Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 March 2020
Wednesday, 3 July 2019
After urging land reform I now know the brute power of our billionaire press
A report I helped publish has led to attacks and flat-out falsehoods in the rightwing media. It’s clear whose interests they serve writes George Monbiot in The Guardian
‘As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.’ Photograph: Christopher Pledger
All billionaires want the same thing – a world that works for them. For many, this means a world in which they are scarcely taxed and scarcely regulated; where labour is cheap and the planet can be used as a dustbin; where they can flit between tax havens and secrecy regimes, using the Earth’s surface as a speculative gaming board, extracting profits and dumping costs. The world that works for them works against us.
So how, in nominal democracies, do they get what they want? They fund political parties and lobby groups, set up fake grassroots (Astroturf) campaigns and finance social media ads. But above all, they buy newspapers and television stations. The widespread hope and expectation a few years ago was that, in the internet age, news controlled by billionaires would be replaced by news controlled by the people: social media would break their grip. But social media is instead dominated by stories the billionaire press generates. As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.
They use this power not only to promote the billionaires’ favoured people and ideas, but also to shut down change before it happens. They deploy their attack dogs to take down anyone who challenges the programme. It is one thing to know this. It is another to experience it. A month ago I and six others published a report commissioned by the Labour party called Land for the Many. It proposed a set of policies that would be of immense benefit to the great majority of Britain’s people: ensuring that everyone has a good, affordable home; improving public amenities; shifting tax from ordinary people towards the immensely rich; protecting the living world; and enhancing public control over the decisions that affect our lives. We showed how the billionaires and other oligarchs could be put back in their boxes.
The result has been four extraordinary weeks of attacks in the Mail, Express, Sun, Times and Telegraph. Our contention that oligarchic power is rooted in the ownership and control of land has been amply vindicated by the response of oligarchic power.
Some of these reports peddle flat-out falsehoods. A week ago the Mail on Sunday claimed that our report recommends a capital gains tax on people’s main homes. This “spiteful raid that will horrify millions” ensures “we will soon be joining the likes of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam in becoming one of the world’s few Marxist-Leninist states”. This claim was picked up, and often embellished, by all the other rightwing papers. The policy proved, the Telegraph said, that “keeping a hard-left Labour party out of office is not an academic ideological ambition but a deadly serious matter for millions of voters”. Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond and several other senior Tories weighed in, attacking our “mad” proposal.
But we made no such recommendation. We considered the idea, listed its possible advantages and drawbacks, then specifically rejected it. As they say in these papers, you couldn’t make it up. But they have.
There were dozens of other falsehoods: apparently we have proposed a “garden tax”; we intend to add “an extra £374 a year on top of what the typical household pays in council tax” (no such figure is mentioned in our report); and inspectors will be sent to people’s homes to investigate their bedrooms.
Dozens of reports claim that our proposals are “plans” hatched by Jeremy Corbyn: “Jeremy Corbyn’s garden tax bombshell”; “Jeremy Corbyn is planning a huge tax raid”; “Corbyn’s war on homeowners”. Though Corbyn is aware of our report, he has played no role in it. What it contains are not his plans but our independent policy suggestions, none of which has yet been adopted by Labour. The press response gives me an inkling of what it must be like to walk in his shoes, as I see my name (and his) attached to lurid schemes I’ve never heard of, and associated with Robert Mugabe, Nicolás Maduro and the Soviet Union. Not one of the many journalists who wrote these articles has contacted any of the authors of the report. Yet they harvested lengthy quotes denouncing us from senior Conservatives.
The common factor in all these articles is their conflation of the interests of the ultra-rich with the interests of the middle classes. While our proposals take aim at the oligarchs, and would improve the prospects of the great majority, they are presented as an attack on ordinary people. Progressive taxation, the protection of public space and good homes for all should strike terror into your heart.
We’ve lodged a complaint to the press regulator, Ipso, about one of the worst examples, and we might make others. But to pursue them all would be a full-time job (we wrote the report unpaid, in our own time). The simple truth is that we are being outgunned by the brute power of billionaires. And the same can be said for democracy.
It is easy to see why political parties have become so cautious and why, as a result, the UK is stuck with outmoded institutions and policies, and succumbs to ever more extreme and regressive forms of taxation and control. Labour has so far held its nerve – and this makes its current leadership remarkable. It has not allowed itself to be bullied by the billionaire press.
