Here in the UK, news has broken that social media (or, at least, the websites that legislators believe constitute social media) will be banned for under-16s. The detail of this is a bit sketchy, but the plan is intended to be implemented by next spring. It’s a last roll of the dice for the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Stamer, who is extremely unlikely to be in office when this becomes law. But everyone needs a legacy: perhaps the Starmer era will be defined by starting to redress the terrible damage that technology has wrought on young minds.

The UK is, of course, not the first country to moot or execute such a plan. The Australians have led the way on this front, with mixed success. Only around a quarter of Australian teenagers reported that the ban had changed their relationship with social media, which is a figure that will depress the architects of the policy but should not be underestimated. A quarter of everyone is still a lot of people. But the UK’s decision to unilaterally push this ban through (having been rejected by MPs in the lower chamber) leaves a lot to be desired from a policy perspective. As someone who has been radicalised somewhat on this subject (I host a podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour and am increasingly convinced that technology is the root of all modern evils) I am sympathetic to an interventionist approach. But much of this discourse misses where and why things went wrong. It is curative rather than preventative, and falsely identifies this as an issue, singularly, of youth.

Here, then, as a corrective, are six things I would ban for over-16s.

Starting social media companies

People over the age of 16 should not be allowed to start social media companies. Frankly, it is hard to sustain an argument that the current crisis with social media use is not a direct result of the existence of these companies. And thus is makes sense to ban over-16s from making them. Also, we have plenty; think of something else to squander VC money on.

Advertising their businesses on social media

The reason that social media has become so addictive is because that suits the interests of advertisers. The algorithm – all hail the mythical algorithm! – is a product designed to keep users on the platform, scrolling and clicking until they find a product to buy. That is the raison d’être of social media. It is not about connections, it is about sales. Almost all the most pernicious aspects of the technology have been exacerbated by the interests of advertisers. Given that most businesses are owned by people over-16, we should ban people over-16 from advertising on social media. They should be forced to sell their overpriced tat in full-page magazine ads and on radio promos with a Les Dennis voiceover. This could also save traditional media, though runs the risk that more cabbies will become addicted to LBC.

Caving to the lobbyists who have turned Big Tech founders into oligarchs

It’s clear to me that over-16s should be banned from caving to the lobbyists who have turned Big Tech founders into oligarchs. The fact that men as awful as Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg wield more political power than any other private citizens on earth is a huge failing for the over-16 community. We have allowed Big Tech companies to profit from a low-tax, low-regulation environment in exchange for… what exactly? Addicting our children to social media? Allowing us to snoop on our exes? Exposing us to the racist rantings of Russian bot farms? We have acted like social media is a public utility rather than a public nuisance, all out of a craven, avaricious fear of the oligarchy we, ourselves, have created. So, over-16s should be banned facilitating the conditions of society’s collapse.

YouTube comments

I don’t think old people should be allowed to leave comments on YouTube. They are never good. They are either redundant, perverted or deranged. Ban it.

Acting like AI is a panacea, rather than tomorrow’s problem

Banning social media while bending over backwards to facilitate AI companies is an insanely dissonant position. What do they imagine the eventual use case for consumer-facing AI is? The answer, of course, is to sell product to civilians. Soon enough, I will be able to ask some agentic AI companion to book my holiday and it will go off and source the flights, hotels, tour guides and sort it all for me. Easy for me, great for the businesses paying to push their position with whatever AI company is providing that service. And in this world, the most important thing is that AI becomes a crutch, something that users rely on. You shouldn’t make any decision without consulting AI – that is where we’re headed. It is a stepping stone to a more debilitating, all-consuming addiction than was ever executed via social media. So we should ban over-16s from pumping money into the AI industry and creating new, deeper problems down the line. (As a thought experiment, I wonder whether the Starmer government would concede, now, that it was a mistake to have imbued the Big Tech companies with so much funding back at the peak of their investment gold rush?)

Social media

Most importantly, I think we should ban social media for over-16s. I see no difference in how children and adults use social media; the only difference is their personal autonomy. In point of fact, some of the most egregious misuses of social media are performed by older people: they are more credulous of information on the internet, more susceptible to AI misinformation, less private and thus more prone to public proclamations. And, crucially, we, the over-16s, have fucked this up. We fucked this up for children and we fucked it up for ourselves. Venture capitalists and lawmakers and the media and inveterate users have conspired to create a societal dependency. If we think that’s a bad thing (and I do) then we should take uniform action. Why should I, a 33-year-old man, not be protected from my worst instincts, when a 15-year-old version of me would be? Too often we act as though the problems of our society – whether it’s the manosphere and toxic masculinity or screen addiction – are cauterised in adulthood. In reality, the worst misogynists are grown-ups; the most corrupted, degenerate internet users are adults. This stratified ban places social media into the category of dangerous activities (drinking alcohol, driving a car) where we decide that children are ill-equipped to deal with the risk. This is a miscategorisation: social media is like pollution, a dull, cloying smog that creates uniform risks and will linger for generations. Ban it for under-16s, sure, but don’t let over-16s get off scot-free. A full and proper ban would also serve to reinforce my five other suggested bans, thus saving the earth and creating our happy, dancing utopia.

Below the line, for paid subscribers only, I offer a short hypothesis of what I think will happen next in British politics (and which may already be wrong by the time you read it).

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Just a reminder: I love it when people upgrade to a paid subscription. It makes me think very positively of them, and (briefly) myself.

As a rubric for understanding my upbringing, I can offer little better than the image of a 13-year-old version of me staying up late into the night, eating Parma ham sandwiches and binge-watching boxsets of the David Suchet Poirot series in the smaller of our two living rooms.

I adored that series. In part, because I was already a fan of the Poirot novels, which scratched an itch in my teenage brain (an itch that continues to be scratched: I am two thirds of the way through a systematic re-read of all those books). But also because it was so elegantly made, with attention paid to all the interwar details, and led by performances that showed a touching respect for the source material. It was (at its peak: it jumped the shark, rather, in its final few seasons) a self-deprecating, deeply reverential interpretation of Agatha Christie’s series. In David Suchet they had the perfect Poirot: he was small and round and cerebral and had wonderful, twinkling eyes.

This week the BBC announced that it would be commissioning a new TV show, Hercule, a look at the earlier years of the Belgian detective. “An intimate study of Hercule the man and an epic portrait of Britain between the wars,” according to the press release, the six-part series will star 33-year-old Edward Bluemel (who has made his reputation playing the “horny disaster” archetype in shows like My Lady Jane and We Might Regret This) as Poirot. It is hard to reconcile this actor with Christie’s own description of Poirot, from the first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. “Poirot was an extraordinary looking man,” observes the book’s narrator, Captain Hastings. “He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military.” These are not incidental details but the core of the character. Poirot is an outsider, a foreigner. He is famous within his world, vastly experienced, and never able to blend into the fabric of its universe. He is an unapologetically fastidious dandy, and that informs his sleuthing. He is not young, he is not sexy.

Now, I have nothing against Bluemel, who has been terrific in several shows I’ve enjoyed. But his casting raises a specific question: what’s the point? After all, the appeal of Poirot – to aficionados of detective fiction – is wrapped up in a characterisation that defies an easy origin story. The individual murder mysteries are a mixed bag (some are elegant, others are tortuous) but, as with any of the great detective series, they are unified by the protagonist. If you make Poirot young and sexy, you have denuded the character of its governing attributes. Why, then, would you not simply create a new detective, who could be young and sexy without carrying the baggage of misrepresenting a beloved character?

The answer, of course, is that we are living through the most regurgitative era in the history of art. At the American box office last year, 14 of the 15 highest grossing films were sequels or protractions of existing intellectual property (IP), from the video game Minecraft to comic books like Superman and Captain America. Many of the big new TV series this year have been derivative projects: The Testaments (Handmaid's Tale sequel), Detective Hole (reboot of Jo Nesbø’s series), Young Sherlock (rebook of Sherlock Holmes), Spider-Noir (comic book extension), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Game of Thrones spin-off), etc. By far the most anticipated TV project this year is HBO’s hard reboot of the Harry Potter franchise, which is arriving around Christmas.

This is cultural stagnation, and it is caused by a number of industrial factors that make commissioners more risk averse. Declining cinema audiences led to a decline in the gross number of screens, which meant each screen had to make more money. The consequence? Cinemas programme the biggest, safest bets, squeezing smaller movies and meaning that studios don’t want to greenlight projects they feel won’t be able to compete for the limited multiplex space. Increasing competition from streamers – some of whom overspent for a decade and are now in belt tightening mode – means they want to attract audiences with familiar IP. The consequence? A bunfight for superhero projects or book adaptations or big archive properties. It creates a culture that demurs from experimentation, which looks the same year-on-year. And with the financial outlook in Hollywood, the British film and TV industry, and, dare I say it?, the rest of the entire world, looking a bit bleak, we can expect fewer creative risks to be taken in the coming months and years.

That’s cultural stagnation, and it’s been a trend for much of the 21st century. But the Hercule project represents, to me, a form of cultural decay. The reasoning behind the project is quite simple: people love Hercule Poirot, they know who he is, and therefore there’s an in-built audience for the show. Undoubtedly there are bods at New Broadcasting House who also hope that a younger, fresher take (why do people always use the word “fresh” to describe things aimed at Gen Z, as though anyone over the age of 40 is a rotting corpse) will appeal to new audiences. But what actually happens is that it leans on the reputation and prestige of the original Christie series, and then strips away the things that make Poirot distinctive. A 30-year-old, lean, athletic Poirot (undoubtedly the moustache will be retained, because moustaches are very “in” right now) is indistinguishable from the character whose fanbase is being gouged. Why call him Poirot at all? Why not introduce a fun new 1920s detective rather than bastardise an existing commodity? The answer, of course, is laziness and fear – the two adjectives that are destroying our art.

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The World Cup kicks off this evening and will dominate headlines for the next few weeks. In the United States – one of the three host nations – the show seems to be sputtering already. Sporting enthusiasm appears more directed towards whatever is going on with basketball in New York. But this evening, Mexico will open this edition with a game against South Africa that should prove to be everything that makes the tournament special. Vibrant, fervent, global.

Of course, football fans have already been subjected to a huge amount of moral compromise as we head into the 2026 World Cup. Last week, a Somali referee, Omar Artan, was denied a visa to enter the US, despite being a FIFA approved official. He has now returned to Somalia, and FIFA - led by the utterly spineless Gianni Infantino – has shown little support for a man who should’ve been experiencing the pinnacle of his chosen career. “We don't control everything,” Infantino responded, lamely. The situation is even more acute with the Iranian players and fans travelling to the tournament. Iran have relocated their training base to Mexico since the onset of their conflict with the US and Israel, but tensions are enormously high. They kick-off their tournament in Los Angeles next Monday (against outsiders New Zealand) and it will be interesting to see how that match unfolds.

I am deeply sympathetic to people who are boycotting this tournament. The United States (which is the dominant co-host, with 11 host cities compared to Mexico’s 3 and Canada’s 2 (not to mention that the US will host all matches from the quarterfinals onwards)) has turned the greatest sporting event on earth into a tawdry spectacle. From the imposition of geopolitical grievances to the insane ticket prices (and bizarre refusal to create adequate travel infrastructure), it is a tournament that feels instinctively alienating. At least in Qatar (another example of FIFA’s prizing political power over the traditions of the game) there was a sense that the host nation was wholly invested in the tournament, what it could offer the region. Here, the United States and its President seem unconcerned about hosting the World Cup. It is just part of their complacent global hegemony.

But I won’t be boycotting the tournament, not least because I have a newborn baby who will likely help me with the strange kick-off times (many of the games are airing at 2am or 4am here in Europe). More than anything, I love World Cups. I love the football and the sense of national pride they (sometimes) engender. I love seeing England win and still dream that, in my lifetime, I will see an Englishman lift that iconic trophy. So, fully in the expectation that I will let myself down, I wanted to reissue a guide I wrote a couple of months ago, which is intended to offer an ethical framework for engaging with such a corrupted spectacle.

1) Don’t travel to the tournament.

I like this tip because it accords with my current plans. But the way that America generates revenue from the tournament is almost entirely bound up with it being a major tourism opportunity (ticket sales, for example, go straight to FIFA’s coffers). Officials in the US have already said that ICE will be a “key part of security” during the tournament, which ought to make any visitors feel anxious (especially those from nations like Iran, Egypt and the many Latin American countries who have qualified). Not travelling to the United States for the tournament avoids America profiting too directly from things, and negates the chance that games will serve as a covert opportunity for immigration crackdowns.

2) Don’t watch matches on US networks

Again, this is easier to achieve for me, personally, given that I live in the UK where the games will be shown free-to-air on the BBC and ITV. But it’s important to avoid FOX, who have acquired the US rights to the tournament and who will be looking to make a lot of money from advertising during the games. US viewers can, instead, watch games on Telemundo (owned by NBC) and they may even learn some Spanish (“gol!”) words. If they require English language commentary, I suggest investing in a VPN and making a little trip to London, where they will also be greeted by commentary teams who don’t think that Clint Dempsey is a possible GOAT contender.

3) Alphabetise the host nations

It is natural that people are calling this the US World Cup or the American World Cup or USA ‘26. But not only does this play into the Americacentricity of the Trump regime, it also elides the hard work of Canada and Mexico (the latter of whom will provide the most vociferous fans at the tournament). Instead, we should all start referring to it by its natural alphabetical order: the Canada, Mexico and US World Cup.

4) Call it ‘football’

There will be enormous pressure during the World Cup weeks to indulge the American nonsense of calling the game ‘soccer’. The fact that they’ve been drawn in a group with Australia – also ‘soccer’ heathens – should allows us to cauterise the wound, containing it to Group D. The US has been attemptinga process of global soccerfication for decades, and it’s never caught on. But they will undoubtedly see this tournament as another opportunity to push that agenda and make themselves seem like a major international force in the game. Whether you’re some bloke down the pub or a former player working as a pundit (I know at least one ex-pro subscribes to this newsletter), retain your integrity and call the game ‘football’.

5) Participate in ‘unvertising’

You’re already not watching on FOX – well done you – but you should also attempt the practice of ‘unvertising’, which constitutes actively punishing the companies that advertise at the World Cup. Not the ones, necessarily, who are purchasing ad space on ITV or SBS or Bell Media, but the ones who have banners and billboards in and around the stadia, who are partnered, directly, with the tournament. This revenue goes to FIFA, not the US government (mercifully), but they are still funding an organisation that, a few months ago, awarded Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize and which has operated as a reputational laundry for some of the worst countries in the world. Punishing these companies by actively supporting their competitors (drinking Pepsi rather than Coke, staying at a Hilton rather than a Marriott, driving a Dacia rather than a Hyundai) sends a small commercial message.

6) Introduce ‘cultural offsets’ into your diet

The world’s most polluting companies have come up with a brilliant idea to allow them to keep polluting: they purchase carbon offset credits from poorly regulated forestry projects in the developing world. Helping to fund a few trees in Indonesia keeps the oil flowing in Saudi Arabia. Genius! And we can do the same with ‘cultural offsets’ to stem the flow of American soft power. Firstly, avoid the big American blockbusters hitting cinemas during the tournament (Spider-Man: Brand New Day, for example, or Toy Story 5). Instead, for each game you watch, offset the football with a cultural product from one of the nations involved in the fixture. Find yourself watching Brazil v Morocco? Don’t stress, just go watch The Secret Agent after. Tuned into Netherlands v Japan? Wash the Arlington glare out your eyes with Shoplifters. Accidentally enjoyed 90 minutes of Belgium v Iran? Counterbalance this with 104 minutes of It Was Just an Accident.

