prioritise “engaging” content that
also favor[s] controversy, misinformation, and extremism: put simply, people just like outrageous stuff. Sometimes this inflames existing political tensions. The most devastating example to date is the case of Myanmar, where viral fake news and hate speech about the Rohingya Muslim minority escalated the country’s religious conflict into a full-blown genocide. (Karen Hao)
And while I can find many things to love about social media and the connections it affords, it is also worth saying there was a time before Mumsnet and WhatsApp groups when most of us would have to try really hard to find a big group of people who shared our pet peeve. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” used to more often be the organising principle of school bullies, hate groups and political lobbyists than it was the raison d’être of entire social networks.
Complaining
Given the infinite canvas of modern communications, it is fascinating to me that the media commentators and politicians on the front line of the UK Culture Wars have decided to use it to complain. Using the extraordinary potential of modern technologies to weaponise moaning seems relatively unambitious, but it is also a very British response to being able to communicate at scale. What follows is by no means complete or in chronological order, but it’s an attempt to put in one place a few of the people and institutions deemed worthy of complaint.
- Remoaners
- Experts
- the Wokerati
- the Metropolitan Elite
- refugees (particularly male children and anyone who arrives in the UK on a small boat)
- anyone who rescues people arriving on a small boat
- students
- Snowflakes
- trans women
- anyone who wants to use a gender-neutral toilet
- “Net Zero hysterics” and “the green establishment” (two phrases from this weekend’s Telegraph)
- the Blob
- people who wear masks/ride bikes/want clean air/live with chronic illness
- everyone who works at home
- civil servants – sorry, “bureaucrats”
- the Anti-Growth Coalition
- charities that campaign
- Millennials
- people who eat avocado toast and don’t have a mortgage
- people who don’t want to walk for more than 15 minutes to go to the doctors
- the child free
- everyone who receives benefits
- unattractive women
- the National Trust
and
- the BBC.
These people and organisations do not have much in common besides the fact that they have been marked out as not “in group”. Some are institutions or groups of people with high-levels of financial security and social capital, others are among the most vulnerable in our society who would ordinarily warrant high levels of protection rather than vilification, and others still may not actually exist, yet all of them have been criticised for restricting power, growth and freedom – often in very non-specific ways.
Othering
This practice is called Othering, and it’s by no means a new phenomenon; in fact, in the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described it as being “as primordial as consciousness itself”.
Othering is the process through which one powerful group casts itself as high status and another group or groups as low, often based on factors including race, gender, or class. Stuart Hall’s 1982 essay “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” examines how Othering has played out through C19th and C20th media and cultural representations, and it breaks down some of the related tropes and power moves:
stereotyping is what Foucault called a 'power/knowledge' sort of game. It classifies people according to a norm and constructs the excluded as 'other'. Interestingly, it is also what Gramsci would have called an aspect of the struggle for hegemony. As Dyer observes, 'The establishment of normalcy …through social- and stereo-types is one aspect of the habit of ruling groups to attempt to fashion the whole of society according to their own world view, value system, sensibility and ideology.’
john a. powell, of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, builds on this and describes Othering as a push to dehumanise others, based on imagined, in-group assumptions rather than knowledge:
Othering is not about liking or disliking someone. It is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain identified group poses a threat to the favoured group. It is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact. Overwhelmingly, people don’t “know” those that they are Othering.
So far so familiar, except — in the case of the UK Culture Wars — the Norm remains a void, kept intentionally vague and defined only in relation to the Other. This promotes an uneasy sense of estrangement, but it also makes it easier to add new groups of people to the moan list (see last week’s rush entry of “Net Zero hysterics”, right at the top). I suspect it is also the reason for Sunak’s rather dreary set of policy announcements; nothing can grow in a void – there are no green shoots in negative space – it is only possible for things to be stopped or thrown away.
Looking at the list above, it seems extraordinary that our electoral system should provide incentives for politicians to be so resolutely unpleasant about so many of the people they are meant to represent. But the politics of hope requires hard work; it depends on delivering effective policies that work for people who aren’t already millionaires, and so perhaps it is easier, ultimately, to unite whoever is left around the Void, complaining about people, institutions and imaginary car pooling, than it is to start anything new.
Meanwhile, if you’re a media commentator, social-media influencer or GB News regular, being on the side of complaint can offer a shot at money and fame that might not otherwise be available (*cough* Laurence Fox). From Joe Rogan’s $200m Spotify deal to smaller-scale digital profiteering, the opaque monetisation mechanisms that drive social platforms mean that some parts of the online knowledge economy are now little better than conspiracy jackpots. This business model layer has not been addressed in the UK Online Safety Bill, which also includes extremely broad provisions for journalistic exemption, which both make it very lucrative to belittle and bemoan.
Data
It is impossible to know the extent to which data has really played a role in forming the bases of the Culture Wars, but the last few years have certainly been a boom time for Chart Twitter.
In the immediate aftermath of the Referendum, understanding public opinion became an essential competency for those who had assumed Remain would win. Meanwhile, by all accounts, Cummings continued to be fascinated by what he could glean from the available data, and I’d be surprised if potential superforecasters weren’t also “snoop[ing] for non-obvious lead indicators” to inform their predictions.2 Seven years and four prime minsters later, there are quantities of polls each week that drive the contents of Op Eds, headlines and short-term policy announcements, and it seems likely they are clinging to an idea of a “general public” that no longer really exists.
This clustering of people into smaller, more socially coherent mini publics can be visualised as atomisation rather than polarisation; an explosion of the general public into many smaller groups that might be networked back together in different arrangements.
This is driven by a range of factors including social media, differing generational approaches to news consumption, the fragmenting impacts of austerity, and the myriad ways digital services reinforce self-service individualism. It informs the construction of entertainment experiences and superhero brand extensions, while many policy-oriented polls still look for majority opinions rather than sympathetic patterns. Somehow the Culture Warriors appear to have an innate understanding of the fact that agreement in a networked world can be constructed through building social relationships and affinities rather than by seeking consensus.
In 1984, Dame Mary Warnock recognised in the Report of the Committee into Human Fertilisation and Embryology that narrow solutions are not always useful for a “pluralistic society” grappling with new kinds of problems. She wrote that “it is not to be expected that any one set of principles can be enunciated to be completely accepted by everyone” and deferred to legislation and strong public institutions as the preferred conduits for broadly acceptable “moral ideal of society”.
We are coming, I hope, to the end of the era in which the British love of complaining is most solidly unifying force. After a tumultuous few years, there is much work to do to restore our institutions, but we can find sites of agreement that bind mini-publics together. The third and final instalment in this series will be about what we can learn from fandoms to build coalitions of hope.
The message Cummings is referring to is the one on the side of the bus that said, “We send the EU £350m, let’s fund our NHS instead!”, later found to be “a clear misuse of official statistics”.
From the “Ten Commandments for Superforecasting” at the back of Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction