"Why would you want to live in Blade Runner? It's shit!": Owen Hatherley
"Everyone in Cybernetic Culture Research Unit wanted to live in Blade Runner and that's much less appealing now that we do..."
I meet architecture and cultural critic Owen Hatherley at Rock Steady Eddie’s in Camberwell. It’s a greasy spoon time capsule, or as Owen says - “a 90s imitation of the 50s, that’s somehow survived into the 2020s”. I order him a cup of tea and a ‘speedy grill’ - which is composed of all the English essential food groups: beans, bacon, eggs, chips. I get a coffee, nothing more. Owen’s food arrives and I am riddled with the most crippling food envy. I return to the counter and order some eggs and chips. Then I’m back to my seat, and we’re rolling.
That summer, I’d seen Owen speak at Durham University’s Labour club. I had long been a fan of his work. Owen was part of the 2000s blogosphere - where he met Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and other writers. His early works ‘Militant Modernism’ and ‘A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’ put forward new radical criticism on the intersections of UK architecture and politics. Since then, he’s written around 15 more books on architecture and aesthetics from the UK, to Soviet Russia, Central and Eastern Europe and recently, North America. Forthcoming is 'The Alienation Effect: How Central European émigrés transformed the British Twentieth Century’ which will be published by Penguin in March. Owen was culture editor at Tribune and is now a commissioning editor at Jacobin.
Our conversation encompasses shitty architecture under neoliberalism, brutalism, 2000s boredom, the jungle obsessed ‘Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’, private school mentalities and our political future.
JJ: When you gave your talk at the Durham University Labour Club, you spoke about this idea of architectural ‘dross’. Could you expand on what you mean by dross architecture? - where it comes from, how it happens, and whether there are any other particularly dross ridden cities in the UK you would point to as good examples?
OH: I always think of a Philip K Dick concept of ‘kipple’ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It’s this kind of rubbish that constantly accumulates and no-one knows why. It’s this crap, this dross, that just spreads inexorably and everyone’s helpless to do anything about it. I think about that a lot. It is slightly easier to pinpoint why it’s there. In Durham, all of that quite poor architecture around the river is the consequence, I think, of on the one hand, the failure of architectural innovation; partly the developers being very profit-driven, but also the planning system which knows how to stop certain things from happening, but not how to have any positive proposals. So in a city like Durham, I imagine a lot of that will have been post-war buildings that won’t have been the best. That's what would have been there before. And so the main thing will have been these various kind of planning officers, who sometimes come from a conservation background, off against a very powerful conservation movement, who will be trying at all costs to avoid certain things - too much glass, too much concrete, looking a bit too modern or aggressive. So you'll get this sort of cladding of brick or cladding of stone to try and make it look a bit less modern than it is. But... any sense of what you might want and why kind of disappears from that. Everything's going to come into being through these series of accidents. Sometimes accidents can lead to quite exciting things, but we've created a system where accidents lead to things that tend to be very, very boring.
I wrote a book for Verso about 14 years ago called A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. I thought at that point that you could explain the places that are the most ‘drossed' by poverty. And not just by poverty, but the feeling of it - having been told by places in the rest of the country that they were shit-holes for so long, that they came to believe it. And also having undergone in the 80s in particular such an economic decline that if any developer wanted to build a thing in the place, it was like ‘please come here! build!’ And I think that was true for some places. It explains a bit of Manchester for me. Almost nothing was built in central Manchester in the 1980s. I can think of maybe two buildings in central Manchester from the 80s, which were just crap commercial buildings. When that boom happened in the late 90s - that’s still continuing there - there was a feeling almost of gratitude: “thank god the developers are here!”. Which means that they're sort of pathetically grateful for them, so there's no real interrogation of what they do, or whether it's any good, or whether we need it. And the planning system was already not particularly good at architectural quality.
