The Tepid Take

“A seed of professionalism” is the unspoken proverb behind my latest email address. Fifth of its kind, it followed a series of particularly ridiculous, egregious examples that did an excellent job of helping me stand out from the crowd, in exactly the wrong way, when I tried to become an adult. Begone, victoryoverdignity@ymail.com ! Farewell smoothandawsum@yahoo.co.uk ! And let’s not even speak of cledmundo@yahoo.co.uk , a childhood favourite and unexpectedly good portmanteau. I don’t have the foggiest why my young self was such a big fan of Yahoo’s email service; now I despite it. What came afterwards was a professional, name-centric address accompanied by a slightly more casual one inspired by an obscure brand of soap I liked without being as silly as the above. Both of these were Gmail accounts, the service owned and operated by Google that integrates so effortlessly with all their other services. One of these email addresses now more or less forms the glue that interfaces ever...

In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason dissects the challenges facing the late capitalist system and explains how contradictions in its inner workings could lead to its total collapse. One of the key ideas he expresses is that the economies of developed countries are increasingly trying to sell things that we are not used to selling – personal care, basic errand-running, and, most pressingly, information. The sale of things that are infinitely replicable, from machine blueprints to open source software, poses a serious issue for the capitalist system. This is because these “goods” touch on the idea of “zero marginal cost”: the idea that it costs no more to produce 1 copy than it does to produce 1000, and costs for 1 copy trend towards zero as renewable energies grow more efficient. This looks a lot like the onset of what the cool kids called “fully automated luxury communism”: as things steadily require less and less labour value to produce, their costs tend towards zero, and if the theoreti...

This article was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan’s government commissioned a report intended to modernise Britain’s railway system, and to make it profitable for the first time in ages. Victorian “railway mania” had generated some of the most impressive railway routes in Europe, but it had come at a cost: early investment in railway infrastructure had grown and grown, even in areas where it was economically unsustainable. The changing transport habits of the post-war period proved the final straw: by 1963, fully half the train stations in the UK only brought in 2 per cent of the revenue, with many routes running almost empty trains at a heavy loss. This problem, outlined by the report, was not controversial; indeed, it was factual. But it was the solution, proposed by the now infamous Dr Beeching, that proved so radical: closing almost half of the United Kingdom’s railway infrastructure for good. The “ Beeching Axe ” has been loathed by ...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. There are 14 railway terminals in London. That sounds like a lot, even by the standards of London’s 8 million strong population. For context, Beijing has just six terminals between its 21 million people. So if you decide where to live based on the obscure metric of “number of railway terminals per million people”, London is doing really, really well. But it’s such a bother, isn’t it? Making the inconvenient, interchange-laden journey from Liverpool Street to London Bridge, for example, is the price we pay to travel cross-country; changing in Central London is the norm for many a journey, even though it’s expensive, inefficient, and adds to the footfall at stations that are already stereotypically congested. In fact, as is so often the case, there’s actually a pretty sensible explanation for why London ended up with so many railway stations, even by European standards. As pioneers of the industrial revolution, Britain was the ...

I am still trying to catch up with the classics. The other day, I gave The Wire a go for the first time, having never watched it before. While I appreciated the detective story set-up of intrigue and bluster, what really struck me about The Wire was how the police officers on the upper floors were willingly using typewriters to do their work. The first series of The Wire was released in 2002; computers were commonplace but it wasn’t yet kitsch to use a typewriter with added irony or absurd to use one without; the typewriter was on the turn. Now, a standard office not populated with ubiquitous screens – be they desktops or the laptops of the employees themselves – sounds truly ridiculous. Personal computers and the World Wide Web are integral parts of our waking days, they’re how we store information, how we access it, and how we process it. Even books, the standout stalwart in the face of a digital onslaught, are today drafted on computers. This is the sort of truth that we all kn...

We are alarmed, we are all alarmed. Even Francis Fukuyama, who once declared that the neoliberal consensus symbolised the end of history, has refined his beliefs in the face of identity politics and the populist wave. The commentariat as it exists today is happy to decry what it sees as the end of common sense politics, relenting to extremism, the end of a nebulous representative democracy. Of course, this has yet to come to pass, but it’s a tangible fear nonetheless. Today I want to explain why Spain’s Pedro Sanchez is the most brazen exception: why he holds high the torch of social democracy, currently the proudest branch of the Reformist tradition, in the face of increasing political hardship. I want to establish through a brief analysis whether there’s something special about Spain, or whether it’s all down to Sanchez himself, complete with wily consultants and remarkable jawline. Pedro Sanchez has been the Prime Minister of Spain since 2018, when a moción de censura (vote of...

If you visited the Tate last December, you'll have noticed the giant iceblocks out front: their gentle melting a testament to the decidedly un-gentle process of climate change. These resolute bergs, nicked from the Arctic itself, were installed by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, to raise awareness of the precarity of human life on earth. This “ Ice Watch ” could melt away just as easily as all our hopes and dreams, if we don't prevent catastrophic, irreversible climactic change, which is what we're still hurtling towards like some vindictive planet-sized Titanic impersonator. There was something about the frigid blocks that bothered me, though. The installation was sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, not a dangerous organisation in itself, but one built on the back of high-risk financial speculation and investment banking: economic structures symbolising the very weak points in late capitalism that leave us teetering on the edge of climate disaster. The irony (i...