I can make you hate (43 page)

I’m currently on another planet, namely Japan, which for the average Westerner is an experience tantamount to recovering from a serious head injury, in that while the world around you is largely recognisable, it somehow makes little sense. Incredibly minor example: they sell green Kit Kats here (not the wrapper – I’m not that easily impressed – I mean the chocolate itself is green).

Furthermore, just like someone struggling to reacquaint
themselves
with everyday life, you have to continually re-learn how to perform previously straightforward tasks such as going to the toilet. In Japan you either crap into a bluntly utilitarian hole in the ground (reverse squat-toilet style) or, increasingly, into one of their famous hi-tech Toto superbogs with a heated seat and a remote-controlled bum-washing jet.

The first toilet I encountered in Japan was so advanced it
automatically
lifted the seat itself the moment it sensed my approach, like it just couldn’t wait for me to crap down its throat. It’s disconcerting, shitting into a robot’s mouth.

In five years’ time that toilet won’t merely cock its lid when you enter the room, it’ll be programmed to hum lullabies as it swallows your droppings. If the machines ever rise up and kill us, we’ll only have our own smug sense of mastery to blame.

But I’m not in Japan to sit on toilets. I’m here to write some travel pieces for this newspaper, which will appear later in the year. As a result I’ve been zipping all over the place. But every now and then, when the sheer sensory overload gets too much, I retire to the hotel room to stare at the television.

Westerners have been confounded by Japanese TV for decades, ever since Clive James amused millions in the eighties with clips from a gameshow called
Endurance
, in which contestants had to undergo a series of increasingly painful and humiliating ordeals. For British viewers, much of the fun came from sheer outraged disbelief that watching people being physically tormented and degraded was considered entertainment.

But of course that was 100 years ago, before
I’m a Celebrity
transformed low-level torture into mainstream British fare. Nonetheless, you don’t have to watch Japanese TV for long until you see something shocking. The other evening I watched a programme in which a man was shown spooning boiling molten metal into his mouth. This was followed by footage of a man being mauled by a tiger and a rib-tickling sequence in which a studio guest was deliberately poisoned by some kind of sea creature.

Generally though, the TV here is surprisingly dull. The vast majority of programmes consist of several seriously overexcited people sitting in an overlit studio decorated like a novelty grotto made from regurgitated Dolly Mixture, endlessly babbling about food.

Seriously, it’s all food, food, food. People eating food,
answering
questions about food, sometimes even just pointing at food and laughing. It’s as if they’ve only just discovered food and are perpetually astonished by its very existence. Imagine watching an endless episode of
The One Show
with the colour and brightness turned up to 11, where all the guests have been given amphetamines, the screen is peppered with random subtitles, and every ten seconds it cuts to a close-up shot of a bowl of noodles for no apparent reason. That’s 90 per cent of Japanese TV right there.

For a nation so preposterously hi-tech, it’s a curiously
old-fashioned
approach to television. People talking in studios. Forever. Like it’s the fifties. And yet it’s insanely agitated: as though the participants are simply too wired to make a proper TV show, and have subsequently just switched the cameras on and started yelping.

The adverts continue this vaguely old-school theme. There are plenty of super-sophisticated ones starring giant CGI cats and the like, but there’s also a rather charming emphasis on dancing: people unpretentiously dancing and singing about the product on offer (generally a foodstuff, which presumably explains their terrifying level of excitement). It makes the Go Compare tenor seem subtle. Sedate, even.

But while onscreen Japan offers up old-fashioned fodder with an unhinged, frantic glee bordering on malevolence, the moment you step outside, the population itself seems incredibly calm, as though faintly mesmerised by the screaming technology surrounding them.

The cliché about the Japanese being unbelievably polite also holds true. At times they’re so helpful it’s almost a pain in the arse.

Ask a passing stranger if they know where the nearest branch of Mos Burger is and, if they don’t immediately know the answer, they’ll often start researching the subject on your behalf, whipping
out their smartphones to locate it using Google maps or calling up their friends for advice.

And if after several minutes of peering at maps, placing phone calls, and umming and ahhing and apologising, they still can’t provide a detailed set of directions, they appear to take it as a personal blow. In London, you’d get a smile and a shrug. Here they almost run away in disgrace. You actually feel guilty having inflicted that level of shame on them.

Like I say: another planet.

Sharing. Now there’s a basic social concept that has somehow got all out of whack. The idea behind sharing is simple. Let’s say I’m a caveman. I hunt and slaughter a bison, but I can’t eat it all myself, so I share the carcass with others, many of whom really appreciate it, such as my infirm 86-year-old neighbour who hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks because he is incapable of killing anything larger than a woodlouse. Have you tried grilling a woodlouse? It’s scarcely worth the effort.

But it’s not all bison meat. Let’s say I am still a caveman. The other thing I share is information: the thoughts inside my head or stirring tales of the things I have done. I grunt a hilarious anecdote about the time I dropped a huge rock on a duck and an egg popped out, and mime scandalous gossip about well-known tribesmen. I’m the life and soul of the cave-party.

All this sharing served a purpose. It kept the community fed, as well as entertained and informed. Now zip forward to the present day and, like I say, sharing has somehow got all out of whack. A small percentage of the population hoards more bison meat than it could eat in 2,000 lifetimes, awarding itself huge bison meat bonuses on top of its base-rate bison meat ‘salary’. I say ‘bison meat’. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m using it as a
clever metaphor for money.

The huge salaries and bonuses, we are told, are essential if we are to prevent this tiny percentage of selfish, hoarding arseholes from moving overseas. Imagine if they flew to Singapore and started selfishly hoarding things over there instead. Drained of their expertise and reassuring presence, how would Britain cope? Within days we’d be walking on all fours and devouring our offspring for food.

