2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with ‘work stuff’ (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at ‘fun stuff’. How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at ‘fun stuff, my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring video game of all time, a plodding, dismal ‘adventure’ in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, Doom was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac’s relationship with ‘fun’.

  Ultimately the campaign’s biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow ‘define themselves’ with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe—but not a personality. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that’s what we PC owners are like—unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you’ll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash comin##f;@

  Read it and weep

  [26 February 2007]

  You know how sometimes you develop an obsession with a writer’s work, and decide to seek out their entire oeuvre and inhale their every word, even if you don’t really know what an ‘oeuvre’ is or what it looks like? Well, I do that for masochistic reasons. I actively enjoy reading people I can’t stand. When they write something particularly horrid, a wave of nausea surges through me and my pulse quickens. I’m hooked on it, like a BASE jumper compelled to leap off chimney stacks for the adrenaline rush. Consider it a sickness.

  Previous obsessions have included Liz Jones of the Evening Standard (specialist subjects: new age spa treatments and marital despair) and the Barefoot Doctor, who used to write for the Observer.

  The latter took over my life for several months. Everything he said incensed me. He gushed a wild river of bullshit, which I swam through open-mouthed, savouring the taste. I even bought one of his books—a ‘guide to urban survival’, an incredible how-to manual apparently designed to help shallow, cosseted airheads become even more self-obsessed, justifying their unhinged narcissism as spiritual development.

  It outlined concepts such as ‘people-surfing’—which seemed to involve deliberately developing superficial relationships for personal gain—and ‘visualisation’. If you wanted a new laptop, he said, you should picture yourself throwing a magic lasso around it, and before long it would be yours in real life (assuming you walked into a shop and bought it at some point).

  I read the book from cover to cover, pausing occasionally to hurl it across the room in disgust. Even the typeface annoyed me. It was brilliant.

  And now I’ve got a new obsession, this time with a blogger. Not just any old blogger, mind—this one’s a showbiz journalist with a celebrity girlfriend. He’s called Joe Mott and he writes for the Daily Star. His blog, archived at dailystar.co.uk/blog, is the single most dazzling body of work I’ve encountered in years. I urge you to read it yourself. It heaves with demented beauty.

  At the top of the page squats a photo of our hero, grinning like a man who’s just found £10,000 up his arse, beside the legend ‘Joe Mott’s HOT’. The word ‘HOT’ appears to be made of gold. Over this, a little textual strap informs us that Joe Mott’s HOT is ‘AWARD-WINNING’. Sadly it’s not clear what sort of award it was. Perhaps he entered a competition to see who could devise the most infuriating byline imaginable. If so, he deserved his prize.

  The byline on its own is enough to trigger my coveted puke-surge, but beneath it, thrillingly, Mott has actually written several hundred words about his incredible life. Within seconds he’s describing a rowdy night out with some ‘fellow journos’ and bragging about getting a Lotus Europa (‘it’s small, fast and arousing’). Slightly annoying, but this is Mott Lite. Scroll further down and you strike gold.

  Mott recounts his night at the BAFTAs. He starts by ticking off ‘charmless man’ Daniel Craig, who ‘had less charisma than the spotty youth who took my ticket on the way in…come on son, you’re James Bond…you could have larged it at the parties afterwards…sort it out.’

  Yeah, Craig. Pull your finger out.

  He attended the evening with his current beau, Sarah Harding from Girls Aloud. ‘Fittest one there was my girlfriend. And you know that is an actual fact, which statisticians could validate using their craft.’

  He clearly loves Sarah a lot—almost as much as himself, in fact, because he’s recently bought her a ‘well flash gift…it’s a Swarovski crystal-covered bottle in pink and it’s blinger than everything in the world…the only other person who’s got one at the moment is JayZ.’

  But his life isn’t all chuckles and flashbulbs and larging it at the parties afterwards’. There’s also beauty. ‘I woke up this morning in the converted church I live in, to find snow settled beautifully on the slate rooftops’, he muses. ‘It’s funny how I’ve started noticing that sort of thing as I’ve got older…my younger self would still have been thinking about garters, g-strings and possibly women’s volleyball.’

  Magical. But sadly his joy doesn’t last long.

  ‘I turned up at Cirque for the launch of a new mobile phone fronted by David Blaine,’ he writes. ‘I just wanted a free phone—simple. But look after me and you’ll get plugs and a decent party write up.’ Instead, outrageously, an ‘Aussie-sounding bloke from God knows what PR company’ holds him up at the door because ‘we thought you were bringing Sarah’.

  ‘You do not invite national press to cover an event, make them wait at the door, tick them off for not publicising you properly last time…then express disappointment that you haven’t brought your celebrity girlfriend’, Mott fumes. ‘That’s first room stuff…the idiot should…admit defeat and go to his natural home in telesales’.

