What am I going to do?
There is Inflation and Unemployment; and there is noticing that the price of eggs has gone up and hearing that your Uncle Albert has been laid off. There is reading about war and walking down the street and seeing piles of rubble which used to be your neighbour’s houses. There is reading about the Pandemic and discovering that the streets are empty, everyone is wearing masks, and you have a tickling at the back of your throat.
I was at a folk gig, of course, listening to the wonderful Chris Wood in the lovely Wardrobe venue. There were only half a dozen people there; and the manager was explaining, ruefully, that the venue was going to have to close, and the singer was saying that he was well-known enough to weather the storm, but some younger singers might not be. That was the point at which I realised that Covid was a real thing, not just something that you read about in the papers.
There was enough warning that I could do a little bit of preparation. Make sure that I had some masks and some testing kits, and go to Asda and buy too much pasta and too many cans of tuna and too much toilet paper in case there was a shortage [1]
We had an English teacher who told us more or less in so many words that we didn’t need to worry too much about our exams, because almost certainly there would be nuclear war before the 1980s were out. I think he talked about constructing a bomb shelter in his garden. But there was an assumption, I think, that if there were a nuclear war, someone would be in charge: there would be police to set up standpipes in the street and vans bringing supplies and Captain Mainwaring to tell us to make sure our windows were blacked out. And there are the Preppers, obviously, the survivalists, with cellars full of condensed milk and baked beans and assault rifles. But for them it is a hobby, a fantasy, like dressing up as a wizard and thumping your friends with rubber swords.
There are a lot of lunatics in the world at present, and several of them have nuclear arsenals. I don’t think there is much danger of a Threads-style holocaust with everyone firing all their missiles at everybody else and a few survivors eating cockroaches in the ruins of Lords Cricket Ground. There is some chance of a small mushroom cloud in Chernivtsi or Rafah. There will be pictures of Ukrainains or Palestinians being reduced to Hiroshima shadows, candle-lit vigils outside churches and letters to the Times deploring it in the strongest possible terms. But I don’t think that buying a sixteen pack of bog-roll will have much effect one way or the other.
ALEC GUINESS VOICE: “That’s your uncle talking.”
When I was twelve, if I could have had one single wish, it would have been to read every Marvel Comic book, including the ones that came out before I was born; and also to watch every episodes of Doctor Who, including the black and white ones, from the beginning, and to watch Star Wars every day if I wanted to. I didn’t envisage magic or time travel: a readers pass to the BBC archives and the Marvel vault would have done the trick. [2]
When I was a little older, I would have added “To go to see a Shakespeare play or a Wagner opera every night” to my list.
Twice a week someone writes an article about what the Internet has taken away from us, and how wonderful it would be if we didn’t have mobile phones. “Oh, the wifi went down one night and there was beautiful silence and conversation and we all started to play charades, darling!”
“Why don’t you play charades when the wifi is not down?”
Because we don’t want to. [3]
I find the people who pull out their phones the moment there is a lull in the conversation incredibly irritating. I get so annoyed that I pull out my phone and post something amusing about them on Twitter. I am distracted by the people who text in cinemas or at gigs: not by the light or the noise, particularly. I am distracted by the mere fact of other people being distracted even if they are not distracting me. [4]
But people who get out their phones during the good bit of a film, or when I am coming to the punchline of a joke they have only heard three or four times before are the same people who used to pull paperback books out of their pockets on movie night; whose face was always obscured by the Times or the Daily Mirror; who wouldn’t make eye-contact with me at breakfast because they were more interested in the ingredients on the orange juice carton. And there were kids who used to get hit with the big stick for fidgeting and not paying attention at school; and ladies who wouldn’t go anywhere, including theatres and prayer meetings, without their knitting, and men who knew very well that smoking was incredibly bad for them but needed something to do with their hands.
And people have always liked pictures of ladies with no clothes on and cute kittens: what do you think tabloid newspapers were for? [5]
Phones don’t irritate people; people irritate people.
I can remember the days when everyone had to carry a little book around with them wherever they went. And when they wanted to pay for something costing more than a few pounds, they would take the note book out, write in it, tear a page out, hand it to the cashier, who would write a number on the back of it, and put it in the till.
