March 31, 2011
Fight Back!
Last December and January a group of extremely dedicated bloggers and activists assembled an e-reader – Fight Back! - collecting some of the best writings related to the student protests.
Dan Hancox did huge amounts of spadework, but Laurie Penny, Guy Aitchison, Siraj Datoo, Cailean Gallagher, Aaron Peters, Anthony Barnett and Niki Seth-Smith all made huge contributions too.
I – on the other hand – was mostly useless, dealing rather badly with a relationship breakdown whilst engaging in some hardcore academic navel gazing. Nonetheless, the others were kind enough to put my name on the cover, which I didn’t really deserve at all.
The original e-reader ran to 350 pages with contributions from 43 authors (one of them being myself, where I did actually contribute something semi-useful in the form of a chapter). It picked up a staggering 13,000 downloads in its first four weeks. Thanks to this enormous demand, Fight Back! is now being launched as a proper book.
Here’s the press release, for your information.
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Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest
Tasha Bell, 16, describes her experience in a kettle: “The police have pushed us from the top of the road to the bottom, using their thick lines, their horses and their batons. The crowd has thickened, and now I’m not on the front line anymore I’m deep in the middle. I have no control. I can feel my phone vibrating and I’m trying to move my arm to get it but I can’t.”
Joanna Biggs (LRB) describes the UCL occupation: “I hear words like ‘alert’, ‘critique’, ‘offensive’ and even ‘Marxism’. At the edges of the room students sit around circular tables hunched over their laptops, as if they knew how much they look like the photogenic Harvard students of The Social Network.”
Laurie Penny in “You Say You Want a Revolution”: “There can be no question that the conditions are right for a youth movement. The young people of Britain are suffering brutal, insulting socio-economic oppression. There are over a million young people of working age not in education, employment or training, which is a polite way of saying “up shit creek without a giro”.
For review copies, interviews, or for details of the London launch event on 6 April, contact the publishing team on fightback@opendemocracy.net // 07824 807 142 // 07552 569 196
March 23, 2011
Deep Pathologies
According to Liberal Conspiracy:
“The TUC held a 60-second ad contest, with a theme of public spending cuts, last month and received a record-breaking 41 entries.
Fourteen entries were shortlisted – many of which will be shown on the big screen in Hyde Park at the March for the Alternative.”
This is the winner:
I hope you will join me in agreeing that it is absolutely terrible.
What, exactly, is the video’s message? That ordinary people are in the position of pre-pubescent infants? If so, that’s hardly a very flattering portrayal. Indeed why exactly is this a father-daughter relationship at all? Are the makers of the video implying that our rulers and masters stand in relation to us as controlling parents – more precisely, exploitative and abusive parents? Come to think of it, who is the father figure supposed to represent, exactly? A banker? The Government? If these are metaphors, they are mixed indeed.
And if that weren’t all bad enough, there’s the bombshell closing slogan: “Don’t burden your kids with a lifetime of debt – Oppose the cuts”.
I had to think for a good few minutes to figure out exactly what this was supposed to mean . For it appeared to make no sense at all. But I now think the reasoning is supposed to be as follows: if we force the next generation to bear the brunt of austerity measures now, that is effectively saddling our children with the effects of debt, manifested through the cuts, and that’s not fair, so we must oppose the cuts, so as to prevent the effects of the debt, as experienced via the impact of cuts.
Which is not exactly snappy. But what is worse, the Coalition response is likely to be far more effective, to wit: we quite agree that we must not burden out children with a lifetime of debt! Indeed that’s precisely why we are making these cuts – to bring down the debt!
On every level this video is a disaster. Yet apparently it will be screened at the end of Saturday’s major anti-cuts march in London. Which very much presses the outstanding question: how is it that such a bad video could not only be dreamed up and filmed, but then selected by the TUC as their prize-winner and flagship piece of propaganda?
It would be nice to explain this away as merely the work of “iPhone-wielding wonks“. That it is merely the product of the mental narrowness exhibited by those who spend a lot of time in Westminster, but very little time meeting real people and their real political concerns.
Yet I strongly suspect there’s a deeper pathology at work here. Namely, that many on the left are frankly uninterested in clarity, accuracy or political efficacy. What they are interested in is lumping all their preoccupations together in one ungainly amalgamation of thinly veiled incoherence, and then shoving it down the throats of passers-by whilst expecting them to happily agree and acquiesce.
