That’s what the babies did, after all, when they were born. They looked a look at the world as if they could see something that your own eyes couldn’t, or had forgotten how to.
—Ali Smith, There but for the
The future lies in a black box off the A19, ringed by a handful of car-dealership forecourts and pointless mini roundabouts. Everything is neat here, and drawn in straight lines: trim grass banks, abbreviated trees, and a double fence with a strip of no man’s land between it, the sort of unplace that belongs to nowhere and leaves you feeling lost. But nothing is as neat and straight as the black box itself, as big as an aircraft hangar, or the cluster of slightly smaller grey boxes that surround it. I had to show my passport at the gate, and then drive slowly up the approach road while my car and face were repeatedly filmed, scanned and processed, shredded into data packets that blazed through wire coils and server racks and cooling tanks the size of houses before looping their way round and triggering a dull green light. The structures up ahead had no windows, and no personality. This land wasn’t made for people. Apart from the solitary guard back in the security booth, there wasn’t another human being in sight.
The Stellium data centre lies about five miles east of Newcastle city centre, and just north of what remains of Segedunum, a Roman fort that once protected the easternmost edge of Hadrian’s Wall. Covering more than 10,000 square metres of floor space and capable of drawing on 180 megawatts of power – that’s the equivalent of more than 25 million household light bulbs – there is nothing else quite like this, according to Stellium’s chief technology officer Gerry Murray, in the country. From here, he explained to me, beams sent down fibre-optic cables should reach anywhere in the UK in less than seven milliseconds, all of Europe in under fifteen milliseconds, the east coast of America in about fifty milliseconds, and Australia in 259 milliseconds: that’s half a second to span the entire globe. ‘We are part of a virtual marketplace,’ said Murray. ‘But rather than a traditional market defined by the buildings around it and the stalls within it, this marketplace is not bound by walls, or rules, or anything. It’s defined by light.’ From its stronghold on the Tyne, Stellium is in a race to fling and fetch light through its pipelines faster than its rivals can, and to store the information conveyed by that light more securely and efficiently than anyone else. It seems ironic, then, that when Murray gives me a tour of the facility, we end up walking predominantly through darkness. ‘When you arrive here as an outsider and you travel around the town, you see the legacies of the industries that were in this region: the coal, the steel, the shipbuilding, all of that,’ Murray observed as we navigated halls of massive, blank proportions, stacked with sterile air and electric hums. ‘You see the things that were built in the boom times, all the old banks, office blocks and working-class housing estates, all these rows and rows and rows of houses, and you say to yourself, “Where did all those people go?”’ He fumbled his way along a pitch-black corridor and then through a set of doors out into the open, and we found ourselves in a vast yard hemmed in by high walls and red alarm beacons, standing among backup generators and 20,000 litres of diesel held in vats. ‘Now you see the new Newcastle, the new north-east,’ Murray, who moved here from Ireland a couple of years ago, concluded with a sweep of his arm. ‘And you just try to figure it all out.’
At the end of one Britain, and the fitful beginnings of another, the landscape surrounding Stellium is as good a place as any to try to figure it all out. There are gatherings here, of people trying to work different things into shape from the shreds and splinters of the present. Some of the gatherings take place on the ground – by the River Wear, for example, about fifteen miles south of where we were standing. Others unfold inside the data centre itself, in strings of ones and zeros. How we think about these gatherings will determine what sort of paradigm comes after this one; indeed, it is how we conceive of our own capacity to gather, and to act collectively, that will decide our collective future.
*
In the old days, when he was just a bairn, David Brown would wake up on the morning of the Big Meeting and run down Saddler Street from Market Place, darting and slaloming through a forest of grown-up legs. There were thousands of legs, packed into the narrow alleyways that slope to Elvet Bridge, and on the other side there were many thousands more: filling the pavements, filling the roads, filling the paths that led into the racecourse and spilling out across the green. His uncle Tommy – the best trumpeter in Craghead, as anyone who heard him will tell you – was in the colliery band, and what David wanted on those mornings more than anything in the world was to find him among all the legs and bustle and beer cans and brass, and then follow as he marched past the Royal County hotel, his lodge’s blue and yellow banner proudly thrust aloft. David is retired now, and Uncle Tommy is on life support; Craghead colliery closed in 1969. Still, David keeps coming to the Big Meetings, just as his dad did, and his dad’s dad before that. ‘I would sit up there from half-eight in the morning until God knows what time,’ he told me, pointing at a scrabbly ledge overlooking the racecourse. ‘It was brilliant, completely brilliant. I just sat there, loving it, and watched.’
It’s been a quarter of a century since the last pit in the Durham coalfield was shut for good, but every summer, at the annual miners’ gala, more than 100,000 people still gather to drink, dance, and sing; to just sit there on the racecourse, loving it, and watch. The Big Meeting, as the gala is also known, has been called an ancestral procession and an almighty piss-up, and when you’re in the middle of it all, encircled by concentric rings of noise and colour – the stage set and the speakers, the wire fences where the banners are hung, the stalls and tents beyond them and the fairground rides past that – both those descriptions sound about right.1 There’s a defiance to the nostalgia here, writ large on the Orgreave placards and the ‘Blacklisted’ T-shirts, and on the red blimp that flies high above the river reading ‘Never on our knees’. It used to be the miners who dominated the gala, and then, after Thatcher, the ex-miners. These days, more and more, those making up the crowds are the ex-miners’ children, who know better than anyone the ways in which economic shock gets passed down the generations, poisoning each one anew. ‘The people who really struggled were those like myself,’ said Darren, the son of a miner who went down the pits in Boldon at the age of fourteen and worked there at the face all his life. ‘It was always assumed that we would follow in our fathers’ footsteps, so we didn’t get no career advice at school, no forward-planning, no path to anywhere else where our lives might end up. And so when the colliery closed as I left school, I had no idea what to do next.’ A group of women walked past us clutching trays of chips and gravy, and wearing T-shirts that proclaimed ‘The North Remembers’. Darren smiled, nodded, and addressed no one in particular as we soaked up the sun. ‘You took all the apprenticeships away, you killed the shipyards, you killed the pits, you killed the steelworks, you killed the heavy industry,’ he murmured. ‘You gave us a call-centre job and some bookies and said there you go, thank you very much, have fun.’
