Art book sale!

I’m having a bit of a clear-out. Here are some of the art books I’ve accumulated over the years. All priced to sell (I don’t think you’ll find any of them for less online) and all available for immediate purchase on eBay.

Histoire(s) du Cinema – Jean-Luc Godard

The four volumes of Jean-Luc Godard's 'Histoire(s) du Cinema' laid out in a row a counter. Elegant, dark blue coveres with white and light san-serif lettering.
Godard

Four hardback volumes and five CDs in a very solid slip-case. This is a splendid thing. The whole soundtrack of Godard’s amazing eight-part TV history of the movies (a project that some – including me, I think – consider to be his most interesting work) plus four beautifully designed books in a handsome slipcase. And it’s an ECM edition, which I guess makes perfect sense. Buy Histoire(s) du Cinema on eBay

Semiotext(e) Architecture

The chaotic front cover of a large-format architecture book called Semiotext(e) Architecture. Food, pill packets, wires, photographs - all jumble together.
Semiotext(e)

One of the more bonkers Semiotext(e) editions: a three-foot, in-your-face, on-your-lap monster. Chaotic and frankly nausea-inducing design – kind of David Carson on acid. Complex texts struggling with graphic design that’s intended to give you a visual and conceptual headache. Inside you’ll find Atom Egoyan, Félix Guattari, Arthur Kroker, Catherine Ingraham and other members of the po-mo and theory elite, in a volume too big to open in most city flats. Buy Semiotext(e) Architecture on eBay.

From my Window – André Kertész

Front cover of a book of photos by Hungarian-American artist André Kertész. Glass ornaments on a windowsill refract the light from the New York sky beyond.
André Kertész

This is such a gorgeous book. I remember loving the fact that Kertész carried on taking photographs and making his beautiful art after he couldn’t get out so much by turning his camera to the view from the windows of his apartment in New York. Now that I’m older (still getting out, though!) I find this even more moving. A great artist who narrowed his focus so that he could stay productive. Wonderful. I also kind of love the fact that the cover is unevenly faded, presumably by the sunlight from the windows in my house. Buy From My Window on eBay.

Chris Marker – Staring Back

Front cover of a book of black and white photos by Chris Marker. A young woman looks seriously at the camera, the background thrown out of focus by a large aperture. She is smoking a cigarette
Chris Marker

Lovely book of black and white photos by the great Chris Marker. I guess we knew he was an obsessive photographer of his world: his first feature, a film I’ve always found to be so unsettling I can barely watch it, was made entirely from still photos. This is a gentle book, maybe not so hard-edged as the movies. It’s beautifully printed, in the way photography books ought to be, and it’s in a lovely approximately 35mm aspect ratio, which make it even more treasurable. Click the link to see more of the photos. Buy Staring Back on eBay.

Ralph Gibson – Syntax

A high-contrast black and white portrait of the side of a man's face. The front cover of a book of photos by American artist Ralph Gibson
Ralph Gibson

A beautiful and quite rare collection of photographs by American art photographer Ralph Gibson. I loved this kind of cool abstraction when I was trying to get started with photography. In fact I still find the camera roll on my mobile to be full of squared-off urban scenes, grids, shadows and so on. Gibson’s obviously still lodged in my brain somewhere. The book is in beautiful condition and the photographs, printed in the highest quality, are among the most distinctive of their era. A treasure. Buy Syntax on eBay.

Branded Youth and Other Stories – Bruce Weber

A young man leans, asleep, against a huge pig , lying calmly in straw. The cover of a book of photos by Bruce Weber called Branded Youth
Bruce Weber

It’s a beautifully-printed, heavy hardback published for Bruce Weber’s popular exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1997. The title refers to a story of some wild-child teenagers Weber met in Montana, who in an act of teenage bonding had branded each other on the shoulder with the heated blade of an army bayonet. It’s a bit of a gay classic and long out-of-print. Buy Branded Youth on eBay.

Sol LeWitt – PhotoGrids

Grids of drain covers photographed by artist Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt

Sorry, this one’s gone. A beautiful and quite rare paperback from an important phase in Sol LeWitt‘s career. Over 400 photographs of found grids from his travels around the world: doors, windows, fencing, gratings and manholes. Photographs of grids laid out in grids, a visual exploration of the grid’s organizing influence on our everyday lives. The cover is scuffed but the interior is perfect.

Allan Sekula – Fish Story

Cover of Allan Sekula's book 'Fish Story'. At the top a photo looking forward along the top of a container ship - in the background a cloudy sky and choppy sea
Allan Sekula

Sekula spent his whole career trying to invent and then popularise a politicised, realist art photography. He was a kind of photographic Brecht. This book is typical – the tip of a vast iceberg. Fish Story wasnt’t just a book of photos or an exhibition, it was a huge, multi-year, documentary project that traced the entire fishing supply chain. This book documents the project. This edition was specially printed to coincide with a show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London and comes with the original printed material from the exhibition. It also has an updated foreword by Laleh Khalili, an academic who has studied global supply chains. Fascinating and beautiful. Buy Fish Story on eBay.

Bernard Tschumi – Event-Cities

Front cover of an architecture book by Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. A red and black duotone image of a modernist structure
Bernard Tschumi

One of a famous architecture series created for MIT Press. This one’s now quite rare as far as I can tell. It’s a double-phone-book 600-page collection of Bernard Tschumi‘s most important projects. Gorgeous, head-spinning 1990s design (very MIT), packed with provocative illustrations and texts. A po-mo jewel. Buy Event-Cities on eBay.

Gilles Deleuze – Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation

The front covers of a two-volume book by Gilles Deleuze called Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation.
Gilles Deleuze

I remember spotting this in the Pompidou bookshop and being brought up sharply by an unexpected collision of Bacon’s decadent London modernism and glamorous French philosophy – I didn’t know these worlds had ever met, or that they could. It’s all aesthetics, objects of perception (‘percepts’) and sensation.

It’s a beautifully packaged two-volume set in a slip-case. Volume 1 is the paintings and volume 2 is Gilles Deleuze’s essay on the painter and his work. I bought this edition during the gallery’s 1996 Bacon exhibition. It’s in essentially perfect condition. Buy Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation on eBay.

