Jobless? All you need is pluck, aspiration and a Channel 4 Production crew

A few years ago I happened to watch something called the Fairy Jobmother. Ostensibly a lightweight reality show, it felt more like a multi-episode PR release from the Coalition government to defend its carve-up of the benefits system. An “employment expert” (…?) called Hayley Taylor was helicoptered into an area of high unemployment to scrub up a load of jobseekers on benefits for dream jobs as Specsavers assistants or call centre slaves, in what might be called the neo-Victorian TV genre of "reform the poor". The last decade specialized in this ouvre - we'd had experts pointing accusingly at working class parenting, experts pointing accusingly at working class dinners, experts even pointing accusingly at working class turds. But this working class wasn’t working. This – to give it the title they really wanted to use – was Proles on the Dole.

The Fairy Jobmother told you more about coalition Britain than an entire binder full of Hard Working Families conference quotes. The claimants were portrayed either as shiftless work-shy scroungers or heartbroken Dickensian poor, while Hayley strode around around in spiky post-Apprentice businesswear, like the wife of a Gestapo commandant doing a photoshoot for Zara, breathing Business Studies slanguage from the very pores of her skin. You’re not looking for a job - you’re “seeking career opportunities”. You’re not pawning your left toenail to buy your child’s Poundstretcher Christmas gift, you’re “problem-solving your way through a new challenge”. Hayley could rebrand a drunken piss against a wall as a challenging urine disposal scenario.

For me the real hero was Dave, a pudgy, human swearword on a sofa whose get up and go had long ago got up and gone. I half wondered whether Dave was actually real or a breathtakingly convincing CGI creation co-funded by Cameron’s government and the Daily Mail, so stubborn was he in his refusal to be “improved”. Unsurprisingly, Hayley didn’t have much luck with Dave. “I’m hoping Dave moves forward with his negative feedback and takes it all on board,” she tutted, as they got the No-Call from a prospective employer over a job application. The only thing I could see Dave moving forward that evening would be the rest of his Tandoori.

But here’s why the show said so much about our times, in the way that earlier narrative masterpieces like Oliver Twist or People of the Abyss said so much about theirs. Because what was strangest about The Fairy Jobmother was that it wasn’t really about jobs at all. None of her flock of The Saved were actually trained for anything. There was no teaching, no skills imparted; you didn’t actually have to know how to do a job or any of that boring stuff to get one. The only currency here was “motivation” – which was raised via inspirational sequences like standing in the middle of a rainy street singing to passersby because it's, like, you know, empowering.

What could say more about modern Britain. In an age where jobs have been downsized, automated and deskilled to the point where they bore even the robots, this is what's left: a sea of infoshite edutainment, buried beneath the hollow language of aspiration. Why actually train for anything in this age, when it’s immaterial finance that makes money rather than the ability to tune an engine? Why blame joblessness on the lack of jobs when you can enlist some self-help snake oil to "motivate everybody"? Why expect to ever get paid more than survival wages when you'll probably be priced out of your city to make way for essential core services like PR specialists or hedge fund managers? 

Once upon a time Victorian Temperance Societies campaigned to “save” the poor by closing their pubs down; now, in our more caring times, they just put them on a reality show and film them mopping the toilets of the local multiplex. This is social justice via Paul McKenna – all you need’s a bit of faith, and a TV crew and you too can realise your dreams. Just so long as your dreams pay £6.08 per hour.

“How do you feel, Ellen?” the beaming Hayley asked a single mother on landing her a dream position at Iceland stocking the frozen peas. “I’m lost for words,” the Chosen One breathed. Then the Fairy Godmother sat down with the rest of them and discussed structural unemployment as the major cause of social inequality. Guess which part of that isn’t true.

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Slavoj Žižek? Be honest, you don't understand him either

As Schopenhauer once said, probably, the point of knowledge isn’t expanding the consciousness of humanity. What it’s really about is impressing people at parties. As a Wikipediaphile, hooked on easy-readers, Made Simple and For Dummies and all the other forms of McKnowledge, I hold myself as something of an expert on this theme – in fact I could probably do a PhD on the subject. Except that would be beside the point. I’m insufferable enough as it is; imagine what I’d be like if I actually knew something.

What I do know is that all those years of study, learning, academia are a complete waste of time – all you really need to sound clever is to quote someone with a serious sounding name. Someone like Julia Kristeva, or Milan Kandura. Something austere, east-European. Like Slavoj Žižek. Žižek – a kind of updated Jean Paul Sartre played by an ageing David Brent – is today’s hipster philosopher of choice, someone who invites such fawning sycophancy by quasi-intellectuals and quote junkies you’d think he could epitomise the human condition just by breaking wind.

Slavoj Žižek. Go on, try it out. Roll it around your tongue. Sounds good, doesn’t it? If you’re going to quote anyone, quote Žižek. He reaches the questions other philosophers don’t reach. He’s so cool he could turn post-structuralism into a guitar solo – a “rockstar” thinker who narrates documentaries about Freud in modern cinema like he was delivering the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus instead of talking over a clip of Porkies. Never mind the Marxist theory, just being able to pronounce his name practically qualifies you as a cultural sophisticate. 