Later, I went up to Durham Cathedral to observe the Miners’ Festival Service, where new trade union banners are dedicated – a ritual which goes back to the earliest days of the gala. As each intricate square of fabric was carried into the transept to be blessed, including the first-ever official women’s banner, the band struck up the haunting miners’ hymn, ‘Gresford’, which commemorates the Welsh mining disaster in 1934 that claimed 266 lives.2 ‘In the words of St Paul,’ intoned the bishop, ‘we are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.’ The bishop’s assessment seemed correct. As much as a remembrance of something lost, the Durham Miners’ Gala is a celebration of endurance, and of a culture of political organising reinvented to fit the times. From the main stage of the gala, I·brahim Dog˘us¸, the son of a Kurdish miner who arrived in Britain as a refugee, declared: ‘The Big Meeting is not just big because of its numbers; it’s big because of its big values, its big vision, its big heart.’ During the departure procession from the racecourse along Old Elvet that marks the end of the Big Meeting, ageing trade union bosses sashayed with teens from Unite’s Young Members division as the brass bands pumped out ‘I Predict a Riot’ and gullies of liquor drenched the gutters. A woman in her twenties twirled past with a sign bearing the words ‘Miners’ grandchild against transphobia’, and the throng around her cheered. ‘It’s about the collective strength of a working-class community,’ David Brown had answered when I asked him what the gala was ultimately for. ‘I was going to say “a community that has died off”, but look around you. It hasn’t. It’s just changed a bit.’ In the late 2010s the gala has evolved into an expression of the new left almost as much as the old: international, diverse and precarious, bringing migrants in Manchester together with zero-hours contract staff in Sunderland, queer kids in London and working-men’s clubs in Carlisle. And perhaps befitting a political moment in which so many communities – especially post-industrial ones – have turned their backs on an imploding centre ground in search of alternatives, standing among a thicket of anti-Trump posters that had been pinned to the racecourse railings was an ex-miner wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ cap, watching it all, loving it, unapologetically taking everything in. It emerged afterwards that a number of supporters of ‘For Britain’, the far-right Islamophobic movement, had attempted to join the Big Meeting that day, which they praised as embodying ‘the very essence of being an Englishman in our free and pleasant land’.3 After a series of altercations, the group were escorted out of the city by police.4 Out of all this history, and all this injustice, and so very many grievances, something fractious and volatile is being constructed here, as it is in every corner of Britain, and it’s still not clear in what direction that something will go off. ‘The past we inherit, the future we build’, runs the National Union of Mineworkers’ slogan. But there are myriad ways to make sense of that inheritance, and from them many different futures to be built.
Peter and Baz know this.5 I met them a few days later on the first floor of a Caffè Nero in central Newcastle, where we talked about the far right over cappuccinos while Peter’s kids clambered on the sofas and chased each other around our table. As administrators of the ‘Northeast Frontline Patriots’ (NFP) Facebook page, the pair had noticed the high volume of anti-Trump imagery associated with this year’s Durham Miners’ Gala, which coincided with Trump’s first visit as president to the UK. They were determined to push back. ‘Some of the miners past and present will be shocked,’ they posted, alongside an image of a ‘Trump Not Welcome’ banner being unfurled at the Redhills Miners Hall. ‘A waste of money and an insult to all.’ In response to the ‘lefties’, they had mocked up a picture of Trump on horseback dressed as St George; in it, he is holding a Northeast Frontline Patriots flag, next to a sign stating ‘Welcome to England’. Underneath, in capital letters, was a caption: ‘Expect a reaction from the ordinary people! We are no longer silent’, it boomed. ‘He gives me hope,’ explained Peter, highlighting some of the economic similarities between north-east England and the American rust-belt states from which Trump drew critical support. ‘We need people like him.’ Baz agreed. ‘We’re up against it here, aren’t we,’ he ventured. ‘Things are collapsing from the inside. Most of these politicians, they don’t know what to do.’
Neither Peter nor Baz hail from mining families themselves, though they both claim an affinity with the ways in which the industry has shaped the landscape of the north-east, and with the insecurity that has attended its demise. Peter, now in his late forties, is from Morpeth, a market town about fifteen miles north of Newcastle. ‘I grew up in a family of criminals, to be honest,’ he told me. ‘My ma was into all sorts, and she married seven times. I left home at sixteen and I’ve worked ever since.’ Baz’s story is more complicated, and painful; his childhood in the Newcastle care system was marked by sexual abuse and violence. ‘We was just passed about,’ he said. ‘It led us into a different life, into crime. I ended up in prison for a lot of my adult years.’ The pair met through the English Defence League (EDL), the proto-fascist street movement most strongly associated with hard-right provocateur and convicted fraudster Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. ‘He stands up and tells it like it is,’ insists Peter. ‘It doesn’t matter how bad things get for Tommy, he’s still there.’ Peter used to be the main EDL organiser for Northumberland, but fell out with other senior members of the organisation when he used its social media pages to flag up stories about white paedophiles, stories that complicated the EDL’s relentless warnings about ‘Muslim grooming gangs’. He and Baz, who sat on the EDL’s national committee, subsequently split off to form the breakaway NFP, and took many others in the region with them. Before its account was eventually removed by Facebook for violating the company’s terms of use, the NFP page had almost 10,000 followers and a total reach, according to Peter, of half a million users (it has since reappeared on the platform under a slightly different name).6
Each day, the pair post about seventy updates between them, ranging from far-right memes to excoriating takedowns of left-wing social media content and a running commentary on the news. Most attract a string of responses from NFP supporters. ‘It’s like a full-time job,’ said Baz, who is now in his sixties. The majority of the content is focused on three themes, which in the NFP’s imagination are often smudged and interlinked: sexual violence, particularly by child molesters; the problems associated with immigration to Britain; and the menace posed by Islam and its adherents. ‘Oh dear how sad never mind,’ wrote one NFP fan, below a link to a news story about thousands of migrants being expelled by Algeria and left to fend for themselves in the Sahara. ‘They’re illegal immigrants terrorists rapists & paedophiles hell bent on the destruction of our countries, they’re dangerous & unwanted.’ That comment was fairly typical of interaction on the NFP Facebook page in the days leading up to my meeting with Peter and Baz. Another popular post consisted of a single photo of an anti-Trump protester – a person of colour dressed in a flamboyant leotard and dazzling jewellery – which prompted dozens of enraged responses. ‘If this is British future [sic],’ read one, ‘have mercy on our souls.’ A headline about a Leicestershire police officer charged with the sexual assault of a seventeen-year-old girl drew a similarly furious reaction from the NFP community. ‘Hang the c**t,’ insisted one follower. ‘What chance has a white girl got now,’ complained another.
