How Demanding ‘Refunds’ Highlights the Problems With University Tuition Fees

This is not an essay, this is a raw nerve…

I was recently directed to a couple of protests by students and graduates demanding ‘refunds’ for their degrees… this has been going on a while, and rears its head every couple of months, either around admissions time or graduation.

Now, while I’d love to boil this down to a 60 second InstaTok video, this has a lot to unpack. So, long blog post it is! Very long, in fact. There are a lot of ideas that need to converge together, and chatting to a camera for a minute in portrait mode just won’t cut it. Even on YouTube, this would require at least three costume changes.

It was the COVIDest of times…

First, let’s address the low-hanging fruit pretty brutally. The main thrust of these demands for refunds is about online learning that happened a few years ago. Gee, I wonder why that happened…

228,984 reasons and counting, in fact

Just to remind everyone: we were not doing all that for funsies.

I know people who died from COVID; people who lost family to it; people who were chronically disabled by it. Sorry you had some online lectures for a year. My friend’s 10 and 13 year old kids would love to hear about it; it’ll distract them from how their mother’s lungs strangled her to death while her body graphically and horrifyingly inflamed and deformed over the course of a month.

Yes, it’s a low blow, but that elephant in the room needs addressed, and now that’s over, we can ignore it going forward. Mostly.

Quality doesn’t grow on fees…

Let’s start at the top of the grievances about money.

In the UK, higher education comes in at an absurd £9,250 per year. Loans to cover living expenses are available in a similar order of magnitude. The end result is that you can be lumbered with a debt on par with having a full mortgage by age 21.

This is, of course, Not Good.

I am emphatically not pro tuition fee. But let’s also be very clear about how this system works: in the vast majority of cases, students have not paid anything. £9k of public money moves to universities (which is still between £2-5,000 short of funding a STEM degree, incidentally) and the student then has to pay it back.

At least, they have to pay some of it back.

The debt isn’t collected at a rate familiar to graduates in the United States, where it literally can be like paying off a second mortgage. There’s an income threshold that you must meet to be liable for repayment, and then you’re effectively taxed on income above that threshold. And you eventually stop paying it — either you clear it off, or it times out (after 30 years) and the debt is wiped. This system means that the government always makes a direct loss on fees. This is a graduate tax by another name

To be clear, the deal underpinning this is steadily being made worse, but this is entirely an issue of government policy (this will become a theme below…) and frighteningly little to do with universities.

Or is it?

Let’s back up a moment. That £9,250 figure is a cap. Universities are not a allowed to charge more than that, but they are allowed to charge less. When this cap was raised (and also when the original ‘top-up’ fee with a £3,000 cap was introduced) the idea was that it would introduce competition. Universities would charge less to attract “budget-conscious” students. Only the “best” universities would charge the full amount. Whatever “best” means, but that’s another discussion about the damage league tables have caused.

Why don’t universities do this? Why are the majority of courses £9k, and we don’t see these multiple fee tiers appear in reality?

To figure that one out, notice how the “debt” gets wiped, and that repayment acts as a tax. It doesn’t matter if you’ve taken on £7k per year of debt or £9k per year of debt (or £5k or £15k for that matter) your repayments and marginal impact to your take-home salary month-on-month is the same. The only change is the number of tax-free years you’ll have at the end as you rocket towards age 50. Or, more likely, you’ve simply changed the probability you’ll have any of those tax-free years at all.

So the benefit, the incentive, for a prospective student to pick a cheaper course is negligible. But, because the fee still represents the amount of public money transferred to the university, the downside is taking a course that has 25% or even 50% less funding. That’s a material loss to any student.

There is no incentive for students to take cheap courses, there is no incentive for universities to offer them. QED.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is exactly what people in the sector said would happen when the £9k cap was proposed a decade ago. To get alarmingly political, tuition fees are the perfect microcosm of how neoliberal-conservative politics repeatedly fail to understand economic incentives and money in general; the subject they claim to be experts and ‘grown-ups’ in.

Speaking of Conservatives, however, let’s just add that there are exceptions to the above. You can choose to pay up front to avoid the graduate tax. But if you’ve got around £10k going spare, and choose to spend it on tuition fees instead of, say, putting it in a high interest savings account for little Tarquin or, you know, just giving it to them each year, you’re an idiot. Paying up front is not a good investment at all. But I have been attacked on Twitter by a handful of people (that is, parents of students) who have done this. All Conservatives. All of them.

They’ll probably talk about it being a long-term saving, but again, you do not live in the Real World if you don’t understand the power of a £20-30,000 lump sum in cash, and instead opt to save £35 on a £2600 salary each month. They are not the fiscally responsible grown-ups they claim to be.

Anyway…

The psychological damage…

Again, to reiterate: with some outlying exceptions, the vast majority of students have not “paid” £9,250 per year.

BUT…

They are made to feel like they have.

The entire media ecosystem around UK universities inescapably focuses on this figure. Students feel that higher education is an investment, and one that must pay off. If I fuck up, even slightly, the words “I’m not paying £9,000 a year for this!” can be moments away. Even if you’ve actually paid diddly squat, you’re made to feel otherwise.

It’s a lot of pressure. For staff to live up to it (and to have it held to your throat every day…), and for students to live up to the investment.

To feel that you’re spending so much money, and must get as much from your degree as possible, get the ‘best’ university name on it, get the highest grade… all to get that job at the end so you can pay for it. When you’re told, constantly, that you’re lumbering yourself with the largest debt you’ve ever seen, a figure you likely have no salience for when you’re just 18, and then have to work to justify it… I cannot overstate the damage this has caused.

If you sat down to intentionally design a system that would demotivate and depress people, using all your knowledge of goal-directed behaviour and expectancy-value theory, you couldn’t intentionally come up with something this effective.

We’re seeing students less able to work, less resilient to setbacks, and all because they are under a relentless pressure to perform that they have to panic over every lost mark, and every little thing that makes university Not Worth It. And if it’s not worth it, why get up in the morning? Why open that textbook? Why even turn up to a lecture? It’s all a battle to min-max your time: get the highest marks, for the least effort, so that you can spend that time on other things (mostly working to afford rent, as we’ll see soon…).

Then let’s go back to the pressure on staff to make degrees “value for money”. We have to pack the curriculum with training, and job experience, and authenticity, and additional skills, skills, skills… Science curricula, already extremely information dense, need boosted further with employability… While nothing is cut to make room for it… All of which needs assessed and graded (or no one will do it) and takes up huge amounts of time.

No wonder there’s a “mental health crisis”.

If fees were less, then that pressure would be off, but instead it builds and builds…

And the other loan…

Less talked about than fees is maintenance.

This is the living expenses that students need to, you know, live while studying.

In our subject, students are with us for the best part of 15-20 hours per week.

Which will immediately trigger a number of people do say that it’s low! And students should count themselves lucky to have such a short week! Well, sparky, that’s contact time. That’s the time they’re physically in the room or the lab with me. We expect an additional hour per hour of self study. Time to revise, research, work on skills, write, edit along with the pre-reading watching required to make the much sought-after in-person lecture effective. That brings us up to a full adult portion of 35-40 hours of work. Less at start of the year, often far more as due dates loom. And that’s assuming the increasingly pressured timetable is efficiently spaced enough to allow for extra work between contact sessions, otherwise, much of the day is simply wasted.

This doesn’t leave much room for part time work. And, in fact, part time work doesn’t even cut it anymore. I know STEM students — fucking STEM students! — who need to treat their degree as secondary to their full time job just to make rent. Others need to live at home with parents, and commute — wiping out as much as two more hours each day in a car or (if they’re lucky because they can use the time to read) a bus, as well as severely limiting their options for where to study.

So, to get by, you need to take out the maintenance loan. Originally the only loan (that’s the one I’m still paying off, I think — as the SLC don’t have my current contact details but have no problems charging me) then a grant combined with loans for a little while, then all loan again. It’s all complex and all over the place. This, combined with fees, is what makes the total debt astronomical.

I also cannot emphasise enough that, of these two facets of student finance, the maintenance loan/grant is the bigger scam. While the fee at least goes to tangible things like the library, giving everyone a shiny copy of Office 365, journal access and, of course, paying me (and I like being able to afford food) the maintenance loan is largely a scam designed to offload as much public money as possible into the hands of private landlords.

I did this chart some time ago. It’s already adjusted for inflation.

The total average rent a student currently pays now exceeds the total maintenance loan I was eligible for in the mid/late 2000s. The increase in rent is between 7% and 10% each year depending on the location and the figures you pick, while typical national inflation averages 2-3% in normal circumstances.

