Progressive flickers
Our world is increasingly complex, baffling and enraging.
Was political progress just a cathode ray dream?
For many years now, I’ve pondered the symbolic meaning of television. Not the shows, the content, colours and sounds. The technology itself. It came, it conquered and disappeared. It shaped living rooms and national moments. And as in many families, my Dad could remember who was first on his road in Kensal Rise to get one. Royal coronations, half the street in. TV quickly meant everything to us, yet it remained inexplicable, a form of domestic magic. And then one day, the technology was gone.
The original cathode ray tube television is an interesting phenomenon – a cultural messenger from the Victorian era, a smallish box that dissolved distances and enabled a shared culture. Today’s flat panels are really just two dimensional surfaces connected to an infinite and changing internet. By contrast, the cathode ray tube television, proudly elevated within its wooden frame, was originally a conduit to the familiar and knowable. Men and women in dinner jackets and sober dresses, reading the news in cut glass accents, committed to education, information and entertainment. Television might be a revolutionary technology, but its intrusion was shaped by a respect for an existing order.
The last televisions that relied on blasting electrons through some sort of tube, ended production early in the 21st century. But as mass market technology, they represent the epic drift into empowered ignorance that consumer technology continues to produce. To this day I couldn’t convincingly tell you how television actually worked. Something, something electron beams, frequencies, and so forth. I certainly couldn’t win a pub quiz round with what I can call to mind about it now, that’s for sure. I do know that if the picture was a little fuzzy a smart slap across the top might help? So, was it a pet, creaking furniture or an errant child?
But this living room window to the world didn’t need to be understood to be valued. Much like the motor car – it wasn’t how it worked that mattered, but where you could go with it. Grainy footage from the Apollo moon landings brilliantly distills this phenomenon: delight and awe at NASA’s celestial achievement, while almost no one viewing could explain how what they were seeing was possible.
This ubiquity-vs-knowledge gap is now one of the defining underpinnings of contemporary life. I still recall getting my first iPhone – the 3GS one – and marvelling at how the maps app could be set to satellite imagery mode, and look! You could zoom in on possible missile sites in North Korea. Technology that once marked you out as a double-O level agent, licensed to kill, was now just a way of wasting time in the pub. Quite a shift in the order of things.
Can you change a society you don’t understand?
Power without understanding has never been a stability-inducing cocktail. The last decade’s convergence of social media addiction, weaponisation of news and politics within the smartphone in your pocket hand, seems to have made the stupidest things the most entertaining. The doom scrolling driven by the attention/dopamine economy is clearly not good for us. The LED backlight illuminating our tired faces under the duvet seems a poor life choice. But like humble television, we’re too dazzled to look away, and we’d rather watch the next video than explore the underlying realities of how the content gorgon has entranced us for fun and profit. Generative AI tools make this disconnection between cause and affect profoundly worse. Given its hidden nature and complexity, most people have no idea what AI is or how it works; they simply react to what it serves up. An eager-to-please, human sounding machine that has no concept of truth, would be considered evil in a literary setting. In the real world it’s hype and a stock price bump. The result is more feeling than knowing, more seduction than enlightenment.
This same burgeoning knowledge gap expands throughout the structures of society that we have painstakingly erected. The Hobbesian philosopher John Gray continues to point to the end of social democracy and liberalism – convincingly framing today’s most well-meaning governments as bound in a kind of self-directed ignorance as to what’s driving social and political discontent they face. For Gray, they’re just ghosts of the 1990s technocratic dream, doomed to continue addressing the world in ways that can’t assuage today’s voters’ drives and preferences. To acknowledge financial reality and social preference would be to give up on the West Wing type dreams that career politicians so often champion and embody. Maintaining the consensual delusion is task one of any new administration – be it populist or liberal, social democratic.
Engagement is not agency
In this way, the widespread lack of understanding again seems central. Poll after poll in liberal democracies shows that most voters vastly over-estimate how much money is being spent on contentious policies. In the UK, a focus group held by MoreInCommon reckoned that MPs’ salaries were about 8% of overall GDP (which would mean they were earning £4,436,923,076 a year each!). We see MPs on television but we don’t understand how they work. A large number of people who should know better, doubt the moon was landed on at all.
We conduct our lives in societies composed of services we’ve come to rely on, dependent on a web of agreements and covenants between strangers, legally guaranteed and occasionally backed by mandated force. Much as we moan, this seamless complexity should be seen as a marvel. Yet the more the world provides us with access to information the less we understand, the more anxious and riled up we become. Technology platforms encourage us to become low stakes contrarians, ‘done me own research mate!’, pub philosophers with no real awareness of what is or isn’t true (or what would make it so).
Vibes for the people
In the UK, the Green Party’s new leader Zach Polanski has created quite a stir. Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, he’s telegenic, articulate and confident. He seems like someone who would be making smartphone video content even if he wasn’t a politician. But like everything else in the entertainment world, there’s reason to fear that his well-meaning crusade for a green and leftist agenda, is also predicated on a certain simplism. That he’s only appealing to our understandable need for optimism. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the complexities of the current UK economy… something, something tax billionaires, job done! It’s an eerie mirror to Nigel Farage’s pint waving monologues about stopping small boats. Vibes, always more vibes.
What, if anything, have we learnt? Compared to the somewhat stolid technocratic positioning of Kier Starmer’s incumbent Labour Party, Polanski has ‘rizz’ and growing poll numbers. But I suspect Gray would identify both parties as stuck in related positions built on an ignorance of the underlying realities the country faces. The Greens are having a moment of renewed relevance and understand which tone to adopt. Labour is grappling rootlessly with governance, in front of an unforgiving crowd.
We urgently need to understand how things work, not simply how we’d like them to be. If we want to advocate for priorities we believe in, you have to recognise the features, virtues and shortcomings of the society we already have. Not simply ideological analysis, but honesty about our motivations, our paradoxes, our conflicting attitudes and behaviours. Facts would be a start. Social democracy has been pretty good to most people, but if we don’t know how things work, the debate shifts to a mad series of culture war topics that don’t address anything that matters. And that’s the best way to ensure that the great derangement continues long after Trump and Farage are gone.
PS: John Gray’s critique of liberalism is thoughtful and pointed, and worth engaging with if progressives still want to move forward. Interview on NewStatesman.