The old threat has not abated – it has intensified. If a newspaper is owned by a billionaire, be suspicious of every word you read in it. Check its sources, question its claims. And withhold your support from any party that allows itself to be bullied or – worse – guided by their agenda. Stand in solidarity with those who resist it.
All billionaires want the same thing – a world that works for them. For many, this means a world in which they are scarcely taxed and scarcely regulated; where labour is cheap and the planet can be used as a dustbin; where they can flit between tax havens and secrecy regimes, using the Earth’s surface as a speculative gaming board, extracting profits and dumping costs. The world that works for them works against us.
So how, in nominal democracies, do they get what they want? They fund political parties and lobby groups, set up fake grassroots (Astroturf) campaigns and finance social media ads. But above all, they buy newspapers and television stations. The widespread hope and expectation a few years ago was that, in the internet age, news controlled by billionaires would be replaced by news controlled by the people: social media would break their grip. But social media is instead dominated by stories the billionaire press generates. As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.
They use this power not only to promote the billionaires’ favoured people and ideas, but also to shut down change before it happens. They deploy their attack dogs to take down anyone who challenges the programme. It is one thing to know this. It is another to experience it. A month ago I and six others published a report commissioned by the Labour party called Land for the Many. It proposed a set of policies that would be of immense benefit to the great majority of Britain’s people: ensuring that everyone has a good, affordable home; improving public amenities; shifting tax from ordinary people towards the immensely rich; protecting the living world; and enhancing public control over the decisions that affect our lives. We showed how the billionaires and other oligarchs could be put back in their boxes.
The result has been four extraordinary weeks of attacks in the Mail, Express, Sun, Times and Telegraph. Our contention that oligarchic power is rooted in the ownership and control of land has been amply vindicated by the response of oligarchic power.
Some of these reports peddle flat-out falsehoods. A week ago the Mail on Sunday claimed that our report recommends a capital gains tax on people’s main homes. This “spiteful raid that will horrify millions” ensures “we will soon be joining the likes of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam in becoming one of the world’s few Marxist-Leninist states”. This claim was picked up, and often embellished, by all the other rightwing papers. The policy proved, the Telegraph said, that “keeping a hard-left Labour party out of office is not an academic ideological ambition but a deadly serious matter for millions of voters”. Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond and several other senior Tories weighed in, attacking our “mad” proposal.
But we made no such recommendation. We considered the idea, listed its possible advantages and drawbacks, then specifically rejected it. As they say in these papers, you couldn’t make it up. But they have.
There were dozens of other falsehoods: apparently we have proposed a “garden tax”; we intend to add “an extra £374 a year on top of what the typical household pays in council tax” (no such figure is mentioned in our report); and inspectors will be sent to people’s homes to investigate their bedrooms.
Dozens of reports claim that our proposals are “plans” hatched by Jeremy Corbyn: “Jeremy Corbyn’s garden tax bombshell”; “Jeremy Corbyn is planning a huge tax raid”; “Corbyn’s war on homeowners”. Though Corbyn is aware of our report, he has played no role in it. What it contains are not his plans but our independent policy suggestions, none of which has yet been adopted by Labour. The press response gives me an inkling of what it must be like to walk in his shoes, as I see my name (and his) attached to lurid schemes I’ve never heard of, and associated with Robert Mugabe, Nicolás Maduro and the Soviet Union. Not one of the many journalists who wrote these articles has contacted any of the authors of the report. Yet they harvested lengthy quotes denouncing us from senior Conservatives.
The common factor in all these articles is their conflation of the interests of the ultra-rich with the interests of the middle classes. While our proposals take aim at the oligarchs, and would improve the prospects of the great majority, they are presented as an attack on ordinary people. Progressive taxation, the protection of public space and good homes for all should strike terror into your heart.
We’ve lodged a complaint to the press regulator, Ipso, about one of the worst examples, and we might make others. But to pursue them all would be a full-time job (we wrote the report unpaid, in our own time). The simple truth is that we are being outgunned by the brute power of billionaires. And the same can be said for democracy.