When I hear students complain that maintenance hasn’t kept up with inflation, I have to point out that (medium-to-long term) this simply isn’t the case. It has exceeded it. What it hasn’t kept up with is rental costs. And it likely never could, because the instant that income gets a boost, landlords lick their lips and suck it up. Be assured, Tax Payers and fellow Old People: that pint you see a 19 year old quaffing on a Thursday night is not the thing you’re paying for.

There are a lot of reasons for this explosion in living cost. The general perpetual housing crisis being a key suspect. However, there are also strong contributions from private developers, hell bent on creating “luxury” student accommodation and charging a devastating premium for it. There’s also universities themselves, building increasingly shiny and expensive accommodation to attract students in a accommodation arms race to impress students (well, their parents, actually…) on open days.

This accommodation is still often complete trash, and not much better than the breeze-block hell I experienced a decade (or two…) ago. Student landlords are still the worst, and are absolutely raking it in even more.

To be extremely blunt, again, that students are angry about fees but rarely mention rent reflects very badly on us as educators. So much for us converting them to Marxist revolutionaries.

Selling the Experience…

That’s student finance, and you might have noticed that I haven’t addressed the grievances about ‘refunds’ much. That’s partially because I think the blunt and brutal foreword about COVID does a lot of heavy lifting there. But there is one word that keeps popping up when you hear people talk about why they were short changed:

“Experience”

This is possibly one of the more tragic shifts in recent years. We no longer provide higher education. We no longer provide degrees. We are purveyors of student experience.

You see it in the brochures, the prospectuses, the websites, the Instagram pages. All those photos of happy 20-somethings crowding around green fields and trees reading books in the glorious sunshine (which is funny because university terms happen over the colder months); the suspiciously clean nightclubs and luminous wrist bands; the enthusiastic smiling, glasses-wearing kid raising their hand in a lecture (never happens: the school system has made people too terrified of being wrong for that to ever happen). That sort of thing.

That’s the Experience. It’s the thing we’re selling. Or, at least, the thing we’re told to sell. Customer Satisfaction is the main KPI.

COVID shut that down. COVID shut a lot of things down. Notably it shut down the respiratory system of several million people, which is why I find this discussion offensive more than just irritating, but I digress. This discussion is only possible because the purpose of university has been shifted from education to “Student Experience”.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying student experience isn’t important. Internally, we use it a a shorthand for mental welling, achievement, accessibility, equity, feedback and assessment, all of which are important. And, of course, there are things like learning to live on your own, with others, and growing to become a functioning adult with university acting a zone of proximal development. This is important.

But packaging this up as an “experience” for us to sell has caused some damage. Do I believe we “dumb down” courses to bribe students into ticking higher scores on the National Student Survey? No, I think that’s the Office for Students making shit up. But it does sometimes feel like that episode of Community, where Dean Pelton is desperately trying to court that high-roller prospective student with endless gimmicks — and the college suffers because they’re turning it into something it’s not.

We’re selling The Student Experience of shiny computer rooms and photogenic accommodation. And we have to sell more of it to pay for it, of course. And if we don’t sell it, the customers will go elsewhere to the institutions that paid for even shinier computer rooms and even more photogenic accommodation.

All that competition means more and more funds get diverted to endless initiatives that aren’t academic. We have these lovely cafes and “study pods”, we have trendy lighting and reclaimed wood tables, and you can get your book out while someone brings you fries served in a galvanized steel bucket — meanwhile, the ceiling in my teaching lab literally collapsed this week, and two research labs don’t have access to running water. In demanding The Student Experience, students have undermined the actual purpose of higher education.

We’ve sold university as a commodity that grants you a degree, so when we shut down lectures (which are not that pedagogically great, anyway) there’s a riot.

That’s not to blame individuals, per se. This is a systematic problem that has been building for the last twenty or so years. From the media environment telling you what student life should be about (Fresh Meat being the more realistic depiction) to government policy driving competition.

Maybe I’m just biased having worked in a place that did pretty well during the pandemic — having had access to a lot of online learning specialists who could make the rest best of it, resulting in us completely bucking the NSS trend in 2020. Maybe elsewhere was truly terrible. But I’m still convinced that the feelings of students who are demanding refunds are driven by these long-festering systematic issues, especially around the crushing demotivation of student finance, and the COIVD shutdowns were nothing more than a catalyst to highlight it.

So, about those refunds…

So, you had some online lectures. You had to MS Teams your way through tutorials while you kept your screen blank and refused to say anything. You want a refund.

It feels like students think a refund would be a £1000 sent immediately to their bank account. No it wouldn’t. You’d knock a few quid off your overall debt and it would be cancelled and wiped out 10 years before you managed to pay it off instead of 12 years. Paying the graduate tax for 30 full years is the case in all possible realities. Your agreement with paying this number back is with the government and the Student Loan Company.

Let’s say it’s even possible to get a “refund”. It would basically involve the university transferring several million pounds to the government. That’s it. It would make little sense in macroeconomic terms. The government receiving money isn’t like it collecting gold coins that it can then spend like it’s King John in a Robin Hood movie. Taxation and government income is basically about removing money from the system so that any public spending doesn’t immediately trigger hyperinflation. So, as a student, you would not be getting that money. But universities would suddenly have very real pounds missing from their budgets, which is hugely damaging t their ability to deliver the precious student experience to the next cohort of students.

It’s very easy for me to sound callous here, and very snarky, but at the end of the day we’re talking about people with an immense amount of privilege whining about something that occurred because literally hundreds of thousands of people were dying. I find that very hard to move beyond.

And I find it hard to deal with because this ire is directed at universities and teaching staff when, as I’ve hopefully illustrated above, the  root causes of student finance problems are systematic and political. This is the result of decades of neoliberal and conservative policy trying to undermine higher education in the UK.

But who is the villain…

If you don’t mind me sounding like a conspiracy theorist for a moment, I’d say that this is exactly what the government wants. We’re stuck with a system that is inherently neoliberal, late-capitalist, and is slowly devolving into proto-fascism. Or possibly no “proto” about it. Universities are the enemy. It’s in the best interest of the government to get students to hate universities, and resent their education, and specifically target academic and teaching staff.

If I’m feeling feisty, I’d say think this is what the Office for Students was set up to do. Its priorities have repeatedly driven wedges between students and universities. While claiming to fight for students, it hasn’t really done much for them. Its policies and interventions have been based around non-issues like “freedom of speech” (of the “for me, not for thee” kind) and culture war nonsense. I can’t help but point out that feedback and assessment shows huge levels of dissatisfaction on the National Student Survey, but OfS haven’t set up a dedicated task force to address that — we’re far more likely to see them ask “Have you felt marginalised for saying trans people should be sent to death camps? Give us a call!” than anything else. And, already, we’re seeing independent reports remarking that OfS is simply acting as a political mouthpiece for the government. Rather than be horrified that students and universities are at war over fees and student experience, OfS is likely cackling to itself that all is going to plan and that this station will be fully operational by the time you’re rebel friends arrive…

Not good. Not good at all.

Ultimately, right-wing governments do not want educated people in their population. They do not want you to see education as a right, or something you can do because you enjoy it. They’ll dress it up, but ultimately it boils down to them viewing education as state-subsidised training that private companies don’t have to pay for. That’s why they’re happy for people to think universities owe them money, and not the government.

To try and bring it together, yes I do think a lot of calls for “refunds” is (mostly) uncalled for whining of middle-class privileged kids. But I do think it comes from a genuine place of frustration with the costs, both real (that is: rent and living) and perceived (that is: how you’re made to feel about tuition fees). That is something I can’t (and won’t) dismiss. In fact, we need to draw more attention to it.

The fees regime is… Bad. Make no mistake. But it’s something we have no control over. Most academics want education publicly funded, and for its benefits to be publicly realised. This halfway house, where we attempt to have public funding, but then badge it as a highly demotivating private debt, is simply unsustainable.

And that is something worth being angry about. Furious about, even. It should radicalise you, and make you demand change at the highest level, accepting no half-baked compromises. And it’s worth that feeling far, far more than any acute problems incurred in 2020.

There’s a lot here, but it’s also a wide reaching subject and I’ve missed lots out that could also be addressed. And because there’s so much of it, there’s no quick and easy solution.

A Call to Inaction: Universities Should not Join The Fediverse

As Twitter steadily turns further to shit, the hunt to replace everyone’s least-favourite verbal-abuse-based theme park ride continues. The popularity of long-standing free/open-source alternative Mastodon, and the accompanying Fediverse, continues to chug along. I won’t bore the uninitiated with the jargon except for the one thing needed to understand this post: you can start your own server (paying for hosting) and then connect it with the rest of the system to talk to everyone on it. So, unlike a VB or phpBB forum of old that you might stash on your own server and host a few dozen or hundred accounts, you can follow and be followed by anyone and connect to various other networks, not all of which are Twitter-like.

