Don't trust anything I read in the media? But you're in the media, so how can I trust you and oh my head has exploded.
I have my finger so firmly on the pulse of modern life that I will be tweeting it’s demise ironically before the first carrier pigeon is devoured. Because of my inherent wisdom and up-to-dateness I was already aware that the “Girl quits her job using photos and a DryErase board” story was a fake before most people had heard of it. Yep, I’m cooler than you. Either that or I’ve got too much time on my hands, you choose.
So some little chaps somewhere in America decided to see how quickly they could make something go viral and create an internet meme at the same time. I’m still at a loss to understand how people make a living out of this kind of thing, but good luck to them anyway. They seem to have succeeded, it certainly went viral very quickly, and there’s every indication that it might become some kind of meme. It might even go down in history as the shortest lived hoax ever created, so soon was it discovered that it almost doesn’t qualify as a hoax at all, except that there are probably thousands of people just receiving it and believing it this morning, so it probably lives on. Maybe it’s the shortest-lived hoax-that-some-discovered-wasn’t-a-hoax-before-others-had-discovered-the-hoax? Maybe, as a colleague pointed out, they’ll be outdone tomorrow by a meme that goes viral, is exposed to be an elaborate hoax, the hoax goes viral, then someone discovers that it wasn’t a hoax at all, but was in fact real so it is, in fact, the quickest non-hoax ever to be discovered as a hoax that goes viral then goes viral again because it wasn’t a hoax at all. I think I’m going to be sick.
So whilst the Internet slowly masturbates itself to blindness, I’m left pondering all this and wondering if it matters at all. It probably doesn’t, but the photo above (nicked from Techcrunch) is interesting, because it has a point. There is plenty of stuff that is fake on the Internet and in the media in general. But the Internet and the Media are also, increasingly where we get the majority of our information. Newspapers and TV occasionally set themselves up as points of authority in an Internet-enabled world gone mad: you may not be able to believe everything you read in Wikipedia, but the print media is founded on sound journalistic principles. Of course, that turns out to be bollocks too, because journalists use the Internet more than anyone. So where is authority, where does truth lie?
No, really, I’m asking because I haven’t got a clue. It might be fun to dupe news organisations, and maybe it will make them more rigorous long-term (or more Internet-savvy at least), and a healthy dose of scepticism and critical analysis is very important, but essentially what we’re now saying is that nobody can be trusted. Even the trustworthy can’t be trusted because the untrustworthy might have tricked them so what they’re being trustworthy about might just be a big hoax.
We’ve only got ourselves to blame, and it’ll all end in tears, you can trust me on that.
Frank Field - fill the whole world with a rainbow.
It looks like Labour’s Frank Field is to turn our coalition government all rainbowy when he heads up a Poverty Commission. Now I’ve no idea what powers he will have, what the Commission’s remit will be and how they’ll approach the issue, but what is clear to me is this: tackling poverty is not simply about making poor people a bit richer, it’s got to be about making rich people poorer too.
It’s deeply uncool to talk about re-distribution of wealth and the concept of social inequality makes some shuffle uncomfortably and talk of “de-incentivising” and other nonsense terms, but at some point we have to face up to the uncomfortable fact that poverty is a relative term. When everyone’s poor, nobody’s poor. When everyone’s rich, nobody’s rich. The very concept of poverty cannot exist without someone, somewhere being rich.
Whilst this may seem like a truism, it’s something that must be dealt with if we actually see poverty as a problem worth solving. Poor people can’t afford to buy houses (I know, I’m one of them) and it’s not because we don’t work, or don’t work enough, or don’t work hard enough. It’s not because we haven’t got access to easy credit (we’ve got access to too much a lot of the time), and it’s not even really because we don’t have enough money. The reason I can’t buy a house is because other people have a lot more money. The market place is competitive by design and definition and whilst I, despite working a full time and reasonably-paid job, cannot afford to buy a home there are many more around me who can. And they can buy more than one home, in fact they can afford to buy lots of homes, and then rent them to me.
The widening gap between the richest and the poorest is the real story of poverty. Whilst people on £25,000 a year and less compete in a marketplace with those who take home £1 million bonuses on top of wages that are 20 and 30 times higher than the people they work alongside, poverty will always be a problem.
Now it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from what I’m pointing out here to Communism, as I’m sure plenty would be keen to point out, but I’m not suggesting forced equality, or a totalitarian redistribution of wealth. I’m saying that the problem of poverty does not lie with the poor, it lies with the rich. I’m asking us to question the mechanisms of an economy that justifies a company director earning 20 times what a normal worker at the same company earns. There is something strange about those figures; they may make some kind of warped economic sense, but they make no ethical, moral or social sense.
Tax credits, benefits, higher employment figures, cheaper, more plentiful food and products: all these things can improve the lot of the poorest, but they will stay poor whilst other members of society are able to earn disproportionately higher salaries. The question is whether we want to improve the lives of the poor, but keep them poor, or actually deal with poverty, in which case, look to the rich.
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