Bill Brandt – Portraits

Front cover of a collection of photographs by Bill Brandt. White text out of black and a sombre portrtait of a very serious man in a large greenhouse
Bill Brandt

This is the catalogue from a landmark 1982 exhibition. Brandt was an enormous inspiration to me when I was beginning as a photographer – something about the unlimited possibilities of a wide-angle lens and a roll of HP5. This is a lovely, slim introduction to his portraiture. From the gallery’s description of the show: “Bill Brandt has for some time been recognised as one of the established masters of British photography. This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major retrospective devoted entirely to his portraits: from the earliest, taken while an assistant to Man Ray in Paris in the late 1920s, to the famous series of poets photographed for Lilliput and Picture Post in the war years. There are also examples of his later work, and many recent portraits which will be seen for the first time.” Buy Bill Brandt: Portraits on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – Atlas

The front cover of Atlas, a collection of found art, drawings, photographs and painting from German artist Gerhard Richter. In the middle of the cover one of the artist's works in which a young woman in a floral jacket turns away from the viewer
Gerhard Richter

This is a mighty tome – one of the many clever and beautiful editions the Richter machine seems to produce. It’s a pretty special and quite rare edition of a career-spanning collection of sketches, collages and photographs from Gerhard Richter, who must be one of the most collected contemporary artists (imagine how rich he must be!). This material has been collected by the artist since he was a young man (click the eBay link to see some of the book’s layouts). It’s a beautifully-produced, oversized (34x24x3.5cm, 388 pages) monograph that’s considered rare (and the marks on the cover, like a artist’s accidental marks, are all part of the design). Buy Atlas on eBay.

Ava Hofman – poems

Front cover of a book of poetry by Ava Hofman, apparently designed to look like the cover of a very worn old music manuscript, brown and stained.
Ava Hofman

This is a lovely, slim paperback that’s somewhere between a collection of poems and an artist’s book. A self-consciously visual collection that’s really charming. More pics from inside the book in the eBay listing. Buy Ava Hofman – Poems on eBay.

Bani Abidi – the Speech Writer

Bani Abidi

And this is an actual artist’s book. I should say I don’t think I’ve ever been very sympathetic to the idea of an artist’s book: “artists, you do the art; authors, you focus on the books.” Maybe I’m just being pedantic. I mean this one is nuts, though. Click through to the eBay listing and you’ll see that it’s substantially more than a book – more of a puzzle or a card game embedded in a book. I can’t actually remember where I acquired this but it’s genuinely unique. Buy The Speech Writer on eBay.

Hillman in Hendon and in Tehran

Is the Israeli attack on Iran the first on a country that manufactures electric cars by one that doesn’t?

A man proudly leans on his beautifully-restored 1970s Hillman Hunter estate car, in a deep orange colour. Behind him the A5 road in North London and a row of shops.

I met this gorgeous car and its proud owner in Hendon the other day. He’d first met the Hillman Hunter in Iran when he was a kid. Not this one – it would have had a Paykan badge on it. That was the brand used by an Iranian firm called Iran Khodro that licenced the design from British manufacturer Rootes Group. He’s just restored this one, in its original, gorgeous, deep orange colour (he’s about to start on the engine).

When we met, next to the car, parked up on the wide pavement in West Hendon, North London, we bonded because our families had both owned a car like this when we were kids (I’ll be honest, ours was the downmarket Avenger, although also the estate model). The Paykan version, cut off from its British roots, survived the Islamic revolution and was manufactured 100% natively for almost fifty years, hanging on long beyond its design life because war and sanctions prevented it from being replaced.

The footage we’re seeing from the attacks on Tehran shows the expected mix of European and Asian cars in the rubble and in the lines of cars leaving the city. Iran’s 1970s ambitions for import replacement-led growth fell apart when the Islamic Republic was definitively kicked out of the family of nations after the revolution but Iran did not stop making cars and Iranians did not stop loving them.

Oportunities for the country to restart its integration with the world economy have come and gone – cars licenced from Renault, Citröen and Kia were manufactured there until sanctions were tightened in the 2010s. The latest set-back looks as close to final as any we’ve seen so far, of course. If President Trump sends American forces to assist it’ll probably be decades before another car is manufactured in Iran, under licence or otherwise (pretty sure he’d be furious if he found out they used to build Cadillacs there).

Jacked-up Peugeot 405 in Iran.
From Autopian.com

Iranian car culture looks fascinating and distinctive – when you’re shut out of a globalised passion like cars and car modification you’ll pretty soon develop a kind of mutant culture that celebrates different values. For instance, in Iran the unglamorous Peugeot 405 (another one of those cars built under licence – you’ve definitely ridden in one if you’ve ever hailed a cab in half of Europe) is a focus for Iranian hotrodders but they don’t drop their 405s to make them look cool like an American or a Brit would, they jack them up – and this, I read, is a complicated cultural reference that has its origin in the fact that the car was tough enough to be used in smuggling operations, in trackless border areas where you’d need a bit of extra ground clearance. Locally manufactured mash-ups – a Mazda chassis with what looks like a Renault body, for instance – are a solution to the embargo on parts and machinery. The Paykan itself has had a long afterlife too and modified versions are cult vehicles with younger drivers who’ve developed a freaky design culture of their own (and of course they show up in videogames).

Very compact, cream-coloured four-door car viewed from the side.
The Pars Khodro Electric Hatchback

Foreign car brands are still built in Iran but they’re not European in origin any more, they’re Chinese. Some are built under licence by Iran Khodro, the people who built the Paykan, including this EV, which looks pretty cool and is licenced from a Chinese firm called Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co, which just happens to be a subsidiary of global car giant Stellantis, parent company of all-American brands Jeep and Chrysler and RAM trucks. Oops (and it’s not the only Iranian-built EV). Some of these cars are manufactured directly by Chinese or joint-venture companies, firms that evidently have little fear of sanctions (the Tehran Auto Show, in January of this year, looks like it was pretty busy – over thirty Chinese brands were present).

Iran has a fast-growing population of 90 Million, huge reserves of oil, 16% of the world’s gas reserves and a hunger to participate in the world economy. The bleak and brutal regime of the mullahs has evidently not even slightly repressed the desire of Iranians to enjoy sophisticated consumer goods and modern lifestyles. Historians should note that the current attacks by Israel might well be the first by a country that does not manufacture electric cars on one that does.

Homayoun Ershadi in a still from Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. He looks impassively over the wheel of a car
Homayoun Ershadi in Taste of Cherry

I couldn’t finish without endorsing the movies of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami here. The man was evidently a car nut. In his beautiful Taste of Cherry, a man drives around Tehran in a classic Range Rover (which looks old enough to have preceded the revolution) looking for someone who will bury him when he kills himself, which he has impassively resolved to do.

Still from Iranian film Ten, by Abbas Kiarostami. Mania Akbari plays a Tehran taxi driver, behind the wheel, her hand raised in front of her
Mania Akbari in Ten

In Ten, the action is confined to the front seats of a Tehran taxi, driven by a young woman whose conversations with ten different passengers add up to a beautiful, humane film.


  • It turns out that the car is a battleground in Iran’s permament dialogue between Islamic doctrine and civil society. Specifically whether a car can be regarded as a private place where a woman might not be obliged to wear her headscarf, for instance (looks like that’s a ‘no’).
  • Fascinated also to learn that the Iranian car industry (which is the biggest in the region by a long way) has an export element and that there’s a plan to export cars built by a joint venture in Azerbaijan to Russia, where the ambition is to ‘soak up the bottom end’ of the market’. Sanctioned states got to stick together.

Nationalise what?

Public ownership as end-of-life care.