  ‘And did I even get a phone? Nope.’

  Fighting back sympathetic tears, I read on. Mott visits Spearmint Rhino for a magazine launch, where his problems get worse still.

  ‘My mate fancied a girl who was there for the event, so I started talking to her ugly friend to try and get him in there…[she] didn’t even want to pass the time of day…being snubbed by a rough bird is not a good experience. ‘Look woman. You’d be lucky if I did fancy you and I’m only trying to help my friend out plus I’ve got a fit girlfriend already, so don’t flatter yourself you riverpig,’ was what I didn’t say to her. But I thought it, a lot.’

  Marvellous stuff. But not my words. The award-winning words of Joe Mott. Right now he’s my favourite writer in the world. That a prick this immense could actually exist in our universe is utterly inconceivable—yet Mott, clearly the most brilliant parodist of our age, almost has you believing it’s true. If I bump into him some day, while I’m ‘larging it’ at a swanky press-awards ceremony, I swear I’ll kiss him full on the lips, whether Sarah Harding’s there or not. I urge you to read him. The man is HOT.

  On a mobile twit machine

  [5 March 2007]

  It is astounding how quickly you get used to technological change. For instance, within the space of 18 months, I have gone from regarding wireless broadband as an outlandish novelty to considering it my God-given right. Cables appal me—they belong to the stone age—alongside electric typewriters, fax machines, video recorders, pagers and the plough.

  But there is one device I just can’t get comfortable with—my mobile phone. I’m not some medieval yeoman, infuriated by mobiles full stop. Just this particular model.

  The trouble sta
rted die afternoon someone from Orange rang me up to say, ‘Hey, valued customer—do you want a free phone?’ At first I wasn’t interested, but he went on and on about how popular and great the Samsung £900 was, then promised me free texts at weekends for life if I said yes. So I gave in.

  The phone arrived the next day and immediately began elbowing me in the ribs. It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently—a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there—but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour.

  The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off merely by holding the phone against your ear to hear them. It has no apparent ‘silent’ mode, and when you set it to vibrate, it buzzes like a hornet in a matchbox.

  It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary ‘features’ aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny animations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word ‘car’ is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen. There is also a crap built-in game in which you play a rabbit (‘Step into the role of Bobby Carrot—the new star of cute, mind-cracking carrot action!’).

  When you dial a number, you have a choice of seeing said number in a gigantic, ghastly typeface, or watching it moronically scribbled on parchment by an animated quill. I can’t find an option to see it in small, uniform numbers. The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble-sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high. Worst of all, it seems to have an unmarked omnipresent shortcut to Orange’s internet service, which means that whether you are confused by the menu, or the typeface, or the user-confounding buttons, you are never more than one click away from accidentally plunging into an overpriced galaxy of idiocy, which, rather than politely restricting itself to news headlines and train timetables, thunders ‘BUFF OR ROUGH? GET VOTING!’ and starts hurling cameraphone snaps of’babes and hunks’ in their underwear at you, presumably because some pin-brained coven of marketing gonks discovered the average Orange internet user was teenage and incredibly stupid, so they set about mercilessly tailoring all their ‘content’ toward priapic halfwits, thereby assuring no one outside this slim demographic will ever use their gaudy, insulting service ever again. And then they probably reached across the table and high-fived each other for skilfully delivering ‘targeted content’ or something, even though what they should really have done, if there was any justice in the world, is smash the desk to pieces, select the longest wooden splinters they could find, then drive them firmly into their imbecilic, atrophied, world-wrecking rodent brains.

  Anyway, over the past week, I’ve bumped into other people scowling at the same poxy phone as me. And in each case, the story is the same: Orange rang up and offered them one for nothing. It’s spreading like a sinister virus, putting me in mind of the meteor storm at the start of Day of the Triffids— a seemingly innocent event that rapidly cripples humankind. My theory: the government is offloading these twittering handheld crapstones on to as many people as possible in a bid to whip us all into a state of perpetual, simmering anger in readiness for some kind of bare-knuckle street war. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  There’s only one way for Bush to dig himself out of this unpopular hole: with an ironic shovel

  [12 March 2007]

  You’ve got to feel sorry for George W. Bush. No, really. Bear with me. At the time of writing, he’s just arrived in Brazil as part of a ‘goodwill tour’, only to be greeted by 10,000 protesters banging drums and carrying banners with ‘Bush Go Home’ printed on them. And Hugo Chavez is due to address thousands of people in an Argentinean stadium—an event at which, according to BBC News, ‘he is expected to hurl insults at Mr. Bush’, an act likely to garner ‘an enthusiastic reception’.

