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For The Emigre

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For The Critic

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Born when we were born, and embarking on writing ‘careers’ (LOL) just as the web ripped the financial guts out of the paper industry, my idea of a good time is to phone my best mate every couple of months and bitch about how, ten years before us, even the lowliest hacks had an expense account, and, ten years afterwards, world-famous ‘media’ types make actual fortunes from unboxing videos.

I’m not on TikTok. I’d never heard of Clubhouse til last week. Hell, I don’t even have a LinkedIn account. Why would I? My idea of self-promotion is to post my articles on Facebook. Once. I would sooner shit myself in public than use an unironic hashtag.

Then, last October, said mate sent me a Wall Street Journal bit about a 21-year-old Texan ‘electronic music producer’ who, having amassed 52,000 followers on social media, dropped out of college to go full-time, and in the last two years has made… just under $70.

Damned if I didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for the poor fellow.

Symeon Brown’s Get Rich or Lie Trying opens around the same time, 15-20 years ago, when hip-hop up-and-comer Soulja Boy used LimeWire, YouTube, and appropriated 50 Cent song titles to send his breakout ‘Crank That’ viral, and net himself $7m in the process. ‘By design or good fortune, [Soulja Boy] created a formula for viral success that is still being used today by artists, companies and social media influencers.’

Still, at least he was creating something.

That shift away from the dominance of the traditional media ‘generated a new global currency: influence.’ The current highest-earning influencer, Kylie Jenner, can make over a million dollars from just a single post on Instagram – most often in association with brands like Fashion Nova, ‘a market leader in ghetto chic and timeless hoochie wear’, which has paid rappers for shout-outs (i.e. product placements) in their songs, and signed up ex-reality TV superstars like Cardi B as employed brand ambassadors.

But the apparent glamour of Fashion Nova’s couture is somewhat at odds with the reality that it is hastily ripped off and poorly made in rat-infested wage-thieving sweatshops, and by and large even marketed for nothing on – literally – the backs of young women, many of whom have paid for kit decked out with slogans of female empowerment.

The majority of GRoLT‘s investigations into the corrosive influence of influencing are saturated with this and every other conceivable flavour of dishonesty.

Turkish cosmetic surgeons offering ‘aggressive discounts’ to surgery obsessives (some of the least alluring paragraphs you’ll ever read) who then proceed to advertise on their behalf. Meme-humour accounts built up and sold on with their followings (one offered me a dildo just the other day). Borderline-non-existent dropshipping ‘businesses’ that at best sell cheap Chinese crap, and at worst take your money and then simply evaporate. ‘Traders’ who flat-out fabricate high-flying lives, recruiting – for cold, hard monetary gain – ‘fellow investors’ to finance their own dreams, while it turns out they are living with their mothers.

Inexorably, of course, we come to cryptocurrency: ‘A culture where nothing needs to be intrinsically valuable or true about a commodity…’

Many of Brown’s targets are little more than good old-fashioned ‘direct selling’ pyramid schemes – ‘the default business model of the social media age’ – get-rich-quick wannabes duped into paying fees and subscriptions for supposedly elite training/goods/access privileges. In one instance, students signing up to market nutrition drinks (as an avowed alternative to mountainous post-college debt!) found that ‘97% of them would have made more in a minimum-wage job.’ Another company – in a nicely circular bit of legal logic – had to pay out $4.75m in a consumer (sic) protection suit brought by its own ‘staff’.

And in almost every situation, from breast-implants to bitcoin, ‘the challenge was to make as much money as possible before the game was up.’

In this eye-watering environment of chicanery and cynicism, the abuse of language is, naturally, endemic. ‘Platinum 150’ is the lowest rung of one particular Ponzi scheme. ‘Boss Babes’ routinely turn out to be ‘young women, single mothers and housewives short of money.’ When a fly-by-night plastic surgery outfit is eventually embarrassed online they respond, ‘Clinichub pays great attention to BODY AWARENESS and BODY POSITIVITY.’

So: where there’s bullshit there’s brass. But at least social media enables us to come together for the most-obvious (and least-monetisable) causes such as social justice, right?

Wrong. ‘The infighting between the most prominent figures attached to #BlackLivesMatter has become a lesson in how social media incentivises competition and disincentivises collectivism.’ One leading light became a brand ambassador for Twitter itself. Another amassed a private million-dollar property portfolio ‘while publicly proclaiming socialist values.’