This is a quick note in response to the head-spinning fact that, apparently, both ends of the British Parliamentary political spectrum are now positively disposed to the idea of nationalising British Steel.

I mean everyone’s into. Nigel Farage’s into it. Keir Starmer’s into it. But, let’s be clear, it’s a very specific kind of nationalisation these new champions of public ownership are advancing. It’s not the grand, rational, humane – even noble – kind of public ownership that inspired the post-war generations – roughly the boomers and the X-ers – that these guys are after.

Obviously, no one in this story is reasserting ‘the idea of the public’, they want nothing to do with the shared or the collectively-owned or the mutually-beneficial either. And certainly not the emancipatory idea of putting important aspects of our lives under democratic control or involving ordinary people in their governance. None of that, obviously.

Don’t nationalise that

What Labour and Reform are calling for when they contemplate taking British Steel – what’s left of it – back into public ownership, for instance, is, let’s face it, a shitty, rushed, contingent emergency nationalisation. An urgent takekover of a failing business that employs 2,700 people – roughly the same number as fancy cake shop chain Gails. It’s a last-minute resuscitation for an industry that’s on its last legs anyway and probably can’t be saved (this morning I read that it might even be less than that – it might simply be an agreement to supply coal to the business so it can keep the blast furnaces alight for a bit longer – even sadder).

And, to state the obvious, this kind of miserable, thin, last-resort act is the worst kind of solution – a refusal of all the promise of public ownership, of its potential to contribute to a revived public realm, with institutions and organisations that we trust and can expect to act on our behalves.

Also, of course, if what you’re nationalising is just the weakest and most fragile parts of the economy (and the parts that are in deep financial trouble), the odds that it can actually work are low. So what you’re likely to wind up with is, to put it directly, a failed nationalisation. A nationalisation that, when it does fail, can only undermine the idea, set back the whole enterprise, the promise and the potential of public ownership in other parts of the economy.

Nationalise this

This will obviously look like the most ridiculous, starry-eyed naivety in the present moment but what we ought to be nationalising is not the diminished, collapsing parts of the economy but the big, active, socially and economically important parts – the sectors of the economy that employ a lot of ordinary people and especially young people and people who need better contracts, more security and bigger salaries.

So let’s start by nationalising hospitality (Starbucks? Publicbucks more like!) and the night-time economy (the people’s nightclubs!), the delivery economy (Deliveroo run in everyone’s interests!), retail (publicly-owned shopping malls, like People’s Palaces!), entertainment (cinema chains that belong to all of us!)… everything with an app or a big shopfront or an outsize place in the lives of the young, everything that touches their lives. Not the rusting, already failed relics of their parents’ lives – heartbreaking though it is to watch them fall appart – but the vigorous, now elements of the culture and the economy, where public ownership isn’t a desperate final act but an investment in the promise and potential of people and nation.

AI-generated image of a publicly-owned cinema. An old-fashioned marquee with a neon sign reading 'The People's Cinema'. The initial prompt was: 'generate an image of a publicly-owned cinema, part of a chain of cinemas owned and operated in the public good, a joyful place that serves and entertains and put on the best, biggest, brightest movies that people will love'
I asked ChatGPT for a picture of a publicly-owned cinema.

  • (all right, I know, it’s ridiculous – a fantasy… the idea that the dourest, tidiest, most grey and workmanlike and timid government in modern history might embrace public ownership as an expression of joy or an uninihibted investment in a brighter future is my silliest idea yet).
  • Obviously. there’s some day-to-day politics here. Farage is not what you’d call one of nature’s nationalisers – quite the reverse – but he has the political freedom, in this moment, as an insurgent political figure with no actual power, to advance a pretty ambitious and explicitly patriotic programme. He frames it as a national emergency: “There are three days left to save primary steel production in Britain.” And Starmer, facing local elections in a few weeks that could honestly be a bloodbath, and not just for the Tories, can’t let Farage have the topic to himself, hence: “all options are on the table, including nationalisation.” One of these men – Farage obvs – sees a political opportunity in advancing nationalisation; the other sees a threat and responds to it with a weak statement that does the absolute minimum, essentially acknowledging nationalisation as a last-resort possibility. But neither of these men – no one on the political scene, in fact – can admit the obvious: that rescuing a dying steel plant, a fraction of a fraction of a strategic national asset, would be pointless. An unstrategic waste of money. An empty political gesture.

On the beach after the gold rush – annotated

I wrote this article for Mark Ellen at The Word1 fourteen years ago (I hope he won’t mind my putting it up here). The events described – my stupid progress through the stupid dotcom boom (and the stupid crash that followed it) already felt like a long time ago then… What you ought to do is scroll down and read the footnotes – that’s where I’ve put the gags.


When dotcom fever hit ’90s London, companies led by young chancers like Steve Bowbrick could suddenly attract millions of pounds of investment. These were the days of indoor lawns, beautiful people floating around with orchids, endless PowerPoint presentations, boundless optimism and illusory profits. It couldn’t last. It didn’t2.

A page from the December 2011 issue of British magazine The Word. An article about the dotcom boom in London and New York by Steve Bowbrick.
(note indoor lawn at top right)

Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11. I was getting drunk – oblivious to the world-changing calamity unfolding in New York City – in a gastropub in Kentish Town3. I was with the finance guys. Our business, a web-based email service called another.com4, was in trouble. It was over a year since the NASDAQ5 – the hi-tech stock market – had crashed and two years since we had raised well over £6 million from investors for the business. That money, plus more we’d raised in the meantime, was running out fast, and we were a long way from making a profit. We weren’t ready to acknowledge it yet, but our party was well and truly over. The lunches were getting longer and the amount of booze consumed increasing. When we returned to the office that day, the TV screens were all tuned to the news from New York and I’m pretty sure that’s when we knew it was finished. How could the whole vain, febrile dotcom nonsense survive what we were seeing on our TV screens? It couldn’t, of course. But it was another year before we finally gave up the ghost and sold the business for a fraction of a fraction of its fantasy dotcom value.

And so ended my decade in the dotcom business6: a story that began in the early ’90s and consumed essentially the whole of my thirties.

In 1993, my friend Ivan Pope7 began publishing a magazine about the World Wide Web called 3W8. The magazine morphed9 into a company we called Webmedia later that year. It seemed obvious that writing about the web couldn’t possibly be as cool as building actual websites. We beetled off to Companies House10 and paid over the fee to start a limited company. We called it Webmedia because we suspected that the fragile bundle of protocols and standards emerging from under a mountain in Switzerland was going to turn into a medium. The fate of the web wasn’t at all obvious back then. I remember typing a 3W subhead that read “there are already hundreds of web sites.” There were many more, of course, by the time we got started11 but it was still far from clear that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web12 of academic papers and research data and Cambridge coffee pots13 would evolve into a useful new publishing platform, let alone a new field of human expression.