The NFP do sometimes try to hold rallies and marches in Newcastle’s city centre, though they are always heavily outnumbered by anti-racist counter-protesters. But it is online, and particularly on social media channels, where people who already think like Peter and Baz tend to discuss and discover one another, and where curious doubters are radicalised into viewing the world through a similar lens. ‘The Internet is like that now,’ Peter told me. ‘You can post a picture, and that’s then law: it’s true, because it’s up there. Or at least it’s true to a lot of people, is what I’m trying to say.’ He took a sip of his drink, and tried in vain to get his children to settle down for a while in front of a tablet screen. ‘It gives you power, I suppose, to manipulate.’ For the NFP, digital technologies are a vital tool in the effort to promote a specific vision of the future, one that has far more in common with that of the ex-miner wearing the MAGA hat and the For Britain supporters who tried to crash the Durham gala than it does with the one envisaged by most of those taking part in that event. To Peter and Baz, Stellium’s data centre is where their own Big Meeting takes place; deprived of one world, they have gained – redemptively – another in which to rise again. ‘British history and culture is being taken away from us,’ said Baz. ‘It’s lost. You’ve lost your community. But with the Facebook page, and how powerful that is, you do have that control.’
The chaos which has ripped through our politics in the years since the financial crisis has been thoroughly mixed up with the rise of new digital technologies. The chain of causation is often murky, but the Internet, we are repeatedly told, is emboldening people like Peter and Baz, and as a result imperilling the very survival of liberal democracy. ‘Can democracy survive the Internet / social media / Facebook / digital technology?’ has been a headline, in one form or another, at the BBC, The Economist, the Spectator, Forbes, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Journal of Democracy and the Harvard Kennedy School in recent years, to name but a tiny handful. The impulse behind that question is understandable. Although the idea that we all now live in unprecedented information silos is hard to justify historically – almost everybody in Britain today accesses a wider range of news sources than almost everybody in Britain sixty years ago – it is true that the mushrooming of social media feeds driven by personalised search histories and confirmation bias has fragmented the media landscape, limiting our exposure to alternative perspectives and fuelling an intellectual flight to the extremes. ‘We don’t trust the mainstream media, on the left or the right,’ said Peter. ‘Those journalists don’t care that Joe Bloggs has had to shut his shop down, because they’re still going home to their big houses and loads of pay.’
Facebook allows the NFP to create and share their own framing of reality without mediation, in a setting where hierarchies appear flattened, barriers to participation are levelled, and credibility is crowdsourced rather than imposed unaccountably from above. In such an environment, scepticism about claims made by the authorities, any authority – the ones, as NFP supporters regularly remind each other, who lied about Iraq, crashed the economy and bailed out the bankers – becomes a form of defiance in its own right, and can quickly give way to credulity. ‘We always do our research, and we’ll remove any fake news from the page,’ Peter told me, citing several recent occasions where this had happened. But as just one example among many of verifiably false information that was posted by the NFP in the run-up to our meeting and hadn’t been taken down, I pointed to a series of screenshots that Peter himself had uploaded a few days earlier purporting to show that the LGBTQ+ community were campaigning to legalise paedophilia and add ‘P’ – for paedosexual – to their initialism. This is a hoax that originated on far-right Internet forums back in 2016 and has been repeatedly debunked by the Snopes website.7 Despite going back and forth on the matter for some time, it proved impossible for me to get Peter to acknowledge that regardless of all the other political disagreements we had, the ‘paedosexual scandal’ simply wasn’t true. As far as he was concerned, the facts on this were fundamentally unknowable. It was, like everything else, just one more contested claim in a whole galaxy of contested claims: claims that could be right, or could be wrong, but which ultimately – if they chimed with the mood music of the online spaces that enveloped him – had a ring of authenticity to them that no fact-checking team would ever overcome. It might be a hoax, he admitted, or the accusation that it was a hoax might itself be a hoax by the liberal media establishment. And just as I could point to what I considered to be inconvertible proof of it being the former, including links to the Reddit forums in which those behind the hoax openly laid out their plans, so he could show me a hundred examples of things on the Internet that would disprove my beliefs and contradict my facts, on this topic or any other; what else therefore, when all is said and done, do we have to go on but our instincts? ‘I’m 50–50 on it, whether it does [turn out to be genuine], or whether it doesn’t, we just don’t know,’ he offered, magnanimously. A few moments later, that ambivalence had already recrystallised into certainty, as if our entire conversation on the subject had never happened. ‘I believe this paedosexual thing,’ Peter said in passing, definitively. ‘And it’s a big problem, giving people like that the green light to go and do whatever.’
