I was an early adopter of Twitter and loved its rambunctious vibe for many years. It even brought me a brief moment of notoriety. 

I was relaxed about the change of ownership but gradually sensed a coarsening of the texture, hearty debate being replaced by shrill chanting, like a digital Millwall match. So I used it incrementally less and then, about a year ago, I stopped using it entirely. Few people noticed, I’m sure, but reports from those still in the trenches suggested I’d made the right move. I’m now on Bluesky which, for the time being at least, is more to my taste. And, since the recent US election, and Elon Musk’s prominent role in that unfortunate occurrence, a lot more ex-Tweeters have come on board.

But that’s just my take. Brian Klaas puts things into historical context (did you know about the lunar bat people of 1835?) and explains exactly how Musk weaponised his acquisition and why we should worry whether we use it or not: 

Our attention is finite, and the more we divert it to sensationalist lies, the more that we aid and abet actual conspiracies and corruption that warrant harsh public scrutiny. If we aren’t careful, we’ll meme ourselves straight into dystopia. Unfortunately, amid those embers of a dysfunctional society burning itself down, it’s clear that those who lit the match on the internet will inevitably become rich, now with the help of Musk.

I found this plea for financial assistance on a website that includes the full text of my book about Radiohead. I wonder how much they’re planning to pay me.

Hi Miles, 

Not hurt, just pointing out what I see as a paradox.

In 2007, I wrote a book. Back then, if people wanted to read it, they bought a copy and, in theory, some of the money made its way back to me. 

Now, I understand how notions of copyright and ownership have been upended since then, and I get that some people feel entitled to read and watch and hear content for free, so they have no qualms about going to Internet Archive and downloading it. Obviously, none of the money makes its way back to me. What does niggle just a little is that, presumably, some other people do feel some kind of obligation to pay money for this privilege; they just won't pay that money to the people who wrote or published the book in the first place.

And in answer to your question, yes, I do blog to blog. But my baby just loves to dance.

Two responses to the decision of Sheffield Hallam University to suspend its English literature course, apparently attempting, if not to define literature, to explain what it’s for. The first, from a senior lecturer in that department.

I loathe and fear non-fungible tokens because I don’t really understand them, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right. (I have the same response to bitcoin, and I infer fuzzily that the two are somehow connected, but my ignorance ensures I don’t know how or why.) Anyway, I think this is probably a good joke, but maybe someone can explain why it isn’t.

PS: A friend on Twitter just linked NFTs with alcohol-free gin and I think she may be on to something...

I am intrigued by the tale of TikTok star Stephanie Matto, who sold her farts in jars then claims to have ended up in hospital from over-indulgence in high-fibre foods. Not because of the product itself – that’s just a half-arsed (sorry) take on Piero Manzoni’s Künstlerscheisse – but because of her decision to sell non-fungible tokens of her bottom burps instead, proving once again that NFTs attain a level of conceptualist purity that would leave Duchamp gasping in admiration.

And while we’re on the subject of artists not averse to making a quick buck, this picture just popped up on Twitter, depicting a little soirée Warhol threw at the Factory for (among others) Quentin Crisp, Keith Haring and, uh, Marilyn. A dream dinner party for many – so why do they all look so bloody glum?

One surprise from this week’s budget was a grant to develop yet another Beatles attraction in Liverpool; suggesting that, to this government, culture is OK if it’s very, very old.

No doubt it will be successful; if people can be lured from the other side of the world to stand on a zebra crossing, they’ll be happy to pay to see an array of scrawled lyrics, some broken drumsticks and one of John’s old moustaches, and then go to a gift shop and buy 64 different varieties of yellow submarine. But there is the chance to put at the centre of the exhibit something that is old enough to be respectable but, to the vast majority of the visitors, utterly new.

Carnival of Light is a 14-minute composition, recorded by the Beatles in early January 1967 and played during the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at London’s Roundhouse a few weeks later. Barely anyone has heard it since and although Paul argued for its release as part of the Anthology project, this was vetoed by his colleagues and Yoko Ono. Whether this is because its unveiling might upend the approved narrative and remind people that Macca was the proper avant-garde innovator in the band or, as some of the survivors of the Roundhouse have suggested, that it’s not very good, is unclear. (And if it’s the latter, it can’t really be as bad as the execrable ‘What’s The New Mary Jane’, can it?)

Paul holds on to the tape, apparently. Maybe he listens to it now and again. But I would suggest that the recording should be donated to the new gallery/museum/mausoleum; not to be heard, but to be sealed in a Perspex box and if anyone even tries to get inside, the whole thing, and indeed the whole building, will self-destruct, taking with it any last vestige of the notion that the myth should be bigger than the music.

