Men Sell Not Such In Any Town

Backwards up the mossy glen

Turn’d and troop’d the goblin men,

With their shrill repeated cry,

‘Come buy, come buy.’

When they reach’d where Laura was

They stood stock still upon the moss,

Leering at each other,

Brother with queer brother;

Signalling each other,

Brother with sly brother.

 

The wicked merchants of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ bewitch people with their magical fruit: ‘Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries’. The fruit tastes so good it’s addictive; users come back for more only to find that the goblins have vanished. The unfortunate customer ‘Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey, Then fell with the first snow.’

 

My edition of Rossetti’s selected poems says that there is no allegorical content to ‘Goblin Market’ – Rossetti just wanted to write a narrative verse. JK Rowling uses the poem as an epigraph in her novel The Ink Black Heart, which is about the dark side of virtual worlds. The Victorian phrasing clashes with Rowling’s modern crime thriller, but you can read the resonances all the same. Social media addicts spend more and more time on constant broadcast, chasing that dopamine high, the taste of magical fruit. The sites themselves are full of fanatics, grifters, conmen and bad actors – signalling each other, brother with sly brother.

 

Nick Cohen makes the case against Twitter here. It encourages groupthink and high emotion at the expense of depth and complexity. And it’s particularly bad for writers. ‘For today’s writers,’ Nick says, ‘social media is now the prime distraction and the foremost enemy of promise.’

 

I must disagree with Nick on this occasion. While acknowledging the dark side of social media, I think overall that Big Tech is the greatest gift that global markets have left to an ungrateful nation. 

 

The narrative against Big Tech comes from boomers. They don’t understand it, they don’t like it but they’ve got to engage because the publisher tells them to. It’s the ‘do it to say you’ve done it’ imperative from which the disillusionment comes. It’s hard to take a step back and realise how much the bitterness dominates thinking about technology. One of the best novels I read this year was Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, in which an inventor works out how to actually externalise the human consciousness – put it into an interface that contains actual human memories. The Candy House is thoughtful, compulsive, dazzling and could never have been written by a British author (and if it had would just have been rejigged as an obvious satire). 

 

No disrespect to old people. I mean, I’m old. But maybe you have to be a Gen Xer to understand. 

 

It’s the little things really. Imagine waiting for a bus without having an iPhone to check your emails. Imagine the crimes that would have gone unpunished without street footage captured on smartphone cameras. The suicides that would have happened without a stranger reaching out. People I’ve known kept indoors, or living in social deserts, whose loneliness has been alleviated by Facebook and Twitter. Could you imagine the lockdowns in, say, 1992? Could we have survived the pandemic without social media, as annoying as it was?

 

Oh, the dopamine has long since burned out. When I first got onto Twitter in the 2010s you could log on at any given time and see a post that would make you reconsider your beliefs, or laugh out loud in the street. Now, as Nick says, it’s full of careerist bores with blue ticks. I thought that Musk’s takeover at least meant the bores would clear off. We get a lot more adverts for Saudi megacities, Tom Hanks and gold exchanges. But the bores are still there. They just have Mastodon strings in their profile names.

 

One of Nick’s problems with Twitter is that it devalues longform content:

The bitter truth is that the ungrateful swine don’t click. A study of 200 US news publishers from 2016 found that Twitter generated ‘1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations’. At the same time a joint study by Columbia University and the French National Institute concluded that your tweet may go viral but your content may not be read.

 

So how do we get people to actually read the content – stuff that matters? One idea that Nick and others have taken up is to do substacks, with much of the content subscriber only. But then, who’s going to read all these substacks? I read Jesse Singal‘s and Leyla Sanai‘s. I’d encourage you to get paid subscriptions, to theirs and to Nick’s, if you can afford it. But who is going to pay the rest of these subscriptions? The coffee house of the Republic of Letters never used to charge admission. And longform content isn’t necessarily good content. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Unherd essay mill.

 

Meanwhile, don’t worry – all the posts on this blog will stay free, which would mean something if the blog was ever updated.