This week I resigned from the Labour Party in disgust. I don’t reach for that shopworn and ignorable phrase, “resigned in disgust”, because it’s easy and I want to knock out a newsletter without too much effort; I use it because I don’t want more eye-catching language to obscure the simple, basic sensation that I experienced on Monday: disgust. Disgust and revulsion; perhaps that’s a better phrase, “resigned in revulsion”.

Late on Monday night, shortly after watching the self-abasement of yet another Labour point-person on TV, I posted a message to our CLP (Constituency Labour Party) Whatsapp group:

This is a hard text to send. I’ll be leaving the party tonight. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know many of you and being made to feel warmly welcomed in the CLP since moving here a few years ago, but today’s events are the limit. When we’re being applauded by Tommy Robinson I think that we have crossed a line.

I hope I’ll be able to return one day. But, for now, that’s it from me.

The one and only previous time that I revolted, disgusted, in a different CLP, I had been talked down by the MP Stella Creasy. That was in the high-heat of Corbyn Labour and what became known as the “antisemitism row”, but which I think is again better served by an older, shopworn phrase that more viscerally captures just how disgusting it was: “Jew-baiting”.

Like many in my party, my first response to the Jew-baiting had been to dismiss it as a transparent and defamatory Right-wing plot, and to reassure myself and others that it was inconceivable that we, the party of empathy and anti-Fascism, could ever be guilty of anything so crass and repugnant. Then came the wide-eyed disavowals from witnesses whom I knew - “no Elio, you’re wrong, it really is happening” - and the reports of Jewish members being called “Zios”, and of pop-up inquisitions in which demands were made of our comrades to identify themselves as “Zionists” or Israelis, and the disgusting episode in which a young, female, aide to the MP was called a “Zionist cum-bucket”, and the damning EHRC report, and the dear leader, Jeremy Corbyn, approving of a revolting image on social media in which naked black people are bent double while Jewish financiers play Monopoly on their backs.

Stella called me at home and received an appalled rant about the Jew-baiting and many other matters besides. “Don’t go”, she said, “stay in the party and fight to get it back. You can do more from inside”. And etcetera and so on with these types of arguments.

There is a symmetry to all this disgust, and revulsion and abhorrence; in both instances the animating quality was what everyone, everywhere now calls “populism”: the unsympathetic, incurious and stupid politics of them-and-us measured, always, against what Slavoj Žižek once described as “the low standards of common sense”. Back then it was Jew-baiting on the Left of the party, now it’s migrant-baiting on the Right.

On Saturday I had attended my last CLP meeting – the AGM. Labour had sent a rep from the regional party along (they’re clearly worried), someone asked about how best to counter the Reform-inspired lies and racism on social media, there was a discussion about effective rebuttal. Forty-eight hours later the Home Secretary climbed to her feet in Parliament and loudly endorsed all the Reform-inspired lies and racism on social media.

Shabana Mahmood’s statement proposed changes to asylum policy that are immoral, will be ineffective, and will further degrade our communities; Stella Creasy is one of those leading an admirable rearguard (alongside my current MP, Tony Vaughan, who has been excellent), and she has critiqued Mahmood’s plans in a Guardian article, I advise reading it.

Mahmood had trailed the statement in her own Guardian article, which had all the intellectual depth of Yoda’s “Fear is the path to the dark side. fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering”, without showing any of the foundational political understanding that you must never, under any circumstances whatsoever, seek to appease the Far-Right, which can never be appeased. “Dark forces are stirring up anger in this country”, Mahmood wrote, “and seeking to turn that anger into hate”. Her statement in Parliament then outlined all the steps she intends to take in order to pander to these “dark forces”; the additional media briefing around the policy was particularly disgusting: how Britain will expropriate the property of refugees, how we will make them pay for sanctuary, how we will pull gold teeth at the border.

The Far-Right embarked on a victory lap, “Far more right wing than the Tories”, posted the influencer Carl Benjamin, “The Labour turn to the right is a godsend…not only will they establish the infrastructure for mass deportations, but they will have normalised it for the British public”.

My first documentary feature, The Asylum (2001), followed an Afghan family who had escaped the Taliban, been terrorised by people traffickers in Ukraine, and was trying to build a new life in Britain. When faced with deportation, the desperate father asked me whether, if he were to commit suicide, his wife and three young children might be given a reprieve; I was twenty-one years old, and I felt an absolute moral obligation to do everything that I could to help them. The threats of deportation had come during a characteristically spiteful campaign against asylum seekers in the Right-wing press, and at a time when the “dark forces” in the British National Party were gaining support. Migrant-baiting is not a new thing, it was happening ten years ago, at the time of the Brexit referendum, it was happening twenty-five years ago, when I was making The Asylum, and it was happening every decade before that.

Labour was in government in 2001, and certain voices on the right of the party started to advocate for harsher treatment of migrants; there was talk about abandoning the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, and an opportunistic Conservative Party mobilised its favourite dehumanising language: “migrants flooding the country” etc.

I had managed to draft the support of the late Tony Benn in my campaign to prevent the deportation of the family in The Asylum, and Tony and I attended a meeting organised to defend refugees, where he was scheduled to speak. Together with the legal and moral arguments around the need to protect those fleeing from war and persecution, Tony warned against accepting any part of the Right’s xenophobia, which it disingenuously phrased as expressions of “concern” about migration. To do so, he said, would be to admit “Fascist ideas” into our politics, ideas which would gradually poison everything. And that is precisely what has happened.

By 2009 support for the BNP, a Neo-Nazi party, had ascended to a level at which the BBC’s public broadcasting mandate required it to invite the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, onto Question Time. This was seen at the time as such a transgressive development that there was a public debate about whether Griffin’s appearance could be prevented. When the broadcast eventually came, the atmosphere in the studio was sombre, the gravity of the event was recognised by the media, the panel of other speakers, from across the political class, united to marginalise Griffin and publicly denounce his views. Griffin was exposed as the petty Fascist that he was, and shortly thereafter the BNP ceased to exist as a meaningful political party.

This lesson in how to treat the Far-Right and populist nationalism was not well learned. A litany of catastrophic mistakes followed: David Cameron trying to neutralise UKIP via the Brexit referendum, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak trying to see off The Brexit Party, Reform, and all the other incarnations of populism by moving onto its territory, by admitting Fascist ideas. The consequence? The Conservative Party has been completely devoured by Reform, and Labour now faces the same annihilation.

The Fascist malignancy now suffuses our politics. In October this year the Conservative MP Katie Lam, spoken of as a potential future leader, gave an interview in which she said that thousands of people who are legally settled in the UK would be deported in order to make the country “culturally coherent”. This would, as far as we can tell, include my own father, who has been here since 1963 (far longer than Lam, whose blight on the nation only commenced in 1991, when she was born), has worked and paid taxes for decades, who has British children and grandchildren, but who is not himself British and therefore would, under Lam’s regime, be torn from his family, stripped of his rights, home and assets and be deported to a country in which he has never lived. This would apparently make Britain more “culturally coherent”, despite him having known no other culture for sixty- three years; again, Lam’s own experience of our culture only extends to thirty-four years.

Reporting on Lam failed to name her ideas, but they do have a name in longstanding: “remigration”. Remigration is the euphemistic term applied by the Neo-Nazi movement to describe the racist expulsion of anyone that it deems not to be “indigenous British”. To be clear: in 2009, Nick Griffin’s BNP considered this policy too extreme to be advocated in public; it is now a concept shamelessly expressed by a prospective leader of the Conservative Party. It is disgusting.

Shabana Mahmood, in standing at the dispatch box and validating the positions of the extreme Right, is the latest for whom the lessons of recent history remain obscure. The Labour Party, in chasing the votes of people who will not vote for it, abandons those who do; it profanes the principles of the Labour movement; it intensifies the extreme Right-wing venom that ravages our politics. The party leadership has to understand that this deranged nihilism will cost them more votes than they hope to gain, which is partly why I resigned. “Stay in the party and fight”? Not this time. There have to be some red lines, some dignity.

“I am the one who is regularly called a ‘Fucking P**i’ and told to ‘go back home’”, Mahmood replied to the spokesperson for the Lib Dems during Monday’s debate. I leave my former comrade with some parting advice: if someone calls you a “fucking P**i”, and tells you to “go back home”, you don’t tell that person that they’re right.

Armoured, balaclavad, “enforcement” divisions carrying assault rifles and shotguns belong to paramilitary campaigns, belong to civil wars, belong to repressive political dictatorships and their partisan militias. They are also part of the iconography of Trump’s America.

These groups, photographed manhandling shackled prisoners at the Salvadorean concentration camp, CECOT, or filmed hurling members of the public to the asphalt in California while their loved ones cry and plead and beg, are a manifestation of state terrorism. Their appearance, mode of conduct, violent impunity, is expressly designed to inspire terror, to advertise the state’s monopoly on violence, to suggest that that violence can be turned against anyone, anywhere, at the discretion not just of the state, but specifically of the executive: the Trump White House.

The apparel and balaclavas are more than just a form of aesthetic intimidation, the anonymity, and the refusal of the officers to identify themselves or justify their authority, is also intended to evade accountability and legal redress. It is to insinuate that all this might be extra-legal, that legal rights may not actually mean anything at all, that demanding justice is merely shouting into the void; the silent, expressionless balaclavas insist that we are done with all of that. Enough. Now the only law is physical strength, and that monopoly that I mentioned.

The American state’s monopoly on violence is seen most starkly in its penal code, which permits it to put its own citizens to death, not just in a moment of high-drama or risk-to-life – a shooting rampage, say, or an armed insurrection – but as part of a formal procedure: capital punishment. And it is in that procedure that accountability, the rule of law, the integrity of the judiciary, and the right of redress in the courts are absolutely critical, because the kind of bellicosity, impunity and disregard for legal process that the Trump White House has exhibited thus far, will lead to the arbitrary murder of innocent people.

I am currently working on a film about the system and experience of capital punishment – how the mechanisms of putting people to death operate, and what it is like to go through the process. I have heard of harrowing stories in which innocent people have been condemned to death and struggled to achieve justice.

Ahead of the election last November, I wrote an article which highlighted the recent execution of a man who was likely innocent, and expressed concern that many more people (both the innocent and the guilty) would be put to death by the state should Donald Trump return to the White House. I was, and remain, surprised that the issue of state killing is not more salient in US politics.

I am against capital punishment, mainly for moral reasons, but I think that where I and those supportive of capital punishment definitely agree, is on the principle that innocent people should not be murdered by the state, and that no efforts should be spared in seeking to cure miscarriages of justice when someone’s life is at stake.

In my previous article I highlighted Trump’s enthusiasm for executions during his first stint in the White House and my fears around his return:

Unsurprisingly for someone who has shown nothing but contempt and disregard for the lives of others, Trump initiated a killing spree during his first term in office. More people were executed under Trump than under the previous ten presidents combined. In the final, hysterical days of his presidency, the bloodlust escalated as Trump broke with over a century of precedent, in which Federal executions are paused during a presidential transition, and executed five people before Joe Biden assumed office.

Trump’s language of extreme vengeance, threats to imprison and execute his opponents, exact violence against groups that he disapproves of, a thirst to condemn and kill that predates his political career, means that state killing, to include the murder of innocent men and women, will likely expand from the first day that he assumes office.

Some of these fears were pre-empted by Joe Biden, who commuted the sentences of almost all Federal death row inmates prior to his departure, but of course Biden had no jurisdiction over the fate of those condemned to die by state, rather than Federal, courts.

Since Trump’s return, executions in the states have surged. Robert Dunham, Director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, published an article on Substack on August the 4^th entitled Executions are Up but the Sky is Not Falling. In his article Dunham argues that despite the new Trump surge, the trend is towards a decline in both executions and public support for the death penalty. Given those trends, Dunham asks, “what accounts for the increase in executions, and what is skewing the numbers?”. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that the answer is not just, Trump, but Trumpism:

It is a Trump effect — but not in the manner that the media is reporting… I believe the stacking of a now extremist Supreme Court, which has emboldened and empowered states to flout the constitution on a broad range of issues, is the main driver of the rise in executions… The death penalty is a canary in the coal mine of the assault on decency and democracy currently underway in the United States. The norm-shattering federal execution spree in the final months of the first Trump term was a harbinger of the Court’s now habitual abandonment of its constitutionally assigned institutional role as a protector of the rule of law.

On August the 18^th, the investigative journalist Radley Balko published on his Substack Paul House has died -- a wrongly convicted man whom John Roberts gave the okay to execute. The article is a detailed account (which I recommend reading in full) of the exoneration of a death row inmate following a narrow, 2006 US Supreme Court decision in favour of his petition; the dissenting opinion was authored by John Roberts prior to his elevation as Chief Justice. For what I understand to be pedantic procedural reasons, Roberts preferred to see a possibly innocent man put to death rather than disturb his own academic notions of propriety within the hierarchy of the legal system.

Of course, Roberts is now Chief Justice, and his court has proved to be exceptionally accommodating to the views of the Trump White House, particularly when it comes to the limits of executive authority and due process of law. In his article on the House case, Balko observes:

Roberts’s dissent would have made it extremely difficult for the wrongly convicted to get any federal review at all… It seems likely that if today’s Supreme Court had been in place when Paul House’s case came before them in 2006, he’d have died on death row — or been executed.

This is the court which will determine if the summary arrests and renditions, the troops in the streets, the cold terror of the unexpected knock on the door and balaclavas waiting beyond it are legal. This is the court expected to defend the US constitution. The testimonies that I have been gathering from innocent people condemned to die show what happens when operation of the law becomes arbitrary, casual and capricious. For Americans, the fear must be that these same tendencies overwhelm the state and the integrity of rights granted under its constitution; as Dunham says, “the death penalty is a canary in the coal mine of the assault on decency and democracy”. The renewed enthusiasm for the death penalty, at both Federal and state level, is bigger than the inadequacies of the system, bigger than doubts over the guilt of people who will be put to death by the state, bigger than the way in which capital cases are adjudicated in the courts; it is a symptom of Trumpism, and the creeping degradation of civil, legal and human rights.

As a European looking at Trump’s America from the outside, I notice that the cancer of Trumpism is steadily metastasizing within our own societies, and I worry that we are not taking it seriously enough.

Today, my first attempt at crowdfunding concludes. It has not been a success.

In Creator Notes #6: The Ghosts of Futures Past, I walked through some of the recent developments in the film and television business and how the economic environment has sharpened against independent creatives:

What does this mean for independents and creatives? I’m afraid that there are reasons to be concerned. Experience shows us that consolidation produces cartels which quickly seek to dominate their industries. Independents are often faced with a choice between abandoning meaningful autonomy, and going to work for the cartel, or remaining independent but struggling to make a living.

We have a new film coming out later this year, which ran into a bit of a funding gap during post-production, and in that insoluble quest for “meaningful autonomy”, I thought it would be worth giving crowdfunding a go. I am a big believer in trying new things, and I also hold that failure is a pre-requisite for success, one shouldn’t fear failure or recriminate too hard when it attends. So, full of hope, we launched a Kickstarter that has been running for the past month.

Our project was ideal for the type of niche audiences and subcultures that enthuse on crowdfunding platforms and online communities - we had a number of Big Names attached, all of whom came with their own followings; the funding goal was modest-ish; there was a decent array of sparkly exclusives on offer.

The campaign soared out over the cliffs, hitting 10%, then 20%, then 30% of our funding goal within the first 24hrs, before climbing too close to the sun and plummeting back down towards the black ocean waters, beneath which it remains submerged; the tide will not offer up any limited-edition Blu-Rays with exclusive artwork after all.

One of the themes that I picked up in Creator Notes #6, is that the range of projects that are economically viable has narrowed considerably across recent years:

I worried that [YouTube & streaming] would incentivise a race to the bottom, that it would make anything that didn’t pander to the maximum possible numbers uneconomic and unviable and that artists who produced creative, intelligent, difficult or niche work for a naturally limited audience would be reduced to hobbyists. And I worried that the film business would become a sub-branch of the tech sector.

Over the past decade there has been an industry-wide effort to crowd into a contracting space, my company has been repetitively warned by sales agents everywhere to abandon our deranged adherence to arts, history and culture documentary and go all-in on reality tv, true crime, extreme weather, sharks and Nazis. And a tv industry Nuremberg subsequently executed the Nazis from that list (we did a couple of Nazi shows, including a true crime/Nazi crossover as, obviously, the Nazis were also true crime).

While all this reality tv wisdom was being dispensed, my distressed mind would often turn to the question of what had happened to our audience, the arts & culture audience upon which we had built a thriving business during the Golden Age of physical media. I reasoned (and still do reason) that it must still be out there, but that it’s probably too niche to sustain us in the streaming era, unless we want to be hobbyists, or go to work in the mines on behalf of the entertainment industry cartel.

I had hoped that crowdfunding would offer a viable route back to that audience: it seemed to serve niche interests and communities, and it looked like physical media still had a pulse on Kickstarter, which might help make sense of the money.

We poured effort into it. We produced videos and artwork, launched a website and socials, sent press releases, ran ad campaigns, made podcast appearances, attended conferences; we drove thousands of people to the Kickstarter page, all of whom were loudly enthusiastic about the film. But only a couple of hundred were prepared to part with any money, proving the old adage about drawing a horse to water.

So, why hasn’t it worked? I’ve taken a few useful lessons from the experience. The first is to appreciate what crowdfunding is, and what motivates online communities. For our campaign we worked with an acquaintance who had successfully funded a number of documentary projects on Kickstarter, and he cured me of a misapprehension: people do not want to fund your film, they want to buy and collect rewards. In this formal sense, crowdfunding is better understood as ecommerce, rather than fundraising. You have to work out a retail offer ahead of time, and design your project around that; arriving late in the day and working backwards, as we did, is unwise.

The second lesson is that the landing zone for making a professional living in the creative arts remains narrow and obscure, no matter the medium. It could be that we have been unable to match the right film with a paying audience. The click-through rates from our social media ads were remarkably high – up to 10% on the best performers – but the expectation that films are something that stream for free, or as part of a pre-existing, cheap subscription service, remains stubborn; I noted comments online in which our audience expressed confusion as to why the film wouldn’t simply be instantly available on streaming, without all this eccentric talk of Blu-ray and crowdfunding.

Third, the corpus of physical media is probably in the advanced stages of putrefaction at this point. I don’t think one can run sustainable business off the collectors’ market and, if it were possible to do so, I think it would most likely be with a collectible of something which has some brand recognition, rather than a new documentary release.

Which brings me to a final observation: the projects that appeared to be most successful on Kickstarter were run by people who have pre-existing name/brand recognition, or which offer a product specifically designed to appeal to the closed-system of “people who pay for things on Kickstarter”.

This phenomenon is part of the scourge of the digital era: music streaming works fantastically well for Beyoncé, but any new artist better make sure that they have two full-time jobs alongside their Spotify creator account. And we see it here on Substack, where the most successful newsletters are generally A) Authors, journalists and personalities with name recognition and a pre-existing following or B) People who publish newsletters on the subject of how to have successful newsletters, aimed at the closed-system of people who aspire to publish successful Substack newsletters (the Being John Malkovich principle, which also applies on YouTube and every other platform).

I don’t think that crowdfunding is the answer to the problem of how to produce economically viable, independent films. Could it be part of the answer? Maybe. But I think that would take a carefully chosen project, which is designed around a Kickstarter campaign from its inception. I’d like to give it another go with something, perhaps not a film.

The quest for a hospitable path through the chaos and diminishing returns of the streaming era continues.

This article was initially written for the 25th anniversary of the online film & technology magazine Netribution and published on the new Netribution 25 website. It is reproduced on Aftershocks with the kind consent of Nic Wistreich.

I’m in the middle of a project which has engaged many of the themes in the piece, so I’m posting it here as a primer for a future Creator Note, in which I’ll discuss some recent discoveries in the ongoing struggle to produce economically viable, independent films.

The first Netribution office stunk of curry and rubber, I lived in it.

You reached it by groping through the tunnel with the smashed light between the tyre shop and Indian restaurant on a main road in Wembley. At the top of the dark stairs that climbed out the far end there was a narrow walkway along which a row of bright-blue industrial refuse bags that bulged with beer, wine and vodka empties marked the trail to the faded red door of a smoke-filled student flat behind which Nic and Tom dreamed about the future while I, one of Nic’s two flatmates, pulled on B&H cigarettes and loudly (and wrongly, as it turned out) defended the past.

We had all met as film students, Nic was excited about the expanding galaxies in cyberspace and the opportunity to connect filmmakers directly with their audiences. He grabbed a bottle of vodka from the freezer and talked energetically about a film studio in every bedroom and fridges with barcode scanners that would order new tubs of marge when you ran out.

“Don’t be silly”, I said, “buying things is not the reason that people go shopping. People go shopping to get out of the house, meet their mates and browse the racks, you can’t do any of that at home, on your own, sitting in front of your computer. That Amazon website is never going to take off”.

As history ran past, giving me a kick in the nuts on its way, Nic and Tom’s Netribution project steadily expanded: lists of film festivals and funding bodies assembled on the site, young film journalists started sending in reviews and interviews, bewildered couriers emerged from the pitch dark between the tyre shop and the curry house with boxes of merch and other freebies; Nic started making exotic trips to Paris and meeting American financiers in SoHo. Netribution was soon out of the bedroom in Wembley and into a proper, grown-up office from where it sailed ahead, into those online galaxies, which would eventually swallow us all.

A decade later Nic and I were walking through the East End, embroiled in another argument about film future. This time it was YouTube that Nic was excited by, and the realisation of his prediction that the internet would connect films and audiences, emancipating creatives from the shabby commercialism, gatekeeping and exploitation of the old industry and its parasitical middlers. I demurred.

As a working filmmaker and owner of a production company, I couldn’t see the economic logic. I worried that it would incentivise a race to the bottom, that it would make anything that didn’t pander to the maximum possible numbers uneconomic and unviable and that artists who produced creative, intelligent, difficult or niche work for a naturally limited audience would be reduced to hobbyists. And I worried that the film business would become a sub-branch of the tech sector. In that argument, unfortunately, I think history has proved me right.

When Nic and Tom launched Netribution and I launched my studio, Spiritlevel (together with a different Tom), the DVD boom was in its summer. This, in hindsight, was genuinely a golden age for film, and particularly independent film, because the economics of DVD made spectacular sense. Films could achieve a wide theatrical release through back-end security: a disappointing box-office showing could be made up on DVD, a box-office hit could be sold to the same audience twice, once at the cinema and then again on DVD. Films that couldn’t achieve theatrical distribution or TV acquisition could find their audiences by going direct to DVD, and could turn enough profit to earn producers a decent living.

There was, of course, the quiet foreboding - that what had happened to the music industry, when the Mongol hordes of file-sharers and tech disruptors swept in to pillage and burn, could come to the peaceful valleys of the film business, with its glorious DVD boom, but the technology was not there yet and so why worry before you have to?

Regrettably, worrying before you had to is precisely what the industry did. Clearly unable to withstand the sweaty pressure of a latent threat, studio executives collapsed in anxiety, and burned their own house before the tech hordes got there. They embraced streaming too quickly, prior to rationalising the economic model, and killed-off DVD sooner than necessary, with knock-on effects for theatrical.

Initially, the arrival of the streamers provided a fillip. They were hungry for content and competed with linear TV to drive up acquisition fees, their novelty stimulated audiences and generated excitement, they provided additional revenue streams and encouraged AVOD platforms like YouTube to develop competing business models that might provide producers with greater rewards and an opportunity to revivify their back catalogues.

Alas, as time marched on it became clear that the economic vandalism of tech “disruption”, which has a habit of colonising industries and leeching the value, would accompany the streaming revolution. Physical media was buried, theatrical exhibition destabilised and linear television placed on life support.

Now, it may be that all this was inevitable, technological change is the indelible fact of human and economic development. But it is not the inevitability of technological change that is at issue, but whether that change provides an environment that is as good, if not better, for the producers and artists whose hard work and ingenuity power the creative industries.

Like other disruptions, the streaming revolution has struggled to make sense of its economics, and the film and television industry has been in a state of emergency for the past couple of years. The catalyst for the present crisis was the Covid pandemic. It’s complex and multi-faceted, so rather than attempt to litigate all of it, I’ll share a representative example.

Amazon Prime, initially a decent source of recurring revenues, had been arbitrarily reducing the royalty rates that it paid to producers for some time as, like all the other streamers, it struggled to identify a sensible business model. Then in early 2021 Amazon abruptly purged all nonfiction content, hurling indie producers, including us, into existential crisis. What appears to have happened is that Amazon’s limited income from fixed subscriptions collided with it’s potentially unlimited outgoings on producer royalties. As audiences sat at home during the pandemic, consuming unheard of quantities of streaming video without paying a penny more for the privilege, Amazon’s royalty payouts went through the roof. You see the problem.

How the industry will emerge from its current malaise is an open question, but I imagine that it will track quite closely to what has happened in other sectors: there will be a period of consolidation. Linear television will end once and for all, the streaming marketplace will narrow, and various players will either cease to exist or become absorbed by a small cartel of emerging superpowers. We saw this happen in music, and the first phases are already in evidence within the television industry – the rise of Banijay is an obvious example.

What does this mean for independents and creatives? I’m afraid that there are reasons to be concerned. Experience shows us that consolidation produces cartels which quickly seek to dominate their industries. Independents are often faced with a choice between abandoning meaningful autonomy, and going to work for the cartel, or remaining independent but struggling to make a living.

Another interesting phenomenon that has attended the streaming era is a neurotic fixation on “IP”. This arose in part because streamers were vulnerable to having content pulled by producers who would either license it to rival platforms, or retain it as exclusive to their own, competing streaming services. It wasn’t long before the leading streamers addressed this by moving from exhibition into production.

But the intense focus on IP is much bigger than simply ownership of production and/or content, it narrows the scope of the types of productions that are likely to attract finance and support and, in my view, is an enemy of creativity. It sets pre-conditions, insisting that some form of proprietary rights should be engaged by production, and it has a tendency to favour re-production, the repeated exercise of those rights in an effort to sweat the property asset. It has also led to a more jealous, litigious culture in which rights-holders seek to aggressively guard and police their “property”.

These tendencies have been intensified by the emergence of AI, and the fear that the tech sector will imminently plagiarise creatives into wholesale redundancy. I think the concern is justified, but I would caution creatives against becoming over-protectionist and property-obsessed: that is a game that favours capital and plays into the hands of the cartels.

The counterpart to both the move of film and TV to online streaming and the obsession with IP is the role of data. And here I again see blaring red warning lights. The fastidious insistence on being “data led”, a concept absolutely intrinsic to the tech sector, naturally leads to an effort to re-create what has worked in the past, rather than create what might work in the future. The whole purpose of data analysis is to minimise risk, but it is in risk, difference, unknowability that creativity thrives.

However, there may be some causes for optimism. It’s true that filmmaking has become ever cheaper and more accessible, and it’s possible that Nic’s vision of a truly decentralised independent sector, connected directly with audiences, economically viable and able to thrive outside the tyranny of the cartel could still happen. It certainly remains the dream.

But while the past 25 years have been characterised by a revolution in the production, distribution and exhibition of stories, I think that it will be storytelling itself that is transformed over the next 25. Online life has completely reconfigured how we communicate and interpret story; accelerated demands and abbreviated attention has already led to film form becoming more immediate and concise, not just on TikTok, but in mainstream studio cinema, where narrative construction and pacing is different to what it was a couple of decades ago. And whereas audiences, in particular young audiences, once viewed subtitles as an impediment, now young people, conditioned by viewing primarily on social media, prefer video to be accompanied by text.