So, for example, it doesn’t matter whether the father figure is supposed to represent a greedy banker or the Government. Because in the minds of rather a lot of over-enthusiastic and naive leftists, there’s basically no difference between the two anyway. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if depicting ordinary working people as exploited children is offensive to ordinary people and thus strategically stupid. Because what takes priority is not strategy, but coming up with a (supposedly) funny dig at the powers that be (whoever they might be), regardless of whether it alienates the constituency that needs to be convinced.
In short, the point of the video appears not to be the promotion of a well-thought-out political strategy to fight the cuts. Its point appears to be an enthusiastic thumping of the political drum with unreflective self-assured and self-righteous pride. The pathology runs deep: so deep that people involved in political activism can not only come up with it, but that the TUC can in turn endorse a video which shrieks of an incoherence likely to cash out in practical political suicide.
Welcome to politics on the left. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
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Indeed what makes it all even more shocking is that there are manifestly better videos on offer, and yet which were passed over for the big prize.
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UPDATE – Here’s how to do it properly (nsfw):
February 16, 2010
Taking Negative Campaigning to Strange New Places
There’s been something wrong with all the Tory campaign posters so far, even before their myriad and amusing spoofings.
Take the “We Can’t Go On Like This” line, first seen accompanying David Cameron’s shiny airbrushed forehead. Rather than a reason to vote Conservative, it reads like the first stage of a relationship break-up. Almost as bad as “It’s not you, it’s me”, but somewhere above “If you liked it, then you shudda putta ring on it”.
Either way, Cameron’s serious-but-friendly-and-look-I’m-not-wearing-a-tie expression hardly invites the electorate to fall in love.
Last week there were the tasteful “R.I.P OFF” gravestones, taking a mooted proposal, dishonestly elevating it into Labour policy, and turning the morally complex issue of end-of-life care into a macabre political football. But again, the message was hardly “here’s a reason to vote Conservative”. It was more “OOOOHHHH be SCARED, evil Gordon is coming to steal YOUR MONEY when you’re DEAD!”
This week we’re greeted by the “I’ve never voted Tory but…” campaign.
The most incredible thing about this is that the Conservatives are practically admitting that they are a rubbish party, hence why people don’t normally vote for them. The slogan fits the model of “I’ve never licked steaming dog crap before, but I suppose if that’s the only way to save the babies from the baby-grinder…”
I imagine CCHQ thought this would be a clever way to entice new voters. You know, decontaminating the Nasty Party brand by claiming that Ordinaries can vote Tory too. “Conservative Voters: not just climate-change-denying, EU-obsessed, Thatcherite troglodytes wearing tweed!”, or something to that effect.
Yet the negative framing of the slogan may inadvertently prompt people to remember why they didn’t vote Tory the last 3 times. Either way, it tells you something about the Party’s state of self-belief that they admit on their own campaign posters that people think they’re rubbish.
Of course, there’s another good reason why all the Tory posters have been negative, focusing attention on Labour’s failings. Because for as long as the Tories do that, they don’t have to talk about their plans to slash spending and crater the economic recovery, give tax breaks to millionaires, implement incoherent plans to benefit wealthy families at the expense of the poor, their inability to use statistics, or any of the other concrete policy areas that get the party into so much trouble whenever they open their mouths.
Whether this approach will be enough to discourage voters from asking serious questions about Dave and Co for another three months is a big question. This election is Dave’s to lose. And judging by the posters, his party knows it.
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Personally, I think CCHQ should just go with this from now on. It’s to the point, honest, and pretty much spoof-proof.
February 10, 2010
F*** Off
Another day, another Tory advertising campaign.
This one is particularly distasteful.
The Tories are claiming that their posters target a new “death tax” proposed by Labour. The problem is, Health Secretary Andy Burnham has outright denied that Labour are proposing any such thing.
By contrast, I’ve laid out my reasons for opposing the Tories’ own tax inheritance tax cuts for millionaires on numerous occasions.
So let’s all get to work spoofing the latest campaign and making sure people know the facts about how the Tories want to give tax breaks to millionaires whilst drastically cutting public spending.
I like this early make over, hosted by Clifford Singer of mydavidcameron.com, which hits the nail on the head:
In similar vein, here’s my take:
You can make your own – and see other people’s efforts – here.
The original poster has already received a very poor reception from Murdoch-owned Sky News and even The Spectator.
With the abject failure of the airbrushed “We Can’t Go On Like This” poster campaign, one has to wonder if the Tories have made a terrible mistake.
Although they wanted to focus attention on Labour policies, the opportunity is now rife to turn the spotlight on Tory inheritance tax plans. Not least because Labour isn’t proposing a £20,000 “death tax” levy at all.
