The Bluestocking 361: Five Years On

Who Goes Culture-War?

Happy Friday!

We are just about to hit the fifth anniversary of the first British lockdown, and so I have been thinking about the lingering after-effects of Covid. Not just in the longterm sickness numbers—although those are terrible, and the politics of reducing them are fraught—but the psychological consequences of that prolonged period of isolation. Five years on, it’s clear that there were profound effects from driving so many people away from their loved ones, their communities and their workplaces . . . and towards their screens. Covid might have been a respiratory disease, but the pandemic era profoundly affected our brains.

You might not have heard of Neil Oliver, but he’s one of those people who has drifted away from a successful mainstream career into the strange realms of conspiracism. He used to present Coast on the BBC, but he’s been a vaccine sceptic for a while, and frequently hosts guests with some eyebrow-raising views about “Zionists” and how the elite is run by “Jewish mobs.” In response, GB News moved some of his output online to avoid the scrutiny of the television regulator, Ofcom.

I was recently reading an article by a former friend of Oliver’s, who can’t square his current persona with the man he once knew, and therefore wonders whether he really knew Oliver at all. “He was intelligent, curious, funny, irreverent, and self-deprecating – seemingly the antithesis of the grizzled bloviator who now often pops up, occasionally on my social media feeds, showering the airwaves with his views and wild theories.”

I’ve now heard multiple versions of this puzzlement, expressed about multiple people. Covid is a part of it. And social media. And a host of personal factors that come up again and again.

Sam Harris on Elon Musk immediately comes to mind: “The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention,” Harris wrote in January. “But his engagement with Twitter/X transformed him—to a degree seldom seen outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology. If Elon is still the man I knew, I can only conclude that I never really knew him.”

Or what about the former academic collaborators of Matt Goodwin? “The picture they paint is not of an ideologue,” James Ball wrote last August, “but instead of a man whose ambitions were not met rapidly enough by the genuine success he had in his career — sending him veering off course and radically changing his politics and his perspective.”

Or how about Jon Ronson and Adam Buxton on Glinner’s transformation from comedy writer to culture warrior? “I was kind of obsessed with our mutual friend who let it take over his life to the extent that he lost all of his work and his family,” Ronson said last March.

The whole of Doppelganger, Naomi Klein’s book on Naomi Wolf, addresses this subject. She suggests “a kind of equation¹ for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like this: Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right wing meltdown².”

All of those elements are present in the Neil Oliver story: a big ego, real success, a sketchy attention to detail combined with a desire for attention (leading to embellished anecdotes, such as passing off a Woody Allen line as his own). Add to the checklist a sense of grievance—the feeling that snooty elites were looking down on him. (Oliver had success as a pop-archaeologist presenting Coast, but attracted grumbles from established academic historians when he became a “face” of BBC factual programming. In a similar way, the pseudo-archaeologist Graeme Hancock is obsessed with his alleged marginalisation at the hands of Big Trowel, but . . . he’s the one with all the bestsellers and a Netflix show, which most academic archaelogists can only dream of having.)

Earlier this week, David Runciman and I hosted a screening of the 1976 film Network, followed by a Q&A. (It’ll be released a Past Present Future podcast soon.) The first question he asked me was: who does Howard Beale remind you of? And do you think his crack-up is real? My answers were “Kanye West” and “yes.” But Beale is also a premonition of lots of today’s conspiracist and culture war turns.

In midlife, showbiz careers often fade away—as gatekeepers find younger and more fashionable proteges and because audiences want to look at hot people. In their 40s and 50s, people in all fields realise that their career has probably peaked, possibly at somewhat lower an altitude than they thought they would achieve. Or, more basically, they suddenly realise that death isn’t just something that happens to other people—old people—but will happen to them, too.

And then add in social media. The Covid years isolated many people from the Brownian motion of regular society, cooping them up with self-selected groups online. And in isolation, groups have a well-known tendency to drift towards the extremes.

The attention economy, meanwhile, offers huge rewards for saying provocative things (financial and in terms of attention) but the cost is a huge backlash, too. That kind of hate is hard enough for anyone to deal with, let alone a fragile narcissist, a vulnerable oddball or anyone with imposter syndrome. For some, social media can be used as a form of self-harm, like drinking or gambling. It’s even worse than those things, sometimes, because a troubled person can associate themselves with a social cause, and then shrug off any criticism as attacks on The Movement.