I found that you'd get stuff that was just as bad in Edinburgh. My theory didn't work anymore because Edinburgh's got all the money in the world; it's the financial capital, it’s got the Scottish government's money concentrated there. Edinburgh should be full of amazing buildings. And it did have a relatively good 90s; just pre-devolution, Scottish architecture was quite creative. So I came to realise that it was more about a particular way that neoliberalism works in the UK, which is that you have regulation to create a very ruthless free market. You have this actually quite strict planning system but all of the things that it's set up to regulate are things like the building heights, being in keeping, being contextual which actually have nothing to do with whether a building's any good or not. That has much more to do with things like build quality, quality of materials, and how well they're put together. In the rest of Europe, there’s much more in the way of things like city architects, of municipal design expertise, which is a different thing to planning officers who have no design expertise…whose role is basically to decide if a thing is following the rules or not.
So you have this very reactive public system with a deeply corrupt and ruthless building industry, which was awful even in the 60s - building things like Ronan Point and so forth - after that, the thing you would have thought would have happened was a much stricter regulation of that building industry to make it less corrupt and shit. And what actually tends to happen, particularly in the 80s and 90s, was this progressive deregulation. So the Building Research Establishment, which was the thing set up to make sure things like Ronan Point didn't happen, was privatised by Blair’s government. A lot of the things that led to Grenfell can be laid at the door of the fact that the public institution that's supposed to stop the corrupt construction industry from being evil bastards is basically an arm of the construction industry. So it's this weird thing of very untrammelled, ruthless capitalism and a state sector which isn't really fit for purpose anymore. And that's why there’s a right-wing argument about dismantling the planning system. They point to one aspect of that, correctly, which is the negative effects of conservation, which is true. But they then lay astonishing faith in the construction industry not being ruthless, corrupt shit. It’s comic after Grenfell to be like, “yeah, let's let the construction sector in Britain do what they want”. So that's how dross happens.
I think an element of it which shouldn't be understated, although it upends my Edinburgh theory a bit, is the ‘shithole theory of British cities’: that ‘everywhere's kind of a bit crap, so it doesn't really matter if there's more crap’. And that's why the most ruthless preservation movements are on things like preserving the New Town and Old Town of Edinburgh. So you can do what you like in Leith. We don't care. Leith - fuck them. So Leith's full of absolute drivel. But, in the Old Town and the New Town we mostly keep it out, although that shopping centre that's shaped like a spiral turd still managed to get through. The same thing with Oxford and Cambridge, the same thing with the very centre of Durham, the same thing with Westminster. All of these things are extremely strictly protected. That's the natural perception of what a city's like and what we sell to tourists is that. But it's not where most people actually live. Where most people actually live, there's this idea of, ‘oh, they're all rubbish, they're all shitholes’.
And that's why our third and fourth and fifth cities are so crap compared to the fourth or fifth or sixth cities in France or Spain or Germany or Italy. Because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
JJ: So is dross an architectural equivalent to neoliberalism?
OH: I mean, if you like, yes.
JJ: I’m interested in what you just said about us compared to France, Spain and Germany. Why are those European countries 'less neoliberal’ than the UK? What makes us different?
OH: First things first, I think all those countries are going in our direction. They've been going there slowly, but they're going there. There’s more there to neglect which means that there's a certain amount of surviving infrastructure and surviving institutions that mean they can survive it better. But austerity became a Europe-wide project, under Merkel in particular. The quality of public space and infrastructure and some of the things like upkeep is now pretty much as bad somewhere like Stuttgart as it is in Manchester.
So there's very few countries that have been moving against the grain of neoliberalism. I think Spain to a certain extent, not just because it's been electing centre-left governments, but I think because of the urban movements, both from above and below. I think Spain's got interesting trends. It has a state that has a lot more capacity, despite the things we saw in Valencia recently. Spain still builds high-speed rail and metros and so forth at a rate that Britain could barely even imagine, as does France, but Spain is a much poorer country historically. They’ve built thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time that it took Britain to tunnel through the Chilterns for HS2. So on one hand Spain, and this is also true of France and a few other countries, they can still do these big state things. And also the tenants movements in some cities managed in some places to effectively take power, in Barcelona, and in other places, at least if not take power, than have such an effect that there had to be a lot more things like new social housing, curbing traffic and so forth - much more interest in public space.