This has lead to numerous calls for universities to join it. I’ll use the one I’ve linked to as a jumping off point, as it also makes the case for students to use it, and even have it given to them by default as their key account. The purported benefits are community, decentralisation, and conversation without putting your trust in a corporate entity like Twitter or Facebook.

But here is why this is a bad thing and we should not do it.

Bad for Academic Freedom

Many academic staff use / have used Twitter for a combination of personal and professional work. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate these two spheres. I’ve seen people make a herculean effort to separate the two by running multiple accounts. Inevitably, even that still blurs the line as you will follow and be followed by the same single-account people anyway using both your ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ personas.

Despite this blur, we can get away with not representing our respective institutions because it’s Twitter – it’s not formally linked to our employers. Finding out who we work for is usually trivial but, still, it’s activity that’s nestled away over there, and badged as personal regardless. It’s ambiguous, but it works. Mostly.

All this changes the instant you end up with a “.ac.uk” or “.edu”at the end of your handle.

In that situation, there is no ambiguity. You are there representing your employer, and on their terms, using their money and resources to post and host content – not only your content, but the content of anyone you follow, since Mastodon servers cache everyone you follower, and image-heavy users fill up that disk space with NSFW furry art faster than Netflix will cancel a fantasy series.

The joy of unambiguously representing your employer

Unambiguously representing your employer brings with it many limitations. Small talk about movies and music would be allowed. I’m sure. Right? Maybe. But what about the spicier subjects that Academic Twitter has made itself known for?

CanI criticise league tables just as we’re rising up through them on an edict from the Vice Chancellor?

Can I criticise the institutions polices and implementations?

Can I shitpost? And swear?

Can I post pro-Union content and endorse strike action?

If you have to earnestly whistleblow anything from corruption to bullying and sexual assault allegations, you do not want your employer having access to the “suspend account” button.

On separate servers not controlled by the institution, that’s at least a muddy grey area, one ruled mostly by precedent, unreliable common sense and assurances that we’re posting only in a personal capacity. In an area owned and operated, wholly and officially, by the institution, if you can’t say it on your website profile, best not to say it at all. Naturally, this would mean switching to personal accounts to keep things separate. But, again, that separation is difficult to maintain by all except the most stoically self-involved of academics. That also undermines the idea of having an account designed to interact with the whole of the fediverse.

The overlap of the personal and professional

Now, what about situations where that personal capacity overlaps with professional capacity?

My professional remit covers student mental health: and one key contributors to that is finance, driven by a need to pay extortionate rent. There is no boundary between this professional remit and my personal conclusion that student landlords are a scam designed to transfer billions in public funds (as maintenance loans) into private hands (as rent). It is a simple smooth transition from observation to conclusion. This sort of thing cannot be said without bringing my employer, if not the entire sector, into some disrepute as it’s a sector that has steadily done nothing to address this, an even actively contributed to it through their expensive, decade-long arms race to build the shiniest buildings. It is incredibly murky for me to make this observation even in a personal capacity linked to my job, never mind on server owned and branded by the University. Yet, I’d be professionally negligent to not raise it as a key factor in student wellbeing.

Sure, you can choose to only post papers, dryly network with others and, frankly, just be a boring old fuck.

But for the majority who actually use social media in a semi-professional capacity (which is actually a minority of all university workers) that is not the case. Remaining boring necessarily means lower engagement and fewer people being in interested in what you have to say. No one, in practice, cares for people who have used their social media accounts for nothing except professional self-promotion. At the same time, those refusing to take any stand at all against injustices are simply branded complicit in it.

That overlap can only exist when we have the capacity to post individually. Otherwise, it’s just Worktribe with bells on.

Bad (or at least pointless) for Students

I’m now into my second decade teaching professionally in higher education. My current job title sounds very senior and fancy. I’d like to think I have sufficient experience to judge what would happen if we automatically gave every student a fediverse account. I’ll sum it up in one word: nothing.

Students will not use it. It’s yet another system, another location, another thing to check. So another thing to ignore.

There are now 15 competing standards

We have our Student Information System (SIS), the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), SharePoint, Teams, PebblePad, the Canvas forums, email… and that’s just the official university systems that I can remember off the top of my head. There will be more. Parallel to that we have various backchannels: Instagram accounts, Whatsapp groups, student society groups on Facebook, institutional social media accounts… it’s a crowded field, competing for your attention. Each addition dilutes the one thing we need: authoritative, single points of truth, which are communicated easily.

[to anyone who has just exclaimed ‘but that’s what the fediverse can be!’ please do join me in reality]

It’s hard enough having to keep with with multiple Canvas sites running in tandem without also adding Mastodon tags or accounts to push information to students. The path of least resistance would be to simply ignore it, and never engage. It’ll come via email anyway. I’m not saying that’s the most likely course, I’m saying that will be the course. Setting up student communities artificially and with institutional authority over it will always be met with a passive shrug.

You can always force engagement by staking marks and credits on it, of course, but…

Intolerance of the intolerant

But suppose I’m wrong.

I’m not, but let’s suppose.

Suppose there is engagement from students, whether naturally or forced because grades are decided by it. We then have to look at moderation, and that’s a bit more complex than “just moderate it”. This requires time, effort, resource. I’ve ran a few MOOCs in recent years, and despite these running for a few months, with only a few hundred users interacting on my course, it was an enormous drain on my brain space and capacity. Asking me to moderate mine and my students’ Fediverse presence is not a trivial ask because it’s quite a serious duty. And it’s one I do not want. My job is slammed full as it is.

Let’s be clear: the Fediverse swings very left/liberal. Moderation of a server must clamp down on things such as racism and transphobia. Personally speaking: this is good. I genuinely like that aspect. If a server decides it wants to host racists and massive homophobes, the others very quickly isolate it and stop talking to it. But that works because people individually own their communities, are responsible for them, and have every right to control what they allow to be hosted on there. They’re paying the server costs, after all. You want to host bullshit, pay up and take the consequences.

Once you have a University signing up, that forces them to adopt a compatible stance, and by extension control and moderate their students’ personal political stances. If I, in a personal capacity, click ‘block’ on a twerp who turns out to be a student within my university, faculty, school or even on my degree programme, well that’s one thing. If I have to do it, to delete and censor their posts on their official, institutionally-backed account, which provides them access to course materials and information, and gives them an official presence within the Fediverse, or else I risk my entire institutional presence on that system, well, that’s something else entirely. You’re basically excluding students before you even start, removing them from an official platform purely for their political stance.

And that brings us back to the same point again: why would anyone want to use an account with such restrictions when they can get their own, and post without restriction?

To be clear: those are political stances that are wrong, and I do believe it is immoral. Many of those stances, if acted on, go against our internal codes of conduct and policies (as they would for many employers). But those police behaviour in the context of official activities, not online communities where personal and professional beliefs mix. I can and will protect, for instance, my trans students from abuse. I am institutionally supported in doing so. I can’t (and won’t) kick someone out of my lectures just because they joined the Harry Potter Society and started liking their author’s paranoid tweets. If I’m allowed to have opinions on the grounds of “personal capacity”, I’ll extend that courtesy to students. At least as far as Prevent lets me.

If we wanted the university to federate, someone would need to police those opinions much more closely. And despite what the newspapers think happens, none of us have the time for that.

What is it good for?

To be clear: I’m not saying the following are bad ideas:

• Academic staff signing up via Mastodon,
• Students signing up via Mastodon,
• Universities and departments signing up via Mastodon,
• Universities starting their own server so that they can have @department@institution.edu accounts.

That’s fine, but it’s also not even a mild departure from what has always been possible, no matter the platform.

But officiating our presence? Compelling a sign-up by default? (a shadow-profile thing that Meta’s Threads has been getting shit for recently) Even hinting at making it essential for grades and communication?

I cannot think of much that’s worse.

Banning LGBT+ content will not make you happy…

According to the UK government petitions site, the petition to remove LGBT content from the school curriculum has reached over 200,000 signatures. The counter petition, to keep it, has less than half of that…

First, two caveats

1. I’m under no illusions that the petition site means anything. The numbers are usually a function of social media popularity campaigns, and I’m not aware of one that has ever made a tangible difference or generated anything but the government fobbing it off by just stating the problem again.
2. The official response is in: LGBT+ education is not required, but is not banned either, and there are no plans to change that optionality. So, either petition cannot really be acted on. This is a little nore complicated than either statement can capture. Go figure.

Still, that’s beside the point. The numbers alone are staggering, and they show immense support for a reactionary political statement against LGBT people across the country, at a time where the media and political parties are rabidly circling people, looking for scapegoats and lightning rods for hate. The UK has never had an excellent track record with LGBT rights, and there’s no reason to believe it can’t possibly regress, and very very quickly, too.

