Social media

We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or at least being seen to, is the height of rudeness, and just not very cool. But English snobbery is in fact as potent as before — and possibly even more insidious. Among my age group of twentysomethings, it is rife. Our elders might think of us as fiercely egalitarian, and in some ways that’s true. We aren’t as obviously obsessed with class. But we’ve found sneakier ways of being snobs. It starts with social media. Everyone has an online profile, and that has created a new generation of ultra snobs,

Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of sources, and use statistical modelling to prove… um, whatever bullshit conclusion you hoped to prove in the first place. For all the excitement of the information age, we must remember that self-serving delusions like nothing better than large quantities of information. The internet was a gift to conspiracy theorists, for instance. But confirmation bias is also more pronounced among the educated. (No one measures the negative consequences of higher education, but a naïve faith in universals has to be one of them.) Back in the analogue age, people couldn’t avoid

When you get into a taxi, there’s usually a framed sheet of paper describing what you pay for your trip: the cost of every mile travelled at different times of day, and the price of waiting time. As digital screens become ever cheaper, it won’t be long before someone suggests that there is no need to have these things any more. Instead a button will appear on the taxi’s new seatback touchscreen which will reveal the tariff when pressed. All very sensible, you may think. Except for this. The nature of a promise displayed on paper is subtly different to a promise displayed on a screen. Anything writ in liquid

Ever since a Twitter troll was elected 45th President of the United States, the Twitterati has agonised over who to blame. But since it was Twitter that gave American voters unfettered access to Donald Trump’s brain, they really ought to be blaming Twitter itself. It’s not possible to say anything balanced or nuanced in 140 characters — that’s a format for jokes, insults and outrage. If you want to seize the world’s attention today, you must troll or be trolled on Twitter. And since this is the one skill at which Trump is utterly unrivalled, he’s now busy trolling both America and himself. When a man with barely any followers

When I was young my recurring nightmare was that I would die and be reincarnated as a polo pony. I squeezed in lots of polo during the years I played, at least three matches per week, mostly in Paris, and I felt that polo ponies had the kind of deal the mass media are now handing Trump. I wasn’t mad about the people I played with either. Back then, in the Sixties and Seventies, fat businessmen who cantered hired good Argentines to carry the can, but picked up the cup after strolling around the field and yelling quite a lot. Well, now I’m over it, but have an even worse

I think on balance I would prefer people to demonstrate their opposition to political developments — Brexit, the forthcoming state visit of Donald Trump and so on — by setting fire to themselves in the manner of outraged Buddhist monks, rather than simply by clicking ‘sign’ on some internet petition. I think the self-immolation thing carries more force. It is true that a mass conflagration of a million and a half people in Trafalgar Square would, in the short term, greatly exacerbate the appalling smog afflicting London as a consequence of wood-burning stoves. But as most of the signatories of the petition against Trump coming probably own all of those

Here we go again, my 40th Christmas column in a row, and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed the last one. This is a very happy time of year — parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man and happiness all around. Mind you, there is an old calypso that says: ‘If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife…’. I’m not so sure about that; in my book, the prettier the woman the happier it makes me, but I could be wrong. My instinct tells me that a pretty woman keeps a man on his

Last week I was asked to give a talk about generation snowflake. This was at a breakfast organised by a recruitment company called GTI Solutions and the idea was that I would provide an urban anthropologist’s take on this new tribe for the benefit of their corporate clients, most of whom are thinking about how to recruit them and, once they’ve got them, how to keep them happy. This has given me an idea about a new consultancy service I could provide. The main challenge thrown up by employing these new graduates, it seems to me, is that they won’t be particularly good at communicating with members of other generations

There are only three infallible rules in advertising. Be distinctive. Make a lot of noise. And try to feature a cute animal somewhere. Had Donald Trump followed my advice and bought a springer spaniel he would have won California. For a man with such tiny hands to be elected to the world’s highest office, I think we can all agree, is a tragic loss to proctology. But it is also a remarkable lesson in how to play the media. Hillary had $2 billion to spend; what Trump miraculously found was that with each outburst of political Tourette’s, he got more airtime than her, and for free. So eager were the mainstream

The publication of private emails by Colin Powell has spread panic in Washington. Now nobody feels safe. Some prominent people have even deleted their entire email accounts, fearing that their private messages will be hacked and revealed to the world. It hasn’t been the leaking of official secrets of the kind associated with WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden that has caused the present alarm; it has been the exposure of the ordinary gossip on which Washington thrives. Powell, a former secretary of state, always seemed a cautious, buttoned-up kind of public servant, but he turns out to be just as uninhibited as anyone else, calling Donald Trump a ‘national disgrace’, Hillary