It is easy to see why political parties have become so cautious and why, as a result, the UK is stuck with outmoded institutions and policies, and succumbs to ever more extreme and regressive forms of taxation and control. Labour has so far held its nerve – and this makes its current leadership remarkable. It has not allowed itself to be bullied by the billionaire press.
The old threat has not abated – it has intensified. If a newspaper is owned by a billionaire, be suspicious of every word you read in it. Check its sources, question its claims. And withhold your support from any party that allows itself to be bullied or – worse – guided by their agenda. Stand in solidarity with those who resist it.
Tuesday, 16 October 2018
The danger in talking past each other
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
Gossip plays a crucial role in one of our greatest epics. I am talking of the Ramayana, and what Sita has to undergo as a consequence of, yes, gossip after she has been rescued by Rama. Of course, distrust of gossip is also stressed by other religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Islam goes so far as to consider gossip to be the moral equivalent of sibling cannibalism.
The more things change
But, alas, we seem to have forgotten – and new technical developments have encouraged us to forget. Because if there is something that social media reminds me of most, it is not conversation, not discussion, not even argument; it is gossip.
Conversations, discussions, even arguments are basically reciprocal. You know who is talking and who is listening. You know where the words are coming from, and hence you know what they are intended for, or can at least guess. Being reciprocal, they have limits, both temporal and spatial. But gossip is not reciprocal; it circulates endlessly. It mutates and infects like a virus; it is alive and dead at the same time. In this, again, it resembles social media.
Gossip has no fixed source or end. There are no limits to gossip; the more outrageous it is, the more it tends to spread. In this again, it is like ‘information’ on social media. Actually, given the way in which Twitter and Facebook work, it pays to be outrageous and polemical. The more people you offend, the more visible your posts get — the more your ‘gossip’ circulates. So-called polarisation is inevitable in such a situation. Gossip is also embedded in polarisation of the sort that social media basically enables — because it can be faceless and highly mobile, two essential characteristics of gossip.
There is a convincing argument, which I have made in my column earlier, that digitalised communication makes it easier to evade difference, and to stereotype and ridicule it. In other words, it is easier to avoid facing the other on computers. At its simplest, this can be explained with reference to an ordinary conversation: in a conversation (unlike in gossip), one faces the other, and this face-to-face interaction often modulates both the positions despite differences. Healthy politics depends on such conversations, which include but also absorb arguments. When polarised arguments end the conversation, we move from politics to war: one can argue that countries can exist in this state of war internally too.
Disturbingly, in digitalised interactions one need not engage with the other; one can simply ‘unfriend’ a person one disagrees with (as Donald Trump regularly does) — or only accept Facebook friends one agrees with. Once again, this aids political polarisation, which is not really a serious and respectful engagement with differences but a kind of gossiping about it. More so because one does not really read social media postings much of the time, given the non-contemplative and distracting nature of the medium. Like gossip, one repeats it or ignores it depending on what one already believes.
Lost engagement
If reading was just a mechanical act — which is what it appears to be much of the time on social media — then perhaps political polarisation would be the inevitable state of human communication. But that is not so. Reading involves the kind of personal investment and deep attention that goes beyond the mechanical. It calls for time and effort. It forces the reader to enter other – different – spaces. Hence, Facebook, Twitter and other digital media posts (and responses to them) are not acts of reading: these are incredibly flat activities. They lack depth. They do not enable a conversation. At best, they resemble gossip: talking in a one-sided, flat manner about someone who is not present and, hence, cannot engage you in a discussion.
Real conversation requires depth, consideration and contemplation. It sets out to accomplish an understanding – and hence a change on both (all) sides. That is also what real reading does. Reading on social media — and much of digitalised reading – does not resemble a conversation. It resembles gossip — and is just as superficial, incidental and shallow.
It is true that gossiping is considered to serve at least three crucial purposes. Scholars often define these in terms of social bonding, the creation of cooperative reputation, and indirect reciprocity. But here again, a degree of nuance is necessary. Gossip creates social bonding in terms of innuendo, prejudice, prejudgment (which is etymologically the source of ‘prejudice’), etc. Such ‘social bonding’ is negative – and definitely detrimental to democracy. Something similar can be said of ‘cooperative reputation’ – the words ‘cooperative’ can be replaced by ‘coercive’ in the context of gossiping. And ‘indirect reciprocity’ in the case of gossip is not an engagement with the other; it is a framing and dismissing of the other. Gossip, by its very nature, takes place behind the victim’s back.
