stealing « Critical Mass

On Wednesday September 21st 2011, The Irish Examiner ran an editorial by Steven King (not the horror author) on the world reaching 7 billion people. All personal politics aside, the main problem with the article was that it was in many places a direct copy of a speech delivered by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, at a debate at the Battle of Ideas in London on October 30th, 2010.

I know this for two reasons. First, because I was filming that debate for my documentary almost a year before King published his editorial. Second, in order to bypass my possible self-delusion in spite of video evidence, I obtained a transcript of O’Neill’s talk from a third-party website in order to compare it with King’s article.

Although I will not go into the background of O’Neill here, this article will give anyone with a high pain threshold a very good round-up of the origin of the network which has its roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party here in the UK, later known as the Living Marxism (or LM) Network whose peculiar brand of “humanism” is a beautiful demonstration of Orwellian doublethink.

Leaving aside the questionable motives of the original author and the spurious nature of the content, let’s merely compare the texts:

O’Neill (30/10/2010): “The main Malthusian idea I want to challenge is the idea that resources are finite. The idea that the Earth itself is finite. The idea that we live on a finite planet and therefore we can only have a certain number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food.”

King (21/9/2011): “the notion that we inhabit a finite planet and, therefore, we can only have a certain maximum number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food, must be challenged.”

O’Neill: “It seems commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and a bit mad to say that it isn’t, but it’s important to recognise how fluid and changeable resources are. It’s important to recognise that the usefulness and longevity of a resource is determined as much by us – by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the existence of that resource in the first place.”

King: “It might appear commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and slightly perverse to say that it isn’t, but it’s imperative to understand how fluid and changeable resources apparently limited are. It’s important to recognise that the utility and longevity of a resource is determined as much by humankind — by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the amount and availability of that resource in the first place.”

O’Neill: “Resources are not fixed in any meaningful sense. Resources have a history and a future, just like human beings do. The question of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

King: “So, resources are not static in any meaningful sense. Resources have a past and a future, just as human beings do. The issue of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

O’Neill: “So in Ancient Rome, one of the main uses of coal was to make jewellery. Women liked the look of this glinting black rock hanging around their necks. No one could have imagined that thousands of years later, coal would be used to power massive steam engines and an entire Industrial Revolution, forever changing how we produce things and transport them around the world. “

“Two thousand years ago, the only way people used uranium was to make glass look more yellow. It was used to decorate windows and mirrors. You would probably have been locked up, or subjected to an exorcism, if you had suggested that one day uranium might be used to light up and heat entire cities – or indeed destroy entire cities at the push of a button. “

King: “the supposed limits to resource-use have been transgressed time and time again by advances in human productivity — whether that is in terms of discovering that coal could be used not just for jewellery, as it was in Roman times, but to power an entire Industrial Revolution, or the use of uranium to heat and light (or destroy) entire cities, or the so-called “green revolution” in agriculture.”

O’Neill: “Thomas Malthus himself, the messiah of modern-day Malthusianism, argued in the early 1800s that food production wouldn’t be able to keep apace with human reproduction, and as a result there would be ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would sweep off millions of people. Yet in his era, there were only 980million people on Earth – today there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

King: “Malthus argued that food production wouldn’t be able to maintain pace with human fertility. Yet in his time, there were only one million [sic] people on Earth; today, there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

O’Neill: “Malthus’s problem was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His fundamental pessimism meant that he considered it impossible for mankind to develop beyond a certain, nature-enforced point. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the industrial revolution and various social revolutions, mankind did overcome many social limitations and found new ways to make food and deliver it to people around the globe.”

King: “Malthus’s problem — shared by much of the environmental lobby today — was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the Industrial Revolution, mankind did overcome many social limitations and discovered new ways to make food and transport it to people around the globe.”

O’Neill: “The idea of sustainability is anti-exploration, anti-experimentation, anti-risk – all the qualities we need if we are going to make the kind of breakthroughs that earlier generations made with coal and uranium and other resources.”

King: “the whole idea of sustainability is, at core, anti-exploration and anti-experimentation — the qualities we need if we are going to replicate earlier generations’ innovation breakthroughs.”

O’Neill: “The ascendancy of the Malthusian outlook can really be seen in the way people are frequently discussed these days: exploiters, the mere users of resources, the destroyers of things.”

King: “We need to think about people as positive agents of change not mere users of resources, destroyers of things.”

O’Neill: “we created the means for extracting and transforming those resources; we created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources; and every time, we managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and created new resources along the way.”

