The Beginning of the Ending
It is one of my more controversial opinions that ‘Be Right Back’ is the finest episode of Black Mirror. For those that don’t remember, that’s the one where a virtual ghost of Domhnall Gleeson is built by an AI algorithm after he dies in a car crash, using the content of his old social media posts. The result is an android that looks like him, speaks like him and broadly speaking acts as he would, yet exists in a bizarre and brilliant portrayed emotional uncanny valley, lacking the flaws, faults and foibles that define his humanity. Haley Atwell’s Martha finds it impossible to relate to the creation in any meaningful way, and ends up keeping it locked away in the attic. There it remains, happy, positive and always pleased to see her, in a remarkably chilling closing scene.
When it first aired, kicking off the eagerly anticipated second series, many were surprised at the comparatively sentimental tone. After the pig fucking exploits of series one, few had expected a slow moving study of grief and loss to open season two, and its impact was perhaps dissipated by the visceral brutality of the following episode, White Bear. But I still consider Be Right Back to be the most horrifying of the entire run, perhaps because it plays so close to home. It is one of the finest fictional explorations of how our carefully curated social media personas are essentially inhuman, and ultimately terrifying. It’s no coincidence that my only presence on social media is a fictional cartoon character that, other than sharing my profession (and a few opinions), has little in common with me as a person.
Be Right Back had a lasting influence on my life and career. It came out around the time that I was trying to get into writing, and I had long dreamt of creating short, one off horror comedies, along the lines of The Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected. But as I watched, I realised I could never write anything quite that good, and decided to concentrate on the more familiar ground of food and science. Although gutting at the time, this eventually played out pretty well, with my third book due out in a few days time (BUY IT!!).
I have always had a distinctly love hate relationship with social media. For all its faults, I would never have been able to promote my work if it were not for Twitter and the like. Social media has democratised writing as never before, and although privilege and nepotism still dominate, there is at least now a path for someone like me. My obscure little blog has led to a trilogy of books, a newspaper column, festival appearances and writing awards. Despite being a middle aged man with no connections, who had never written anything previously, I found an audience, largely because I had something different to say.
Social media has also led me to interesting, powerful writing, from voices I would never previously have heard. I can use it to quickly tune in to expert opinion during developing news stories, learning in real time from people who know their shit. I can engage in useful and thought provoking debate, or just find new ways of howling at the moon. And most important of all, I can contact the previously unreachable, making connections that have shaped my thinking, ideas and work. Although I despise it at times, social media has changed my life, largely for the better.
But the pay off is sometimes dark. I fell out of love with Twitter not because of the division and debate, but the desperate clamours for attention from those with little of interest to say. A desire to have something ‘go viral’ has shaped many people’s feeds of late, leading to some of the most banal and painful discourse in human history. When Notre Dame caught fire back in 2019, my timeline was choked with various hot takes from people shouting about what the fire meant for them, usually based on powerful insights gleaned during a school trip twenty years ago. Everyone seemed desperate for clicks, likes and acknowledgement, latching on to a big story that they had only the vaguest connection to. No one seemed to understand that when you have nothing of interest to say, it is surely best to say nothing. I unfollowed or muted a lot of people that day. Shortly afterwards, in an unrelated post, someone from the world of nutrition Twitter shared a video of them speaking into the camera as their dog was being was put down, which was perhaps the most uncomfortable and unnecessary thing I have ever seen. Ever since, I have been largely unable to engage with social media at all, now using it only for browsing and sharing blog posts.
These days I look on in horror at the performative outrage that dominates Twitter, a million times worse than it was in 2019. It is the same clamouring for attention, but edged with some deeply unpleasant vitriol. If Be Right Back was remade today, imagine the personas its fictional AI would construct. The most valuable currency on social media is no longer a fictionally perfect lifestyle, but the discovery of new reasons to be disgusted and upset. As a result, many earnest and harmless individuals are routinely lambasted for not considering the theoretical harm they might be causing to fictional victims.