In all these respects, much of what exists on social media is not conversation or even argument. It is sheer gossip — in content, context and structure. We ignore this aspect of social media when it fits our prejudices, even though we know that gossip, especially when it is not recognised as gossip, can cause much damage. Or at least we Indians should know this: we have the latter part of the Ramayana.
Gossip plays a crucial role in one of our greatest epics. I am talking of the Ramayana, and what Sita has to undergo as a consequence of, yes, gossip after she has been rescued by Rama. Of course, distrust of gossip is also stressed by other religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Islam goes so far as to consider gossip to be the moral equivalent of sibling cannibalism.
The more things change
But, alas, we seem to have forgotten – and new technical developments have encouraged us to forget. Because if there is something that social media reminds me of most, it is not conversation, not discussion, not even argument; it is gossip.
Conversations, discussions, even arguments are basically reciprocal. You know who is talking and who is listening. You know where the words are coming from, and hence you know what they are intended for, or can at least guess. Being reciprocal, they have limits, both temporal and spatial. But gossip is not reciprocal; it circulates endlessly. It mutates and infects like a virus; it is alive and dead at the same time. In this, again, it resembles social media.
Gossip has no fixed source or end. There are no limits to gossip; the more outrageous it is, the more it tends to spread. In this again, it is like ‘information’ on social media. Actually, given the way in which Twitter and Facebook work, it pays to be outrageous and polemical. The more people you offend, the more visible your posts get — the more your ‘gossip’ circulates. So-called polarisation is inevitable in such a situation. Gossip is also embedded in polarisation of the sort that social media basically enables — because it can be faceless and highly mobile, two essential characteristics of gossip.
There is a convincing argument, which I have made in my column earlier, that digitalised communication makes it easier to evade difference, and to stereotype and ridicule it. In other words, it is easier to avoid facing the other on computers. At its simplest, this can be explained with reference to an ordinary conversation: in a conversation (unlike in gossip), one faces the other, and this face-to-face interaction often modulates both the positions despite differences. Healthy politics depends on such conversations, which include but also absorb arguments. When polarised arguments end the conversation, we move from politics to war: one can argue that countries can exist in this state of war internally too.
Disturbingly, in digitalised interactions one need not engage with the other; one can simply ‘unfriend’ a person one disagrees with (as Donald Trump regularly does) — or only accept Facebook friends one agrees with. Once again, this aids political polarisation, which is not really a serious and respectful engagement with differences but a kind of gossiping about it. More so because one does not really read social media postings much of the time, given the non-contemplative and distracting nature of the medium. Like gossip, one repeats it or ignores it depending on what one already believes.
Lost engagement
If reading was just a mechanical act — which is what it appears to be much of the time on social media — then perhaps political polarisation would be the inevitable state of human communication. But that is not so. Reading involves the kind of personal investment and deep attention that goes beyond the mechanical. It calls for time and effort. It forces the reader to enter other – different – spaces. Hence, Facebook, Twitter and other digital media posts (and responses to them) are not acts of reading: these are incredibly flat activities. They lack depth. They do not enable a conversation. At best, they resemble gossip: talking in a one-sided, flat manner about someone who is not present and, hence, cannot engage you in a discussion.
Real conversation requires depth, consideration and contemplation. It sets out to accomplish an understanding – and hence a change on both (all) sides. That is also what real reading does. Reading on social media — and much of digitalised reading – does not resemble a conversation. It resembles gossip — and is just as superficial, incidental and shallow.
It is true that gossiping is considered to serve at least three crucial purposes. Scholars often define these in terms of social bonding, the creation of cooperative reputation, and indirect reciprocity. But here again, a degree of nuance is necessary. Gossip creates social bonding in terms of innuendo, prejudice, prejudgment (which is etymologically the source of ‘prejudice’), etc. Such ‘social bonding’ is negative – and definitely detrimental to democracy. Something similar can be said of ‘cooperative reputation’ – the words ‘cooperative’ can be replaced by ‘coercive’ in the context of gossiping. And ‘indirect reciprocity’ in the case of gossip is not an engagement with the other; it is a framing and dismissing of the other. Gossip, by its very nature, takes place behind the victim’s back.