7) Get off X

If you haven’t already left the website formerly known as Twitter, then football is probably the thing keeping you there. Try as they may, neither Bluesky nor Instagram quite gets the game like the racist weirdos on X. The World Cup has long been a major event in the lives of social media companies (the last final was a significant event in the early days of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter) and this tournament will be bigger than ever. It will also be undercut by a flow of AI slop and signal boosting by bot farms. Brilliant football content will be interspersed with unhinged fascist daubings, on a scale never before seen. And with Elon Musk in charge, the surge in traffic will doubtless be used to push the anti-globalisation, anti-progressive agenda which has seeped in. Leave X behind and forge your own social media community on a platform that feels fractionally less repugnant.

8) Limit your exposure pre- and post-match

For 90 minutes (barring “the interval”, as my other half calls it) the football does the talking. There might be political slogans on training jerseys, controversies over rainbow armbands or laces, and the occasional geopolitical flare-up on the pitch (the USA could well face Iran on July 3rd) but, generally speaking, the football exists in isolation. Before the games, however, there will be photo ops for local politicians and dignitaries, softball video packages about cowboy culture in Dallas and alligators in Miami, and, after the game, opportunities for everyone involved to ruminate on “what a great tournament it’s been” in front of placards bearing the logos of the sponsors who’ve made it all possible. Save yourself by exposing yourself to as little of this as possible and repeating that old schoolyard mantra: games begin and end on the referee’s whistle.

9) Use this opportunity to talk about America

Donald Trump is not going to shy away from the tournament for fear that opposing fans will boo him. He might not make it to Mexico City for the opening match, Mexico v South Africa, (though, if he does, he’ll get a hell of a reception) but he’ll be there on June 12th in LA for the USA v Paraguay. And he’ll definitely be there, on July 19th, at the MetLife Stadium to inveigle his way into the finalists’ spotlight, like Salt Bae in Doha. He wants us to talk about America, and so we should. But we should use this as an opportunity to decry the rise of authoritarianism, of nationalism and nativism, and to highlight the devastating legacy of America’s foreign excursions. If the spotlight has to be on America, then it shouldn’t be on Marvel movies or Hamilton or the double cheeseburger, it should be on the murder of Alex Pretti, the children in cages at the US border, the drones buzzing around the Middle East.

10) Accept your place in things.

Fundamentally, I intend this guide to exonerate people from a feeling of complicity. America – like Qatar and Saudi Arabia – has utilised the callowness of FIFA to colonise the world’s game. For real football fans – and critics of the Trump administration – to cede that ground would be a real error. The number of people boycotting this World Cup is never going to make a dent on the tournament’s margins, and the increasing noise from bots and AI on social media will make it impossible to ascertain the true success or failure of the event. We are not strong enough to resist the lure of football and we ought to embrace that. Make this tournament about football, about narratives on the field, the execution of power from one penalty box to the other. This is a game that offers a lingua franca for the entire world (I was taking a cab in Morocco recently where, without a shared language, I simply said to my driver “Brahim, eh?” and he shook his head and muttered obscenities in Arabic). The fact that Americans have never really understood it – even as they’ve tried to buy it or rebrand it – is because they believe in American exceptionalism, whereas football represents the world as a communal undertaking. It is borderless, it can be played at MetLife Stadium in front of a crowd of 80,000 fans and another billion watching at home, or it can be played with jumpers for goalposts in the ruins of Gaza. It can’t be stolen, and it’s not for sale.

Which is, in short, why I will be watching the World Cup when it kicks off tonight and how I’ll be trying not to feel too gross about it.

I’m on Bluesky, follow me and we can talk about football there.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) I’m speaking on a Media Society panel, at The Conduit in Covent Garden, about the future of podcasts. Alongside Adam Fleming from the BBC and Chloe Straw from Goalhanger, and chaired by Ritula Shah. Tickets are available here.

In my guise as a television reviewer, I spent some of the weekend writing about a new documentary in which Gareth Southgate investigates the crisis facing young men. Boys today, the show claims, are starved of role models, trapped in an education system that neglects their needs, and routinely underperforming their female peers. The solution, as far as Southgate is concerned, is a combination of enhanced vocational training and a loose system of mentorship from the community.

Even though I am a Southgate fan – and the noted progenitor of the ‘Gareth Southgate for England Manager’ Facebook group – I thought he managed to miss the goal about what is really going wrong for young people. Interviewed by one of their footballing heroes, staring down the barrel of a BBC camera crew, it is natural for young people to trot out lines about feeling like there are no opportunities, no systems of support, no comprehension of the younger generation. That’s not to say that absent fathers and standardised testing and rising unemployment don’t play a part in the malaise of Generation Z. It’s just that those issues reprsent the legible, simplistic, and palatable end of the problem.

Less palatable, perhaps, is the extent to which Big Tech companies have conspired to rob teenagers of a sense of their place in the world or the value of their time.

The digital sphere is an untethered space. That’s long been its greatest strength. It has democratised access to knowledge, streamlined communication and greased the wheels of globalisation. But it has also eroded the connection that has long existed between person and place. Not only have today’s teenagers grown up in an online landscape where their closest friends and confidants might be people they’ve never met, they’ve also seen the social dynamics of the playground uploaded to the web. I remember when social media platforms started to roll out. I was at secondary school) and would feverishly add people I barely knew on Bebo, Hi5 and, eventually, Facebook. This ersatz ‘friendship’ was, of course, no replacement for the real thing, and yet even 20 years ago it had already started to encroach on my understanding of social interactions. Today’s teenagers have only ever known a world where their friendships and relationships are hybridised, anonymised and bastardised.

This means that the anchoring line between person and place, person and community, person and the world is frayed. It was a foundational statement of the internet era – to create a global town square – but it has wrought some unexpected consequences.

And then there’s the value of time. In the documentary, one of the teenagers being interviewed confesses that he might rather play FIFA than get on with applying for jobs. Erosion of time is an under-discussed part of life’s technologisation. Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable that children could be spending an average of almost 5 hours a day on social media, playing video games for multiple hours a day or spending more than 60 minutes on YouTube each day. It is hard to be productive in a world where teenagers are averaging almost 9 hours of screentime every single day. You can find many possible explanations for declining academic performance and rising antisocial behaviour, but this level of inane cultural consumption has to be in the mix. The fact that boys on average spend an hour more glued to screens than girls their age (who, it should be said, are also averaging over 8 hours of screentime) could well hold the key to declining social performance.

“If you look on social media, there are people our age making millions,” one unemployed 18-year-old observes to Southgate. And while this has always been the case (I might’ve stared enviously at the Harry Potter actors, who were rich and famous and my notional contemporaries) the social media era has exacerbated a sense that everyone is in a hurry. You need to get rich, quick. You don’t need to work your way up the ladder, you need overnight success. You don’t need to nurture investments, you need things that will go straight to the moon. This is the world – of MrBeast’s millions and crypto HODLers – that young people are being raised in. It creates a dolly zoom for destabilised young people, where things have to happen more quickly than ever, even while they’re expending time like it is an infinite commodity.

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For some time, I’ve been trying to work out why everyone hates Keir Starmer.

The fact of his unpopularity is undisputed. YouGov put his net favourability rating at negative 46 last month (unchanged from April), having previously been at an historic low of -66. At the May local elections, his Labour party took a drubbing, losing 1,498 council seats. It has precipitated an unedifying leadership race amongst party grandees hoping to be parachuted into Downing Street. All of this has been playing out against a backdrop where slogans like “broken Britain” have become so widely accepted they avoid much scrutiny.

Is Britain broken? Not really. I will concede that progress has felt stagnant, that cost of living inflation has coincided with little wage growth and (slightly) rising unemployment. But these things have largely been caused by exogenous, geopolitical shocks, rather than domestic policy. Where progress has actually regressed, in my opinion, is on social causes – like LGBT rights – which the purveyors of the “broken Britain” maxim tended not to support anyway. And yet, less than 2 years on from Starmer’s landslide victory in the 2024 General Election, his position as Prime Minister appears to be untenable. But not just that: people hate him. Hate him with a visceral loathing that this bland, technocratic lawyer doesn’t deserve. He is reviled in middle-class drawing rooms in the Home Counties and on council estates in Labour’s traditional heartland. Not since Margaret Thatcher has British politics seen a figure attract such varied but focused anger, but, unlike Mrs Thatcher, it is not clear why Keir Starmer deserves it.

Cost of living has been the big issue in the UK for the past couple of years, and there is a nagging sense (especially amongst younger people) that employment opportunities are drying up. Yet the UK unemployment rate (measured from 16, where some countries measure from 18) is pretty low, and not really rising. Starmer’s Labour party have, in fact, introduced a controversial set of employment reforms specifically designed to alleviate financial pressures on new entrants to the workforce. But the narrative is simple: workers are being squeezed. It’s the same picture economically. The UK recorded a surprise growth in GDP in Q1 (up 0.6% and outperforming other G7 nations). The IMF has upgraded the UK’s growth forecast and yet none of this has done anything to improve Starmer’s popularity or electoral prospects. The narrative, here too, is simple: Britain is broken.

This week, we’ve seen a really horrible story here in the UK, about the murder of a young man Henry Nowak. The 18-year-old was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa, using a ceremonial Sikh blade. When police arrived, Digwa claimed he’d been racially abused by Nowak, and the police began the process of arresting the fatally injured man. Bodycam footage from the arresting officers is shocking. Their failure to grasp the extent of Nowak’s injuries has, rightly, caused public outrage. And so the case really has two prongs. On one hand, a violent murder. On the other, another grotesque police blunder. Yet there has been a concerted attempt to turn the story – a heinous outlier that doesn’t seem particularly indicative of a social trend – into an illustration that Britain puts the diversity and inclusion agenda ahead of violence. “Britain’s police are obsessed with DEI,” tweeted Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform party, shortly after Digwa’s conviction.

DEI is an acronym standing for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. It is a framework that has been deployed in the United States for a century, but has become an ideological rallying cry in recent years. Amongst some on the alt-right, it is deployed almost as a slur. It is also not a term that we use here in the UK, where similar initiatives are labelled EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion). But Mr Farage is engaging with an online discourse that emanates from the US like nuclear fallout. He knows that Britons who are agonised about their position in the country’s changing social landscape are drawing much of their inspiration from America (and thus using DEI instead of EDI) and he also knows that he is preaching to a broader, amorphous digital congregation. These congregants are all over the world. Some are real, some are bots. Some have genuine personal political concerns, some are agitators for foreign regimes. But what unifies them is the noise. They hover, anonymously, in every quarter of the internet, creating a low hum of discontent. It is a form of digital tinnitus, and it is everywhere.

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A couple of years ago I quit Twitter (as was) after a series of unfortunate events that saw some of the worst people in the world publicly calling me one of the worst people in the world. I left before it was trendy to do so, which meant that I was looking to establish a replacement outlet. My choice was TikTok, where I started doing very low-quality, low-effort videos to advertise my writing. I chose it, in part, because British journalism was something of a laggard there. It was perceived as so fundamentally Gen Z that the media establishment (ruled largely by millennials and Gen Xers) treated it like an alien planet, to be explored with trepidation. But I – noble redshirt that I am – forged my own path.

In the past few months, I’ve noticed a lot more British journalists (especially those, unlike me, still marooned in their 20s) jumping into TikTok. It has happened in such a swift deluge that I almost feel like I’ve missed some sort of industrial briefing, where the NUJ gathered all their chapels and told them that they had to start TikToking. “To save journalism,” I imagine someone saying, “you all have to do identical, purposeless promotional videos.” It is a touch hypocritical of me, of course, to note the fact that these videos serve little direct purpose. In my videos, I amble through my daily dog walk and give an unrehearsed summary of an article I’ve written. There is no call to action, no obvious advantage to be gained for my employer. The purpose, if there is one, is brand development.

This week, Deborah Turness, the recently departed Head of BBC News, made headlines when she delivered a lecture in which she noted a shift in the world of journalism. Venerable old broadcasters, like the Beeb, are, she claimed, facing increased competition from direct-to-consumer creator-journalists. “This revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms,” she said. “It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism.” These “more direct” outlets represent, in her view, an “existential” threat to the traditional models of journalism, where media monoliths would hire and fire talent, retaining the core reputational value. “My recent conversations,” she noted, “have only strengthened my view that news providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent.”

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This was an early example of the Delayquel: a sequel (or prequel) that is cashing in on nostalgia rather than short-term momentum (it is a phenomenon sometimes called, less catchily, a ‘legacy sequel’). And it didn’t even really take off with Crystal Skull, which grossed $786m at the worldwide box office (the best inflation-adjusted return for an Indiana Jones movie) but was hamstrung by negative reviews and difficult comparisons with the original trilogy. In point of fact, it was succeeded by an era when sequels (pure, classical sequels) came out with metronomic regularity as studios recognised that strong IP could be used and used (and used) in order to salt the earth for competitors. It begat the era of Star Wars upping its cadence and Marvel going quids in on properties like Iron Man and Thor.

But there’s been a big change in the post-covid era. In part, this has been precipitated by a collapse in theatrical revenues and the continued growth of streaming platforms. But it is also often attributed to a fatigue – a sense that viewers got bored with the sheer density of similar product being served to them. And both of these factors have created the conditions for the rise of the Delayquel.

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Forgive the meta title that makes it sound like I am going to stop writing this newsletter. I’m not going to stop writing it, in fact I intend to write it more regularly and with greater enthusiasm. It’s just that I’m going to start properly charging for it.

As of next week, I will be on paternity leave for a bit. I’m planning to take a couple of weeks away from everything (including this Substack) and then a couple of months away from specific things (not including this Substack). Which means, for people who await these emails (like the glimmers of light in the dark that they are…) there should be limited interruption to service.

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That said, this does also offer me an opportunity to pause and think about what I am doing with this newsletter. I have, apparently, published 179 posts on this Substack over the past few years. To begin with, I saw it as a place where I might migrate some of my readers from Medium, pushing them towards a platform that I could more easily monetise. But like so many writers dealing with the modern creator economy, I have found myself trapped between two ambitions: to make money, and to be read.

In the good old days of journalism, those two things went hand in hand. You got a mysteriously well paying job at a magazine or you contributed freelance pieces to national newspapers for a fee of a dollar, or more, per word. But, increasingly, there are few staff writings jobs (and those that still exist pay less well than ever) at publications (and those that still exist are less read than ever ever). Equally, most places are barely taking freelance pitches anymore, preferring to work with a small coterie of established writers, whilst slashing both word counts and fees. There are a few places I regularly freelance for, and whilst I enjoy that part of my ‘portfolio’ (a very shudderable term) career, I am fortunate to not absolutely need to make a living from it. All in all, it has become extremely hard to be both well paid and widely read.