When we retreat into online echo chambers, it is those whom the political sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo calls hyperleaders – including authoritarian populists like Trump – who are best placed to capitalise. At the core of any demagogue’s appeal lies a claimed moral monopoly on representation; they, and they alone, speak on behalf of the silent majority, rendering other political actors illegitimate. Such characters have always circled the fringes of democratic systems. But the walled gardens of social media platforms now create microclimates that can accommodate physically scattered millions, in which simmering resentments are amplified and authoritarians can offer a fantasy of liberation from them without biased brokers getting in the way. Belief in the existence of widespread voter fraud hardens when every news item appears to confirm it; do a web search for one racist theory and you will see pages with racist content soar up the rankings next time round. From inside the morass, benevolent strongmen appear to offer a direct line between aggrieved subjects and organs of power. As the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller argues, anti-democratic figureheads invariably promise a facsimile of direct democracy while in reality cleaving to a strongly representative model – one in which they, uniquely, are the genuine representatives.8 To Peter and Baz, that apparent clarity – Trump or Tommy Robinson ‘telling it like it is’ – is precisely what they crave. And services like Facebook enable anti-democratic forces, be they authoritarians or just your common-or-garden plutocrat, to capitalise on that desire in other ways as well. Most notably, they offer political campaigns a means of micro-targeting selected segments of the population with divisive messaging that might play badly if subjected to the scrutiny of an entire electorate, but which can prove highly effective – and incendiary – when appearing only in the social media feeds of particular voters identified through data profiling. Facebook has been blamed for fanning outbreaks of political violence in the Philippines, Turkey, Kenya and Myanmar; in Italy, right-wing populists Lega dominated the social media battlefield on their road to power.9 In 2019, the campaign group Avaaz identified more than 500 different far-right Facebook pages spreading false news across Europe, generating more than half a billion views between them.10
If this trajectory continues, then it would seem that we are drifting towards a dystopic politics in which untruths, hyperbole and hatred are more powerful than their opposites, a politics that will privilege Peter’s and Baz’s form of gathering over others that are less conducive to private profit. Social media products are designed to ensure that we spend as much time as possible within their platforms generating data trails, which in turn means providing us with content that will maintain our attention, which in turn encourages the sharing of information that either reconfirms our existing prejudices or makes us apoplectic. It is this particular business model that has given us the digital universe we inhabit today. Despite an EU package of General Data Protection Regulations coming into force in 2018, and a small but high-profile political backlash against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, so far both governments and the citizens who elect them have, with a few notable exceptions, appeared generally content to allow digital technologies to grow and govern along existing lines rather than recalibrating them to serve a wider, non-marketised interest. The senior corporate figureheads behind such technologies show no compunction at ignoring subpoenas by democratic parliaments; ‘old institutions like the law’, complained Google co-founder Larry Page in 2013, impede the company’s freedom to ‘build really great things’.11 We view with alarm the former company-towns, designed and dictated entirely by coal barons or other industrial magnates for their own purposes. Yet to date we have acquiesced in the construction of a far larger digital metropolis in which the notion of public accountability is assumed, almost by default, to be inapplicable, to the point where Apple has the chutzpah to rebrand its private retail outlets as ‘town squares’.12 Maybe future generations will chastise our own for so passively accepting the enclosure of our digital commons as the long, late twentieth century drew frenetically to a close. Maybe, in defence, we will tell them how unremarkable that choice felt at the time; how its very mundanity rendered it almost invisible.
We already have a decent idea of where, on current trends, that invisible choice will lead. In its never-ending quest for competitive advantage, capitalism is necessarily extractive: it continually seeks to identify new resources that others have yet to recognise and exploit. Big Tech is merely another extractive industry. The resource it mines is data: those information signals that emanate from all of us as we speak, move, think, feel and make decisions, and which, if collated and interpreted correctly, enable others to predict how and when we might speak, move, think, feel and make decisions – especially purchasing decisions – in the future. As of now, Silicon Valley has grabbed at the low-hanging fruit, such as the search terms we use in our web browsers or the products we look at online before parting with our cash. But just as our economic system has always evolved via the commodification of new materials, absorbing things that were once outside the marketplace – water, woodlands and meadows, for example – and transforming them into tradable assets, so capital now seeks to do the same with our private thoughts and inner lives, creating proprietary material out of everything from our use of exclamation marks in an email to the slope of our shoulders as we walk.13 Facebook’s machine-learning system already generates 6 million predictions per second, and as the American scholar Shoshana Zuboff has demonstrated, the more that it and other technology platforms can fine-tune and herd our behaviour rather than simply observe and record it – a shift that data scientists describe as going from ‘monitoring’ to ‘actuation’ – the more accurate, and lucrative, those predictions will become.14
This drive to find or create new markets is intensified by the vast cash piles that technology giants have amassed, money that demands something to invest in. As of 2016, Apple had reserves of $216 billion, the vast majority of which it holds offshore, while Google is so cash-rich that it could, if it wished, buy the whole of Goldman Sachs outright.15 That is the reason Amazon runs its ‘Prime’ membership at a notional loss – the scheme’s value lies in the data it provides, not its next-day deliveries – and is aggressively marketing its facial ‘Rekognition’ software, which under the right conditions can track the eye movements and diagnose the emotional state of anyone caught on camera.16 It is why Amazon is also competing so heavily with Google to get its smart speakers (another loss leader) into as many homes as possible, and why we are constantly being ushered towards a modernity made up of smart fridges, smart thermostats, wearable tech and the ‘Internet of things’.17 ‘It will be ubiquitous,’ Gerry Murray, the chief technology officer at Stellium, told me. ‘Where a place like this comes into its own is in the aggregation and manipulation of all that data mining, using it to profile clients.’ There is an echo of colonialism in this scramble to capture ‘uncharted’ territory, and it’s unsurprising that in its hunger for supremacy, Facebook has built a ‘Free Basics’ program, providing a pared-back and carefully controlled form of Internet connectivity for large numbers of people in countries such as Ghana, Mexico and Pakistan.18 ‘From a data-production perspective, activities are like lands waiting to be discovered,’ observes Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism.19 ‘Whoever gets there first and holds them gets their resources – in this case, their data riches.’ Facebook’s public mission statement is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’. But community and closeness only really matter to Facebook as far as it results in data resources flowing back to the company, as Mark Zuckerberg himself confirmed privately in 2012 when asked about the possibility of applications utilising the data of Facebook users without producing useful Facebook data trails themselves. ‘That may be good for the world,’ he wrote in an internal email, ‘but it’s not good for us.’20