I recall a columnist in the Daily Mail saying that if we valued civilization we had at all costs to preserve these “cheque-books”. Writing a cheque created a little pause for breath in the hustle and bustle of daily life. It meant that the person you bought your wine from saw your handwriting. It meant that the cultured could show off their smart leather “cheque-book-holder” and their smart silver “fountain-pen”. And it discouraged impulse spending by reminding you of what things cost.
None of which is untrue. But once the technology existed, we all started using plastic debit cards instead, because they were more convenient. Shout “cash is king” until the cows come home, but I haven’t seen a £5 note since before Christmas.
Douglas Adams said that when a new media is invented, people cling to accidental features of the obsolete media: people like to have articles that they are never going to read; people like the smell of books.
I like to write; and I like to read; and I like to think. I am very much aware that if I got a phone call from the Guardian tomorrow asking me to write five hundred words on what a Star Wars enthusiast thinks about Donald Trump I would spend 48 hours failing to start it; stay up until 6AM and send it off three minutes before the deadline, having failed to say what I wanted to say, and only noticing after publication that I had written “I do think Donald Trump is a nice man” instead of “I do not think Donald Trump is a nice man.” And I’ve never had the confidence to write pitches or go for auditions. Heck, if someone says “Well, it’s quite good, but we don’t like the middle paragraph” I would probably crawl into a small dark room and not come out for a fortnight. [6]
So fanzines and self-publication have always been a precise fit to who I want to be. Cut out the middle-man, get your words down and put them in the hands of a reader. Rattling off documents on a word processor and photocopying them and selling them to anyone who will read them for 50p or a free beer.
So the Internet was a gift to me. I could throw my words into space and see if anyone caught them, without any nasty editor or vulgar paycheck to get in the way. I hate to think how much time I spent writing commentary and throwing it into UseNet in the olden days. (Who remembers Drax? Pierre Savois? The Rev’d Steve Winter?)
On the other hand, the existence of a disposable media of this kind creates fluency, hitches your typing fingers to your interior monologue, gives you permission to write the worst first draft in human history: I wouldn’t be doing this today if rec.arts.drwho had never existed.
Usenet was my Hamburg and my Cavern. Twitter was fun until it wasn’t. Threads was like Twitter used to be for about six months and then became like Twitter is now.
For a disturbing number of years, I have published my writing on Blogger. I have promoted my writing on Twitter and Facebook. I have made a pitifully small amount of money from Lulu, and a quite decent side income from Patreon. I have read comics and books on Kindle and the Marvel App. My Work In Progress could never have happened without the Internet Archive.
What will I do if the whole of the Internet becomes indistinguishable from Twitter?
If any of my friends read this, I know well enough what they would say. [7] They would say “Well, if it annoys you so much Andrew, there is a very simple solution: just stop reading social media.”
They have a point. If Facebook is a racist sewer I don’t have to stick my nose in it. Some people announced rather forcibly that they were flouncing off Twitter and deleting their Twitter accounts when the Dark Lord’s Apprentice bought it for the price of a large glacial island in the North Atlantic. I have simply found that the Twitter which actually used to be quite good fun has simply gone away and is never coming back. But for, eegad, twenty years, and much more if you go back to Usenet, Soshal Meejah has been what I use to get my stuff out there. Would you be reading this now if you hadn’t found me on Google, or Facebook, or Twitter?
But if Google and Facebook and Twitter join the Muskocracy, in what way does Online Andrew, the real Andrew, me, continue to even exist?
[1] There was a shortage, but only because everybody else was stocking up as well.
[2] What I remember most about the legendary Longleat Twentieth Anniversary festival is squeezing into a tent and watching old stories that I had read about but never dated to hope I would see. I think that is still the only time I have watched Dalek Invasion of Earth right the way through.
[3] Why did folk music come to an end? Because the “folk” were offered a choice, and chose the Music Hall and the gramophone instead.
[4] There is probably a three letter abbreviation for that condition.
[5] I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wicked about photos of cute kittens, provided the kitten has given informed consent.
[6] There is probably a three letter abbreviation for that condition as well.
[7] None of my friends will in fact read this. My friends will say “Why would we read you going on and on about your pet subjects when we can hear you doing it in the pub.” In fact, the Andrew who types and the Andrew who speaks are two quite different Andrews; and the one who exists in Cyberspace is the authentic one.
Come over to Bluesky. We have Mark Hamill and George Takei.
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