So, an important message to everyone who has signed up to remove LGBT content from schools: this will not make you happy.

Whether you’re a right-wing conservative who thinks it as a matter of course, or a centrist liberal who thinks this will magically stop at trans people only, it doesn’t matter. Banning this content, successfully, will not bring you the happiness you crave. It will not fix your problems.

You can utterly annihilate LGBT+ content from school. You can cut it out of the media forever. You can never see a gay character in fiction again. You can never have to hear the word “pronoun” again. It won’t make you feel better.

From here on, every relationship could be one man in a suit marrying a woman in a pretty A-line dress who does all the cooking. You never need to see two men holding hands again. You never have to worry about your kids seeing two women kiss on TV — that can stay as a secret between you and your internet service provider as God intended.

It will do nothing to protect children.

LGBT+ people have never been the threat, and you know that. Probably not even that deep down, you know that. It could all disappear tomorrow, having never existed, and you still wouldn’t be happy. It can be wiped from the past, present and future, you would still be miserable.

That’s because your actual problem is that you can’t stand the fact that people who are not you can be happy.

Your problem isn’t with the specifics. If it was, your arguments would make coherent sense. You’d have evidence, and you don’t. You’ve made stuff up time and time again, misrepresented things time and time again, and you just trick people into thinking that there’s a danger from a group of people who have never harmed you. All you have to go on is moral panic and lies. Why? Because you just don’t like other people being themselves, being happy, and doing so on their terms.

That implies being a miserable, grouchy, gutless, spiteful piece of shit who hates your fellow humans is your own fault and you might have to take responsibility for that. That’s your ultimate fear: you’re miserable and hate everyone, but you don’t have to be, if only you stepped outside the dull status quo you inherited but lack the imagination to change.

You can say otherwise, but I don’t believe you. Because I’ve read your opinions. I’ve seen what you have to say. The entire media and socio-cultural landscape we live in is based around your views. The very language we must use to discuss things in gives undue deference to your political views. For every backwater blog post like this that exists, a half dozen mainstream newspaper articles will be circulated to tens of thousands of people saying the opposite. You’re very, very transparent with how you feel.

In short: you’re winning, but you’re still fucking miserable.

Turning Point Memes are the Fucking Worst

Content warning: This post will use the word “text” in the literary theory sense.

Let’s talk about memes for a bit.

First, let’s look at your basic, classic, Old Skool quote-unquote “advice animal” style meme. Such square. Much 2000s. Wow. These are so out of fashion pretty much everything has been said about them already, but mentioning them here will make sense. Come on Gen Z, bring these things back. I double-dare you.

You also have the post-meme, with their happy cartoon illustrations and asinine quotations favoured by Facebook Moms. Oh, good god, even these are old now. Less of a “meme” in the sense of the above, and more like a slogan t-shirt. One-part sassy backtalk, one-part clowning, and one-part inoffensive attempts at offense.

There are also exploitable comics and edits that go around. Personally, I like these. That’s the shit right there. Fucking sue me. Society peaked with the invention of these and I shall be taking no questions at this time.

And there’s whatever the hell the InstaTok does that… look, guys, I’m at the “take two ibuprofen in the morning for your back” age. I’m not going on there looking. But imagine I’ve just embedded a video of someone doing a sea shanty or whatever. You know, I watch my TikToks on Instagram, 2-3 weeks after they were first popular, like a fucking adult.

But, then, oh-my-oh-my, we have Turning Point memes.

Now, to be painfully fair… Turning Point have had a more-recent (by which, I mean, about half a year’s worth) tendency to just put quotes from people on photographs of them with some coloured branding, but they still do the occasional “zinger” meme in the setup/punchline format, and older ones still do the rounds. They also produce a lot of it. I must confess to getting half these examples from Cropped Boomer Memes purely to save my eyeballs the pain of scrolling through more of it than strictly necessary to sample the most pertinent ones.

Where to start? I suppose let’s do a bit of basic analysis over memes for a bit.

Memes, in the general interwebz sense and especially for the pictorial ones, carry two messages within them.

• The specific message of the text (its most direct content)
• The broader idea of the text (what it references)

In the specific text, Good Guy Greg might sleep on your couch but make up for it by making breakfast, and Bad Luck Brian might find that even his pet rock runs away. But in the broader text (a context, if you will), Greg does a thing you expect has negative consequences but he makes up for it in the end, Brian does a normal thing and an unfortunate thing occurs because he’s a bit of a dweeb. With exploitable comics and edits, Anakin will always horrify Padme by subverting her premature hopes; Bobby will always draw something terrible that is the opposite of art; and no matter what was on the sign, if those kids could read they’d be very upset.

If I was feeling especially pretentious and insufferable — you know, really Stephen Pinker-esque — I’d point out how the humour derives from projecting a specific content onto the broad context, and recognising the connection between the two, which increases the salience of the specific aspects of text. This is particularly true when we project current events onto existing memes in order to convey sometimes-complex feelings about them simply, and quickly.

Actually, that’s probably more insufferably pretentious than Pinker. Feel free to ignore that.

Even with the likes of ‘Plums in the Ice Box’ — which differs from typical memes, as its places the original’s content within a different context rather than the other way around — relies on you spotting the connection between the new version and the broad idea. If anything, spotting it is the joke. See also: the Game or Rickrolling.

This is also how they spread and evolve, in the memetic sense. We have a template for the text, the template can be modified and mutated. New jokes can be added, references can be made to other memes. But underpinning that, is the connection to the broad theme.

Now, about Turning Point memes.

What is the broad message, here? What is the recognition to be made? In short: where’s the fucking joke?

We see the specific part of the text, but not the broader context that’s meant to connect to. It’s not that right-wing or conservative types can’t do this — we’ve had that hippy chick and the triggered girl since forever, apparently — it’s that Turning Point cannot do this. This is their fabled memeing (in)ability.

If anything unifies these posts, it’s “liberals are dumb” and… that’s usually about it. There are no recurring characters, no individual themes to relate to, just “libs = dum, we smart smart”. And it is, more often than not, painful to look at under any critical eye. It’s humour, snark and wit, but as imagined for an audience who just want to be told they’re special and clever and so much better than everyone else.

In that respect, they’re Facebook Wine Mom post-memes. They’re Tweety Bird folding their arms and saying “I’m such a sassy bitch” or Minions declaring “I’m totally zany”.

Turning Point memes, therefore, occupy an odd space of mixing the older top-text-bottom-text, [Statement] / [Punchline], format with the (relatively) newer meaninglessness of the Boomer Facebook Wine Mom post-meme. They aren’t there for you to relate to a specific character in order to make it evolve, they’re there to reinforce a particular broad attitude to the target audience. A post that begins with “Hey liberals!” isn’t actually addressed to liberals, but to the conservative audience, who aren’t meant to engage with them interactively, edit them or evolve them, just share and gawp at their own cleverness.

(again, to be painfully fair, there is the occasionally exploitable one in the mix so they’re not all this exact format… but often I’m not sure they get why the exploitable is funny…)

These “memes” aren’t designed to be messed with and evolved by their target audience.

But, also, you can’t evolve them because the memes themselves are, frankly, very high quality. That’s technical quality, of course, of the stock photos, of the resolution, the colour pallet. The logo displays prominently over a professional stock image with an unobtrusive background. The bold font is carefully rendered by professional software rather than a hasty web-based editor or the undying MS Paint. It’s a far cry from exploitable memes where the remnants of 2-3 previous versions can just be seen, where the replaced text doesn’t match the original (and no one cares) or where the JPEG compression has piled up so bad it’s generated entire jokes just around that aspect. There is no genuine community here, there is no sense of collectively coming together to shout “dammit” when you’ve realised something was Loss all along.

To me, that makes the Turning Point meme the perfect microcosm of the world of Conservative astro-turfing. This organisation is meant to be a “student movement” or at least a vague youth movement. Yet the audience seems to be everything but that. The content feels perpetually middle-aged, like a gawky 40-something preacher trying to seem cool in front of 15 year-olds by rapping.

The whole exercise is a charade designed to offer some facsimile of the authentic original: it has image over text, it has the right font, it has the right structure. But, like a guy on a six-figure salary claiming to be poor and impoverished by a 1% tax rise in the top bracket, it has a glossy sheen that can’t rub off. The people making these things don’t have the experience of those who haunted forums, having fun, making jokes, and quickly scribbling over images they’ve shared with whatever software they had to hand, copyrights be damned, before the conversation moved on. They’re graphic designers, with paid-for Photoshop, putting together content generated by a team of writers under the direction of a trust-fund jock, funded by shady origins. It tries to ape the style, but always falls short of authenticity. It cares for branding and image. They can’t have the Turning Point logo get pixelated. They can’t get away with a visible ShutterStock watermark. It’s all sass and sizzle. It’s shiny-shoed business exec pretending to be a rough salt-of-the-earth regular guy. It’s a too perfect, too pristine attempt to copy a format that crawled out of a virtual gutter and rarely showers.

