Social media

On a recent sodden weekend walk, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking: it’s not so bad. Not the slugs or the sky or the rain making its way down a gap between neck and waterproof. But I couldn’t do it. Losing heart, I turned back. Glump, glump, glump through the puddles. It rained through breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Same the next day. And the day after. I wore grey and sighed at the window. But I am aberrant. Melancholy is against the rules nowadays. I should have put on my yellow wellies, twirled my spotty umbrella, photographed myself in the garden and put it online with the hashtag

My pen hovers — but refuses to touch the postal ballot paper. I pour a drink (I won’t say whether claret, schnapps or English ale) and break off to watch Versailles, with its parade of lecherous continental backstabbers. The blood stirs, but still I cannot choose. So I defer the moment of decision, Remain or Leave, until after a short trip to France… Middle-aged match Meanwhile, business as usual. Microsoft is spending $26 billion to acquire LinkedIn, the social network for job-seekers. That looks a crazy price for a venture which lost $166 million last year on revenues of $2.9 billion and has never been regarded as cool. But what

Not only are today’s young girls having to work hard on their abs, butts and glutes, now the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian are instructing the poor lambs in the art of keeping their ‘lady garden’ in mint condition. Subject to the approval of their best mates, apparently, the formerly taboo subject of ‘down south’ is now open for discussion. Some celebs now cultivate, manicure and moisturise the ‘no-fly zone’ with as much effort as they put into their faces. Whatever next? Will Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt suddenly inform all studs how to take care of their gentleman’s gentleman? I’ve been on Twitter for four years now

The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’. The ‘virus of liberty’ was spreading, it said. Now it seems that the virus has been wiped out. We live our online lives in a dystopian nightmare of Twittermobs, ‘safety councils’, official procedures for ‘forgetting’ inconvenient facts, and the arrest of people for being

‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question was Microsoft’s first great experiment in artificial intelligence, given the tone of a teenage girl and the name of Tay. The plan was for it — her? — to lurk on social media, Twitter mainly, and listen, and interact, learn how to be a person like everybody else. On a public-relations level, at least, the experiment did not go swimmingly. ‘Gas the kikes, race war now!’ Tay was tweeting, after about a day. Big Hitler fan, it turns out. Not so fond of anybody else. ‘Why are you racist?’ somebody

You can always tell when a public figure has said something with the ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or two later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology. Often there is a sort of partial non-apology apology first: I’m sorry if I upset anyone, but I broadly stand by what I said, even if my wording was perhaps a little awkward. That, however, won’t do — by now the hounds of hell are howling at the back door. Social media is beside itself, wrapped up in its moronic inferno, the cybersphere splenetic with self-righteous outrage. People

Whenever I hear a leftie complain about being abused on Twitter, I think: ‘You should try being me.’ A case in point is the journalist Caitlin Moran, who has often taken up the cause of feminists threatened with violence. Among other things, she campaigned for a ‘report abuse’ button in the hope of making Twitter a safer place, more in keeping with ‘the spirit that the internet was conceived and born in — one of absolute optimism’. A noble sentiment, but I couldn’t help taking this with a pinch of salt after the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of feminists on Twitter. Take the time I appeared on a

Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived to save teenkind. Poor nieces. Though they scuff their Uggs on the carpet and stare longingly at the door, I carry on. When I was your age, I say, we had no access to boys. Those of us at mixed schools had a few limp options, and the rest relied on miracles: a hottie met by chance on holiday; a friend’s brother’s friend. There was no social media, no looking someone up, so unless you bagged your hottie sharpish he vanished. Boys surfaced like rare sea-mammals for single sightings before

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year the greatest Greek writer since Homer turns 80 (but we’ll keep quiet about that for the moment). Our world is so stuck in reverse that a woman who was stabbed in Miami during the Art Basel shindig, and was bleeding and begging for help, was mistaken for an artwork and ignored. The woman survived but will art? Conceptual art must be the biggest con since Bernie Madoff and then some. And speaking of con artists, I’ve never had any respect for Mark Zuckerberg, someone who is reputed to have copied

  I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes to one. A waft of gravy in the air indicated that Christmas lunch awaited in an adjacent room. One agenda item to go: Colin the company secretary made a throat-cutting gesture to Kevin from health and safety, who had exceeded his allotted time for a presentation on disposal of toxic waste from Indonesian supplier factories. Coming after Maureen the HR director’s Powerpoint on ‘issues around diversity’, this had entirely lost the attention of the board, most of whom, Colin observed, were fiddling with their phones under the table. Except for

Sriracha, for the uninitiated, is a chilli sauce, thicker and sweeter than Tabasco, with a garlicky tang. They eat it in Thailand and Vietnam, though the world’s top brand is made in California with a distinctive rooster on the bottle. Once you have Sriracha in the fridge, you find yourself adding it to many ad hoc meals: fried eggs, falafel, corn fritters. It’s ketchup for grown-ups: a comforting dab of something sweet and spicy that makes everything taste familiar. I’m fond enough of Sriracha, as mass-market condiments go. But mere fondness does not cut it in this age of social media. Sriracha is one of many foods — see also

After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering emails. Quotidian stuff. An early dinner with one of my sons, and I was in bed at a decent hour. Checking Twitter, I began to realise that a grim spectacle was unfolding in Paris. Soon enough, on-the-ground reportage was joined by rumour, inaccuracy and blatant misinformation. That’s the problem with ‘rolling news’ — and Twitter has become part of that industry. On the TV, the reports were more measured but far less immediate, with repetitious footage of police cars and emergency workers. Twitter was the more immersive and pulsating place

Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until his quip about spaghetti. I read about the tweet in a newspaper, as I’ve never used social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — and hope that I never will. Why would I, unless I wanted to make trouble for myself? Not everyone needs to know what you’re doing all of the time. Or any of the time, for that matter. They say that the most destructive four-letter word in the digital domain is ‘send’. (Just as the scariest three words in American literature are Joyce Carol Oates.) I recently received

I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that I think about them at all, I think that they are an ephemeral by-product of those creepy ‘virtual worlds’ in which obsessed gamers eventually go mad; that only such lost souls could seriously believe unregulated online money might eventually supplant the state-backed real thing; and that fashionable belief in them can only lead to fraud and loss. In short, I concluded some time ago, they are probably the work of Satan. ‘Every normal person above the age of six and not over-affected by chemical stimulants should [grasp] that societal concepts