  Most of the time, when people take a holiday abroad, they return home gushing about how friendly the locals were, how helpful, how accommodating. They whip out their digital cameras and bore you with pictures of them grinning alongside that nice bloke who ran that lovely little restaurant, the one who gave them that recipe for that thing. Bush doesn’t have any photos like that. His holiday snaps, assuming he takes any, must consist of brief glimpses of landmarks as seen through a ten-inch layer of bulletproof glass and a billowing cloud of tear gas.

  It can’t be good for the psyche, being reviled around the world. And I can’t see it getting better any time soon. When Bush retires, where’s he meant to go for a nice relaxing getaway? Let’s face it, even in the year 2025, if he pops out for some curried goat during a Caribbean break, chances are the kitchen staff will be queuing up to dribble all manner of bodily fluids in his food. He’ll wind up thinking all global cuisine tastes vaguely similar and possibly a bit too runny for his liking. On the plus side, his hotel minibar will be perpetually overstocked with complimentary packets of pretzels.

  All is not lost. He’s got just under two years left in office: plenty of time to recover. The solution is simple: he needs to become an ironic ‘re-imagined’ version of himself. And here’s how:

  Grow a big floppy schoolboy fringe. Like Bush, Boris Johnson is a blustering, incompetent right-wing buffoon. Every time he opens his mouth, a herd of stupid horses gallops. He’s offensive, clumsy, childish, frequently lost for words and hopelessly prone to scandal. But he’s also got a big floppy schoolboy fringe, so everybody loves him. Start growing one now, George. Within six months you’ll be greeted with a warm, lairy cheer at student unions worldwide.

  Leak a sex tape on the Internet. Never did anyone any harm, and besides, according to estimates, by 2015 everyone on the planet, Pope included, will have starred in some form of’stolen honeymoon video’. Politicians will be forced to out-do one another in order to gain our respect—so if Blair’s sex tape features a rather polite threesome at Chequers, Cameron will top it with a noisy twelve-way orgy on a solar-powered yacht. To make a mark, Dubya must create the most shocking and explicit video yet, something so grotesque the computer itself starts vomiting. Look up ‘necrophilia’ and ‘zoophilia’ in the dictionary, Mr Bush. Then marry the two. That’s your starting point. It’ll be the worst evening of your life, but you’ll be an Internet hero.

  Disappear for a bit, then return with a game show. This is the Noel Edmonds manoeuvre. No matter how much everyone dislikes you, if you hang on in there long enough, your very unpopularity will eventually make you a prime candidate for ironic reinvention. All you need is the right format, and Deal or No Deal is it. In the US, it’s currently hosted by a weird, bald goatee-sporting guy called Howie Mandel. Action a little regime change and it’s all yours, George. And instead of conversing with ‘the banker’, you can receive special instructions from God, which under the circumstances will seem like a fun gimmick, rather than a terrifying indication that the world’s most powerful man has completely lost his mind.

  Be more cringeworthy. Richard Madeley has become wildly popular for saying what-ever’s in his head, no matter how embarrassing it may be. Bush is already pretty good at this, but needs to try harder. Next time you’re at a global summit, turn to the Japanese Prime Minister live on air and ask him if it’s true about those vending machines full of schoolgirls’ knickers—that kind of thing.

  Stop invading nations and killing people.

  While not quite as simple as suggestions 1-4, this is nevertheless vital to anyone’s ironic appeal. You can be as big an arsehole as you like—bigger even than Piers Morgan—but you’ve got to appear ultimately harmless. Witness the way Jade Goody’s ironic charm vanished the moment she became a bully. Unfortunately, whereas she could at least try to claw back a fe
w atoms of goodwill by publicly apologising to Shilpa Shetty, you’ll have to visit the afterlife and grovel before the 650,000 Iraqis and 3,188 US soldiers estimated to have died since the whole clumsy war thing started. And that’s going to take some time.

  Actually, it’s probably best to hope there isn’t any kind of afterlife at all, because if there is, chances are they’re already working on those ‘Bush Go Home’ placards with their magic indelible ghost pens. And God knows what kind of bodily fluids you’ll find in your food. Whatever you do, don’t order the milk and honey.

  A fool and his money are soon parted. A bastard and his money are best friends

  [19 March 2007]

  Only a few things separate us from the apes: (1) there’s no direct ape equivalent of The Apprentice; (2) apes are hopeless at changing duvet covers (they pull them over their heads and panic because the sun’s disappeared); and (3) apes don’t use money. This third fact alone makes them vastly superior to humankind.

  Money is the most terrible thing in the universe. It causes more stress, disputes and wars than religion, which ought to be impossible. Everything about it drives me up the pole, which is why I’m useless with it. I pay bills at the last minute, rarely check my bank balance, and get ripped off left, right and centre because I just can’t bring myself to care about it. Friends gasp at my ineptitude. A few think me insane.