So I think that explains Spain, and I think Spain has moved against this trend towards austerity and neoliberalism a little bit. Mostly not really. Italy's built a lot of good high-speed rail, but its urban transport infrastructure pretty much outside of Milan is really, really bad. No matter how bad people think the Tube is, compared to the metro in Rome it's fucking utopia. I think one reason is what you said, the closeness to the U.S. I do think it's quite precise to talk about Britain as being quite mid-Atlantic; it’s a figure of speech but I think it's a real political thing. If you go to the U.S, at least the small bit of it I've gone to - which is New York twice and Washington once - it’s not quite as bad here as it is there. The airports here look quite nice if you've been to JFK. The quality of public space is a bit higher here than it would be there. We only have a trickle of new social housing, but more than there would be in New York. So this is that midpoint. It's the only place I've been - apart from bits of Eastern Europe - where public infrastructure looks worse than in Britain. But we are close to their thing of just seeing the state as an enemy. The political right’s project in the U.S. is to see the state, aside from policing and the army, as its enemy, as something it should deliberately hobble. A lot of the more direct democracy aspects of America actually trend rightwards in that way. Imagine the equivalent of people in the Chilterns demanding that HS2 be tunnelled under their fucking farms - those people in the U.S. would have just stopped it getting built at all. So we’re kind of mid-way.
In lots of Europe, I think it’s an artefact of proportional representation. It’s because of the fact that governments have usually had to be coalitions so on the one hand - until 2010 and the Tory government comes down to dismantle it - the NHS was a more socialistic thing than anywhere else in Europe because of the fact we had the 1945 government being able to be an elective dictatorship, having this enormous majority because of the FPTP system, being able to say ‘we're going to do whatever the fuck we like.’ Well, you can't do that in Europe. And so that also meant that we had Thatcherism, which wasn't really possible in the rest of Europe because there was always a coalition partner going “Well, you can’t.” Helmut Kohl would probably have liked to have done a lot of what Thatcher did, but he couldn't because of the fact that he had to deal with this much stronger local state. You can’t foist neoliberalism on the quite strong German state system. The government couldn’t say to North Rhine-Westphalia in the 1980s ‘you must immediately close all your coal mines’. They can't do that. And then countries that have that traditional kind of political consensus, like the Netherlands or Belgium, similarly, there'd always be a party in there -whether it would be a Christian party or a social democratic party or a Green party - that would be slowing it down. They would never be stopping it. They would be slowing it down. And so that's why it's happened I think, the combination of those two.
JJ: You’ve said you would encourage anyone on the left to admire brutalism and modernist architecture. What would be your brutalism sales pitch?
OH: So there's two ways of looking at it, really. There's the Jonathan Meades one and my one. This isn't to criticise Meades because I like him a lot and I owe him a lot but Meades sees it as part of a long architectural tradition. So he links it to the late English Baroque, architects like John Vanbrugh - this very heavy, aggressive architecture - and he links it to the high Victorian Gothic - architects like William Butterfield, S.S. Teulon. So all of these people that did big mad shit basically, even things that aren't actually Gothic but are in a Gothic tradition of being against order and clarity for these aggressive, hit-you-in-the-gut type forms. And I like that in architecture. I think a lot of people think it's bad for architecture because it's something that you see all the time. Some will see it as egotistical. And I think you can definitely link some of that end of brutalism to contemporary things like the late Zaha Hadid. There's a similar thing of massive, individualistic form. And I wouldn't deny it's part of it.
I think what interests me a lot, in 20th century art generally, is those moments in which a particular politics is linked up with particular aesthetics. And here I do think, and this isn't the case everywhere, but in Britain especially, and a few other countries, Brutalism was so identified with the social democratic state. It was an avant-garde architecture that happened to work for, largely, public institutions. And that's how you have Park Hill Flats, the new universities like East Anglia, Essex, Sussex; Preston Bus Station, the National Theatre in the South Bank. They're all public projects. And there are a few Brutalist private projects in Britain but they're massively outnumbered by this architecture that is for a social democratic state. And so because of that they were necessarily trying to work out how to design some sense of “communal luxury” - the phrase Kristin Ross uses. I don't think Kristin Ross would like Brutalism, but the way she writes about that notion through the Paris Commune always intrigued me quite a bit - that idea of making a space that's communal but not private into something that feels like it's got a certain grandeur and a certain collectivity and a certain kind of excitement. And I think Brutalism does that really, really well. I also just have a slightly sort of boringly English liking for ‘truth to materials’. I like the fact that you can always see what it's made of and how it's made. The constructional ethic of it is something that I've always quite liked, perhaps more simple-mindedly. It doesn't lie to you. There's no subterfuge about it. It is what it is.