By contrast, the Tory proposal of tax breaks for the richest 3% of estates in a time of fiscal tightening is surely unwise. If this spoof campaign goes viral like the last one, then Conservative’s own inheritance tax plans are going to be put under repeated public scrutiny. And that won’t serve them well.
The promise of tax breaks for the rich may have gone down well in 2007. But this is 2010. Three years is a very long time in politics.
January 15, 2010
Sign O’ The Times
OK I know I’m argument avoiding on two threads. I will hopefully get round to replying this weekend, although I’m at the Fabian New Year Conference all day tomorrow. I have made an initial reply to Giles regarding tax avoidance here though.
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Giles at Freethinking Economist likes to fight the good fight of the optimists versus the miserabilists (see also here and here). I’ll confess I’m normally more inclined to the miserabilist camp. Giles tends to emphasise things like the historical growth in living standards for ordinary people, that wealth is increasingly less concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, and that child mortality has been consistently falling for decades.
He’s right about all these things.
But I tend to wonder if we’ve peaked, and it’s all downhill from around here. What with oil running out, global climate catastrophe, and so forth.
Having said that, some things are indisputably better. Ever increasing social acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and other (for want of a much better word) “alternative” sexual lifestyles is an example that the optimists definitely have on their side.
In the early 1960s, homosexuality was illegal in this country. And it would be naive to think that intolerance of gay, bi, transsexual and transvestite people has ceased to exist. (“Gay” is still a commonly used derogatory term, and I bet schoolchildren up and down the land remain as virulently homophobic as they were in my day).
But who could imagine this advert being made even 10, let alone 20 or 30 years ago?
Which just goes to show, some things do change for the better.
November 20, 2009
The Left, The Right, and Advertising
I’ve edited this post slightly to make it tighter, and to incorporate an aspect of Giles’s comment below the original.
There are two adverts currently doing the rounds that really get on my nerves.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely heard of Twitter).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will actually encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
Which leads me to my substantive point. I hate advertising. A quick summary of why: it inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need (cf. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society). This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage (indeed, it does lead to useful economic activity and create demand in the economy, so right now could have lots of advantages). But for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot live happy or fulfilled lives without the junk that advertising shoves down our throats all day every day.
Furthermore, because so much advertising is based on distortion, misrepresentation and outright lying, the general effect is the successful and pervasive dissemination of bullshit, dishonesty and manipulation. And I think we are significantly the worse for that.
And this is a point where I think people on “the left” can broadly be said to part company with “the right”. The former will tend to think there is something both intrinsically dubious in the practices of modern advertising, and undesirable in its effects. The latter will tend to think this is a bit silly: advertising is (on one conception) simply the process of rational economic actors seeking to maximise their utility by making other rational economic actors aware, or desirous, of their products. It thus prompts mutually beneficial exchanges, with create likewise beneficial effects for wider society. Or (on a related but different conception), that advertising is just something that human beings left to their own devices as free individuals will end up engaged in, and not something to be unduly concerned about – or at least, not so concerned as to think people’s lives are negatively impacted to the extent that the civil and market freedoms of advertisers ought to be curtailed in the name of any individual or social good.
If that’s right, an interesting consequence seems to follow. Insofar as the strength of hostility towards modern advertising does roughly track left-right divisions, this implies that being on “the left” is about more than simply having a preference for greater equality within societies (which tends to be how it’s delineated). Instead, thoughts about what kinds of practices we should be concerned about, and how those practices influence people’s psychology and well-being (and whether they have significant influences at all) seem pertinent too.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely heard of Twitter).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will actually encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
Which leads me to my substantive point. I hate advertising. A quick summary of why: it inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need (cf. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society). This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage (indeed, it does lead to useful economic activity and create demand in the economy, so right now could have lots of advantages). But for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot live happy or fulfilled lives without the junk that advertising shoves down our throats all day every day.
Furthermore, because so much advertising is based on distortion, misrepresentation and outright lying, the general effect is the successful and pervasive dissemination of bullshit, dishonesty and manipulation. And I think we are significantly the worse for that.
And this is a point where I think people on “the left” can broadly be said to part company with “the right”. The former will tend to think there is something both intrinsically dubious in the practices of modern advertising, and undesirable in its effects. The latter will tend to think this is a bit silly: advertising is (on one conception) simply the process of rational economic actors seeking to maximise their utility by making other rational economic actors aware, or desirous, of their products. It thus prompts mutually beneficial exchanges, with create likewise beneficial effects for wider society. Or (on a related but different conception), that advertising is just something that human beings left to their own devices as free individuals will end up engaged in, and not something to be unduly concerned about – or at least, not so concerned as to think people’s lives are negatively impacted to the extent that the civil and market freedoms of advertisers ought to be curtailed in the name of any individual or social good.
