This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter. Subscribe to Reaction here.
Boarding a flight to Munich a week ago with a colleague, we both picked up printed copies of the Financial Times and the New York Times. The former I have written for several times down the years. The latter I haven’t written for once, not ever, but that’s not why I call the NYT the world’s worst newspaper.
It’s the NYT’s sluggish headlines, with commas, that I dislike. Or “NYT-style headlines mildly antagonise ageing British writer, criticisms made” as the paper would put it.
And the NYT opinion pages and the sanctimonious opinions on those pages, and in particular the opinions of Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, are annoying.
Even so, what a joy it was that morning last week to pick up the New York Times and read a print version of an actual newspaper, to feel the old, pre-digital serendipitous sensation of scanning over the printed page and alighting on an article to read rather than doom-scrolling endless headlines on a screen or surfing what is left of Twitter, or X as its eccentric owner renamed it.
You get the same positive effect with the newspaper I write a weekly column for – The Times of London, not the NYT. I still read the print edition whenever I can. Online in its app it attracts an audience that wants to feel connected and part of a likeminded, civilised community of interests.
Back on the plane, after five minutes of the NYT, I turned to the FT instead and it was even better. In the course of the ensuing forty-five minutes I learnt a lot about the latest in the Chinese economy, global affairs, the regulation of US financial markets and British politics.
The standout was a full page on the state of Germany’s attempts to upgrade its defence policy. For two decades the German consensus was that Russia was no longer a threat. The cold calculation back then was that German industry could be powered by cheap Russian energy. All of that went up in smoke two years ago today, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The FT long read provided a detailed account of the struggles underway to get Germany’s armed forces up to scratch. I read every word, took in the graphics and landed in Germany prepared and better informed.
My colleague, who had also been reading both newspapers, turned to me and commented that it was good, so good, to read this way. Less stressful, more useful, more enjoyable, more human.
It confirmed again my view that printed newspapers and magazines are a superior form of technology, superior that it is to the internet and the digital prison created in the last fifteen years via search and social media.
Even though print is superior, it’ll still be killed off (or turned into a rare luxury). The destruction of the iPod for music shows how this works. Apple killed off this superior technology – the device where you could upload your record collection and not be disturbed when listening – precisely because you could not be disturbed. The iPod had to be destroyed in order that we could be forced onto our smartphones where we are tracked and bombarded with distractions and adverts.
Digital is relentless, endless.
This isn’t anything like what journalists are meant to say. For a decade and a half we’ve been going to meetings and conferences where consultants evangelise about how exciting the shift to digital is and how we have to adapt to get ready for a new “golden age of journalism”, first by producing blogs, then by writing ten stories each a day. Then data visualisation. Then for a while everything was going to be videos and then podcasts arrived. And then it was YouTube where you video podcasts being recorded, and cut it up to post as clips on social or perhaps run the full thing as a three-hour bonus episode for premium subscribers. Journalists clung on, doing enough of the new stuff, enjoying some of the freedoms to write at greater length and connect directly with an audience, hoping enough people would care about good writing.
All the while the whole thing spun faster and faster, propelled by social media, with the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook sucking out most of the revenue, reducing what was available to spend on journalism.
Next comes Artificial Intelligence, AI, which we are told is going to either be a boon to creativity making research easier or a destroyer of jobs that will make it possible to create endless stories with no human input, building a global perpetual news machine with AI feeding off footage and archive information from the rotting internet it can digest and then spewing back out, over and over in endless permutations.
There is little more boring than journalists each generation complaining what is happening to journalism. As a trade (not a profession) we’re prone to self-importance and over-estimating how much people care about the news business. Later, I’ll get to why this is about more than journalists whining and explain how it connects directly with deep problems in Western democracy.
Look, digital has its advantages. All manner of historic clips and concerts are available on YouTube. Digital publishing has enabled individual or small publishers to talk directly to an audience. For example, you’re only reading this newsletter on an electronic device because you have subscribed to Reaction. And thank you for being a subscriber. It makes possible our Young Journalists Programme through which two dozen young journalists since 2016 have got a head start.
It’s hard selling subscriptions to support this – thank you again – and as many new publishers have discovered, you have to develop a very particular niche or diversify (as we have done at Reaction) and find other ways of supporting the enterprise, be that philanthropy, or events, or merchandise, or some combination.
