UK Doomsday Preppers

 I watched a documentary on UK Doomsday Preppers this morning, and I was struck by how much the prepper mindset is rooted in, and fuelled by, social isolation and loneliness. The preppers' apocalyptic fantasies either serve as an affirmation of the individual's present isolation, or as an imagined negation of it. 

There are preppers whose fantasies are all about individual survival: a solitary badass macho man, sometimes accompanied by his immediate nuclear family, hiding away from the imagined evils of a society crumbling around them, surviving and thriving due to the Great Man's ingenuity and resourcefulness. Strength in isolation.

One has hidden a large cache in a hut in the Welsh countryside; he gets his family to do drills regularly, where they quickly pack their things, leave their Stockport home, and drive to the Welsh hideaway to practice living simply, away from the society whose imminent collapse they imagine. Really, it's just an elaborate excuse for a camping holiday.

Another has his supplies hidden on a small uninhabited island in the middle of a river, which he can navigate to with a kayak. He imagines he could survive alone on the island for several months, living off either his supplies or the island's flora and fauna. He does not mention the negative psychological consequences of a lack of human interaction, probably because they are such a constant in his present life that he sees them as normal.

On the other extreme, there are the preppers who imagine that the apocalypse would grant them opportunity for socialisation and community that they have been denied under present society. 

One prepper has stocked up on equipment for 'about a dozen like-minded people', who he imagines he will meet in the ruins. Crucially, they are not the friends and family he knows today, but imaginary future friends whom society is currently preventing him from meeting. He also imagines that 'because of [his] resources and knowledge, [he] would probably have leadership thrust upon [him].'

Another, who explains that she lives in an area that is majority Muslim, has several copies of the Qur'an in her doomsday supplies, which she might need to read during the apocalypse in order to fit in with her wider community. 

There's a latent curiosity apparent in this fantasy; she could, of course, read the Qur'an right now, get to know her neighbours, become active in the community, all of her own free will. Literally no one is stopping her but herself. But instead of doing that, she imagines apocalypses which force her to do all those things.

She also has a stockpile of condoms and lube, because sex is one of the few easily accessible comforts during an apocalypse, and you never know you will meet as society collapses, so it's best to be prepared.

Some people would rather spend £1000s on army surplus equipment and non-perishable food, than get therapy or learn social skills. One could also make a wider and deeper point about atomization, the breakdown of community, and the need for greater mental health services and therapy options in our hyper-individualistic capitalist society, but that's not something I can really be bothered going into in this particular Facebook post.

'Pennyblade' by J.L. Worrad

Grimdark is a genre I tend to bounce off, so I was a bit apprehensive going into this, and some quite unpleasant scenes early on were off-putting (there is an attempted sexual assault in the first chapter, and a bit later on some really horrific ableism). However, I am very glad I persevered, because once it really got going I was hooked. The fictional world is well drawn and fascinating. The story has good depth and complexity, with a heartfelt romance at its core, nuanced characters, and insightful-but-not-in-your-face commentary on the real world. 

Masks, literal and metaphorical, play an important role in the story: characters are often hiding their true selves behind superficial facades. And so is the book. As the protagonist's vulgarity and unpleasantness hides her inner sensitivity and vulnerability until her mask slips, so too does the book's gruesomeness obscure the work's emotional core and social commentary, until Worrad chooses to let the mask slip.

Discussing one of his novels, China Mieville said 'Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.' That quote came back to me while reading Pennyblade. Worrad's fantasy race - the Commrach, elf-like humanoids related to cats - go into heat every year and become sex mad. Worrad has clearly spent a lot of time thinking how this aspect of their biology would affect the culture of an intelligent species as it developed civilisation. He's taken this ridiculous idea very seriously, and created a convincing culture for the Commrach, who are understandably more relaxed about sex compared to humans, and, being cat-like, are very up themselves.