I was the sales guy. Ivan was the techie. We were, of course, not qualified for either role. Both of us had spent our twenties slacking – acquiring degrees in subjects providing no obvious route to employment. Of the two of us, Ivan was the more energetic – a kind of artistic Tigger14, a Goldsmiths graduate with an anarchic streak and an enormous, shambolic, multi- floor “studio” in Hackney that I hugely envied. I was barely making a living, teaching a bit, creating a substantial body of unexhibited art and working up a detailed knowledge of the quality of the Guinness on offer in every pub between Whitechapel and the Royal Docks15. Along the way, though, we’d both, independently, bumped into computers – I met my first Mac in 198516 – and developed a passionate belief in their potential to rewrite human culture, to liberate us all17. My undergraduate thesis, from 1988, described in detail an internet I had never met18. The web was clearly my destiny. Webmedia’s business was designing websites for businesses. Ivan knew roughly where to put the angle brackets in the HTML (the web’s language) and I had a winning smile. How could we lose? On the World Wide Web, things were still very ragged and anarchic. When we got started, pictures weren’t possible. I repeat: PICTURES WEREN’T POSSIBLE. The celebrations in our office when HTML was extended to allow pictures were long and loud. We built early sites for forward-thinkers like Time Out magazine19 and The Body Shop and moved into the offices of a bankrupt wine-tasting school underneath the just-opened Cyberia20 cafe in London’s glamorous West End. Cyberia was a cybercafe21, a hangout for speedy kids who fancied themselves characters from William Gibson stories, for geeks seeking a fast connection fix (in the days of dial-up22, remember), for credulous journos and for men in suits who’d been asked to find out about this internet thing. Cyberia became our meeting room. We schmoozed there, cooked up nutty plans, devised manifestos. It wasn’t Les Deux Magots or the Algonquin but maybe it was our World’s End. There was an impatient, creative, punk feel about the whole thing. We were like a movement. We thought Cyberia was the emerging web world’s dead centre and we were lucky to be there.

Our landlords and friends upstairs – they ran the cafe and an upstart internet service provider that went on to be a very big business – provided us with internet access. They had a cowboy streak too and an unlikely background in revolutionary politics23. Keith the techie (now a Silicon Valley luminary) stood at the top of the stairs and threw down a cable: “Plug that into your network but do it quick because all our dial-up customers24 will be offline while you’re doing it.”25 We rented a water cooler because we’d seen them in movies and we spent the last of our own money on champagne we drank from those little conical paper cups. Parties were held and the first in a long line of sparky kids26 arrived – hipsters and geeks who knew just enough about the advancing technology to get through the door and down the dingy stairs. The studio was loud and chaotic; later a pair of Technics decks arrived – from where I never knew.

At the beginning of 1995 we were already on a kind of conveyor belt, touring the offices of ad agencies and IT companies in cheap suits purchased for the purpose. We needed money for rent and wages and server hosting and one of these august institutions was going to give us some for a share in our company. We were sure of it. And it didn’t seem unlikely. Everybody wanted in. A publisher wanted to “add us to its portfolio”. IT consultancies wanted to “tap into our vision”. There were, hilariously, extended discussions with noodle empire Wagamama (I kid you not) about a merger of some kind. This was my favourite mainly because I wanted to call the merged company WebaWagaMamaMedia. I think they fired the guy27.

A closer call came in the offices of a monster global ad agency in a glass office by the Thames. We were shown into a room – just the two of us – and sat on one side of a shiny boardroom table opposite five men. One was the executive who wanted to buy our company and the other four were highly groomed 20-something clones – like the agents in The Matrix. They handed us business cards. Every one of them read “Company Secretary”. It was Kafkaesque and the atmosphere was chilly. The executive – I can remember his name; I’m just not telling you in case saying it summons him from the dark place he inhabits – made us a complicated, multi-clause offer that, even to our untrained minds, seemed to require that we gave him quite a lot of our money. Which wasn’t what we had in mind at all. We literally ran from the office and the sense of escape, outside in the fountained plaza, was enormous, joyful – like something from a movie. There should have been a spiralling helicopter shot. We laughed and laughed.

I used to win web-design business by phoning the people I read about in magazines. I was green: I bought a magazine called Media Week28 because it sounded like it was about the media. It was weeks before I figured out it was about advertising. But the people I phoned had all read about the web in the Sunday supplements and would often invite us in to meet them out of pure curiosity. Sometimes they’d come to our damp basement office. We were short of furniture: I remember seating a bank’s marketing director on a bag of cement.

In the early days, Ivan the anarchist would come with me to these meetings (we learnt to call them “pitches”). We’d sit in the lobby waiting for our slot and we’d argue about how much we could plausibly charge. We’d practise saying large numbers without laughing. “Thirty-five thousand pounds plus ten thousand annually for maintenance” (giggles)… “Forty-five thousand pounds” (more giggles).

The people we were pitching were a forbidding crowd: this isn’t even 20 years ago but marketing directors were still grey-haired men in handmade suits who had their hair cut in Jermyn Street29. They’d been in the business since the ’50s, drove Astons and quite often smoked cigars while we pitched. They ran meetings like military briefings.

I had to stop taking Ivan after a while because he couldn’t, ultimately, contain his disapproval of the whole grim process30 and that our idealistic club seemed to have been annexed by the advertising business. He was an awkward presence at the best of times – fidgety and impatient – but he’d often reduce the room to silence, usually mumbling but sometimes actually interrupting my presentation, thumping the table and shouting, “But that’s bollocks! It’s all bollocks!” The trigger was usually some marketing buzzword I’d read in one of the magazines. You’re not usually heckled by your own side in these things. It was unhelpful.

Wired magazine31, the digital revolution’s paper of record, had a London outpost32 during Webmedia’s rise and fall. They sent a journalist to cover London’s mini-Silicon Valley. He brought with him a photographer whose will it was that we all leap in the air for a cover photo. I look at the photo now33 (that’s me at the front and Ivan right behind me) and see the barely contained hysteria and stiffnecked angst of that crazy period. Or maybe we were just happy34.

We were bold and stupid enough to attempt an early US adventure for Webmedia. We chose New York, principally because we’d never been there and we loved the music. The two of us stayed – wide-eyed, scanning the corridors for legendary faces – at the Chelsea Hotel35. We imagined a life spent jetting back and forth and living – like beat poets or rock stars – at The Chelsea. I diligently “networked” in NYC, visiting many times and getting to know the city’s money guys. This was easy enough. Americans were surprisingly ready to entertain me – web people were still tattooed with dollar signs in those days and we were exotic, like The Beatles.

I was taken for dinner in midtown skyscrapers and cocktails in downtown bars. My last visit to the twin towers was for drinks at Windows On The World, the 101st-storey bar, with a venture capitalist who was so young he was ID’d for drinks. Lunch by the lake in Central Park was memorable, not least because the music industry legend paying for my lunch kept writing very large numbers on napkins with a fountain pen the size of my lower arm. Jetlag and several bucket-sized glasses of pinot noir reduced me to incoherence. “Is that where John Lennon lived?” I remember asking, pointing at the Chrysler Building.