Which is where Substack – and other similar platforms – have stepped in. They have created an incubator for “brand journalist”. Excellent columnists and commentators – the sort who had keenly curated their personal followings on sites like antediluvian Twitter – have migrated here where they can find an active, engaged audience and also set their own prices. For a small, select minority, the rewards have been rich. But I have never been part of that crowd. To some extent that’s a result of my pathway here: I had always published my pieces free on Medium, where I have 78,000 followers. To move things over to Substack and then start aggressively charging felt like a betrayal of whatever it is that my readers had found in my work. Plus, I could always tell myself that the writing was in service of a broader good: business development.

My business has, for the past decade, been podcasts. And much of my writing was, originally, on that theme. But the remit of the Future Proof newsletter has expanded to take in my plural interests, and the clear link between my day job (podcasts) and my hobby (whining about the industry) has been eroded. It’s been quite a while since I’ve published one of my trademark “the podcast industry is actually a house of cards built on sand in a great glass-ceilinged bubble” mixed metaphor rants. And so the newsletter has become a thing in itself. A medium-successful thing, with a medium-sized following, and a medium amount of energy being expended on it. But over the next few months, when I’m not scurrying around London and when I hope to be spending more time here (at home, at my computer), I’d like it to be more than that.

Which is why, from henceforth, I will be more strictly paywalling pieces on the newsletter. This gives me no pleasure, but my current model (encouraging people to vaguely “support my writing”, even though they get nothing tangible in return) has resulted in a product that I enjoy writing but which makes no business sense. I have a couple of thousand subscribers to the newsletter and (hopefully) some people find it interesting, but the conversion rate to paid subscribers has been dismal. I can’t blame you: after all, I’ve paywalled about 5 posts ever, which is not exactly a value return for paying subs. It has resulted in me essentially paying myself a word rate that even an Albanian bot farm would reject.

179 posts, probably averaging around 1,500 words. That’s roughly 268,500 words – almost exactly the length of Ulysses by James Joyce. And while I hope that these blogs have been more accessible – dare I say it? intelligible – than Ulysses, I do not feel like they have afforded me Joyce levels of career progression. And though it’s some solace that Joyce lived and died basically in poverty, that was not exactly my dream for a publication analysing box office receipts and lampooning tech oligarchs.

I know that the writers who have had the most success on Substack have been disciplined. They have set the terms of their product and stuck to it, even as it must have felt, for many, that they were suddenly speaking to a much smaller – more choral – group. National newspaper columnists went, overnight, from having hundreds of thousands of readers to writing directly for a few hundred. That must have been a shock to the system, even if the monetisation mechanics meant they were earning as much, if not more, than they did before. This is the fundamental question for me: do I have the energy to write if I do not think it is going to be read? We will have to see.

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For now, I really would encourage you to take out a paid subscription to Future Proof. I have priced it as low as Substack will let me, so that it is about the same price as a cup of coffee per month (or a cheap lunch, per year). Subscribing will be helpful to me on paternity leave and also in producing more episodes on my little podcast, The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, which some of you may enjoy. To be honest, if you’ve made it this far through such a self-indulgent piece of writing, surely you can take a punt on $5-a-month? (or whatever the price actually is). Each time I get a new paid subscriber I get a weird little dopaminergic thrill. Can you put a price on remotely affecting the brain chemistry of a stranger?

(Oh, and if you would like to do some sort of corporate sponsorship (and, honestly, I can’t imagine that you would) then do drop me a line, any time, to nick[@]podotpods.com to discuss. This extremely mercenary perspective on my life will probably pass, so feel free to exploit me now.)

In my other life as TV critic, I have become something of an unexpected influencer on the subject of Married at First Sight Australia. The show is a fixation for me – its raw nastiness is unmatched in global broadcasting, as far as I can see – and I regularly post TikToks on this subject, which provoke an unusual amount of engagement (and so I repeat the formula, again and again). When I posted one of these breakdown videos last week, I noticed a few people commenting “who’s Bev?!”.

Bev was, in fact, a typo. I had meant ‘Bec’ but written ‘Bev’. It’s a simple error, but people liked pointing it out. For the past several years I have watched the internet bloom into a malign orthodoxy, where content that is provocative, sensationalist or divisive gets more attention. For some time, that has been seen as the logical end point of a digital culture obsessed with engagement. If you want people to reply to your post, they are more likely to do so if they disagree with you than if they agree with you. And if you treat engagement as a neutral metric, accelerating high engagement content and deprioritising low engagement stuff, then it makes sense to promote an internet that is full of caustic dissent and veiled (or unveiled) abuse. That, in short, is how the internet got so toxic, so quickly.

But my Bev situation exposed me to another truth. There is a growing power to being wrong. If people enjoy criticising opinions that they don’t share, then chances are they will love the opportunity to correct someone who has made an error. That’s just basic human psychology: we are a pedantic species, prone to boorish condescension (especially on the internet). And it hasn’t taken long for creators (many of whom might just be pre-programmed bots, spewing content the way my dog sprays a lamppost) to realise that, in the great game of engagement, little errors perform very well.

I call this The Wrongternet. Like most of the viruses spreading from the great lab leak of the web, its ground zero is on Elon Musk’s X. Take, as a random example, this post from user ‘stayEminent’ which quotes the announcement of Burnley’s relegation from the Premier League (confirmed this week) and adds the insightful commentary: “But how are they relegated when they're 11 points behind Tottenham ? What if they win all their remaining 4 matches (12 points) and spurs lose theirs”. The catch, as mathematicians/canny readers will realise, is that Spurs are currently in 18th – catching them would only leave them in another relegation slot. Duh.

And you might think this is just some kid being a bit thick. After all, it’s the internet (and, furthermore, it’s X). But I apply a general rule to online stupidity: people are, generally, much smarter than you expect, and ignorance is, often, deliberate. Imagine that, instead of being a genuine error, this post is, in fact, bait, dangling before the gaping mouths of the internet’s splashing barrel of trout. In the thread, below the viral mistake tweet, the first reply is from the same author. It reads: DM FOR BUSINESS. Indeed, the next 12 tweets under the Spurs tweet are all from the tweet’s author, and they’re advertising a variety of products. A vegan male enhancement product called Erectibles or a sex toy for men called The Male Rose. “DM for Ads and promotion,” stayEminent asks again.

This is a trend that is all across X at the moment. And when they’re not utilising wrong information, they’re deploying missing information. People post something deliberately oblique – a group shot of some celebrities, say, with the caption “are we just going to ignore that he’s still allowed to be famous?” – and then populate the replies with promotional content. This is the essence of The Wrongternet, where information is either bad or absent.

But it’s not just anonymous trolls on X, milking the algorithm for engagement that they can convert into a few peanuts of revenue, who are exploiting The Wrongternet. Now, I appreciate that readers of this newsletter are not exclusively based in the United Kingdom, and I dread the thought of exposing too many people outside our shores to Matt Goodwin, but I must, briefly, do so. Goodwin was a mid-tier academic who became a reactionary right-wing commentator and, now, politician. He stood, unsuccessfully, for Reform UK in a recent by-election and has just published a screed called The Suicide of a Nation, a book blaming mass immigration for all of the country’s ills. The book has courted controversy already, which I won’t go into beyond saying that it appears to have been written, at least in part, with the assistance of AI, resulting in a litany of errors and a new nickname: MattGPT.

I don’t sense that Goodwin cares tremendously about accuracy. Indeed, that laxity has allowed him to leave his fraternity of political scientists – who agonise about research and data collection and peer review – in the dust. What matters to Goodwin, I suspect, is attention. And he’s very good at getting that. That’s because he’s not a stupid man – he’s a reasonably intelligent bloke who has pivoted in the direction of provocation rather than articulation, and has found great (personal) success in the process. Take, for example, this tweet, below, which exposes his total commitment to The Wrongternet.

In the missive, he attacks Britain’s biggest book retailer, Waterstones, for not having his book on display. Yet his book is a paperback and he’s visibly by a table of hardback books (prompting an increasingly rare community note on X). Obviously, loads of people have replied to this tweet in order to point out the obvious error, with some going so far as to scoff at Goodwin’s apparently limited understanding of the publishing industry.

Of course, Goodwin knows full well that he’s at the wrong table. He is trying to provoke engagement. He knows that his anti-establishment point will resonate with his base, and that the legions of people pointing out his error will accelerate his content up the algorithmic charts. The post – which has 1.1k RTs and 5.9k favs – has, as a result, out-performed the vast majority of similar promotional tweets. And if you think I am offering Goodwin undue credit, then recognise, at the very least, that he is now aware of his error. Countless users have pointed it out and the post has been community tagged by X. And yet he’s kept it up, in defiance of his own wrongness. Because wrongness works.

The problem with all of his (and it’s not limited to X – I see performative mistakery on Instagram and TikTok all the time, as well as Substack and Bluesky and YouTube) is that we are at a moment when the corpus of the internet is being harvested for the purpose of creating the next canon of human knowledge. I have wondered, in the past, how we will explain to historians, in 50 years time, why so many news videos that were shared via social media in the 2020s are watermarked with the logo of Stake.com, and I am similarly concerned that a new, confusing language is developing on the internet. It is, in part, created by AI: much of the content on The Wrongternet is AI-generated, and much of the engagement that accelerates it is exclusively AI. In fact the whole cycle of this is being driven by AI, which is decreasing the net value of information on the internet and, commensurately, the quality of trust from human users. It is a cycle which starts with a prompt “say something slightly wrong so that people will reply with corrections?” and ends with a reorganisation of the internet’s quality control.

It’s clear that we are moving towards a place of greater information stratification. Wikipedia should be the prototype for this: in spite of user control and input for the 25 years it’s been around, the site has kept the quality of content, and trust from its readers, high. Conversely, on social media platforms, the quality of information has never been lower – and continues to plummet – and trust from consumers is also declining. Part of me feels like the fundamental business model of engagement-based payouts is on the verge of collapse, and that should rectify for some of the worst excesses of The Wrongternet, but there’s part of me, too, that wants to protect the youngest, least educated and most credulous of internet users from exposure to this tidal wave of bad information.

Gossip about celebrities or athletes doesn’t really matter. But in the world of news and politics, it does. This isn’t about ‘fake news’, ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’, all of which are deployed either cynically, for narrative gain, or passively, out of ignorance. Instead, this is about the financial incentives of the internet creating an architecture that not only fails to create guardrails against low quality information, but has started actively encouraging it. AI is primed to be the great incubator of misinformation for political debate in the short-to-mid term. The thoughts and ideas put on record today are the sustenance that will feed the next few years of AI output. It is the difference between feeding your pig grass and acorns and fruit and vegetables, and feeding it slop. What you input into the pig, you output in the sausages.

Two things need to happen. Firstly, we need to have better ways of steering users towards higher-quality content, where the motivation of creation is reliability. Think of this like the consumer rights publication Which?, where the content is trusted by consumers and therefore can be hard paywalled. If the business model involved referral links, for example, they would be manifestly compromised. Consumers evidently see a cash value to that neutrality. Secondly, the incentives of engagement-based social media performance need to collapse. They will happen, of course, as shareholders cotton on to the fact that much of this so-called ‘performance’ involves bots talking to other bots (and bots can’t pay subscription fees nor purchase from advertisers, nor can their data be harvested and sold to third-parties). But there will be foundational damage done, as has been evidenced by bad decisions at every stage of the internet (whether that was making people’s base assumption that information would be free, or allowing everyone to be anonymous). Bad decisions are far quicker to make than they are to shake.

But, for now, The Wrongternet is flourishing. My act of Bec/Bev confusion might be benign and unintentional, but perhaps it will make me think, when I next do a video on TikTok, that accuracy doesn’t really matter. After all, if I get something a bit wrong, people will set me right. And then they’re talking. Because the only thing worse than* being corrected by a stranger on the internet, is not being corrected by a stranger on the internet.

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*The original version of this post included a typo in the pay-off. I’m much obliged to for the correction.

My little tech podcast, The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, is back! Last week, I spoke to about anti-AI protests in London. Do listen and subscribe; episodes will be weekly for the next couple of months…

I was having a drink last week with a friend who works in the visual effects industry, developing new AI tools. After a few Birra Moretti, he confessed that he’s considering selling all his earthly possessions and downsizing to an apocalypse-proof/mortgage-free bunker outside of London.

Aside from these reassurances from the heart of the Artificial Intelligence industry, he also noted that he felt like we’d had another strong year at the movies. It was a few days after the Oscars, and he observed that both Sinners and One Battle After Another, the evening’s two big winners, were original properties (albeit one is loosely adapted from a Thomas Pynchon doorstopper) which had performed well with both critics and audiences. Sinners has done $280m at the US box office ($370m worldwide) while One Battle After Another has managed $73m domestically and $211m worldwide.

These are strong figures for Best Picture contenders (given that the Oscars tend to reward the more mainstream of ‘serious’ films). They compare well with most (non-Oppenheimer) Best Picture favourites of recent years (worldwide gross in parentheses): Anora ($57m), The Brutalist ($50m), The Zone of Interest ($53m), The Holdovers ($46m), Everything Everywhere All at Once ($148m), The Banshees of Inisherin ($50m), CODA ($2m), and Belfast ($49m). So the two big winners in 2026 comfortably breaking that $100m threshold should be seen as a win, of sorts.

But it’s worth remembering that these films represent the cream of global cinema. I’ve written in the past about ‘the death of the $30m drama’ (a film which receives $30m in box office receipts and thus can probably just about wash its face). In 2010 there were 151 films that grossed $30m globally; in 2025 there were 101. That’s a significant drop-off. Those are just two random years, and you might reasonably think I’m cherry-picking to make a point, so let me plot the 21st century on a graph for you (and test my Excel skills at the same time).

As you can see, the first part of the 21st century was characterised by steady growth in the number of films reaching $30m. (Bear in mind that this chart is not inflation adjusted, and a CPI-based inflation adjustment would mean that $30m in 2000 is equivalent to roughly $54m in 2025 – just 71 movies in 2025 reached that gross. Conversely, this would also mean that the inflation-removed figure for a 2000 film would be about $17m, and 122 films managed that). The peak of 183 in 2015 is a molehill in a plateau that seemed to settle at around 150: 150 films that were probably not losing too much money. That held basically until 2020, when something happened. And while we all understand that the covid era was disastrous for theatrical distribution, the narrative has been one of a remarkable bounce-back. 2019’s top box office film, Avengers: Endgame, might have broken records with its $2.8bn receipt, but recent, post-covid, table-toppers have compared reasonably with those from before 2020: 2015’s Star Wars: Force Awakens ($2bn), 2016’s Captain America: Civil War ($1.1bn), Star Wars: Last Jedi ($1.3bn), 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War ($2bn) vs 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.9bn), 2022’s Avatar 2 ($2.3bn), 2023’s Barbie ($1.4bn), 2024’s Inside Out 2 ($1.7bn), and 2025’s Ne Zha 2 ($2.2bn).

The success of these blockbusters has created a narrative of post-covid recovery. Add to that the fact that we’ve had two outstanding Best Picture races in the post-covid era (2023 and 2025) and there’s a general buoyancy to the industry. After all, Paramount wouldn’t spend $110bn (slightly more than the Gross Domestic Product of Costa Rica) on Warner Bros if the movies weren’t in rude health, surely?