But if you ever scratch that sheen off, it’s just shit all the way down.

FFS, I’ve always disliked Harry Potter…

One key reason that I hate JK Rowling’s speedrun of “I have legitimate concerns” to “send them to camps!”, is that she’s destroyed my ability to dislike Harry Potter on its own terms.

I have never been a fan of it.

Obviously, I never will be.

Yet that’s now fundamentally inextricable from the bloody author’s best attempts to make life hell for a number of my friends — and the complete denial of this from her most dedicated fanbase. That’s been covered better elsewhere, Shaun’s video on the people that have driven her radicalisation is pretty comprehensive, and Lyndsay Ellis’ contribution on Death of the Author explains why I think its fans are morally complicit in her views…

However, I just cannot stand this series, and it has nothing to do with any of that.

The memes are a saving grace of the series, I’ll give it that.

I tried reading a book in 2000-something. On a family holiday, I got handed it and told it would be enjoyable. I got fundamentally bored within pages. I cannot remember which one it even was. All I remember of it is:

Harry Potter was a special boy. Because, you see, Harry Potter was a wizard. That made Harry Potter very special. Because, of course, you should know, wizards are special people.

At least, that’s the impression I had literally at the time. Then, it turns out that this is exactly how she writes even in her serious, adult fiction.

Sure, you can get away with the conversational “settle down, children, while I tell you a story” method in a literal kids book, but a detective series that supposedly isn’t Richard Castle style satire? Good grief. This is an author that people fawn over as good!

A few years later, I tried another one after I knew the story from the films later. Whatever one opens with the exceedingly boring conversation with the Prime Minster that reads like political commentary written by someone who has only ever seen two episodes of Grange Hill. You’ve got to have quite a writing talent to lose my attention to staring out of a train window, instead.

“It’s so clever because the werewolves are named “Sirius” like the ‘dog star’ and “Remus” like the Latin or whatever for wolf!” Jesus Shitting Christ that is not clever. That is barely high school poetry level.

The films are, at best, so-so for me. They spend that much time gurning through this magical world that they actually forget to explain the plot. It’s borderline-incomprehensible if you haven’t read the books and don’t have someone next to you to explain plot holes. I have not read most of Lord of the Rings, I followed the films just fine. I haven’t read Song of Ice and Fire yet, but the TV show was perfectly understandable! They adapt, they cut, they merge, they add… all in service of moving people through a coherent and consistent plot in that format.

The Harry Potter movies? I’m still not entirely sure I know who it was that stole the thingy and left the note at the end of the film where they… I forget, it blurs into one. And who was the… werewolf one that was running around a corn field setting fire to things…? I’m sure I’ve seen these films more than once. But, honestly, without leaning on people who have read the books for explanation, these films make no sense. They’re so beholden to people who think “true to the book” means adapting the dialogue word-for-word, whether that makes sense or not.

I also don’t think the premise is that clever.

The “boy in a cupboard” and the practically-comic abuse he gets from his adoptive family at the beginning of the story is knock-off Roald Dahl at a best. I don’t think setting it in a stereotypical public school is that imaginative (the Worst Witch was released in 1974, please read a second fucking book). I don’t think the world is as fleshed out and well-realised as people claim, at least not compared to something with the momentous mechanics of Discworld. See, in Night Watch, Pratchett bothers to consider that, as a living, breathing thing, the city of Anhk-Morpork would have countless deliveries of food and materials heading toward it, and that would pile up in the event of a revolution. In Harry Potter, our hack of an author invents time-travel and then has to profusely apologise for it by accidentally destroying all the time travelling stuff off screen. Except for when it’s needed again.

I know it’s all opinion, but, come on, this is not good writing.

I especially dislike the reliance on paratext, with the author continually updating and ret-conning things in a way that, at best is cringe-as-fuck (such as naming a character after Elizabeth Warren in hindsight) but extends to outright fucking-offensive (Dumbledore is gay for the liberal cred, but, you know, not gay-gay, as in, visibly-gay or doing anything gay, ewwww). Still, I miss the days when this was the most objectionable thing on the author’s Twitter account. All being lapped up by a fanbase that’s rapidly ageing, with no threshold for cringe, and with no sign of every wanting to read a second book.

Eugh…

Then, you end up digging more into the subtle-maybe-not-that-subtle racism in it. The stereotyping. How the main character is an obnoxious jock if you stand back and look at it. I really cannot relate to this, and the only reason I think it ever took off was an accident of publicity sometime in the late 90s.

I’m openly not a fan of Lord of the Rings. But I don’t actively think it’s bad. I may even get around to re-watching the films or trying to get through the book again. Harry Potter, I actively dislike, and always have. I wouldn’t willingly turn one of the movies on again. I would not be paying Actual Money to see the stage production thing. I will not read a book, because I have tried it and failed miserably to care about a single word written on the page. I admire the sheer strength and belligerence of the people who have managed it to critique it as literature.

These are opinions on the series I have held for years and they’ve never really mellowed. From that first tedious attempt to get through the pages to sitting in a cinema in 2013 and shrugging as we were meant to feel sad about the deaths of characters that had 8 seconds of screen time to introduce them.

But, no.

Apparently, I just want to “cancel” her for “disagreeing” with me. I must dislike the series because I dislike something the author said. It’s my only possible motivation. After all, it’s popular, I must be wrong! I have to “separate the art from the artist”.

Fuck that noise. It’s not mere “disagreement”. I hate that she uses her wealth and privilege and platform to demand that several of my friends get erased from existence to satisfy her and her mates’ absurd conspiracy theories.

For that, sure, I do think she’s personally an odiously catastrophic fuck of an individual.

But, no, that’s not why I dislike Harry Potter. I formed the opinion that her writing is asinine, boring, trite, dragging, tedious, lame, clunky, dull, morally awkward and unimaginative 20 years ago. The only thing that’s changed is that I’m less bothered by letting people know that.

Now, look at yourself. You’re in your 30s. That Hogwarts letter is never coming. Grow up. And for the love of God read another fucking book.

The Twatterpocalypse – where next?

Given the inevitable implosion of Twitter following Pylon Crunk’s (really stupid) takeover of it, people are wondering “what now?”

Or, more specifically “where now?”

Which site will come rescue them? Where do they need to abandon ship to?

To me, I don’t particularly mind and don’t think it matters too much. Indeed, not thinking about it too hard and spreading around multiple sites might be beneficial. We all know the joke that the internet since the 2010s has been just five websites, filled with screenshots of the other four. Seeing that era die off feels like an exciting potential development.

I’ve certainly gained a lot from Twitter since kind-of-accidentally signing up in late 2016. I’ve created many new professional connections, reconnected with former colleagues, got conference speaking invites, and various inspirations for how to do my job as people share their work and ask to learn as much in return. Without that, I probably wouldn’t be in the (reasonably successful) position I am now compared to when I last published to this WordPress backwater.

But none of that is really to the credit of the site. It’s all down to the community that it happened to host. As someone else recently pointed out; if you buy Twitter, you’ve bought a community, not a tech company. I agree with that assessment. I also agree that, as something ran on ads and selling data, that community is your product, not your customers. It’s probably best not to destroy your product. Best not to alienate customer or product, either, but I digress.

The point is that it’s not a site, it’s a community, and it’s a (sub) group of people, that have made it worthwhile for me until now.

As a site, and as an overall culture, I actually have very little to say about it that’s positive.

Let’s be honest, it’s a bit crap

As technology, it’s remarkably limited. I don’t think I’ve watched a whole video via the platform, even a 15 second clip, before an endless buffering loop — but at least the interface is dominated by people shilling their crypto scams via the Spaces feature that I can’t get rid of. I can’t direct my posts to dedicated audiences, but I can buy a hexagonal Enn-Eff-Tee profile picture. I can’t edit out spelling errors, but it’s possible for hidden accounts to send abusive minions toward me for it.

Cool…

Culturally, Twitter is almost terminally self-obsessed. As if we’d get the UK back into the European Union if you simply follow everyone who tweets a single “follow back!” hashtag. As if you can swing an election by writing 200 characters on a website where only a tiny fraction of the population is actually active. People have acquired countless thousands of follows for simply following prominent politicians and replying “zingers” to them, in the hopes of mining it for likes. Entire personalities exist around “having a twitter account”. An entire cottage industry of people tweeting “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” was destroyed the day Donald Trump was finally banned.

Exceedingly tedious stuff that’s often difficult to mute.