A New Yorker told me to get down to one of Burt Alimansky’s breakfasts. Alimansky36 was a mid-town investment legend and back then he ran a monthly breakfast – introducing the money to the money-hungry. I bought a $100 ticket and showed up at the fantastically New York time of 6.30am in the glittering 1930s splendour of the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Centre. It was a ballroom with a revolving dancefloor and an appropriately surreal setting for the torment that followed. I was seated with other supplicants, seekers-after-funds. This was a different crowd – hardly a hi-tech visionary among them. These guys had copy shops in Queens, small chains of rib restaurants, dog groomers.

After breakfast began the brutal capitalist cabaret. This was a different world, a David Mamet play. Everyone was expected to make a two-minute pitch, standing on a wobbly banqueting chair positioned in the middle of the ballroom. I joined a line, snaking back from the chair. My turn came, I grabbed the mic and sweated my way through my two minutes, scattering my notes on the floor below me (I remember they seemed such a long way down). All I could think of was the revolving dance floor. Was it revolving? Or was it all those blank faces? My accent and my undisguised terror can’t have helped but, when I got down from the chair, the only person to approach me was an immigration lawyer: “Do you have papers? I can get you papers.”37 No investment was forthcoming.

Webmedia’s New York adventure was short-lived but my address book38 (which preserves the period like a geological stratum) still contains the names of the hundreds of New Yorkers I met and schmoozed during our time there – and informs me that Webmedia did live, albeit not for long, for a few months during 1996, at an address on 8th Avenue, NY NY39. I used to call the office to hear the name of the company pronounced by our Brooklyn receptionist.

And we did ultimately sell some of our business. We sold it to adland genius Maurice Saatchi.40 I have, to this day, met Maurice once, at the dinner he threw to celebrate the investment, upstairs at The Ivy. We ploughed on, hiring dozens of staff – mostly eager, unjaded young people. But more expensive adventures like the one in New York and a heartbreaking and protracted split with Ivan (the money guys called it a “demerger”41), set the company on to what now seems like an obvious downward spiral and Webmedia was, by late 1998, bust. The most miserable meeting of my short business career, with our creditors in an airless Baker Street basement, provided a grim full stop for the whole thing. A book about the period said: “Webmedia: such pioneers they went bust before the boom.”42

There was more. My next web adventure was called another.com. It was an all together more serious enterprise. I started it, with new partners and new investors (no anarchists this time), in 1998. The business, originally called Funmail, was based on a clever idea from another web entrepreneur, Jeremy Kerner. We were going to provide personalised email addresses to digital teens43. Funmail was a dumb name for an email service, so we changed it to another.com.

Coming up with a new name was a pretty dumb process in its own right. We hired a branding consultancy who’d named TV channels and high-tech products. How could we fail? They spent weeks researching and brainstorming names, emailing us long lists of hopeless candidates every day. We tore them all up and came up with our own: another.com – it was meant to be flippant and funny, very now.

Of course, even then, acquiring a name wasn’t straightforward. We needed the internet domain name too. We learnt that the owner of another.com had already made millions by being among the first few dozen employees of Amazon.com. He didn’t really need our money, so couldn’t muster much interest in selling the domain. We hit upon a plan – we’d give a medium-sized wad of cash to a charity of his choice. Amazon man accepted and I’m still rather proud to say, ten years later, that there’s a WWII Spitfire that’s still airworthy because of our substantial donation44.

Meanwhile, we were raising money for our new business in the midst of the dotcom boom. Preposterous businesses, one after the other, were securing epic sums of money from investors and then going public at eye-watering valuations. We felt sure we could be one of them, so a board of directors was chosen45, we appointed brokers and advisers and set about floating the company – which was then only a few months old and hadn’t traded at all – on the stock exchange46. Our brokers were of the old school. Meetings took place in the oyster restaurant round the corner from their City offices and would always begin with an initial order of four bottles of Chablis. We were being prepared to join a bizarre club, the club of listed companies.

But I didn’t like any of it. Early on, I’d had the privilege of visiting the bizarre Carnaby Street offices of the web’s most preposterous flight of fancy to date: hip online fashion company Boo.com47. My visit functioned as a kind of inoculation, putting me off the whole weird and decadent game. Boo.com was like something from a Richard Lester movie – beautiful people, male and female, floated around the office, some carrying orchids, some apparently sketching in watercolour. I spoke to a group of a dozen, most of whom appeared to be essentially ornamental. I became convinced that I didn’t want another.com to be on the same list as Boo.com. I wanted us to raise some money privately, from a respectable source, and spend it quietly in the old-fashioned way, without the attention of shareholders.

So I took this idea to my partners and, with considerable impatience, they agreed we should have a go. They gave me licence to try to get another.com’s seed money from a private investor but there was a condition: I had to raise at least as much money as we’d have got from the stock market and I had to get it quick because we were about to “press the button” on the flotation, which had already cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds.

So off I went, on my own, unsupported by my sceptical partners – to the Mayfair offices of a blue-blood private investment firm48. There and then, in wing-backed armchairs around a marble coffee table and on the strength of a frankly lacklustre Powerpoint, I was offered a no-strings six million quid. Stumbling into Mount Street, hyperventilating, I called my partners from the minicab on the way back to the office but they were impatient. “Ask for more!”49 they said. I called my brand-new investor and asked for more. “OK,” he said… This is what it had come to. Enormous sums of money were being handed out on the merest suggestion of a dotcom payday. It couldn’t end well50.

Once funded we needed to staff up – and staff up quickly. We needed techies, designers, marketing and sales people, a customer service team. Securing staff for a dotcom in those fevered times wasn’t done in the normal way. A recruitment agency identified candidates and funnelled them into a bar in Soho where I was waiting with a laptop51. On the screen a spreadsheet that illustrated the improbable wealth that would result from signing up with another.com52. The candidate was invited to specify their own unfeasible rate of growth for the company and this was fed into the spreadsheet, which then calculated the ridiculous amount of money that our lavish share option scheme would produce. I did this dozens of times: “Look, if our userbase grows at this rate you’ll make a million pounds!” And it worked. The thought still makes me cringe.

And then, nearly three years later, in the dog days of the crash, and a year after the twin towers had fallen, I was still grafting away, still trying to translate all that energy into a big payout, but the money was gone, the business model screwed, the market collapsed. Almost everybody knew we were finished but our escape depended on the credulousness of the shrinking band of people who didn’t. So we invited a high-class investment bank to value our company53. Their valuation would help us to sell the business. Our new bankers charged us £35,000 for the valuation and they sent a fleet of young men to perform the intricate calculations required. After about a week they emailed their final valuation: a number so long and so comically out of touch with our reality that we used practically a ream of paper printing it out with one digit on each sheet so that we could stick it to the wall as a kind of morbid encouragement. Investment bankers don’t seem to have got much better at this sort of thing in the decade since.

