ST ELSEWHERE
During the time before the end of the world as we knew it, at the height of the golden age of globalisation, the thing that seemed to unite all mankind was the desire to be elsewhere. Indeed this issue is – as with all our Winter issues – dedicated to the art of travel writing. If you imagine any social scenario from our recent past, you will find that without the desire for, or benefits of, travel, few people, or things would be left in the picture. The internet was supposed to negate geography; in reality, it turned it into another currency of exchange, maybe the most commonly traded commodity of the new millennium. The Irish gap-year backpacker wanted to be smoking opium in the highlands of Thailand, whereas an aspirant traveller from Thailand fancied being in a dark and dank pub in Ireland, waiting quietly for her Guinness to settle.
In the age of globalisation, the desire for elsewhere meant a boom for tourism on the back of cheap fuel and exploding volumes of global trade. As you might have heard, the pandemic has meant a tenfold increase in the cost of shipping containers out of Asia. I recently consulted an expert in international logistics for some answers. “But the price of fuel hasn’t gone up ten times, has it?” I asked. He explained that a big portion of containerised freight piggybacks on passenger flights, so the lockdowns and travel bans have meant no passenger flights for the freight industry to ride on. This loss of access to all that capacity is the main reason for the massive scale of price hikes and not the relatively small rise in oil prices.
Aside from the pure economics of globalisation, culturally speaking the past 30 or so years were characterised by a global outbreak of FOMO. Whether by a few or several thousand miles, everybody was agitated by the thought of missing out on something happening somewhere else. Better weather and nightclubs, rare consumer goods, exotic food, better sex, spiritual fulfilment – you name it, the better kind of everything was elsewhere. Even though globalisation delivered on its promise of bringing everything to everyone everywhere, it found that oftentimes we weren’t home when it attempted to deliver, because globalisation also fired in us the desire for other places. During the lockdown, opinion polls showed the British longed to get away from Britain on a holiday abroad much more than seeing their beloved granny.
The Americans or Europeans starved of spirituality headed to Indian ashrams and the sub-Saharan Africans starved of economic opportunities headed north. Sex tourism took middle-aged Western men to Thailand and women to West Africa. Middle-class Russians, Brazilians and Indians found an annual shopping spree at Harrods and Selfridges most refreshing. Needless to say the boom in globetrotting was not confined to five-star hotels, airlines and luxury cruises. People smugglers also found business opportunities exploiting a far more desperate class of would-be passenger willing to pay high fees and risk life and limb in dinghies in the Mediterranean or walks across deserts. It’s safe to assume that not all in this class were motivated purely by the pull of whim or fancy, but also by the push of drug cartels in South and Central America or the numerous wars in the Middle East and Africa and the failed states they left in their wake, most notably Libya, which until recently hosted open-air slave markets.
In his short story “The Dinner Party”, American writer Joshua Ferris, a forensic dissector of nowness, tells the tale of a young and restless couple in their early thirties. They are good-looking, well-educated and work in creative industries. Heavy lashings of irony and postmodern intertextual humour garnish every dish that they are preparing for a dinner party, planned that evening for another couple. The hosts consider their guests as their social inferiors; impoverished in the rarest metal of that age, a form of social capital known colloquially as cred, the Bitcoin of its age.
Given that the hosts of “The Dinner Party” inherently know they are cooler than the incoming guests, throwing the tiresome dinner party is an obligation, more an act of charity than anyone’s idea of fun. So much so that the hosts spend the whole time counting all the predictable ways that their anticipated company will be filled with boring well-rehearsed routines. Yet as time goes on and the guests fail to show, the hosts grow more agitated. Listening to them just a few minutes before one would have guessed they would have been relieved by the no-show, but not a bit of it. Finally the man, in a moment of rage, drives over to the guests’ apartment to wake up the losers who he assumes might “have fallen asleep watching Kung Fu Panda”. To his horror, he discovers that not only are the guests awake, but they are hosting a party of their own with some of their mutual friends present. Horror of horrors, they even have celebrity guests. The discovery of being held in disdain is an open wound into which the salt of FOMO is applied with cruel expertise.
The millennial and Gen-Z hipster is often ridiculed by older generations for having a fragile ego, for being a snowflake. This is an ignorant generalisation. After all, not every generation is burdened with the same pressures and challenges. This most observed and recorded generation inevitably has developed to be highly sensitive because for them, giving and receiving attention in an economy in which attention is currency, is akin to a desert dweller discerning the scent of rain long before it arrives. Their social media profile is their main currency of social exchange. By the way, this is anything but unprecedented; historically, the idea of attaching extremely high value to one’s social standing can be traced in many ancient blood feuds and so-called honour killings in traditional societies from Corsica to Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan. In these societies the threat of losing “face” in the eyes of the peer group is a form of social control. Social prestige is frequently more valuable than any other asset, including one’s life.
Facebook was born of the digitisation of a systemic form of sexual harassment of young female students at Harvard by a group of male techies who had a lot of success with computers and little in attracting a mate. What’s more passive-aggressive than rating women into two groups of hot or not, considering that neither group would date you? Amplify this form of coercive control several billion times and give it access to the best science and technology enabled by an abundance of finance and you have the potency in place to create great generational harm at a global scale.
In October, former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen, who had been publishing leaked internal documents from Facebook in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, came to London to give testimony to the British parliament, which is looking at the responsibility of the platform for causing vulnerable young people to self-harm or commit suicide. In the same week, Ben Rhodes, the former advisor to President Obama, called Facebook “an existential danger to democracy and a global public safety hazard”. It was then revealed that Facebook had deliberately amplified religious hatred in India, a country in which lynching of minorities is a reality.
What has been the response from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Being elsewhere of course. In a presentation featuring the black-clad CEO supported by a cheering bevy of obsequious lackies including our very own former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, he set out a radical new vision. A cynic might suspect that he is creating a distraction in the form of a rebrand (we have to get used to calling Facebook Meta) and the promise of a new product category in the form of virtual- and augmented-reality functionality, but one that might take ten years to build. Despite the styling inspired by Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg is closer to Elon Musk’s generation of tech bosses who in their presentations deliver far more promises about future products than actual products. Platform capitalism is much more about finance than engineering or technology. The week when Haugen was testifying in Washington and London, Facebook’s profits for the quarter were a record $9 billion. This is exactly why monopolies are so dangerous: their customers have nowhere else to go.
The one ray of sunshine in this gloomy picture is the solution offered by the likes of Lina Khan (interviewed in the TANK Winter issue 2018), who made a splash by suggesting that laws once used to curtail the monopolies of railway barons should be used to defang digital platforms. The British-born legal academic, not even 30 years old when we spoke to her, represented a radical outsider point of view in Washington’s corridors of power, so imagine our shock and delight when she was picked by president Biden to chair the US Treasury’s powerful trade commission.
To misquote the French philosopher of the mostly German Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser: “everything that looks like culture the night before, is revealed to be economics the next morning.”
Here, in these pages of course, you needn’t worry about the booming cost and other challenges of travel. Hoping that the flame of wanderlust still burns, you can take a trip around the world in these 256 pages without even generating extra carbon dioxide, except for the hyperventilation caused by the really exciting passages. Masoud Golsorkhi