It will be interesting to see how these themes evolve and I look forward to kicking the questions around with Nic. We’re both now fortunate enough to live in decent housing, although one of the ironies of the past 25 years is that the drive to get out of the smoke-filled bedrooms and into proper offices has been usurped by remote work and a civilizational march back to the bedroom. I no longer smoke, though, and with an additional 25 years on the clock, immoderate vodka sessions are of course inconceivable.

You know I’m sure it was a Monday when I first noticed her, so it was probably the start of something new. She arrived at 7.38, when the barriers clatter open and the city cascades onto the concourse, rising to fill the station. From up on the balcony I watched her rummage in an outsized leather bag that hung off her shoulder, the black and grey eddies swirling about her, the occasional wave obscuring my view. I always spotted the bag first, being pulled along in the torrent, pushing into the barriers between the shaking heads and angry stares, her tumbling blonde hair following in behind. It had a wide zip that she struggled to close all the way, sometimes she washed onto the concourse while desperately pushing a fistful of make-up into it. Sometimes, as she moved out of the station, I got a look at her shoes, usually heels, rarely sandals. If I were to guess I’d say size 5, 5.5, I bet she has marvellous arches.

I don’t remember when I first noticed him, it must have been weeks later. He was leaning against the wall of a side passage off the concourse. Looking down from my spot I could see him staring at her as she tapped through the station, gathering her hair, a band stretched around the fingers of one hand, trying to bring order to the chaos.

He always arrived early, with a cardboard cup from AMT. I watched him hanging there at the perimeter, like a pall at the edge of a dream. In time he became part of mine, just as much as she had been.

Sometimes he circled in dangerously, joining the march and pushing right up behind her to where the crowd breaks against the dazzling light at the exit, before circling back around to his passage and I would feel my blood fast-flowing. Once, he dashed out across her path, knocking her bag and apologising profusely when she gasped, cupping her elbow and resting his other hand on her shoulder, as if to steady her, brow furrowed in concern, watching as she stiffened and hurried from him. After a while his circles became braver, until he, too, vanished through the exit.

Time swam by and both became absent from my disconsolate mornings, until on one late afternoon he re-appeared, hurrying across the far side of the concourse, against the tide. He marched briskly into the area where the municipal bins are, gripping an outsized leather bag, and emerged seconds later without it, vanishing towards the exit as if he’d hadn’t broken stride.

I have never told anyone about him, nor her, and sometimes I feel ashamed. But then, I never tell anyone about the things I see, I like to keep them for myself.

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This is an announcement post: I have some work to share. And also some comments on what and why, together with some dreadful shibboleths that will be familiar to most creatives.

When I imagined, as a young man, what my work would be, it was fiction. I imagined myself making narrative fiction films, not documentaries. All my first, diffident, hilariously incompetent efforts were fictional drama; although I liked documentaries and thought the form important, I imagined that non-fiction would be an occasional, worthy digression in an otherwise expanding catalogue of fiction. I did not yet perceive the distinction between my work and the product of my work.

The product of my work, when it came, was documentary; this is what stumbled from me and into the world. I spent first years and then, recently, decades tirelessly producing documentaries, paid-for and paid-out in the necessity cycle of production and consumption. Some of this work was the subject of praise, some of derision, some even of envy – a close friend once came back to my office after a night descending through the drunk levels from joyful to morose. He took a swig from his sixth-too-many, rolled his eyes around the darkened reception area and said “you’ve got it sorted, haven’t you? Fucking sorted. And what have I got?”, and I remember thinking, “what on earth does he mean? I haven’t been able to accomplish a single piece of work, my real work.”

But the concept of the real work was, like the real work itself, a product of the imaginative realm, and forever trapped there. The time will come, I reassured myself, I just need to earn enough to achieve complete emancipation from any demands on my time whatsoever and then I will be able to embark, immaculately, on the real work.

This is a common creative affliction: living imaginatively in all senses, world-building your life, suspended in potential, filling libraries in your mind in which all the stacked pages are merely vaporous impressions, dreams which struggle to remember themselves, labyrinths unnavigable by you or anyone else, work with no product. Unreal work.

A few years ago I discovered Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a ball of string in the labyrinth. I would recommend it as essential reading for anyone wanting to embark on a creative project - read it every year, and make weekly pilgrimages to Steven’s admirable content-repurposing operation at stevenpressfield.com

The War of Art showed me how to appreciate my real accomplishments, rather than compare them unfavourably to my unreal work, and it provided instructions on how to transmute the unreal to real - here come the forbidding shibboleths: there is no perfect time; there’s never a perfect time; you are your own worst enemy; it will never be right; no-one wants to read your shit; you are what you do; sit down and do the work.

I concluded that if I couldn’t scale the massive barriers in time and treasure required to make fiction films, I could at least write fiction, which, after all, is costless and some time can always be found somewhere.

Of course, this is a war without armistice and so I quickly sprinted back into the labyrinth and started assembling archives of notes, fragments, half-finished chapters and unread stories. Pressfield is right, I affirmed, I must set the ideal conditions in which to accept that there are no ideal conditions and then complete the real work.

Last year I turned a corner and my foot hit the ball of string again. The most important thing, I reminded myself, is to do the work and that means completing and publishing it; it means having the product of work, just as I have had throughout my career - which has been the real work. So I started this newsletter, the newsletter without any readers, and started publishing lots of non-fiction. But I also wrote the first piece of fiction that I’d ever shown to anyone, the product of work. It was published in the literary magazine, Bull, at the beginning of this year.

Now that some time has elapsed and that story has had its run in Bull, I can share it here. And so the announcement is that having recently completed a lengthy non-fiction series, I’m going to get on with some fiction, which will become part of Aftershocks alongside the essays and creator notes.

Fiction was what I first imagined my work would be, I intend to do the work, I hope you enjoy the stories.

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As everyone will recall, indeed has recalled, over and over again: on January the 6^th 2021 a mob of armed conspiracists, most of whom had been radicalised online, launched a massed frontal assault on the US Capitol. It was a rupture in cyberspace, the intoxicating fantasies lived online and stimulated by engagement algorithms and social media beat their way into the real world with an attempt to overthrow the state.

For me, the most affecting impression from that day was not the unfolding legal-constitutional crisis, it was the shrieking terror of the few police officers who found themselves swept beneath the livid waves of mob violence. The kind of primal terror that invades the night and seizes your chest, the terror that swallows your breath at the thought of it. Concussive, helpless terror of the slow, carnal death that enveloped those officers. Even if they were eventually restored to life, it would not be life as it had been lived, the stain of terror is indelible.

Daniel Hodges, trapped against a door as hundreds of contorted faces press in, hands tearing at his neck and clothing, squeezing the breath from his failing body, his bones cracking under the pressure, his consciousness slowly dropping from him, towards oblivion. Michael Fanone, pulled beneath the surging crowd, struggling to swim towards the surface, convulsing as a hand pushes a taser against his skin, hands spray chemicals into his eyes, setting them aflame, hands beat his face and body, which stiffens in cardiac arrest, hands swarm over him while he lies prone, blinded and screaming desperately of his children, and among the hundreds of grasping, swinging, pummelling hands not one extends to help lift him from death.

On the 20^th of January 2025, Donald Trump issued a blanket pardon to those responsible.

The most interesting aspect of Trump’s pardons was the spontaneous reaction of the radical Right and the Magasphere. Rather than simply express relief and wait for the process to take its course, supporters of the convicted marched on police stations and accosted cops, with self-righteous demands for their friends to be released without any procedural delay whatsoever. That this is, of course, not how the legal-penal system works, was the whole point – within the Magasphere Trump’s declaration was taken as supralegal, and confirmed that the January 6^th convicts were martyrs; their convictions and detentions were cast as a perversion, rather than an operation, of the law. This distinguished Trump’s wholesale pardons from almost all previous Presidential pardons, in that the pardon was received not as a reprieve for the guilty, but as vindication of the innocent.

The indiscriminate manner in which the pardons were issued, taking no account of the severity of the offence, or the degree of violence committed by the various convicts, the accompanying language, the subversive disregard for the law and legal system, including for pending cases, not only granted a reprieve to January 6^thconvicts, it served to confirm the fantasies of the entire Magasphere.

The cosmology of the Magasphere is a synthesis of fantasy and reality, facilitated by the era of lives lived online to such a degree that people have a hard time distinguishing where fantasy ends and reality begins; where the common substance is. Part of the specific fantasy of hardcore, conspiratorial Trump supporters is that their leader is an avenging-angel embarked on a righteous campaign to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the state, including its courts, by which they feel coerced and humiliated. For his supporters, Trump is above the law precisely because he is the law, an immaculate instrument of divine justice, while the contemporary legal system is merely a corrupt organ of the “deep state”.

A few weeks after the pardons, JD Vance insulted the European democracies with a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he accused them of suppressing free speech and violating “basic liberties”. In doing so, he promulgated one of the favourite themes of the radical Right, which is that they are subjected to tyrannical censorship and thought-policing by the state, by “elites”, by media conformity, by academic orthodoxy, by excessive wokery. What they describe as “free speech” is a fundamental, totemic issue for the Right, but it is not really concerned with censorship, as they insist. “Free speech”, in the mouths of this version of the Right, expresses both an affirmation of their fantasy, and a neurotic fear of its disruption.

While Vance disgraced himself and his country in Munich, his administration banned the Associated Press from White House press briefings, arrested students for engaging in peaceful protest, issued threats to media organisations, undertook acceptability “audits” of the books available in schools, demanded, under threat of punishment, that universities conform with the ideological positions of the Presidency, and embarked on the mass surveillance and deportation of journalists, to the degree that the Committee to Protect Journalists had to issue an international warning about travel to the US. JD Vance, the Trump administration, and the Maga-Right are transparently unconcerned with defending free speech.

The rationale behind free speech is the proposition that our thoughts and words are not circumscribed in the way that our actions are, but the Maga-Right’s distorted concept of “free speech”, in a context where they are otherwise highly censorious, is something different; it exists to protect their fantasies. Any disruption of their ability to describe and live their fantasies online (by, say, efforts to counter disinformation, or fact-checking and community standards) reminds them of the distinction between their online existence and material realities offline, and confronts them with the distressing prospect that their fantasies may always remain unrealised. Donald Trump’s arrival announced the political age of fantasy; hence the fantastical post-pardon demands presented by Maga types to bewildered cops outside police stations.

Fascism has always been a political movement of fantasy and spectacle, which is part of the reason that it has historically struggled to resurrect itself within the modern democracies – contact with reality is fatal to its prospects. Fascists have therefore understood the need for their real intentions to remain clandestine, and have typically presented their political program as an unremarkable form of atavistic conservatism. It's also why the most spectacular acts committed by Far-Right radicals have focused on destabilising reality as a pre-condition of integrating Fascism: the Oklahoma bombing, and the massacres perpetrated by Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, for example. But there has been no modern equivalent of a fantastic, costumed march on Munich with a genuine intention to overthrow the state, as in 1923, until, perhaps, January the 6^th 2021. In their attack on the Capitol, the Far-Right saw no barrier between their fantasies and imminent reality, that is the parallel with the 1920s, and why it was the most dangerous moment in decades.

On the freezing afternoon of January 25^th, 2025, the day of the pardons, Donald Trump was sworn in to his second term. His inauguration was attended by the leaders of several Far-Right and neo-Fascist parties from Europe – Vox, AfD, National Rally – as well as prominent conspiracy theorists, and the heads of some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, who gathered in fealty while their businesses energetically torched content moderation policies, fact-checking protocols and editorial standards, in order to better conform to the ideological diktats of the incoming Trump presidency, and remove the mechanisms of fantasy-disruption.

The tech oligarchs had worked hard to get Trump elected; they had poured millions of dollars into financing his campaign. JD Vance, the protégé and Vice-Presidential pick of the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, placed his hand on a bible in the Capitol Rotunda, where four years earlier hordes of armed, Right-wing militia had demanded the head of Nancy Pelosi. As wintery winds swirled around the Capitol, the image of the tech barons, stiffly assembled in line to genuflect before Trump, recalled the summit meeting between Vladimir Putin and the leading “businessmen” of post-Soviet Russia at the turn of the century, a meeting held to affirm the union of security-state and oligarchy, in a new Eurasian autocracy.

In their complicity with the Trump administration and the Maga-Right, the tech oligarchs explicitly committed to the political age of fantasy and authoritarianism. Their motivations for doing so were likely varied, but certainly included, on the part of Thiel, Elon Musk and others, an accelerationist belief in disruption, the same type of destructive pathology that we see in their business practices. This strain of thought held that the political, economic and cultural status quo had become intolerable, and that post-war Liberalism had produced a decadent, declining empire in the West that required swift euthanasia, which the brute-force chaos of Trumpism had the best prospects of accomplishing.

The intellectual movement behind this emerged online, from the fantasies that germinate in the online subcultures, that are fed by the algorithms, that network with a greater speed and facility than in any previous epoch. It permeates all levels of the Trump administration, from the Vice Presidency down to the legions of White House staffers whom investigative journalists have linked to Twitter accounts which disseminate the most vile racism, misogyny and Fascism; the type of grotesque provocations that populated 4chan and similar communities, from where many of these people drew their politics. And it has a name: Neoreaction, or NRx.

The “Dark Enlightenment”.

The corpus of Neoreactionary writing is as verbose as it is boring, so I will strive to be concise. NRx originated as a response to the 2008 crash and the subsequent period of zombie Capitalism, and so part of its analysis overlaps with that of the Left (this was also true of classic-era, 1920s Fascism) but, as we explored earlier in this series, the active zone of ideology is not in diagnosis, but rather in prescription.

NRx alleges that the Neoliberal era of globalisation, international institutions and “universal values” has produced a moribund, bureaucratic, decadent and repressive state that entrenches mediocrity and decline. It refers to this as the “Cathedral”. In NRx’s conception, the “Cathedral” is not simply the government and state institutions, it is the whole edifice erected by and supportive of Liberal thought – the media, the academy, charity and third sector, NGOs and so on; what the Right often refers to as the “liberal consensus”. The movement is explicitly hostile to egalitarianism, as well as democracy in the form of universal suffrage.

NRx’s fantasy is for the “Cathedral” to be torn down and replaced with Libertarian-capitalist city-states administered by a limited executive operating under the benevolent dictatorship of a “monarch”. This is of course a tech fantasy, so NRx theorists’ idealised monarch is not of the belching, syphilitic, decapitating kind, but more like a Silicon Valley CEO – they identify Steve Jobs as the Platonic Ideal, a detail which attests to their belief in the ultimate munificence of the tech oligarchy, and that the private sector tech industry is the last best hope of mankind.

Insofar as democracy has a role, it is simply within the context of market mechanisms, a form of consumer choice - those dissatisfied with life in one city-state, for example, can move to an alternative one. In this respect, Neoreactionary ideas represent a fork of Neoliberalism, which is one of the many contradictions that marbles the theory; it’s progenitors are the Libertarianism of the Austrian school and the ideas of Milton Friedman which, carried to their end, arrive at Friedman’s dictum that “democracy is the enemy of freedom”, a concept that provided the theoretical foundation of Elon Musk’s recent attempts to destroy the US government, and which we explored in part four of this series. Socially, Neoreaction is conservative, authoritarian, racist and supremacist, it bears similarities to the Far-Right fantasies of thinkers like the Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, which have contributed to Russia’s own fantasy era of revanchist nationalism.

So there we have it. Where the Left has failed to propagate a vision for a post zombie Capitalism future (or, to use Mark Fisher’s phrase, an alternative to Capitalist Realism), the Far-Right has done so: a techno-futurist fantasy that emerged from the same online milieu as cyber-utopianism.

Neoreaction’s principal theorists are the blogger Mencius Moldbug, a.k.a Curtis Yarvin, and the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, who coined the phrase “The Dark Enlightenment” to describe the set of ideas. Of the two, Land is the more interesting and more extreme (his views appear to have emanated from a psychological breakdown), while Yarvin is the more famous.

The most notable figures within both the oligarchy and politics to have been influenced by Neoreactionary thought are Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen and JD Vance, though the ideas proliferate in Silicon Valley and amongst Trump-world staffers. After Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, Yarvin suddenly found himself the object of titillated media interest, with profiles and interviews appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian and Politico.

The best of these is the outstanding profile Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America by Ava Kofman, published in The New Yorker on June 2^nd, 2025. In it, and in the person of Yarvin, we see the culmination of many of the themes that I’ve been drawing together throughout this series: the individualism and contrarianism of the countercultural 60s and the Bay Area hippies; the ideologies that informed the computer age; the Libertarian-Capitalism of Silicon Valley and the Cyber-utopians; into the Libertarian-authoritarianism of the present moment and, eventually, the prospect of a new Fascist ascendancy:

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,”…He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry…He used some of [his money] to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory… Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects.

The portrait that emerges from Kofman’s article, as well as any acquaintance with the online communities in which Neoreactionary ideas are discussed, is one of a charmless misfit, with a simultaneous desire to be attractive (which expresses itself as a narcissistic demand, rather than through charisma), to be admired, and to wreak vengeance. These are the politics of a fractured, leaking ego: supercilious, graceless and obnoxious. There’s a fragile dilettantism about Yarvin and his ilk, a repetitive insistence that all value can be measured in IQ (where they, of course, are priced most expensively), a smug geekiness which deploys a specialised lexicon to belittle those outside the in-crowd with acronyms like “NPC”, an adolescent and vainglorious recital of their own exceptionalism which, of course, screams hormonal insecurity. And an awful lot of tell don’t show. Nrx is shot through with the obsessive pedantry of the Otaku and the bitterness and cruelty of “Netto Uyoku” net rightism: pedantic, insecure and obsessed with boastful demonstrations of intellectual virility for its own sake.

In Kofman’s telling, Yarvin himself is frequently moved to tears, perhaps a counterpart to Donald Trump’s own hippiesque descriptions of almost everything as “beautiful”, and all wrapped in love:

Gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

I take Yarvin’s tearful love for the people as a misfit’s contempt for people; the imaginary, requited love that resides in vengeful fantasises, where people are reduced to avatars in a tormented universe of desire, bitterness and self-gratification. He’s an Otaku.

On one level NRx is just a masquerade, a deranged spectacle for the internet era; but therein lies the danger, because a deranged spectacle is precisely what Nazism was, and the great error of the Weimar Republic is that it took Nazism seriously for what it was, and laughed at it.

Techno-Fascism

As a set of ideas, NRx’s achievement has been to unite the authoritarianism of the traditional, reactionary Right which pushed Trump into office in 2016 (personified by the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller), with the individualistic Libertarianism of Silicon Valley. It is this syncretic Libertarian-authoritarianism that we saw at work on social media during the Covid pandemic, on January the 6^th 2021, and in the pact between the tech oligarchs and MAGA that produced the Trump restoration in 2024.

In part four of this series we looked at the Libertarian fantasies that came to dominate the culture of Silicon Valley in the 1990s, at the moment of the tech industry’s ascent to global dominance, a culture that the technology writer Paulina Borsook described in Cyberselfish as “the true revenge of the nerds”. Borsook warned that it would come for political power, and that moment has arrived. The radical Right’s message of small-state autocracy chimed with the Randian narcissism of a modern, post techno-hippie, post cyber-utopian tech class eager to exercise its plutocratic power, indulge its Libertarian-hero fantasies and talk about transhumanism and colonising space.

Marx’s “authoritarianism of the individual” has been intoxicating Silicon Valley for some years now. In 2021, Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, published an article in The Conversation entitled Ayn Rand-inspired ‘myth of the founder’ puts tremendous power in hands of Big Tech CEOs like Zuckerberg – posing real risks to democracy. The article suggests that tech oligarchs have been deploying the mechanisms of Capitalism to undermine oversight, accountability and corporate democracy, in direct defiance of the claims made by NRx (and Libertarian Capitalists generally) that those same mechanisms would prevent their “corporate city-states” from quickly devolving into Fascist tyrannies:

Dozens of…publicly traded tech companies – many with household names such as Google, Facebook, Doordash, Airbnb and Slack – have issued two types of shares in an effort to retain control for founders and insiders… dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently… The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company. In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.

I attribute it to Silicon Valley’s mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance” that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals…. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened” by any form of outside regulation.

What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?... The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans’ access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.

Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America’s political discourse.

One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.

What Davis’s final sentence invites us to contemplate is, although those on both the Left and Liberal centre might have approved of the censure of Donald Trump after January the 6^th, what would happen if the tech companies deployed their political power in circumstances where we did not approve? Well, in 2024 they switched sides, didn’t they?

Davis’s description of “Silicon Valley’s mythology of the founder” is, of course, a description of a form of elitism, and yet another contradiction within NRx: it simultaneously venerates and disdains elites. This is where the theory departs from classic Libertarianism - liberty is NRx’s vehicle, not its end; it deploys Libertarianism only as a means of achieving the ascent of a new authoritarian elite.

Paulina Borsook suggested that in order for Silicon Valley to maintain its Randian fantasies, it requires a form of psychological evasion, the pretence that the tech sector was built by the pioneer spirit of exceptional individuals, rather than through the massive economic, political and regulatory support provided by the state. But I’m not so sure that the tech oligarchs do ignore this fact, which is precisely why some of them think that they should just be in charge of the state, as Yarvin proposes.

I do not like to throw the term “Fascism” around lightly, and I believe that the Left is guilty of doing so too often. But in describing the present miasma that is rolling into our politics and societies from Silicon Valley, I think the use of that term is justified.

Some proponents of Neoreaction, including Nick Land, explicitly reject the charge of Fascism, and like to run the argument that Fascism was anti-capitalist, whereas NRx is hyper-capitalist. While this may have been true of Fascism’s own pronouncements (which were often unstable and paradoxical), the relationship between twentieth century Fascism and capital was not, in practice, especially hostile; as with most of its concepts, Fascism’s position on capital was refracted through its racism - what it especially didn’t like were Jewish capitalists, or fantasy capitalists “controlled by Jews”, rather than capitalists per se. It’s also true to say that Fascism was hostile to religion, and yet faith is absolutely core to its ideology.

Rather than the specious claims that Fascism made about itself, what we see in the Libertarian-authoritarian aspirations of NRx and Trumpism are all the actual characteristics of Fascism: a corporate state with power concentrated in an executive under a charismatic leader; a highly stratified society, with a strict hierarchy based on arbitrary concepts of “merit” (in the case of the Nazis, this was racial, but a particular concept of mathematical-intellectual ability, or “entrepreneurialism”, are decent enough analogues); elitism, with an accompanying emphasis on class co-operation in place of class antagonism; a pact between capital, oligarchy and political leadership, in which the oligarchy agrees to subordinate itself in exchange for broad supra-legal privileges; “traditional” conservative values enforced by a central authority; racism; extreme nationalism; hostility towards independent media institutions; the militarisation of the state…I could go on with this list, but I think that the similarities are enough that we don’t have to argue about it. We’ve seen this before, dressing it up like a cyber-punk, or Steve Jobs, doesn’t change it.

In an interview on The Rest Is Politics: Leading podcast on the 14^th of April 2025, the journalist Ezra Klein addressed the political character of “the explicit, often self-described effort among all of the MAGA people from JD Vance to Donald Trump, to their in-house philosophers…to change the regime, to destroy what they call the “Cathedral”. Klein talked of “the effect Trump has on the world…the way he has persuaded so many in his coalition to embrace the politics of public cruelty”. Klein gave examples from what he called a “4chan-like celebration of mimetic cruelty” - communications from the White House X account, run by NRx-inspired staffers, which labelled the sound of manacles dragging across the floor “immigrant ASMR”. When it became popular to use ChatGPT to create memes in the animation style of studio Ghibli, the White House created and posted one of a female immigrant weeping as she is deported by ICE officers. “When you crush that part of yourself that knows that that is wrong”, Klein said, “you’ve crushed a really important guardrail between yourself and a descent into a kind of inhumanity…the really dangerous thing about MAGA under Donald Trump is [that] it is a movement about the political virtues of cruelty and the need to signal that as a kind of important reclamation of strength and nationalism in politics”.

As we covered in part six of this series, the tech sector bears its share of the culpability for these tendencies, for the destabilisation of truth, for stimulating and amplifying the far-right, the lies on which they rely, and for the surge in political extremism. Its business practices, and the deregulated market capitalism championed by its dominant ideologies also set the conditions for this political moment. But these mechanisms evolved beyond the cynicism of YouTube’s early efforts to “increase watch time” as part of some ethics-free business plan, and the coercive potential of the internet is now deployed, along with massive sums of capital, as part of direct, ideological, political action, as we have seen most vividly with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

When the most influential personalities on the tech-right - Peter Thiel, for example – and their adherents in politics and the intellectual class, complain about “elitism”, about stagnation, about a society in crisis, they are wrestling with the destructive nihilism of their own creation, and therein lies the path to the myth, fantasy, cruelty and ecstasy of Fascism.

We Owe It All To The Hippies

“When Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned, was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted”. This statement was uttered by Peter Thiel during an interview with Ross Douthat for The New York Times on the 26^th of June, 2025. The interview was entitled Peter Thiel and the Antichrist – the original tech right player on A.I., Mars and immortality.

“In my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over”, Thiel goes on, “my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won”.

This series began as a kind of sequel to Lessons from the Counterculture, my series on the 1960s and the hippie movement. In part one I wrote:

It's worth noting that the Left’s victories in the 1960s were the Right’s defeats. The ‘60s is the locus of the Right’s historical grievance, the painful moment at which those on the Right feel that their future was stolen from them, an imagined future of a weird, perpetual past, a permanent 1950s of patriarchal order, status, conformism, immutable gender roles, racial hierarchy, sexual diffidence, religious observance and chauvinistic nationalism. These are their indices of virtue, the ideal Western Polis, in their minds violently supplanted by modernity and a perplexing hellscape in which all that is scared is violated and all that is abject is venerated. Their culture war is a struggle for redress, through which they seek to recover this lost future and their sense of identity.

This passage sought to describe the MAGA mind, the attitude of the Steve Bannon faction and Trumpism’s reactionary anger; what it did not capture, is the bizarre heterodoxy of Theil and NRx.

In my interpretation of the ‘60s, although the Left had important achievements, which continue to shape modern society to our collective benefit, the Counterculture ultimately resolved in a victory for the Right. This was, I argued, because the core ideologies guiding most of the Counterculture, in particular the hippie movement, were Right-wing. The individualism, Libertarianism and politics of self-interest that characterised the hippies led directly to the deregulated, “greed is good” market Capitalism of the 1980s and the Neoliberal era. In this series, I have gone on to explore how the hippies carried these tendencies into Silicon Valley, and how they influenced the development of computers and the computer age.

For Thiel, the victory of the hippies has created a Left-wing society of permissiveness, conformity, political correctness and stagnation enforced through regulation, censorship and the coercive mechanisms of the both the state and global institutions.

But Thiel’s views are riven with paradoxes: his Manson is the profane consequence of a cultural movement in which “everything is permitted”, yet he advocates for a permissive, Libertarian rejection of regulation, which he calls “totalitarian”. In an article for the Financial Times, published in January 2025, entitled A time for truth and reconciliation, he described the election of Donald Trump as “the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won”, yet he is happy to endorse the wars of the authoritarian Right, and has recapitulated Milton Friedman’s criticism of democracy in his own, elitist, renunciation of universal suffrage. As we have seen, Neoreaction, a movement suffused with the conspiracism and fantasy of the cyber age, permits all these paradoxes to co-exist.