Another.com was ultimately sold but there was no enormous payout for anyone. It did continue to trade, as a rather small email service attached to an ISP54. And I did, I’m happy to say, escape and find a new way to make a living.

Bubbles are hardly a good thing. In fact, they’re hugely destructive, often wiping out more value than they create. But they’re entirely human creations, and since the only way to suppress them would be to snuff out the quite natural enthusiasm and belief that accompanies new ideas, I suspect we’re going to have to live with them. When the bubble I’ve described here burst it hurt many people and it took me a long time to recover personally but, writing all this stuff down, I realise I’m rather happy to have lived through it all and would quite probably have another go if the chance came along55.


Footnotes. Yes, footnotes. In the article I was obliged to try to cram ten years of ridiculuous, exhilarating, maddening, often quite terrifying activity into 3,000 words. So what I’ve decided to do is to annotate the story, adding some context that might be interesting… maybe to that one historian who will one day want to write the history of the British dotcom experience…

  1. The Word was a splendid noughties eructation of grown-up writing about pop culture, literature, music and so on, from the men who brought you Smash Hits (and all that other golden-age stuff) – Mark Ellen (editor) and David Hepworth (publisher). Looking back it’s obvious that the magazine belonged to the last happy flowering of print and that such a thing couldn’t possibly exist today. I’m very happy to have written a few things for them (and also to have appeared on their podcast!). ↩︎
  2. Mark wrote this standfirst, of course, and I can’t honestly argue with ‘chancer’. ↩︎
  3. It was The Vine. It’s still there, over the road from Highgate Studios, the huge converted Victorian wallpaper factory that housed our office. Highgate Studios was itself very much a creature of the boom. A self-consciously funky spec office development aimed at the late-nineties boom-era crowd: Blair’s babies: startups, mobile phone entrepreneurs, designers, PR agencies, online businesses and all the services they needed in one place. It too is still there, prominent as I whizz past on the Thameslink into St Pancras. ↩︎
  4. another.com has left no trace. Even the domain name is not currently in use. Buy it, why don’t you? ↩︎
  5. The NASDAQ did crash but its irrational exuberance really could not be suppressed and it’s now the second-biggest stock market in the world, bigger than every national market except its parent the New York Stock Exchange. It was originally designed as a ‘junior’ market, more lightly regulated, with automated trades (so no trading floor) and focused on tech and startup listings. It’s now home to all of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks. Stock markets around the world have copied the idea of a secondary market for newer, high-growth stocks and startups. One of the most successful is London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the market another.com would have been listed on if I hadn’t got my oar in. ↩︎
  6. In the end it was a bit more than a decade and, in fact, after over thirty years of web nonsense, I’m still essentially in the business – now doing social media and stuff for a big broadcaster. ↩︎
  7. I first met Ivan in The Angel, St Giles’s Circus, in the shadow of Centrepoint in the West End. It was a meetup for the listserv that he ran – an email mailing list for the Internet-curious (must have been 1992? Early 93?) I was a nervous attendee, having only acquired my first modem a few weeks earlier (it was a US Robotics Sportster, a breakthrough device that was cheap enough to persuade ordinary people to try this Internet thing. It looked a bit like a Stylophone), but the evening was lovely and I felt immediately at home amongst these oddballs and, of course, a partnership was born. By the end of this story, Ivan had also escaped from the dotcom nonsense, having thrived in various important sectors, including the domain name business – the plumbing of the Internet. He’s now working as an artist again and renovating a farmhouse in France. Of the two of us he’s the only one with a Wikipedia entry (although his does have a photo of me in it so I guess I am on Wikipedia, right?) Ivan recently obtained a diagnosis of ADHD and, of course, this made perfect sense to all his friends. Looking back, I think I was, several times, a beneficiary of Ivan’s ADHD. On two or three occasions I wound up sole proprietor of one of our joint enterprises and it was sometimes a puzzle how this had actually happened but, now that we know, it’s obvious. He’d lost interest and it was causing him actual pain to stick around. Ivan’s neurodiversity made me the man I am. ↩︎
  8. 3W began life at Goldsmith’s as Ivan’s ‘World Wide Web Newsletter’. I was editor from issue three and this may have had something to do with the fact that issue four was our last. Ouch. (we used to joke that what actually killed us off was the four-colour cover, which was very expensive). 3W was, without question, the first magazine about the web anywhere in the world and became a vital reference to the emerging medium. You have to remember that, in this period before the web, people who wanted to find out about new phenomena had to go and ask someone, usually a librarian – public, corporate or academic. So this was a big factor in 3W’s success. Librarians who’d been asked to acquire information about this new WWW thing would find 3W – on some kind of librarians’ grapevine or BBS, presumably – and get in touch. As a consequence we had subscribers on five continents and dozens of countries (Ivan continued to receive subscription cheques for years after we’d shut it down). ↩︎
  9. The magazine was attracting the attention of proper publishers. We met with curious executives from several of the biggest magazine firms: IPC, EMAP and The Guardian. I seem to remember that Tony Ageh, the Guardian’s irritatingly clever head of development (and now a sodding OBE), who was at the time also talking to Jefferson Hack and Rankin from Dazed & Confused, considered some kind of Frankenstein merger of 3W and Dazed, which would have been hilarious and, well, actually just hilarious. Before we gave up on print and started Webmedia we’d considered a big relaunch, in a self-consciously cool tabloid format (we were both hideous magazine wankers – you know, the kind of blokes who’d hang out in those Soho newsagents where you could buy Ray Gun and Mondo 2000). But I remember meeting with a magazine design veteran who explained to me the horrors of ‘the plinth’, the deep shelf near the floor at the bottom of the magazine display at the newsagent’s. “Tabloid?” he said, “you don’t want to be tabloid. You’ll be down on the plinth with the Exchange & Mart.” I’ve never forgotten this advice ↩︎
  10. You had to beetle off in those days. There was no web site, obviously. You had to look up your business name and idea at a microfiche terminal on an upper floor in a brilliantly Dickensian Chancery Lane office, then fill in a paper form and push a cheque across the counter to a cashier. ↩︎
  11. Keeping track of the number of web sites was pretty easy when there were only a few hundred of them. It was the kind of fact you’d see in a box-out on an inside page. This list says there were 2,738 in 1994. There were technical limitations on the number of web sites that could exist in those days. Only one domain name could be associated with an IP address and only one IP address with a server. So a rack of a dozen servers could host only a dozen web sites. One of the brilliant innovations of Webmedia’s first techie Steve Hebditch, was a tweak to the networking software allowing multiple IP addresses to be attached to a single server network card. This permitted an explosion in the number of possible web sites. ↩︎
  12. I met Tim Berners-Lee once or twice back then and I even booked him to come to a conference in London to explain himself to a lot of curious suits in a shitty room behind a hotel in Shepherd’s Bush (was this 1995?). I’ve also got a very dumb story that might or might not be about him which you can read right here on this blog. ↩︎