In all these respects, much of what exists on social media is not conversation or even argument. It is sheer gossip — in content, context and structure. We ignore this aspect of social media when it fits our prejudices, even though we know that gossip, especially when it is not recognised as gossip, can cause much damage. Or at least we Indians should know this: we have the latter part of the Ramayana.
Wednesday, 28 December 2016
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
Twitter IPO: why the wrong people ended up with the money
If you think the social media company's stockmarket flotation is an advert for starting your own hi-tech company, just look at what happened to the founders
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Photograph: Rex Features
Every time a Silicon Valley name goes to Wall Street and raises billions, you hear a creation myth. You heard it again last Thursday, as Twitter floated on the stock exchange.
It comes in many flavours, but the ur-myth runs thus: a young man with more ideas than dollars hides in his parents' garage, has a eureka moment and devises some new gadget or program that changes the world – or at least distracts swaths of its population. Then comes the glorious denouement, where our startup hero goes to the stock market and cashes in big. And that, dear reader, is why we have Bill Microsoft, Mark Facebook, and Larry and Sergey Google. The end.
This is capitalism's version of The X Factor.
In the X-Factor economies of Britain and America, you may no longer be able to count on a decent job, affordable home or moderate pension, but still you are offered visions of outlandish success – whether in singing (for the glamorous) or business (for the rest of us). Doctoral theses will some day be written on how, as the arteries of social mobility hardened, the BBC served up ever more versions of the minted entrepreneur: Dragons' Den, Gerry Robinson, The Apprentice. The assumptions are easy to tease out: collective bargaining may be dead, but heroic labour can still earn the individual a string of zeroes.
The story of Twitter, as told over the past few days, snaps perfectly into this bigger jigsaw. A band of T-shirted young men (tick), coding in a flat (tick), come up with a crazy new software application (tick), which soon becomes a global phenomenon. Within seven years is floated on the stock market at a value of $34.7bn – more than most of the companies in the S&P 500. Cue details about how the founders are now paper billionaires, the employees are sitting on options that will make some of them millionaires, and the entire San Francisco HQ celebrated with an "overflowing tower of doughnuts" (tick, tick, tick).
Except the more you look at what has actually happened with Twitter, the more it comes to look like the opposite of the heroic earnings of a few hard-workers. Many of the billions will go to a select group, many of whom have put hardly any work into the company or taken comparatively little risk. That is true of the stock market flotation, of Twitter itself and of its entire business model.
Let's start with what happened last Thursday, when Twitter went to the stock market. On the first day of trading, the company's shares soared 73% – implying that they had been sold for over a billion dollars below what they could have got. By way of comparison, shares in Royal Mail jumped over 40% on opening, forcing Vince Cable to do some explaining.
Yawning gaps between offer price and true value are hardly unusual in flotations: they're often referred to as "leaving cash on the table" – the cash being for the investment banks managing the sale and their mates at other banks and funds who buy some of the shares. If an estate agent asked you to sell your house for £100,000 less than it was really worth, so that they could offer it around their mates in the building trade, you'd probably be straight on the phone to Watchdog. Yet when it comes to flotations, I am still waiting for the BBC report that notes how much the bankers scooped alongside the founders.
Let's also look at the company's story. I spent my weekend reading Hatching Twitter, by Nick Bilton, a biography of the business based on hundreds of hours of interviews with key participants. One of Bilton's achievements is to show how the credit for the idea can be split several ways. First, Jack Dorsey floated the notion of updating friends on one's whereabouts, while Noah Glass championed it and gave the application its name, then Biz Stone was asked to help with building the program by a still-reluctant Evan Williams. Yahoo! tells the minnow team that it's "simply just a messaging service" and a "few engineers could do the same thing in a week".
Look at which of the Twitter team did best from the flotation and the answer is: Evan Williams, who, in Bilton's telling, initially had least to do with the program, and Jack Dorsey. Those two are now worth over a billion dollars apiece. But the other members of the fab four are not even listed as major recipients of company stock. Who is? Typically, finance guys who took big stakes in the business when they could see how it might pay off.
