Sunday West: November 6

The perils of audience capture

Good morning. I wrote last Sunday that I wouldn’t produce a newsletter this weekend. Well, I lied. But there won’t be one next Sunday (I say that, but I may be lying again).

Only one piece this week, although there will be a lot coming in the next couple of weeks; that post was about the two stages of decadence, the aggressive and passive, and how my generation were starting to suffer health problems associated with the Swinging Nineties. At least we had some great music.

Being at the vanguard of technological change, I obviously embrace every new innovation, and that includes the latest Substack feature, which is something called ‘chat’. It means that I can start a thread on the Substack app and every paid subscriber is alerted and can join in. I will try it out later today.

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Elsewhere,  Ian Leslie on audience capture.

The football writer Michael Cox recently observed that English football managers get fired and replaced at a faster rate than ever before. The owners of Italian clubs used to have a reputation for being trigger happy; Italian football experts looked enviously at the patience of clubs in England, where managers were “as secure as civil servants”. But the turnover of English managers is now staggeringly high; any manager appointed before February 23rd this year is already in the top 50% of long-serving managers. 

Ian’s piece on the Mona Lisa Effect from last week was also super-interesting. I didn’t know any of this. (I’ve never thought the Mona Lisa was that good, but have shied away from voicing such an opinion for fear of looking like a complete idiot.)

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A few weeks ago an elderly German woman was arrested over an alleged plot to overthrow the government and restore the Hohenzollern monarchy. I mean, I love a lost cause but there are limits. In the Spectator Katja Hoyer writes about Germany’s bizarre monarchist movement.

There are other monarchist groups that lobby for a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty that once ran the country. One, Ewiger Bund, makes its own passports in a pre-1914 style which it then attempts to get stamped by a member of the old aristocratic families to gain citizenship of a lost imperial Germany. Many see Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia and the great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, as the only legitimate ruler of the country. One monarchist group, Ewiger Bund, makes its own passports in a pre-1914 style

Elements within German society have long been susceptible to the esoteric. Biodynamic agriculture, which can involve practices such as burying bull horns full of quartz next to crops, has its largest following in Germany. Many former East Germans still believe that HIV is a man-made virus resulting from a disinformation campaign run by the Stasi and the KGB in the 1980s. Other more insidious elements have adopted parts of the American QAnon philosophy, mixing Covid conspiracies with theories about a secret global government. Some believe that it is Donald Trump’s destiny to free Germany from supposed foreign occupation, allowing Germans to abolish parliamentary democracy.  

Interesting, though, that while only 10% of Germans want to restore the monarchy, one in five young people agree with the idea. ‘Based,’ as the kids say.

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James Merriott on why a global town square is in fact terrible.

In his statement, Musk warned that the alternative to a “town square” was a society divided into “far right-wing and far left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society”. In fact this has things precisely backwards. The idea that society needs a town square is a fallacy of recent invention. It is not necessary that citizens debate with one another on digital networks of vast scale. Successful democracies require voters to live in relative ignorance of one another.

The idea that “echo chambers” represent the chief danger posed by social media to politics does not bear scrutiny. As Ian Leslie points out in his book Conflicted, the most reliable studies indicate that “social media users have more diverse news diets than non-users” and get their news from “twice as many places”. The problem is not too little exposure to different views but too much.

Social media offers conservatives infinite opportunities to become infuriated by the eccentricities of poly-gendered humanities PhD students with whom they would never otherwise come into contact. To liberals it provides platoons of racist and misogynistic trolls who (though unrepresentative of the population at large) confirm all their worst suspicions about Britain.

He adds that’On holiday in Venice last week I saw the bocche dei leone in the city’s public squares — stone lions’ mouths into which citizens once posted anonymous accusations and slanders. Almost all pre-modern societies have had some mechanism of social shaming and ostracism to enforce the community’s norms. The town squares of our ancestors were places of public humiliation and punishment.’

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Woke radicals are not evangelicals, writes Michael Lind, they are entryists. Interesting piece. Via WSoH subscriber Aidan Barrett

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Henry George defends Roger Scruton from the ‘Principled Conservatives’. My view is that, whatever you do and say, you’re probably going to be called a fascist or fascist-enabler, so develop a strong inner conscience about whether you are doing the right thing and whether, in fighting demons, you are becoming one yourself. Incidentally I’ve been to the Scruton Café in Budapest, although I think I had a latte rather than espresso.

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At the Atlantic Derek Thompson writes on analytics ruining everything.

I’ve written before, the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity. Take the music industry. Before the ’90s, music labels routinely lied to Billboard about their sales figures to boost their preferred artists. In 1991, Billboard switched methodologies to use more objective data, including point-of-sale information and radio surveys that didn’t rely on input from the labels. The charts changed overnight. Rock-and-roll bands were toppled, and hip-hop and country surged. When the charts became more honest, they also became more static. Popular songs stick around longer than they used to. One analysis of the history of pop-music styles found that rap and hip-hop have dominated American pop music longer than any other musical genre. As the analytics revolution in music grew, radio playlists became more repetitive, and by some measures, the most popular songs became more similar to one another.

Via Post-liberal Pete

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While Riad Chat Whitton critiques Thompson’s previous Atlantic piece about Britain not being open enough (yes, he said we were poor because immigration wasn’t high enough!).

If that sounds like me making a triumphal point about how open we are, it is not. I am making the point that there are few places where promoters of all-encompassing openness have got their way more than low-growth Britain. In Thompson’s piece, we are given a picture of nativists closing Britain off from the world like the Tokugawa Shogunate. But there are few nations where the insufficiently open have less power. They have next to zero purchase in the Tory party, which I am told has made a byline for the Hard Right. George Osborne, after campaigning on a platform of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands in 2010, actively boasted 7 years later about how he and his fellow ministers never took it seriously. Johnson, our supposedly Trumpian figure, scrapped it altogether. Taking all this into account, how can anyone say the UK’s problems come from a lack of openness?

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The culture war is now just the battle of the sexes, writes Conor Fitzgerald. This is almost certainly true, and something I will write about in the coming week. The empathy gap explains a lot of culture war issues, while in Haidtian terms the care/harm foundation is stronger, on average, among women, and liberals.

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Cambridge academic Nathan Cofnas on his attempted cancellation for crime-think (by the Daily Mail of all things – we really are doomed). Good for him, and credit to The Critic for publishing his response, on a subject that most conservative publications now shy away from.

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Ross Douthat on how left and right have reversed. This, as regular readers will know, is a major interest of mine, and the subject of probably my most-read piece ever (which was in turn influenced by Douthat).

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Janan Ganesh on why the voters know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

So, yes, the past three UK prime ministers were dire. Much of the governing class is unserious. But what is anyone meant to do for an electorate that both obstructs growth and resents its absence? What about the governed class?

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Finally, on the current Channel crisis — in which 2 per cent of Albanian men have illegally crossed just this year — Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes about Tory dishonesty over immigration, and Guy Dampier on the charities speaking up for the migrants.

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It was lovely to meet Rob Henderson in Cambridge this week. If you don’t already, subscribe to his his substack!