William Davies

Fandom acquired a political and economic utility at a moment in history when passion became required of us both in the workplace and at the shopping mall, and when nations were reimagined as giant corporate brands in a race against one another. What monsters were unleashed in the process?

The quest for authentic joy or shock – or best of all, joy and shock at the same time – which drives reaction content endows the human face with a communicative magic that words cannot match. It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing, the ‘surprise’ that turns out to be staged, the emotional outburst that has been practised. TikTok is awash with apparently ‘authentic’ clips of humorous reactions (often based on pranks), the comments on which are preoccupied with whether or not the interaction is ‘real’. The human face, the standard for emotional truth, is also the basis for emojis and Facebook ‘reactions’, now an entire system of signification capable of conveying considerable meaning, but one from which the promise of authentic or immediate emotion has been lost. Any culture that lavishes praise on ‘authenticity’ to the extent that ours does will be beset by worries regarding ‘fakery’.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have unleashed something that not even the most careful reader of Britannia Unchained, the book they co-authored in 2012 with other members of the Free Enterprise Group, would have expected. By demonstrating disregard for the judgments of ‘the markets’, before which everyone from Bill Clinton to Rishi Sunak has cowered, they may believe they have demonstrated a degree of autonomy and courage that others have been unable to muster. This is precisely what the mid-20th-century neoliberals feared would happen as nations acquired their sovereignty after decolonisation. Do Truss and Kwarteng believe Britain is a newly decolonised power, now that Boris Johnson has delivered Brexit? Larry Summers’s line, that the UK is behaving like an ‘emerging market turning itself into a submerging market’ seems closer to the mark. The difference between Britain’s new-found sovereign autonomy – if one believes in such a thing – in 2022 and that of the newly independent nation-states of the 1950s and 1960s is that Britain today confronts a global economy shaped by more than forty years of neoliberal reforms. 

As​ Boris Johnson limped towards his final prime ministerial disgrace, his supporters in the Conservative Party and the press believed they had hit on a strategy for weathering the mounting economic gloom. With inflation now reducing the value of every pound by 9 per cent a year, it was no surprise to see unions representing transport workers, refuse collectors, teachers and telecom engineers, among others, begin to ballot their members to strike for higher pay. The political right immediately responded with oddly euphoric analogies to the 1970s. ‘Labour Isn’t Working!’ one Daily Mail front page yelled. ‘We regret to announce that this country is returning to the 1970s,’ the front page of the Sun said the same week. The aim in conjuring up this memory (at least among the over-sixties) was quite clear: if this is a replay of the 1970s, then the unions must be responsible for a large part of the economic disorder, so what’s needed is some strong, Thatcherite figure to come along and take charge.