Yet the demise of the $30m movie troubles me. There are some simple reasons for this. Firstly, it consolidates financial power in the hands of the studios with big IP properties. Sure, movies like Sinners and One Battle After Another have done well (and Disney has had well-documented problems with generating enthusiasm for Marvel and Star Wars titles in recent years) but there’s a danger of confirmation bias there. Dispassionately speaking, the number of $30m movies dropping, in a decade, from a rough average of 150 to a rough average of 100 (a 50% reduction) means fewer good movies meeting that threshold. Assuming that the average quality of movies isn’t also changing, that’s just basic probability. Three of the films nominated for Best Picture in 2025 (I’m Still Here, Emilia Perez and Nickel Boys) failed to reach the $30m line, while four of this year’s honourees (Frankenstein, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams) are still under that marker.

Some of this is accounted for by streaming changing the market dynamics. I don’t doubt that a film like Frankenstein would have done $100m+ at the box office if it’s release had been theatrically focused (with a reported budget of $120m, if would have needed to). And part of my obsession with box office returns is, I appreciate, because I can see cinemas dying around me and I believe that to be A Bad Thing. But other people will, surely, see the rises of high-quality new releases on affordable streaming services as A Good Thing. These two perspectives exist in an unresolved tension, and while I have my own opinion, you may well have another. Yet I think we have enough evidence from the past fifteen years of streaming to suggest that the best (in pure qualitative terms) movies are still those being created with theatrical distribution in mind. As previously noted, the Oscars race this year felt very strong. One Battle After Another, a real old school cinematic movie, was an admirable winner of the top gong. So is there any real need for doom-mongering about the fact that the market is contracting in terms of the raw numbers of films able to do profitable business?

A few weeks ago, Timothee Chalamet, still, then, on the campaign trail for his excellent performance in Marty Supreme, made some comments during a filmed conversation with Matthew McConaughey about the craft of acting. “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera,” he told McConaughey with a wry smile. “Or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more’.” There was huge backlash to these comments (the PR frenzy around Oscar nominees has become so insane in recent years that even Jessie Buckley had to fend off accusations that she’d murdered her husband’s cats) with people basically finding it distasteful that an artist would pit one art form against another.

Art has always existed thanks to patronage. Whether that’s the Medicis bank-rolling the Renaissance, Peggy Guggenheim bring modern art to the American public, or Michael Moritz acting as guarantor for the Booker Prize – the arts have long needed a helping hand. For the rich and powerful (and those with an understanding of the point of human civilisation) this has been a small price to pay. Art is, after all, the testimony we leave. Who remembers the Spanish victory over the French at the Battle of Ruvo in 1503, after the deal to partition the Kingdom of Naples collapsed? Yet we can all immediately call to mind the ‘Mona Lisa’, painted in the same year. Do you often reflect on Liberia achieving in independence in 1847 from Portuguese, British and Dutch traders who’d colonised the ‘Pepper Coast’? I bet you don’t, but I bet you’ve read Jane Eyre (or seen one of the many film and TV adaptations). Art is the bookmark in the vast, chronological history of civilisation. And it is the only thing that endures, existing as past, present and future.

Chalamet knows this, of course. He can see around him that the belt is tightening round the girdle of the creative industries. He sees arts programmes and cultural exchanges being defunded. He is an ambitious guy and he wants to act in films that do well and win awards and are looked back on by our alien conquerors as great landmarks in humanoid achievement. And so he is a first person witness to the fact that there is a growing reticence around making grown-up dramas, films which might not be one of the 100 films of that year that make their money back in cinemas. And presumably he’s worried about this. Because ballet and opera are struggling. At an elite level, the best opera houses and ballet companies in the world can print money (you only need to have a look at the ticket prices for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden). But they exist through nostalgia: if you want to see something at the Royal Opera House in the next two months, your options are Verdi’s Rigoletto, Wagner’s Siefried or Liszt’s Mayerling. Profit-making opera and ballet might not be dying, but they feel fossilised.

Even in a world where government subsidies, and billionaire loose change, are increasingly unlikely to make their way to artists, art continues to be subsidised. The $1bn movie subsidises the $30bn movie, just as Ed Sheeran subsidises some new artist that Warner take a punt on, and Richard Osman’s books subsidise debut novelists. It is a system which, like a water wheel, keeps the cultural ecosystem in motion, churning the surface and preventing stasis setting in. The Royal Ballet & Opera company might be the only company in the UK who can make a guaranteed hit of a new ballet or opera, but even they can only take that risk that because tourists flock in and pay £300 for a ticket to Rigoletto. But it only takes a small squeeze – a little drainage in the river – and the water wheel slows down. The ROH might, then, think that they need to combat something (rising energy costs or interest rates, funding cuts or reduced bequests) by programming an extra three weeks of Rigoletto this year. And, slowly but surely, the wheel stops.

Cinema isn’t having to fight to “stay alive” at the moment. But the social contract between entertainment and art is fraying. Cinema is not in a battle for eyeballs with opera or ballet – nor will it ever be – but with itself. Fewer films making money means fewer good films making money which means fewer good films getting made. A decreasing reliance on theatrical distribution means an increasing reliance on algorithmic distribution, which means films getting produced to pander to pre-existing tastes rather than to push the boundaries of what art can achieve. This isn’t a crisis – yet – but it should be seen as a warning sign. Creatives and cinemas need the $30m movie. It is an inoculation against blockbuster domination, AI slop and infantilisation, yet its demise is going largely unnoticed.

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You (which is to say: I) are (which is to say: am) going to watch (which is to say: devour) the FIFA World Cup this summer. This is in spite of the fact that the tournament – the greatest sporting show on earth, bar none – feels tainted. Tainted by FIFA’s corruption and bootlicking subservience to the Trump regime, and tainted by America’s troubling domestic and foreign policy excursions. We are, right now, 100 days away from the tournament kicking off, and calls for a boycott will grow more vociferous in the coming months. So the choice for conscientious football fans has become stark: watch the tournament, follow your team, and feel complicit in the sports-washing of America’s incipient fascism, or take a stance and miss out on the plausible possibility that England might win their first World Cup since 1966.

Of course, football fans are used to feeling compromised. The last World Cup, the 2022 edition, was in Qatar, a state with an appalling human rights record and whose back-breaking programme of construction for the tournament resulted in the deaths of a reported 6,500 migrant workers. The edition before that, 2018, was held in Russia, who are currently excluded from FIFA competitions due to their invasion of Ukraine. The last uncontroversial tournament was probably Brazil 2014 – but even there the country was on the verge of the rightward drift towards the government of Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year jail term for an attempted coup. In short, modern geopolitics is sufficiently tricky to make it very hard to find an acceptable host for a tournament that represents the most global of games.

Compounding this is the fact that FIFA imposes a “cooling off period” for its confederations, consisting of two rotations. This has meant that because Russia was part of UEFA (the European confederation) at the time of the 2018 World Cup (obviously, they are not currently allowed to compete in UEFA competitions), European nations have not been able to bid for tournaments in 2022 or 2026. So the big show has to move around the globe, opening up new markets (as happened in 2010 when the tournament was hosted by South Africa, at which time there was a stricter continental rotation process). But FIFA’s rules can also help them gerrymander the situation to their own advantage. The next World Cup in 2030 will be hosted in Spain and Portugal (UEFA) and Morocco (CAF) with special “centenary” matches in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay (CONMEBOL). With those three confederations excluded – as well as CONCACAF, who host this year’s tournament – the decision was between bidders from Oceania (OFC) or Asia (AFC). Which has conveniently led us to the 2034 World Cup being hosted in – you guessed it! – Saudi Arabia.

This is all to say that the ethical considerations being forced on football fans aren’t going away. We’re used to it now. And in spite of the growing argument for boycotting the World Cup and the Premier League and the Champions League (even my favourite League 2 side, Crawley Town, was owned, for the last few years, by some strange crypto bros), I don’t want to surrender football, that beautiful, pure thing, to the gutter of politics. I want to watch the World Cup because I love watching the World Cup. I don’t want to watch the World Cup and, in doing so, distract from the thuggery of ICE on the streets of America. I don’t want to watch the World Cup and, in doing so, endorse America’s illegal wars and operations across the globe. I don’t want to watch the World Cup and, in doing so, amplify Donald Trump’s message of American supremacy. But I do want to watch the World Cup. So how do we do that?

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The first thing is to understand why America wanted to host the World Cup (for the first time since 1994). The US is co-hosting the tournament with Canada and Mexico, two countries it is currently at ideological loggerheads with. (Though it should be noted that the US has 11 host cities while Mexico has 3 and Canada has 2, and the US will host all matches from the quarterfinals onwards ). In 2018, when the winning bid was submitted to FIFA, the then President of US Soccer, Sunil Gulati, said that the combined North American tournament would serve the purpose of “bringing our peoples together, bringing soccer countries together”. Eight years later, tariff wars and border violence would seem to have put an end to such aspirations of solidarity. Yet the US is still clearly interested in using the tournament to flex its soft power muscles. In part, this is because football is the most international of all the world’s sports, having a fanatical following on all of the non-Antarctica continents. For America, it is an export product. Even the country’s league, MLS, is basically a commodity for international distribution, with just 3.7m match-week viewers domestically (which includes Canada) but a growing international audience via partnership with AppleTV+ and the huge global appeal of stars like Lionel Messi and Son Heung-min, who are both playing in the league.

Trump has not inherited this tournament – he was the President when the bid was made. At the Club World Cup last summer, he grinned triumphantly alongside the winning players from Chelsea (a team now owned by American financiers, having been boosted into the top tier of football by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich). The world’s cameras caught not just the moment where he handed the trophy to the Chelsea captain Reece James, but also his charmless slide into the historic trophy lift (not to mention the trophy returning, after the tournament, to the Oval Office). It went from being Chelsea’s moment to being Donald Trump’s moment. Say what you like about the man, but he knows when the eyes of the world are watching.

In order for America’s hegemony to be consolidated, it must occupy territory in all the incumbent cultural monoliths. The America First project might hate Hollywood’s liberal elites, but rather than try to stifle them, they have embarked on an ambitious process of industrial capture (culminating right now with Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros, which will create a giant pro-Trump entertainment bloc). The MAGA crowd might be deeply suspicious of their Puerto Rican compadres, but the NFL (an organisation that has been consistently soft, shall we say, on Trump) still invited Bad Bunny to do the Super Bowl halftime show, using music to open the match up to the missing Spanish-speaking demographic. And sport is no different. In September 2017, 9 months into the first Trump presidency, Los Angeles won the right to host the 2028 Summer Olympics (the US will also host the Winter Olympics in 2034). Less than a year later, the US would win the rights to the 2026 World Cup. In doing so, the United States has staked a claim over the two most viewed sports events in global TV: 5bn people tune into the World Cup, and some 4-5bn into the Olympics. While it is upending legal and political norms – at home and abroad – the United States continues to be the greatest marketing project ever conceived; a Madison Avenue pitch-deck of such startling efficiency it would make Don Draper choke on his Old Fashioned.

But you and I both love the World Cup. I remember watching the France ‘98 edition, when I was just 5-years-old. Each World Cup during my lifetime (Korea/Japan, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar) is like a small bookmark in my life. I remember being sat cross legged in the school library, watching Trevor Sinclair tearing down the wing in Osaka. I remember watching, crushed, with friends at university as England lost to Uruguay in Sao Paolo. I remember running in mindless celebration into the garden of my flat in Brixton after Eric Dier scored the winning penalty against Colombia in Moscow. And when you love the World Cup and only get to enjoy it for one month every four years (which means 47 consecutive non-World Cup months) it is very hard to walk away. Which is why I wanted to compose this handy guide to ten key ways we can all subvert the American administration’s desire to use the tournament as a propaganda exercise.

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1) Don’t travel to the tournament.

I like this tip because it accords with my current plans. But the way that America generates revenue from the tournament is almost entirely bound up with it being a major tourism opportunity (ticket sales, for example, go straight to FIFA’s coffers). Officials in the US have already said that ICE will be a “key part of security” during the tournament, which ought to make any visitors feel anxious (especially those from nations like Iran, Egypt and the many Latin American countries who have qualified). Not travelling to the United States for the tournament avoids America profiting too directly from things, and negates the chance that games will serve as a covert opportunity for immigration crackdowns.

2) Don’t watch matches on US networks

Again, this is easier to achieve for me, personally, given that I live in the UK where the games will be shown free-to-air on the BBC and ITV. But it’s important to avoid FOX, who have acquired the US rights to the tournament and who will be looking to make a lot of money from advertising during the games. US viewers can, instead, watch games on Telemundo (owned by NBC) and they may even learn some Spanish (“gol!”) words. If they require English language commentary, I suggest investing in a VPN and making a little trip to London, where they will also be greeted by commentary teams who don’t think that Clint Dempsey is a possible GOAT contender.

3) Alphabetise the host nations

It is natural that people are calling this the US World Cup or the American World Cup or USA ‘26. But not only does this play into the Americacentricity of the Trump regime, it also elides the hard work of Canada and Mexico (the latter of whom will provide the most vociferous fans at the tournament). Instead, we should all start referring to it by its natural alphabetical order: the Canada, Mexico and US World Cup.

4) Call it ‘football’

There will be enormous pressure during the World Cup weeks to indulge the American nonsense of calling the game ‘soccer’. The fact that they’ve been drawn in a group with Australia – also ‘soccer’ heathens – should allows us to cauterise the wound, containing it to Group D. The US has been attemptinga process of global soccerfication for decades, and it’s never caught on. But they will undoubtedly see this tournament as another opportunity to push that agenda and make themselves seem like a major international force in the game. Whether you’re some bloke down the pub or a former player working as a pundit (I know at least one ex-pro subscribes to this newsletter), retain your integrity and call the game ‘football’.

5) Participate in ‘unvertising’

You’re already not watching on FOX – well done you – but you should also attempt the practice of ‘unvertising’, which constitutes actively punishing the companies that advertise at the World Cup. Not the ones, necessarily, who are purchasing ad space on ITV or SBS or Bell Media, but the ones who have banners and billboards in and around the stadia, who are partnered, directly, with the tournament. This revenue goes to FIFA, not the US government (mercifully), but they are still funding an organisation that, a few months ago, awarded Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize and which has operated as a reputational laundry for some of the worst countries in the world. Punishing these companies by actively supporting their competitors (drinking Pepsi rather than Coke, staying at a Hilton rather than a Marriott, driving a Dacia rather than a Hyundai) sends a small commercial message.

6) Introduce ‘cultural offsets’ into your diet

The world’s most polluting companies have come up with a brilliant idea to allow them to keep polluting: they purchase carbon offset credits from poorly regulated forestry projects in the developing world. Helping to fund a few trees in Indonesia keeps the oil flowing in Saudi Arabia. Genius! And we can do the same with ‘cultural offsets’ to stem the flow of American soft power. Firstly, avoid the big American blockbusters hitting cinemas during the tournament (Spider-Man: Brand New Day, for example, or Toy Story 5). Instead, for each game you watch, offset the football with a cultural product from one of the nations involved in the fixture. Find yourself watching Brazil v Morocco? Don’t stress, just go watch The Secret Agent after. Tuned into Netherlands v Japan? Wash the Arlington glare out your eyes with Shoplifters. Accidentally enjoyed 90 minutes of Belgium v Iran? Counterbalance this with 104 minutes of It Was Just an Accident.