Amazon is already a military behemoth; it manages cloud computing on behalf of America’s intelligence agencies, and is currently the leading contender for a new $10 billion contract with the Pentagon.21 Via its purchase of a smaller tech company that had previously struck a deal with the British health authorities, Google now has access to more than a million NHS patient records.22 Uber, with its unparalleled insights into where and when we want to travel through our cities, is positioning itself as best placed to own and operate the transport systems of tomorrow.23 The danger is that these firms, while remaining largely immune to democratic accountability, develop beyond mere market participants into gargantuan market-makers: the gatekeepers of huge swathes of human existence, left free to regulate themselves and discipline the rest of us. Facebook has developed systems to measure its users’ ‘trustworthiness’ and the company’s insights are now exploited by third parties to determine personal credit scores.24 China offers a glimpse of how this technology could intersect with authoritarian governance: its ‘social credit’ scheme – which will eventually combine data from private entities and government departments to assign every resident a dynamic score that determines individual access to all sorts of economic and social opportunities, consumer products and physical places – is currently in its planning stage and set to be launched within the next few years.25 But for examples of social marginalisation via algorithms that cannot be seen or challenged, we don’t have to wait until then. In several US cities, artificial-intelligence programs are already being used to guide law and order operations and criminal sentencing, and have been shown to replicate racist human prejudices; Kent constabulary are one of fourteen police forces that have been trialling the same ‘predictive policing’ software in the UK.26 The notion that we could ever ask, persuade or ‘nudge’ technology companies into doing a shuddering about-turn and scaling back their levels of digital surveillance is as ludicrous as the idea of asking a shopkeeper to stop selling goods: the act of mining data and producing behavioural predictions from that data is the essence of the tech giants’ business model, and privacy is entirely antithetical to it.
And yet. Social media, smartphones and Google’s information empire have positively enlivened our world in innumerable ways, and they are the outcome of immense human ingenuity. The same technologies that enable Facebook to profile our credit worthiness, and which allow the Northeast Frontline Patriots to hurl abuse at people dying of starvation in the desert, can also be designed for very different purposes – creative, democratic and humane. Wikis, open-source software and the Creative Commons licence are all digital commons in their own right. Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ is a marketplace for casual labour; ‘Turkopticon’ is an initiative by two design activists at the University of California, San Diego, which ‘hacks’ the Amazon software to provide workers with better information and more power when navigating potential employers. These illustrate how common endeavours can disrupt digital infrastructure from within. At the local level too, examples of radical technological potential abound. In Beijing, residents are collecting air-quality data from the ground up. More than two dozen campaign groups have come together to form an ‘Open Data Tax Justice Network’ which crowdsources investigations into high-end financial improprieties in offshore tax havens. In Barcelona, the authorities have designated data a ‘public good’. Reporters have been using digital tools to collaborate on maps of migrant routes across the Mediterranean so that more stories can be told, and more lives, sometimes, can be saved. Meanwhile, academic researchers and rebel developers are working on creating new online domains like Indienet and Indiephone, designed to circumvent the collection of data by private entities; distributed web infrastructure that makes commercial data-harvesting impossible is already available; decentralised artificial-intelligence systems and blockchains have been built that serve a wider cause than the bloating of Apple’s offshore cash reserves.
As the nascent fightback by sections of the Silicon Valley workforce against their employers’ enabling of censorship, racism, state violence and border enforcement has shown, people can be motivated towards innovation for reasons other than the pursuit of profit.27 If the current model feels like an inevitable outgrowth of technological progress, it is only because we are making the category error of conflating digital technologies with the logics of capitalism that currently control them, and of viewing ourselves as merely economic consumers rather than political subjects; only because our political imaginations have been foreclosed. ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral,’ runs the historian Melvin Kranzberg’s first law of technology. It is a caution against both fatalism and banal techno-optimism. Digital advancements do not come preloaded with a moral status; their impact depends on the nature of the world in which they land, and the systems that determine their ownership and usage. These factors are not immutable. ‘Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prising it from the clutches of capital,’ argues Wendy Liu, the former software developer and start-up founder who now writes about the politics of technology.28 ‘But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends – for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia – will depend on the outcome of political struggles.’ The question that the BBC, The Economist, the Journal of Democracy and all those other publications should be asking is not whether democracy can survive the Internet, but whether democracy can survive an Internet subordinated to the demands of the market; or, to put it more succinctly, whether democracy can survive the elevation of market logics over humanity. And the answer is that we don’t have to risk it. The collapse of technocratic authority that has been precipitated by the financial crisis and furthered by the rise of digital technologies has, if nothing else, exposed a stubborn determination on the part of many citizens to defy the old political status quo and see themselves as agents of their own future rather than captives of somebody else’s. To arrest a drift towards dystopic politics, our best hope starts here.