JJ: When I was at university, most of the students - a vast amount of which went to public school - would always rage against the student union, which is a listed brutalist building. Everyone thought it was incredibly ugly! You’ve spoken about a kind of private school fantasy image of Britain. Could you comment on that briefly - how does that impact the wider discourse on brutalism?
OH: Partly, people like nice things - and that's fine! I don't mind people liking the centre of Durham. Why wouldn't you like it? It's great. What's not to like? I don't really have as revolutionary a position on a lot of this stuff as I probably ought to. I've got my own preservationist instincts. I was reading a book about Scottish architecture over the weekend. And there was a whole bit in there about the Aberdeen market that was demolished in the 60s. I know what the Aberdeen market they replaced that with in the 60s was - it was just this kind of big, boring, concrete drum. And it used to be this incredible multi-level, partly ancient Greek, partly Victorian iron and glass futuristic thing. How could you possibly have demolished that for this piece of shit? How dare you? So I can get quite conservative about architecture if I want to.
It's not like I think these people are wrong. I just don't think they understand how these things actually come into being and why, and how you can get the thing that you want. If you look at new buildings in historic cities and you want to find a place where they're good, you go to Belgium. And Belgium is way less weird about it, particularly Flanders actually, which pains me to say because it's quite a right-wing place. And that's because you have very, very strong city architects. You have a very strong culture of construction being very, very regulated and being very high quality. And you have a sense that the main question asked about the historic building in the centre of the city isn't ‘how do we stop a monstrosity?’ It's like, ‘what do we want here? What do we think would be good here?’ And we just do not fucking have that.
I think in Britain generally, it comes a little bit out of the general decline from being a massive imperial power. So there's that feeling of ‘well nothing can really be as good again as it was’. And I find that hateful for various reasons. But also I think there's a road not taken in a lot of English, Scottish and Welsh architecture: responding to that in the 60s, responding to decolonisation by going modern. Instead, when that got rejected, we set up this post-imperial hangover. ‘What are we going to be as a country if we can't be this industrial superpower?’ Harold Wilson's answer was, well, we'll be a kind of high-tech economy. And that could have happened in some ways. There were some quite interesting things in computing. It could have been a cultural superpower, which came out of Blair a little bit and also Labour politicians before Blair, even T. Dan Smith had the insight of culture being a real thing.
And that was a smart choice because of the fact that Britain was the most important global centre for pop culture after the USA. It made total sense to put loads of money into that like Blair did. But if it's not those two things, what is it? It's Hogwarts. And so that means that you have this dual thing of public school kids on the one hand expecting a certain thing, people that didn't go to public school feeling that if they don't get that particular thing they're being served up shit because the good thing is the public school thing and then the third thing, which is tourists and foreign students and people who are working here from abroad, but particularly foreign students, are coming here for Hogwarts. What's the appeal of Britain if you come from China? All the modernity you can find here, you can find a hundred times better in China. Why would you come here for that? But what we have that they don't have - apart from a few corners of Shanghai - is 19th and early 20th century Hogwarts architecture. So that's what they're here for. There's a whole load of things coming together to create this fantasy.
JJ: Speaking of Blair - you must have seen online that Gen-Z and millennials are still pining after 2000s nostalgia on social media.
OH: I find this deranged
JJ: What do you attribute that to? What do you perceive about it?
OH: I think it's closely connected to why I didn't like the 2000s, which is that they were boring. The 2000s sucked if you were someone who was interested in the world. It was a really, really bad time to be interested in politics, in radical art and culture, in the culture of the 20th century. But it was probably great if you had money and a house. And it was also a period in which, simply because not that much happened, it's going to look really seductive in a period in which everything's happening in a really, really constant, terrifying onrush. Some of Mark Fisher's ideas don't really bear examination now because they're so predicated on this ‘slow cancellation of the future’. In a political sense that's still true insofar as neoliberalism is ending, but it's not being replaced with some kind of new, wonderful alternative, it’s being replaced with a right-wing nationalism with some sort of protectionist economics attached to it and increasing tensions between the big powers that might lead to World War III. It hasn't ended with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders leading us into a new age of social democracy; it's ended with something worse.