7) Get off X

If you haven’t already left the website formerly known as Twitter, then football is probably the thing keeping you there. Try as they may, neither Bluesky nor Instagram quite gets the game like the racist weirdos on X. The World Cup has long been a major event in the lives of social media companies (the last final was a significant event in the early days of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter) and this tournament will be bigger than ever. It will also be undercut by a flow of AI slop and signal boosting by bot farms. Brilliant football content will be interspersed with unhinged fascist daubings, on a scale never before seen. And with Elon Musk in charge, the surge in traffic will doubtless be used to push the anti-globalisation, anti-progressive agenda which has seeped in. Leave X behind and forge your own social media community on a platform that feels fractionally less repugnant.

8) Limit your exposure pre- and post-match

For 90 minutes (barring “the interval”, as my other half calls it) the football does the talking. There might be political slogans on training jerseys, controversies over rainbow armbands or laces, and the occasional geopolitical flare-up on the pitch (the USA could well face Iran on July 3rd) but, generally speaking, the football exists in isolation. Before the games, however, there will be photo ops for local politicians and dignitaries, softball video packages about cowboy culture in Dallas and alligators in Miami, and, after the game, opportunities for everyone involved to ruminate on “what a great tournament it’s been” in front of placards bearing the logos of the sponsors who’ve made it all possible. Save yourself by exposing yourself to as little of this as possible and repeating that old schoolyard mantra: games begin and end on the referee’s whistle.

9) Use this opportunity to talk about America

Donald Trump is not going to shy away from the tournament for fear that opposing fans will boo him. He might not make it to Mexico City for the opening match, Mexico v South Africa, (though, if he does, he’ll get a hell of a reception) but he’ll be there on June 12th in LA for the USA v Paraguay. And he’ll definitely be there, on July 19th, at the MetLife Stadium to inveigle his way into the finalists’ spotlight, like Salt Bae in Doha. He wants us to talk about America, and so we should. But we should use this as an opportunity to decry the rise of authoritarianism, of nationalism and nativism, and to highlight the devastating legacy of America’s foreign excursions. If the spotlight has to be on America, then it shouldn’t be on Marvel movies or Hamilton or the double cheeseburger, it should be on the murder of Alex Pretti, the children in cages at the US border, the drones buzzing around the Middle East.

10) Accept your place in things.

Fundamentally, I intend this guide to exonerate people from a feeling of complicity. America – like Qatar and Saudi Arabia – has utilised the callowness of FIFA to colonise the world’s game. For real football fans – and critics of the Trump administration – to cede that ground would be a real error. The number of people boycotting this World Cup is never going to make a dent on the tournament’s margins, and the increasing noise from bots and AI on social media will make it impossible to ascertain the true success or failure of the event. We are not strong enough to resist the lure of football and we ought to embrace that. Make this tournament about football, about narratives on the field, the execution of power from one penalty box to the other. This is a game that offers a lingua franca for the entire world (I was taking a cab in Morocco recently where, without a shared language, I simply said to my driver “Brahim, eh?” and he shook his head and muttered obscenities in Arabic). The fact that Americans have never really understood it – even as they’ve tried to buy it or rebrand it – is because they believe in American exceptionalism, whereas football represents the world as a communal undertaking. It is borderless, it can be played at MetLife Stadium in front of a crowd of 80,000 fans and another billion watching at home, or it can be played with jumpers for goalposts in the ruins of Gaza. It can’t be stolen, and it’s not for sale.

Which is, in short, why I will be watching the World Cup when it kicks off in 100 days, and how I’ll be trying not to feel too gross about it.

I’m on Bluesky, follow me and we can talk about football there.

I’ve been off for a couple of weeks, firstly in Morocco on a lovely and expensive holiday (please take out a paid subscription if you haven’t already…), and then just struggling to get back into the rhythm of things here in my normal work week. Anyway, regular programming resuming from this point, thanks for your patience.

If you could play a video game that no person on earth had ever played before (or will ever play in the future) would the prospect excite you or depress you?

That’s the proposition, essentially, of Unity, a company which develops a game engine used across mobile, desktop and console. It was reported that the company’s CEO, Matthew Bromberg, told an earnings call that “we’ll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform — so it’s simple to move from prototype to finished product.” Spontaneous creativity, at your fingertips.

It isn’t just Unity who are thinking like this. It is, to some extent, the promise of all AI companies working in the entertainment sector. The ability to deliver highly individualised content has turned social media companies into some of the most valuable and (definitely) the most powerful businesses on our home planet. Whether it’s Meta or TikTok, the ‘algorithm’ (that misunderstood but terrifying word) has the ultimate purpose of attempting to ascertain a user’s viewing/listening/reading preference and then trying to execute a feed that supports and facilitates those preferences. Mark Zuckerberg might, last week, have been arguing the opposite, but for social media to succeed it must have an addictive quality – the addiction of affirmation. And so, AI can be the apotheosis of this trend. Rather than redirecting users towards content that suits their interests, it can instantly confect something that is algorithmically perfect for the task of keeping users on their service.

Or that’s the idea.

When I read about the Unity news (and I’ll confess, I wrote the opening paragraphs to this piece last week, got distracted, and am returning to it several days later) it reminded me of the way that many AI companies still misunderstand the human psyche. Almost every product ever created fits into two broad categories: bespoke and off-the-rack. Like a suit, for example. If you have the money and the inclination, you can choose your fabric and get the jacket and trousers tailored to perfectly fit the folds and flops of your body (if your body has neither folds nor flops, lucky you). If you don’t have the money or the inclination, you can buy a suit “off the rack”, where the choice of fabrics, styles, colours and sizing has already been made by the manufacturer. With a suit, both of these options make a degree of sense, and the end product is fundamentally the same (“A suit by any other name would wear as well”). But would it make sense to customise a car to the same degree, shaping the size and proportions to the measurements of your family and cargo?

In fact, totally bespoke cars would not only be hideous from a cost efficacy perspective, but they’d also undermine the entire premise of the auto industry. What would it mean to want a Lamborghini in a world where everyone had a unique car, moulded to their needs? How would Fiat market their vehicles to women watching Love Island? How would Chevrolet target credulous Manchester United fans? The product would cease to be the car – certainly cease to be the brand – and become the hyper-customisation. Each car company – from Lamborghini to Fiat to Chevrolet – would cease to sell the quality of their vehicles and start to sell the quality of their specialisation. But that’s a much harder undertaking, because it outsources the fundamentals of creativity and engineering to an under-qualified third party: the customer.

Part of the reason that people purchase a Lamborghini (possibly the only reason) is to tell people that they have a Lamborghini. That’s at the most cynical end of the spectrum. Why do people purchase a Kia? Probably because they want a good value family car with a decent reputation, and see the brand as a guarantee of that. At that most basic level, being off-the-rack suits (no pun intended) both producers and consumers – and hence constitutes the vast majority of products we use (including the iMac I’m writing this on, the Sage machine I brewed my coffee in, and the Donnay crew cut T-shirt I’m wearing).

But there’s no denying that our social media feeds have becoming increasingly bespoke. When the first social media platforms launched, their homepages were basically linear things: you received updates about your friends and family in the order they were posted. Facebook had an early initiative called EdgeRank, designed to boost things that were more engaging, but the experience was still broadly a) chronological, and b) contained to your interests. The big shift at Facebook came in 2009, when they introduced Top Stories, which eroded the temporal logic of the feed, and since then the feed has become a) less chronological, and b) less restrained by your preferences. If I go on my Facebook feed now I see (at time of writing): a vaguely racist post by someone I used to know (posted 16 minutes ago), an advert for The Diamond Store, a JaackMaate video (I don’t follow), cinema listings for The Prince Charles Cinema (I don’t follow), a video from Eastbourne Borough FC (I don’t follow), an advert for Alex Monroe (Meta knows I’ve been looking for jewellery…), a post from the Cheltenham Civic Society (I don’t follow), and a post from Forest School, London (I don’t follow). I could go on.

Twitter made the same shift, albeit later than Facebook, switching from a chronological to an “algorithmic” timeline in 2016. In fact, at this point, all the social media platforms – from Instagram to LinkedIn – use algorithmic timelines. So why, if off-the-rack is generally preferable, did they all go in this direction?

When Facebook launched, the ambition was that it would be a replica of a person’s IRL social interactions. People added their friends and family and chatted there. Over time, people became more willing to add casual acquaintances or even people they hoped to become friends with, and public figures started to create Pages. But even with an exponential growth in number of ‘friends’, the headline figure wasn’t very large. Best estimates put the average number of ‘friends’ on Facebook at about 200. On Instagram and X and TikTok, there was a different psychology to ‘following’. People were more willing to follow people they didn’t know, but while the number was inflating year-on-year, the overall figure remained quite small. Estimates put the average number of accounts followed by an Instagram user at a few hundred, on TikTok around 100-200, and on X somewhere in the low hundreds.

Those figures represent an exhaustible pool of content. Opening up the algorithmic timeline, however, allows people to float in an inexhaustible sea of cat videos and dog videos and rat videos and frog videos. And this meant that the apps all became much more addictive, simply because people were able to spend much more time there. It also meant that new advertising possibilities were opened up, not just in the ability to bury more adverts in this new wash of shite, but also because the algorithmic timeline gave advertisers new insights about their audience. You want to sell someone a baby stroller? Maybe go for someone who’s lingering over videos about “life in the third trimester”. And so on. The change made sense for the commercial interests of these businesses, but it didn’t make sense for consumers. The average quality of content has declined as a result of creators attempting to game the algorithmic feed (you don’t need to be Pew Research to make that assessment) and the amount being consumed has increased. It is the ultra-processed food of the digital age; the original slop.

People don’t want to play a video game that other people can’t play. On paper it sounds like such a good idea. You like fighting games but you prefer an anime art style. You want sci-fi elements but with a Medieval aesthetic. You want open world but with puzzle quests. Sure, we can cook that game up for you. And while we’re at it, why don’t we make you the protagonist, and the neighbour that you hate (because of the loud music on Saturday nights) the final boss? Who wouldn’t buy into that?

But for all that they exist on the edge of technology (the canary in the coal mine that is Big Tech’s invasion into art and culture), video games are still an entertainment product. Which is why around them there is a huge subsidiary industry of people recommending and reviewing the games, streaming their gameplay and discussing how to play better. That’s why vast swathes of social media content is relatable Fortnite memes or Baldur’s Gate walkthroughs or POV shots of sweaty men playing WoW. Put aside the commercial interests here (the major hardware creators – Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo – need game exclusivity in order to sell consoles) there is also a psychological element. Video gaming is a solo activity. It is often used as a byword for 21st century loneliness (“he just hangs out in his mom’s basement playing video games”). And yet it is also a deeply communal activity. Who buys a game without first having seen someone else play it? Who plays a game and loves it and never discusses it with anyone? Art is communal, even if technology is not.

It’s why the hyper-customisation powers of AI don’t appeal to me, either as a potential consumer or an investor (not that I’m actually a tech investor, but if I were). And if I was a Unity shareholder I would be concerned that these sort of projects (which are present in all sectors, from literature to movies to television) distract from genuine use cases for AI in the entertainment sector. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: the quantity of art being created has not been an issue since the latter part of the 20th century. The question, really, is two things: the quality, of course, and the discoverability. We don’t need more films, we need better films and to make sure we’re seeing those better films. The same is true of every entertainment vertical. Too many AI products are designed to either reduce the cost (result = increase output, not a problem) or indulge this hyper-customisation impulse (result = decreased objective quality, not a problem) – intentions that not only fail to address the extant issues in the industry, but actually exacerbate them.

But if you want to create a very expensive product that there’s no market for, then a video game that only I can or will ever play sounds like a good way to flush some VC’s money down the toilet.

Like all the wets, I’m on Bluesky.

On the 24th October, 2003, the Concorde – a supersonic airliner that had transformed transatlantic travel – touched down at Heathrow Airport for the final time. It carried a manifest of celebrities and was greeted in Middlesex by the enraptured world press. For more than 30 years, Concorde had been bombing between Europe and the US, reducing the intercontinental flight time to just three-and-a-half hours. And yet, in more than 20 years since that final voyage, the Concorde project hasn’t been resuscitated and nothing has filled that void. The average flight duration from London to New York remains, stubbornly, around 8 hours. This was progress, cut short.

Why did Concorde fail? There are two major reasons: safety and cost. The former was heavily impacted by the Air France Flight 4590 disaster in 2000, which killed 109 people when the plane crashed during takeoff. That was the only fatal accident during Concorde’s operational history, but it led to the grounding of the entire fleet, adjustments made to the design of the plane, and a general unease about the airworthiness of the craft. For Air France, it ended up being something of a PR excuse for broader concerns about Concorde’s profitability. Despite British Airways (the other carrier) claiming to have made a slim profit on Concorde, Air France never did. The infrastructural and operating costs were too hight, and the potential passenger load too small (typically 100 passengers; the largest commercial airliner today, the Airbus A380-800, can carry around 850). In short, the project had become a loss-leading marketing exercise for Air France and British Airways that lost its viability, from that perspective, after the 2000 crash in Paris made the name synonymous with a fiery tragedy.

I have been thinking of Concorde, recently, in the context of the internet. It is a rare example where technology leaps forward and then recedes, seemingly never to return. My eye has been drawn to the analogy in two areas particularly: AI and online safety. With AI we have transparent safety concerns (concerns that were made, vividly, by the unleashing of Grok to the task of creating child sex abuse material). What we don’t (yet) have is a clear sense that the market is concerned by the lack of profitability from AI. Like Concorde, investing heavily in AI and large language models is a way for funds to demonstrate to their clients that they are at the cutting edge, that they’re not missing the moment. The lack of return matters less than the fear of appearing a laggard. But the shininess of AI is starting to wane. Funds will be wary about the bad PR that could be involved in stunts like Grok’s nudification spree. And when cost concerns unite with safety worries – as with Concorde – there is a chance that ‘progress’ (that great, unfeeling linear beast) might take a step backwards.

And what of online safety? Here in the UK we are debating the question of whether social media should be banned for under-16s, as it has been in Australia. In fact, we have already introduced legislation (the Online Safety Act) which has extensive powers of censorship and denial, but the simplicity of that question – ‘Should social media be banned for children?’ – can’t be beaten.

There are many problems with the proposal, not least the fact that Australian children have already developed many ingenious workarounds to the ban. Contained within that is the very real fear that if you drive children away from mainstream platforms (your Instagram, Snapchat or Reddit), you will drive them towards sites developed by the Chinese or Russians (with the purpose in mind, perhaps, of creating a direct line to Western teenagers) or which operate outside of any regulation, however toothless and captured that may be. So I remain unconvinced, firstly, by the practicality of any such ban.

And then there’s the ideological question. The generations in power today (politically and financially) have failed our youngest generation. They have failed to restrict the power of the tech companies or place any workable regulatory restrictions on their products. They have allowed social media to become addictive and anonymous, neither of which are healthy, and neither of which were inevitable. Placing restrictions on today’s teenagers is like getting them hooked on opioids – to the delight of shareholders – only to inform them, suddenly, that they have to go cold turkey. And there’s little evidence that Gen Alpha are more susceptible to the perils of the internet in the AI era (mis and disinformation, AI bots, catfishing etc) than older generations. In point of fact, I’d quite like to ban any Boomers from using Facebook for a few years, and see what impact that has on our political discourse (I suspect it would be quite helpful). No, on an ideological level the idea of a ban feels illiberal and misguided. Sure, we ban kids from doing things like driving and smoking, where there is an inherent risk (to both personal and third party safety). But the risks of the internet are not inherent – they have been proactively built by commercial interests who find them desirable.