King: “We created the means for extracting and transforming mineral resources. We created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources. Every decade that passes, as a species, we have managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and create new resources along the way.”

Well, that was fun. So who is this (un)masked man who publishes his opinion in the form of other peoples’ words?

Steven King, or, to give him his full honorific, Dr. Steven King, is currently the director of the New Delhi office for APCO Worldwide. The man has degrees from three universities, one of them Oxford, and for years was the chief political adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party. He ostensibly left politics to join the Policy Exchange, a British think tank where he worked as the External Relations Director from 2006 to 2008. The Policy Exchange is “powering the renaissance of the centre right” according to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

I’ve written about the creeping (and creepy) influence of the think tank system before. The Policy Exchange isn’t to my knowledge affiliated with the IEA/Antony Fisher crowd, but the intellectual high ground they profess to inhabit can be shown as quicksand very easily nonetheless. Today, the Policy Exchange are having a debate at the Labour Party Conference called “Remonopolising power? Reforming the electricity market”, which is sponsored by Oil & Gas UK, who describe themselves as working “to strengthen the long-term health of the offshore oil and gas industry in the United Kingdom”. So both major political parties in the UK are participating in a debate about energy issues which is sponsored by an industry lobby group which recently danced on the grave of the mooted EU offshore drilling moratorium. The only other speakers were representatives of Policy Exchange, another think tank called the Regulatory Policy Institute and a representative of the lobby group sponsoring the whole sordid farce of “policy-based democracy”. Policy written by whom, based on what and enforced by what public mandate, one might ask. As we will learn from the heads at APCO, this falls under one of the global PR machine’s primary strategies: “the imprimatur of a respected third party”.

So back to Steven King, now that we’re familiar with his pedigree. He works for APCO Worldwide, one of the largest PR companies in the world. Frankly, I’m at a loss as to where I can begin with these people. Let’s just go through their greatest hits:

In 1993 APCO founds TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) on behalf of Philip Morris after secondhand smoke is classed as a carcinogen; the intention of the “grassroots” movement is to “prepare and place opinion articles in key markets”.
In 1995 APCO, on behalf of Philip Morris, spearheads the “tort reform” drive to stem the rising tide of product liability suits. APCO also represented Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha that year after the adverse press caused by the detention and execution of nine environmental activists including Ken Saro-Wiwa.
In 2007 Ken Silverstein gives an excellent account of a meeting he took with executives from APCO while pretending to work for a company interested in livening up the image of Turkmenistan – I won’t go into further detail here but his article is a riot.
Speaking of riots, that same year Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat in India, hires APCO after over 1,000 people were killed and thousands more injured in riots in 2002 which Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to. In 2005 he was refused a visa to enter the US on the grounds that he was “responsible for, or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom”. This from an American government that had Muslims detained without trial at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. Go figure.

Oh, I almost forgot. TASSC, the APCO front espousing concern over “junk science“? They’re also the leading purveyor of doubt-fog on other “controversial” scientific topics like pesticides and climate change. George Monbiot outlines their role at length here. With reference to my previous article about the Institute of Economic Affairs, it’s worth noting that Ralph Harris wrote a screed about secondhand smoke during the same period as APCO’s campaign against the “controversial” scientific assertion that breathing in secondhand smoke might be bad for you.

This PR strategy/trend appears again and again – multiple “unconnected” sources producing counter-intuitive, market-led objections to common sense concerns about the social or physical environment. So how is it any surprise that a representative of APCO publishes an “opinion” in The Irish Examiner that happens to tie in with exactly the market-uber-alles corporate dogma peddled by the clients of the company that pays his salary? What is surprising is that a man with three degrees working for one of the world’s largest PR firms puts his name to an article largely copied from a source which goes unmentioned and unacknowledged.

Even more shocking, or, perhaps worryingly, not shocking at all, is that an established newspaper will accept editorial opinion from a representative of a PR firm retailing specific market ideologies without pointing out that the same guy saying that human population growth is not a strain on our biosphere works for a company that defends dictators, excuses human rights abuses, casts doubts on the carcinogenic effects of smoking, refuses to see pesticides as potentially harmful to humans and classes climate change due to CO2 as a controversial theory.

I cannot help but see a certain irony in Steven King arguing the “human ingenuity beats scarcity” case with words he plagiarised. Perhaps honesty is a finite resource.

So it has come to this. Outside, sirens doppler back and forth every few minutes. My street is one of the quiet ones. The looting is restricted to areas with high street brands.