But the terrible truth – what journalists are discussing on our WhatsApp groups – is that the changes in the industry can now be viewed plausibly as “the death of the media.”
There are spiralling lay-offs in US news organisations, as the digital business model unravels. Even though those bigger publications that have a subscription model (the only way) either make some money from digital advertising or if they don’t they need to be swimming out there to be seen online, to capture passing interest and convert it into subscribers.
Today, online advertising, or the bit that is not just scams, the bit that was supposed to help fund the news business, is in existential crisis as the internet rots.
Google, the giant of the search business that has hoovered up much of the money, appalled the industry in January by announcing that it would end third party cookies on Google. The company has been threatening to do this for five years.
For the news business and advertising agencies, it will become much more difficult to track and attract people browsing and to sell digital advertising. Yet another strand of revenue, as cover price revenue and print decline, becomes much tougher for publishers. Several tabloid-era legacy publishers have shrieked in pain already, almost pleading with Google. Upmarket publications are also worried.
Ironically, scrapping third party cookies is being done to make the internet more private, which is hilarious given what’s been done to privacy in the last decade or so by Google itself.
To be fair to Google, it is taking a rational business decision, changing itself as online search with a keyboard or smartphone is replaced by voice and AI. Cutting-edge research, quantum and cloud computing are the future.
The cumulative impact of these developments on society is a different matter.
A landmark piece that explains just how much damage is being done appeared last week. Ted Gioia is a leading jazz critic, author and former academic who writes the Honest Broker Substack. In State of the Culture, 2024 he explains a lot. It’s well worth reading and subscribing.
It’s not just the news business that’s in trouble. It’s the whole culture of the West. As he says, the television companies and streaming giants are also starting to be eaten and finding it more difficult to make money, the money they need to make stuff, because it is tough to hold our attention when devices are set up to prevent it.
This is about addiction, he says: “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies – because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal. They don’t say it openly, but they don’t need to. Just look at what they do. Everything is designed to lock users into an addictive cycle.”
Indeed, our smartphones have us trapped in a dopamine loop of endless scrolling and short clips, a process which Gioia describes as the entertainment industry being eaten by the “distraction industry”. This addiction doesn’t lead to happiness, to put it mildly. On the contrary, it leads in many cases to depression, especially among the young who we have (incredibly) inflicted this on.
It is a huge shift in human affairs. Think back thirty years ago, and someone in a bar claiming to be from the future describes to you the smartphone that’s coming and its addictive effects. A teenager, a child even, will use it for, like, seven hours a day maybe ten. They will be able to access everything imaginable, every horror, and they’ll be in giant networks where their peers and creepy strangers compete to make them feel bad about how they look, what they eat, the supposedly imminent end of life on earth, and so on. Oh, and for adults it will make stalking and fraud easier, and spread conspiracy theories and drive reasonable people to the extremes.
To a person in 1994, this smartphone culture sounds mad. They, governments, parents, aren’t stupid, they are never going to allow that to happen, surely? They’ll use the law and regulation before it gets out of control, no? They’ll do something in about 2003 or 2008 when they realise the implications, as long as they’re not distracted by other things going on in those years. Oh drat.
So, it happened, one step at a time, like water dripping on stone, and here we all are.
In only one respect do I disagree with Gioia, who dismisses the US election. He says: “Forget about politics. All the action now is happening in mainstream culture – which is changing at warp speed.”
This is wrong. Don’t forget about politics. The Ukrainians know this. When politics goes badly wrong you get war, death and destruction.
Politics is part of mainstream culture and what is happening to politics is being driven in large part by the dopamine, smartphone process Gioia describes with short clips, and leaders, commentators and voters competing for attention and needing to generate more exhausting outrage to get noticed.
America, as the tech giant, leads the way. Lately, I’ve been searching for a way to describe what has changed about America since the birth of the internet as a mass phenomenon.
I’m going to call it the Hamiltonisation of America, or the Hamiltonisation of everything because it extends to Britain and anywhere English is the first language or a dominant presence.
I’m not dismissing Hamilton the musical, though I don’t care for it after having tried to listen to the music several times. People whose opinions I respect tell me it’s a great night out at the theatre – fusing history, the Broadway tradition and rap music.