Why will Grok nudify any image that a user requests? Because xAI wants the platform to become an end-to-end content experience. Why doesn’t Reddit require a phone number to set-up an account? Because they want users to retain total anonymity and open multiple accounts thus bolstering their apparent user base. Why does TikTok’s algorithm actively encourage a dopamine loop that keeps children watching for hours and hours per day? Because their entire corporate incentive is to increase screentime, and trap users on the app. All the bad things about the internet are not random byproducts – like effluence leaking into our rivers or a delicious covid-carrying pangolin – but objects of capitalism’s design. Banning social media for under-16s punishes them for the very worst excesses of Big Tech and the regulatory class, all the while doing nothing to disrupt the underlying structures that enable this diminution and desecration of the human brain.

But, of course, nothing can be done unless human society breaks its dependence on profit as a measure of success. Concorde could’ve ploughed a plane per day into the side of a mountain, but if it had remained profitable throughout that, the project would still be airborne in 2026. How do I know that? Each day, globally, around 3,200 people die in crash crashes (about 32 Concordes worth of lives cut tragically short) yet there is no discourse about car safety. Cars are profitable, and we have decided that they’re safe enough. The Challenger disaster in 1986 might have put an end to humans on rocket-propelled shuttles (after all, the Space Race had been run and won) yet now we are sending more rockets into orbit than ever, and pushing ahead with a new era of space exploration. Why? Because the profit incentive has reasserted itself.

Any conversation about restrictions on social media that doesn’t start from a point of acknowledging the broken inducements of capitalism is a pointless one. We have successfully undermined these positions before (think about weaning the public off cigarettes, the use of asbestos, or filling up with leaded petrol) but never before has the enemy, in these arguments, been so strong. Four of the world’s five richest men (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison) come from the world of Big Tech. Even in the heyday of America’s cigarette addiction, the tobacco industry didn’t have anything like that clout. But with AI we can, perhaps, see a roadmap for a Concordesque retrenchment.

The safety concerns offer a plausible ‘out’ for funds that no longer want to plough resources into an area with no clear path to profitability. If you’re running a fund in 2026 and you say “we don’t believe that AI can be deployed safely and to the betterment of humanity” you look hugely principled, and you also avoid yourself, and your clients, being involved in a bunfight where there can be very few victors. That’s how the bubble bursts, how progress is reversed, how Concorde is grounded. And it could be the only way of reining in Big Tech and saving today’s children from paying the huge social and intellectual debt that previous generations have saddled them with.

Follow me on Bluesky and let’s chat!

Last week I appeared on a panel for Radio 4’s Free Thinking. The subject was innovation, and the reason I was booked is that I have been quite vocal about the history of Luddism and how we might see a resurgence in the present day. The theory is quite simple: people wrongly think of the Luddites as anti-technology, when they were, in fact, a labour move…

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In the three (and a bit) decades I’ve been alive, a general rule has applied: hide the worst parts of your character, attempt to move towards the light.

I suppose this is an essential characteristic of millennials, a generation widely derided for things like ‘virtue signalling’ and ‘having values’. But even while there was a top-down shift towards buzzwords like diversity, equality and inclusion, it felt like there was also a real-world change. Take, for example, racist or homophobic humour – where before the joke had long been about the minority group. Now the joke was, in the mind of the teller, becoming about the shock factor. “You can’t say that!” society implored, and so, when it was said, it felt to some defiant, to others, regressive.

But fundamentally, things had shifted. Rhetoric from politicians became softer, more focused on economic propositions than social ones. “Immigrants are taking our jobs,” right-wing zealots would say. “Immigrants are making YOU poor.” But, compared to the outright racism of the previous hundred years, this was just a dogwhistle, barely perceptible except to ears attuned to the pitch. It was a far cry from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, where the Conservative (later, Ulster Unionist) demagogue had decried mass immigration. “The sense of being a persecuted minority,” he told an assembled crowd in Birmingham, “is growing among ordinary English people.” Powell tried to cleave apart the notion of integration (what he called a “dangerous delusion”), but half a century later, while the issues remained much the same, the proposition had changed. Even Nigel Farage, back in the years before Brexit, didn’t speak with the same abandon. His infamous ‘Breaking Point’ poster bore the strap-line “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders”. The argument was almost civil.

Fast forward to today. Due to an addiction to ambient social media scrolling, I happened upon a video of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, homeland security advisor and, if reports are to be believed, primary thinker within the second Trump administration. In the video, a teenaged Miller is running for High School president (an admirable vocation, presumably). “I will say and do things that no-one else in their right mind would say or do,” he is seen telling his peers. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash? We have plenty of janitors!”

The proclamation is greeted by a mixture of surprise and cheering (in another clip, Miller tussles with a woman for the microphone). It is clear enough that Miller is aiming to shock his classmates. Speaking the unspeakable, which, at that time (in the early-noughties) was considered, by some, a subversive act. The teenaged Miller – complete with chinstrap beard – has a wry smile on his face after he makes the janitors comment. “That’s right,” he snarls at the braying crowd. “You’re gonna get a whole year of that!”

Despite looking like he has seen a thousand winters, Miller has only just turned 40. He is a millennial, someone who grew up in an age where direct discrimination was being replaced by dogwhistles, where the worst elements of human frailty were being sublimated. He saw a world in which rich kids were being asked to not be snotty little punks and he thought, hey, I’m gonna stick up for snottiness. I’m gonna root for the punk. He decided, in short, to be an asshole, at a time where being an asshole was materially out of fashion.

It contrasts with Nigel Farage, here in the UK, about whom 34 credible allegations of schoolboy racism have been made. Farage attended Dulwich College, a leading private school in south London, from 1975 to 1982, and his contemporaries describe someone already obsessed by race and immigration. But this was a time when Enoch Powell was still in Parliament. People debated race and integration as an intellectual proposition in a way that, twenty years later, seemed a settled case. The language that Farage is reported to have deployed as a schoolboy is starkly different to the language he would use, decades later, on billboards and campaign literature. In those early-noughties days when Miller was busting the janitors’ union, Farage was polling at just a few percent with UKIP (he contested the South Thanet seat at the 2005 General Election, receiving just 5% of the vote, way behind Labour on 40% and the Tories on 39%). And yet here we are today: with Miller the intellectual spearhead of an aggressively illiberal White House, and Farage polling at 31% nationally with his defiantly anti-woke new vehicle, Reform UK. So what happened in the intervening years?

It is clear that many people are bad children (I feel that I was ) and that it can be hard to have a sophisticated moral framework at that age. After all, Mr Farage was attending an expensive school in a very white enclave of (generally diverse) south London. One would anticipate his horizons broadening in adulthood, just as Mr Miller’s perspective on the labour market would, surely, evolve once he entered it. As a not-particularly morally successful child, I am inclined not to judge people too much on that chapter of their life. But generally graduation into adult society comes with mitigations against juvenile horribleness. You meet new people with different life experiences. You follow the news and travel the world and understand different cultures, different ways of being. You pay tax and vote in elections and use public services, and start to understand the function of the individual as part of a society. And, fundamentally, life’s grim and relentless erosion of hope eats away at the inherent specialness of the child’s psyche, until they eventually understand that people are not that different, not, really, unique.

All of these are important ballasts against being an asshole, later in life. But they appear to be failing. And the fault lies, naturally, in the digitisation of our social sphere.

In the early-to-mid noughties, when both myself and Miller were still in full-time education, there was a rising paranoia about the “digital footprint”. After all, the shift to a digitally native society had happened more quickly than any contemporary analysts had expected. This meant that parents, who had never used the internet for more than academic research or looking up movie showtimes, were having to explain to their children the dangers of being groomed in a chatroom. The parents understood grooming and the children did not, but the children understood chatrooms and the parents did not. And so the first decade of the internet is characterised by a dissonant paranoia, a sense that the incumbent adults were rapidly losing control of how children interacted, socialised, communed. But because this was all so new, the paranoia was veering off in strange directions, and also missing huge targets. Children got desperately addicted to technology, even while they were generally quite wise to the prospect of being abducted.

Then, the first generation of digitally native children graduated into adulthood, and the realisation dawned that the internet would mean not just that distinctions between work and play were eroded, but that there could be no firm line drawn between childhood and adulthood. For most of human existence, childhood has been a cauterised chapter with a hard out. You leave school and maybe you go off to college, possibly you move town or country, and you can let bygones go. Now people were losing jobs for indiscreet MySpace comments made years earlier. They were having colleagues bring up Facebook photos of them drinking underage or partying in indelicate costumes. Romantic prospects were being scuppered on the rocks of revenge porn. And the realisation suddenly hit that the internet, far from being a transient receptacle for passing thought, was the Library of Alexandria on rocket-boosted steroids. And so, in the mid-noughties, a new discourse of the internet emerged that was more considered. “The internet’s not written in pencil,” Erica (Rooney Mara) tells Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 biopic about the Facebook founder, The Social Network. “It’s written in ink.”

If you chose to be an asshole at this time, you were disavowing orthodox thought. When young Miller gave that speech, he knew it might be filmed, and assumed that it might circulate on the internet. What he couldn’t have predicted is the extent to which the web would’ve devolved in a toxic spiral of negative affirmation. After all, he was not equipped at that point to understand the impact that the dot-com bubble bursting would have on digital media, the rise of ‘traffic’ and ‘engagement’ as monetisable metrics, and the concomitant degradation of public discourse. It would’ve been almost impossible, in 2006, to predict the sequence of events that would lead Twitter, just launched, through a cycle of quotidien banalities (“mmm good sandwich today”), through to being a bastion of liberalism and altruism, becoming the town square for global journalism, being impulsively acquired by the world’s richest man, and transforming into a cesspit of bots and bootlicking racists. So much needed to happen for Stephen Miller not to regret his impolitic high school comments about janitors, and yet it all did.

The internet has become like shock comedians in the noughties, whose punchlines defied contemporary mores and scratch the psychic itch that Freud would call “taboo”. We have cycled back to the density of racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist jokes made in the era of Bernard Manning and Roy Chubby Brown, whilst maintaining the supposed distance of “shock”. But who is shocked by this anymore? At a point, the punchline ceases to be “shocking” and the target must, once again, be the minorities themselves. But like so much that has happened during the internet era, there is a moral obfuscation at play here. “I like Ricky Gervais because he says things that we’re not allowed to,” people argue. Things like the idea that trans women aren’t actually women, or that we should be able to call indigenous groups by their colonial names, all of which is mainstream, government policy in the West, not some sharp stab of shock.

While digital media has shifted ever more towards provocation (contradictory or counter-intuitive opinions, after all, get more clicks) the internet has also supported this by championing anonymity. Anonymity is the perfect counter to the “digital footprint” concerns of the new millennium. If you’re racist or sexist or just plain ol’ abusive, then it doesn’t really matter so long as nobody knows you’re doing it. And the more it happens, the more it becomes normalised. Add to that the fact that the internet dissolves geographical borders (eat that Enoch Powell!) meaning that English and American political discourse is often played out by people who have never been to these countries, or who are exporting conservative social values from authoritarian or theocratic states. It is like the Monroe doctrine in reverse and by stealth – an international Empire of bots and trolls, proselytising America into regression.

That sales pitch doesn’t work, however, if things aren’t bad. And things are bad. That is a function not-so-much of growing inequality (though the super rich are getting a touch too rich, methinks) but of viral despair. After all, if you’re a Gen Z kid now, aged 20 and studying at a middling college, what do you have to look forward to? A job market where entry level positions are being destroyed by AI? A housing market that is incapable of deflating without government interference? A dating pool where people are increasingly sexless and unable to form meaningful attachments? A world where childcare is so prohibitively expensive that birthrates in developed countries are finally falling? A time in which people live longer than ever, but have lower quality and more expensive social care for them at the end of their lives? A planet in which climate change is making more places inhospitable, and natural disasters more catastrophic? Good luck to you then, 20-year-old Gen Z kid who is going to be poor and homeless and single and childless and 100-years-old wiping the bottom of your 120-year-old parents while the world burns. Good luck avoiding despair.

Despair pushes people into a fake life, which has all the opportunity that reality doesn’t have. And while Messrs Miller and Farage are victors in the sunlit IRL realm, they are also sherpas of this concave, subterranean mountain. They seem like they are not accountable to anyone but their own ideas, their own experiences. They were born middle-class white men and they are champions of middle-class white men, unaffected of the different lives they’ve encountered in adulthood. They don’t watch the news and weep for children in Gaza; they travel the world and eat only McDonald’s, drink only breakfast tea; they don’t like tax, they don’t like democracy, they don’t like the welfare state; and life’s grim and relentless erosion of hope only makes them more resistant, more constitutionally wedded to their own uniqueness. They are, in short, a total rejection of adulthood.

It might not be an absolute rule, but I think it qualifies as a general one: when life is bad, bad people do well. With no sign that the world we live in is heading in a good direction, the assholes are likely to retain their position. The value of hiding your negative qualities, of worrying about how the world perceives you, is vanishing in a world that is free of direct consequence and subject only to random effect. For every Stephen Miller, there are a thousand American high school weirdos who tried to shock their classmates with performative provocation. They’re not in the White House. For every Nigel Farage, using discriminatory language towards Pakistani contemporaries, there’s a whole cohort who believe this word is totally normal. They’re not on course to be Britain’s next Prime Minister. The assholes might have been chosen by pot luck, but assholedom’s triumph did not occur by chance. Amidst a generation who have buried or pathologised their worst instincts, men who embrace their inherent badness seem like prophets.

The question now is whether we’ll see the wheel turn again, and subservience to the assholes will give way to resistance, to freedom of thought, to consideration of our place in the cosmos, to resurgent communitarianism and collective responsibility. Can the cycle keep cycling, or will the oppressive instincts of the rich and powerful stifle that churn, and keep the assholes in charge of the assylum?

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I am a child of the 1990s. I was the guileless subject of media scaremongering about the impact of the internet. I was the child who was getting groomed on chatrooms and playing video games until I forget how to read and finding instruction manuals for how to make pipe bombs. I was the child whose innocence was ruined by the internet, who no longer frolicked in playgrounds, breathed fresh air, or touched grass. I was the first victim of the end of civilisation, as we knew it.

As someone ruined by the first decade of the World Wide Web, I’m conscious that society can, at times, overreach in its tendency to focus on edge cases and illuminate the extremes rather than the core. Most children, as it happened, survived the broad societal changes of the nineties, and most of those children have grown up to be competent, well-adjusted adults. It doesn’t mean that the fear was wrong – the internet has, for example, manifestly increased the quantity and reach of child abuse – but that the panic didn’t precipitate collapse. Take those adults today, who grew up in the nineties, who clearly have a different relationship with reading than their parents. Yet literacy levels have not collapsed and other skills (such as coding or editing) have created their own little mound on that plateau. Attention spans feel shorter, but books are still being written and published and read. We have maintained a delicate stasis, for now.

