The Bluestocking, vol 96: Merry Bleedin' Christmas
Happy Friday!
It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, and I don't know about you, but I am immensely looking forward to the toughest year of my life finally drawing to a close. Why has it been so bad? It's hard to say. I haven't suffered a major bereavement, been sacked or got divorced (although there is a fortnight left, I guess). I got a chest infection in January and never really recovered, hobbling through the year feeling stuffy and tired and perpetually behind with work. In retrospect, I think it was an error to subscribe to the "productivity" tag on Medium, because now I get daily emails with links to pieces called things like "How getting up at 4am turned me into a work MACHINE" and "Is your relationship dying because you work too hard?" (Mixed messages, guys.)
The political climate didn't help, either. Regular readers will know of my attempt to chart the Men Driven Mad By Brexit (symptoms include: wild, conspiratorial tweeting, random outbursts of anger, accusing people on the other side of being part of the Deep State). But the truth is that it's driven all of us a bit mad. As I wrote in February (ha), British politics has felt stuck since the referendum result. For normal people, there's the option of simply tuning out. But if you work in or around Westminster, you are forced to watch the slow-motion car crash up close. I've found that hard.
Still, not everything is terrible. This week I was coughing my way through some interviews for a radio series going out early next year, and I'm (so far at least) really proud of it. There are now 70,000 words of the book in existence, some of them even publishable. And on Monday, I pre-recorded the Christmas Day edition of Woman's Hour, in which I got to quiz Prue Leith about how she disguises sprouts as cabbage by shredding them. (It's on at 10am on the big day; apologies to those of you I know in real life who might suddenly go: bloody hell, has Helen broken into my kitchen?)
Anyway - see you in January -
What's Really Driving the Gilets Jaunes? Facebook
"What’s happening right now in France isn’t happening in a vacuum. The Yellow Vests movement — named for the protesters’ brightly colored safety vests — is a beast born almost entirely from Facebook. And it’s only getting more popular. Recent polls indicate the majority of France now supports the protesters. The Yellow Vests communicate almost entirely on small, decentralized Facebook pages. They coordinate via memes and viral videos. Whatever gets shared the most becomes part of their platform.
Due to the way algorithm changes made earlier this year interacted with the fierce devotion in France to local and regional identity, the country is now facing some of the worst riots in many years — and in Paris, the worst in half a century.
This isn’t the first time real-life violence has followed a viral Facebook storm and it certainly won’t be the last. Much has already been written about the anti-Muslim Facebook riots in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and the WhatsApp lynchings in Brazil and India. Well, the same process is happening in Europe now, on a massive scale. Here’s how Facebook tore France apart."
Weirdly, some on the British Left seemed initially convinced that the Gilets Jaunes protesters were the French branch of Corbynmania, an analysis which looked hopeful even before polling revealed that the top two political preferences among them were a) Marine Le Pen; b) did not vote.
Anyway, a far more interesting take on the phenomenon comes from Buzzfeed's Ryan Broderick, who explains the fractured, decentralised nature of the protests by showing that there is no "central command". Instead, local protests arose on small, closed Facebook groups, which were heavily promoted to users as part of Facebook's attempts to counter "fake news". (Local = trustworthy, they thought.) For me, this is yet more evidence that Facebook is too big to live. Its algorithm is absurdly powerful, its audience are often not sophisticated news consumers, and its newsfeed changes often have (negative) unintended consequences.
Quick links:
Lynn Nottage, author of SWEAT, sounds interesting. She's also doing an all-women-of-colour Richard II at the Globe in the New Year.
I enjoy this list of 52 things the author has learned every year.
The replies to this NYT tweet asking people for their experiences of petty crime in London are everything. "Someone held the door open for me when I was still ten feet away and then I had to run and pretend I was grateful. I was sweaty and fuming."
I will admit I did not watch the advert in the SquattyPotty story from the last newsletter. That was an error. It might be the greatest film of the 21st century. It's like The Princess Bride, if the Princess Bride were more about good defecation habits.
This piece by Toby Young on the worst year of his life is a minor masterpiece. It keeps edging so so close to getting you to feel sorry for him, and then snatches it away. For example: he notes that freelance journalism doesn't pay very well, then adds: "Poor Caroline has had to take a part-time job to keep the wolf from the door." <clutches chest> Your wife... has to... work? <fetches smelling salts> Then there's the bit where he admits that his love of "banter" often used to result in his children getting so upset they burst into tears and ran away. Things are better now they are old enough to be rude back to him.
The weary, patient customer support people of Xbox Live explaining why you can't have "Hugh G. Aynis" as your Gamertag are extremely cheering.
Guest gif: How I plan to land on my sofa in 10 days' time.
Happy Christmas, and see you in the New Year...