But it’s going to be submarines, isn’t it? And lots of the buggers.

I’m quietly impressed by the Danish artist Jens Haaning, who was commissioned to reproduce one of his old works, but delivered a pair of empty frames, claiming that his failure to deliver on the contract was the art. Were I in charge of the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, which spent half a million kroner on said work, I might not be so enamoured.

I’ve remarked before about the way BBC journalists – presumably in the spirit of accessibility and inclusivity – have taken to explaining references that 10 years ago would have needed no gloss; thus, a mention of Hamlet becomes “Shakespeare’s play Hamlet” and so on.

But some other aspects of our culture have become embedded in the stuff-you’re-assumed-to-know box, and remarkably quickly at that. A year ago, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), but today a BBC website story not only refrained from explaining what they are (there’s a link to a separate article that does that) but didn’t even say what the abbreviation stands for. Or whether “a professional NFT collector” is a real job.

And just as I’m about to hit send, another BBC-related thought. Geronimo the alpaca met his fate today; it was a bit of a silly season story, and some questioned why a culture that happily slaughters thousands of animals a day should fixate on this one beast. Evan Davis, on the PM show, mused on similar lines, as an explanation of why he wasn’t covering the story. But surely by doing so, he’s covering the story. The only thing worse than being talked about, as Wilde nearly said, is having one’s purported newsworthiness dismissed live on Radio 4. Well, that and being shot in the head by a vet.

I’ve written before (here and here) about the strange back alleys into which self-Googling can take you. The problem seems to be that whole sites are based on data parsed from other sites, without a flesh-and-blood bullshit detector in the middle. I have no idea whether anyone but me has seen the page claiming that I was born in Chicago, and died in 2007, but it is there. (If a lie appears in the the digital forest and nobody reads it except its subject, might it just as well be true?)

Anyway, here’s a new one. Nobody knows what I weigh, which is a relief; but they have managed to calculate how rich I am, which comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s just a pity that I’m too dead to enjoy it.

Facebook has once again demonstrated the abject wrongness of its advertising algorithms by suggesting that I might like to avail myself of the services of a book curator, someone who I am expected to pay to acquire and arrange reading material on my behalf. (Unless of course the placing of the ad on my feed was purchased by someone who just wanted to irritate me, in which case, nice work, Facebook, job done.)

This outrage did however prompt me into a half-arsed renovation of my shelves, rearranging a few into some semblance of logic and even filling a couple of boxes for the charity shop run. Inevitably this process was derailed by a desire to read every other book that passed through my hands, but that’s perfectly OK because it gives me something to blog about. Ha, take that, Marie bloody Kondo.

First, yet another cracking one-liner that would have fitted nicely into my dissertation: this time it’s EM Forster, from a speech he made at Harvard in 1947, about people whose aesthetic preferences remain just that, unassailed by critical faculties:

‘Oh I do like Bach,’ cries one appreciator, and the other cries, ‘Do you? I don’t. I like Chopin.’ Exit in opposing directions chanting Bach and Chopin respectively, and hearing less the composers than their own voices.

And then an old favourite, Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. One image that’s stuck with me since I first read it at the age of 10 or so is the redeemed Sugar hurling all his casino winnings from his Mayfair balcony to the people on the pavement below; and I wake up to the news that a man in Chongqing has done the same thing (although he was off his face on methamphetamine at the time).

Apparently blogging is 25 years old but the current landscape looks very different from what the pioneers came up with, or even what I encountered when Cultural Snow took its first baby steps in 2005. In The Guardian (the only British newspaper that really got its head round the idea, integrating blogging into its news/views mix at a very early stage), John Naughton looks at the early years through the idealised prism of Habermas’s public sphere and obviously there are still people keeping that faith.

But social media and, more significantly, money have combined to piss on old Jürgen’s chips. Blogs aren’t dead but the phenomenon got so mixed up with other digital platforms that you can’t really see the join. There’s now a magazine (Yes! Dead tree media! The very thing we were supposedly endangering!) called Blogosphere but it’s not about the sort of blogging I remember, where we’d collectively ponder the meaning existence, but also have time for complete gibberish like this. No, it’s “all about influencers and the influencer industry” which is essentially people with very white teeth and no perceptible body hair being paid to pretend to like things. I think if one of them had popped up 10 years ago we (Patroclus and Slaminsky and Billy and LC and RoMo and Spinny and many more) would have stomped them to death with the sheer force of our self-righteousness. And, y’know, I think we would have been right.

PS: A lesson in how to deal with influencers.