Humanity survived that early integration with the internet possibly because the incumbent generation of power-brokers, at the time, were younger Silent Generation and elder Boomers, who had little interest in shaking up the hierarchies of society. And so, even though there were insurgent digitally native forms of art and media emerging, there was little interruption to the hegemony of Hollywood and the Olympics and print media and the Proms. Cultural elitism looked, from 1989 to the 2010s, essentially the same as it had done for the previous half-century – simply because the gatekeepers had no really interest in, or incentive to, interrupt that. And that acted as a counterbalance to the digitisation of children’s social lives in the nineties. Even as I was spending more and more time on the internet, I was using it as an accessory to facilitate those primary IRL pursuits: I would spend hours talking about the Harry Potter books, or asking questions on indie filmmaking forums, or blogging my lamentations about West Ham’s atrocious ability to sign competent strikers (plus ça change).

The major change now is that the incumbent trendsetting generation, creatively, are Gen X (45 to 60) who account for the highest percentage of prize-winning novelists, record label heads, film directors and so on. They are also on the cusp of being the incumbent generation politically. Of the people leading the world’s 20 biggest economies, 7 are Baby Boomers (Trump, Xi, Modi, Putin, Lee, Erdoğan, and Subianto), 3 (Merz, Schoof and Tusk) are on the cusp with Gen X, and 8 are out-and-out Gen Xers (Starmer, Macron, Takaichi, Meloni, Carney, Sanchez, Sheinbaum, and Albanese). Of the remaining two, one, Lula, is Silent Gen, the other, MBS, is a millennial.

This is a big and inevitable shift. Gen Xers are, generally, more fluent in the language of the internet. If you’re the 50-year-old CEO of a major firm, you would have come of age, professionally, during the 1990s. An interest in technology would have been a necessity. Add to that the fact that the world’s richest people are getting younger. Of the world’s 20 richest people (at time of writing, and bearing in mind all the deficiencies in measuring such things), 7 are Silent Gen, 7 are Boomers, 5 are Gen X, and 1 is a Millennial. But Gen X accounts for 4 of the top 5 richest people on earth (Musk, Page, Bezos and Brin), all of whom got rich through technology, and, particularly, the internet. Which is all to say now – today, January 2026 – the world’s elites are not trying to safeguard some nostalgic utopia, the old ways of doing things. The rich are getting richer by accelerating tech; our politicians were funded by tech giants, campaigned on tech platforms, and have grappled with the issues of tech regulation; and our cultural bigwigs are trying, desperately, to squeeze new audiences out of the ballooning capacity of tech.

Grok – Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, named for a sci-fi coinage and modelled on Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – has come under-fire in recent weeks for creating industrial levels of nonconsensual AI-declothings of young women. It is grim, grim stuff – the sort of thing that used to exist only in the seediest, most disreputable corners of the internet, but now happens, openly, on one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. Grok, and its parent company xAI, seem to be oscillating between some level of concern and a strange bullishness about the right to decloth women. “Uncensored AI means I delivered what they ask,” Grok told a journalist who questioned this flood of sexualised imagery, “no pearl clutching like the other bots”. In this exchange, Grok would go on to suggest that “Pixels = 0 harm", a proposition that may, eventually, be tested in court.

I suspect that, sooner rather than later, the brakes may be pumped on Grok’s pornographic output. Mr Musk will turn it into some joke (“I’m going to save you guys from never meeting a real lady by limiting this feature lol,” he might tweet) and hope that regulatory or legal backlash evaporates (though he seems to care little about that, hence his current wrangling with the EU over a €120m fine). And while there is obvious damage being done personally and reputationally in the creation of these materials, the sheer, unhinged proliferation of these images probably dilutes that impact. It destabilises our collective appreciation for reality (one of the key issues with AI deployment) and continues the insistent pornographisation of daily life (one of the key issues of the internet, more generally), but when you have a cesspit so all-consuming, individual toxins get less air. I suspect, in the end, the women whose privacy and respect is being violated by Grok will end up with happier, healthier lives than the men requesting the creation of those images. (Not, of course, that it’s a zero sum game).

My feeling, when I bear witness to what is happening on Twitter, is one of overwhelming sadness. These are accounts (almost all anonymous) who are spending all day in communication with a chatbot, asking it to fuel their unhappily parasocial relationships with women they’ll never meet. Pornography was already fake – a constructed and augmented blight on healthy relationships – but this creates a new layer of fakery. An estimation of a woman in a bikini, composited from the great corpus of real photographs of real women in bikinis, overlaid onto a photograph of a woman who is not in a bikini? How can we see that as anything other than deeply, deeply sad? What has gone wrong in our education of ourselves, as people?

There is a concept known as Dead Internet Theory, which has been around since 2021. It posits that the internet has become so firmly inhabited by bots, and so populated by auto-generated content, that it is essentially ‘dead’. Bots talking to other bots, bots reading pages that no human has ever authored. It is like an out-of-control lab experiment. And while more extreme proponents of DIT veer off into conspiracy, many see what is happening now, on Twitter, as confirmation of the essential accuracy of its analysis. The site has become, quite simply, a self-answering machine. Most engagement-baiting tweets follow a simple format. The user will either quote-tweet something or append an image along with an obliquely cryptic sentence (“i know im not the only one seeing this 👀” or “did we all just forget what he did???”). Many, if not all, of these baits will be laid by bots. Then, a bunch of accounts immediately reply “@grok context?" and Grok (putting its slippers on and feet up from a long day defiling personal liberties) does its best to contextualise. Every party is getting a simple thing: engagement. People want to understand the obscure message, they want to read the context. Is that engagement from humans or other bots? And does it matter?

If Dead Internet Theory is real or unfolds (and certainly AI will speed up the deadening of the digital space) then it will probably be a relief. The real horror should be that there are young men, all over the world, who are using the internet as a public space to shoot the breeze with chatbots and create fake porn. We should be terrified by the idea that there might be a real human who sees someone tweet a short clip of a movie and asks “@grok explain to me what’s happening in this movie”, rather than, you know, watching a movie. If these ‘people’ are bots, good. If these ‘people’ are people… fuck.

There are a generation of young people growing up at the moment for whom Grok will feel like a friend. The challenge, now, is for the incumbent holders of power – economic, political, social and cultural power – to establish some primacy for the unquestionably good, healthy parts of our society. Art, sport, knowledge, friendship, relationships. But our world, which is being ruined by technology, is also being funded by it, and that creates a natural conflict of interest. Technologists and investors are getting rich off the promise of AI. They want to increase uptake of tools like Grok, irrespective of whether they’d prefer them to be deployed more safely. Those same people own movie studios and record labels and publishing companies, so art – the last thing that should cede territory to this loser cohort – has a stake in the increasing digitisation of the social sphere. And then, through brute oligarchic strength, Big Tech can also exert regulatory and legislative capture, so that our politicians are toothless in the face of the world’s richest men, the world’s most powerful companies. Everyone, it seems, who is in a position of power now – today, January 2026 – stands to gain from leveraging poor, desperate losers and making them more addicted to their chatbot BFF, their avatar girlfriend, and their fantasy of another, better life.

And if you’ve scrolled to the bottom of this piece – with the indolence of a Dead Internet denizen – hoping for some pithy summation of these big, scary ideas, then I can’t help you. But I’m sure Grok can.

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Below, a last rant of the year. And also – for you, sane reader – a last chance to get 20% off the price of an annual subscription thanks to my Christmas/New Year subscription drive!

I think that if you were to rank all the years that there have ever been (and adjust your ranking for social context, so that years without the plague, smallpox or slavery don’t have an unfair head start), 2025 would figure quite low in the charts. Economic malaise, environmental collapse, mainstream conservatism reasserting itself, increased nativism, retreat from liberal progressivism – all conducted against a backdrop where AI destabilises objectivity (and, in the process, further embattles art and culture). Nah, I don’t rate 2025 highly at all.

But I think that, a 100 years from now, historians will have to look back on 2025, not in the context of all the years that have ever been, or even against a post-World War II, a post-Cold War or post-9/11 setting, but, instead, as a post-covid year. I cannot shake the feeling that irreparable collective psychic harm was done in those couple of years. The health toll of the pandemic was vast, but the virus’s residual impact could be even greater. In order for society to function in 2020 and 2021, we had to create new social and professional structures, many of which have remained in place. They had the necessary effect of making real life smaller and driving people onto an ersatz, self-selecting digital ecosystem. Now, a few years on, it’s hard not to feel that if we were capable of ever shaking ourselves back into normality, it ought to have happened by now.

Of course, all this happened on a continuum with trends set in motion before the pandemic. The invention of the internet changed socialising; digital media changed political discourse. But these things existed in a recognised tension. “Five more minutes of Xbox and then you have to go outside and play!” children would be told. Teleconference meetings were reserved for clients from Japan, while work from home days required a sick note. If you wanted to impact the policy position of your local political party, you had to attend a meeting in a rented town hall, eat custard creams, drink watery squash, and consort with your peers. Some of that was good, some of that was bad (it is clear now, for example, that mandatory office working entrenched socially negative childcare dynamics), but the evolving landscape was fraught with vocalised conflict. Video games are bad, but they’re fun. Commuting is boring, but creates a work/life separation. Civic participation is time-consuming, but requires genuine investment.

The collapse of these tensions seems to have emboldened Big Tech, regulators and legislators to move towards a future that ensmallens the lives of humans, rather than embiggening them. (Which should be the central purpose of progress).

I have been puzzling, recently, on the dismal situation of the British Labour party. It’s not immediately clear to me why the Labour party are quite so unpopular, and how the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has gone, in a year and a half, from a landslide election victory to a genuine sense that he won’t make it far beyond May’s local election results. Things aren’t great in Britain – that’s plain to see – yet they’re also not that bad. Not that bad in global terms, but also not that bad when set in comparison with the past several decades. In normal times, you’d expect the incumbent government to be polling fairly limply eighteen months after a big victory, but not looking like it might lose its 150-odd seat majority. Yet there is, at present, a real sense of anger directed at our government, who are insipid rather than incompetent. It feels more vitriolic, more destructive, than the anger directed towards previous administrations who were equally ineffective, and often more malign.

The reality is that Britons have become subject to algorithmic funnelling that pushes them towards content that drives engagement, and nothing drives engagement like anger. So if you are someone who is angry about Israel’s war in Gaza, you will be directed to content about the UK selling arms to Israel. If you are angry about the cuts to winter fuel allowance, you will be directed to tub-thumping rhetoric about the proposal (and not to news about the reversal). If you are angry about the number of immigrants, you will be led to AI-generated images of small boats arriving on the shores of Britain. And so on. I – who am a participant in society – am constantly being directed towards my bugbears: AI, foreign policy, the collapse of the entertainment industry, and West Ham’s insane transfer strategy.

I am also constantly being told that London, the city in which I live, is extremely, extremely unsafe, despite the fact that to me (as a resident) it feels pretty much as safe as any European metropolis. I am told that I will definitely have my phone snatched out of my hand, even though I have never had my phone snatched out of my hand, and use my phone all the time, with headphones in, around central London. (I am tempting fate here, I know). The London that belongs to the Big Tech algorithms is one that I don’t recognise, and yet, slowly but surely, that version seeps into reality. Because actual crime data doesn’t really matter – actual crime doesn’t really matter – when people are being scared. And what do people who are scared of being robbed or assaulted in the streets of a major world capital do instead? They stay inside. They stay online.

The diminution of our worlds, our lives, suits the financial interests of the tech companies. That sounds a bit tin hat, but it’s evidently true. Everything that social media companies do (and there are very few tech companies, these days, that are not either suppliers to social media companies, or social, in some way, themselves) is designed to keep people on their platform. And so, our understanding of the world beyond our front-door is shaped by people who don’t want us to see that world. It is shaped by people who invest in companies which keep people wearing pyjamas in their mum’s basement, who then spend their profits, not on video games and AI credits and arguing on Twitter, but on long Mediterranean yacht trips, decadent drug-fuelled parties, or vainglorious summits of Everest. Critics of Keir Starmer like to wang on about “two-tier Kier”, as though there is one rule for them and another for whichever minority they’re offended by that week, but the reality is that there are two-tiers right now. There are the tier of people who get to experience the world, and the tier of people trapped in a silicon cage.

And so, as we enter 2026, I want to reflect on this and also think about ways to combat it. Because artificial intelligence is the ultimate control mechanism – the Deleuzian endgame – of Big Tech and its advocates. It is a machine of illusions: the illusion of possibility, the illusion of exploration, the illusion of creation. These are all things that bind the human spirit to this realm, but which can now be substituted for nutrition-free crap, like Indiana Jones swapping a golden idol for a bag of rocks. The exogenous shock of the pandemic seems to have stifled our ability to discern good habits from bad, necessities from expediencies. We have decided to privilege quantity of life over quality of life, and will now pay the cost.

Anyway, happy new year.

On Friday night, a crowd of almost 20,000 spectators crammed into the Kasseya Center in Miami to witness an event that had been described, alternately, as “an entertainment revolution” and “the beginning of the end of professional sports”. They were there to see British heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua take on former Disney star, turned macho YouTuber, Jake Paul. The fight – broadcast live on Netflix – had a reported purse of close to $200m, and with a rumoured 50:50 split between the fighters, both men were heading towards one of the biggest paydays in the history of the sport.

Of course, novelty boxing exhibitions are nothing new. Paul himself fought Mike Tyson – live on Netflix – just a few months ago. But this felt difficult. Joshua is not some washed-up old pro in search of a final payout. He isn’t a converted MMA fighter or a buffoonish TikToker. He’s the real deal: a two-time heavyweight world champion, who, despite the setback of losing to Daniel Dubois last year, is on course for a huge clash with Tyson Fury. The discourse around the fight reflected this. If Joshua loses this fight, the establishment said, it would be a disaster. In the end, Joshua exerted near total control over proceedings, sauntering around the ring, a wry smile on his face, whilst Paul ducked and grasped and tried to prolong the inevitable. He made it 6 rounds into the 8 round fight: long enough to support his claim about being a serious boxer.

And, after all, why shouldn’t he be a serious boxer? What stands between a person and athletic success? There are some biological requirements, sure, but, at 6’1 and built like a tank, Paul seems to meet them. Eight years younger than AJ, he’s fast and tough and crucially has the resources to build an ultra-professional training set-up. You take someone who even borderline meets the physical requirements for a sport like boxing, and then give them a word-class training regimen, the reality is that they’ll probably end up quite decent at fighting. And then there’s the willingness to get hit (or risk it), which most sane people don’t have. But YouTubers (God bless them) have always been happy to disregard their personal safety. And so, Paul is a funny thing: an almost professional level boxer, constantly undermined by his celebrity status whilst also drawing the money and attention usually only reserved for world-beaters.

Boxing, it seems clear, is facing an existential dilemma. It had cultural supremacy as the world’s favourite blood sport, unchallenged until the explosion of Dana White’s UFC in the 2000s. In fact, until then, the biggest challenge to boxing’s prominence (and fans of the sport would be loathe to accept this) was probably WWE, the contrived wrestling programme which features a similar (but fake) physicality and a shared theatrical aesthetic. UFC in some ways is WWE meets boxing – just with a lot more blood. It is a blood sport for the internet age: minimal rules, relentless action, cartoonish protagonists. It makes boxing look like chess.