In A time for truth and reconciliation, Theil takes a walk to the soundtrack of conspiracy theory’s greatest hits:

My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.

It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein. But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement…We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19.

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

Here we glimpse the thinking at work on January the 6^th and its ultraviolent spectacle of folklore and fantasy: the slain king, John F Kennedy; the evil Jewish banker, Jeffrey Epstein; the Satanic plague, Covid-19, and the sinister mage, Anthony Fauci, who released it from mysterious caves in China, while trying to unlock the forbidden secrets of God.

Theil’s article argues the need to convene a “truth and reconciliation committee”, a portal through which we can enter this realm of undisrupted fantasy. He gives examples, in his march through the conspiracies, of the modernist fantasy that we would all be free to live in, if only permitted to do so by the deep state. Presumably, if Curtis Yarvin’s Fascist “monarchy” could be realised, we could all live inside the fantasy and for those, like Thiel, who can afford it, the fantasy could be limitless.

“When Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started”, Thiel said in his interview, “what he saw on LSD, what he learned, was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted”.

“The freaks who design computer science will wrest power away from the rich and powerful institutions”, Stewart Brand said, “computers are coming to the people. This is good news, the best since psychedelics”.

And in answer to Thiel, Yarvin and Land’s own hallucinations, as counterpart to Milton Friedman’s dictum that “democracy destroys freedom” we have Slavoj Žižek’s observation that “brought to the end this attitude is self-destructive, because too much individual freedom…destroys human freedom itself”.

In the real world…

…The second Trump term has brought a wave of arbitrary arrests and detentions. There are daily immigration raids throughout America, performed with para-military aesthetics. There are deportations to a penal colony in El Salvador, a concentration camp in Florida, Marines deployed to a US city, journalists intimidated by border agents, judges arrested in their own courthouses, judicial rulings ignored by the executive, tax cuts for the wealthy and welfare cuts for the poor. And so on, the list spools out relentlessly.

The European democracies are under threat from insurgent Far-right, Trumpist movements. This phenomenon isn’t going anywhere, articles and studies on conspiracism and the Far-right repeatedly warn that increasing levels of time spent online is making the problem worse, and that the progression of AI is going to intensify it, no doubt to the delight of accelerationists like Nick Land. The ideal conditions in which the Far-right thrives are here, which the pact between the tech oligarchy and MAGA enthusiastically exploits with massive amounts of capital and the algorithmic potential of the internet.

The form of twenty-first century Fascism is unlikely to be as spectacular and lurid as it was in the 1920s and 30s; Russia, Hungary and other examples have sketched the contours, it’s what Zach Beauchamp, author of The Reactionary Spirit, calls “competitive autocracy”: there is the appearance of democracy and a constitution, the appearance of elections, the appearance of an independent media; but the elections are heavily weighted in favour of the autocrat, it’s impossible for a challenger to actually win; the media’s ability to report is heavily circumscribed; the institutions are Potemkin institutions; the constitutional arrangements of the state and its democratic processes are gradually subverted. It’s too early to know whether this type of Fascism will succeed in the US and Europe, but if it does, it will happen slowly, and with fear. Everywhere, there will be fear.

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For the first time ever, l am truly ashamed of my country. I thought of Americans as kind, decent, generous, fair, rational... Guess not.

-John Perry Barlow, Facebook, November 21^st, 2016.

Caleb is an unhappy kid. He arrives home from school each day and rushes to where he belongs - his computer, and his friends, laughing and shouting together through their virtual gamescapes. Caleb isn’t with them, he’s never met and will never meet many of them; kids don’t get together to play games anymore, they do it alone, together online.

As the late hours gather in, and his friends’ gaming handles wink off the screen, Caleb heads to YouTube, where he falls asleep watching videos by “New Atheists” - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens; he describes finding them “subversive” and “edgy”, a means of stimulating his thought beyond the stultifying conformity and prospectless routines of his life in America during the early Obama years, shortly after the 2008 crash.

Caleb enrols in college, where his experience is a miserable one. He finds it difficult to socialise and spends an escalating number of his waking hours online, which further degrades his ability to socialise. By his early 20s Caleb has plunged into depression, he lives in his grandparents’ home, where he remains, refusing to exit into the light outside, cycling instead through anonymous hours of waking and oblivion in front of his computer, scanning and hoping for hope, searching cyberspace for an answer to the blunt ache of his depression, and the hunger of isolation.

He finds relief on YouTube, in videos by self-help gurus and the Canadian libertarian Stefan Molyneux. Molyneux explains to Caleb, and millions of others, that his alienation is the fault of society. Molyneux broadcasts glowing depictions of his own stable, rewarding family life with advice on how others can achieve it, Caleb desperately wants to achieve it; the ache of depression becomes an ache for stability, and family. For human connection, rather than the cyber-utopians’ virtual society.

When YouTube stops limiting video durations to 15 minutes, Stefan Molyneux begins pumping out monologues of one hour, two hours, to his captive, yearning audience.

Caleb finds Molyneux’s exhortations useful, his long night begins to recede, and he emerges, blinking, into the sun. He finds a job, his confidence improves, he reintegrates into society; to a point - Caleb continues to watch YouTube 10-14 hours a day.

Initially, the YouTube algorithm prioritises clicks – the more clicks, the better the video must be. But this encourages a deluge of click-bait, which induces users to leave the website in frustration, so YouTube adjusts its algorithm to favour total watch time, which pulls its content and users into a feedback loop – the more the user watches of a particular video, the more YouTube seeks to stimulate the user and drive engagement by serving them with limitless iterations of that video: similar content, similar themes, similar perspectives.

An engineer at Google, alarmed by the polarising and self-reinforcing perspectives being served to different groups on YouTube (the incipient “echo chambers”), designs an alternative algorithm that would encourage plurality. YouTube never even tests the algorithm, it reminds the stunned engineer that civic duty is not YouTube’s priority, YouTube’s priority is to increase watch time.

Caleb’s watch time increases. Stefan Molyneux warns about the establishment, he advises vigilance against the lies of the “mainstream media” and its project to enforce politically correct conformity on the free provinces of cyberspace. Molyneux reviles social justice warriors, Molyneux rages about the “Gamergate” conspiracy that has broken out on 4chan, which alleges that young men are persecuted by feminism and political correctness. Caleb is enraged by the social justice warriors, 4chan is enraged, its army of anonymous users launches a war of flaming and trolling and rage. An active section of 4chan’s anons reviles political correctness, and foreigners, and women, and black people. YouTube is awash with Gamergate, Molyneux denounces Cultural Marxism, Caleb watches endless, rage-filled videos. YouTube fears becoming repetitive, it seeks to expand its users’ tastes. The algorithm is re-engineered around an AI technique, “the Deep Neural Network”, which makes connections and perceives patterns that are beyond the capacity of humans. YouTube presents Caleb with a wall of right-wing rage, Caleb watches videos by the plausible, aristocratic racist Jared Taylor, Caleb listens to right-wing propagandists, 10-14 hours a day. YouTube is tireless in its encouragement. Caleb abandons his former admiration for Barack Obama and becomes a fanatical Trump supporter. Caleb has certainty, and self-confidence, and purpose; when asked, Caleb describes his views as broadly aligned with those of Brenton Tarrant, the rage-filled, white supremacist who, armed with a cache of semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and pistols, slaughters fifty-one people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant livestreams his carnage on Facebook.

Caleb’s story forms part of Rabbit Hole, an eight-episode podcast series by Kevin Roose for the New York Times, which ran shortly after the January 6^th, 2020 attack on the US Capitol. The series explores political radicalisation online, and how the design of YouTube and the social networks intensifies political propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theories and addictive behaviours. Fortunately, the story ends in relief; its coda is redemptive: Caleb is talked down from the Nazi axis by persuasive liberals and now spends his time contributing to deradicalisation initiatives.

Most of us are now familiar with “Caleb” in his phenomenological sense: there has been an inexhaustible, harrowing procession of Nazi Calebs, terrorist Calebs, activist, survivalist, self-denying, self-gratifying, self-hating, self-harming, self-aggrandising, violent, exploitative, delusional, desperate, suicidal Calebs that have sobbed and raged and violated their way through the twenty-first century.

Part of this is attributable to the natural power of the internet to intensify: it takes the divisions, extremities and pathologies that have always existed within society and politics, and amplifies them through volume and proximity. But another part of it lies in how cyberspace has been designed and evolved by Silicon Valley and the major tech companies.

To briefly recap: in this series we’ve traced the ideology of personal computing, as articulated by the techno-hippies, in which there would be an intimate, solipsistic personal connection between man and machine, and in which computers would be tools of personal liberation. We’ve looked at the anti-establishment conspiracism of the ‘60s Counterculture and its insistence that the cyber age would be unregulated and impossible for central authorities to control. We’ve covered the Libertarian utopianism and Randian narcissism which drove the deregulated, market-driven, Neoliberal Capitalism of the Reagan era and beyond, in which many former ‘60s hippies and Leftists were complicit, and which collapsed so spectacularly in 2008. And we’ve examined the Venture Capital models developed in Silicon Valley, which have subverted our economies, concentrated enormous wealth and power into a diminishing number of companies and individuals, constructed an oligopoly, and incentivised the remorseless capture, engagement and surveillance of internet users, i.e. everyone. All of these phenomena have been swept into a cyber cyclone that is wreaking catastrophic damage to our societies.

In part two of this series I quoted the techno-hippie Stewart Brand:

The Counter-Culture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of the entire personal computer revolution. The freaks who design computer science will wrest power away from the rich and powerful institutions. Computers are coming to the people. This is good news, the best since psychedelics.

What has in fact happened, it has become clear, is that far from wresting power away from “the rich and powerful institutions”, the “philosophical foundations of the personal computer revolution” have instead created institutions that are richer and more powerful than almost any that existed at the time Brand made his predictions. And this, in turn, created an enormous opportunity for the extreme Right.

Libertarian-authoritarianism and the New Right

As we have seen, the ideal conditions for the rise of the populist Right were set when deregulated capital collapsed the global economy in 2008. The Otaku and “Netto Uyoku”, “net-rightists”, that had appeared in 90s Japan as a consequence of economic depression, were replicated in the west – Caleb is an example. The difference from 90s Japan is that the dislocations of 2008 intersected with web 2.0, the social media age, and the era of manipulative algorithms; anyone reading this will, I’m sure, be broadly familiar with the compulsive behaviours and radicalisation that those algorithms have stimulated. It was a combination that opened a new political space, in which a modern populism on both the Left and the Right could flourish, but because of money, cynicism, sophistication, and the beguiling simplicity of its message, the Right was, as is typical, better at seizing the opportunity.

The failure of Neoliberalism was perceived by those on the Right, who shared many of the criticisms articulated by the Left: that an unsustainable debt economy had loaded pressure onto the working and middle classes; that the beneficiaries were a small band at the top, who managed to evade responsibility for their failures and refused to bear the costs; that the legacy of the War on Terror had been devastating; that globalisation had produced too few winners and too many losers; that political power had become unaccountable. Once Neoliberalism was resurrected, post-crash, in its zombie form, a perception emerged of a rigged game organised to benefit an “elite”, an elite which was no longer conceived of in purely material terms.

This is a theme that I explored in Lessons from the Counterculture:

Both Left and Right can arrive at the same diagnosis, but that diagnosis is far less important than prescription, it is prescription that is the active zone of ideology, ambivalence on the part of the Left is the great opportunity for the Right, which will exploit an irrefutable diagnosis to obscure the mendacity of its appealingly simple, and appalling, prescriptions.

For the Right, that prescription was a traditional mix of extreme nationalism, an assault on liberal cosmopolitanism (reformulated as “the elites”), and a system of laissez-faire Capitalism enforced by a small, authoritarian state in which power is concentrated in the executive.

What emerged was a strange and novel species of Libertarian-authoritarianism. In material terms, the Libertarianism was framed as basic laissez-faire Capitalism, albeit with a protectionist angle that Steve Bannon and his ilk describe as “economic nationalism”: hostile to globalisation and international trade co-operation, but in favour of deregulation and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

But far more profound than its economic prospectus, was the New Right, or “Alt-Right’s”, emphasis on culture, and its narrative that an “elite” class of irreligious, internationalist liberals had destroyed noble traditions and shared values through a self-serving programme of universalism, equality and political correctness which prioritised the least deserving in society at the expense of a hard-working majority. This narrative metastasised into the “anti-woke” campaigns, the culture wars and the political projects built around Donald Trump, Brexit, and nationalist movements in the western democracies, which we are all by now wearily familiar with.

The language of dictatorship, discipline and retribution suffused the politics of the New Right, and yet the Right repeatedly characterised the liberal-left, with its regulation of business and consumption, policing of politically-correct behaviour and “DEI” programmes as the true, “Marxist”, authoritarianism. And, in a certain sense, that characterisation was accurate.

In Lessons from the Counterculture, I explored how the positions traditional to both the political Right and political Left had been distorted by Libertarianism, specifically, the type of Libertarianism that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and had been inculcated within Silicon Valley; the type of Libertarianism advocated by John Perry Barlow.

The relationship between Libertarianism and authoritarianism is an old one, and was addressed by Marx in his critique of Anarchism. Marx argued that a certain form of Anarchism (a form we would recognise in modern Libertarianism), was premised on individualism, with a focus on the isolated ego and rejection of collective political action and social responsibility. He warned that the consequences of this type of individualism could lead to a kind of social Darwinism in which the strong dominate the weak: an authoritarianism of the individual.

Writing in 2024, Barry Richards, Emeritus Professor of Political Psychology at Bournemouth University, published an article in The Conversation entitled Why have authoritarianism and libertarianism merged? For Richards, the answer to this question lies in the dislocation, atomisation and precariousness of modern life:

As a state of mind, libertarianism is superficially the opposite of authoritarianism…yet there is a history of these two outlooks being intertwined.

Trumpism’s fusion of the authoritarian and the libertarian was embodied in the January 6 attack in Washington DC. The insurgents who stormed the Capitol that day passionately wanted to install Trump as an autocratic leader…But these people were also conducting a carnivalesque assertion of their individual rights, as they defined them, to attack the American state.

A psychological approach can help us to understand the dynamics of this puzzling fusion… authoritarianism and libertarianism are the interchangeable products of the same underlying psychological difficulty: the vulnerability of the modern self.

Both outlooks serve to protect against the potentially overwhelming sense of being in a society on which we depend but which we feel we cannot trust. While politically divergent, they are psychologically equivalent. Both are ways for the vulnerable self to ward off existential anxieties. There is therefore a kind of belt-and-braces logic in toggling between them or even occupying both positions simultaneously.

In any specific context, authoritarianism is more likely to have the necessary focus and organisation to prevail. But its hybrid fusion with libertarianism will have broadened its support base by seducing people with anti-authority impulses.

And in its response to the aftermath of the 2008 crash, it was indeed the Right which summoned the requisite “focus and organisation”. While the Left was lost in dreamy notions about freedom and distributed political action trough movements like Occupy, the Right got on top of how power actually works. It pulled together properly integrated political movements under charismatic leadership (MAGA being the most famous example), developed sophisticated new media strategies, “flooding the zone with shit”, as Bannon put it, and relentlessly targeted the Calebs of this world, Bannon’s “rootless white males”, the Netto Uyoku.

Its most powerful tool in this endeavour was the unregulated internet, and in particular the social media networks. As everything from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the various Facebook and YouTube whistle-blowers who have emerged since have shown us, the money-hungry, growth-focused tech oligopolies were more than happy to sell their user data to the highest bidder, and have the Right exploit their technologies in campaigns of mass manipulation. As Caleb’s example shows, the tech companies’ logic of “engagement”, of trapping people in stimulation and addiction, rewards and amplifies discord, extremity, polarisation. The more people engage, the more disoriented they become, and in turn the more angry, alienated and receptive to the lies, as if wrapped in thorny limbs that tighten as they struggle.

And what of the tremendous economic and political power that the tech companies managed to amass? They deployed it, under the rubric of “internet freedom” and crass, Barlow-esque Libertarianism, to resist any form of regulation or curbs on their omnipotence (including, as it happens, proper taxation), which has deprived our political culture of the means to resist the insurgent extremism and authoritarianism propagated online.

The distributed, unregulated internet that Barlow and his fellow travellers imagined would be resistant to repressive authoritarians in government, and which the military imagined would be resistant to an attack by hostile powers, became the favoured instrument of malign authoritarians and hostile powers, most especially Donald Trump and the Russian state, with its various campaigns aimed at undermining western democracy. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has observed, it is impossible to imagine the political ascent of Donald Trump without social media.

Cyber-Dystopia

“The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule [do unto others…]. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis”, John Perry Barlow wrote in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “The failure of law will almost certainly result in a compensating re-emergence of ethics as the ordering template of society”, he said in The Economy of Ideas. It was all utopian fantasy. Hippie bullshit.

The cyber-utopian dream that the unregulated internet would produce “natural ethics” and define a “new society” in cyber space in fact produced the opposite. Rather than societies, it has created obsessive subcultures; rather than stimulate the “re-emergence” of ethics, it has enabled the most unethical, destructive forces on the planet. Rather than distribute power to the people, it has assembled new, unprecedented, concentrations of power in the form of the tech oligopolies.

Those oligopolies both feed and thrive on the pathologies that they have unleashed. The economic damage caused by their “disruptor” business models increases social atomisation and anxiety, which their social networks and algorithms then in turn stimulate and exploit. Their deregulated, distributed structures are optimally designed for the purposes of bad actors, as is the power superintended by a tiny number of unaccountable, capricious and manipulable oligarchs, as the Trump administration has recently demonstrated. In sum, they have recreated the ideal conditions in which Fascism thrives.

In November 2016, to the horror of liberals, the Left and indeed much of the conservative centre, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States; the culmination of the radical Right’s assault on liberal democracy, combined with the tech-driven collapse of truth and social cohesion. “For the first time ever, l am truly ashamed of my country”, John Perry Barlow posted on Facebook, “I thought of Americans as kind, decent, generous, fair, rational... Guess not”. Barlow died a couple of weeks after Trump’s inauguration.

Barlow doesn’t ever seem to have reflected on his own complicity in the triumph of authoritarianism, and whether the Libertarian philosophies and causes to which he dedicated his life might have contributed to that triumph. His final statement was representative of hippie thought, a kind of shallow homily: “I thought of Americans as kind, decent, generous, fair…”. Well, yes, some can be, some of the time; but not all of them are, and even those that are some of the time, aren’t all of the time. Tellingly, he uses the word “rational”, “I thought of Americans as rational”, he said. And this is where Douglas Engelbart and the techno-hippies’ vision of the personal computer encounters its internal contradiction.

Engelbart and the techno-hippies had conceived of the personal computer as a device which could enhance and augment human ability, an extension of the individual. But within the discipline of computer engineering, which is based on science and rationality, they don’t appear to have considered the human capacity for irrationality, and that computers, given the right circumstances, might serve to augment, facilitate and enhance our irrationality. Online algorithms deliver to the Calebs of the world inflating quantities of what those algorithms think the user wants, no matter how irrational or destructive. In fact, where the internet has been genuinely “self-regulating” in the way that Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow imagined, is in its ability to desensitise and rewire the human brain in response to the online deluge of shock, filth and depravity.

Perhaps part of the appeal of transgressive online discourse, of the racism, the contrarianism, the trolling – the types of discourses that radicalised Caleb - is precisely that it breaks the dehumanising “systems” and “networks”; the mechanistic self-regulation of humanity promoted by cyber-utopianism, and instead expresses perversity and resistance, the most authentically human elements of the technological age. In context of Barry Richard’s notion of “the vulnerability of the modern self…the overwhelming sense of being in a society on which we depend but which we feel we cannot trust”, it’s easy to see how people are compelled to try to look behind the curtain in order to discover some meaning, particularly when the technologies are designed to validate and encourage them in doing so.

In the introduction to this series, I discussed the conspiracy theories that proliferated during the Covid pandemic, including amongst people that I count as friends:

Returning to the people I knew who embraced conspiracy theories during the Covid pandemic, and who have since been seduced by populism, there was something about them which initially eluded me but which I came to notice: their susceptibility to conspiracy predated the pandemic. Covid set it off on steroids, but it was…something that was already part of their lives and which, during the pandemic, became all-consuming: the habit of spending far too much time on the internet.

The process of online radicalisation operates by stimulating fantasy, and fantasy has become an indelible part of our political era. Covid intensified this phenomenon (online activity related to the QAnon conspiracy, which had begun on 4chan in 2017, tripled during the pandemic), but it was already pervasive within our culture.

Fantasy (and conspiracism) has suffused the computer age, the Libertarianism of the techno-hippies, the dreams of the cyber-utopians, the aspirations of the Silicon Valley oligarchs. And fantasy has always been intrinsic to extreme political movements. In the next part we’ll look at one of the most recent extreme political movements, one which began online, occupies executive offices in Silicon Valley and influences the White House. Its adherents variously refer to it as “Neo Reaction”, “NRx” or, preposterously, the “Dark Enlightenment”. I think it’s more accurately described as Techno-Fascism.

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“The best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.”

-John Perry Barlow, The Economy of Ideas, 1994.

Japan, 1990: an asset bubble produced by financial liberalisation explodes, the fireworks can be seen streaking across Pacific skies, a glittering spectacle of extinguished hope, the descending sparks fading into the lightless night, where misery, despair and bitterness will reign in Japan’s “lost decade”. This was the yield of the kind of policies advocated by libertarian free-marketeers in Silicon Valley, by cyber-utopians like John Perry Barlow, by their political allies, like Dick Cheney.

The lost decade saw the dank fog of economic depression swallow Japan. The youth became the primary victims of a broken social contract, employment opportunities were limited, an early iteration of the gig economy appeared – low paid, unstable and short-term work, not a foundation on which to build a life.

Despair descended. Japanese suicide rates climbed to the highest ever seen in the developed world. Japanese youth, economically trapped in the parental home, locked themselves in their bedrooms, comforted only by the faint blue glow of their computer screens, and the seductive fantasy worlds out in cyberspace, where new subcultures emerged from the gloom.

In 1999 Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese student living in Arkansas, created a bulletin board which catered to online communities and subcultures in Japan, he called it 2channel. Unlike Stewart Brand’s WELL, 2channel permitted users to remain unregistered, anonymous, and to post using the default handle “nameless”. A type of nameless user became ubiquitous on 2channel: the “Otaku”, or “Superfan”. These were obsessive fans of anime and Japanese pop-culture from amongst the disenfranchised, ultra-online youth, who used 2channel to create their own virtual communities.

Uninhibited by the fear of social stigma or reproval, the anonymous denizens of Otaku communities on 2channel began to articulate the type of political ideology which is always attractive to the disempowered, the hopeless, the lonely, the bitter and angry: right-wing nationalism. These posters became known as “Netto Uyoku”, or “net-rightists”, their politics were the typical populist-right mix of nationalism, revanchism, and atavistic normativity (“things were better in the past when traditional values reigned”). They denied the historical crimes of Imperial Japan and venerated its legacy, they expressed violent xenophobic hostility towards perceived enemy civilizations (China, Korea), and their disposition was one that we have become all too familiar with in the social media era: vengeful, conspiratorial, hostile to offline communities and sources of information (the “mainstream media”, the “elites”), petty and volatile. With virtual communities a poor substitute for actual human social contact, all that these net-rightists, isolated behind their computers, really had as a source of identity and meaning, beyond their pop-culture obsessions, was that they were Japanese, a concept in which they invested, and defended to the last. Make Japan great again.

In 2003, Chris Poole, a fifteen-year-old American, fan of Japanese anime and regular visitor to the forum Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse on the website Something Awful, began to notice that much of the content shared on the forum had originated elsewhere, on a Japanese board called Futaba Channel, a place that 2channel users had migrated to when the latter had been threatened with closure.

Poole decided to download Futaba Channel’s open-source code and make an English-language clone of it for a Western audience, in the process, the default user handle “nameless” was incorrectly translated as “anonymous”, which in turn became the default username on Poole’s creation, 4chan, and its infamous original board: /b/ (Anime/Random).

4chan, and in particular /b/ board, started as a place for outrageous, iconoclastic humour and pranks, anti-establishment counterculturalism and grassroots cyber-activism – the hacktivist collective “Anonymous” was born on /b/, and named after the default handle of its users. Echoing the cyber-utopian dreams of John Perry Barlow, Poole gave an interview to the New York Times in which he said, “the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards”. 4chan would not be centrally policed or moderated, there was no hierarchy, the community would self-regulate, free from censorship.

Although it hosted a certain strain of iconoclastic humour that wasn’t to be taken absolutely seriously, 4chan soon went the way of its Japanese predecessors and descended into racism, nationalism, conspiracy theories and extreme, reactionary identity politics. “Net-rightism” became the political characteristic of a section of 4chan users who, shielded by the anonymity that was forbidden on the WELL, never had to face accountability for their words and deeds. An ugly form of transgressive fascism began to germinate on 4chan, from where it spread to other online communities of disaffected, or simply bored, youth.

Web 2.0 and the cyber surveillance state

A year after the appearance of 4chan, the very first Web 2.0 conference was held in San Francisco, the era of the social network had arrived. In contrast to the first generation of websites, on which users passively viewed content, web 2.0 emphasised user-generated content and a participatory culture in much the same way as the cyber utopians of the WELL had envisaged. Web 2.0 would create borderless cyber kingdoms ruled by their citizens according to the principle of the “golden rule”, with agency devolved to the individual user, rather than preserved in the mediating hands of corporate webmasters, the promise of the fully distributed internet finally fulfilled.

Between 2004 and 2006 Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were all founded, financed by the Silicon Valley venture capitalists that established their business model with Fairchild Semi-conductor back in the fifties (and which we looked at in part three of this series), although by now the business model had mutated.

John Perry Barlow’s 1994 essay The Economy of Ideas attempted to address issues around what digitisation would mean for property rights, and for the ability of creators to be recognised and rewarded for their work. As was typical, Barlow’s most pressing concern was his idealised concept of liberty (“the greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent”), and while on one level the essay is thoughtful and sober, even prophetic, it’s also hopelessly naïve and utopian, “I believe that the failure of law will almost certainly result in a compensating re-emergence of ethics as the ordering template of society”, Barlow declared, while he recycled his evidence-free belief that communities of liberated individuals will somehow consensually produce equitable societies.

In The Economy of Ideas Barlow reached for an example from his time working with the Grateful Dead. He explained how the band had expanded its popularity by encouraging fans to make bootleg recordings of their concerts, “the best way to raise demand for your product”, Barlow wrote, “is to give it away”, and it was a form of this theory that Silicon Valley venture capitalists deployed as the economic premise for the design of web 2.0.

YouTube, Facebook and the other web 2.0 companies appeared to offer a free product, but in reality they were exploiting the “free labour” of user created content while venture capital underwrote massive financial losses. Web 2.0 Terms of Service agreements were very happy to take advantage of Barlow’s “outdated” concepts of law to claim perpetual licenses to user-generated content. In turn, they used that content to create profiles of users to sell to marketers, precisely the commodification of private individuals and their thoughts that some users of the early internet chat groups had feared. Web 2.0 sites, it became clear, were involved in a type of giant surveillance operation against their users, precisely the opposite of what the cyber-utopians had envisaged. Constantly retaining and engaging their users became of paramount importance to the business plans of the social networks, and they eagerly developed algorithms that would do just that.