So, that part of the argument is right, but the cultural one isn't. Because I think at some point - 2014-15 is when I first noticed it - culture went from being this thing that was, as Kodwo Eshun put it, a “future shock absorber” - there was still technological change in the 90s and 2000s but the culture was there to distract your attention from it. At some point in the mid-2010s, that just stopped completely. And instead there's been this constant onrush of cultural and technological and political change, at such a pace that you can't really keep abreast of it. Most of it is quite evil, but you can't avoid it. You can't pretend it's not happening.
I think a lot of the Mark Fisher circle and all of us that read K-Punk at the time all thought it would be really cool to live in a 1980s dystopian film, to live in Blade Runner. And now loads of us in big cities, we do kind of live in Blade Runner - and it's not very good. Why would you want to live in Blade Runner? It's shit! It's not like living in some Ursula Le Guin utopia. It's living in somewhere horrible. But I think everyone in Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, living in Leamington Spa in 1998, wanted to live in Blade Runner and that's much less appealing now that we do. So I do think the 2000s simply is a time when time slowed down. Partly it's just fashion just recurs and recurs. Everything comes back into fashion eventually. God forbid but maybe in the 2040s there'll be something about the 2020s that people are going to be like, ‘ah remember that?’ Maybe they will because it's a very intense time. Hopefully, if we're lucky, we'll be in a less intense time in the 2040s. I'll be able to look back on this mad period and go, remember when that happened? But now the 120-year-old Bernie Sanders is running the United States of America and we're doing just fine! So yeah, I think that's probably part of it. Probably three-quarters of it is just fashion because that's just what happens, all eras get revived on a predictable cycle. But I think a big part is people younger than me really liking the idea of a time when nothing's happening.
JJ: You were part of that 2000s blogosphere and you met Mark Fisher. Could you speak a bit about that and your relationship with Fisher?
OH: We were good friends for a few years. It’s a tricky one because the last four or five years he was around, we weren't particularly close for one reason or another. So all I can talk about is the period from about 2005 to about 2010 when we were very close and that's when the blog scene was around. And then it kind of migrates onto Zero books and Repeater books and it migrates onto social media. So it has this kind of good upshot, I think, which is migrating on to print, onto people actually working out their ideas properly rather than just posting. And the other side of it is just posting. What Mark was absolutely right about in his ‘Exiting the Vampire’s Castle’ essay is that social media was a disaster for a lot of the internet. The internet pre-Facebook was a very different place and pre-Twitter was a very different place. It's very telling that our current supervillain rulers have seen those social networks as absolutely their potential tools. Because the way they are rigged up is necessarily violent and inquisitive and obnoxious. And it rewards that. It always has. I've met loads of people off Twitter and Twitter, if used wisely, could be quite fun, but that is all a feature, not a bug.
Anyway, he was right about all sorts of things, but not all of them. But I owe Mark loads. I wouldn't have done a lot of what I did without Mark's encouragement. And there are loads of people that can say that. There's a long list of writers of the 2010s and 2020s who basically owe their entire thing to Mark spotting it and encouraging it. In some ways, I think Mark's legacy is more that than a lot of his own writing. Because a lot of blog stuff is very ephemeral; a lot of it doesn't age well. But Mark as a kind of catalyser of things, as an intensifier of things, was of absolutely enormous importance, and I feel very privileged to have known him.
JJ: What are your thoughts on the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit?
OH: It was before my time. I mean, it's no accident that some of them ended up fascists. But I think part of that is going to be answered by what I was saying earlier, which is that the cyberpunk element is less seductive in a quite cyberpunk society. The world you willed into being kind of happened and it wasn't very good. And in some cases, particularly with the American right’s interest in Nick Land, there's direct causality in that. So it's not an accident. Some of the most evil fuckers in society have taken a lot of inspiration from Nick Land. So have nice people like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams and Helen Hester, people whose work I really like, have taken from that as well. But so have our fascist supervillain tech bro rulers. I think a lot of it made most sense as a description of a lot of culture that was happening at the time.