*
Like Peter, Jamie Driscoll was born in the early 1970s and left school at the age of sixteen. Like Peter, he has strong views on education, and home-schools his two children. And like Peter, he thinks something has gone profoundly wrong with life in the north-east, something you can feel in the texture of the place and hear in the timbre of its people. I met Jamie in the café of the Tyneside Cinema, a former newsreel theatre and art deco masterpiece that first opened in 1937. It’s just around the corner from the Caffè Nero where I’d sat down with the NFP; the whole area falls within Monument ward, which Jamie represents as a councillor. ‘It’s not uniform,’ he told me, when I asked him how he’d characterise Newcastle and its hinterlands. ‘The population in this neighbourhood speaks about thirty different languages, from Bosnian to Somali. You’ve got financial institutions here in the city centre that have done well, especially through property speculation, and you’ve also got council estates where residents are living in the same homes that their grandparents did. And then if you travel just a few miles out in any direction, you sense the shift – to a fear and anger among pretty much everybody about the fact that their kids are going to be worse off than they are.’ As in Tilbury, what’s been lost here is more than jobs: it’s something deep and vital and intangible, something to do with the links between person and person, and between people and place. ‘When I was growing up, everyone’s mam or dad worked at Sterling Organics,’ said Peter, referring to a pharmaceuticals firm founded in 1969 that has since passed between the hands of many different global investment outfits, ‘and if you lived in Dudley or Annitsford you’d join the Christmas parties there each year. You knew the shops, like Mr Ahmed’s on the corner who you could go to with a note from your mam, you had your butcher’s, you had your fishmonger’s, you bought your Craster kippers. But you don’t need to leave the house now. On the Internet you can do your shopping and top your gas and leccy up, you can charge your phone. You don’t need to talk to anyone, because the web is like a big shop for relationships.’
Both Jamie and Peter have inherited a sense of displacement and loss within their community, but what they have done with that inheritance is very different. In a life that has so far included software development, engineering, and a rise through the ranks to achieve a black belt in jujitsu, most of Jamie’s energy has been poured into left-wing politics – particularly anti-fascist organising, and working to stop groups like the NFP from building a street presence in Newcastle and surrounding towns. ‘If you get out to County Durham or go further along the Tyne, you’ll find lots of people who agree with you that the rich should pay more tax, that there should be more council homes, and that we should stop exploitation at work,’ he said. ‘But hardly anyone has ever come along to them and really talked about those ideas; they’ve left a space open for others to come in and say yes, your life is hard and you’re getting ripped off, and it’s because these guys who look different from you are taking your jobs.’ For Jamie, that narrative chasm has been widened and heightened by the financial crash. ‘Neoliberalism broke in 2008, and it can’t be fixed,’ he insisted. ‘This is the moment of breakdown and transition, and it will be a patchwork process. We’ll see new ideas, and backlashes; time periods and places that are marked by bloody conflict, and other time periods and places that are peaceful.’
As we are regularly informed by pundits, these are polarised days for Britain. We appear to view the world in ways that are more divergent and impassioned than before; any assumed infrastructure of broadly shared values and opinions has been exposed as rickety at best, and at worst illusory. We are angrier at each other, and our anger has lent a different tone to our political discourse, to our online interactions, to the curiosity and understanding we feel capable of extending to those who possess contradictory viewpoints to our own. But this polarisation is not the outcome of some sudden and regrettable failure of etiquette on a mass and mystifying scale: it’s a by-product of the breakdown this book has been exploring, and will subside only if and when that breakdown is fixed. That will not happen quickly. Our economic system is now working almost completely in the interests of those who live off existing wealth rather than those who survive by earning wages; ownership and the power that accompanies it are overwhelmingly concentrated in the grip of a very few. The richest 10% of households in Britain now control about half of the country’s aggregate wealth, while the poorer half of the country can lay claim to just 10% of its riches; within that poorer half, the median person’s net worth is £400, when debt is taken into account, and the value of their property holdings is zero.29 Under economic decline and austerity, the middle classes too have been impoverished by the erosion of socialised healthcare, libraries, pools, parks and welfare; as the journalist John Harris observes, ‘their councils have no money left, and the public realm is decaying in front of their eyes’.30 Is it any wonder we are getting irritable with one another on Twitter?
Fragmentation and uncertainty have also disordered those at the top. Our governing class has itself been a victim of the breakdown, not necessarily financially but in terms of the indignities that popular opinion in the post-crash era has inflicted on them in the form of both Brexit and Corbynism, and those accustomed to the job of ruling have experienced both phenomena as a trauma. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin once suggested that Britain, ‘with her great administrative experience and remarkable achievement in the Civil Service, should offer a worldwide service called “Rent-a-Government”’.31 Such a service would have very few customers today. When we talked, Jamie used the analogy of an office block whose ground floors are on fire while those at the top carry on working as if nothing untoward was happening, blithely ignorant of the bangs and crashes, the teetering walls and floors, and the rising fumes from below. A few months later, running on an unabashedly radical manifesto, he was elected by a landslide as the very first mayor for the North of Tyne region, which encompasses the area from Newcastle all the way up to the Scottish border. To get there, Jamie had to first defeat Newcastle council leader Nick Forbes in a Labour primary, and few initially gave this anti-establishment insurgent any chance of winning. Forbes is known locally as the ‘heir to Blair’ and ‘Slasher’ due to his role in implementing local spending cuts, and he ran a campaign based on politics as safety first. ‘This is no time for a novice,’ he claimed, in the run-up to the primary vote.32 ‘I know the business community are looking anxiously to make sure Labour chooses a candidate who has credibility and experience in the region.’ Both Labour voters and the wider electorate told Forbes in no uncompromising terms what they thought of those who boasted of governing credibility and experience. In his acceptance speech, Jamie called the result a verdict on a derelict politics. ‘All of these crises have the same cause: a dog-eat-dog ideology,’ he declared from the stage in a Northumbria University sports hall. ‘You cannot outsource democracy,’ he added. ‘If we’re going to unite as a country, we will need to win the trust of those who have disengaged with politics … Because that’s what real democracy is, it’s the citizens of our country taking part in public life and actively deciding our collective future.’