It may be a great night out, but it is also the perfect symbol of what’s happened to our culture – the noise, the garishness, the carelessness with facts and manipulation of complexity, the postmodern cutting up of history and pasting back together, the bending of history to fit contemporary pre-occupations, the elevation, always, of victimhood.
On one level, something like this has always happened in art. Look at Shakespeare’s history plays. But that process played out first in front of relatively small audiences and then seeped into the culture and national life gradually over centuries. What’s different now is the speed and all-consuming intensity the digital revolution imposes.
And this is before AI. Recently Ted Gioia noticed books about jazz being turned out by a Frank Gioia, who it seems doesn’t exist. Someone has trained an AI to mine Ted’s books and create a fake author with the same surname. It’s close enough to Ted Gioia – using his work, stealing his identity and surname – but not real.
Which is where we get to the Liz Truss Margaret Thatcher tribute act. The Hamiltonisation of politics helps explain the former British Prime Minister who this week was in the US for CPAC, the right wing, Trumpy gathering.
Truss was hailed by her hosts as a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher. This is a perfect example of Hamiltonisation, in that Truss in her career has behaved as someone who has seen a series of 30-second clips of Thatcher on YouTube and missed the nuanced point. Thatcher was strategically bold but tactically very cautious. Her first term in office was a model piece of statecraft, as is demonstrated in 1979 by her waiting six months to abolish exchange controls fully having thought about it and having had to be persuaded by Nigel Lawson. For all her skill, she was almost undone by the Falklands invasion in 1982 and had to be clever as well as daring in responding.
In contrast, Truss when she became PM went for the smartphone era approach, a madcap dash of sudden moves and reckless statements to get noticed and make an impact, rather than taking her time, applying historical lessons from the old world of just forty years ago, and understanding there is a balance to be found between style and substance.
As a wise American commentator said to me on Friday having heard Truss blaming the “deep state” for the failure of her calamitous premiership:
“Truss’s shamelessness is a lesson about our times. Time was when a politician, or anyone for that matter, who failed as totally as she did (and of course no one in modern history failed like that) would go away, learn the lessons of that failure and recommit to doing something useful. Now they brandish their failure as a mark of victimhood, and of course our culture, especially over here in America, rewards their narcissism, celebrates their refusal to acknowledge reality and so their very ineptitude becomes their asset. We can’t survive if this is the model.”
He’s right. We can’t survive if this is the model. We’re in a war era and need serious leadership.
At CPAC, a grinning Truss also appeared alongside Steve Bannon (author of Trump’s American Carnage inauguration speech in 2021) and said nothing while Bannon strayed into unpleasant territory. Even the graphics on Bannon’s “show” are as they are on all these shows, shiny, garish, Hamiltonish.
Peak Hamiltonisation was the recent Super Bowl LVIII circus. The half-time show was so dizzying and flash it made Hamilton look like The Iliad. The Super Bowl hype was whizzed up by social media until it ended up on the BBC news. Why? Taylor Swift was somehow central to proceedings. The winners won right at the end of the match, which was reported breathlessly as being some kind of, like, awesome unprecedented historic event rather than sport. The Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas even ended with a tragic shooting.
When it comes to the news business, I hope people will still want to know what’s going on via big high-end brands with subscribers, or niche publishers dedicated to defending civilisation, or popular radio.
Media as we know it will take on, though, more of the character of a resistance movement with intelligent readers seeking shelter from the digital storm.
What I’m watching
I’m in Edinburgh for the Calcutta Cup, Scotland v England, one of my favourite occasions of the year. Actually, that’s not true. The 80 minutes of the game are extremely stressful because the fixture matters so much, to Scots anyway. Scotland are on a winning streak in this fixture. My innate Scottishness tells me that winning streak has to end at some point, so the priority is to see old friends before the game and in the stadium try for the first time (after more than twenty years of going to watch Scotland play England) to enjoy the actual game.
What I’m reading
When it came out I dipped into Calder Walton’s account of a century of spookery and the intelligence battle between Russia, the UK and the US. Now, I’m reading it properly. Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West is gripping. From the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, it is clear the Russians took spying on the West very seriously. It took the West decades to realise how seriously and to reply in kind. Russia saw this all along in terms of great power conflict, even when we in our decadent way took holidays from history. The applied history lesson should have been that when a KGB guy called Putin took over Russia on 31 December 1999, he was not likely to be the West’s friend even when he claimed to be.
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