There is a lot of sex in the book, which I would normally find quite tiresome, but I was impressed by the way Worrad described it. At no point did I feel like I was supposed to be getting aroused by what was being described; there was none of the cringe-inducing eroticism I normally expect from sex scenes. Instead, the sex is described with language that is a mixture of bluntly matter-of-fact and oddly poetic, which is at times hilarious, grim-in-a-funny-way. Tellingly, it is only the casual, meaningless sex scenes that are described; hidden 'off camera', but made reference to, are the private, meaningful, intimate acts between two lovers.

After finishing the book I'm better able to reflect on the unpleasant scenes I found off-putting near the beginning. I do think that having an attempted sexual assault in the first chapter was unnecessary and starts the book off on the wrong foot. However, the horrendous ableism serves a greater purpose within the story.

The Commrach civilisation in the book has a belief system like real-world eugenics. They are working towards 'the final countenance', the perfect form, and members of the society see themselves as vessels for the Blood to be passed on to the next generation through selective breeding.

I came to this book having recently read [book:Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics|59693838], so the real world links were very fresh in my mind: eugenicist thoughts and beliefs have scarred our culture and society, and continue to influence those in power. In Britain during the pandemic, eugenicist ideas were being openly discussed and flirted with by people at the top of government. It is probably no coincidence that the virus was largely allowed to run rampant through care homes, and COVID patients with learning disability were often given blanket Do Not Resuscitate notices. 

Worrad does not shy away from showing how unpleasant the eugenicist mindset is, and how damaging it is. These views, espoused early in the novel by the Commrach protagonist, highlight how unpleasant Commrach society is, and forms part of the protagonist's character arc throughout the novel. It also highlights a very real bigotry in our world - a bigotry that is more common than we'd like to believe, and one that is often forgotten. Worrad's fictional eugenicists are used to great effect in one particular scene (when the book's gruesome mask slips) to highlight the implicit eugenics of free market capitalism.

Overall I was extremely impressed by this book, and if you get the audiobook, the narrator does a frankly incredible job. I look forward to Worrad's next one.

'Flat Earth News' by Nick Davies; 'Bad News' by Mark Pack

Two books on how awful the news industry is, which I read in parallel. 

I was impressed with 'Flat Earth News' (2008) by Nick Davies, which is about how and why so much falsehood ends up in the news. His titular 'flat earth news' refers to stories which appear true but would quickly be shown to be false if anyone bothered to check. It's a book about fake news and the need for fact-checking way before those topics became so massive in the public consciousness, post-2016.

A lot of mainstream coverage of these topics, by journalists not wanting to attack their own profession and colleagues, has pinned the blame on social media. Davies shows that all that falsehood and distortion is a product of decades-long trends in the news industry. The Internet and social media has accelerated those trends, dialling them up to 11.

He opens the book by explaining that a lot of news industry criticism is done by outsiders who don't actually know how the industry works, so their analyses miss an awful lot and tend to focus on a few basics: the influence of advertisers and owners.

Newspapers want to please their advertisers; owners want their papers to push certain lines. As a result, the news industry presents a version of reality that is acceptable to corporate advertisers and billionaire media moguls. Davies accepts that advertisers and owners do influence editorial decisions, but far less than popular media criticism would have you believe.

Advertisers don't care that much about the political stances of where the adverts show up, as long as people are seeing the adverts. The only time that advertisers properly influence the editorial line is when the story is directly about the advertiser - such as when the Daily Telegraph refused to run stories about HSBC's money laundering, because the bank was one of their big advertisers. 

Historically, a lot of newspaper owners wanted their papers to push their political opinions - they were propaganda outlets first and foremost, a way for the wealthy to push for what they thought was positive social and political change. However, through the 20th century, newspapers were bought up by corporate owners who saw the papers primarily as a business which made a profit. They would still influence the paper's line when doing so would benefit the business, but the motivation was profit and business growth - not the desire for particular social and political change.

In order to increase profits, the new owners cut staffing numbers, and wanted the remaining journalists to write more and cheaper stories, which fuelled the rise of 'churnalism' - writing stories based largely on material already written by someone else - and meant a massive reduction in the time that journalists had to properly check their stories. 