This region is the first in Britain to directly elect a mayor standing on an explicit platform of municipal socialism. It is also the region in Britain responsible for the highest number of people classified by the government’s ‘Prevent’ scheme as being at risk of far-right radicalisation; despite accounting for just 4% of the UK population, the north-east is the source of 21% of all right-wing extremism referrals under the programme.33 ‘It’s such a weird time to be alive,’ Sara Bryson, a Newcastle-based community activist, told me. ‘It’s hard because everything is so intense day-to-day, but if you take a historical step back from it all, it does feel like the death of something, like we’re witnessing an ending of sorts.’ Like Baz, she grew up in poverty here – in her case in Cowgate, the huge 1920s housing estate that dominates the north-west corner of the city. Her family were soldiers, shopworkers and pitmen; she received her education at what Channel 4 described as one of the worst schools in the country. And yet working for a local children’s charity over the past few years, Sara was exposed to levels of destitution that felt viscerally shocking even to her. ‘Something different has been happening,’ she said. ‘When I was a kid, you were poor if your parents didn’t work, but all these kids were in working households and yet hardly any of them had three meals a day. When I was a kid, hard as it was, I could go from Cowgate to university at the LSE and a secure job on the other side, whereas now the rungs on the ladder are so enormous, how do you climb them? When I was a kid, people could say with some honesty: go to school, work hard and you’ll be alright. You can’t tell kids that any more, because it’s not true. These are unmet needs, and people are open to anyone who promises to meet them. My parents still live on the same council estate, and the feeling there is: “Something has to change. I don’t care what it is, but something has to change.”’
There is a danger, when trying to unpack the rise of hard-right sentiment, of stumbling into claptrap clichés regarding ‘legitimate grievances’. Peter and Baz have a great many legitimate grievances about the inequalities that have afflicted them, the economic processes that have atomised them, and the political ideologies that have marginalised them; legitimate grievances that are shared by millions of people in Britain of different skin colours and religions. There is nothing legitimate about framing those grievances through the lens of a racialised white oppression; by 2020, women of colour will have lost nearly double the amount of money than white men have from the cumulative impacts of austerity.34 But nonetheless, out of those grievances, a battle is under way over who can tell a more persuasive story of resolution: people like Jamie or Sara, who is now the north-east organiser for Citizens UK, working to bring communal institutions and faith groups together for progressive ends, or people like the Northeast Frontline Patriots, and the political elites that inflame and court them. ‘We need to explain how we will build a stronger society that can hold the market in check and make the state accountable,’ argues Sara. ‘Because markets have been unfettered, and the mechanisms of limiting them have become unclear. The only way we can do that is to organise ourselves.’ That is exactly what the organisations and movements explored in these pages – from Demand the Impossible to United Voices of the World, the London Renters Union to Momentum and Glasgow’s Unity Centre – are doing.
There is a word, coined in 2005, to describe homesickness for a place that remains one’s home: ‘solastalgia’, a combination of ‘solace’, ‘desolation’ and ‘nostalgia’. It refers to the seeking of comfort in the face of distressing forces, and the suffering of abandonment and loneliness as one’s space in the world alters beyond recognition. As climate change speeds up, all of the places explored in this book are mutating, and all of their occupants are negotiating that change alongside the economic impulses propelling it. Scotland, according to the nation’s natural heritage organisation, is facing a ‘climate apocalypse’.35 Parts of the south coast of England are at risk of being ‘swallowed’ by the sea.36 In London, the Thames Barrier is already in operation twice as often as expected when it was built, and 1.25 million people are believed to be at risk of severe climate-change impacts by 2050.37 In Greater Manchester, Saddleworth – the hill near Oldham with the desirable homes that Kyle looked up to with envy – has been devastated by wildfires, as have other local moorlands.38 Layla has been politicised in part by the threats posed to Congo and other nearby countries by soaring heat; a reminder that it is communities in the global south that have been suffering from the twin forces of market liberalism and ecological violence for the longest, and which have been leading the resistance to them too. ‘It makes me so angry,’ Layla told me. ‘My environmentalism is about where I’m from, there and here.’ A study by Oxford University has predicted that on current trends, temperature changes in the north-east could contribute to sand eels dying out, which in turn would devastate kittiwake bird colonies and Northumberland’s famous puffin population; increased winter rainfall as a result of extreme weather events will cause water to run off blanket bogs into surface streams, releasing carbon, while wildfires will destroy upland heaths.
Nearly 200 miles to the south-west, on the edges of the Snowdonia national park, local authorities have already announced that due to coastal erosion an entire community will, over the next quarter of a century, be officially ‘decommissioned’. By the time young adults like Layla, Kyle and Hannah reach middle age, many more towns, villages and city neighbourhoods on these islands will have followed suit. Late capitalism has helped get us into this mess – perpetual economic growth is simply incompatible with avoiding ecological catastrophe – and our reverence for or willingness to subdue market logics will determine just how far that mess spreads, and what emerges out of it. We are haunted by the spectre of dual and interlocking directions of travel: one towards scarcity, in the shape of environmental disaster, and one towards abundance, in the shape of technological strides towards automation. Who benefits from these transformations will not be resolved by robots or ice sheets, but by the choices we make – choices regarding who owns the robots, and whether or not the melting of the ice sheets is confronted for the good of us all.
In 2019, the IPPR think tank warned of a gathering storm of human-made threats to both nature and the economy. ‘In the extreme, environmental breakdown could trigger catastrophic breakdown of human systems, driving a rapid process of “runaway collapse” in which economic, social and political shocks cascade through the globally linked system,’ its report stated, comparing the level of risk to the 2008 financial crisis.39 The mobilisation of resources required to confront this threat is likely to be of a magnitude rarely seen in the past outside of periods of war, or revolution; which of these ruptures will more closely characterise our future remains to be seen. The longer that climate change is permitted to advance unchecked, the harder collective solutions become to implement, and the more likely it is that a resentful, defensive and fascistic world turns in on itself. The NFP have posted links to stories claiming that climate change is a ‘UN-Led Ruse To Establish A New World Order’; it is telling that their spiritual cousins in Germany, the AfD, have embraced climate denial and turned on the Swedish schoolgirl and climate activist Greta Thunberg, dismissing her as ‘mentally challenged’ and a fraud.