I remember Simon Reynolds writing about reading Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus for the first time while listening to jungle and feeling like “wow, it just describes what's happening!” And it kind of does. And it makes much more sense to see Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus…
JJ: Have you read those?
OH: Yeah, you had to in order to be in the blog scene - they wouldn't let you in otherwise! You had to at least pretend you'd read it! Those things are much more interesting as kind of cultural descriptors or cultural intensifiers than they are as political analysis. As political analysis, they're fucking nonsense. Absolute fucking nonsense. As psychiatry, they're fucking nonsense. But as you know, describing the kind of, you know, the desiring machine of jungle, it makes a lot of sense, right?
JJ: Can you explain how the idea of the desiring machine works at the level of something like jungle?
OH: No, not really. I think it was a question of the prose - this prose describing this thing that's constantly in this process of becoming and transforming and constantly changing from one thing into another while remaining the same thing or remaining rhythmic. That always seems quite A Thousand Plateaus to me. You know, it never quite becomes a fixed creature. It's just this kind of constant onward rush of transformation.
And I think for all of the CCRU junglists, it made sense to use that tool to analyse the world at that point. And then for Mark I think especially, when culture then slowed down in the late 90s and 2000s, it was no longer a useful tool because it couldn't describe the world as it was. And that's why he ends up being drawn to first the kind of hipster theory communism like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. And later his move towards more traditionally leftwing thinkers like Ellen Willis and Herbert Marcuse. Those are his later crushes and those people are all politically much more serious. It's much less just ‘running on vibes’ than that Lyotard, Deleuze and Guatarri, Baudrillard canon.
By the time I met some of the CCRU people in 2005, it had long since burned itself out. So I wasn't there. I was too young for it.
JJ: Fisher wrote an essay called ‘The Strange Death of British Satire’. He wrote that so much of the media and the BBC's political coverage back when he was writing in the mid 2010s was marked by a particular tone - in which nothing's to be taken too seriously; the coordinates of political reality were established in the 80s, and all we can do is operate within them; that we were increasingly living “inside the mind” of a “psychically mutilated adolescent bourgeois male.”
What's your response to how that's felt in the media today? And how is that felt in culture more generally?
OH: What’s different there is that there was a big counter reaction to it. There was a phrase Paul Krugman used - “the very serious people”. The very serious people were proven massively wrong by the Iraq war, then by the financial crisis, then by Brexit. There's a whole load of things they didn't predict, they didn't anticipate and they had no way of dealing with. So you've got these counter movements, both of the right, obviously of Trumpism and Farageism and their various local equivalents, and of the left, of Corbynism and Sanders and the DSA and the left populism in lots of Southern Europe around Podemos and its outgrowths and Syriza and so on. And they've all fizzled out one way or another, either through their own stupidity in the case of Syriza or through being basically crushed by the media and the political class like Corbyn was. Or by being assimilated, like Sanders and AOC and the DSA have been. Some of those people are still standing in a way - Corbyn's still there doing his thing, and those younger people like Zarah Sultana are still there doing their thing. So those things have their legacies. But anyway, there was a counter-movement to it. And what we're in now is the time which they have scorched the earth to create; they’ve eliminated their left-wing competitors. I mean, we're still here, and we're still much bigger than we were pre-2015. And, you know, we could elect several MPs to parliament, as we did in July.
But in 2019 here and in 2020 in the US, we were serious contenders for power, and we're not that anymore. And that's because of these people. They fucking did it. And, you know, they have their toy back now. And that’ll last only until they once again completely fail to actually respond to any of the actual problems of the 2020s, and usher in the next time a right-wing populist wins an election, which has obviously just happened in the U.S.