  13. Old-timers will remember the excitement of looking up the current status of the ‘Trojan Room Coffee Pot‘ in the Cambridge University computer lab. Everyone else will probably just shrug. ↩︎
  14. See note 5 above. ↩︎
  15. The answer, of course, was The White Hart, which we used to call Murphy’s, on Whitechapel High Street, although the absolutely best pub in the East End was the Grave Maurice, sadly departed, which was the fancy hangout of the Kray twins (in contrast to their more murdery hangout, The Blind Beggar, which was a couple of hundred yards further east). The Grave Maurice was a cosy pub on the Whitechapel Waste where the twins would conduct their business meetings. The legend was that they insisted the only music on the jukebox was opera – and in the eighties and nineties it still was. They had antimacassars too. ↩︎
  16. A nice man by the name of Steve Whaley, an influential London politician and also, at the time, head of the degree course I was doing at the Polytechnic of Central London, introduced me to a roomful of Macs, all of which – I vividly remember – were still in the cardboard boxes they’d come in. ↩︎
  17. How’s that going then, Steve? ↩︎
  18. This dissertation, thankfully now lost, referenced two critical texts: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – an impenetrable work of philosophy from 1980 that I definitely, definitely (I mean definitely) didn’t understand but which had a cool concept they called the ‘rhizome‘ which I concluded was in some way analogous to this Internet thing – and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which had just been published and also had a kind of Internet in it – and was unbelievably cool, right? ↩︎
  19. Should I feel in some way responsible, as one of those predatory web guys, for the the fact that Time Out – London’s Village Voice and, for decades, the primary source of yoga classes, awkward first dates and pretty much everything organic or countercultural in the capital city – became a free-sheet in 2012 and finally dematerialised all together, going online-only in 2022? I suppose I should. In its early years Time Out was a paragon of worker-control and democratic management but that all came to an end when somewhat autocratic founder Tony Elliott (RIP) scrapped the equal pay scheme. There was a long and nasty strike and a competitor – City Limits – was born. All right-thinking people switched to the new weekly, which looked great and was more radical, very often standing arm-in-arm with the Ken Livingstone-era GLC (and actually outliving it by a few years). Tony Ageh (see note 9) was one of the prime movers in the new workers’ coop. ↩︎
  20. I could dwell at length on Cyberia’s wonders, on the thrilling row of PCs with big screens that lined the windows at the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street in London’s Fitzrovia; on the Neuromancer-style artwork on the walls; on the excellent chocolate brownies and cappucino (and the fact that we hardly ever paid for ours – sorry); on the many lovely people I met there and the huge numbers of puzzled and sometimes frankly frightened people I brought through the place to show them this new web thing. Founders Eva Pascoe and Gené Teare are still influential figures in Internet business and culture. ↩︎
  21. cybercafe n. An establishment (originally and esp. one serving food and drink) with multiple computer terminals providing access to the internet, usually for a fee” – OED. Ivan claims he was the first to use the term but the dictionary disagrees! ↩︎
  22. In 1994, the very latest thing in modems was a V.34 device capable of warbling up to 28Kbps. Most of us were still using V.32 models, which would screech their way to a max of 19.2Kbps. In those days 28K was just about enough for a phone call, so streaming or even downloading much was off the agenda. Streaming audio and video over IP networks wasn’t a total fantasy but was very much for the people in lab coats at this point. Absolute Internet Gods would shell out for a second phone line so they could ‘surf’ the web while family members made phone calls. A couple of years after this I would outfit my London flat with an unbelievably cool digital ISDN line for Internet access, providing a stunning 128Kbps. It took a bit of setting up and because it still essentially depended on making a phone call to reach the Internet, when I received my first ISDN bill it came in several large cardboard boxes: I’d misconfigured the thing and run up a £7,000 bill by triggering thousands of one- and two-second calls per day. The nice people at BT zero’d it for me when I started crying. And for reference, according to Ofcom, the median broadband connection in the UK today is 72Mbps, roughly 2,500 times faster than the 1994 state of the art. ↩︎
  23. It was the Revolutionary Communist Party, the apostate Trotskyite sect that would later make an outsized contribution to the emerging ‘post-liberal’ thing and produce Spiked!, Claire Fox, Frank Furedi. ↩︎
  24. Upstream from Keith’s dial-up customers was a ‘leased line‘ from an outfit called Pipex, Britain’s first commercial ISP, founded in a period when the Internet was still very much an academic and scientific network. In 1991, when Pipex leased a 64Kbps line across the Atlantic to provide connections for UK businesses, the only commercial customers for Internet access were tech giants with big research departments like IBM and DEC. Pipex quietly became the wholesaler behind pretty much all of the first generation of UK ISPs, scrappy outfits like Demon who were busy getting the great unwashed online. The company’s policy guru at the time, adviser to founder CEO Peter Dawe, was one Bill Thompson, now one of the UK Internet’s éminences grises and a bigwig at the BBC. ↩︎
  25. I suspect this isn’t a thing any more but back in the day you needed to turn and click a chunky metal terminator onto the end of your coaxial ethernet otherwise the signal would drop off for everyone on the network. This is the wild west period of Internet access, with ISPs popping up all over the place. Our upstairs neighbours Easynet, led by Dave Rowe and the man with the ethernet cable Keith Teare, managed to survive the brutal period of consolidation and bankruptcies that came in the 2000s and became a huge firm, quietly hooking businesses up to the Internet. Dave now runs an investment firm. ↩︎
  26. The sparky kids are now everywhere, of course, some of them, preposterously, running famous opera companies and Internet safety companies. ↩︎
  27. Founded in 1992, Wagamama was one of the big hits of the nineties ‘casual dining’ boom (can you remember a time before ‘casual dining’? When you used to have to put on a shirt and tie or a nice dress to go out to eat and the only alternative was a greasy spoon?). Wagamama persists but, in 2018, was sold to a huge casual dining chain called The Restaurant Group for £559M. A few years later, after Covid-19 had done its worst, Restaurant Group itself was sold for £701M to a private equity firm with a casual dining focus. It’s casual dining all the way down. ↩︎