Needless to say I've never read Slavoj Žižek. How could I? His books are all ten thousand pages long and utterly incomprehensible to a carbon based life form; the prose style exists on a wavelength pitched between somewhere Sigmund Freud and the Higgs Boson and you have to be eighty times cleverer than Gary Kasparov just to make your way through the sleeve notes. 

No, let’s face it, nobody has ever read Slavoj Žižek. By all appearances even Slavoj Žižek has never read Slavoj Žižek - or he might have indulged in an arcane process known to lesser writers as “editing” and reduced his 1,300 page books into a punchy 900. But it doesn’t matter. Slavoj Žižek doesn’t exist to be read. He exists to be quoted. The important thing is to read about Slavoj Žižek: to throw Slavoj Žižek-shaped poptarts of information down your gob and roll them around in your mouth before artfully spitting them out again at the right moment.

“Žižek suggests that consciousness is opaque, citing Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat and coat,” you can casually throw into the conversation, as you get up to order a packet of nuts. Just memorising five lines from his Wikipedia page can provide enough pretentious waffling fuek to power an entire post-arthouse movie discussion.

And that's the point. To quote, not to know. As we speak, the base of human knowledge is changing. Knowledge is happening faster now. It's getting wider and lighter. Humanity's intellectual heritage is starting to resemble a sort of gigantic, fluffy pancake – a soufflé of feeds, links and listicles, an “ambient” knowledge that’s trivia rich and fuelled by social media. We know a Hell of a lot less about a Hell of a lot more. This isn’t dumbing down. It’s dumbing around.

Just consider the example of Wikipedia. Why ever read anything again when you can have it shoddily summarized by a crowd of poorly-informed amateurs? Why trust boring “encyclopedias” and “experts” when you can trust to hyperlinks, which give every high-level query the feel of a pub quiz? 

Take a book like Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. “Ah, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,” I hear you cry. “That fascinating chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia.”

Wrong! Fathers and Sons is actually: a 1970 song written and originally performed by British singer Cat Stevens; an album by Muddy Waters, released in 1969 on the Chess label, and featuring Donald "Duck" Dunn of Booker; and it’s the M.G.'s and “Paul Butterfield” of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Oh, and it’s also a chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia. Yawn.

Philosophers once said that the answer to democracy lay in educating the people. I disagree. I think the answer to democracy lies in making everybody equally stupid. In a world where we can never hope to understand a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of all there is to know out there, our only defence against info-geddon is edutainment, TED talks, Fast Facts. And quoting Slavoj Žižek. You heard the one about Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat and coat?

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Why I need a "bad newsfeed"

What’s Facebook? It’s a massively multiplayer boasting platform; it’s a planet sized town square where people stand around shouting about vaguely interesting bits of their lives; it’s a Borgesian library of carefully-curated selves. It's also the biggest exercise in narcissism in human history. Let's face it, Facebook's an ego-trip. An ego-trip with the gain set to eleven.

And it's also hard work on the soul. The company was accused a while back of a manipulative "emotional contagion" experiment whereby it gave some 600,000 people a downer by showing them negative newsfeeds for a while. Not to play devil's advocate, but I disagree with the almost the whole of humanity on this one. You see, I'm pretty sure I've been the lone subject of a contagion experiment specially adapted towards me, whereby powerful algorithms are trained to clutter my newsfeed with the happiness, triumphs and achievements of everyone I know in an incessant reminder of my miserable failure as a human being. 

“Have you noticed how pretty Victor’s girlfriend is, Dale?” it’ll nudge me. 

“Heard about Rachel’s award from the Arts Council?” it’ll trill innocently.

“Jen’s just been made editor-in-chief of the Independent,” it’ll hum innocuously. “She's younger than you, isn't she?”

That’s on top of the spew of status updates broadcasting the parties, weddings, orgies and awards ceremonies everyone’s just attended, photographed, had sex at, selfied, shared, boasted about, and now wants to spray in my face like a demented sociopath wielding a can of Smug. 

Open Facebook and you plug yourself into a giant, bipolar RSS feed beamed direct from Planet Self Doubt, one where your emotional stability can be instantly shattered by a stray algorithm informing you that your childhood sweetheart has just married, or that your friends are all being promoted, or that the girl who used to borrow your pencil sharpener at school has just been made editor-in-chief of the Independent. It’s an existential crisis taking place in status updates; a self-esteemicide.

And herein lies the biggest irony. 

The “emotional contagion” experiment may have been unethical, but it was a Hell of a lot less depressing than the usual Facebook. As someone who despises humanity, I’m actually extremely keen for everybody else to be unhappy. I like seeing unhappy status updates. They make me happy. They’re a confirmation that my own drizzly, depressive, spaghetti-stained existence isn’t quite as unique as I thought it was, that I’m not the only one whose most meaningful human connection is being frisked in the airport queue, not the only one who contemplates ecological Armageddon with a vague sense that it might not be an entirely bad idea. 

For this reason I propose a reverse Facebook, an anti-social network - with a “Bad Newsfeed” where powerful algorithms are trained to filter out anything except the misery and misfortune of everyone you know. Emotional contagion tweaked for misanthropes. Anybody want to get infected?