Disruption salts the earth

Meanwhile, out in the real economy, a version of this logic was busily dismantling previously thriving industries through the process Silicon Valley euphemistically terms “disruption”. What “disruption” means in practice is that tech companies, backed by apparently inexhaustible venture capital, parasitically enter a host market, deploy the Barlow principle, and leech all the value from that market until the market is either no longer viable, its businesses reduced to brittle, necrotic husks, or the tech companies have managed to construct an oligopoly. Think of it as the economic version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To be clear, this is not Capitalism, it actively disdains Capitalism’s core tenets that the business-of-business is to pursue honest profits and that fair competition is the key to effectively functioning markets.

Cyber-utopians were often derisive of any endeavours unrelated to technology, or where the economics might impede their vision of a techno-libertarian future, and dismissive of the rights of others to earn a living. “As we return to continuous information, we can expect the importance of authorship to diminish”, John Perry Barlow wrote in The Economy of Ideas, “Creative people may have to renew their acquaintance with humility”.

Paulina Borsook, in her 1996 article Cyberselfish, observed:

Implicit is their assumption that those who excel by working with the tangible and not the virtual (e.g., manufacturing and servicing actual stuff) are to be considered societally superfluous. Technolibertarians applaud the massive industrial dislocations taking place in affluent North America, comparable to the miseries of the Scottish enclosures or the Industrial Revolution.

It's worth taking a short detour at this point to examine how Silicon Valley’s Bodysnatchers operate in greater detail. The starkest example came during the Covid pandemic, when several prominent tech startups, including Deliveroo and Uber, suddenly ran into financial trouble. The companies started frantically shedding jobs, and like all Randian heroes who venture forth asking for nothing but the freedom to harvest the fruits of their own endeavour, they suddenly became committed socialists and begged for evil government bailouts.

These events were striking and incongruous: Deliveroo delivered food at a time when all restaurants and cafes were closed and supermarket visits were limited to one a day; Uber also delivered food, and provided private transport at a time when people were eager to avoid public transport. It should have been the glory years for both businesses, they should have been printing gold bullion, and hiring every out-of-work waiter and furloughed airline pilot who had no alternative but to accept their shitty pay and conditions. How could it be possible that the insolvency sirens were blaring? An article by James Ball, published in The Guardian in 2020 and headlined Deliveroo was the poster child for capitalism. It’s not looking so good now, gets us to the bottom of the matter:

The answer lies in the fact that Deliveroo’s real business model has almost nothing to do with making money from delivering food. Like pretty much every start-up of its sort, once you take all of the costs into account, Deliveroo loses money on every single delivery it makes, even after taking a big cut from the restaurant and a delivery fee from the customer. Uber, now more that a decade old, still loses money for every ride its service offers and every meal its couriers deliver.

In other words, drastically increasing sales sends the losses soaring. If your business is the business of losing money, the last thing that you need is more business. But why? Who would design such a deranged scheme, an inversion of Capitalist rationale? Ball explained:

This is the entire venture capital model – the financial model for Silicon Valley and the whole technology sector beyond it. Don’t worry about growing slowly and sustainably, don’t worry about profit, don’t worry about consequences. Just go flat out, hell for leather, and get as big as you can as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter that most companies will try and fail, provided a few succeed. Valuations will soar, the company will become publicly listed (a procedure known as an IPO) and then the company will either actually work out how to make profit – in which case, great – or by the time it’s clear it won’t, the venture capital funds have sold most of their stake at vast profits, and left regular investors holding the stock when the music stops.

Tech giants move in on existing sectors that previously supported millions of jobs and helped people make their livelihoods... They offer a new, subsidised alternative, that makes customers believe a service can be delivered much more cheaply… These start-ups come in to existing sectors essentially offering customers free money: £10 worth of stuff for a fiver. It turns out that’s easy to sell. But in the process, they rip the core out of existing businesses and reshape whole sectors of the economy in their image.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

We’ve seen this dispiriting phenomenon deplete living standards over the past twenty-five years: industries that were once stable, solvent and provided decent careers were driven into insolvency by “disruptors” collapsing the profitability of their sectors. Workers found themselves accelerated into unstable, underpaid work in the gig economies; a joyless subsistence in service to the tech giants, as memorably depicted in the film Nomadland, for example. What eventually developed was a hybrid system of radical proprietary protectionism (in hypocritical opposition to the Libertarianism Silicon Valley likes to profess), combined with Barlow’s “giving it away for free”, until the market collapses and an oligarchy emerges.

But back in the early noughties, and the dawn of Web 2.0, those consequences remained obscure. A joyful spring planting was in progress, harvest time far away in other seasons. Inspired by the futuristic avant-garde out in Silicon Valley and their-fast moving economic deconstructionism (what is your limiting concept of maths, anyway?) grey-suit Capitalism on Wall Street embarked on a thrilling new era of disruption in the banking and real estate sectors…

The music stops for Neoliberalism

The World, 2008: an asset bubble produced by financial liberalisation explodes, the fireworks can be seen streaking across the sky, a glittering spectacle of extinguished hope, the descending sparks fading into the lightless night, where misery, despair and bitterness will reign. This was the yield of the kind of policies advocated by libertarian free-marketeers in Silicon Valley, by cyber-utopians like John Perry Barlow, by their political allies, like Dick Cheney.

With the 2008 financial crisis the neoliberal system that had driven globalisation since the 1980s collapsed. Either unwilling to be honest about that, or unable to conceive of an alternative, global institutions and political leadership resurrected that system in its zombie form. The social consequences matched those seen in Japan after 1990: life for most became more precarious and greater numbers of people retreated into online communities like 4chan, particularly the youth, who were often trapped in the parental home, and for whom prospects seemed especially limited.

Unlike previous recessions, the post-2008 malaise seemed depthless, fundamental. There was a sense that the whole social-economic system had not just broken, it had been revealed as a giant ruse, a malevolent fraud perpetrated on the majority by a narrow band of amoral liars who had extracted massive wealth and social capital at the expense of everyone else. New terms entered the lexicon with which to identify the guilty: “the 1%”, “the elites”, “the swamp”.

Social media became the locus of anti-establishment discourse and a tool with which to organise and co-ordinate protests. This was the apex dream of techno-hippies and cyber-utopians who had come of age in the counterculture of the 1960s; a distributed network in which non-hierarchical, mass-movements organised for social change without being vulnerable to attacks and infiltration from the establishment, nor subject to manipulation and betrayal by formal political leadership. It was Stewart Brand’s vision of “power to the people in a very direct sense”, in which “computers would liberate society”.

The most visible movement to emerge was Occupy, which explicitly modelled itself on the kinds of ideas articulated by John Perry Barlow, and staged worldwide protests, with the Guy Fawkes masks of 4-Chan’s Anonymous collective visible in the crowds. But, as Adam Curtis put it in Hypernormalisation:

It became clear that there was a terrible confusion at the heart of the movement. The radicals believed that if you could invent a new way of organising people, then a new society would emerge, but what they did not have was a picture of what that society would be like, a vision of the future. The truth was that their revolution was not about an idea, it was about how you managed things…. social media had helped to bring people together…[but] the internet gave no clue as to what kind of society they could create.

What was also interesting about the aftermath of the 2008 crash is that it resisted a critique of Capitalism. Movements like Occupy made some attempt, but were ultimately too rudderless and incoherent to successfully explain to people that what they were experiencing were the injustices, inequalities and crises that are produced by Capitalism. Instead, the majority interpreted the crisis in cultural, rather than economic, terms. The concept of “elite” became disassociated from economic power (billionaires like Donald Trump were not “elites”) and instead came to describe a perceived social power, enforced through culture, with the “mainstream media” complicit in the fraud through its role in cultural production.

On the liberal left, a traditional Socialist critique of Capitalism at its moment of crisis appeared to have been usurped by the belief in a redemptive “people power” and commitment to the individual. While more classic Socialist movements did spring up in Europe (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain), in the US and, to an extent, the UK, the response was more in touch with the Libertarian-individualist ideas that had emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s; a programme of decentralised direct action and consumer action, and what amounted to the kind of Libertarian Capitalism that became the guiding ideology of techno-hippies and cyber-utopians in Silicon Valley and, ultimately, a powerful theme within online discourse.

That was an aimless road for the left, one which eventually forked off through the woods of identitarianism and culture wars that I critiqued in Lessons from the Counterculture; but for the political right, 2008 presented a massive opportunity. This was their modern Weimar Republic, just like in Germany during the ‘20s and ‘30s, a desperate spiral was driving our political culture inexorably towards rage and fragmentation. The established political class failed to articulate a viable alternative to zombie Capitalism – the spiral turns downwards - Silicon Valley “disruption” expanded its economic vandalism, the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers process – the spiral turns again – this produced even greater economic precarity, social atomisation and political alienation (the emergence of the gig economy is a prime example) – turn - tech companies, and in particular social media platforms, that depended on ever-inflating user numbers, market share, captive audiences and data mining in order to justify the logic of their venture capital investment models exploited all these pathologies for their own ends – turn again, down, towards the void.

During an interview on Yascha Monk’s The Good Fight podcast in January 2025, The economist, and author of Technofeudalism, Yannis Varoufakis, commented on the dialectical nature of the modern relationship between computers, individuals and the tech companies, and what it has meant for human behaviour:

It's produced means of behavioural modification. Now, behavioural modification has always been around. This is not new: every preacher, every author, every politician, every philosopher tries to modify our behaviour. Every psychologist, every advertiser, for that matter, especially since the Second World War. What is new is that this has become automated. It has been given as a task to a machine. And not only that, but it is the most dialectical of machines in the sense that it is a machine that interfaces with you in real time, day and night. So you would take Amazon's Alexa or Siri…or the Google Assistant or any of these devices—essentially, you're training them. You're training Alexa to know you. You're training it to train you to train it better; to give you good advice, capture your trust…and it does give you good advice, whether it is Spotify recommending music, or Alexa recommending books, or what to do on your night out. It gives you good advice and gains your trust. Once it has implanted into your mind a preference for a particular product or service, it actually sells it to you directly, bypassing markets.

Varoufakis’s example neatly illustrates the dialectical endpoint of Douglas Engelbart’s “augmentation” thesis. It describes how humans would adapt, in their personal, individual relationships with computers, to become more easily exploited.

The convergence of the instability and immiseration bred by neoliberalism’s collapse, its reincarnation in zombie form, the Bodysnatcher disruptors, and Silicon Valley’s dopamine-led project to keep people on their devices and engaged, created the ideal conditions for a whole society of Otaku and net-rightists to emerge in the West. Right-wing strategists were quick to spot how the exploitative potential of technology could be harnessed for political ends; Steve Bannon publicly expressed an ambition to tap into the online communities of what he called “rootless white males”, and the tech companies would be more than happy to assist him in doing do so.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence, or perhaps it’s intrinsic to decentralisation, but the “fully distributed internet” would contribute, in the Web 2.0 era, to atomisation, loosening of communal bonds, disintegration of shared cultural experience, and the “epistemological crisis” warned of by Barack Obama in November 2020, two months before armed mobs of right-wing conspiracy theorists, radicalised online, launched an assault on the Capitol. John Perry Barlow’s utopian, “virtual world” generated all these monstrosities precisely because it’s virtual. It’s inhuman, and that inhumanity would naturally produce a virtual, inhuman politics.

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Our generation proved in cyberspace that where self-reliance leads, resilience follows, and where generosity leads, prosperity follows. If that dynamic continues, and everything so far suggests that it will, then the information age will bear the distinctive mark of the countercultural '60s well into the new millennium.

— Stewart Brand, We Owe It All To The Hippies, Time Magazine, Volume 145, Number 12 1^st of March, 1995

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

— John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8^th of February, 1996

The 1990s

In history’s halcyon end days, with the dark Satanic mills abandoned, collapsed and cleared, the chewing gears and raging foundries still and cold, and the iron curtain lowered, money ticked over. It travelled through the networked markets tended by benign and rational motherboards that blinked away at the end of the gold-brick road, under the gleaming spires of the Silicon City, where the clouds drifted across infinite glass, the sky repeated in mirrored facades, and the impression was one of floating through air, blessed by heat of the sun.

The politics of self-interest, that had always been implicit in the countercultural ‘60s, were, by the ‘90s, explicit. Many on the radical Left had embraced Reagan-era Capitalism, in some cases working for the Reagan and Bush administrations, or right-wing Republican politicians, or evangelical Libertarian-Capitalists. Jerry Rubin, the former radical Leftist leader of the Yippies and one of the Chicago Seven, said “the strategy of this generation is to transform America through entrepreneurial Capitalism…we’ve learned that the alternative to Capitalism doesn’t allow much freedom and we’re in the process of transforming Capitalism from big business to entrepreneurship”. Rennie Davis, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, and another of the Chicago Seven, became a venture capitalist with an emphasis on tech investments, as well as a self-absorbed mystic and advocate for daft New Age Spiritualism.

The start-ups and tech enterprises awash with venture capital riches named themselves after Ayn Rand and various of the deranged hallucinations in her books; some of their executives even named their children after various of the deranged hallucinations in her books. Rand’s philosophy of selfishness was by now openly venerated by the techno-hippies and their descendants. Forget Socialism, equality, liberty from the exploitation of capital and the other naïve, repressive illusions of the New Left – the liberated future would belong to the entrepreneurial individual, and it would be non-exploitative spiritually. The Golden Rule, “do no harm”, best intentions.

The era of the personal computer which the techno-hippies promised would liberate the individual from the asphyxiating grip of The Man, and enable him to pursue his own self-interest, had arrived. It was of course intimately entwined with the arrival of another technology that had been rapidly progressing since the 1960s: the network.

The network had its origins in the cybernetic visions of the computer savants: Vannevar Bush’s vision of the Memex, J.C.R Licklider’s concepts of “man-computer symbiosis” and the latter’s work on time-sharing; all of which we explored in Part 2 of this series.

In 1962, Licklider pitched up at the Pentagon’s “Advanced Research Projects Agency”, or “ARPA”, where he began articulating grand concepts for an “intergalactic computer network”, with centres that are “netted together” globally. These ideas translated into the development of ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet.

The foundation stone of ARPANET was that it would be a fully distributed network. This principle, established at its genesis, is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the internet and how it operates. It meant that, unlike a centralised network, with a single controlling hub, or a decentralised network, with a series of regional hubs, ARPANET, and thus the internet, would comprise a network of nodes, equal in their ability to distribute data, a system that would empower individuals and over which it would be difficult, even impossible, to exercise central control.

This design was in part motivated by security concerns, the project was being paid for by the Pentagon, after all. In a centralised or decentralised system, an enemy attack on the central command or regional hubs - say, a nuclear strike – could take down the entire network. With a distributed system, it would be impossible to eliminate all the nodes, any that became incapacitated would have their data routed through alternatives, the network would always continue to function.

In the 1980s, as modems became widely available, this cyber-utopian dream of an emancipated network, a “liberated zone” like Haight-Ashbury and the countercultural hubs of the ‘60s, synthesised with the techno-hippies’ vision for the personal computer as an instrument with which to extend the capacity and independence of individuals. Personal computer users would be able to build communities in cyberspace, liberated zones impervious to the supervision and demands of authority; unlike in the ‘60s, The Man would not be able to deploy the National Guard.

Again Stewart Brand appeared, like Merlin under an electrical storm, approaching once more from over the misty hills to anoint the arrival of a new computing age and announce the risen sun. This time it would be the reincarnation of his Whole Earth Catalog as the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL, arguably the first ever virtual community, and a precursor to modern social networks.

Established in 1985, the WELL aimed to be an egalitarian, non-hierarchical community defined by its members. People were free to discuss anything that they wished, new users were greeted with the phrase “You Own Your Words”, which was both a dispensation and a warning – your contributions to the WELL would not be commodified or copyrighted, but you also bear responsibility for your own actions. Both these principles would eventually be discarded by social media, in its avarice and exceptionalism, along with the nudge mechanism introduced to defend them: users on the WELL could not post anonymously.

A year or so after the WELL went live, its community was joined by John Perry Barlow, a counterculturalist, contrarian and polymath in the lineage of Ken Kesey, who was closely associated with the Grateful Dead, having attended school with Dead guitarist Bob Weir and contributed lyrics to some of the band’s recordings. The WELL had a strong “Deadhead” presence, and Barlow became a prominent member, eventually joining its board of directors.

Barlow proved to be an energetic futurist, and travelled the world evangelising for the internet, while indefatigably filing articles and essays in praise of the coming cyber age. His utopian faith in the potential of cyberspace was profoundly ideological, animated by libertarian beliefs that he shared with figures like Kesey and Stewart Brand and which were characteristic of the discourse on the WELL. These are political views which, to my mind and for reasons that I discussed in Lessons from the Counterculture, place Barlow, contrary to his countercultural appearances, emphatically on the radical Right.

His formal political record justifies such a designation, despite various later recantations, apologies and caveats: he was chairman of his hometown Republican Party and ran Dick Cheney’s congressional campaign in 1968, only with the cursed birth of Donald Trump’s Presidency did he finally renounce the Republican Party and even then, as we shall see, with none of the self-awareness that becomes the true penitent.

Libertarianism and individualism of the Brand-Barlow variety was the dominant political mode of the WELL and other early internet communities. Usenet groups, discussion boards and mailing lists dedicated to advancing decentralisation, autonomy, and freedom from authority proliferated across the network. Many of these communities were either run or joined by people who would go on to become famous personalities in the cyber age – Julian Assange, for example.

In 1990 John Perry Barlow and two other Libertarians from the WELL, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as an organisation aimed at “defending civil liberties in the digital world” and “to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world”; they were later joined by Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. Their mission to oppose unjust control and subjugation of the network by traditional sectors of power was, on the face of it, a noble calling.

The Big Bang occurred in 1993, when Al Gore achieved success in his campaign to have the internet opened to commercial use. Cyberspace rapidly expanded, with new galaxies and star systems forming monthly. At the beginning of ’93 there were 50 web servers in the world, by the end of the year there were 500. Barlow and his fellow utopians space-walked in tearful wonderment, it really was the next thing after acid.

In ’96 a poetically moved Barlow, outraged by what he perceived to be a government/corporate attempt to colonise cyberspace, published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind”, Barlow intoned, “on behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather”. He went on to describe his vision for an anarchistic, self-regulating, supranational community, the ethical core of which would be the very Randian-sounding “enlightened self-interest”:

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you… You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours… We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

Quite apart from the astonishing hubris on display in presuming to speak for every internet user, which would, in short order, be pretty much the entire world, Barlow’s declaration was, of course, hopelessly naïve. On what premise did he hold the belief that all internet users would “recognize the golden rule”? With what mechanisms did he propose to “identify and address real conflicts and wrongs”, and who appointed him to do so, by the way? The strong impression is that, far from being a thoughtful response to nascent issues of governance, jurisdiction and regulation of the internet, Barlow’s declaration was simply a statement that he preferred to do just as he liked, without reference to anyone or anything else, thank you very much. And wasn’t it always thus with the hippies, and their Libertarian apologia?

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was spectacularly successful, and inspired a corpus of works dedicated to Utopian futurism around the internet: hierarchies would vanish, the wisdom of crowds would construct balanced societies, citizen journalism and user-generated content would secure the accuracy and integrity of information.

In his documentaries All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis describes the Brand-Barlow vision as one in which “individuals freed from political control and hierarchies find themselves in a network with its own equilibrium and natural order…a new, powerful individualism that could not fit with the idea of collective political action”

On one level, the computer revolution framed in this way was a means of grappling with the pure id of a hippie movement that had ended the 1960s with the Weathermen and domestic terrorism. It posited a system based on rationalism and logic, and which would achieve “equilibrium”, objectivity, the Golden Rule; and which could mitigate some of the worst excesses of the extreme solipsism and selfishness previously unleashed by the syncretic Libertarianism, Leftist radicalism and identity politics of the counterculture, without discarding the Libertarianism and individualism. “Computers would liberate society”, Stewart Brand said, “power to the people in a very direct sense. An eco-system that was self-correcting”.

“Barlow gave a picture of cyberspace not as a network controlled by corporations, but as a magical free place”, Curtis says in Hypernormalisation, “an alternative to the old systems of power. It was a vision that came to dominate the internet over the next 20 years… a place that they could retreat to, away from the harsh right-wing politics of Reagan’s America”.

For Curtis, this ambition is a fallacy. He points out that in the 1960s communes, supposedly non-hierarchal communities of free individuals, leaders inevitably emerged. The egalitarian dream of the communes in California, which inspired Engelbart and the personal computers, ended up creating hierarchical structures. “The self-organising model”, Curtis argues, “cannot deal with the central dynamic forces of human societies – politics and power…The networks hadn’t eliminated power, they had just shifted it, and concentrated it in new forms”.

While I largely agree with Curtis’s analysis, there is often a fatalistic, even nihilistic, streak that runs through his work that I think, in this case, leads him to be too generous towards the cyber-utopians and techno-hippies. For Curtis, capital and power are inexorable and never really change; the techno-hippies are just benign, utopian fantasists recoiling from the truth.

Where I depart from Curtis, is that I don’t think that the cyber-utopians were looking for “a place that they could retreat to, away from the harsh right-wing politics of Reagan’s America”, I think that they actively colluded in those politics. Reagan’s deregulating, privatising, marketizing, tax-cutting government chimed melodically with their hippie Libertarianism, inherited from the Merry Pranksters, and their affinity with Ayn Rand’s “heroic individual” and William Rees-Mogg’s “Sovereign Individual” (a new right-wing fantasy birthed in the 1990s, which would come to be heavily influential amongst the techno-fascists and billionaire plutocrats of late Silicon Valley - Peter Thiel contributes the introduction to the latest edition). Reagan’s America was Jerry Rubin’s “entrepreneurial Capitalism” and Stewart Brand’s veneration of business, the spirit and philosophy of which they carried into the 1990s.

In the early ‘90s John Perry Barlow staged “Cyberthons”, gatherings of cyber-utopians through which he tried to build a movement. “The Cyberthon as it was originally conceived was supposed to be the “90s equivalent of the Acid Test”, Barlow said, “and we had thought to involve some of the same personnel…and it immediately acquired a commercial quality that was initially a little unsettling to people like me but as soon as I saw it actually working I thought ‘ah, well, if you’re gonna have an Acid Test for the ‘90s money better be involved’”.

If there was anything that Barlow and his cyber-utopians wanted to “retreat” from, it was not the “harsh right-wing politics” of Reaganism, as Curtis would have it, it was the logic, the material realities and hypocrisies of their own politics. Their utopianism wasn’t an attempt to escape their ideological ally Ronald Reagan, it was an effort to escape themselves, to escape accountability.

Brand and Barlow’s aphorisms – “information wants to be free and it wants to be expensive”, “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away” – show that they were aware of the paradoxes that entwined their political views, but it was as if they were content simply to observe these paradoxes: curiosities, part of an inconsequential, discursive game. The networked computer age financed by venture capital and centred in the Silicon City, however, was amassing enormous economic, social, and therefore political, power. The way that these technologies integrated into societies was not a utopian game or thought experiment, it was a deadly serious historical inflection point, and arguing that it should be premised on laissez-faire Capitalism and shallow, hippie Libertarianism would have consequences.

John Perry Barlow did experience some blowback in the early online communities. Hypernormalisation examines “a notorious public debate online, [in which] two hackers attacked Barlow. What infuriated them most was Barlow’s insistence that there were no hierarchies, or controlling powers, in the new cyberworld”. The hackers stole Barlow’s credit data and published it online, they wanted to demonstrate that, contrary to Barlow’s fantasies, the internet was a technology which enabled sectors of power to gather previously unheard-of levels of detail about individuals, which could then be used to coerce and manipulate. In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Curtis highlights the case of a woman who posted on one of the early chat boards and who had come to the realisation that, in participating in Cyberspace, she had commodified herself and her interior thoughts, that Cyberspace was “a black hole that takes human emotions and reproduces them as spectacle”.

A few months after John Perry Barlow posted A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace online, the technology writer Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish in Mother Jones Magazine. Cyberselfish was both an account of Borsook’s time in Silicon Valley, and a critique of its politics which were, at that time, generally obscure to the public. She coined a new, catch-all term to describe the community of techno-hippies and cyber-utopians: “technolibertarians”. “It came as a shock, when I stumbled into the culture of Silicon Valley”, Borsook wrote, “although the technologists I encountered there were the liberals on social issues I would have expected (pro-choice, as far as abortion; pro-diversity, as far as domestic partner benefits; inclined to sanction the occasional use of recreational drugs), they were violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation”. She went on to present an excoriating depiction of technolibertarianism, in its hypocrisy, and in its virulently right-wing ideology excepting, of course, the cosmetic approval of joints and gay sex:

These are the inheritors of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in technical education the planet has ever seen; and, like the ungrateful adolescent offspring of immigrants who have made it in the new country, they take for granted the richness of the environment in which they have flourished, and resent the hell out of the constraints that bind them. And, like privileged, spoiled teenagers everywhere, they haven’t a clue what their existence would be like without the bounty showered on them. These high-tech libertarians believe the private sector can do everything — but, of course, R&D is something that cannot by any short-term measurement meet the test of the marketplace, the libertarians’ measure of all things. They decry regulation–except without it, there would be no mechanism to ensure profit from intellectual property, without which entrepreneurs would not get their payoffs, nor would there be equitable marketplaces in which to make their sales…. And when Self magazine started an online gun control conference on The WELL, an electronic bulletin board and Internet gateway smack in the middle of tree-hugging, bleeding-heart-liberal, secular-humanist Northern California, opinions ranged from mildly to rabidly anti-gun control…The nexus of libertarianism and high-tech in the Silicon Valley will come to matter more and more, because it involves lots and lots of money.

Borsook’s conclusion was stunning in its perspicacity and prescience:

As surely as power follows wealth, those who make money decide that society, having rewarded their random combination of brains and luck in one sphere, should pay attention to them in another. And so, high-technocrats are beginning to try to influence the world beyond VDTs [video display terminals].

But what will result if the people who want to shape public policy know nothing about history or political science or, most importantly, how to interact with other humans? Programmers, and those who know how to make money off them, mostly find it easier to interact in e-mail than IRL (in real life), and are often not good at picking up the cues, commonplaces, and patterns of being that civilians use to communicate, connect, and operate in groups.

The convergence between libertarianism and high-tech has created the true revenge of the nerds: Those whose greatest strengths have not been the comprehension of social systems, appreciation of the humanities, or acquaintance with history, politics, and economics have started shaping public policy. Armed with new money and new celebrity — juice — they can wreak vengeance on those by whom they have felt diminished.

We began with a quote from Stewart Brand’s 1995 article in Time Magazine: “the information age will bear the distinctive mark of the countercultural '60s well into the new millennium”. In that prediction he was correct. The technolibertarians dragged the Starbucks Paradox out of Haight-Ashbury and into the networked era, which evolved in context of Capitalism and in particular Venture Capitalism and, even more specifically, the neoliberal Capitalism inaugurated in the Reagan era. They were so keen that life should proceed according to their utopian visions, that they ignored how it was likely to proceed. They did not take into account the mechanics of power, which they perceived, in the unsophisticated, conspiratorial hippie’s way, as simply the dictatorship of The Man. In that sense they made a false distinction between the coercive state and its institutions, and private companies which, within their cosmology, are something akin to community associations of free individuals, operating in free markets. What this limited analysis misunderstands is the dynamics of power, and that the power of private interests can be just as coercive, if not more so, than that of the state, with none of the mechanisms of accountability. Technologies, just as psychedelic drugs or decent rock music, do not fundamentally alter power dynamics. As the ‘60s should already have shown them, hierarchies always emerge, the question is one of accountability, which is political.