There are a million examples. When lockdown started back in March, many bored people started sharing hints and tips on ways in which people might spend their time whilst stuck at home. Take up a hobby, learn a language, write a book, start a podcast. Links were shared, there were tips for motivation, ideas on different approaches. But at every turn, someone would take time out of their lives to claim outrage, stating that such posts were insensitive to people who struggled to motivate themselves. Not everyone has the resources, the time, the space, the energy. How could you not think about how they might feel?
Similarly, at exam results time, there is always some middle aged celebrity who shares an admittedly dull story about how they failed all their exams, but still managed to achieve something with their life. And within minutes, a stream of supposedly concerned individuals will lambast said celebrity for being insensitive, pointlessly amplifying the original post. It is always telling how virtually no one in these exchanges has actually just received their exam results, presumably because no one under 25 is ever on Twitter. We are left with attention seeking middle-aged outrage spirals, completely distanced from the reality of anyone’s lives.
Perhaps some people do get disheartened by posts about others starting new hobbies. And I admit that some dreadful wankers did share hugely obnoxious threads claiming that if you hadn’t learnt Swahili and set up a Fortune 500 company by the beginning of May, then you were a waste of oxygen. But it is also true that some people may have found motivation or inspiration from posts sharing ideas about stuff to do, perhaps helping them when they were bored and desperate. The only real tragedy is that so many of them started a fucking podcast.
And at exam time, I often wonder if one or two young people are at a desperate end after poor results, and might find a gram of positivity in knowing that someone they admire went through a similar thing. We don’t all admire the same people. We don’t all share the same dreams. As anyone who has ever conducted a risk assessment will know, you cannot always remove risk of harm completely, but that doesn’t mean you have to shut down. Even though there are individuals with compulsive disorders regarding hygiene, we still have to remind people to wash their hands.
For many, this performative outrage can quickly escalate into accusations, hatred and abuse. Once it does, it becomes toxic to speak out. We live in a world where it has become accepted that women will be routinely sent dick pics and rape threats by people supposedly campaigning for a more inclusive feminism. The 2021 android in the attic would be an angry, illogical, violent and abusive. Equally inhuman, but vastly more destructive.
I can’t help but feel partly responsible. In 2016, I created a social media character and writing voice that was performatively angry, and it achieved moderate success in a small corner of the internet. Yet looking back, although I admit to occasionally overstepping the mark, my outrage was always targeted at those that were causing genuine harm. My crosshairs were aimed on wilful misrepresentations of the truth, on the undermining of expertise, or the harmful stigmatisation of marginalised people. I tried to always punch up, never hit down. And it was hopefully clear that the outraged chef I created was never intended to be fully rounded persona. It was a fragment, cherry-picked to get a particular message across.
But after four years and a million furious words, my time with the Angry Chef has become difficult and exhausting. Perhaps a little too exhausting. The final book in the Angry Chef series, out on the 7th January (BUY IT), will represent the end of the road for the character, meaning that I will eventually wind down this blog and my presence on social media. Hopefully it will not be the end of the road for my writing, as I have discovered a love for it that I never thought possible. There are definitely still battles to be fought, and my words have proved a powerful weapon.
Book three, Ending Hunger, is my most accomplished and important work to date, and I urge you to buy it if you can. As with any creative endeavour, finally putting it into the world is a moment of considerable fear and relief. It was incredibly hard to write, but richly rewarding. I learnt way more than expected, and hopefully I share that journey of discovery in a useful way.
It is a book full of outrage and anger, as you might expect given that it covers some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. But it also contains its fair share of hope and wonder, things that anyone writing about the history of scientific endeavour will always be left with. It required me to share far more of me personally than I have in the past, because that was the best way to drive the message, which perhaps means that my android in the attic is a little more human now. I’m still not sure quite how I feel about that, but it’s clear that it is time for me to move on.
As I do, I thank everyone for listening to me over the past few years. You changed my life for the better, and I hope that I gave you something useful in return.