Unlike in Hollywood disaster films, the real danger ahead is not a total collapse of humanity, but rather a slow, bitter and steadily escalating struggle over dwindling space and resources as landscapes degrade and bits of the planet, piece by piece, gradually become uninhabitable. The apocalypse, if it comes to pass, will lie not in a human failure to adapt to climate catastrophe altogether, but in a human failure to prevent a privileged elite from asserting control over those vanishing spaces and resources, and cocooning themselves off from a realm of deprivation left behind. Some members of the super-rich are already shelling out down-payments on mountain bunkers; meanwhile UVW, LRU and the others are striving for the kind of economy that neither creates nor maintains a super-rich at the expense of others, and the kind of politics that could mean the bunkers are never needed after all. As the novelist William Gibson observed, ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.’ Stellium’s light beams can span the planet in half a second: it’s up to us, and our political choices, to establish in whose interests those light beams will flash in the years to come, and what kind of planet they will illuminate.
*
The old railway line runs a few metres to the east of Stellium’s data centre, winding north through the pit villages of the Tyne lowlands before striking out across the coastal plain towards Blyth, a medieval port town with its face set against the sea. The ‘waggonways’ network once bore horse-drawn coal loads along these tracks, to the keelmen who would row their freight out to collier ships anchored in deeper water, waiting to set sail for London. In the nineteenth century, the horses were replaced by steam engines; in the twentieth century, the steam engines were replaced by weeds. Soon, in our own century, the weeds will be joined by tight bundles of silica clad in multiple layers of protective sheathing and reinforced with Kevlar, all gathered together in a plastic tube and passed carefully through the earth below the train tracks. When the tube reaches Blyth, it will plunge down through the harbour wall and hug tight to the seabed for more than 400 miles, all the way to the town of Esbjerg on Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. This new underwater cable will be part of a huge subsea communications network carrying data traffic from North America across the Atlantic to Europe, and connecting Internet users everywhere with enormous server-banks built by social media companies up in Scandinavia’s coldest reaches. The name of the network is Havfrue, the Norwegian word for ‘mermaid’, and Facebook and Google are two of its principal investors. The western end of its North Sea section will terminate here, among the huddle of mini roundabouts, right inside the black box of Stellium. ‘In the Middle Ages, people went to sleep when it fell dark and woke with the sunrise,’ said Gerry Murray. ‘When the canals arrived, life changed because people and things could go further, quicker. Then it was the railways, and then the roads. Now there’s this.’ He told me that he sometimes got to walk bits of the cable route between Stellium and the coast as part of preparations for construction work, treading all that way upon past and future. ‘It’s an expression of the transition,’ he reflected. ‘I think it’s marvellous.’
Today, most of what remains of the railway track is a half-forgotten bridleway, fringed by gorse and nettle embankments. Pylons stand sentry over nearby shrublands, feeding power into small cul-de-sacs of suburban homes. Past the site of what was once Prospect Hill station – now just ruts and grooves on a muddy floor, clogged with beer cans and crisp packets – things get more scraggly. The old colliery at Backworth is being slowly reclaimed by lichen-crusted trees and a cool, damp carpet of pine; Seghill, the next stop along, is a low-rise edgeland, pebble-dashed and furrowed-green. It was among pitmen here, during the lockout by mining companies in 1844 and the mass evictions of unionised workers that accompanied it, that the seditious folk song ‘Blackleg Miner’ originated, celebrating the community’s determination to chase out strike-breakers. ‘So, divvint gaan near the Seghill mine,’ goes the most famous stanza, ‘Across the way they stretch a line / To catch the throat and break the spine / Of the dirty blackleg miner.’ At Seaton Sluice, the road curves suddenly to reveal a vast expanse of sea up ahead, perfectly flat but for the hulking silhouettes of Blyth’s offshore wind farms, and a few hard, tiny pencil-lines on the horizon where container ships were passing in the distance. The dunes are soft and the sand dark, like demerara sugar. It was early evening by the time I reached the waterfront, and the slate-grey Northumberland sky was shot through with ribbons of pink and golden-yellow.
The renewable energy industry here is one of the great economic hopes for the region; there are huge turbine halls and research centres built at the mouth of the Blyth river, right next to where the Blyth and Tyne train line reached its end, and where Stellium’s fibre-optic cables will sink down on to the ocean floor. ‘I’m optimistic,’ Sara Bryson had told me as we said goodbye, ‘because the problems we face can also be solutions. You had industries here that people organised around, and then those industries were decimated and those ways of organising were decimated with them. Now we have new industries, new ways of working, and new opportunities to organise.’ She paused, and a half-smile played upon her lips. ‘I don’t want to have to look my child in the face when they ask me what I did in the late 2010s, at the time when the world went mad, and reply, “Well, I just kept hoping for the best.” I want to be able to say that I knew it was a time when the future was up for grabs, and that I didn’t watch it unfold passively.’
The former railway terminus is now a car park for a shopping centre and a Mecca bingo hall, and from there it was just a short walk out on to the harbour wall. A squabble of gulls was tussling over some mackerel discarded by a solitary fisherman, while the rest of the colony lined the fences around an old radio mast on the edge of everything, taking refuge from the waves. I stood at the end of the wall and thought about the words Nigel Farage had used during a recent campaign speech made 250 miles south of here, gazing across at the same body of water. ‘Just look out there,’ he told supporters. ‘It’s called the North Sea – and half of it should be ours. Not to be shared with the Dutch or the Danes or anybody else. It’s ours. It’s our birthright.’ I thought about all the mental processes that went into making, and believing, such a statement: the possessive nationalism, the resentment, the toxic entanglement of hereditary entitlement and commercial competition. I thought about how powerful those words were, and the size of the silences that sat between them. I thought, most of all, about what the North Sea and the land adjoining it will eventually look like if, from the chaos and the tumult that roils our age, it is Farage’s philosophy that wins the day, if it is his future that is screeching down the tracks towards us, rather than that of the teenagers on the Demand the Impossible course in Ancoats, or Fatima at the Ministry of Justice, or Yusra up in Glasgow, or Jamie Driscoll here. The fisherman’s small shelter buckled against the rising wind, and he began packing up his gear. I turned to go as well, drawing my jacket tight around me. The tide was coming in.