BBC, Richard Seymour, Bankers' Greed

BBC

The Flush of Youth

Edgar Herbert Thomas (1862-1936)

Photo Credit: Pembrokeshire County Council's Museums Service
[CC BY-NC]

…The obsession with youth is seeping into programme content. Radio 4 veterans have noticed an embrace of metropolitan identity politics, at the expense of issues that affect the station’s traditional audience. “We are ignoring vast swathes of people who live outside London, by focusing on liberal elites,” said another presenter.

(The Times, 2019)

Haven’t the media, in general, for a very long time, ignored vast numbers of people who live outside London?

Books  


The Twittering Machine – Richard Seymour

A Reverie, Walter Langley (1852-1922)

Photo Credit: Penlee House Gallery& Museum [CC BY-ND]

… People today are the slaves of their fetishized, deified smartphones… and like the discredited cults it replaced, it doses the faithful with opium.

…nowadays we are unsure whether the magical gadget we hold in our hands is a “benevolent genie or a tormenting demon”. The twittering machine, as Seymour calls it, has no innate morality but it preys on our weaknesses to monopolise our attention and modify our behaviour. We are left jangled, needy, constantly alert for the chirp that announces some new and unnecessary missive, ever ready to resume our chore of clicking the “like” button, surrendering to the advertisers who gather up the personal data we so guilelessly provide.

… As Seymour promises, his book is “a horror story”. Teenagers livestream their suicides, and trolls later jeer on RIP sites set up to mourn them. Message boards such as 8chan allow terrorists to cheer one another on. So-called “swarms” of protestors rejoice in a sense of “despotic rectitude” that reminds Seymour of fascist street gangs in the 1930s. Utopians used to insist that the internet would be a paradise of connectivity, “where minds, doors and lives open up”. Instead, it is at best, a virtual Las Vegas casino, enticing us to enrich the big tech behemoths by playing their inane games; at worst, it has become a sickbay for neurotics addicted to “cyber-crack” a training camp for alt-right crazies and a battlefield.

… No technology can be uninvented, so Seymour’s pessimism leads him to a conclusion that feels merely wistful. The worst offence of social media, he argues, is “the theft of the capacity for reverie”. Time spent online is time deducted from our lives, just as taking a selfie is an excuse to not be yourself. By way of escape, all Seymour can whimsically suggest is to go for a walk in the park, making sure you leave all your “devices” behind.

In his last sentence, he even recommends lolling on a lily pad. I have some more earnest advice: if you really want to set yourself free, you should read a book – preferably this one.

(Peter Conrad, The Observer, 2019)

Maybe Seymour is right when writing about social media but what about the benefits of this technology? What about the interchange of ideas and materials among scientists, university lecturers and students? What about the sharing of new medical techniques by surgeons? What about the knowledge to be gained of different cultures and ideas? What about distance learning, video conferencing and better communication between family and friends?

Bankers                                              

St Just Tin Miners, Harold C. Harvey (1874-1941)

Photo Credit: Royal Institution of Cornwall [CC BY-NC] 

More than 3,500 bankers in the UK are paid more than €1 million (£860,000) a year, according to new pay and bonus details published by the European Banking Authority (EBA) yesterday.

…At the top of the scale, 30 bankers were paid more than €10 million. One asset manager received €40.9 million (£35m), of which the bonus alone was 38.3 m. That works out as 1,220 times the median salary of a full-time UK worker and more than 2,000 times that paid to a newly qualified nurse.

…The UK was home to 73% of all millionaire bankers across Europe, according to the pay data, which the European parliament forced banks to make public following the financial crisis. Across Europe, 4,859 bankers earned more than €1 million in 2017, a 42% increase on 2010.

…There are nine times more millionaire bankers in the UK than in Germany and 15 times more than in France.

(The Guardian, 2019)

Why can’t we have at least one publicly owned national bank? Scotland will have The Scottish National Investment Bank operational this year. The Royal Bank of Scotland doesn’t count as an authentic example, does it?