PPS: By Kathy Macleod:

I’ve pondered the whole idea of the commodification of the alternative many times; is it a debasement of ethical principles, or the natural outcome of the individualism at the heart of the indie ethic? Is this poster by Dorothy, depicting indie classics in the form of commercial print adverts, a recuperation of rebellious instincts or a weary admission that pop music, however fragile and/or angry it has to be, is ultimately a cash-grabbing exercise?

Two pieces to remind you that funny, clever journalism is still a thing, even in America; first, a Q&A with John Waters in Vulture:

Divine never dressed as a woman except when he was working. He had no desire to be a woman. He was fat. It was too hot to wear all that shit. He couldn’t wait to get that wig off. The tits were so hot. He hated it. He didn’t want to pass as a woman; he wanted to pass as a monster. He was thought up to scare hippies. And that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to be Godzilla. Well, he wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla put together.

And from Hmmdaily, a (supposedly) AI-generated piece on San Francisco’s existential crisis:

List to become increasingly absurd until mention of either drones, food/laundry delivery robots, and half-joking/half-serious evocation of dystopian science fiction, including George Orwell’s 1984 (book), Blade Runner (movie), or Westworld (television program), including SEO-friendly mention of the premium cable network that produces it.

I’ve written two proper books about popular musicians (and, if you haven’t had the pleasure, you really should, no, really), and I reached a similar frame of mind by the time I’d got to the end of both of them; that the music was ultimately less interesting than the people creating it.


I recently had my prejudices reinforced, twice over. First, I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of Nick Broomfield’s upcoming film, which tells the tale of Leonard Cohen and his long, complex relationship with his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, which lasted from 1960 to 2016, the year they both died, just three months apart. At first, I thought it would appeal only to die-hard Cohen fans, a strange bunch, as I’ve discovered. But ultimately Cohen’s music fades into the background of a narrative that’s really about love and loss, death and ageing, and the search for personal peace. It’s gruffly tender and drily romantic, like the best of Cohen’s work, but exists beyond that oeuvre.

I have a similar attitude to Radiohead; I haven’t been particularly swept away by anything they’ve recorded since the Amnesiac album in 2001, but I still find them weirdly, awkwardly fascinating, not least in their constant awareness of the paradox they embody, a band that forges its identity through its opposition to global capitalism, but can only feasibly exist thanks to the operation of the same capitalism.

And that paradox bubbled up again this week when, after someone hacked into an archive of sessions from the OK Computer period, and held them to ransom for a six-figure sum, they made the whole lot available for £18, with proceeds going to Extinction Rebellion; the glumly realistic – and very British – sales pitch being that the sounds are “only tangentially interesting”.

I’m not sure how seriously to take the article below; for a start, it has to be taken into account that it appears in The Times, the sober, respectable manifestation of the virulently anti-BBC Murdoch empire. And in any case, I’m not sure if the phenomenon it reports is really that new; when I was touting my Noughties book a decade ago, I encountered interviewers (on both BBC outlets and Sky TV, part of the same stable as The Times) who had clearly only read the press release, and ultimately, in the course of a five-minute chat, it didn’t really matter. The only thing that strikes me as odd is the assertion that producers have explicitly been advised (“no direct order”) by their superiors to follow this tactic, which would be a bit like teachers specifically telling their students that it’s perfectly OK only to read the CliffsNotes and not bother with the text itself. The teachers know it happens; they’re actually quite glad it happens, because the alternative is that the kids have no chance whatsoever in the all-important exams, which are the be-all and end-all of modern education; but if they were to say it out loud, it would be akin to Toto pulling back the curtain.


It is interesting, though, that what is essentially a “dumbing-down” narrative is presented in the context of a shift in priorities towards younger listeners. Whether this is either fair or accurate is another matter, but the perception seems to be there. I wonder how many people from that all-important under-24 demographic read The Times?

Education secretary Damian Hinds on proposals for variation in tuition fees between courses:

What we need to look at is the different aspects of pricing — the cost that it is to put on the course, the value that it is to the student and also the value to our society as a whole and to our economy for the future.

“Value.” Such an interesting word.

Went on an interesting diversion in class yesterday about memes, touching on the idea they have to start somewhere, even if the originator is anonymous, maybe even blissfully unaware of what s/he spawned. That said, when there is a definitive patient zero for a digital phenomenon, the rewards tend to be a wee bit abstract, as witnessed by this encounter between the man who identified The Streisand Effect and the man who gave his name to Godwin’s Law.

Alice Cooper has discovered a version of Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair print in a locker alongside some of his stage props. I was initially amused by the comment from his manager, Shep Gordon, about a discussion the then-drunk rock star may or may not have had with the artist: 

“Alice says he remembers having a conversation with Warhol about the picture... he thinks the conversation was real, but he couldn't put his hand on a Bible and say that it was.”

“Andy Warhol was not really ‘Andy Warhol’ back then.”