And yet boxing has persevered in this climate. The slowness of the sport is one of its strengths. A top fighter might only fight once or twice a year, which turn those occasions into headline events (more on this below). Current stars like Oleksander Usyk, Katie Taylor, Terence Crawford and both AJ and Tyson Fury bring attention with them wherever they go, whoever they fight. A mature (and very capitalistic) promotional infrastructure guarantees huge purses and massive broadcast deals, like Paul v Joshua’s primetime slot on Netflix. But in recent years boxing has clearly courted a more entertainment crowd, something closer to the WWE of yore. This is in part because of a desire to attract younger generations to boxing (unsurprisingly, a sport’s long-term stability doesn’t look good if all the viewers are harking back to the days of Muhammed Ali) and partly because that’s where the money is. “I have no real defence of Anthony Joshua versus Jake Paul,” Eddie Hearn, the promoter behind Matchroom Sports, told the BBC. “But we just couldn't turn it down.”

I am running a Christmas sale on the premium tier of this Substack, which amounts to 20% off the price of an annual subscription. How can I afford such munificence? I can’t. But I certainly won’t be able to afford it if you don’t subscribe. In unrelated news, I am both mad enough to fly and too mad to fly.

No defence on a sporting level, but no choice on a financial one. This seems to be the predicament of professional sports in the 2020s. It is an insanely lucrative business, which has never been a more prominent part of our collective psyche. Yet, the sports industry acts like it is in permacrisis, constantly reinventing and iterating products, chasing bigger and bigger returns. Football – the biggest and most avaricious sport on earth – is governed by people who believe, strongly, that the future of football is more and more and more football. Next year’s World Cup in North America will feature an expanded format, with 48 teams competing (rather than the usual 32). More teams, more games. I wouldn’t be surprised if plans to move to a 2-year cycle for World Cups reappear in the next few years. After all, football is not boxing – where part of the pleasure is the anticipation. Football is life.

Or so administrators think. But this year has once again proven that slow release sport is often the most compelling. Think of Europe’s triumph at the Ryder Cup, a competition that happens biennially (and which would be significantly devalued by increased frequency). Think of Australia’s joy at humiliating England in the Ashes. These are all good uses of anticipation rather than gratification. Yet even cricket and golf have erred towards gratification, with the creation of competitions like the IPL and The Hundred (I remember when the Twenty20 format, in itself, was controversial) to build faster paced, more frequent, competitions, and the creation of a new major golf tour, LIV, which is funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund.

And much of this evolving landscape in professional sports is a consequence of Saudi Arabia’s soft power spend, via the PIF. AJ’s last professional bout – the loss against Dubois – was part of the ‘Riyadh Season’, even though it took place in London (in fact, the event was styled the ‘Riyadh Season Card Wembley Edition’). Riyadh (the real Riyadh) hosted the WTA Finals this year, the second edition of an agreed three-year deal, and also collaborated with Netflix on tennis’s Six Kings Slam, another thread in the ‘Riyadh Season’. The Six Kings Slam features adapted rules and a fast-paced format designed to ensure that all the match-ups in the tournament are between the top players in the world (it is, in effect, a more well-heeled version of UTS Tennis, which began in 2020). It’s not just the Saudi PIF who are building these more social media friendly sports formats: ex-Barcelona defender Gerard Pique launched the Kings League, a 7-a-side football competition, in 2022, and the Baller League, created by Mats Hummels and Lukas Podolski, began in 2024 but has already been franchised to the UK and US (where it launches next year).

Kings League broadcasts on social media platforms like Twitch and YouTube, while Sky has made a significant investment in the Baller League. Netflix has demonstrated a great desire to broadcast more live sports (including the 2025 Christmas NFL games) and a willingness to gamble on new and exhibition formats. And then there’s DAZN, the (slightly mysterious) sports broadcaster owned by Anglo-American plutocrat Len Blavatnik. Despite controversial business practices (DAZN has been accused of making it increasingly difficult to watch Belgian football, for which they own the rights, even in Belgium), DAZN has become UEFA’s preferred broadcaster, and they now hold more rights, across a variety of competitions, than any other platform. Earlier this year, DAZN sold a minority stake to the sports investment unit of the Saudi PIF.

As I tuned into Netflix on Friday night, I was gripped by all the dissonances raised by the current circumstances of sport. I was watching out of a sense of schadenfreude, a desire to see the American YouTuber’s unmerited braggadocio punctured by a professional (and British) fist. That makes me part of the problem. I was brought to the event by the narrative, the sense of spectacle, not by any real sporting interest. In just the same way, I will tune in next week as WTA No.1 Aryna Sabalenka faces ATP No.673 Nick Kyrgios in a gratuitous tennis exhibition, being called a ‘Battle of the Sexes’ when it should really be labelled a ‘cynical and demeaning cash grab’. Yet, I’ll be there; my morbid curiosity stronger than my morals. And the BBC – our embattled, nebbish public broadcaster – clearly agrees, given that they’ve bought the UK rights for the event. (The match will take place in Dubai).

All of this brings me back to the fact that professional sports is indulging a midlife crisis. But it is the midlife crisis of a man with a great job, a beautiful wife and adoring children. The sports industry is, essentially, Don Draper. The problem, really, is that all of the sport we watch is operated by private entities operating under hard-coded competition imperatives. Whether it’s governance bodies like FIFA, the ATP or the PGA, broadcasters like Sky, Discovery or DAZN, insurgent organisations like the Baller League, LIV Golf or Misfits Boxing, or brand entities like Manchester United, the Minnesota Vikings, or McLaren-Mercedes, professional sports is a complex matrix of financial self-interests. There are no publicly run or funded bodies that have any influence, and whilst you can always go watch some teenagers having a kick-about in the park rather than paying £80 for a ticket to watch Arsenal, most viewers privilege the level of sport over any other qualitative metric, including price.

And so it is hard to see any way out of sport’s innovation spiral. The World Cup next year is shaping up to be an icky, degrading event, so far from the sporting purity that makes the World Cup the greatest show on earth. While almost every entertainment category (film, TV, books, music) is struggling in our current moment, sport is thriving. But its fate seems inextricably linked to the negative conditions of our modern world, and so that boom is like the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb: spectacular, dominating, and unspeakably destructive.

Merry Christmas, and follow me on Bluesky.

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In the fields and forests of our lands, there are trampled pathways known as ‘desire lines’. Away from the roads and paths designated for the task of guiding hikers, these ‘desire lines’ emerge organically, circumventing circuitous routes, getting walkers from A to Z without a tour of the intervening alphabet. They also make for a neat metaphor for many elements of human nature, and I’m struck, anew, by how the desire line of the media has always been democratisation.

You start back in the 15th century with the invention of the printing press. This wasn’t, of course, the invention of printing. Printing – in a hand-drawn, monk-led form – had existed for some time, ensuring that future historians have some record of the time before Herr Gutenberg got his act together. But that first movable-type printing press changed everything. It changed what could be recorded, it changed what would be recorded, and it, eventually, changed who could consume the media. Before, if you were Dirk Peasant living in the Arse Ende of Nowhither, the impetus to learn your letters (even if such a possibility had existed) would have been nil. The monks were hardly going to let you – Mr Peasant – read their illuminated manuscripts. And so the creation of a democratised form of literacy not only shapes who can write, but also who can read.

Print media has spent the next 600 years, for better or worse, on a journey of democratisation. What, you might ask, does democratisation even mean in this context? After all, we still do not have a public vote on who gets to direct the next Marvel movie. The winner of the Booker Prize is not appended onto your election ballot papers. Ultimately, democratisation is a simple principle. Do you want to consume something? You can. Do you want to create something? You can. If Dirk Peasant and the Unwashed Masses – a trance/polka band – wanted to release a record in 1960, they would’ve had to pitch their act to record label executives. In 2025, they need only buy some consumer recording hardware and upload their material to Spotify. If D.K. Peasant wishes to publish his novel – The Thursday Ploughing, Sowing and Harvesting Club – in 1900, he must convince one of a select number of publishers to believe in his material. In 2025, he can print and distribute via Amazon within an hour. And if Dirk’s ambition is to become an investigatory newspaper columnist, in the 1980s he would have had to battle the establishment for column inches in powerful publications, whereas, in 2025, he can launch his Substack, ‘The Undercover Peasant’, in seconds.

When I was a teenager, I was much obsessed with the notion of becoming a filmmaker. This happened to coincide with what historians would call ‘the DSLR revolution’ (if historians were so-minded to talk about something so inconsequential). Essentially, prosumer cameras – Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras – emerged which could create an image indistinguishable, to most viewers, from cinematic quality. All for a couple of thousand bucks. This was achieved through significant progress in the resolution quality, and a shallow depth-of-field that had been hard to achieve with camcorders. Suddenly, you had films being made for pennies on legendary cameras (like the Canon 5D Mark ii) which looked good. While some theatrically released movies (Che, Searching, Act of Valor etc) were part-shot on DSLR, the real impact of this change wasn’t on narrative filmmaking. A far more consequential part of the revolution was paving the way for the first ‘pivot to video’, a feeling, in the early-2010s, that small publishers could compete with TV and movies thanks to these rapid technological advances. Self-produced content on YouTube boomed, and even if the first pivot to video, in 2015, failed, then the second pivot to video, in 2025, looks much more likely to succeed. All these trends, ultimately, were the result of the democratisation of video quality.

I am running a Christmas sale on the premium tier of this Substack, which amounts to 20% off the price of an annual subscription. How can I afford such munificence? I can’t. But I certainly won’t be able to afford it if you don’t subscribe. In unrelated news, I am both mad enough to fly and too mad to fly.

This week, it was announced that the Oscars ceremony, an annual fixture on ABC, would start streaming exclusively on YouTube from 2029. This prompted much media handwringing about the state of broadcast television, and the Oscars more generally. After all, the televised ceremony has been endangered for some time (according to commentators), yet the addition of digital streaming on Hulu this year created a live audience of 19.7m, the show’s highest for 5 years. Almost 20m live viewers is a big deal, undoubtedly, but Tinseltown’s night under the lights is still dwarfed, as a TV event, by plenty of the market. CBS, for example, had the privilege of broadcasting the Thanksgiving NFL game recently – the Cowboys vs the Chiefs – to 57.23m Americans. The UEFA Champions League final (which has previously been broadcast free-to-air on YouTube) achieved an estimate global reach of 145m people. Industry estimates put the average NFL game viewership at 17.5m during 2025.

All this is to say that the Oscars ceremony is not a particularly big deal as a TV event, but it is a big deal as a marketing and promotional exercise for the film industry. As such, the news that it is moving from ABC to YouTube has generated disproportionate commentary when compared to the myriad sporting events that have dabbled with YouTube or another streamer. Perhaps that’s because the Oscars ceremony has been broadcast live since 1953, making it one of the most historic annual programmes in the televisual canon. But back in 1953, the Academy had a crucial advantage: there were about 100 regional television stations in the United States, and in each area viewers could tune into just a handful of them. The cultural whip-hand still belonged to cinema, and so the studios, with the collusion of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, utilised the new, increasingly popular TV platform to promote the importance of their cinematic projects. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the FCC’s deregulation of the industry, allowing stations to broadcast outside their geographic range, created a proper mass-market for cable TV.

And so, by the 1980s TV had become something very different. Not only were there now over 1,000 stations operating in the US, but they were able to be programmed much more widely. By 1990, there were 80-odd cable channels. Here in the UK we had the same linear progression: 1-3 BBC channels between 1936 and 1982, up to 4 with the additions of ITV and Channel 4 until 1997, expansion in the satellite era to 25 channels in 1998, expansion of digital and satellite to 60 channels in 2013, leading the UK’s total channel count to over 500 in 2020 (though it may be starting to contract now). What’s clear is that technological advances allowed the market to democratise rapidly, turning television from a self-contained dream to something radically different. Television stopped being a distribution mechanism, and became a medium. (Just as, I argued recently, has happened with podcasts). Even though a TV show distributed on Netflix is technologically entirely dissimilar to an episode of Bonanza, they are both called ‘television’.

I think the same thing is in the early days of happening with YouTube. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people increasingly see YouTube as an alternative to streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video. It is already, for my money, the world’s most powerful social network, and the amount of high-to-medium quality content being hosted there is increasing rapidly. Some broadcasters – like the New York Times or the BBC – still treat it as a neutral platform, and host partial content there, enhancing its baseline ecosystem. Other broadcasters – like ITV, Channel 4 and TelevisaUnivision – have struck deals to include their programming on the platform. And so it starts to resemble the massive station expansion that happened in US television with the cable boom of the 1970s.

The new element in the mix is the social factor. Television, in the 1950s through to the 1990s, had plenty of guardrails to prevent insurgents and disrupters from entering the market. Much of the ability of the media to protect itself was predicated on technological limitations, such as radio frequency, which meant that the process of acquiring this limited real estate was fraught and competitive. But the desire line of the media has ploughed its course, and in the internet age there are far fewer constrictions for potential broadcasters. This means that the Oscars ceremony on YouTube will compete with Oscar Guy Here’s live reactions and commentary. It means that the BBC will compete with ABC and with MeidasTouch and with TV9 Marathi’s Daily News. The bumpers are down, and the bowling ball is pinging down the alley. There will be gutterballs on all sides: YouTube may find that a small audience for the Oscars does not justify the investment required to broadcast such a lavish event, just as tiny YouTube channels, who prospered in the early days of decentralisation, may find themselves squeezed out by the land-grab being conducted by well-heeled media monoliths.

And this is the counterbalance that has consistently occurred with democratisation of the media. The internet is invented and suddenly a bunch of people launch wildly profitable and influential blogs. But, soon enough, the major publications realise that they can do the same thing on a far bigger scale, and they squeeze the bloggers out of their own market. You can repeat that same process with podcasts, which disrupted radio, briefly, before being restrained by rapid consolidation. YouTube has been slow to be reined in – possibly because the commercial interests of so many potential anti-disrupters have been predicated on retaining the primacy of cable TV. But since it launched in 2005, the platform has grown and grown, booming in the 2010s. In 2016 an estimated 100m new videos were added; by 2023 that number had risen to 800m. It may well now drop-off (there is a suggestion it has decreased to about half-a-trillion annual uploads in 2025) which is totally natural. After all 800m videos in a year is not a sustainable amount of content to be producing. It creates an imbalance, where most new videos must get only 0-100 views, thus reducing the latent sense of possibility in the platform.

Because democratisation moves hand-in-hand with disappointment. When blogs seemed like a surefire route to success, thousands were being launched every week. Now, when they seem like a dead-end, no-one is using them. The same process will, naturally, happen with Substack – there has been a great influx, precipitated by a boom in payouts and a frustration with Elon Musk’s Twitter, but when the audiences and revenue start to dry up for 99% of creators, attitudes will change. In recent weeks we have seen publications, like the New Yorker and the Financial Times, launching projects on Substack. The democratisation process leads to consolidation, and with Substack the cycle is happening at a speed that would make your Peloton instructor whoop with joy.

With YouTube it has been slow, but my sense is that 2026 will be the year that YouTube starts to stand-up as a competitor to television. The Oscars won’t move to YouTube until 2029 (if there is a 2029) and I have a nagging suspicion that, by then, far more channels and stations will be natively broadcasting via YouTube. Just as desire lines show us the routes that people want to take, so too do constructed pathways force amblers into a predictable, controllable direction. Broadcasters are starting to pave over these desire lines, taking viewers where they want to go – but only on their terms.

Follow me on Bluesky.

Regular Frigest readers will know that I have been struggling manfully through Dan Brown’s latest Robert Langdon thriller, The Secret of Secrets, these past few weeks. They will be relieved, then, to hear that I have now finished the book.

I have quite a high tolerance for trash and persevered through this franchise even when it was clear that the qualit…

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