The quality and veracity of the stories didn't matter, so long as the paper was making a profit. Reporters were encouraged to make stories out of anything they could to fill space - especially on the local papers. I thought a lot about Nottinghamshire Live when reading this book.

Churnalists are reliant on others having written the stories, and so the majority of news stories are reproductions or slight rewordings of press releases, PR, and stories from news agencies.

Wire agencies are like the news industry wholesalers - they write stories which are then purchased by news outlets to present to the public, either reproduced word-for-word, or altered and expanded upon depending on the outlet. Different papers and websites have almost exactly the same story in almost exactly the same words because they've all purchased the same story from the same wire agency. 

This is far more obvious to see nowadays with online news, but back when people would read just one newspaper, it would be unlikely that the readers would notice that almost the exact same report appeared in multiple papers.

The wire agencies have also suffered from staffing cuts over the years, and the demand for more and cheaper stories has led to a decline in both the range of topics covered and the quality of the stories for sale.

There's an excellent chapter on the various ways the PR industry manipulates and colludes with journalists, and the various tricks PR companies use to create pseudo-news and pseudo-events, with fake grassroots (astro turf) organizations, and fake experts (who are just PR employees). Reporters desperate for stories will happily run something handed to them ready-written by a PR agency and present it as news. Many journalists are in regular contact with PR agencies, requesting stories from them that fit certain themes. 

PR companies understand the time pressures that journalists are under, and know that they are extremely unlikely to check whether the story they're given is true. And so, too, do politicians, government press officers, and the intelligence agencies. 

There's another excellent chapter on media manipulation by intelligence agencies. If you visit some of the more paranoid far-left places on the Internet, you'll likely encounter people who label everything they disagree with as CIA propaganda, and any media figure (incl. YouTubers) or outlet that is insufficiently left-wing will be accused of being CIA-funded. Davies' exploration of Cold War CIA activity shows there is a bit of grounding to this paranoia. 

After 9/11, the US and UK's strategic communications (propaganda) operations were massively expanded. Davies explores this through a few case studies of misinformation, and by attending a conference on the subject and speaking to a lot of people directly involved (on condition that the quotes are not attributed to a name). 

One of his sources paints a hilarious-yet-terrifying picture of state disinformation campaigns: all these different agencies and teams, are each putting out their own misinformation, but doing so in a chaotic, uncoordinated fashion, so that false information put out by one agency, another agency will pick up and treat as legitimate intelligence. And that's before we even start to think about the chaos caused by the misinformation campaigns of hostile regimes.

Journalistic time pressures; the inability to check stories; manipulation by PR, politicians, press officers, and propagandists. These are major systemic causes of the falsehood, distortion, and trivia in the media, which ultimately presents a version of reality favourable towards the powerful and the wealthy. And then we can add in the influence of advertisers, owners, and the fact that most journalists come from similar middle class and upwards backgrounds (because getting into the industry often involves unpaid internships), and we can start to see why news media is so full of falsehood, why the reality it presents is so detached from the lived reality of ordinary people.

I was pleased with this book, it made me even more disillusioned with the news media industry. 

(The final three chapters are, admittedly, weaker than the rest of the book: they are case studies looking at the decline of particular newspapers - The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Daily Mail - and Davies unfortunately gets a bit too personal in his attacks on specific journalists.)

'Bad News' by Mark Pack is a guide to spotting distortion and falsehood when you're reading the news. It is quite handy having all this advice in one book, but the chapters are each broken down into smaller sub-chapters which each feel like the length of a blog post. Pack makes reference to his blog multiple times, and this book unfortunately feels like a series of blog posts but together. Each topic is covered briefly, and there is very little sense of a narrative building throughout the book. The short sub-chapters meant the flow of reading was often interrupted. I found it enjoyable to dip into, but not so enjoyable to read for a prolonged period. The footnotes were also annoying, adding further interruption to the flow (in many cases the information in the footnotes could easily have been omitted, or incorporated into the text proper).