Maybe it's not true to say that they're all totally unaware and unable to respond to those realities. To use one example, which is housing. In the 2000s/early 2010s, you were really banging your head against a brick wall going, this system of housing does not work. You have to have more things like council housing. You have to move against landlords. You have to stop things like the right to buy. You have to socialise a lot of the housing sector, or people just won't be able to have good housing. But in the 2000s, people were like, don't be fucking stupid - there's new block of flats over there. It's great. There's some flats for key workers. Everything's fine. And now for a lot of the centre-left, the common sense has shifted on that. They still have what I would consider to be the centre-right trying to stop them. I would consider Keir Starmer to be a figure of the centre-right here and Angela Rayner to be a figure of the centre-left. I think she's much more aware of how we need to change these things but she's in a government which is committed to changing nothing. But that common sense has shifted and I think common sense on climate change also shifted.
A few things did change, but take someone like Morgan McSweeney - he’s the sort of person that probably actually watched This Week. And he'll have found it funny. And all of these awful fucking Labour MPs that were elected in July, all of these awful fucking children, they're all the people for whom that was what they wanted to do with their lives. And, you know, they're all from the kind of parts of society where those people most thrive, which is NGOs, charities generally, lobbying - which has a much closer link to charity than people realise - and law. And those are people who would watch a programme presented by Andrew Neil. That's where they all work. And they are the Labour Party. It's not going to last, as has just been proven by the hiding Joe Biden's hand-picked successor just got. They're amazingly unresponsive to change. And I don't get it.
With Durham, or any Russell Group uni, there's a layer of these people - but you have to realise that in 2002, it was everyone. Apart from a minority of swappies and anarchists, this sort of quietism was the common sense of everyone, that everything's pretty good. Everything's just fine. And that kind of sense of frivolity and nothing really mattering that those people will have, that was the common sense 20 years ago. And it's not now, because of all the things that have happened. But there's this layer at the top, squatting there. And it's because they think that if they play their cards right, they can be running the country. And, you know, some of them kind of are. So I think that's really part of it. I went to Goldsmiths, which you would think would have the smallest layer of those sorts of people. But in the late 90s and early 2000s the still the common sense at the time was just like, even though fees had just happened and so on, there was still this ‘everything's fine, listen to Gomez, go to a Sarah Lucas exhibition, watch a fucking Danny Boyle film, everything’s fine’.
JJ: We're very interested in the division between Gen Z and Millennials. Sam Wetherell, who we interviewed a couple of months back, said that because Millennials had higher material expectations than Gen Z, that provoked a knee-jerk reaction in them that might be associated with a lot of the annoying Millennial stereotypes. Whereas Gen Z are going into adulthood expecting disappointment, and so its likely that they may well produce “a more cynical kind of politics that’s better equipped to fighting for scraps in a declining world.”
OH: And what happened in the U.S.? Gen Z went for Trump. Specifically Gen Z men. The right-wing radicalization of young men is a thing that's happened in the last five years, post the defeat of Corbyn and Sanders. And no one has any idea what to do about it. I certainly fucking don't. I'm just over the line into Millennial, though most of my cultural formation is Generation X - I was born in 1981, so I'm just over the line. And there's a line, I can't remember who said it, about how revolutions happen not in a society of deep poverty, but in a society where everything has been getting better and then it suddenly gets worse. And we didn't have a revolution, but we did have this wave of left-wing populist movements that happened because of that. You were told that the system was actually a meritocracy and it worked and that you only had to play your cards right. And then a load of things happened pretty much after 2008 that meant that was no longer the case. So you had, exactly as Sam describes, an expectation that society was going to have room for you, and it didn't. And if you grew up always knowing it was going to have no room for you, axiomatically, there's no reason to think that would lead you to the left. But what it doesn't lead to is centrism. The 21-year-old constituency for Starmer or someone like that is minimal to non-existent. The constituency for Corbyn and Sanders and their heirs like AOC or Sultana, is substantial, if not quite so substantial as the constituency for the radical right.
It's also because of Gen-Z being boiled in the internet from birth. And all the internet's affects, particularly the internet as it was transformed by Zuckerberg and by Twitter and by the current group of tech overlords. What they turned it into is what you've all been raised in. And it inculcates cruelty and surveillance and anxiety and nastiness as a response to that.
JJ: How are we going to get out of this mess?