And none of the founders are now anywhere near managing the company: within a few years of it getting off the ground, they'd all been cleared out for managers from big business. I'm not playing a violin for the four founders; but Twitter is hardly an advertisement for the rewards of starting up your own company.
Finally, look at Twitter's business. Or rather, look at its own assessment of its business, as stated in its S-1 stockmarket filing. Early on comes the delicious admission: "Our success depends on our ability to provide users of our products and services with valuable content, which in turn depends on the content contributed by our users." Read that again: Twitter is in the business of selling us to us – our news and views and idle banter. Without those, without us, it is nothing. As with Facebook and Tumblr and all the other social media, we're also part of Twitter's workforce. But I bet you haven't seen any stock options, either.
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
How to humiliate brands via social media
'Don't fly @BritishAirways'?
For those with an axe to grind and a broadband account to exploit, here are a few ways to dot-complain on social media
Hasan Syed, disgruntled with the way British Airways handled his father's lost luggage, paid $1,000 to promote a tweet that read "Don't fly @BritishAirways. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
As the first law of digita ldynamics states, much of the energy expended within the internet relates to a) porn; b) cats; or c) complaining. The irate customer service tweet or Facebook update is familiar to us all. But while we may be used to people venting their frustrations online, Hasan Syed has just taken the power of anti-social networking to giddy new heights. Disgruntled with the way British Airways handled his father's lost luggage, Syed paid $1,000 (£640) to promote a tweet that read "Don't fly @BritishAirways. Their customer service is horrendous." This has now been seen by tens of thousands of people and promptly picked up by media outlets around the world.
The fine art of complaining has come a long way thanks to technology. Back in the pre-digital day you had to sit down and write a strongly-worded letter if you wanted to call out brands behaving badly. Those wishing to take a more direct approach could go wave a placard or, as a friend of mine once did, superglue your hands to a multinational's revolving doors. Nowadays, however, you can make your voice heard without risking appendages or wasting a stamp. So, for those with an axe to grind and a broadband account to exploit, here are a few ways to dot-complain in the modern age.
1. Bashtag
Last year Starbucks attracted widespread ire after it avoided paying corporation tax in the UK. So, in one attempt to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about its brand again, Starbucks invited the twitterati to display happy holiday messages on a big screen outside London's Natural History Museum in London by using the #spreadthecheer hashtag. Visitors to the Museum were promptly treated to a number of tweets along the lines of "Hey #Starbucks, PAY YOUR FUCKING TAX #spreadthecheer".
Starbucks isn't the first victim of what is termed "bashtagging." Some bright spark at McDonald's once came up with the great idea of letting people share their heart(burn)warming experiences with the brand via a #McDStories hashtag campaign. Voila, tweets like: "One time I walked into McDonalds and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up. #McDStories."
2. Game Google
Google isn't just a search engine, it's a reputation engine. Like it or not, in the eyes of many, you are what you are on Google. And, for several years, former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum found that what he was on Google was a "frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." This, by the way, wasn't down to a series of questionable decisions by the OED, but the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign by columnist Dan Savage. After Santorum ludicrously compared homosexuality to bestiality in a media interview, Savage gamed Google's search algorithm so that the first result for Santorum that came up linked to a what the New Yorker described as the "unprintable definition" Savage had created to protest Santorum's homophobia.
3. Use your Wifi network name as a targeted billboard
If you live in an area full of upwardly pretentious types you may have noticed a trend of creative Wifi network naming. Instead of settling for LINKSYS53z, for example, a 21st century quipster might call their network PrettyFlyForaWifi. However, as well as using it as a vehicle for unoriginal puns, some people are harnessing their network names to passively-aggressively complain to their neighbours. There is one person in my building whose network is called YOURMUSICSUCKS, for example. I severely curtailed my moments of guilty One Direction pleasure after that appeared.
4. But, wait, the luggage?
While some casual bashtagging or Google-bombing may be cathartic, sometimes catharsis is the only payoff. However, it looks like Syed's $1,000 BA-bashing may have resulted in more than just a warm flush of vengeance. As well as providing fleeting fame, it also seems to have delivered his luggage. Early this morning Syed tweeted "I got what I wanted. I win." Revenge may be a dish best served cold but sometimes, it seems, a little digital degradation can make for a satisfying hors d'œuvre.
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