I don’t want to panic you, but that’s the reality. Never mind weeping over the size of their bonuses: we should be dropping to our knees and giving them blowjobs, tearfully imploring them to remain seated each time we come up for air. Treble their wages. Form a human ring around Britain’s airports to prevent them from leaving. And for God’s sake don’t ask them to share
anything
. That kind of talk merely angers them.

Sharing is for the rest of us. Not sharing money or bison meat, but personal information. Where we are. What we’re doing. Share it! Make it public! Go on! It’s fun!

Increasingly, I stumble across apps and services that expect me to automatically share my every waking action on Facebook and Twitter. The key word here is ‘automatically’. Take Spotify, the streaming music service. I have written before about my admiration for Spotify, about what a technical marvel it is. A world of music at your fingertips! Incredible!

The love affair was doomed. Spotify recently reinvented itself as a kind of adjunct to Facebook and has subsequently adopted some truly hideous ‘social features’. For instance: it will tell other people what you’re listening to, live. Yes, you can switch this feature off. That’s not the point. The point is that it does it by default. By default.
IT DOES IT BY DEFAULT
.

When Sony launched the Walkman back in the late seventies, its main appeal was that for the first time in history you could stroll down the high street listening to Neil Diamond belting out ‘Sweet Caroline’ and no one could judge you for it. It made
you the master of a private world of music. If the Walkman had, by default, silently contacted your friends and told them what you were listening to, not only would no one have bought a Walkman in the first place, its designers would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for sharing thoughts, no matter how banal (as every column I have ever written rather sadly proves). Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can’t decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies. People already create exaggerated versions of themselves for online consumption: snarkier tweets, more outraged reactions. Online, you play at being yourself. Apply that pressure of public performance to private, inconsequential actions – such as listening to songs in the comfort of your own room – and what happens, exactly?

It’ll only get worse. Here’s what I am listening to on Spotify. This is the page of the book I am reading. I am currently watching the forty-third minute of a Will Ferrell movie. And I’m not telling you this stuff. The software is. I am a character in
The Sims.
Hover the cursor over my head and watch that stat feed scroll.

You know how annoying it is when you’re sitting on the train with a magazine and the person sitting beside you starts reading over your shoulder? Welcome to every single moment of your future. Might as well get used to it. It’s an experience we’ll all be sharing.

Yes, sharing. A basic social concept that’s somehow got all out of whack.

There was a minor kerfuffle a few weeks ago when the
Daily Mail
website overtook the
New York Times
to become the most popular news site in the world. Liberals can whine all they like, but that’s a formidable achievement, especially considering it’s not really a conventional news site at all, more a big online bin full of pictures of reality stars, with the occasional Stephen Glover column lobbed in to lighten the mood.

The print edition of the paper is edited by Paul Dacre, who is regularly praised by media types for knowing what his customers want, and then selling it to them. This is an extraordinary skill that puts him on the same rarefied level as, say, anyone who works in a shoe shop. Or a bike shop. Or any kind of shop. Or in absolutely any kind of business whatsoever.

Whatever you think about Dacre’s politics, you can’t deny he’s got a job to do, and he does it. Like a peg. Or a ladle. Or even a knee. Dacre is perhaps Britain’s foremost knee.

Curiously, the online version of the
Mail
has become a hit by doing the reverse of what Dacre is commended for doing. It succeeds by remorselessly delivering industrial quantities of precisely the opposite of what a traditional
Mail
reader would presumably want to read: frothy stories about carefree young women enjoying themselves. Kim Kardashian or Kelly Brook ‘pour their curves’ into a selection of tight dresses and waddle before the lens and absolutely nobody on the planet gives a toss apart from
Mail Online,
which is doomed to host the images, and
Mail Online
’s readers, who flock in their thousands to leave messages claiming to be not in the slightest bit interested in the story they’re reading and commenting on.

Now
Mail Online
has gone one step further by running a story that not only insults its own readers, but cruelly invites them to underline the insult by making fools of themselves.

In what has to be a deliberate act of ‘trolling’, last Friday it carried a story headlined ‘Rightwingers are less intelligent than left wingers, says study’. In terms of enraging your core readership, this is the equivalent of
Nuts
magazine suddenly claiming only gay men masturbate to
Hollyoaks
babes.

The
Mail
’s report went on to detail the results of a study carried out by a group of Canadian academics, which appears to show some correlation between low childhood intelligence and rightwing politics. It also claimed that stupid people hold
right-wing
views in order to feel ‘safe’. Other items they hold in order to feel safe include clubs, rocks and dustbin lids. But those are easy to let go of. Political beliefs get stuck to your hands. And the only way to remove them is to hold your brain under the hot tap and scrub vigorously for several decades.

As you might expect, many
Mail Online
readers didn’t take kindly to a report that strived to paint them as simplistic, terrified dimwits. Many leapt from the tyres they were swinging in to furrow their brows and howl in anger. Others, tragically, began tapping rudimentary responses into the comments box. Which is where the tragi-fun really began.

‘Stupidest study of them all,’ raged a reader called Beth. ‘So were the testers conservative for being so thick or were they left and using a non study to make themselves look better?’ Hmmm. There’s no easy answer to that. Because it doesn’t make sense.

‘I seem to remember “academics” once upon a time stating that the world was flat and the Sun orbited the Earth,’ scoffed Ted, who has presumably been keeping his personal brand of scepticism alive since the middle ages.

‘Sounds like a BBC study, type of thing they would waste the Licence fee on, load of Cods wallop,’ claimed Terry from Leicester, thereby managing to ignore the findings while simultaneously attacking public service broadcasting for something it hadn’t done. For his next trick, Terry will learn to whistle and shit at the same time.