The irony here is so thick it could cure anaemia. London is overrun by looters, smashing in windows, tearing open shutters and making off into the night with armfuls of tracksuit bottoms, DVD players and flatscreen televisions. The streets are strewn with hangers.

The purported flashpoint of this widespread disorder? The shooting of a young man in Tottenham, north London named Mark Duggan. He was shot by the police in what can generously be described as an opaque incident involving an exchange of fire that may or may not have involved the police accidentally shooting each other and blaming it on him. The people smashing into sports shops and electronics stores probably don’t even know his name. They’re too busy, in the words of this girl, “getting [their] taxes back”. With Duggan’s death fresh enough to be bandied about as a cause, the rioting could be somehow explained as a form of protest, an eruption of vitriol from the disaffected youth inhabiting the poorer districts of this city, struggling to find a role in society that won’t involve performing oral sex on disused railway platforms or stacking shelves at Tesco.

How is this anti-establishment sentiment made manifest? By what can only be described as violent shopping. Rampaging through the communities they grew up in, they take out their frustration at a lack of occupation or engagement on the shops and businesses that provide employment in their area, they smash-and-grab the luxury items which are supposedly the fruit of all the social climbing, work and effort our society enshrines. Their generation’s grand gesture of disobedience is straight-up Western-style consumer-capitalism, pure and uncut, direct from the amygdala. Take whatever you can get your hands on for yourself and trash the commons with impunity. They are not inhuman, they are not confused, they are not wrong – they’re us, except they’re doing it here and with no sense of irony. Protest 2.0, London-style.

In Cairo, during the uprising, it was the Egyptian youth who linked arms to protect the Museum of Antiquities, the cultural heritage of their long and respected history. Here in London, if any of these kids have been to a museum, it was after being dragged there by force during a field trip (if their school still had the budget or in fact a subject which included things you’d find in a museum). While there, they glumly trudged the halls, occasionally looking over the dusty artefacts of the past with dull eyes. After all, with a smartphone that has wi-fi and full colour interactive gaming, with Twitter, with Facebook, with Bebo, Myspace, Blackberry Messenger and YouTube, how the hell is a museum supposed to hold a young person’s attention unless they’ve been taught to respect and cherish a slow offering up of knowledge and beauty directly proportionate to the attention one pays? These people have been marketed at since birth. They have been groomed in a manner more insidious than the tactics of the most hungry-eyed paedophile. Their sense of self, their very existence, has been mediated by the economy into which they have been prepped for entry.

From personalised ringtones to Celebrity Big Brother, every possible act of engagement or empowerment has been a commercial transaction for them. Every sub-culture becomes an economic sector. Anything they were taught was only on the syllabus because of its utility in the “knowledge economy”. Who needs to know history or facts when there’s Wikipedia? Who needs maths when there’s a calculator? Who needs handwriting and spelling when there’s Microsoft Office and spell check? Who needs music or art classes when there’s no demand in the marketplace for those skills? Or should I say skillz?

They have been raised as consumers, not as citizens. Consumers have gadgets. Consumers have the respect of business and government because their jealously guarded (and coveted) money is the closest thing they will ever possess to the keys to the kingdom. Even the university education which their parents received for free or for £1000 a year will now cost them £9000 a year if they can get into a university with what little useful knowledge the state allows them to have for their parents’ taxes. After all, don’t we need competition to deliver the best results to the consumer?

Given the opportunity to take to the streets, they come out in force as consumers, not citizens. Their protest is against their lack of spending power, their lack of a flatscreen television, the meddlesome need of government to extract taxation from them for services from which (if they reach their dotage) they will never benefit. They are the purest incarnation of our free market, consumer ideology. They are competing against the law for the best results a consumer can ever hope for, which is something for nothing. And they are winning.

While pundits are onscreen in the coming weeks for the mandatory hand-wringing, while Parliament is debating the inevitable emergency police powers which will bring water cannons and maybe even rubber bullets onto the streets of London, these consumers will be at home watching it all on their new televisions, comfortably toasty in their new tracksuits. They will be re-absorbing the narrative of their activity through the mediated world we created for them, a world which still does not contain a sense of genuine community, of productive work, of social justice, fairness or equality.