The massive objections to an “edit” function seemed to reek of a weird “Twitter Exceptionalism”. The argument goes something to the effect of: what if you liked a tweet about cute puppies, and then they changed it to be a racist comment, and then they forwarded the screenshot to your employer? Certainly, such a convoluted plan that would fall foul of anyone ever checking the original post and seeing the edit history. And if someone isn’t going to check, then any of the fake-screenshot generators online — or, hell, even MS Paint! — could do the same job with or without editing tweets being possible. Web forums have allowed some kind of editing since forever, and yet no problems. Politicians have prominent Facebook presences, which allows editing, and yet no grand conspiracies to hide their mistakes have emerged. To Twitter’s userbase, that site is magically special, and different.

How? It just is!

But it is not.

Sorry to put on a costume and get on stage to play the “Grumpy Old Internet Guy” character, but it is not the centre of the universe. And, frankly, the site’s overall attitude is utterly insufferable. Flaccid internet drama doesn’t become less tragic and sad just because you’re on a social media site with millions of users in 2022 instead of a VB forum with 35 users in 2002.

Twitter’s centring in discussions and discourse is largely an accident of journalism. The posts are publicly visible, and various court rulings granted them a fair-game status for reporters to cite and use. Your posts, and your comments, are now a potential source of free content for everyone else. Suddenly, “So-and-so tweeted about…” becomes a headline. Pop-cultural reviews have descended into endless articles about how a particular episode or movie has attracted ire and criticism which, once you dive into the article, turns out to be two tweets with 6 likes between them.

Journalism ate itself in the last few decades for a multitude of reasons, but Twitter certainly provided some tasty seasoning for it.

The bad and the ugly…

Then there’s the abusive aspects of the site.

Twitter might not be unique in having problems, but it is very structurally based around promoting abuse. Tweets themselves — being short, isolated posts — aren’t so much easily removed from context, but exist atomically in a way that means they barely have any context in the first place. Caveat your points in the replies all you like, that won’t save you from countless people making those misinterpretations anyway. The site is one of the few of Web 2.0 social media that, to quote someone else, rewards being deranged more than being hot.

If you can’t say it perfectly in 280 characters, the site is designed to punish you.

The “quote tweet” feature, while valuable for sharing content you like with your own take, context, or a description to advertise it to your own followers, is the core mechanism for abuse to be spread. The site is filled with accounts whose main schtick is to use that quote tweet feature to send their hundreds of thousands of followers to spam and reply, and further quote tweet, the original — making life unbearable for one poor user who accidentally crossed the path of the bigger account, until the smaller victim locks or simply deletes their account.

And everyone feels like they’re justified in doing it. Chasing the euphoric high of that “like” number going up, up, up as you stick it to the Bad Person. The cultural obsession with the “ratio” of likes/comments/quotes drives it further. The “main character” trope where one person is the willing or unwilling victim for that day. It’s all structurally horrid.

Twitter showed no signs of curbing that behaviour, nor holding people to account for their followers’ actions, even actions driven by them. The plausible deniability of not being responsible for your following remains strong.

Moderation is frequently patchy — and the fear is that it’s going to become non-existent. That’s par for the course for any large site, let’s be clear. When your user base cracks into the tens of thousands (never mind millions), you either have to outsource your moderation decisions to under-paid people, forced to spend mere seconds on a decision to block/ban/suspend, or try your hand at some algorithmic magic to speed it up. In either case, context, background and intent are impossible to convey in your reports, and you end up in a situation where user “H1mml3rFan69” can say he has “14 words” for “globalists” and hopes they “88 themselves”… and it doesn’t break the rules.

Not unique to Twitter, of course, as the crypto-fascists of the world are very good at making themselves look reasonable to those without any knowledge. But Twitter seemed to put even less effort in than most large sites.

So, divesting out of it has been a goal of mine for a while, now feels like a reasonable time to start winding it down.

I don’t believe I’ll miss it, though. Some of the people? Maybe. If they care enough about me, they’ll find where I am. I’ve gone through half a dozen forum communities since the early 00s. Some of those people I still hang around with in other spaces! Some of those groups fizzled out slowly. Others died in a hellfire of profanity-laden drama. Some friendships burn bright for months and then end. Others become strong, almost intimate, over years or even decades, and yet can still evaporate overnight as you wake up to find someone has unceremoniously deleted their account.

“This, too, shall pass” should remain in the back of your mind whenever you join such a group. It’s the flip side of building a community not restricted by geography, but by membership of a platform stored on a disk somewhere. This is no different. It was never too big to fail, or too big to come to an end.

So what, or where, now?

After 4-5 years, is it worth returning to blogging? In fact, let’s do this all old-school! Everyone get a blog. Read them via RSS! Maybe. It’s tempting, sure. But might run the risk of being a bit rose-tinted about the period of transitioning to the social media era. But I think I might try it again. Twitter will die. One day, Facebook, too. I have long-form posts and material on there I might want to keep around, and a blog is a better-kept archive of that material.

So, yes, I might make this page more active again. What theme? Probably none, as before.

I spent some of today re-reading old posts and… actually, it’s not that bad. I expected to be far more embarrassed by some of it, having matured and developed further over half a decade.

It’s certainly not how I’d write now. We can be sure about that.

I’ve spotted a lot of instances where I’d approach things differently. In the specific, I’ve made a few odd references to “western / first-world democracies”, which is fine if you take the intent of addressing an audience that largely lives in those places, but still ignores a more global view. Some of it is less well-researched than I would otherwise do now. There are a few corrections I’d shove in. There are more diverse series of viewpoints I’d be capable of locating and acknowledging now. Some aspects contain slurs I wouldn’t use now — I used to hold a stronger use/mention distinction, whereas now I believe mentioning is still a deliberately form of usage. I can edit those out as I find them, although, contrary to the “I’ve been cancelled!” crowd, people can smell the difference between such mentions and deliberately malicious use.

The big, abusive creationist rant that hit Reddit and pinged my phone with endless notifications for 48 hours? I probably wouldn’t write that now, but I suppose I still stand by it. There’s a fair argument that you cannot shout and shame someone into changing their mind but, also, that wasn’t the intent. Also, they’re creationists. Any creationist capable of altering their opinion on the subject will do so of their own accord, and pretty quickly.

I’d have less patience with people in comments. I can take so much on good faith, but otherwise it’s so much less productive than it appears. In my earliest days on Twitter, I’d actually try to convince the transphobes (aka “TERFs”) that they were wrong. But, no. That never works. That’s a group, along with the forced-birth/anti-abortion crowd, are so used to lying to themselves and others that there is no point. Now they’ve all coalesced into a fanatical, single-issue pressure group, the best course is to just dump them into your blocklist. Pre-emptively if possible. I have better things to do with my life than deal with people like that.

And that’s where we’re up to… if you give a shit — and I highly recommend that you do not — I will see you the next time I hit the “publish” button.

A Crisis of Identity

Allow me to go all special-snowflake and super-self-indulgent for a bit. Normal service will resume shortly.

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I’ve had trouble recently figuring out exactly where I fit in the world.

I feel too weird for ‘normal’ society, but too normal for ‘weird’ society.

I mean, consider: My week isn’t spent counting down to Friday where I go out to get drunk in a packed club; my political opinions go beyond “They’re all crooks!”; I don’t work in an office where my surname has remarkably transformed into ‘from accounts’ or ‘from purchasing’; I can count on one hand the exact number of times I’ve given a shit about sport in the last twenty years; And my main sexual fetish isn’t “phwoar, tits!”.

Meanwhile, at the same time: I hate whimsy; I can’t stand poetry; I’ve committed the ultimate sin in thinking that Doctor Who is just a TV show and, really, just a wee-little-bit shit; I don’t have any ironic hobbies like knitting or collecting tea; I don’t have any mental illnesses or disorders, neither self- nor professionally-diagnosed; And I’m basically cishet scum through-and-through.

So I wonder why either group puts up with me.

I could become a conservative, but I think they’re the Evil Fucking Empire. I’m obviously a liberal, but the liberal-left’s innate talent for self-destruction through its purity culture makes me want to curl into a ball and cry. I could go the South Park route and become apathetic and develop a disdain for any thought that challenges me to care or develop or change but, at the end of the day, I just give too much of a shit about things for that nonsense.

Is my real place with the more-mainstream nerds, fighting for Comic-Con tickets and arguing about X-Box vs the PlayStation 19? Probably not, since I have no idea where I’d find the disposable income for all that bullshit, and I find the casual misogyny and the neckbeardiness that comes with the territory utterly repellent. Does that mean I should join in full-time with the Social Justice Enthusiasts, instead? I suppose so, but I find them to be mostly cloud-cuckoolanders who need to learn to live in reality as it is, first, before they have a hope in hell of changing it because, goat-dammit, guys, perfection is the enemy of good/better, here!