The technolibertarians wilfully refused to parse their ideological contradictions - the contradictions highlighted by the hackers who stole John Perry Barlow’s data to make a point, the contradictions essayed by Paulina Borsook in her five-alarm warning, the contradiction between Steve Wozniak’s place on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, while Apple Computer aggressively constructs monopolies, files and enforces patents, extorts independent artists, golden rule be damned.

The figure who was prepared to be honest about these contradictions, was the Moses of neoliberal Capitalism, Milton Friedman. Friedman’s ideas shaped the economic context of the technological age, applied the philosophies of Ayn Rand, bequeathed Reagan his programme and expressed the beliefs of the technolibertarians, as seen directly in John Perry Barlow’s eager sponsorship of the garrulous Conservative politician and Friedmanite Dick Cheney; “the smartest man I’ve met”, Barlow fawned of Cheney.

In 1996, the same year that Barlow published A Declaration and Borsook Cyberselfish, Milton Freidman gave an interview in which he said:

Hong Kong in political terms has been a dictatorship, but it’s been a benevolent dictatorship. It had a completely laissez-faire economic policy…there is almost no doubt that if you had political freedom in Honk Kong you would have much less economic and civil freedom than you do as a result of an authoritarian government…I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for freedom, but there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy.

What Friedman doesn’t appear to have contemplated quite so thoroughly, is whether his particular notion of a “free economy” might, in fact, destroy democratic societies. In February 2025, a few weeks after snapping out his notorious Nazi salute, Elon Musk approvingly tweeted a video of Milton Friedman advocating the abolition of almost all the democratic institutions of the state. “Milton Friedman was spot on”, he captioned it. We have since seen the yield of Musk’s evisceration of the US Federal Government, a grotesque performance in which he appeared before cameras and gleefully wielded a growling chainsaw. The consequences of his cuts to USAID are estimated, by the Lancet, to include one million avoidable HIV infections amongst children, with half a million of those children expected to die from AIDS within the next five years. The World Food Program has predicted a crisis of starvation, malnutrition and insanitary drinking water.

Time has proved that Freidman’s Libertarian economics, and the ideologies advocated by technolibertarians, have been spectacularly adept at launching massive transfers of wealth to the rich, hollowing out democracies and collapsing economies. In 1997, a year after he gave his interview in praise of Hong Kong’s “completely laissez-faire economic policy”, Hong Kong’s economy crumbled in the Asian Financial Crisis; it had to be bailed out by massive state intervention. This pattern has repeated throughout the neoliberal era, with expansive implications for the political health of societies. In the next part of this series I’ll look at two cases in particular: Japan in 1990, and the great crash of 2008.

The consequences of neoliberal collapses would in turn feed back into the technological age, the aftershocks speeding through the cables and circuit boards, back towards the Silicon City. “The distinctive mark of the countercultural '60s” was indeed coming for the new millennium, but not in the way that Brand imagined: its venture capital; its Libertarianism; the individualism that had produced the personal computer; the conspiratorial distrust of government that had produced the distributed internet; its utopianism and cultishness, which wilfully refused to acknowledge the darkness that gathered at the edges of its sun-kissed towers.

In the last, from all the circuits tangled with contradictions, we have the grand contradiction articulated by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “Maybe you accentuate in a wrong way the radical untouchable character of personal freedom, individual freedom. Brought to the end this attitude is self-destructive, because too much individual freedom…destroys human freedom itself”.

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“Information wants to be free. And it wants to be very expensive”.

- Stewart Brand

The previous part in this series explored the ideologies at work in the personal computer revolution, and ideas of the techno-hippies who fomented that revolution. It was an individualistic, solipsistic, anti-establishment, anti-hierarchical, entrepreneurial form of Libertarian-Capitalism. It had an ambivalent relationship to power - hostile to political authority and the state, yet financed by the state and in particular the Pentagon; a tension which the hippies were conscious of. It fell within the lineage of Ken Kesey’s “religious”, or “psychedelic” counterculturalism, from which it inherited a self-centred, self-serving dimension. And it produced private, commercial enterprises that were clearly going to be worth a lot of money, something that, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, some of the nominally anti-Capitalist hippies found uncomfortable, among them a young anti-war activist named Fred Moore.

Moore had become interested in computers as potentially useful tools for political organising. He had served jail time for refusing to join the Vietnam draft, and after his release in 1967 lived on the breadline around the San Francisco Peninsula, where he engaged in community activism and cultivated a disdain for money, which he felt disfigured all human relations.

In 1971 Moore attended a party thrown by Stewart Brand, to mark the final print run of the Whole Earth Catalog, at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco. As the gathering of one thousand raucous Catalog fans danced, played volleyball and huffed nitrous oxide while the clock rolled past midnight, Brand took to the stage and announced that he had with him $20,000 in $100 hundred dollar bills, to be spent however the collected hippies saw fit.

Brand’s idealistic notion that the wisdom of the crowd would produce sensational, inspired ideas on how to deploy capital to the benefit of mankind proved to be idiotic. Hours of tortured debate ensued, with drunk hippies firing off unpromising suggestions and $5,000 of Brand’s $20,000 mysteriously disappearing as it passed between the various proposers.

Fred Moore was moved to fury. Where Brand saw an opportunity for dynamic, non-hierarchical investment decisions (an opportunity that he was rapidly losing faith in), Moore perceived cacophonous rancour, the division and avarice that always attended the appearance of money. He made several interventions throughout the night, inveighing against the psychotic despotism of money and appealing to the crowd to reject it in favour of using the gathering as an opportunity to forge relationships and freely collaborate. As dawn broke and the sun climbed above the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, the partygoers voted to take the remaining $15,000 from the prone fingers of an exhausted, vanquished Brand and give it all to Fred Moore, the one guy who didn’t want it.

The arrival of Venture Capital

When Silicon Valley established itself in Palo Alto in the early 1950s, the new, innovative technology companies that sprang up also, initially by happenstance, attracted novel forms of finance.

One of Palo Alto’s first tenants was Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a semiconductor research lab founded by the Nobel prize-winning physicist William Shockley. Although clearly a gifted physicist, Shockley was a profoundly unpleasant specimen, and difficult to work for. His reputation was that of an imperious bully, who routinely intimidated and humiliated his employees. He was also a racist, who dedicated his autumn years to eugenics, and the pursuit of proof that black people were an inferior species.

In 1957, eight of Shockley’s most gifted researchers concluded that they had seen enough, and resigned en-masse from Shockley Semiconductor, earning themselves the sobriquet “the traitorous eight” in the process. The eight intended to enter into direct competition with Shockley, but lacked the money to do so. Personal connections eventually brought their proposal to a young Wall Street broker named Arthur Rock, who was prepared to gamble that a group of people with such obvious ability were bound to achieve something extraordinary sooner or later.

The traditional method of privately financing a new venture was either to find a single corporate sponsor, who might be prepared to incorporate a new division, or to apply to funds operated by rich families, who would invest in interesting ideas that the banks refused to back. For the traitorous eight, Arthur Rock approached Sherman Fairchild, a wealthy playboy, founder of Fairchild Aircraft, Fairchild Camera and a suite of other enterprises. When Fairchild agreed to bankroll Fairchild Semiconductor for the eight, Rock’s company also cut themselves in on the action. It was the opening deal in a model of finance that would become known as “venture capital”.

Fairchild Semiconductor and its founders went on to blockbuster success and the company became a progenitor of various “Fairchildren” – a succession of some of the most significant enterprises in Silicon Valley, including Intel. Arthur Rock arranged venture capital for many of these enterprises: start-up finance exchanged for a share of equity.

The money often went to charismatic entrepreneurs, and not necessarily a business plan, “I think talking to the individual is more important than finding out what they want to do” Rock would later say. As the economic model of Silicon Valley evolved, it became very focused on individual entrepreneurs, “founders”, as they eventually became known, and departed from the economic logic of traditional businesses which are, as a first principle, expected to post profits.

The cyber-utopian thinker John Perry Barlow (of whom we will hear much more in this series) would later say, “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away”, and this maxim neatly encapsulates the rationale of Silicon Valley’s venture capital-driven model as it would evolve over the decades. With its focus on charismatic individuals and savants, the model has proven itself able to withstand enormous financial losses, so long as a given enterprise is achieving visibility, market share and an escalating stock price. It has wrought untold damage on our economies and societies, a subject which we will revisit later in this series.

Fred Moore’s Homebrew

Back in 1971, Fred Moore was engaged in what we might consider to be a micro, street-level version of venture capital investment.

He tremulously dug up the Whole Earth Catalog money from his back garden and invested it in various community enterprises around the San Francisco Peninsula. Success was variable and Moore had to reluctantly assume debt-collection duties which, naturally, he detested; his stress was further amplified by a second infusion of $15,000 from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth project.

As a mathematician, Moore had an instinctive interest in computers, but was suspicious of the entire sector, which he saw as an organ of The Man – giant mainframes controlled by unsentimental and repressive corporations. He was, however, intrigued by the concept of smaller, personal computers, which could be deployed to create networks and facilitate the free exchange of information, beneath the notice of giant technology companies and their imperial designs.

Moore started to pay out the Whole Earth money in loans and grants to organisations who would provide computer access and education on the peninsula, he became part of a small, local community of micro-computer enthusiasts and hobbyists, at the centre of which was The People’s Computer Company – a newsletter with a declared mission to restore computers, which it claimed had been used against the people, to the control and service of the people.

In the spring of 1975, Fred Moore, along with other veterans of The People’s Computer Company, founded the Homebrew Computer Club, an open community in which amateur computer technicians and hackers could share, network and collaborate. It was the kind of forum that Moore had advocated for at Stewart Brand’s party in the Science Museum four years earlier, and it marked the moment at which computer development broke out of the technology companies and research labs, and started to circulate freely among enthusiasts in the general population.

The ethos of the club energetically endorsed the first part of Stewart Brand’s aphorism, “information wants to be free. And it wants to be very expensive” (in time many club members would become equally positive about the second clause). But for the Homebrewers “free” meant not only “freely accessible”, it also meant “free of charge”.

The Homebrewers embraced the ethic of piracy that would become prevalent during the early years of the web - an ethic of which Napster would be a representative example. Two of the club’s most celebrated alumni, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, had started out building “blue boxes”, devices that hacked the Bell telephone network and enabled the user to make free long-distance calls. There was a general culture of disregard for property rights, and a feeling that discovery of the luminous technological future depended the free circulation of information.

The club’s philosophy went on to inspire the Free Source and Open-Source movements, which I won’t go into in this series, except to say that the Homebrewers modelled a form of technology development that emphasised community and collaboration in opposition to proprietorship and commercial protectionism. They were less explicitly concerned with the countercultural individualism of Kesey Hippies like Stewart Brand.

Where we might see the Homebrewers’ spiritual antecedents in the counterculture of the ‘60s, is in The Diggers, whom I covered extensively in Lessons from the Counterculture Part 5:

The Diggers [were] an anarchist collective that perhaps best embodied the Haight’s hybrid politics of communal-individualism, in which the interests of community are promoted through Libertarian individualism, anti-materialism and anti-statism…In an early manifesto they proclaimed “the US standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep…our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality… Any important human occupation can be done free… Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property”… The Diggers organised “Free Stores”, ramshackle charity shops in which all the donated goods were free. They ran a soup kitchen in Golden Gate Park, where mal-nourished hippies queued to step through the “free frame of reference” and receive a bowl of meat and vegetables. They organised healthcare clinics staffed by medical students and crash pads where the homeless could find shelter.

The Diggers shared Fred Moore’s abhorrence of money, and the constraints that it placed on human existence. They sought to replace “dull money morality” with their ethic of “free”, the same basic concept that an inflamed Moore had struggled to advocate at Stewart Brand’s party, and the same ethos that animated the free-experimentation of the Homebrew computer hobbyists. But, back in the ‘60s, The Diggers (and the other groups that experimented with alternative ways of living in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood), had had an uncomfortable collision with reality, something that I described as the “Starbucks Paradox”:

The Haight encountered what we might call the “Starbucks Paradox”, a facetious objection beloved of the Right (and sometimes idiotically endorsed by sections of the Left) which had its glory years during the anti-globalisation demos of the early millennium and into the post-crash “Occupy” era. The Starbucks Paradox holds that it is impossible to advance a critique of Capitalism if you have recently purchased a coffee from Starbucks, or bought something from Amazon, or, latterly, owned an iPhone/Macbook. This was the objection levelled at [Bill] Graham – that in running a successful business, he was guilty of advancing Capitalism, and exploiting the community in the Haight.

What the Starbucks Paradox ignores, or pretends to ignore, is that when both the global economy and the nation state are arranged according to the rules of Capitalism, then it is not possible to exist outside of Capitalism. That does not make Capitalism the immutable law of the universe and its metaphysics, as the Right likes to suggest, nor preclude it from critique. In fact, all that this facile argument achieves is to buttress the fallacious moral apology for Capitalism, which is to suggest that the Capitalist system is subject to ultimate democratic accountability via the mechanism of individuals exercising choice within the marketplace. This is why the Right loves the Starbucks Paradox, it’s an attempt to bait anyone credulous enough on the Left into accepting the premise of Capitalism, and it’s why anyone on the Left seriously advocating consumer behaviour as a means to fatally undermine Capitalism needs to give themselves a slap.

In 1976 the Homebrewers had a heated collision with the same reality that had confronted the exponents of the Starbucks Paradox a decade earlier. This time the voice of economic realism belonged to Bill Gates, a twenty-one-year-old computer programmer who was incensed that members of the Homebrew Computer Club had extensively distributed pirated copies of his new, groundbreaking software.

Gates attempted to appeal to the pirates on the basis of the prevailing system of business ethics, that is to say Max Weber’s notion of the “capitalist spirit” and Protestant work ethic. He published An Open Letter to Hobbyists in Computer Notes, The Homebrew Club Newsletter, People’s Computer Company and the Micro-8 Computer User Group Newsletter in which he wrote:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair?... The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?

Gates’s missive was taken by some techno-hippies as the classic profiteer’s complaint: an attempt to repress noble, collaborative, community-based endeavours to advance technologies for the betterment of mankind, in order that some individual can pursue his own personal fortune by wielding property rights.

The reality, of course, is far more complex, especially if viewed in context of the Starbucks Paradox. On what is the Homebrewers’ ethic of piracy and belief that Software should be free premised? If it is, say, the kind of vaguely anarcho-syndicalist beliefs espoused by Fred Moore and the Diggers, then Gates is correct and we run into the obstacle that, in a Capitalist economy, it is not possible to exist outside of Capitalism. While it is of course possible to develop free software or Open-Source software, this relies on the consent of the developer, and there will always be people, like Gates, who favour a proprietary model and do not give consent for the free distribution of their code.

If the idea is that software should be freely distributed in order to then enable some third order of proprietary Capitalism e.g to enable hardware development, which would then be subject to property rights and sold at a profit, then Gates is still correct, because he is right to draw attention to the arbitrary nature of these designations – on what basis is it held that hardware must be paid for but that software should be free?

If, finally, it is some form of vaguely libertarian viewpoint, in which one should be free to use whatever is available, without too much concern for rules, regulations and property rights, and that the mechanisms of the market and good intentions will impose equilibrium in the final analysis, then all of Gates’s arguments are irrelevant, and the laws of the jungle will decide the matter. I fear that it is this latter principle that was at work in Silicon Valley, particularly amongst the entrepreneurial hobbyists.

The more thoughtful techno-hippies were alive to the contradictions that spewed from the boiling furnace of computer innovation: Stewart Brand’s “Information wants to be free. And it wants to be very expensive”; the Cyber-Utopian John Perry Barlow’s “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away”. Brand, and others of this self-consciously libertarian bent, make a distinction in their concept of “free” between “libre” (no restrictions) and “gratis” (no cost), and it is the “libre” that emerged as the animating ethic of the computer revolution.

In his Open Letter to Hobbyists, Bill Gates argued for a grey, traditional Capitalist approach to the business of computer development, one in which companies incorporate to produce goods and are profitably renumerated for their labour and investment. Interestingly, it is Gates the realist profiteer who has emerged from among the early computer pioneers as the most effective philanthropist, the one who has dedicated his wealth to the common good in the form of poverty relief initiatives, vaccine programmes, and climate research. For his trouble, he has become the target of inane conspiracies in direct lineage of those promulgated by the libertarian hippies and counterculturalists of the ‘60s and ‘70s (although it must be said that the picture is mixed - as highlighted by anti-trust suits in the 1990s, Microsoft has also been a force for monopolisation and control).

And what of Fred Moore’s anti-money utopianism? A year before Gates drafted his letter Moore had already left California, having concluded that his Homebrew club would be an incubator of entrepreneurialism, rather than world peace. The violent sound of snapping was audible, as the contradictions piled up on the fragile corpus of personal computer idealism. John Markoff in What The Doormouse Said:

At every opportunity [Moore] repeated his mantra of sharing. But the entrepreneurial explosion that he had touched off was unstoppable…He had been deeply frustrated by the corrosive power of money and then overnight had helped create a powerful community in which the free sharing of information was not just an aspect of it but the essential reason for its existence. The deep irony was that Fred Moore lit the spark that burned brightly in two contradictory directions – towards the creation of powerful information tools that made information remarkably easy to share and increasingly valuable at the same time.

The Homebrew Computer Club was fated to change the world, but when the change came, it was not the one Moore had hoped for. The Homebrew Computer Club wound up serving as the catalyst for what venture capitalist John Doerr was to call ‘the largest legal accumulation of money in history’. At least twenty-three companies, including Apple Computer, were to trace their lineage directly to Homebrew…the hobbyists would tear down the glass-house computing world and transform themselves into a movement that emphasized an entirely new set of values from traditional American businesses.”

The “change that Moore had hoped for” did not arrive precisely because the genesis of the personal computer was not motivated by any genuine, coherent social-political mission, but simply an anamorphous set of mantras around “individualism” and “liberty”.

What we see from the Libertarian-Capitalists’ alternative vision of a devolved, distributed counterculture of unregulated, free exploration, hacking and piracy, is that, for many, it extended only as far as it suited their personal interests. This was of-a-piece with the ideologies at work in the religious side of the Counterculture during the 1960s. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s iconoclasm, their production and sale of Blue Boxes with which to hack the telephone network, their chatter about “decentralisation” and “liberty”, all of this was profaned by the giant, centralising corporation that they were happy to build; one which now shakes-down small independent artists for 30% of the donations pledged to support those artists via Patreon, and spends three times on patents and lawsuits the sum that it commits to R&D. The same is true for many of the other evangelists for small, non-hierarchical enterprises that ended up running giant corporations that are more powerful than the IBMs of the world ever were. Much of the techno-hippie talk about the free-flow of information can be simply attributed to a selfish desire to do as one pleases without the inconvenience of restriction and regulation. As John Markoff phrased it, “Silicon Valley has long been motivated by what author Michael Malone called “The Big Score” – more simply put, greed”.

These tendencies can be observed in each new advance or epoch that erupts from Silicon Valley, one is currently raging about us: the AI revolution. In fealty to the Valley’s laissez-faire approach to everyone else’s rights, even while it litigiously enforces its own, the AI companies are happily exploiting, libre and gratis, the combined fruits of mankind’s artistry, wisdom, intellect and labour in order to train its models, and has no intention of paying for the privilege. It has also (again) embarked on an absurdist demolition of formerly productive industries, in furtherance of an unguided, energy-intensive chaos-engine that has nothing to say about what will adequately replace the economies that it collapses. The technology companies have adopted the Homebrew approach only in a limited way: as a stalking horse for constructing profit-extracting monopolies and cartels later.

Silicon Valley has managed to synthesise the two, opposing propositions in Bill Gates’s dispute with the Homebrew Computer Club: a radical form of the proprietary protectionism defended by Gates, and the Homebrewers’ ethic of “free” – which is little more than John Perry Barlow’s “giving it away” deployed as a tactic until the market collapses and the protectionist oligarchy can emerge. This is the logic of “disruption”, a destructive form of Libertarian Capitalism which produces unaccountable monopolies and centralised power.

The venture capital model pioneered by Arthur Rock, which venerates charismatic individuals, which emphasises empire and dominance, has cultivated enterprises that, unencumbered by the need to grow modestly with the goal of incremental profitability, are in consequence egotistical, megalomaniacal.

This is what happened when Libertarian ideologies in the counterculture reconciled with capital, it really was “the next thing after acid”: many of the leaders of the New Left became venture capitalists; Black Panthers, hippies, Merry Pranksters all flooded into the Republican Party, where they worked to bring about Ronald Reagan’s Neoliberal age, an immaculate political expression of the amoral concept of freedom that attended acid, the hippies and the Hell’s Angels.

John Markoff published What The Doormouse Said in 2004. Twenty years later, one of his final passages has proved to be remarkably prescient:

The computer hackers’ urge to share and the entrepreneurs desire for wealth – it is a confrontation that will inevitably define new technology revolutions. The stage is set for a clash of values that echo the various forces that created Silicon Valley.

What is interesting about Markoff’s portent, is that the clashes he foresees between the “urge to share” and the “desire for wealth” have to a large extent been reconciled by the next phase in the techno-hippie dream: the free flow of information in cyberspace, distributed networks liberated from the supervision of governments and the control of old systems of repressive power.

Those networks bequeathed us Social Media, which has managed to convert the urge share into a source of massive wealth.

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What are computers for? This is not a question that had ever really troubled me. As I suspect is the case for most of my generation, computers simply insinuated themselves into my life, at first as a fairly limited way in which to play electronic games in flickering black-and-green, latterly as a small hand-held device, masquerading as a “phone”, that tyrannises every aspect of our existence.

There are, of course, people who think intensively about what computers are for (perhaps some of you are reading this), and those that asked this question early enough in the genealogy of computing had some additional questions to confront: what could computers be for? What will computers be for in the future? And although those questions might continually present themselves to technologists and computer scientists, by now the basic premises of the technology have already been set, there is a history, the horse has bolted and is running amok through our societies, foaming at the mouth and distributing lies, conspiracy theories, espionage, addiction, organised crime and unregulated pornography in all directions.

But in the early days of computing, those technologists were more or less staring at a tabula rasa; the future had to be imagined, and where imagination is put to work, it is quite often under the supervision of ideology.

The First Computers

The first computers were for calculating. The computer was conceived as a device to help solve mathematical problems quicker than humans could do so alone, while also helping to eliminate human error. They were to be operated by engineers and specialists. The development of these computers was accelerated by that timeless engine of creativity, productivity and innovation: the desire of humans to kill one another as efficiently as possible, and in large numbers.

In 1940, as Nazi armour swarmed into France, the American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush urgently sought an audience with President Roosevelt. Bush, a professor at MIT, had built the world’s first analog electrical-mechanical computer. His machine was an important landmark in the history of computing, and it had a particularly useful military application – generating artillery firing tables, which was the type of task that occupied early computers, essential battlefield calculations that could be made much faster than humans could accomplish by themselves.

During the First World War, Bush had felt that the development of US technology had been hampered by a lack of co-ordination between civilian scientists and the military. Alarmed by the speed of the Nazi advance in the opening stanzas of the Second, he appealed to Roosevelt to establish the National Defense Research Committee and, later, the Office of Scientific Research. These organisations, both chaired by Bush, would co-ordinate military and civilian scientific resources and research with the aim of achieving technological advantage in the war. They would also create what has been called America’s “military-industrial-academic” complex, a confederacy of the Pentagon, large corporations and academic research institutions that would turbo-charge the development of computer technology between the 1950s and ‘80s.

Bush was not only a pragmatic organiser, he was also a dreamer and futurist who stared out over the horizon of technology, and thought about where man and machine may take one another. In July 1945, one month before his Manhattan Project unleashed the rolling nuclear fire that engulfed Hiroshima, Bush published an article in The Atlantic entitled As We May Think. “The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house”, Bush wrote, “They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience”. He went on to describe a personal device that he called a Memex:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanised file and library. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications and is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged, intimate supplement to his memory.

What Bush had described with his memex, was a conceptual progenitor of the networked personal computer, a device that could enhance the cognitive ability of the individual subject, a machine that complements the individual human life as it is lived. This was a profound imaginative leap from what computers were at the time, huge mainframes chugging away in labs and operated by dedicated technicians.

In 1951, six years after Bush had conceived the memex, another computer scientist at MIT, J.C.R Licklider, described a system that would further close the gap between man and machine: “time-sharing”. Time-sharing removed the mediating authority of the computer technician from the relationship between the computer and its user. Prior to time-sharing, users had to hand punch cards or tape to computer technicians, who would exit in the direction of the computer mainframe, returning hours or even days later to loftily announce the results. Time-sharing permitted multiple terminals to communicate directly with the mainframe simultaneously, users could get results almost instantly, in discrete communion with the computer.

In 1960, Licklider published a paper entitled Man-Computer Symbiosis, “The hope is”, he wrote, “that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today”.

Two years later, Douglas Engelbart, an electrical engineer at The Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, published Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Engelbart was in thrall to Bush’s vision of the memex, and had dedicated himself to realising it, “By ‘augmenting human intellect’”, he said, “we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems”.

Engelbart’s theories built on those outlined by Bush and Licklider, he described a close personal relationship between man and machine, one which is variously “symbiotic”, “individual”, and intended to “augment” the natural abilities of the individual.

Engelbart’s mission was ideological and solutionist, he wanted to make the world a better place. He thought that computer technology could harness the collective intelligence of mankind in order to overcome problems of such complexity that they would have previously been thought insoluble. But while he imagined that the genesis of this effort should be the ability of the human individual to “augment” and extend their abilities through a close personal relationship with their own computer, he thought that the end would be a supreme collective project joined by networked individuals collaborating to surmount the challenges facing mankind. Engelbart was given his head, and he founded his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) within the Stanford Research Institute, in part with funding from J.C.R Licklider.

The combined theories of Bush, Licklider, Engelbart and the eventual arrival of ARC led to something of a schism in the early history of computer technology. As John Markoff, in What The Dormouse Said, How the Sixties Counter-culture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, puts it:

Engelbart’s view of the future of computing in the Sixties ran directly counter to the precepts of the mainstream of the computing business. The era was dominated by a belief that artificial intelligence was at hand and would soon create a world dominated by thinking machines. Engelbart’s notion of work groups where human intelligence was instead “augmented” by computers was thought of as quaint and besides the point. It might be suited for the office, or it could improve the skills of a secretary, but it certainly could not be considered computer “science”.

This theme recurs in the work of the other techno-futurists to have conceptualised personal computing; consider Licklider’s prediction in Man-Computer Symbiosis that “the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought”. They all stalked the idea that in the process of adapting computers to augment human capabilities, it is conceivable that the human mind will in turn undergo a process of adapting to the logic and demands of its machines. This is, of course, precisely what we have seen in our contemporary history, often with distressing consequences, as Engelbart’s vision of what computers should be ultimately became the pre-eminent one. John Markoff in What The Dormouse Said:

Engelbart…had been the first to demonstrate a vision that led directly to today’s computing world. He came early on to understand that computers had the ability to range far beyond crunching numbers. He foresaw that computers would become machines that could help human beings communicate and extend the reach of their intelligence…from that original inspiration, both personal computing and the internet ultimately emerged.