Dreams can be a dreadful poison, and ‘the addictive rewards of accruing followers by any means necessary are warping human behaviour both on- and off-line.’ Influencers get their teeth, tits, and everything else done to mimic Insta filters. A modish (and highly marketable) preference for the ‘racially ambiguous’ has even caused a few to ‘fake their ethnicity’ (cue hatestorm). Funnily enough, there are some mental health issues arising from this need to ‘live a life of performance disguised as authenticity.’

So what possesses anyone to compete in these ‘attention hunger games’?

A late-millennial black man from a Tottenham school that gave out more free meals than it did GCSEs, Symeon Brown is well placed to empathise with the ‘immeasurable pressure to be rich, especially among young men and working class racial minorities.’

Boosted by mantras of Blair-era ‘aspiration’ (‘the internet’s most exploitable economy’), his generation grew up at the roiling convergence of celebrity culture, high fashion, hip-hop, and the technology explosion, and went to work between the 2008 financial crash and Covid, in a world of instant gratification where ‘modern apprenticeships barely pay and rarely lead to job progression’. Many of them have, if anything, gone backwards since. It is perhaps forgivable that they would be receptive to any message (Brown notes some striking echoes of the evangelical church) which says the meek are on the fast track with regard to earth-inheritance.

It’s nonetheless noticeable that few of GRoLT’s chaotically-failed influencers ever conclude that they should get a ‘proper’ job. But then why would they? In the context of the current, desperate, gigging economy, a Cameroonian immigrant paid to be racially abused by livestreamers says it is ‘child’s play’ compared to being homeless. Besides, the ‘hustle’ ethos, epitomised by rap musicians and the likes of fraudster Jordan Belfort, is now ‘so pervasive that even having a well-paid job is regularly derided as selling yourself short.’

‘We are all influencers now,’ Symeon Brown declares. Well, no. But Get Rich or Lie Trying is nevertheless a depressingly instructive read – and the nightmare of the influencer (and ‘influenced’) economy is probably still only halfway through getting started. So if, as Brown asserts, social media is now ‘where the first draft of history is written and where the discourse that informs our civic institutions is set,’ please take this opportunity to look up ‘Influencers in the Wild’, and see just how much trouble we’re all really in.

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For The Critic

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For Perspective magazine

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For The Critic

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For The Critic

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For Geographical

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For The Critic

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For The Critic

In January, I promised a visiting Reservist mate that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas ’04, probably saved my life when the tsunami struck…), and there would always be another chance to do it, right?

Things change – and, like much of Colombo, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown (no shops, no walks, no going out at all) when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors, and some chap called David Sharp figuring out how many stairs would ‘top’ the various mountains of the British Isles.

Well… Challenge accepted!

At 2243m, Adam’s Peak – or Sri Pada (‘sacred footprint’) in Sinhala – is not the highest mountain in Sri Lanka (it’s fifth). But it is certainly the most iconic: visible on clear days from the Western sea routes; mentioned in the Mahavamsa and in the writings of Fa-Hsien, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; and sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, and even some Christians and Muslims, for a range of fun reasons you should all feel free to Google. Under normal circumstances, peak (as it were) pilgrimage season would be about now – approaching Sinhala/Tamil New Year – so this seemed an apt time for another crack at it.

The standard route takes an unforgiving two or three hours to climb (including a lot of uneven stone and concrete steps, plus handrails), and then an hour or so to come back down, if your legs still work. Folk mainly set off in the small hours so’s to be at the top when sunrise casts the mountain’s distinctive (i)conical shadow across the plain. It’s not the Matterhorn, obviously; but it’s not comfy either. And it isn’t part of anybody‘s fitness schedule – except, perhaps, a few monks, incidentally.

But I had made up my mind. I recce’d the route from ground to roof, making it 72 steps. Yer man Sharp had said that six steps was about one meter, which comes to 12 metres or so in each direction. And, having done precisely zero exercise these past few months, I thought I’d try for half an hour a day (one mustn’t overdo these things), and see how I got on.

So, sticking a fresh apple and a hunk of cheddar in my virtual knapsack, I girded what my regular Army brother calls my ‘River Kwai physique’, and set out for my remote and quite invisible objective.

Day 1 8pm A good start. At the end of my first 30-minute stint, I’ve notched up 23 full circuits – three floors each way – for a grand total of 552m. Gear: bright orange shorts, and trainers (both Adidas: model’s own). I could pretend the shorts (more an electro-salmon, really) are some concession to the Buddhist thing; but it’s a safety measure, in case someone has to retrieve me from the darkened stairwell.