A religious group is a non-starter, obviously. Maybe I could get in with the hardened, out-and-proud Atheists? Well, to be honest, I’d rather join a religious cult that was happy to admit to it, and I like that when I use the word “logic” I mean some bollocks like “(∃x∈X|x=n)⇔n∉Y” and not “Feminism and Islam are the greatest threat to humanity because Logic”.

Metalheads? Frankly, I’d rather be locked in a lift for 24 hours with a Trump fan than a Tool fan, and if I can’t stand the liberal purity culture I’ll last about half a second in the world of “METAAAAAALL!!!!!”. Besides, the broader ‘alternative’ crowd have always looked at me with suspicion for having zero interest in ever getting a piecing or tattoo ever.

So all those sub-cultures and movements are out, and I’ve never felt right nor welcome in any of them.

I’m not, and probably never will be, the great, perfect, stalwart LGBT ally people want me to be, but I’ll never go back to the “eugh, why does it always have to be about the gays!” crowd because fuck that. I know for a damn fact that privilege is very real, but I know there is literally fuck-all I can do about it – which I know because I once asked what I could do about it and had shit slung in my face for it. And, yes, quite, simply not talking about racism won’t make it magically go away but neither will only talking about it.

Or do I just bite the bullet and turn normal – Get a trendy haircut, support the local sports team (Go Sports Team!), share post-memes with Minions on them, comment on a Facebook post that already has 150,000 comments on it, roll back my self-awareness, and start regularly watching Eastenders? Or go full tits-to-the-wall odd – Shave one eyebrow because “that’s so random!”, take up body-painting, change my Facebook profile picture to the flag of whatever country is going through the shit this time, buy some goofy hats, take up barefoot running, and then invent my own sexual orientation because “there isn’t a word that describes me!”?

Or, is this just normal and expected. Are we all like this and all thinking the same thing?

Fuck Millennials

For context, this is what I hear every time I hear the word “millennial”.

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Fuck the millennial generation! Screw them. They’re what’s wrong with the world right now, they’re the root cause of everything.

Of course, I mean, well… it’s not like they’re old enough to ever hold serious political office. But, it’s definitely their fault that laws are messed up. It’s the young peoples’ fault, definitely. Laws, the EU, the country! Young people today, that’s the fault!

And their voting record is terrible… they just… okay, fine, so anyone under the age of 23 has only been able to vote in one election in their entire lifetime so far, but it’s definitely how they vote and their lack of voting that’s screwing the world up. Damn their entitlement. If they wanted to vote they should have been born ten years earlier!

And they just screw the economy… I mean, none of them are old enough to buy and sell a house, hell, most kids barely can afford a car, but they’re definitely the cause of the economy flustering. Because. They are. Aren’t they? Just useless, the lot of them.

But what really hacks me off about Millennials is jobs. I mean, sure, sure… they don’t, by and large, have any hiring or firing experience…  They don’t run big companies or trade shares because people fresh out of school and college don’t do that sort of thing… they just… it’s clearly just their fault because. Because Millennials.

They’re just too self obsessed with themselves! They should be worrying about my problems, like my pension and whether my house price will go down and whether I’m allowed to call a coon a coon and not trampling my right to say how I want Muzzie-foreigners deported or shot. Because me, me, me… not the me-me-me generation!

Fuck their entitlement. I need my high house prices, I need my cheap fuel and cheap cars, I need my pension and to retire at 65. Why should I care that they won’t get that, the entitled whiny bitches…? What about me and my needs and wants? I’m entitled to things, they aren’t.

And screw their “activism”. If they were really anti-war or whatever, they’d have the good sense of doing something about it by being older and having actual political power rather than having to do their lazy protests and reading and sharing… I mean, come on, how pathetic is that? Why don’t they form their own opinions instead , and quit being so young and just do what I tell them because I’m right and they’re just stupid.

Okay, so they don’t have political power, they don’t vote because they legally couldn’t until recently, they don’t run big companies, they occasionally care about people other than themselves, they don’t sell houses for a profit because they’re literally not old enough to have had one for long enough, and they don’t get high powered jobs because they’re not old enough…

…but it’s still all their fault. Obviously.

Putting Britain First… well, fifth.

In which I thought it’d be clever to catalogue two-days of Britain First posts to see what they talk about – the answer won’t shock you.

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If you’re like me (and I grant this isn’t entirely likely as the majority of the English-speaking internet is American), you’ve probably spent the last week concerned about two major events. They’re two events of extremely insular national self-interest.

1. Almost the entire NHS is on strike over working contracts being imposed by the government.
2. Some leaked documents confirm what we’ve always known – rich people avoid tax by parking it out of the country, and our Prime Minister is amongst them.

You may have also been following issues with the UK steel industry, and at this point I throw my hands in the air and say that’s just one of those things I haven’t had the brain-space for. I know it’s a thing, I know not the intimate details.

Anyway, these are stories of insular, national self-interest. So the US election and the rise (and, may the gods be willing, eventual fall) of Donald Trump and the on-going refugee crisis across Europe and whatever shit Daesh have done this time aren’t things I’m counting. Why? Because of a little quasi-political organisation known as Britain First.

They don’t need an introduction, really. We know what they’re like. At best, concerned citizens who are disheartened, disenfranchised and unfortunately misinformed; and at worst, violent, nasty, illiterate, “send-all-the-nig-nog-towelheads-back-to-bongo-bongo-land” hardcore racialists.

Anyway, in light of these 2-3 stories of, I reiterate, national self-interest, I wondered if Britain First did indeed, and as advertised, put Britain first?

Do they show interest in what is happening in this country? Do they show interest in our politics? Our leaders? Our health service? Our education?

At this point, you probably won’t express surprise that the answer is “do they fuck“. I went to their Facebook page, scrolled down, and started categorising fairly broadly. Here’s the post breakdown from the last 48 hours, April 7th and 8th:

First observation: they post a lot. It works out as a post every half-hour or so.

Second observation: they mostly post about themselves and Muslims, and after that almost entirely about other countries. They want to take our country back; and while they seem to have plenty of idea who they want to take it back from, they aren’t too clear on where they want to take it back to.

A few explanations of the categories.

• Self promotion: Britain First do a lot of this, as you can tell. They advertise their protests, put up vlogs by their figureheads, and post pictures about how you should vote for them in London. Buried in these stories might be things relevant to the United Kingdom, but it’s encapsulated and subsumed entirely within their brand.
• Muslims: This includes any story about a Muslim that was posted only because they were Muslim. Man raped woman? Only counts if they were brown! White Muslim found? Well, that proves it’s not racist! You know, that sort of thing. Two of these posts could be considered “British” as they feature Winston Churchill.
• European events: Indeed, their major source of news is stuff happening overseas. A lot of these were about the Dutch vote on the EU, and a lot were about Muslims in Europe – making it hard to distinguish between this category and the one above.
• US Politics: Yes, the United States were a big thing due to a massive surge across one of these days (see below). They have quite literally said “VOTE TRUMP” more times than they’ve said “SAVE UK STEEL”. Because Britain should come first.
• EU Referendum: And this is the first category that might be considered about Britain. As far as importance go, Britain seems to be fifth in line for their priorities.
• ISIS: I originally had this as “middle east events” to make it as generic as the “European events” category – but, let’s be honest, these are their “brown people make big boomy bang-bangs in sandy faraway land” stories.
• Im’grints: It was hard to split things between this and “the towelheads are coming”, but this is anything that’s a bit more general and aimed any migrants of any ethno-religious grouping.
• Clickbait: Britain First are famous for this. They’ve put up misleading “donate to save the animals!” posters to attract attention, but in this sample they haven’t done much of it.

The rest are effectively “misc”. I will point out the “Fucking commies!” section. One of these stories is about Jeremy Corbyn getting The Morning Star delivered to him.

I broke it down by two days. This shows that their God Bless America fetish was a bit of a one-day spike, so perhaps not representative. As you can also see from this one, their posts about the Panama Papers came in day 2 (April 8th), and only in the last few hours – so they’re a little late to a party that’s been going on all week.

Now, in fairness, they have actually used one of these Panama Papers posts to call for David Cameron to resign – in line with a lot of liberal thought on this.”Wait, Britain First and the UK left agreeing? Surely not!” I hear you cry. And you’d be right. Given the details of their posts on the EU referendum, a lot from the last day have objected to Cameron being on the pro-EU (the “in” campaign) side, and seek to punish him for it. After all, if anyone can sway the UK right to stay in the EU it will be Cameron, and it’s probably in our selfish interest to support him on that, rather than call for him to resign over something comparatively minor. You can also back through Britain First’s comments on the Panama papers, where many resort to the “but it’s legal” defence, suggesting they really aren’t too bothered about the wealthy fleecing them, but are happy to see a Left-wing Socialist Communist Liberal like David Cameron fall on his sword regardless.