This is why attendees at Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos described it as “Moses opening the Red Sea”, what Engelbart was describing was not a new computer, but a new way of being, and while he experimented with computer technologies, other organised scientific experiments were taking place in Menlo Park, in particular those involving psychedelic drugs, in which Ken Kesey was a participant. As we saw in the first part of this series, the two tribes, Engelbart’s techno-futurists, and Kesey’s religious hippies, eventually found each other and embarked on their shared mission to change the world. Markoff:

Engelbart’s “Augmentation Framework” was brought to life by a small band of researchers who were deeply influenced by the political and cultural climate of the mid-peninsula…a tiny band distinguished by their long hair and beards, rooms carpeted with Oriental rugs, women without bras, jugs of wine and on occasion the wafting of marijuana smoke.

The Techno-Hippies

The long-haired stoners that Markoff describes padding through the corridors of ARC were young members of the Bay Area counterculture, many of them had remained at the universities and research labs expressly in order to evade being drafted into the Vietnam war.

As we have seen, Engelbart’s vision was a fundamentally utopian one. He imagined that the computer of the future would not be a tool to help execute discrete mathematical processes, as had been the case in the past, but would be a personal device with the potential to become integral to almost every aspect of human activity, an extension of the self. In Augmenting Human Intellect he described a small, handheld computer:

an artifact that was essentially a high speed, semi-automatic table-lookup device—cheap enough for almost everyone to afford and small and light enough to be carried on the person, [that] could hold the equivalent of an unabridged dictionary, and that a one-paragraph definition could always be located and displayed on the face of the device by the average practiced individual in less than three seconds…how would our vocabulary develop, how would our habits of exploring the intellectual domains of others shift, how might the sophistication of practical organization mature, how would our education system change to take advantage of this new external symbol-manipulation capability of students and teachers (and administrators)?

A utopian belief in the promise of some agent or technology to radically alter human societies also animated the hippie movement. Initially, this had been LSD, then various combinations of new-age spiritualism, Eastern mysticism and novel psychotherapies, now, the potential of computer technology became the focus of their utopian fantasies. When Stewart Brand invited Ken Kesey on a tour of ARC, the astonished Kesey anointed Engelbart’s oNLine system, “the next thing after acid”.

The hippies fundamentally rejected the radical prospectus of the New Left and the political side of the counterculture. In general, they believed that social change would arrive as a consequence of personal liberation, of individuals who had transformed themselves and their way of thinking, and that politics were irrelevant, a distraction.

As we saw in the previous part, the hippie’s worldview chimed with the libertarian philosophies of Ayn Rand. In describing the type of person who might benefit from the augmented future, Engelbart wrote, “let us consider an augmented architect at work”. Although most probably entirely co-incidental, it is in interesting that Engelbart’s illustration reached for the figure of an architect; it was an architect whom Rand cast as the protagonist in The Fountainhead, her foundational defence of individualism. The architect is an appealing hero within individualist, libertarian fantasies because they are simultaneously a designer, aestheticist, problem-solver and a mathematician, a single, individual creative mind, who accomplishes a grand technical-artistic vision alone. The architect and, we might imagine, the computer programmer, emerges from the libertarian cosmology as the ideal Nietzschean archetype, the free individual who will remake the world.

I explored the ideology of the Hippies in depth in Lessons from the Counterculture, and noted that many of the ‘60s radicals ended-up as Republican-supporting conservatives, venture capitalists and wealthy businessmen, which, I feel, is entirely congruent with their ideology:

Perhaps the Pranksters, the Hippies, and finally the Yippies, had a natural ideological affinity with the Liberal Capitalist state, and had been prepared to strike a bargain all along… Although these departures to the Right might appear to be resignation borne of defeat, or else a time-honoured feature of the exodus from youth to middle-age, I think they are consistent with the ideology of the Counterculture, latent within it from the beginning. The Libertarianism and narcissism that were at work in Ken Kesey’s Pranksters, and expressed themselves within the Hippie movement, the defence of inclination as authenticity in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and its politics of “being true to oneself”, the same politics that led to fellowship with the Hell’s Angels, all of this is congruent with the free-market Libertarianism of the Neoliberal Right.

The Counterculture of the 1960s provides us with a guide as to where…ideological confusion can lead. The misdirected expressions of individuality, the…inability to articulate the ideal relationship between the individual and society, the Hippies’ emphasis on a politics of individual libidinal desire, which is, ultimately, the basis of capitalist ideology, the communal-individualism in which the communal space is fractured into identity groups and re-imagined as an extension of individual identity, all of this contributed, in my view, to the emergence on the Right of a radical form of the politics of individualism and privatisation in the form of Neoliberalism. And it’s perfectly logical that so many of the Countercultural Left became venture capitalists.

The hippies were also given to conspiracism and paranoia. Part of this was that paranoia, and the perception that there is some unseen matrix of patterns and connections governing the world, is a consequence of psychoactive drug use. Hippies loved meandering, stoned discourses on the hidden universal truths that could be revealed by psychedelic drugs, but which otherwise remain obscure, concealed from us by the evil machinations of The Man and his quest to impose social control.

Another part of it was the hippies’ blunt and unsophisticated concept of The Man as signifier of the dynamics of power: all systems of power were inherently, even self-consciously, authoritarian, immoral and corrupt. This notion stood in contrast to the Leftist understanding that systems of power arise as a natural consequence of human social organisation, and that what is important are the goals to which that power is directed, its distribution and mechanisms of accountability; in other words, politics. The Left’s mission was to try to acquire control over the institutions of political power, whereas the hippies felt that this was naïve and self-defeating, and that the goal had to be liberty from the demands and supervision of those institutions. For the techno-hippies, computers represented an opportunity to achieve that goal.

“The Counter-Culture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of the entire personal computer revolution”, Stewart Brand would later say, “the freaks who design computer science will wrest power away from the rich and powerful institutions. Computers are coming to the people. This is good news, the best since psychedelics.”

In his series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis describes the techno-hippies as trying “to create a stable world” through computer technology:

An idea was emerging that said that the new computer technologies could turn everyone into heroic individuals. A vision of a society in which the forms of political control would be unnecessary because computer networks could create order in society, without the need for political control…The networks would create self-regulating feedback loops and the world would be stable, with every individual free to pursue their own heroic desires…They thought they could build a society without hierarchy in which, because people are linked by the machines, stability and order would emerge.

Where I depart marginally from Curtis is in the emphasis that he places on the hippies’ desire for “a stable world” and non-hierarchical communities. While it’s true that they were generally hostile towards hierarchies, and thought that computers would change the way in which societies were structured, I think that the hippies were motivated less by a search for a new system of social order, and more by a simple narcissistic desire to do whatever they wanted, without being subjected to interventions from the dominant power (or any power, in fact).

After Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos in 1968, the techno-hippies started to form into a tribe, and coalesce around a set of ideas. A month after participating in Engelbart’s demo, Stewart Brand published the inaugural edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, a journal-cum-marketplace for the techno-hippie community. John Markoff, What The Dormouse Said:

“It helped a scattered community that was in the process of defining itself find an identity. The Catalog…had originally been intended as a resource for a way of life less dependent on the power and influence of modern industrial society… the second half of the short introduction neatly captured that various threads that would soon come together to liberate the computer from large, impersonal institutions: ‘a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG’

Brand later expanded on some of the foundational beliefs in this “realm of intimate, personal power”, in his 1995 article for Time Magazine, We Owe It All To The Hippies, Brand wrote:

As Steven Levy chronicled in his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, there were three generations of youthful computer programmers who deliberately led the rest of civilization away from centralized mainframe computers and their predominant sponsor, IBM. "The Hacker Ethic," articulated by Levy, offered a distinctly countercultural set of tenets. Among them:

• "Access to computers should be unlimited and total."

• "All information should be free."

• "Mistrust authority - promote decentralization."

• "You can create art and beauty on a computer."

• "Computers can change your life for the better."

Brand identified with Ken Kesey’s apolitical, religious side of the counterculture, what he called the “psychedelic side”, and disdained the New Left – “power to the people was a romantic lie”, he would later say. But a political outlook can be discerned from a survey of his life and work, one which can best be described as Libertarian-Capitalist. He was expressly anti-communist, held attitudes that have been described as “conservative”, and took an interest in business, finance and the power of capital. It was a political disposition that became generally pervasive among the techno-hippies. We Owe It All To The Hippies:

As they followed the mantra "Turn on, tune in and drop out," college students of the '60s also dropped academia's traditional disdain for business. "Do your own thing" easily translated into "Start your own business." Reviled by the broader social establishment, hippies found ready acceptance in the world of small business. They brought an honesty and a dedication to service that was attractive to vendors and customers alike. Success in business made them disinclined to "grow out of" their countercultural values, and it made a number of them wealthy and powerful at a young age.

One such figure was Stewart Brand himself. The Whole Earth Catalog had proved to be a spectacular success, but after two years (and accompanying burn-out) Brand took the decision to end its print run. He threw a party to mark the occasion, at which he appeared with $20,000 in cash – equivalent to $150,000 today. 20k was the sum that Brand had used to start the Catalog, and so at the moment of its demise, he felt inspired to re-invest the capital.

By 1972 the contours of the technological future were defined, and so was the governing ideology: computers would be personal, designed to augment the abilities and enhance the aspirations of the private individual, but networked for group communication and collaboration. Under the guidance of the techno-hippies, the personal computer revolution would be anti-establishment, libertarian, entrepreneurial, with a seam of conspiracist paranoia running through it (notwithstanding the contradiction that much of the support would come from central government).

It would be a Libertarian-Capitalist empire based in and around the universities, research labs and hippie communes on the San Francisco Peninsula and possessed of the belief that in technology would be the final liberation of mankind.

All of which brings us to the role of money, and Stewart Brand’s twenty-thousand dollars…

Next: Techno-Fascism Part #3: The Money

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In the opening, frosty weeks of 1966, the author Ken Kesey threw a party at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. The party was an anarchic gathering of five-thousand babbling freaks in the grip of an acid trip, it alarmed the cops, the city authorities and no doubt the longshoremen themselves. Kesey named it The Trips Festival.

The Trips Festival was the culmination of the Acid Tests, a series of gatherings in and around the Bay Area peninsula, organised by Kesey and his group “The Merry Pranksters”, that had taken place over the preceding couple of years. The Acid Tests were the birthplace of the Hippie movement, and Kesey’s Pranksters were the proto-Hippies. They were people who had experienced something profoundly life-changing in the psychedelic experience, and the Acid Tests were places in which they could commune together, drop acid, and explore the future of humanity.

I wrote extensively about Kesey and the Pranksters in my Lessons from the Counterculture series, particularly in parts 2 and 3: they represented the “religious” side of the ‘60s counterculture, a group that disdained the old, necrotic, repressive systems of power, social conformity and truncated lives of 1950s America and who had opted to drop-out. In contrast to the political side of the counterculture, they saw no future in politics or political action, they saw any engagement with the social system and its institutions as a dead-end; for them, LSD had exploded the fictions of the material world, and human liberation would only be reached through individual transformation, not through collective political action.

Kesey himself interrupted an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at Berkeley University in 1964, pulled out a harmonica, blew a shrill version of Home On The Range to the stunned protesters and shouted at them, “Do you want to know how to stop the war? Just turn your backs on it, fuck it!”, which is a neat summary of the general Hippie approach to politics.

In the minds of Kesey and his Pranksters, man’s highest duty was to himself, and it was only in looking to himself that he would find liberation. Although the Hippies would not necessarily recognise it this way, their philosophy had much in common - accidentally, unconsciously - with some of the theories of the author Ayn Rand, in particular her morality of “rational self-interest”.

The Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall was the Hippies’ coming-out event, it announced them to world. Although Kesey was its frontman, the charismatic face of the drop-out generation, the celebrity author, he was not the festival’s only organiser: among the three people responsible for putting it together was Stewart Brand, a Prankster associate and counterculture gadfly who appears repeatedly in the histories of the period, including in the opening paragraphs of Tom Wolfe’s famous ‘60s chronicle The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

“At the wheel…Stewart Brand, a thin blonde guy with a blazing disc on his forehead too, and a whole necktie made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the king of Sweden on it.”

I contacted Brand some fifteen or so years ago, when I was making a film about the counterculture in San Francisco. We exchanged some emails, he politely declined to participate in the film and I didn’t really push it, back then I had only wanted to speak to him about The Trips Festival, I hadn’t appreciated his wider significance in the story of the counterculture.

Brand was a leading figure in an obscure sub-tribe within the Hippie movement, which we will call the techno-hippies. While the counterculture is popularly remembered for its explosion of artistic creativity - the alternative literature scene, avant-garde art, the revolution in music and fashion – it also had a lesser-known scientific, technological side. Clustered around the perimeter of the Acid Tests, behind the stage where the Grateful Dead powered through forty-minute guitar odysseys and face-painted, costumed hippies shimmered in projected colourscapes, were small bands of stoned engineers and mathematicians who experimented with speaker stacks and audio technology. Many of these characters, who had names like “Wizard”, ended up working at Lucasfilm, where they pioneered THX sound technologies. And of course LSD itself is a synthetic drug, developed in a laboratory by a Swiss chemist, it is a product of deliberate, scientific technology, rather than a naturally occurring substance handed down by mystics.

The techno-hippies were the counterculture’s left brain. Whereas Ken Kesey and his lieutenant, Kenn Babbs, had been on the creative writing course at Stanford University, Brand had studied biology at Stanford; while Kesey stole a batch of LSD and used it to send bewildered normies off on acid trips, Brand participated in a scientific study of the drug. What the techno-hippies and Kesey’s religious hippies shared, however, was the Libertarian ideology of dropping-out, of political disengagement, of personal freedom.

In Lessons from the Counterculture I traced the evolution of the religious and political sides of the counterculture through to the conflagration of 1968, the point of maximum confrontation between the New Left and the forces of reaction. But 1968 was also the key year for the techno-hippies. While American cities burned in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, while police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the anti-war movement turned violent, the techno-hippies prepared to assemble in San Francisco for the Fall Joint Computer Conference, where Stewart Brand and Douglas Engelbart, a forty-three-year-old computer scientist, were scheduled to give a presentation that became known as The Mother of All Demos, it would be the techno-hippies’ revolutionary counterpart to the Acid Tests.

The Mother of All Demos

On December the 9^th, 1968, a ghostly image of Douglas Engelbart flickered onto a twenty-two-foot high screen above a crowd of nearly three thousand people at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Engelbart, founder of the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center (ARC), announced to the stunned audience that while he was making his presentation, he would be connected to a computer at his lab in Menlo Park, thirty miles away from the conference hall, from where his staff (including Brand) would also participate.

“The research programme that I’m going to describe to you”, opened Engelbart, “is quickly characterisable by saying: if in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive, how much value could you derive from that?"

Engelbart then went on to demonstrate the principal elements of what we would today recognise as a networked, personal computer, a system that he called oNLine: there was a keyboard, mouse, hypertext links, video monitors, screen windowing, word processing programs, and a graphical user interface, all connected by a home-made modem.

Attendees described Engelbart as having “lightening in both hands”, and “it was like Moses opening the Red Sea”.

The oNLine system set the template for the technology that would come to dominate all of our lives, but it didn’t have to be so; computer technology could have evolved differently. Engelbart’s system was a product of his ideology, his vision for what computers could be and how they could change our world, which he described in a 1962 research paper entitled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Computers, Engelbart argued, should be an extension of the human individual.

It was a vision that chimed with the countercultural, Libertarian ideology of Stewart Brand and the young techno-hippies that worked at Engelbart’s research institute, for whom computers were a means of achieving human freedom, liberation from the domination of corporate America and the political establishment, the same vehicle for transcendental self-reinvention that Ken Kesey had found in LSD.

“Our ethic of self-reliance came partly from science fiction”, wrote Brand in We Owe It All To The Hippies, “We all read Robert Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land as well as his libertarian screed-novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Hippies and nerds alike revelled in Heinlein's contempt for centralized authority. To this day, computer scientists and technicians are almost universally science-fiction fans. And ever since the 1950s…science fiction has been almost universally libertarian in outlook.”

Prior to researching the subject, I had never really considered what computers were for, on a conceptual level. I just experienced computer technology as a useful tool for calculating, writing and playing games, and a crappy tool for painting. As the technology and its capabilities expanded, I uncritically adapted these capabilities into my life without thinking that deeply about where they had come from, or the motivations behind their development.

But in asking the question what are computers for? and studying some of the answers provided by computer pioneers like Douglas Engelbart and the techno-hippies, we are better able to understand the ideologies that glow behind our screens, and what that has meant for modern life.

In the next part we will look at those ideologies and concepts: where computers came from, Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, and where the libertarian techno-hippies, in particular Stewart Brand, took his vision.

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I think that flower-children are responsible for Trumpism, for the extreme Right, for social dislocation, for political violence. I realise that this is a provocative statement.

Over the coming weeks I intend to publish a sequel to my Lessons from the Counterculture series, that will explore the role of the hippie movement and the countercultural Left in the development of computers, Silicon Valley and the rise of the authoritarian Right. This article is a primer.

The Age of Conspiracies

During the lightless depths of the Covid pandemic, the weeks of despair, in which people screamed from high-rise windows, sobbed amongst the ruins of their businesses, moved into the spare room because they couldn’t move out, were trapped in silence yet surrounded, everywhere, by unbearable noise, I noticed a recurring phenomenon: people that I knew (all men, all middle-aged, and with broadly liberal attitudes), were departing from the excruciating prison of reason and joyfully entering the mad kingdom of conspiracy theory.

These men talked to me urgently about the villainous machinations of the World Economic Forum and its plans for global genocide, of the complicity of the “mainstream media”, of murderous tyrants and evil scientists: George Soros, Anthony Fauci, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates. They advised me to flee from the chemical-weapon attacks known euphemistically as “vaccine programmes” and steer clear of 5G mobile phone towers.

Initially, I took their mania for a natural defensive response. People who are unable to deal with the chaos of an indifferent universe have to believe that there is some authority in charge, that order must be located somewhere. They struggle to comprehend that we are all just marginally evolved primates clinging to a ball of rock in the infinite void of space and that, yes, a banal and motiveless microorganism can spontaneously appear and start bumping off the world’s population. No, in their minds existence cannot simply be this meaningless. Even for secularists, there must be a plan, and so they attributed Covid to phenomena that seemed vaguely proximate to the main characteristics of the pandemic: vaccines, medical institutions, medical professionals, economists, politicians and the media that amplified their messages.

But as time wore on, I noticed their beliefs transmogrify in unexpected ways. Conspiracy theories are inherently impervious to the demands of evidence, so when conspiracists make predictions and these predictions fail to materialise, they typically explain it away by some evolution in the theory – for example religious cults, “the messiah did not arrive as predicted because we are not worthy/he delayed until some future event” etc. With the Covid conspiracies, however, the details appeared to just be abandoned altogether, for example I stopped hearing “5G will kill everyone” or “there will be mass deaths, numbering in the billions, from vaccinations”, but the core theme that there is an elite that wants to control and manipulate the population, remained (together with its central protagonists - Schwab, Fauci etc) and served as a reference point for every new shock, crisis or grievance that might present itself: migration, Jeffrey Epstein, the Ukraine war, climate change, advertising on Twitter, inflation, changes to the tax code.

In other words conspiracy, and conspiratorial thinking, had become less of a system of specific beliefs and more of an animating spirit within the broad landscape of our culture and our politics. How did this express itself in political terms? There were numerous effects, but an obvious one was that many of these people were pushed towards populist politics, mainly Right-wing populism, but also the populist Left.

Contemporary Populism

In Lessons from the Counterculture, I talked about the collapse of traditional Left/Right politics and the emergence of weird and paradoxical populist tendencies on both the Right and the Left. In the intervening months, we have seen spectacular examples of these tendencies as the crisis in our politics deepens: the return of Trump in the US, the rise of populists in Europe and, in the UK, a landslide election victory for the Labour Party that has been followed, within the space of weeks, by pervasive dissatisfaction with Labour, renewed hostility to the Conservatives and a surge in support for smaller populists, most vividly the Reform party.

As I wrote in Lessons, I think that we are in an unabating political crisis that began with the collapse of Neoliberal Capitalism in the 2008 crash. There was a need, in the aftermath of the crash, to re-imagine the global economic system and its supranational institutions, but instead the whole edifice was re-erected and what has emerged since is a kind of Zombie Capitalism, staggering on lifelessly, slowly degrading our economies, our culture, our politics and our planet.

I think people generally sense this crisis, even if they can’t articulate it in conscious terms, and this in part explains the wild political aberrations that we have seen over the past decade. The volatility that swung Donald Trump between the White House and the courthouse and back again, that pitched the UK out of the EU, that hands landslide majorities to governments which show record levels of unpopularity within months of their election, is a manifestation of electorates trying to find refuge from the Zombie. No-one from the political classes has yet presented a credible alternative, so electorates cast around either trying to find one, or to protest, pulling whatever levers are at their disposal and sending chaos into the body politic.

The form of contemporary populism that this has produced is paradoxical because it synthesises authoritarianism and libertarianism, communitarianism and individualism. Again, I went into this theory in depth in Lessons, so I won’t repeat it all here, except to say that I argued that our contemporary politics has been distorted by a form of libertarianism that emerged from the Counterculture of the 1960s. It was an ideology that was (and is), solipsistic, narcissistic, inherently Right-wing and, also, paranoid, which is where the conspiracies come in.

Rise of the Techno-Fascists

Returning to the people I knew who embraced conspiracy theories during the Covid pandemic, and who have since been seduced by populism, there was something about them which initially eluded me but which I came to notice: their susceptibility to conspiracy predated the pandemic. Covid set it off on steroids, but it was there already, it wasn’t simply a reflexive response to the chaos of an indifferent universe. Although I’m sure that reflex was part of it, there was something else, something that was already part of their lives and which, during the pandemic, became all-consuming: the habit of spending far too much time on the internet.

During my lockdown-era conversations with these people, I was struck by how regularly Bill Gates surfaced as a target of their opprobrium. There were marches all over the world in which conspiracy theorists wore Bill Gates face masks and waved deranged signs that read “you can shove your vaccines up your ass”, “when tyranny becomes law resistance becomes duty”, “children are not prostitutes” and “Bill Gates is evil!”.

I became fascinated by this. I wasn’t familiar with the details of Gates’s bio, other than that he founded Microsoft, was once the world’s richest man, and had a philanthropic organisation. It was amazing to me that this dull, bookish businessman could inspire passion on any level, let alone on the level of genocidal conspiracy and child prostitution. I thought I’d look into it. I pitched a Bill Gates film, my business partner liked it, as did our distributor and some other film distributors and sales agents, so I set to work.

I appreciate that there are those who find technology incredibly compelling. I am not one of them. In the main, I find technology dull. My feelings about computers are similar to my feelings about cars – I value their assistance. Some people love cars, they eulogise about achievements in engineering, fetishise the iconic brands, dedicate hours to watching Formula 1; I don’t understand any of these behaviours. For me, cars are a means of getting from a-to-b, usually to pick up shopping or drop the kids off, that’s it, that’s the limit of my interest, and the same is true of computers: if they can help me to write this newsletter or send an email, great, I’m not otherwise interested.

So I approached the Gates story, and the wider context of the development of computer technology, from a starting point of complete ignorance. As I began to assemble the details, I started to notice themes that I think computer historians, those with a genuine interest in the technology, have missed, in particular that computers developed not as a neutral expansion of technological capability, but as a product of political ideology.

We have recently come to understand something about the political economy of Silicon Valley and the direct influence that characters like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have on our politics. What I’m not certain of, however, is how well we have understood the more insidious, general influence that computer technology itself, rather than just the activities of random tycoons, has had on our political consciousness.

In the final parts of Lessons from the Counterculture I explored how the hippie movement and countercultural Left eventually ended up joining the political Right, in a manner that was entirely congruent with their underlying ideology. What I hadn’t realised until I started researching the Gates film, was the extent to which those same hippies and counterculturalists had been responsible for the development of personal computers. Adam Curtis’s peerless documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace tells some of this story, but not all of it.

For hippies in the 1960s, the coming cyber age represented a utopia of individual freedom enabled by computers, and liberation from the coercive power of the state, but it was their ideology, selfishness and failure that has led to the resurgence of the authoritarian Right. In my view the conspiracy theories, culture wars, populism and political violence that blights our current moment can in no small part be attributed to role the that technology plays in our lives and the ideologies at work behind it.

I will start the story soon, watch this space.

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There’s a parable of the lucky man, I don’t remember where I heard it, or what, accurately, it is; it’s a kind of swirl of leaves, it spins up from time-to-time and litters my consciousness, perhaps Derren Brown ran an experiment on its main theme, I don’t remember, I’ve probably embellished it, it goes like this: there’s a sunny, optimistic guy, he strides out confidently into the morning, his world is one of blue skies and yellow beams, he likes to say “yes”.

This guy, let’s call him “Sonny”, is curious about the environment around him, he likes to think about it and turn it around in his head. While out striding, confidently, he pays attention to the air and streets and people as life unrolls before him. He notices a dropped tenner, it’s tatty and has the dark shadow of a partial boot-print scuffed over the surface. He has a look to see if there’s someone nearby who might have dropped it, but the streets are empty, he puts it in his pocket and continues on his way.

He reaches a busier part of town, humming with people assembling their day, he nods to those that he knows, he stops for a chat in the market, he asks questions and learns something new. While he is chatting, the pub landlord comes barrelling out of his pub in a state of high disorganisation, he heads for Sonny, whom he knows to be an approachable, good-natured chap. He makes a flustered request for a favour: there’s an emergency, at the brewery over in the next town, unless solved his pub may run out of ale and spin into an economic crisis – can Sonny help? Sonny agrees without hesitation, and departs at once for the brewery over in the neighbouring valley. While he is there, desperately helping the one-armed brewer to turn the jammed wheel valve on the gushing ale tanks, he meets the brewer’s blushing daughter and falls hopelessly in love. The pair are soon married, happiness reigns.

There’s a second guy, let’s call him “Mardy”. Mardy’s skies are bruised and torn, he heads out into the world with his hood pulled over his head, his lips mutter about what a struggle his life is, the recognition that he deserves and doesn’t get, the money that he doesn’t have. Mardy stalks rapidly through the town trying to avoid eye-contact, he stamps over a discarded tenner without noticing it. The pub landlord comes barrelling out of his pub in a fluster, he sees Mardy, whom he knows to be a negative dick, and swerves around him.

Later, while recessed in the corner of the pub, Mardy watches Sonny buying drinks at the bar. Sonny is celebrating his thrilling engagement to the brewer’s blushing daughter, the laughing landlord is clapping him on the back, Sonny regales the crowd with a story of how he found the money for drinks discarded in the park that morning. “Lucky bastard”, thinks Mardy, bitterly.

You’ve probably heard some variation on this story: “luck” attends to people who have an optimistic outlook, engage with the world and are alive to opportunity. In other words, luck is not a matter of chance; the same opportunity that blesses the “lucky” can present itself to an “unlucky” person, but because of their closed-mindedness and sceptical attitude, the unlucky person misses it.

I don’t believe that this is true in all circumstances, I do think there is such a thing as genuine luck, a matter of blind chance. But the core message of the Parable of The Lucky Man does, I think, hold: you have to be alive to opportunity in order to grasp it; which is a combination of positivity, enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and being attentive. This combination can be difficult for creatives, who are often introspective and consumed by their own projects, rather than alert to the currents flowing around them, in the chaos of the material world.

Most of the great artists who have ascended to the top of their profession (say, I don’t know, Steven Spielberg), seem to have mastered the technique of spotting and seizing opportunity. I see examples repeat in their bios. I have also met a chunky quotient of highly talented, “unlucky” artists who have remained in obscurity because they are bad at recognising an opportunity.