OH: I think in terms of how, we have a pretty good idea. Some elements of policy that some governments are trying to move towards show some recognition of that and a lot of technological developments show that we can do things. Running a major industrial power off of renewable energy was impossible twenty years ago but now it’s wholly possible. The problem with renewable energy is that it’s much more difficult to make a profit out of for various reasons. You then have the question of, why can’t we run them as public services? But then, we all lost in 2019 and 2020 so instead of having that, we have things like Biden’s policies - Starmer is going in a similar direction - trying to de-risk green technology and green investment by paying private companies to do it. But why don’t we just fucking do it? Have them as public services…why does there have to be some hedge fund manager creaming some money off the top of it? And that I think sums up quite well, the potential and the problem. Technologically, we can do things we couldn’t do before. I don’t give a fuck about things like AI, I think they’re useless, but the shifts in things like renewable energy are really exciting and really important. But they don’t work that well in a free-market system, so perhaps there should be a change in that! I would’ve said five years ago that I have hope in the kids; I don’t now obviously because I think the kids have moved in increasingly right-wing directions. And there’s no reason to think they should or they shouldn’t.
Having faith in a particular social group has always been a fucking mug’s game. The old Marxist wager on the proletariat wasn’t that we thought they were nice, it was like - they have the force in society that can change it, not because they’re good people or bad people, or cleverer or stupider, but just because the fact that they have the power to do it should they wish to. I still broadly think that, it’s just I think we’re very far away from it. But the idea that something as nebulous like people under thirty would always be left-wing was always stupid. People under thirty though, I think what they do have - young people by and large - is they have immense dissatisfaction with the status quo because the status quo is awful. And again, growing up in the 2000s - where there was immense satisfaction with the status quo - that’s quite appealing to me - I think it’s a good sign; you’re more likely to get change when people don’t like the world as it is than when people like the world as it is, put very very simply.
JJ: How optimistic are you about the future of the Left?
OH: One of the reasons I ended up leaving Twitter is just finding everyone equally insufferable. On the one hand there was this right-wing edge-lord thing that some people on the blog scene were veering towards. On the other hand, there was what Mark writes very well about in the Vampire’s Castle - this constant heresy hunting, snooping, disciplining, scolding; there’s constant telling off of people. If the left could do one thing tomorrow that I think would help their chances, above all else it would be to stop telling people off. That’s not to say you should accept bigotry or accept whatever the bigotry question is - transphobia or what have you. Don’t accept it! but there’s ways of talking to people without wagging your fucking finger at them. That’s not how people’s minds are changed; people’s minds are not changed by being told off and shamed and scolded, their minds are changed by solidarity and experience.
The thing that made the most positive difference in Britain was popular culture and people being in the same spaces, going to the same concerts, going to the same gigs, sharing the same space, being in the same workplaces, that’s what changed it, not people wagging their fingers and telling people how to use language in the 1970s. It was things like Two-Tone that did it. That’s my very sentimental old punk reading of it but that’s very much my reading of it. I think the old sentimental punks are correct, that those are the things that really made a difference. And they fed into politics through things like the Greater London council in the 80s. And a lot of the common sense anti-racism in British cities comes out of that, not out of people in universities having fights with each other about their language. And it’s a difficult balance; I think a lot of people who argue against ‘cancel culture’ do so because they’re basically fine with a bit of racism and transphobia; I’m not, I think those things are foul. I think fighting them is important. But the way to do it just seems so much not to be like this awful combination of academic point-scoring and bullying. I don’t really have a better solution because all the things I’m talking about were organic and took years.
But I remember after the racist riots in August watching Taj Ali - who was a colleague at Tribune magazine - being interviewed by Ash Sarkar on Novara. Hearing them talk was just like ‘ah, thank fuck’. Like the way he talks about this stuff, in a very grounded but very uncompromising way, I was just like - how fucking rare to have an actual working-class voice in this conversation, rather than this kind of caricature white-working class voice that appears - this kind of Life on Mars version of the working-class. So an occasion when I felt optimistic was listening to Taj Ali talk about responding to those riots. If that’s where thirty-year old activists are, then maybe we’ll be alright. I feel less optimistic than I felt five years ago, but I feel less pessimistic still than I did in 2010 simply because of the collapse of support for the status quo - and that’s about it.