Anyway… why, again?

Britain First is followed by over a million people, and are slowly becoming what counts as mainstream thought in the UK – regardless of what they claim about the ‘mainstream media’ they are not as far onto the fringes as they claim. They’ve grown from obscurity to having quite a voice amongst real, actual people, with actual voting powers.

And remember, this is 48 hours where the major events of national self-interest have been the NHS going on strike and the Prime Minister’s involvement in a tax scandal. These are not stories that only affect Guardianistas who are snorting their third line of avodaco, either – the entire country relies on the health service for emergency care, ambulances, accident and emergency, and most medical training. We rely on its scale and purchasing power to negotiate better rates for medical drugs and treatments. We rely on its doctors for cutting edge research. Meanwhile, tax avoidance by the wealthy accumulates into the Tax Gap, which is one of the largest government expenditures and a firm contributor to the government deficit – and it’s the working class, average person, not the millionaire, that gets punished in their attempt to close this gap. They are definitely important and, as I’ve said, very much within our insular national self-interest.

These are big things ignored in favour of posts about how all Pakistanis are rapists.

For anyone who really wants to put this country first, and put the people who live here first, these are major stories. For anyone who doesn’t care about those particular things, this is a country of 64 million people and so it can’t be hard to find some relevant news about us if we want to be selfish. Why is a page that puts Britain, supposedly, first, hardly talking about us? Why are they talking about a “foreign” religious group more than their own religion? Why are they talking about a non-EU county more than they’re talking about the upcoming EU referendum?

So it’s time to stop pretending this is even remotely about “patriotism”.

“Democracy” my ass…

If you ignore the paranoid raving about Skynet coming to eat us, I think this is one of the more lucid thoughts from Eliezer Yudkowsky – that people say things just for the sake of inviting applause. They’re trite and pointless things, but they sound good at a first, uncritical, glance.

This is particularly important to realise in an era where such soundbites aren’t just used to invite the audience to clap, but also used to is used to shut people down. And one phrase I think has come up a lot goes along the lines of “that’s democracy”. I.e., “but people voted for David Cameron and Conservative policy, you shouldn’t be allowed to protest because that’s democracy.”

Because what does “democracy” even mean these days? If it isn’t about putting up a sign that says “APPLAUD NOW”? As Yudkowsky points out “let’s bring more democracy to the process” sounds nice, but doesn’t mean much when you try to figure out their point.

We tend treat it as a magic word that just means ‘Good Thing’. It’s tautologous.

“Democracy is a good thing” simply means “The Good Thing is a good thing” to most people. We fight for it. We rile ourselves up for it. But rarely do we seem to take a step back and ask why it’s a good thing. What properties of “democracy” are the Good Things that we want? Much like “freedom of speech”, democracy is should be the means to a better world, not the end in itself. When people didactically declare that “we have democracy” and “we have freedom”, is that just a meaningless platitude and a thought-terminating cliché?

Anyway…

So what is “democracy” really about? Or, more precisely, what should it be about?  And even more importantly, do we have it? Do we have good things, or do we have the didactically self-declared Good Thing? Have I used too many rhetorical questions in this post so far? Yes?

Is it about elections?

Well, we get those so infrequently we could host most of one of the World Wars in between them, and a lot can change in those 4-5 years. To put it in perspective, we complain that students are a demographic that don’t vote, but about 2-in-5 university students  won’t, statistically, get even the opportunity to vote because elections are so comparatively rare. A degree lasts 3-4 years, and so you could go that entire time without the opportunity to vote. You could be paying fees imposed by a government you had no say in and will have no say in while tuition has salience to you.

But when these elections do come around, our choices are constricted already. We don’t get to choose the candidates, those choices are made for us by the Parties. They have to undergo pre-selection before hitting a ballot paper – and while you can go it alone as an independent, please, don’t make me laugh at you for suggesting they have a genuine chance of making a difference. Our selection process is truncated at the first hurdle without our input.

I hate to say it, but on their own with nothing else to support them, our elections are mostly meaningless.

Or, to be brutally honest, you take more dumps in a week than we’ve had general elections since women were allowed to vote in them. Well, not literally, if it’s literally true for you, see a doctor. But you see what I mean, though? Right?

Is it about voting in general?

Well, we get to vote… occasionally. As I pointed out above, the elections come around every 5 years. Twice a decade.

But we certainly don’t get to vote on most policies, voting for those are covered by our representatives. In theory, that system arises because voting for every little thing is a pain in the arse – elections and referenda are difficult to organise. So we avoid doing it and have representatives.

So, no we don’t get to vote on specific things, or even on general things most of the time. We vote on representatives who we trust make decisions for us. And, as recent UK political events have shown, quite frequently elected governments do the opposite of what they claim. After the election, we’ve got no power to object save protest and petitions. And less said about how the whips system and party power means representatives rarely get a free vote to follow the will of the people, and leaving their constituents high-and-dry in the process, the better.

We will not introduce ‘top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them. – 2001 Labour Manifesto, a position which was reversed entirely by January 2004, conveniently before the next election

Is it about representation?

At this point I would like to say I think this is the biggest key point in the democratic process. You can have all the votes in the world but they mean nothing without representation. Meanwhile, while you can, at least conceivably, do accurate representation without formally voting even once. For instance, you can randomly select people to serve as representatives like jury service – thus making sure you have a statistically representative cross-section of the country, without ever having to poll the whole population at a ballot box once.

Well, the current UK government are in power with about 7 in 10 people not voting for them. Or “actively voting against them”, if you will, since we have a first-past-the-post system that doesn’t allow us to transfer votes and gauge broad support, or empower people to vote for their true preference.

All of our electoral woes translate into a disproportionate number of seats in Parliament compared to the popular vote and our best guess for what the will of the people actually is. More people voted for UKIP than the SNP, yet the translation of that into representative seats is farcical.

Basically, it ain’t representative. Not in the slightest. If you think otherwise you are fucking delusional.

Let’s be clear, though – I fucking hate UKIP. But I have to be consistent. In the 2010 election, Nick Clegg’s performance in the televised debates caused a near-unprecedented surge in popular support for the Liberal Democrats. Despite this increase, they lost a seat. It was absurd then, it’s even more absurd now.

And if you want to change the meaning behind “representation” slightly, don’t forget that Parliament is way off our actual demographic make-up on all counts. Gender, ethnic groups, disabilities, sexual orientations… In fact, the Lords – the appointed house – is a comparative trailblazer in that respect, probably because it’s appointed and not elected. We tend to elect people similar to “us”, and in most places the majority is, as they say, male-and-pale. Given our winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post system… well, it’s an unfortunate side-effect of elections that we don’t get demographically representative representatives. There’s also probably nothing we can do about that.

This is direct from parliament.uk, which looks… okay, until you realise it took until 2010 to get that far. Now, one can argue that representatives should be more educated and older so have better experience, but when we have a health secretary who believes in homoeopathy and a PM that doesn’t realise the effects of his own policies, then clearly that plan is, to use the technical jargon, bollocks.

What about electing the leaders and holding them to account, that must be what democracy is all about, right?

Again… you don’t vote for the leader of the country, that’s selected for you. You vote for your MP, and that translates into a seat, and the side with the most seats takes their preferred MP and sticks them in the executive branch of government.

Even the cabinet you don’t vote for. They’re appointed based on connections and party loyalty, and certainly not their qualifications or suitability for the post. And they’re reshuffled at will, at quasi-random intervals, and usually with regard to what looks good on the news.

So, think about that: in UK politics, the people actually wielding the power are not voted for.

The whips mean the Party must vote the way the government want, and the government – that is, the cabinet and the policy-makers – are selected and appointed from the pool of MPs, not elected directly to their positions. Doctors have zero say in who the Health Secretary is, school teachers have no say in who the Education Secretary is – because no-one, save the Party Elite, has that power.

Oh, and when we petition a vote of no confidence in one of them because he’s fucking up the job at an objective and demonstrable level, we get nothing. In fact, we occasionally get laughed at.

Because fuck you, that’s why.

So, if “that’s democracy”, then screw it.

Democracy is evidently shit.

I’d rather have meaningful voting, qualified representatives, an accountable executive branch, houses that accurately reflect our opinions, and the ability to be continually heard. Because those are good things, not Good Things.

When you say “that’s democracy” like it’s a good thing, to avoid talking about problems with the government, or to shut down protesters, complaints, and petitions, then you’re doing nothing but buying into a load of bullshit. If you want “democracy” to begin and end at elections every five years, if you want representatives that aren’t allowed to represent us, and you want executive leaders who are appointed through their connections and party loyalty, then you probably shouldn’t be engaging in the political process in the first place.