Again, luck does sometimes play a role in success (a topic for another Note), but often enough success is a question of disposition. I remember some years ago when one of my colleagues was out in Germany, shooting a film that we had in production on the roots of electronic music. He had gone to lengths to secure an interview with a particular German artist, who was more obscure than his talent should have permitted, and who was proving difficult to pin down. The day before the scheduled interview the artist pulled out, saying that it was “not a good day”. My colleague repeated this episode to a famous electronic musician who did show up to be interviewed; on hearing about it, this musician said, “that guy? I know that guy very well: yesterday’s not the day, today’s not the day…it’s never going to be his fucking day”.

I know all this, I’m writing it in this article, and yet I still find being alive to opportunity to be a difficult skill to acquire, when it’s not something that comes naturally. My big ambition has been to free myself from the endless bondage of selling labour or submitting to commercial demands, and instead have enough income to pursue my own creative projects without reference to either, however, when the big opportunity to achieve that dream presented itself, I missed it.

If you read Creator Notes#1 (you probably didn’t, no-one did), you’ll be aware that in 2005 my film studio expanded into a four-storey building on Cowper Street, Shoreditch. I signed a lease for an initial five years. The landlord, Sam, was an eccentric, squat, spherical guy with a dodgy toupée clinging unsteadily to his head.

I came to understand that almost the whole of Shoreditch was owned by Sam and four other landlords, who had arrived with cash sometime in the Sixties, when the East End was a collapsing, derelict wasteland, and had bought up all the real estate prematurely deemed to be worthless. He had repeated this trick in other former slums around London (his rubbish-tip empire had its capital near Harlesden) and became unimaginably wealthy during the London property booms.

Sam’s greatest source of stress were the dissolute tenants of his slum properties and their destructive volatility; his entire client base was bad for business. We had taken over the premises on Cowper Street from some record label associated with Pete Doherty, and the whole place was a crime scene of drugs and regret: chasing foils in the basement, stripped mattresses on the top floor, a weird gym area where the kitchen should be, a toilet that carried the sewers in. These people would inflict property damage, freak out the neighbours, fail to pay their rent, skip out with no warning, leaving an enraged mob of utility providers to come looking for someone they could pin the bills on.

For Sam, all this was incredibly vexatious, and so he dearly loved and appreciated us. We were a stable, solvent business that favoured a low-drama existence. We refurbished his property, we always paid the rent on time, we were valued and responsible members of the Shoreditch entrepreneurial class. Sam was a fan of this body of work. I got the impression that he didn’t really understand the area, which he didn’t visit. He was not conscious of the vertiginously rising property prices, nor the tech businesses marching in, with their grating young employees riding BMXs into stripped-brick offices with neon signs that said things like “fucking brilliant” hanging above the entrance.

No, in Sam’s mind this remained a slum attractive only to the mad and the desperate, and so I was able to negotiate an unbelievably good deal. The rent was cheap.

As anyone reading this will recall, the economic prospects of the entire planet went South in 2008, when the dissolute tenants of the banking system eloped, leaving a crime scene of drugs and regret, and an enraged mob of the UK population to come looking for someone they could pin the bills on. London’s financial district was, of course, just down the road from Shoreditch and I remember heading through it as the place went up in flames, bankers spilling out of the pubs in the dark mid-morning, balancing their cardboard boxes of personal effects on the tops of bollards while shot-gunning pints.

We managed to see the crisis through and survive, many of our clients and suppliers didn’t. Businesses that had been around since I was at school collapsed in rows. We shed staff, became leaner, reduced costs, we no longer needed a four-storey office. Our lease was up in 2010, I called Sam to discuss our exit.

Sam took the call badly, he sounded dismayed. I gained the impression that Sam didn’t think temporally, it had not occurred to him that our lease might come to an end, there had been money funnelling into his bank account every month with joyous stability, now there wouldn’t be. My call had snapped Sam into distressing visions of a wrecked future, in which Pete Doherty’s friends smoked smack in their pants and tattooed bailiffs acting for BT went through his picture window with a sledgehammer. I could feel the toupée sliding down his tearful face.

Sam skipped straight from denial to bargaining, “what about renewing?” he asked, hopefully, “take ten years – fifteen. Same money”. I was fixated on surviving the recession. We had discussed a plan, in which our annual production slate was reduced, and we would move to smaller, cheaper premises. This part of the plan was simply to inform Sam that we were leaving. It did not occur to me to modify the plan.

“Sorry Sam”, I said, “we just don’t need the space”.

“OK”, Sam replied, “then you sublet”.

“No, our lease doesn’t permit subletting”

“That’s ok, I’ll change it. New ten-year lease, or fifteen, same rent, and you can sublet”.

“No, Sam, I really don’t want to be a landlord. We’re already looking elsewhere, we’ll be gone at the end of the year. Thanks for the offer, though”.

I reported the substance of call to my business partner. “Who wants to be a landlord??”, he asked, “and how would we divide the space? There’s only one entrance, we’d be crashing into tenants. How would the insurance work?”. “Crazy”, I said, “it’s ok, I told him we’re not interested”.

We could have rented that building out for four, five times what we were paying to Sam. As the tech boom steadily enveloped Shoreditch over the next decade, we could have conceivably charged ten times the rent. We wouldn’t have had to share the space with tenants, in fact, the best business move would have been to get ourselves out of there and into cheap premises double-time, in order to make as much space as possible available to paying tenants. Management of the tenancies could have been outsourced to a local agent, we would never have had to work again unless we wanted to. And I didn’t see it, I was too focused on what was already in my head, on my settled plans, assumptions and prejudices.

When Sam presented me with the best offer that I have ever had, all I saw were the problems, I just wasn’t alive to the opportunity. I’d like to think that I’d spot it the next time, but I’m not certain that I would. It takes a particular mindset, and if you’re not born with it, you have to work to cultivate it.

I now try, so far as I can maintain it, to live in a mental state of optimism and possibility. If I had that call again, I would try simply to say “the lease is up” and then listen. To whatever came back at me down the line, I would attempt to ask the question, “How could this be good?”.

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Introduction

At the present moment there is blood all over the floor, viscous and stinking, and more of it daily washes in.

2024 has been a desolate year for the creative industries, another interval in its age of unreason, where the economic and creative logic of independent film and television has collapsed and commissioning executives refuse to dream, insisting instead on the dull materialism of returning series, “IP” and celebrity vehicles. It’s like the Great Nothing from Neverending Story, chewing its way remorselessly through imagination and a stable industry.

All the signs are that this destruction has not yet culminated. Over the past few years, the royalties that my companies receive from the streamers have declined by about two thirds, not because fewer people are watching, but simply because the streamers have decided to pay less in a one-sided, take-it-or-leave-it deal. Acquisition fees have similarly declined, commissions have dried up completely, advertising revenues are vastly diminished, linear tv is on its way out and with it the shared cultural experience is lowered into its final resting place. Real, proper news is under threat.

All of this hits the small independents particularly acutely, many have already gone. History (and Marx’s always accurate predictions) shows us that when industries come under this level of pressure, they enter a period of consolidation: most companies fail or are devoured by the bigger fish, who then form a cartel and dictate their terms. This is in turn leads to a crisis in plurality and creativity. Smaller creatives are presented with a miserable choice: either you work for the cartel or your work becomes a hobby.

We have an imminent, depressing example of this phenomenon: beginning this month Apple will take a 30% bite out of all the earnings that creators make through the Patreon app on iOS. Apple deliberately makes it incredibly hard for iPhone users to access and pay for services other than through its App Store, and will now use that leverage to divert into its own pocket a massive amount of what is a small sum of money pledged by individual members of the public in support of an independent creative whose work they enjoy. Why? To paraphrase Succession, so that Apple can have another billion dollars to throw on top of its pile of billions of dollars, and fuck it if the small creative’s income dries up.

We’ve already seen the sequence of collapse-consolidation-cartel on a grand scale in recent history, it happened to the music business back in the late nineties and early noughties. The music industry is now basically a cartel, it’s almost impossible for small and independent musicians to make a living by recording and selling music to music fans. Surviving now means sync licensing, writing on commission, live performance and a range of other business activities that alienate the artist from their art. Meanwhile the cartel acts to gate-keep the industry and rig it in its favour.

Yet there are reasons not to topple into fatalism, artists will always want to produce art, and audiences will always want to appreciate it. The challenge for independents is to find a means of reuniting these two constituencies within a commercially viable system of production and distribution.

Interestingly, when the gears of the collapse and consolidation process first began to turn in the music business, a lone resistance fighter emerged: Prince. At the time he was derided as a nut, which he was not (at least not wholly), or a megalomaniac, which was more accurate, but he was able to see over the horizon to the coming, networked future and imagine a world in which the individual creator could build a more intimate connection with their audience, free from the parasitical manipulations of the cartel.

A few years back I made a film on this subject, I contacted Prince’s band, the New Power Generation, his business manager, Alan Leeds, as well as music industry executives. I’ll share those conversations in this article, they provide some lessons that I think are directly relevant to the current environment in which creatives are trying to produce and communicate art. It’s an interesting story.

SLAVE

In the early weeks of 1995, Prince started to appear in public with the word “slave” scrawled across his cheek, in angular, lacerating characters. It was a public declaration of war against the music business, a repudiation of the mediating power that record companies held over their artists and the culmination of a years-long ambition to break free of it.

Alan Leeds, Prince’s business manager:

Prince was both prophetic and way ahead of his time when it came to understanding the impact that the digital age would have on the music industry. You must understand that this was a guy who was already looking for alternative means to market and promote music to the public because he was so dissatisfied with the old business model. We had a meeting and this would have been 1990, 1991, where he called me in, and it was after he had delivered a record to Warners and was frustrated because they weren't in a hurry to put out another record again. The subject matter had once again become the fact that he was too prolific and giving Warners product too quickly.

And in his frustration, he was expressing to me, “you know, we've got to find another way to get music to the public. In fact, what if we went to late-night television and did like these oldies packages that people sell and we actually marketed a record on our own label to the public and we just sold it by mail order. We just do television adverts late at night and people write to a Post Office Box, or whatever, and we sell it through the mail”.

And I said, “yeah, that's great, except for one problem: you're in contract to Warner Brothers, you can't legally do that”.

“Well, then it'll be your label. You do it and we'll, we'll put a different name on it instead of Prince, we’ll put something else”.

And I said, “yeah, but they're not going to sit and let you do that. If you run a business, you can't allow that to happen. So put your Warner's hat on for a minute. Pretend you're [Warner’s CEO] Mo Ostin. What would you do? You're going to get a cease and desist and you're going to legally prevent us from doing that”.

“Well, I don't care. We got to do it”.

And I said, “furthermore, I'm president of a label that's a joint venture. I can't let you have me in jail. I can't be part of that and put it on my label”.

“Well, then put it in your wife's name. We'll call it Gwen Records”.

He was serious. I knew then that he was going to figure out some way to beat the system, even if it wasn't legally acceptable. He was going to push the envelope.

Michael Bland, drums, New Power Generation:

I think, like most artists, they don't really investigate until it's happening to them, and I think that's pretty much what Prince found himself doing, is examining more closely like, “well, how does this work?” Prince is a student and he likes to read and share ideas. So the more he got into the literature about the music business, the more upset he got. You know, and how it's designed. I mean it's systemic. That's what it does: you exploit an artist and they get paid a mere pittance compared to what you make.

The catalyst for Prince’s contretemps with Warner Brothers, was a landmark, $100m deal that he’d signed at the beginning of the ‘90s – “the biggest deal in the history of music” (although this claim was somewhat defied by the small print). As soon as the deal came into effect, the parties reached an impasse on how it would operate: Prince, an artist, wanted to produce and release music at the direction of his muse; Warners, a large corporate, wanted to maximise returns and so it refused to release Prince’s work at the pace that he wanted.

Alan Leeds:

The problem they were having with Prince was that he was producing too many records too quickly. Faster than their promotion and marketing machine could really digest, faster than the marketplace and the media could digest. We were in an era where most artists would release records anywhere from between 2 and 3 years apart, and he arguably could have had two records a year if he had wanted to. And he did want to, because he was of the mind that a record was like a newspaper. When it was finished, it was of that time: “I finished this song last night in the studio. I want people to hear it today. It's relevant to today. I produced it today. It's about how I feel today. People should hear it today”. And of course, the legitimate argument was that radio wasn't prepared to accept that much product from any single artist either. And as a result, it made it difficult for the label to promote it. So there really was a legitimate argument to space things out. It just didn't fit him as an artist.

Sonny T, bass, New Power Generation:

For me, that's their fault. That's not our fault. I mean, you know, if their machine can't keep up with us, what are we supposed to do? What's he supposed to do? You know, he got to get his music out. I mean, within reason. If the material is good, it should be marketed, it should be put out. There should be videos for it. [The artist] should be able to go on tour and they should be able to have support and, you know, do the things that they're supposed to do and have a successful record. Record company gets paid. They get paid.

In frustration, Prince attempted to find a way to circumvent the letter, not the spirit, of his contract. He floated the concept of releasing work under a different name to Warner Brothers, including a new album, Goldnigga, that could be issued as a New Power Generation project on his own label, arguing that it wouldn’t interfere with a more staged release of official “Prince” records through Warner Brothers. Warners was unmoved.

Michael Bland:

They didn't see the vision. You know, I think the idea behind the Goldnigga record was to put out an organic rap-slash-soul record, you know, with real instruments… we had worked on these tracks and friends had been driving around listening to it, it’s  just like, “I really like this, you know, let's put it out”… Warner Brothers revealed that, “no, you can't do that. Anything you release, you know, has got to go through us”.

Feeling trapped, Prince tried to litigate the dispute in public, with a direct appeal to his fans. He refused to undertake promotional work on behalf of Warner Brothers and attempted to sabotage their marketing operation by changing his name from “Prince” to an unpronounceable symbol; anything to frustrate the label’s business, to match the frustration that they had imposed on his art.

Michael Bland:

The situation with Warner Brothers, with his audience as we were on tour… I think Prince was just trying to let them into his world to a certain degree, to let them know what he was going through. It was a monologue mostly. You know, he'd say something about Warner Brothers, and there's a lot of booing in the audience. And one night, I remember, they started chanting like, “Yeah, F- Warner Brothers” and Prince turned around on the mic and he was kind of cracking up and looking at us like, “you hear this??”

Exhausted by the adverse publicity and unmanageable relationship with their artist, Warner Brothers eventually acceded to one of Prince’s unabating requests that he be permitted to release a new single, The Most Beautiful Girl In The World, independently, on his own label.

Joe Levy, Billboard:

What Warners was betting was, “You want to release your music yourself? You think you know better than we do?...You want to do this yourself? Go right ahead. It's going to cost you a lot of money. You'll see. You need us. You don't really understand, radio promotion costs a lot of money. You'll see. You need us. As it turns out, he has a hit.

Michael Bland:

The litmus test was The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. Put the one single out, get the money behind it, you know, we did the whole world on that song.

Alan Leeds:

Warner Brothers letting him do it in a way slightly backfired on them because it kind of gave Prince all the ammunition he needed to be able to say, “I can do this on my own now”.

Michael Bland:

I'm privy to a conversation that he had with Mo Ostin around the time of the Gold Experience [album]. [Prince] mentioned the Gold Experience as a record he wanted to put out. We hadn’t begun working on this record yet. I think we had been talking about it. He got a phone call from Mo Ostin, they talked about other business and then Mo Ostin was like, “okay, well, as soon as you get that Gold Experience record finished, you know, send it right on, you know, and we’ll do what we do. Prince said “I haven't even started on it yet. I'm just conceiving it in my brain” and Mo is like, “well you know, either way it's ours, so…” and I think Prince, at that point, made an epiphany that “this company thinks that they own the ideas that are in my head. I haven't even begun to put anything on tape, and they're already talking about what they're going to do with it”. So I think that was really the point at which Prince realised, “I can't do this anymore” and he walks into rehearsal he’s got “slave” written on his face, and, you know, he's like, “this is it”.

Joe Levy:

His complaint is that Warners isn't giving him ownership of his intellectual property. That's the way we would phrase it today. It becomes an intellectual property battle: “I made this music. Why don't I own it? Why don't I own my masters? Why don't I own my publishing?” …at that time, these were things that, you know, musicians didn't talk about that much. Now it’s not that unusual to find either an indie musician talking about, “Well, I want to stay in an indie label because I want to own my work” or to find someone, a veteran artist, saying, “I'm suing my record company to get back my rights because under copyright law…” At that time, we weren't really used to artists making these complaints. It seemed like bellyaching. I mean, it seemed like someone who was famous and rich complaining that he wasn't rich enough… Turns out we would all end up caring about this stuff, but we didn't know at the time.

Prince (speaking in 1995):

In 1999 we’ll be free, and we can sell the music directly to the consumer. And we can give it away if we want.

The New Frontier

The dispute between Prince and Warners eventually concluded with both parties agreeing to go their separate ways. Warners, of course, still retained rights over Prince’s back catalogue, including all the spectacular hits and radio staples from the ‘80s. For his part, Prince wandered into uncharted territory, tarnished by the row, his reputation injured by the sub-standard material that he had been feeding to Warners in satisfaction of his contractual obligations. He became an international curiosity: a high-profile artist without a record contract nor, apparently, any intention to get one.

Alan Leeds:

In retrospect, Prince's problem really wasn't with Warners as much as it was the industry itself. I mean, Prince was ahead of his time. He was absolutely right. Many of the things that he griped about, I thought he was dead on. Record companies had their heads in the sand. They were all on automatic pilot. The business model was stale. We would have meetings where he would frustratingly want to figure out alternative ways to release and promote records because he was so dissatisfied with how labels conducted business. Now, he was signed to Warner, so of course this frustration is directed to Warners because that's who he was in business with. But it wouldn't have been any different had he been signed to Columbia or RCA or any place else, because it was the business model itself, the industry and how it functioned, that frustrated him.

In 1996 Prince’s first self-released album, Emancipation, hit the record stores. Although sales figures were far smaller than the numbers generated by Warner’s promotional behemoth, more of the profits remained with Prince, who made much more than he would have done at the label. A tour, Jam of the Year, followed, in which he sought to shake up the live music business by cutting out the major concert promoters and booking his own shows. His earnings from the tour alone were estimated to have reached $30m.

In 1997 he made an unprecedented, early foray into e-commerce, promising to release a three-disc boxset if he received enough advance orders through his website, loveforoneanother.com and his telephone hotline, 1-800-New-Funk. Taken together, all these initiatives represented a full spectrum assault on the established practices of the music business as Prince sought to become a fully self-contained artistic and commercial entity.

Michael Bland:

I remember him telling us, “one day music is going to be sold, you know, back and forth by computers”, and we're like, “Get out of here, man! What are you talking about!?” But lo and behold.

Alan Leeds:

Prince doesn't get enough credit for what he was doing in the late 90s. When Radiohead released their In Rainbows box set through their website in 2007, that's ten years later, but people acted like it was the first time anyone had ever done this sort of thing. But what Prince is doing in ’97, is taking pre-orders for the Crystal Ball boxset. And he became the first artist to sell an entire album online, directed to his fans. The whole marketing thing went straight to the people who he wanted to sell it to. There was no middleman. There was no need for a record label. Prince just took it all under his own umbrella organisation. And I think that is incredibly forward thinking.

At the turn of the millennium Prince was vindicated when the music industry suddenly, spectacularly imploded. Over the course of the 1990s, the industry had become a risk-averse, money-making machine, monopolised by just a few major labels who used their muscle to arrange the market in their favour and dictated their terms to artists and consumers alike. The quiet migration of Prince and others to the internet proved to be the precursor to a general exodus. When the peer-to-peer file sharing website Napster launched in 1999, consumers rushed to download and distribute music free of charge, and having neglected to develop a viable commercial presence in cyberspace, the industry was overwhelmed.

Alan Leeds:

They had their heads in the sand, and the evidence is very plain and simple: Napster came from outside the industry. The record industry was so myopic about technology. All a record company knew in the ‘80s was if you had a new product, you went to the radio station, programmers that you knew, you made a video and you took it to MTV and anybody else who would play a video, and you had a PR person go to the print media, into any magazine and anybody else who might write something about your artist; you hired friends of friends, the people that worked for labels used to be programmers at radio stations. I mean, it was this inbred world that had fed on itself for so many years, and basically it had worked so successfully and so many careers had been made by it, and people were loyal to it, and they took vacations together and they partied together and they married each other. And it was this whole atmosphere of we have this winning business model, so let's not fix it if it isn't broken. Well, the problem was it was broken.

Jem Aswad, former Warner Brothers executive:

Nobody saw the digital revolution coming to the degree that Prince did.

Alan Leeds:

The industry was gone. It was over, just literally overnight. And I remember there used to be little signs of worry. Something's going to change here, but we don't know what it is. And we're not really taking the time to figure out what it is. We're just going to wait and react because what we have is too good, it's too easy and it's working too well, so we'll just kind of wallow in it. And when the shit hits the fan we’ll react to it. Well, too late.

This is where the music business ran into its black hour, the insolvencies, the unviabilities, the redundancies and collapses and inabilities. And then the consolidation, as the implacable mouth of capital yawned and swallowed all before it.

But Prince was just fine. Untouched by all the strife he continued to innovate means of reaching his audience and making sense of the restless economics. In 2001 he pioneered the type of subscription service that would become ubiquitous almost two decades later with his online NPG Music Club, where subscribers would receive experimental, digital-only albums. His Musicology download store launched before iTunes. In 2004 he gave away copies of his new album free with concert tickets, to his enduring satisfaction it provoked howls of protest from the major record labels, but also prefaced an industry-wide shift from CDs to gigs as the primary source of artist income.

In 2007 he released a new album, Planet Earth, as a free cover mount on the Mail on Sunday newspaper in Britain. He received more from the paper than he would have done in an advance from a record label, and again used the album to promote a new live show in London, another ground-breaking concept: a 21-night residency at a single venue, the o2, which meant that Prince could avoid all the transport and staging costs of moving around different venues.

Prince was able to produce, release and promote precisely the art that he wanted, on his own terms and according to his own schedule, without recourse to the music industry and its cartel. He won.

Of course, he had a head start. The fact remains that Prince was the beneficiary of the major-label juggernaut and its massive powers of promotion and exposure during its all-conquering glory era. He did not have to face surviving in a depleting industry as an obscure creative, rich in ambition but starved of money. Nevertheless, I think the basic elements of his analysis and approach are pertinent no matter what your professional circumstances, nor the level of your obscurity.

I remember, years ago, probably in the pre-social media days, seeing a review of one of our films online. The journalist remarked that he had tried to obtain an interview with the filmmakers, but that we were “about as outgoing as Howard Hughes on a bad day”. At that point we were relentlessly busy, and had neither time nor appetite for engaging in promotion, which we felt to be unnecessary. But that journalist was out there, trying to find us.

Over the years our films have been watched and enjoyed by millions of people. Those people remain out there but, as of the time of writing, I don’t know how or where to find them. Many of the audiences that appreciated our work have been abandoned by television, discarded in the consolidation, not because they no longer exist, but because corporate executives have concluded that they’re not as valuable as the audience for, say, true crime, or celebrity-driven, reality TV.

The challenge during any large upheaval will always be to reunite the creatives with their audience, and I remain convinced, during this latest, that there are ways to do so without capitulation to the cartel, or to the Apples of this world. I offer the story of how Prince did it.

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This week all thoughts, words and writing are guaranteed to be vacuumed into the annihilating twister of the Trump victory as it makes landfall. There is no routine that I can usefully add to that circus, so I thought it would be a good time to head up to the high ground and publish another Creator Note.

This one will be about the pitfalls associated with working with others, be that a collaborator on a creative project, or people that you hire to work for you.

I remember, right at the start of my career, a fraught afternoon tearing my hair out in a capacious post-production sound studio next to our building. It was one in a run of maddening afternoons spent in that studio. My co-producer and I were taking good-cop, bad-cop turns to encourage a decent sound mix from the persecuted sound mixer. There was a lot of turning and walking away with palms cupped over faces, of shaking heads, of hands reaching for switches and faders and being swatted away. The mixer’s one and only mode was glassy-eyed exasperation, an unspoken demand for us to finally specify what exactly we wanted.

My father had dropped in to meet me, the session having been slated to end some hours earlier, and he quietly watched the whole tortured production from the back of the studio. I slumped into a chair next to my father while my co-producer bent-over the sound mixer, his finger jabbing angrily towards the mixing desk. “He’ll never get it”, my father said, pursing his lips and shaking his head.

My co-producer, blowing out his cheeks, wandered over to the back of the studio to join us, having left the sound mixer to sweep energetically up and down the mixing desk on a wheelie chair, twisting EQ knobs and pushing faders in yet another hopeful attempt to avoid crashing the plane into the mountain.

“He’s just never going to get it”, my father said again, “it doesn’t matter how many times you do this, how many different ways you explain it. He can’t do it.” This was a moment of high revelation for me.

The sound studio had opened at around the same time that we had opened our production studios, and it was in the building next door. We’d seen this as an opportunity and cut a deal with the studio owner, a sound mixer with a decent pedigree in post-production film sound as well as music production, to share work at preferential rates, offer audio services to our clients and have discounted audio post available for all our productions. It was an arrangement that looked like good business.

The problem was, as my father noticed, the sound mixer couldn’t deliver, he wasn’t up to it. Until that day in the studio, I’d never really appreciated that most people (not in all cases, like most rules, there are exceptions) have a natural limit to their ability, which they are not able to surmount. I’d always unconsciously taken the view that people must be able to perform in their career, and I’d interpreted any failure for them to do so as somehow a failure on my part: I hadn’t explained well enough, given them enough time, sufficiently set expectations, I lacked the technical knowledge to speak in terms that they would understand, and so on.

No, the revelation from the sound studio is that some people just can’t do what you’re asking of them and they will never, under any circumstances, be able to. It doesn’t matter what business or collaborative arrangements you’ve made, doesn’t matter how much time you invest in trying to make it work, you have to recognise when it’s not a fit and pull the plug before it gets expensive and you lose your mind.

A friend of mine, hearing lamentations from me on this point, explained a concept that he’d collided with in the corporate world: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. This theory holds that when a person is given a role and they perform it competently, they are in turn promoted and given greater responsibility. The cycle of performance and promotion continues, until such a point at which the person hits the natural limit to their ability and is unable to perform in their role. They can’t do it; they have reached the point where they are no longer competent to do what is asked of them.

A problem then announces itself: in this scenario, they can’t reasonably be returned to a level where they operated just fine, because it would be a humiliating demotion and pay-cut. They can’t ever be promoted into a higher role, because it’s clear that they would not be competent, so they just bob around at their level of incompetence, unable to adequately to do their job. All their colleagues become frustrated, and the organisation suffers.

When you embark on any type of collaboration, or are hiring people to work with you, it is critical that you find people competent to do the tasks that you want them to perform and, if they are not, that you recognise it as early as possible and take steps to end the relationship, which will not be pleasant.

These are difficult and emotional judgements premised on human relationships. Human relationships and professional relationships do not always co-exist harmoniously, you make like the people that you work with and urgently want them to succeed, you may even become invested in their success, and give your time to supporting and encouraging them. But, ultimately, none of that matters if they just can’t do it.

Your creative life will be infinitely less painful if you avoid working with the wrong people at the outset, which will take some effort and divination. In Creator Notes#2 I mentioned the moment at my studio when, in order to arrest the months and years we’d burned down by hiring the wrong people, we designed a new recruitment process. This is how it went:

The old process:

1.        Post a vacancy at our studio, outline the role, invite applications.

2.        Email boxes deluged by incoming job applications, breathlessly try to drain them, emptying buckets against the rising tide while screaming at those trying to “show initiative” by phoning, in defiance of the rules, to back off.