If that’s right, an interesting consequence seems to follow. Insofar as the strength of hostility towards modern advertising does roughly track left-right divisions, this implies that being on “the left” is about more than simply having a preference for greater equality within societies (which tends to be how it’s delineated). Instead, thoughts about what kinds of practices we should be concerned about, and how those practices influence people’s psychology and well-being (and whether they have significant influences at all) seem pertinent too.
October 31, 2009
To the barricades
Blogging is light because I have a million and one things to do, and I am stressed. Maybe there will be a post tomorrow about how people might think about “democracy”, and just what that might be. Maybe, if I can finally sort-out exactly what the hell I think is wrong with Leo Strauss’ critique of historicism…
Today, however, I want to call you all to the barricades (of teh internets). Several months ago I asked readers to submit complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority regarding an advertising campaign by Maximuscle Protein. The ASA upheld the complaints made against Maximuscle, banned the company from repeating such an advertising campaign, and accordingly Maximuscle adverts are now far more toned-down (no pun intended). We’ll never know whether it was the campaign emanating from this blog that made the difference, but I like to believe it was.
In that spirit of optimism, I’m going to ask everyone to submit complaints about another advertising campaign, this time by Sketchers Shoes. The campaign claims that Sketcher’s “Shape-up” shoes can “Promote Weight Loss, Tone Muscle, Improve Posture”. Indeed, these incredible shoes are allegedly so good that they allow you to “get in shape without setting foot in a gym”.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a PDF with the advertising claims, and then attempts to vaguely justify them.
Now I’ll admit that it’s probably possible that these shoes do tone muscle, and maybe even to a noticeable and significant extent. But that they burn a significant number of calories to the point where they can generate weight-loss, and to such an extent that one can get in shape without “setting foot in a gym”, i.e. doing any actual physically demanding exercise? I find that very hard to believe.
Obviously, I’m no expert on physical exercise. But from my limited knowledge, weight-loss occurs from burning more calories than are consumed. I find it very unlikely that a pair of shoes can cause a person to burn sufficient calories that this translates into meaningful weight loss (meaningful being “getting in shape without stepping foot in a gym”).
Of course, I could be totally wrong. These shoes could be truly revolutionary. But if they are not, then this advert shouldn’t be allowed, insofar as it misleads consumers into thinking that Sketchers shoes can promote weight-loss on a level comparable to conventional regular physical exercise.
So I’m going to ask you to join me in complaining to the ASA (via this form) along the following lines: ask the ASA to find out whether Sketchers’ claims about weight-loss and calorie-burning can be backed up by actual scientific evidence, to the extent that wearing such shoes can genuinely replace conventional physical exercise; if Sketchers’ shoes can’t do that, ask the ASA to ban the advert on the grounds that it is unacceptably misleading.
You may be wondering why I care about this. Well, I don’t have anything against Sketchers specifically. And I don’t really care if silly people buy these shoes thinking believing they’ll get thin. What bothers me is the world of advertising and marketing more generally.
We live in an age of constant bullshit, where we are told and sold lies on a daily basis. Modern consumerism largely rests upon selling people rubbish that they don’t need, on the back of false and exaggerated claims which are designed to inculcate desires as much as to satisfy them.
I see two things as broadly resulting from this. One is the ever-growing predominance of quick-fix culture; don’t go to a gym and put in hours of hard, boring exercise, or deny yourself nice-tasting food so as to lose weight – just get a pair of shoes that burn that fat for you! (Except of course, they probably don’t). For a whole host of reasons, I really dislike quick-fix culture. The other resuly is a hollowing-out of language as the mundane and trivial is described in terms that should be reserved for the meaningful and important – resulting in the debasement of values as distinctions between quality and trash are eroded away. These phenomena go beyond marketing and advertising, of course – but they have a lot to do with the growth of aggressive consumerism and the extent to which politics and wider culture increasingly emulated marketting. People may say the Bill Hicks sketch is cliched, but I like it.
So for me, complaining about Sketchers to the ASA is my own, small, personal resistance to the tide of inane, debasing, bullshit which informs so much of what is wrong with modern culture and society. Feel free to add your own insignificant weight to mine.