Day 2 6am Up and at ’em! Another 23 laps. Running (non sic) total of 1104m; but toe already starting to go through my right trainer. I’ve seen a monk skip down the real thing in flipflops… while playing the tambourine! But now is not the time to get competitive.

In the cold (ha!) light of day, I twig I ought not to be counting down stairs. Damnit. Back to 552m, cumulative. That said, ‘base camp’ for Adam’s Peak’s already at 1250m, so, y’know…

Just saw my neighbour on his roof, doing some mere horizontal wandering. Candy-ass.

Day 3 8:30pm Torrential thunderstorm. Some cooler air, at least; but then our staircase turns out not to be watertight. The stairs themselves, what’s more, aren’t straight… on any axis. I feel like Davie Balfour going up there in the pitch black. I suppose I should be thankful there’s no booze with dinner these days (I ran out long since). But then if there were booze, I wouldn’t be doing this tomfoolery, would I?

I take the stairs two at a time, for a more natural stride, but the ankles of my shoes have started to rub. Nonetheless, 23 laps/276m again (my ‘pace’ is nothing if not steady). 828m total.

Day 4 2:30pm Our staircase also is encased in heavy glass, turning it into some sort of Biblical blast-furnace by early afternoon. Inspired architecture, that (against some local competition). My phone’s weather app includes a RealFeel® feature (and even RealFeel Shade™), based, I guess, on extra factors like humidity, a lack of wind, and so forth. Max temperatures all this week, e.g., are 32°; but today is RealFeel® 36°, and I reckon you can stick a couple more on that, in here. My pores are gasping!

Like all other form of abstract exercise, this is extremely boring – so I am listening to the 154-episode West Wing Weekly podcast (in lieu of access to the actual West Wing). Almost halfway there already, though: 1104m.

Day 5 9pm My legs hurt. I clip the newel post with my hip, and hit the concrete wall where there’s a weird outcrop at shoulder height. More brilliant design. Apropos of nothing, my phone starts playing ‘Spem in alium’, and as I try to turn it off I lose all night-vision and nearly plunge to almost-certain death. See also: trying to kill mosquitoes.

There is a mouldering smell all up the stairs. I’m fairly sure it isn’t me. But electric skies without rain just means even more sweat. I introduce a sort of idle pirouette upon the rooftop, in an attempt to force a little air into proceedings. I spy the small red dot of a distant cigarette. My neighbour’s watching me. Weird.

23 laps again. 1380m.

Day 6 10am An unexpected surge to 25 laps. That’s 300m in a session (= 1680m).

I’ve scaled back caffeine intake on the grounds of shortages (or v.v.). But actually, I just can’t take the heat. RealFeel Shade™ says it’s 35°. Given that the chimney – I mean ‘staircase’ – faces due East, any time between about 6 and 11 is most emphatically not in the shade. Surprised I don’t have saltcicles in my beard. And it’s not like I can switch locations!

While I’m here, grizzing it out like an absolute hero, my wife is in the bedroom, doing a Zumba class – with the a/c on.

Day 7 7pm There is a dead fly on the floor beside my trainers. My wife is now insisting that I use the dog towels. If anything goes wrong – with laundry system, not me – I shall be doing laps in a sarong.

One of my legs, I swear, is longer than the other. There must be long-term side effects to always turning left on the way up stairs, and right on the way down. (Perhaps I’ll ask nextdoor if I can use their sister set.) I try to change my angles, but the steps are only so deep, and a size 10 shoe… well, it’s a size 10, isn’t it.

Still, steady improvements. 26 laps. Total: 1992m.

Day 8 7:30pm Two neighbours watching me, now. Oi, oi. They’re prob’ly thinking, “What a completely pointless exercise.” They’d not be wrong. (28 laps/336m, mind!). Pouring again. Good for the ‘warm down’ (LOL).

Day 9 7:15pm Set off… and realise I already ‘summited’, last night. Just didn’t notice: too busy getting in the shower and not doing maths. But there you have it: all done in eight half-hour sessions. I think I’ll celebrate with a cigar – which I’m not sure you’re allowed to do on the real Adam’s Peak.

For now, though, much like Forrest Gump, I might as well just keep on going. Not like there’s that much else to do, is there?

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For The Spectator and The Spectator USA, in (two) different edits