My question is this: how many people has this happened to? I suspect that famous people are more likely to “Go Culture War”, because a) they have had previous success, and so their sense of midlife loss is greater; and b) they are better placed to self-harm through social media. But clearly this is not limited to celebrities: most of us know someone who hasn’t been quite the same since 2020.

Reflecting on this has given me more sympathy with the lockdown sceptics—I don’t deny that we needed stringent measures at the time to prevent the NHS from collapsing. But the downsides of those measures were greater than I, or most liberals, acknowledged. (And it’s worth saying that I was one of the Atlantic’s more Covid-relaxed writers, in that I thought mass vaccination should mark the end of the acute phase.) There was a huge pressure not to question any of the scientific consensus on Covid measures, even though the advice changed (on masks, for example) and different countries with different approaches experienced very similar outcomes.

Before the next pandemic, we should think carefully about ways to contain the disease early and efficiently, in the hope that lockdowns won’t be needed. Because, in the words of Joe Rogan: “We lost a lot of people during Covid—and most of them are still alive.”

Helen

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might show this picture of thom yorke to my hairdresser

How To Escape An Iron Lung

Thirty-two years have passed, but I think about that trip a lot. No-one tells you how to be in a band beyond the lift-off period when you can trade newness for attention and you’ve no reason to believe it might not always be like this . . . [Radiohead] were acutely aware, by the end of 1993, that there was a perception problem around the ubiquity of Creep that they might never overcome. My Iron Lung would be the first new song to emerge in the wake of Pablo Honey, and it addressed the problem around Creep using the metaphor of its title. You’re incarcerated in the very thing that’s keeping you alive.

And, for a while, I wondered it that would happen to Radiohead. My worries began to dissipate in May 1994 when they played a one-off gig at the Astoria in London. Something had changed, and it was impossible for anyone who was there to not notice it. It had taken the calm head of an older outsider to save Radiohead from overthinking their way into oblivion.

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Pete Paphides remembers travelling to America with the young Radiohead, and watching them struggle to go from being a one-hit wonder guitar group to . . . well, Radiohead. Not to harp on my genius theme, but—look how important the influence of the producer John Leckie was here.

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Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

The Democrats Have A Man Problem (The Atlantic)

[Ruben] Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state [Arizona] at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said.

The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.”

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My colleague John Henderson is doing some great work on masculinity and politics in America. Here, he talks to Democrats about their “man problem”, which is a version of their “professional class” problem, which is a version of their “scoldy reputation” problem. (His previous piece on the wellness company Hims is also great.)

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Quick Links

1. “The simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.” People can’t tell AI-generated poetry from the human stuff, and actually, they like the AI poetry better, a paper in Nature reports. Although if you tell someone that a poem is AI-generated, they like it less. (h/t to Colin Fraser on X, who did some fun visualisations based on this paper.)

2. Do not “learn to code.” One in four US programming jobs has gone since 2022, the Washington Post reports. One area where AI is really being felt already is programming—now, generating bits of code (or translating from one programming language to another) is a lot easier.

3. “After Musk’s recent baby news, one wit likened it to the old Chinese imperial court, with all its backstabbing and drama, and who knows what Game of Thrones style battle will occur over the future Empire of Mars. As Rod Dreher put it: ‘The “Succession”-style TV drama over Elon’s love children settling his estate after he’s gone is going to run longer than that Indian soap opera that has aired over 16,000 episodes.’” Ed West on the profilically fertile Elon Khan (Substack).

4. Lin Manuel Miranda posted Stephen Sondheim’s notes on Hamilton. This is great writing advice, whatever you’re writing—vary the rhythm, remember what attracted you to the story in the first place (Instagram).

5. You could probably not draw a bicycle from memory. Hat-tip to Tracy for the link.

See you next time! Also please enjoy how my passion is graphic design:

1. This is obviously not how maths works, but hey ho.

2. Naomi Klein is wrong to frame this as a purely rightwing problem (and to her credit, she doesn’t entirely do this in the book). Doppelganger is undoubtedly a good read, but there’s a wincemaking chapter about the Canadian truckers’ protests (QAnonish and BAD, in Klein’s view) and the outcry over mass graves of murdered children at Canadian indigenous children’s homes (anti-colonialist and righteous). Except—come on. Anyone with a passing interest in conspiracist tropes should be wary of lurid accounts of the mass slaughter of babies, cf Jersey and the Satanic panic. And sure enough, no human remains have yet been found in the “mass graves” (although no one disputes that the homes were cruel and neglectful). Looks like Naomi Klein wrote a book about how we fall for conspiracies that confirm our political priors . . . and then validated her thesis, right there on the page.