3.        Optimistically read through the applications, pleased and impressed by the achievements within; dismiss the internal Cassandra, who whispers that these are lies.

4.        Watch through showreels and discuss.

5.        On the basis of the full application and showreel package, shortlist candidates for interview and get excited.

6.        Meet a gallery of smart, personable and funny people, have a great day and, reluctant to pick just one out of this much talent, eventually settle on the person who seems like best fit.

7.        Six months of hungover struggle reaping the black harvest of that decision, lamenting that Apollo had cursed Cassandra never to be believed.

The New Process:

1.        Email boxes deluged by incoming applications, breathlessly try to drain them, emptying buckets against the rising tide while screaming at those trying to “show initiative” by phoning, in defiance of the rules, to back off.

2.        Pessimistically read through applications, believe Cassandra, in defiance of Apollo.

3.        Watch through showreels and discuss.

4.        On the basis of the full application and showreel package, sceptically shortlist candidates for interview.

5.        Meet a gallery of smart, personable and funny people, have a great day and invite the 5 most promising candidates back for a second interview.

6.        At that second interview, test the candidates on knowledge that they have professed to hold in their application. Review their answers with them.

7.        Show the candidate into an edit suite, seat them in front of an open project that contains a small selection of interview clips, archive footage and music tracks. Hand them a set of research notes and explain that they have 2 hrs to put together a short film sequence on subject X.

8.        Return to evaluate the results, ask about their experience of the task, and conclude the interview.

The new process had benefits for all parties. For us, it quickly identified those who had overstated their abilities, gilded their histories and would not be able do what we asked of them. For the applicant, it gave them a brief experience of the role, so that they could better judge whether they did really want to join our team. We had someone withdraw during the second interview, saying that they’d decided that it wasn’t for them.

The system was spectacularly successful. In a single day of second interviews we were able to dispel the fog and discover our guy standing resplendent before us, waiting for the invitation to assume his natural place in our team. He aced the written test and quiz questions, and when asked to complete the short film challenge, he did such a great job that he asked if he could carry on and finish it off the right way. We gave him a further hour and half to polish the piece that he’d made: isn’t it amazing that he was so conscientious that he wanted to stay longer to get it right?! Admirable, a good job is better than a fast job, after all.

We began a round of self-congratulatory backslapping at the success and infallibility of our scheme, and that we had a discovered a great new asset to our team. Over the course of the next decade he proved to be a pleasure to work with, a valued part of our studio. And he never, ever, handed in a single, finished piece of work on time. What we had read in his interview as conscientiousness and pride was in fact an inability to work to a deadline.

If you design a strong process to identify someone to collaborate with or employ, it should also reveal a clue as to the issues that you may have with that person down the track. You’ll be better able to know both their strengths and weakness, how those complement your own, and how best to stimulate the former and mitigate the latter. But, if someone just can’t do it, do not waste your life trying to wish it otherwise or make them someone they are not.

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On the 24^th of September 2024, the State of Missouri murdered Marcellus Williams, a 55-year-old black man. Mike Parson, the governor of Missouri, was an accomplice to the murder, as was the state Attorney General, as were members of staff in the grim, indifferent corridors at The Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, as were several implacable members of the US Supreme Court.

I use the word “murder”, rather than the bureaucratic alternative, “execution”, as the usual definition of “murder” is “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another”. According to Amnesty International, the killing of Mr. Williams breached international law: “The UN Human Rights Committee, established under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified by the USA in 1992), has said: ‘The execution of a person whose guilt has not been established beyond reasonable doubt constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of life’”. There was every indication in the Williams case that his guilt had not been established beyond a reasonable doubt.

The primary victim in the case is Felicia Gayle. Gayle, a 42-year-old journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was murdered in her home in 1998. The crime scene spoke of horrifying, incontinent violence. Gayle had been stabbed more than 40 times with a kitchen knife, which her attacker left implanted in her neck as she died, presumably in terror, curled into the foetal position in the blood-spattered entrance hall of her house.

Marcellus Williams was tried and convicted of the murder. The evidence against him was shaky, certainly shaky enough to raise reasonable doubt. There was no physical evidence whatsoever that linked him to the crime, although physical evidence was collected at the scene. Witness testimony against him was unreliable and premised on hearsay.

Together with the evidential insufficiencies, the prosecution eliminated all but one, solitary black person from the jury in a notoriously racialised judicial environment. The veteran Death Penalty attorney Clive Stafford-Smith has commented that if the victim in a capital murder case is black and the accused white, there is a good chance that the death penalty can be lifted. If, however, those racial characteristics are reversed, and the accused is black, it is all but certain that they will die.

As the years advanced and doubts over Williams’s guilt mounted, several stays of execution were granted by the court. All those closest to the case were of a unanimous mind that the conviction was unsafe and that, at the very least, the sentence of death should be commuted, yet the system conspired, inexplicably and against all justice and reason, to secure the murder of Williams: an inquiry board of five federal judges was convened to examine new evidence in the case, but after his election as governor of Missouri, Mike Parson disbanded the board without hearing its recommendations; the prosecution itself, admitted its error and presented a motion to vacate the death sentence, but was overruled by the State Attorney General; prosecutors negotiated a plea bargain in which Williams would instead receive a life sentence, the judge refused to accept it; the grieving family opposed the sentence being carried out, no-one cared; the three sane US Supreme Court judges said that they would have granted a stay, but that they were out-voted by the Republican-appointed majority, who seemed, as they so regularly do, unfazed by the demands of justice, morality and international law.

And so at 23.01 on the 24^th of September 2024, Missouri’s “execution team”, their identities disguised under the State’s protocol, began to inject pentobarbital, a fast-acting barbiturate, into Marcellus Williams. It is unclear how accomplished the murderers were, if they injected the poison into a muscle, rather than a vein, or if the needle became obstructed at any point, Williams would have suffered excruciating pain. In any event, the pentobarbital prevented Williams’s lungs from functioning, his vital organs began taking catastrophic damage, eventually his heart went into arrest. At 23.10 the staff at The Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center were able to announce that they had successfully killed him.

This bloodthirsty sequence of events strikes me, a European citizen in a nation that doesn’t retain the death penalty, as completely incomprehensible. Why wouldn’t you scramble to arrest this death march if there was so much as a faintly whispered doubt over the guilt of the condemned? It’s as if the integrity of justice in the extraordinary circumstances of deliberate killing, carried out by the state, is less important than the uninterrupted functioning of the dull procedures that support it.

Someone, I don’t quite remember who or where, observed that in former times they used to strike up the band and summon a crowd when a man faced his moment of execution, there would be wailing and lamentation, a procession, the gravity of the event would be commemorated. Now, in the modern State of Missouri, they simply yawn through procedural hearings that dismiss evidence of innocence as untimely, and dispatch the source of inconvenience over nine minutes at The Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center. The whole production recalls Hannah Arendt’s characterisation of Adolf Eichmann and his accomplices as “desk murderers”.

Another feature of the US justice system that astonishes the European mind, is the sheer scale of the sanctions: sentences that run into hundreds of years, life sentences for theft, years-long incarcerations for petty drug possession offences. It’s hard not to feel that this culture of excessive punishment is incubated by the sinister presence of the death penalty at the summit of the penal code.

We see this in other countries that retain the death penalty, there’s a kind of pornography of retribution, together with an opposing, histrionic movement for salvation. “Proponents of the death penalty will argue that there are terrible crimes that deserve terrible consequences”, Robin Maher, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, tells me, “that's just pure retribution… and there are still some people who argue that there are religious reasons for the death penalty, an eye for an eye, that the religious commandments require them to provide a strong response to very violent crime. Although we have many more religious arguments against the death penalty now, and many more religious organizations who argue that the death penalty is inconsistent with their philosophies of reverence for life”.

I have recently begun a new project around Capital Punishment (I will share updates in this newsletter as it progresses), and what is amazing to me is that the death penalty appears to make no impression at all on national politics. During recent US election cycles, we have seen a passionate and voluble conflict over some of the weightiest moral, cultural and constitutional questions imaginable: abortion, gun control (in the context of mass murders), systemic racism and the police, the limits of presidential power, the composition of the US Supreme Court, the right to vote. And yet the death penalty hasn’t featured at all. During the current Presidential election cycle, at least two people have been executed who may have been innocent, one of whom was Marcellus Williams, and yet I saw no comments in the reporting from either of the campaigns.

The possible resumption of a Trump presidency should make this an urgent question. Unsurprisingly for someone who has shown nothing but contempt and disregard for the lives of others, Trump initiated a killing spree during his first term in office. More people were executed under Trump than under the previous ten presidents combined. In the final, hysterical days of his presidency, the bloodlust escalated as Trump broke with over a century of precedent, in which Federal executions are paused during a presidential transition, and executed five people before Joe Biden assumed office.

Trump’s language of extreme vengeance, threats to imprison and execute his opponents, exact violence against groups that he disapproves of, a thirst to condemn and kill that predates his political career, means that state killing, to include the murder of innocent men and women, will likely expand from the first day that he assumes office. The Trump White House may well commence the bloodiest era in the modern judicial history of the United States, a history which Robin Maher described to me:

 “Many states became disillusioned with the use of death penalty and its use deteriorated to the point where it was barely being used at all up to and through the mid -1970s, or I should say 60s. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court decided that the death penalty, as it had been currently used at that time, was unconstitutional as applied…[and] the court invalidated all of the death penalty statutes in the United States. And all of the states then turned to their legislatures to think about how they could change the way that they were using the death penalty and what unexpectedly happened was a resurgence in the use of the death penalty.

What we've seen since then, in the decades that have elapsed, is that really not much has changed - the death penalty remains arbitrary. It remains racist in origins and that racial bias has continued throughout the use of the death penalty…we've seen many, many problems with innocent people who are still sentenced to death and unable to secure relief in the courts before being executed.

As one of the few countries that continues to use the death penalty in the western world, we have a lot to answer for. People look at us from other countries and don't understand why the United States would continue to use a punishment so severe and so very obviously unfair in many respects. It really exemplifies so many things that are wrong with our legal system. It shows the very extreme results of prosecutorial misconduct, of racism, the effects of ineffective representation for the defendant. Many of the systemic problems that are problems for our legal system writ large can be shown in the death penalty, in the most extreme way, because it results in the death of a human being, sometimes a human being who is innocent.”

At the time of writing I have just concluded a long interview with someone who was condemned to die by lethal injection. Unlike Marcellus Williams, his innocence was proven and accepted by the system before it had a chance to kill him. His story is moving, affecting, distressing, yet also hopeful.

In a few days’ time we will learn whether Trump is to return and whether dozens of people detained in Federal prisons, some of whom will almost certainly be innocent, will live, or be put to death. It’s shocking that this question is not higher up the political agenda, the people of the United States should finally be asked to confront murder committed in their name.

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“That’s really true! How do you know that?”, one of The Byrds asked me. I did my research. “God it’s so refreshing to be asked an actual, proper question, rather than ‘what’s Jim Morrison really like?’”, Jim Morrison’s former girlfriend said to me. Again, I’d done some research. In Chelsea, New York City, Giorgio Gomelsky’s young assistant walked me through a dark, empty club and up to the apartment above. Gomelsky wanted to read my questions about his time managing the Rolling Stones and his life as one of the most significant impresarios in rock ‘n’ roll, before he agreed to sit for an interview. After a few minutes studying my bundle of printed sheets he called his assistant back and leaned over to him, saying in his thick Russian accent, “You see, Raul, look at this, what do I tell you? This is a British journalist, best in the world, none of the crap”. A little research had been put in.

It is amazing to me that the primacy of research when embarking on any endeavour is not immediately obvious to everyone. It seemed so self-evident to me that I did not make a particular point of it when hiring new producer-directors at my studio, and the consequences of not doing so were expensive.

The first few people that we hired on, all of whom had great showreels, good CVs, had interviewed well, all collapsed under the failure to conduct proper research. We had to jump onto their films and re-write, re-edit, retrospectively conduct research ourselves, into the early hours, in the teeth of fury from clients whose projects were delayed, in panic and burning under stress.

We then had to choreograph the miserable ceremony of The Firing: the pointless prefatory remarks that no one hears, the concluding platitudes that no one believes, the anger and despondency, in two cases tears; the begging, the pay-offs, the most wretched part of responsibility. I hate firing people, but have learned that you must know how to spot those cases in which it will become inevitable, and do it early, trying to evade the inevitable will only make it more painful for the person who simply is not right for their role; but that is another lesson, I digress, this is a written piece not a party.

Within the creative industries, neglect of proper research comes, I think, from a tendency among creatives to imagine that their work emerges, winged and glorious, from the peaks of imagination, without the need for a prosaic tread through other people’s material. An alternative misapprehension that I’ve repeatedly encountered (and this is a particular blight in documentary-making), is that, when relying on the expertise or experience of others, expertise is therefore not required of you.

I have several times been confronted with the defence “but why would I need to know that? They are the expert” and had to explain that if you don’t know at least a good chunk of what “they” know (and think), you won’t know what to ask them, you won’t know when they get things wrong, which they will, because they learned their subject years ago, or lived these events decades beforehand, and time is an unreliable narrator.

Research is also a critical part of editing. As you research, the final form of your work should start to reveal itself, making each subsequent process easier as the distant shape of a path starts to glitter over the forest floor. I have seen countless films completely fall apart in the edit, with a distraught director losing sight of their inadequately researched, unguided story.

At my studio, we eventually designed a sleek new recruitment process to better identify the research-and-storytelling-challenged. Although I had some design input, this was the initiative of my co-founder, who sat up until 4am in our reception area, opening cans of beer in sequence and muttering rage-filled lamentations about people’s failure to research.

The process introduced several new stages to our application cycle, one of which was a written questionnaire that was intended to test the applicant’s approach to filmmaking, and knowledge of the specific subjects that we were recruiting for. The first question was designed to address research, it was simple, and crafted in such a way that the research-negligent would trip a blaring red siren:

“You are asked to produce a film on X (we specified the subject in the particular recruitment round). What would be your initial steps in researching the subject?”

The candidates were all people in their late twenties, all of whom had a career producing or directing factual film and television. I kept the completed questionnaires, which are sixteen years old now, for posterity, some of the answers are amazing, they include:

“My dad, then my mate Adam’s dad. There (sic) both mad [on this subject]”.

“Magazine editors. I would look to contact and speak to them first. It’s their job to know who’s hot.”

“pre-interviews – spending a day talking to as many potential talent as possible to find a great angle.”

The answer we were looking for was: “I’d read a book”.

Only two candidates got there. This deficiency is unremarkable, as I said at the top, I have experienced first-hand, and heard repeatedly from others, that most factual filmmakers fail to conduct proper research.

But in research also lie dangerous swamps. It’s incredibly easy to over-research, something that I am often guilty of (my co-founder describes it as “disappearing into the vortex”), and, for anyone familiar with Steven Pressfield, Resistance will also persuade you to spend excessive time wandering around in research.

Here are some notes on how I do it, together with some recommendations on how to navigate the swamps:

Buy no more than two books (or comparable online sources)

Start by getting the two best books on your subject, have a careful look through the reviews to see if the ones you choose are likely to hit the angle on the subject, or points of interest, that you want to get into. If they don’t, you are likely to go back and buy more books and the distant Siren-song of over-research and Resistance will start to drift over the horizon towards you.

There are some exceptions to this rule depending on the specific angles of the available literature, or the number of sub-topics that you’re going to hit, but generally speaking every time I’ve started out with more than a maximum of two books, I’ve over-researched.

You can substitute or complement your books with a few really credible online sources, but for online sources I would head for just the absolutely top couple of sites, don’t go rabbit-holing on the internets.

Open your blank sheets

At the top of every research period, I start three documents, which I have open at all times: Notes, People, and Questions.

Notes: I could (and probably will) do an article just on notes. As you read your books and other research materials, summarise all the key facts, events, points and thoughts relevant to your story in your notes. You will be left with only the information required to develop your particular project, having discarded the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary words and concepts that will clutter up your head space and obscure your story from you.

The physical process of making notes will put you more in touch with your subject, you naturally internalise and memorise the details as you record them in notes. It’s also a shadow version of the editing that you will do as the final stage of your project, money in the bank that will pay dividends weeks later when you have only streamlined, pre-edited material to grapple with, and not a vast universe of all things.

Notes also combine all your various sources into a single source, with a single voice. A good set of notes are a streamlined map of your entire project, they lay out your story, contain its facts, themes and (usually) the core structure. They can be used as the basis of a narration, or to show you the next step when you’re tired and losing the thread of your project.

In making notes I get the facts down, but I also identify and select a few key themes that will underlie my story. It can’t be about everything, so which themes am I going to focus on? This is the way to the heart of the story that you want to tell.

It’s easy to over-note, the process should be disciplined. Strictly evaluate your sources as you go, and only what’s necessary goes in your notes.

People: As I go through my books and research materials I record the name of every person who comes up and whom I might want to contact or interview. This will be my project address book.

Questions: Doing research will naturally fire questions into your mind, I record these the instant that they occur to me, by the end of your research you will have a master set of questions which you can use for interviews or further enquiry.

Do a Wikipedia pass

In recent years I tend to start with a “Wikipedia pass”, a useful exercise. While Wikipedia is not a reliable source for research, it’s a good way to get a general overview of your subject and the references sections may indicate more obscure sources or valuable information that does not appear in your books. It’ll also have the most current information around your subject – books and articles are, by their very nature, out of date.

The Wikipedia pass, however, is the first site of danger. It is incredibly easy to haemorrhage time rabbit-holing on Wikipedia, I once started out on rock music of the 1970s and ended up, some hours later, scrolling down the entry on the Plantation of Ulster in the 17^th century.

Read your books

Now that you have done your Wikipedia pass and have your sheets open, it’s time to wrestle your subject to the ground.

I advise against reading books as a reader. Reading for research is not the same as reading for pleasure or general education. The first thing that I do with my books is flip through to find all the people who are mentioned and record their names and significance in my “People” doc. I might also take a look at the index and jump to the names listed there.

In the early days I used to sit and read cover-to-cover, I found that this was an unnecessary time sink; I eventually developed the ability to skip read. Skip reading is an imprecise skill, something more akin to an instinctive feel for the rhythm and content of the work. With experience, you can discern quite quickly from the way that a book is written and structured where the information that you want is likely to appear, and scan its pages looking for just those places.

Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades, for example (and here I write from memory, having not picked up that book for a good ten years), would trace Dylan’s biography, but follow events like a recording session or album release with lengthy digressions in which Heylin gives his views on the work. Heylin’s views are not relevant for me, so I would spot those sections, have a feel for how long they were likely to be, and skip ahead several pages.

Sometimes it may become apparent that you’ve skipped something interesting or significant, if so, trace back and intently read around just that one thing in order to identify and understand what you missed before you dance on with the skip reading.

I also compare facts around my major story points between the sources, they sometimes differ. If so, I make a note that these facts are contested, and embark on a separate effort to excavate the truth. This is what earns you the comments in the tradition of “how did you know that? People always get that wrong” that I listed at the top.

At the end of this process, with my blank sheets filled and the notes as my guide, I’ll start calling people armed with a degree of knowledge that will help make those conversations rich, thoughtful and revealing. I’ll have further information to go into my notes, some of which will be new, some of which may have been previously lost or forgotten, and my story will be underway.

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“Most people create jobs, not businesses”, Edwin said to us on the tiled ground floor of a collapsing button-dyeing factory in Shoreditch.

Buttons cascaded from rows of cubby holes behind him, black buttons, red buttons, metal buttons, marbled buttons, rimmed buttons, raised buttons, buttons neatly selected and packaged in clear plastic bags, free-floating buttons filling boxes and sacks. Upstairs, a crew of ageing button prospectors led by a sagacious Scottish captain known only as “Tech” boiled great, rusting vats of dyes that belched thick clouds of steam out of the peeling windows, and sieved buttons through trays of an obscure, sand-like substance. Further up still, at the top of concrete stairs slick from the beads of condensation that spilled down the walls, was the door to a film company with three post-production studios, lights and camera gear; my film company.

I’d started the company, together with my business partner, three years earlier, when I was twenty-two years old, and we had taken the rooms above the button dyers on Rivington Street because the lease was cheap and flexible. The landlord, Ron, had inherited the building (and button operation) from his father, and in the ageless tradition of all those emancipated from material concerns via inherited wealth, had departed for the spiritual realm, in his case an obsession with car racing. Ron was a sixty-year-old man pre-occupied by the kind of thing that children are into, he didn’t give a fuck about business, and especially not buttons, and had sold the company to Edwin some years earlier, but retained the building.

Ron had been happy to give us a lease without asking too many questions, questions that might have revealed that we only had enough cash to last three months and so, for anyone who knows the first thing about business, were a matter of weeks away from evaporating back into the atmosphere alongside Tech’s dyes, accompanied by the same unhappy smell.

To the amazement of everyone however, force-of-will and the ability to tolerate unheard of levels of self-abuse had helped us to cheat death. After three years we’d outgrown the rooms on Rivington Street and were preparing to take over a four-storey building nearby on Cowper Street. For his own part, Edwin was packing up his buttons and joining the great proletarian exodus from the East End, the Empire’s old grey factories folding back into history as a dazzling future of high-finance, disruptor tech start-ups and sharp design houses swept in. The decaying building on Rivington would soon be empty, sadly awaiting its emasculated future as block of hipster studio flats and over-expensive Mediterranean delis.

Edwin was concerned that we were about to fly too close to the sun. I’d noticed this tendency soon after we started out in business, older businesspeople could spot us from the horizon line, they had a kind of internal radar on which anyone stupid enough to flee employment, and the benevolent dictatorship of The Man, beeped away in black and green, another vessel naively hurtling towards oblivion. These businesspeople wandered the grid like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, desperately grasping fellow entrepreneurs by the arm and screaming danger. Eventually I became one of them, too.

“You might feel that you’re doing well”, Edwin warned, “money’s coming in, work’s coming in, everything’s getting bigger, more successful. But all you’re doing is creating jobs, the work expands to fill those jobs, and then more jobs and, really, what are you getting out of it? You’ll find that there’s no more money, no more of anything that you might want for yourself, just a lot of jobs and enough money to pay for them. Happens all the time. Just be aware, is all I’m saying. And if you ever need someone to speak to, give me a call”. In three years I’d never once spoken to Edwin, but here we were, on the ground floor of the collapsing button-dyeing factory, preparing to leave, and evidently we’d beeped onto his radar.

The move to Cowper Street took months, we had acquired the building following the indolent flight of Pete Doherty, apparently, and it was in an advanced state of disrepair, the basement littered with chasing foils and discarded vinyl. I oversaw tens of thousands of pounds in refurbishment works, new partitions to create edit suites, electrical re-wiring, installing a kitchen. I stripped and varnished all the wood floors myself, down on hands and knees, shivering through the winter; convinced that this would all pay-off in more money, better work, more time to develop the non-commercial, creative projects that I was interested in.

When we started the company it had been just the two of us, now there were four full-time producer/directors, plus a roster of freelance cameramen, sound mixers, voice-over artists, editors, musicians and other creatives. We moved into the new studios drowning in work: twenty-one feature documentaries in the first year, plus a thirteen-part series, several shorter documentaries, a music video and a load of development work for a new business venture.

People shattered under the pressure. Several interventions were staged at the pubs and bars of Shoreditch - in The Reliance, The Aquarium, The Fountain, The Strongroom - attempts to revivify fallen soldiers through drink and commiseration. Relationships were damaged, there were screaming rows with clients, punctuated by the sound of slammed telephones, our most senior employee quit.

While smoking outside on the street one afternoon, I felt an Ancient Mariner grip my arm. “You’ve got to know where you are on your curve”, Kevin, who ran the small, artisan craft shop next door, was saying to me. He had spent years operating a high-intensity printing business, before shutting the whole thing down to open a distinctly low-intensity shop with his wife. Kevin raised his palm diagonally upwards, “businesses go like that”, he continued, “then like that”, he levelled out his hand, “and then either like that again”, his fingers pointed back up, “or like that”, he concluded, sombrely, his fingers now pointing down. “You’ve got to know where you are, and get out before that happens”, his hand plunged towards the pavement.

My partner and I had a series of frayed discussions, telling each other that we just needed to climb to the end of the year, when all the revenues stacking up would pay out and we could think about the future with money in the bank and a bit of breathing space, but the work, the pressure was unremitting. I ended the year in a thirty hour edit that could never be paid for, the client next to me pumping The Doors’ Break On Through To The Other Side and Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds out the studio speakers in a bid to motivate me through the relentless night.

And when the day broke and we sat down with our extra weight and injured livers to assess our “fuck off money”, as another Mariner had once put it, the money that bought you security, the freedom to tell anyone you liked to “fuck off”, we found that there wasn’t any at all, we were no better off than we had been a year earlier.

Our income had soared, but it had been swallowed by the shiny new studios and extra people, it had been sprayed at the problems clamouring at the door in a bid to hold them off, it had been squandered, because there simply wasn’t the time or headspace to see where it was all going. I remember scanning down the spreadsheet in a cold panic, my lips twitching like a drowning fish, asking how it was possible, how could it be possible, that four of us spent nine thousand pounds (at the time around seventeen thousand dollars) on motorcycle couriers?

We had created jobs, not business. Everyone but us had been paid.

Despite our efforts, this pattern repeated itself over the years. More Mariners called in, “you guys are over-delivering and undercharging, and it’s fucking your business”, one pronounced, “You can only live on your wits for so long, and you’ve been doing it far too long” another declared.

But when you start with nothing, and you’re a creative, and you have a dream, how do you put a price on it? How do you say “no”, when to do so might collapse that dream?

I’ve learned that you have to understand your own value, always charge what you’re worth, and more work is not the same thing as more business. During those years we made one of our clients millions, multi-millions, while they barely lifted a finger. This was in the days when you could make good money in the creative industries, before the tech disruptors “disrupted” the economic logic of everything, including the ability to earn a living. We were terrified that the client might one day withdraw their contracts, so we slaved to deliver their projects and expanded to satisfy their needs, all the additional revenues bled away by the increased activity, the extra jobs.

The client understood something that we didn’t: our value. And so he deliberately worked to keep us poor and hungry. In hindsight I can see that we wielded tremendous power, he was terrified that we might one day withdraw, we were essential to the escalating success of his business. We should have charged more money for less work, not taken on more undervalued work in the forlorn hope that it would lead to more money.

I’ve since become much better at making business assessments, although I remain convinced that it’s difficult and counter-intuitive for creatives to think in cold, unemotional business terms, it’s still not something that I have mastered. The single most important skill that I have acquired, and in many ways the most difficult, is the ability to say “no”. Almost every time that I’ve found the courage to say “no”, it has worked out well, because when you say “no” it’s not simply an act of negation, it’s an act of affirmation, it’s saying “yes” to the alternatives.

Back in that conversation in the dark of the button factory, I didn’t really understand what Edwin was driving at. I heard him, I thought I took his meaning, but I had to go through it, emerge stripped and bleeding to learn it. I simply wasn’t brave enough to take his message on faith.

It has now been twenty years since Edwin grabbed my arm, and I’ve learned a great many lessons since, but here I’m going to pass on that first advice, together with my own supplementals: create business, not jobs, understand your own value, learn to say “no” more often than you say “yes”, and always listen to the Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner.

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