As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then enter one of the Inns of Court as a trainee barrister, before embarking on a period of pupillage. If all goes well, you may be called to the bar. Play your cards right and you might take silk, and then as you reach your fifties, with a following wind, you may be invited to become a judge. Ten years later, with a few widely admired judgments under your belt, you may reasonably claim to be a ‘top judge’.
If I am to endure the peculiarly dysfunctional queue at Gail’s, I want choice. Where is the cornbread?
The alternative is to become a minor local magistrate and get caught in flagrante with a farm animal. At this point every tabloid newspaper will splash your photograph across its front page with the headline: ‘Top Judge in Goat-Sex Shocker.’
I never intended to become one of those tin-hatted nutters who obsess about the ‘mainstream media’. But it is increasingly hard to ignore the extent to which the media distort the world to suit their own ends: rather than what is important becoming a story, what is a good story is made out to be important. Hence ‘top judge’. Yet there is a world of difference between what is important and what is newsworthy. I spent the years after 2016 in a completely frustrated state, not because I was a fanatical Remainer or Leaver, but simply because I thought that leaving the European Union was perhaps only 5 per cent as important as the attention it received.
This is worse than it once was. For one thing, our rapid news cycle is increasingly in the grip of a bizarre feedback loop. If you visit the newsroom of a national paper, you will see lots of screens displaying Sky News. Then, when you go home in the evening and turn on Sky News, you will see people discussing what is in tomorrow’s newspapers. It’s turtles all the way down.
As a consequence, certain stories become absurdly over-amplified, whereas others are neglected entirely. The Post Office scandal, which broke in Computer Weekly in 2009 (read that again – 2009), went nowhere for 15 years, despite the best efforts of Private Eye. There are at present many conflicts other than those in the Middle East, but you’ll need to Google them.
I call this distortion ‘the sourdough effect’. It is a form of ‘Fisherian runaway’ where one manifestation of something arbitrarily comes to dominate a whole ecosystem to the exclusion of everything else. I quite like sourdough bread and I am grateful that it exists. But let’s be frank, it’s not nearly as nice as its ubiquity suggests. If I am to endure the peculiarly dysfunctional queue at Gail’s – where the coffee-ordering process at the end creates a totally inefficient bottleneck among its impatient and somewhat self-regarding clientèle – I want choice. Where is the cornbread? The Irish soda bread? The challah? The pao de alfarroba? No dice. It’s bloody sourdough all the way down. Nobody knows what ‘sourdough’ means – it has simply become a shorthand for ‘posh bread’, in the same way that ‘organic’ became a shorthand for ‘posh food’ and IPA became a shorthand for ‘artisan beer’ (in France, where I am writing this, you ask for ‘Une Eepa’).
The tech equivalent of sourdough is currently artificial intelligence. It’s highly important, yes, but it dominates both discussion and investment to an unhealthy extent. There are plenty of soda-bread technologies out there which may be equally important and worthy of investment – think video-conferencing, say, or Starlink. The effect on the world if only 15 per cent of people are free to live where they like seems potentially immense.
But these changes are slow. Most big, enduring changes involve significant behavioural change, which is by its nature slow. But what happens slowly is never newsworthy. Unless it involves a goat.
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