Our government decries the violence on the streets of Brixton, Tottenham, Lewisham, Camden, Woolwich, Croydon and Birmingham while levying taxes for wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Our deputy mayor is disgusted by the looting of electronics from Curry’s, electronics that have been made for slave wages in a Chinese factory rife with worker suicide and abuse, because that kind of throughput is more “efficient” (read “cheap”) than producing things ourselves using well-compensated labour. How dare they smash their way into a Tesco supermarket and steal food, while Tesco itself runs an approximate £2 billion profit margin annually while purposefully opening up “express” shops next to successful neighbourhood grocery stores, driving them out of business with tactics designed to bypass local objections? How can they set pubs on fire? How malicious is that? Those pubs sell beer from upstanding brands who buy barley from countries wracked by famine while our government bleats about food aid. Whence cometh such cannibalism? Where indeed could these misguided looting fools have gotten these kinds of ideas?

Did these evil thoughts filter into their minds by osmosis? Are they possessed by the Devil? Or did they grow up in single-parent homes on sink estates, surrounded by the remains that “wealth creation” leaves behind, dreaming of a way out? Did the debt-ridden financial system of this country drive both their parents into working long shifts with irregular hours to suit our 24-hour culture, leaving their children in the hands of everyone’s favourite babysitter and pacifier, the television? When Mummy’s hours were cut by Tesco after they put in self-checkout machines, did Mummy have to take a second job to make up the wages she lost?

However did these young people acquire such a bizarre combination of hatred and brand loyalty? How indeed.

As for where this unexpected outpouring of violence came from, the establishment need only cast an eye over the recent past. The dissenters in this country has tried every possible way of reclaiming power. We marched against the invasion of Iraq in our millions. We marched, petitioned and protested against war, against spending cuts, against privatisation, against crony capitalism, against bank bailouts, against globalisation, against corporate tax cuts, against job losses, against pretty much everything we wanted stopped. Did it change a damn thing? Did it stop our government from doing whatever the hell they wanted? Hell no. We even voted against all the major parties in the last election and ended up getting two of them in power instead of none.

In response to the latest raft of austerity measures, students came out and protested for a cause, en masse. It got messy, but hey, nothing like this. Response? Jowly outrage and zero engagement with the demands of the vox populi.

So now, after every avenue has been explored by the public consciousness of this country in an effort to make itself heard, it has come to this. Every one of these thieving magpies on the streets of London tonight is carrying with them a piece of our collective humanity. The frustration at not being listened to, which is even worse than not being heard. The anger at a system that functions in isolation, unaccountable, unresponsive and fundamentally undemocratic. The loneliness of having no community, of families working ceaselessly to meet their obligations as the rising tide drowns everyone without a yacht. The cognitive dissonance of having a millionaire Prime Minister tell us we’re all in it together before flying off to an arms fair in the Arab Emirates as a sales rep for UK Plc, only to now come home early from his family holiday to decry violence.

This is simply the newest manifestation of a festering sore as old as the hills, as untended as a gangrenous limb. There will be other manifestations, make no mistake. If the response of the power structure is to entrench itself, to bring in draconian public order measures and to ignore the underlying root of the problem, this will happen again, only worse and worse as time goes on.

If the individuals in a given society can be considered as parts of an over-arching holistic consciousness expressing itself above the level of personal human awareness, then the collective id of Great Britain just had a serious outburst.

It has been said that violence is the sign language of the inarticulate. If that is true, as I believe it to be, then how much more pronounced are the violent linguistics of the forcibly muted? That this violence turned inward towards the ranks from which it swelled is akin to the self-hatred of the alcoholic, beating himself up about being a drunk instead of laying off the sauce.

By what metric can we judge the behaviour of these people once the nature of our society is taken into account? What transgression can we hang on them which does not originate with our own behaviour, negligence or neglect? Having no sense of community? Having no moral compass? Wanting what they haven’t earned? Taking what does not belong to them? Exploiting the weakness of others through violence? Opportunism? Gluttony? Ignorance? Hypocrisy? Madness? Where can we draw a line that distinguishes their actions here from our collective behaviour as a society both here and in countless, far-flung places?

Whatever the conscious motives or underlying machinations, the metaphor of these riots is the real message, a message which we ignore or underplay at our peril.

Postscript: The word “shopocalypse” was coined by my friend George Arton and, in keeping with recent events, I looted it mercilessly. Shout-out to The West Londoner for keeping the news feed going all night.

UPDATE: August 14th, 2011 – It has been brought to my attention by my diligent commenters that George may have overstepped the mark when he claimed ownership of the word “shopocalypse”. It appears to have been in circulation since at least 2007. Any confusion is between him and the true coiner of the word. I am staying well out of this one.

Tag Archives: stealing

In Other Words: The ‘PR’ stands for Plagiarism

Shopocalypse Now