  28. The advertising business was divided, as it still approximately is, into ‘media’ and ‘creative’ and the two realms were chalk and cheese; wildly different businesses held together by the exigencies of selling stuff. The creatives were the glamorous ones – aristocratic, often extravagently-dressed figures who occupied gorgeous premises in fancy districts of London and produced all the award-winning TV ads and billboards we so admired. The eighties and nineties were probably absolutely peak creative – a period during which respect for the genius of advertising creatives went all the way up to the Prime Minister’s office. The media crowd, on the other hand, had less glamorous offices and tended to wear suits. They planned and bought advertising space – filling the pages of the newspapers and the ad breaks on TV with the fabulous product of the creatives. They were much more aggressive, pugnacious even – but they weren’t chippy because they secretly knew that they were the important ones, the ones concerned with value for money and effectiveness and accountability – the bottom line. Consequently, when it arrived, the media teams were much more at home than the creatives were on the web, which was, after all, a two-way medium that was infinitely quantifiable and measurable – right up their streets, in fact (I used to say that the Internet was really a huge expansion of ‘below the line‘ advertising). In the early days the creatives actively disdained the web – ‘glorified small-ads’ they thought – a ‘below the line‘, ‘B2B’ medium that could never displace the glories of TV and outdoor in the influence business. But the media people knew that the web would change everything: it was simultaneously an unimaginably vast (effectivly infinite) new source of advertising inventory for them to buy, a straightforward challenge to the psychobabble and poetic mumbo-jumbo of the creatives and a threat to profits that would pretty soon rip through the whole industry and turn it upside-down. Advertising has been brutally commodified and parasitised by ad-tech that originated on the Internet. Media Week still exists but has long been online-only and is obviously a shadow of its former, pugnacious self. ↩︎
  29. At places like Geo. F. Trumper. ↩︎
  30. Actually, a lot of people hated the arrival of advertising on the Internet and you can obviously make a pretty solid argument that it’s the advertising that’s fucked it all up; commodified our precious, delicate tracery of connections, meeting places, stores of knowledge… In the very early days even suggesting the idea of advertising on the Internet would produce a riot or at least a flame-war. A well-known early book on the subject was the subject of enormous, culture wars-style controversy and the author (an academic whose name I’ve forgotten) was practically driven off of Usenet. Now, of course, the tables have fully turned and it’s the Internet that’s eating advertising – over half of all worldwide advertising revenue now goes to Google and Meta. ↩︎
  31. Wired Magazine came to Britain twice: the first time with The Guardian (it’s that Tony Ageh again) and then later with Vogue publisher Condé Nast. Wired – in all its versions – was evidence of the ridiculously inflated sense of itself that the young web had – the elite founders, publishers, academics and authors in its pages really did think it was Plato’s Academy for the 21st Century. Wired documented the whole digital revolution – not just the web but the human genome, green energy, cellphones, AI, VR and the rest – but also became an important incubator for what we now recognise to be a poisonous, militantly anti-humanist worldview: rationalists, libertarians, transhumanists, sovereign individuals – also some unhinged monarchists, seasteaders and crypto-fascists. Grimly, the magazine also happily accommodated the amoral claque of Epstein panderers and enablers. ↩︎
  32. Here’s a great story from Danny O’Brien, shared with the influential British tech-insider mailing list Haddock, about the first UK Wired (this is a long way from all that dark American sci-fi paedo-Nazi stuff, to be clear). Danny and Dave Green – two Brits: a kind of geek-jester figure who’s now deeply embedded in the California tech scene and a UK gaming journalist respectively – were, for a remarkably long time, essentially court chroniclers for the UK Internet, in their sarcastic weekly newsletter Need To Know (NTK), a vital industry publication that was 100% wedded to ascii for maybe a decade longer than it needed to be. ↩︎
  33. It was the December 1996 issue of Wired. I’ve got the cover framed on the wall on the stairs. My kids think it’s hilarious. ↩︎
  34. I always felt kind of painfully left-out of the clever geek scene: the club of geniuses and evangelists and oddballs at the centre of the web revolution but now, looking back on it, it kind of makes sense. I couldn’t code, hadn’t encountered a computer until well into adulthood, owned none of the geek passions and manic hobbies of my nerd friends. I’ve always had an admiring observer’s interest in the tech and the culture but could never really have joined it. ↩︎
  35. It wasn’t quite the Chelsea Hotel of Warhol and Kerouac and Patti Smith but we were thrilled to learn that it wasn’t far off. Legendary proprietor-manager Stanley Bard was still behind the counter and patrolling the lobby greeting and laughing and the place was still populated by artists and eccentrics, some of whom had lived there for decades – I spent an hour or two drinking tea with an elderly ceramicist in his beautifully-decorated room during that stay. Sadly the plan to make it our New York pied-à-terre didn’t work out. Instead we used to stay at the eccentric Gramercy Park Hotel and did, on a couple of occasions, borrow a fabulous block-wide loft on East 13th Street. The whole building, I learnt later, belonged to Allen Ginsberg, who lived upstairs ffs. I’m happy, as a consequence, to have been able to add Ginsberg to the list of ‘people I’ve stood next to in lifts’. ↩︎
  36. Alimansky was right at the centre of the New York business scene for decades. In addition to his terrifying breakfast beauty contests he also ran workshops for wannabe entrepreneurs (this NY Times story is about a 1984 session that honestly sounds like it was scripted by Arthur Miller) Sadly, it looks like he died a few months ago. ↩︎
  37. I did not have papers. Nor did I ever aquire them. ↩︎
  38. It’s still my current address book, encrusted with the names of people I’ve not met in 30 years, including the extraordinary Lenny Barshack, a poker player and Wall Street rocket scientist whose email business Bigfoot.com we partnered with for some reason back then. On my first trip to New York Lenny picked me up at the airport and took me to Carnegie Deli in midtown and played the same prank he’d obviously been playing on new visitors for decades – a prank that involved my unknowingly ordering the largest quantity of food I had ever seen, including a pastrami sandwich the size of my head (the place is closed now but you can buy the ingredients for the epic sandwich online). A few years later, while I was getting drunk in that pub in North London, Lenny was taking photographs of the twin towers catastrophe from the roof of his downtown apartment (they used to be online but I can’t find them now). ↩︎
  39. Our office was all the way down in the Village and, of course, there was no receptionist, just an answering service that happened to be in Brooklyn. I’m not 100% sure I even had a mobile phone for those first trips. I did have a beeper, though, bought from one of those shops on 42nd Street. People had beepers because in the USA in those days you paid for incoming calls to your cellphone so it was considered rude to call someone on their mobile, since they’d have to pay for the call. Everyone had a beeper and if someone wanted to speak to you they’d start by paging you so you could call them back. ↩︎
  40. Saatchi had an investment vehicle he called Megalomedia, obvs. He invested £400,000, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. ↩︎
  41. The demerger was news in itself. Slow news day? ↩︎
  42. It’s this book, written by Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley for think tank Demos, an outfit that was closely associated with the Blair Labour Party – which was not yet in government – and invested a lot in the idea of an ‘entrepreneurial Britain’; startup culture, tech-literate policy-making; capacity building and all those buzzwords. I was an ‘associate’ of the think-tank for a while, which meant I was invited to panels and conferences occasionally. ↩︎
  43. The breakthrough here, the enabler that permitted another.com to exist, was the liberalisation of the domain name system in the UK. A quasi-public organisation called Nominet had been set up to manage the supply of domains and they had decided to drop the wholesale cost of a domain name from over £100 to £15. We piled in and bought 15,000 domain names! ↩︎
  44. We didn’t publicise the purchase of the domain or the gift to the Spitfire people because our Amazon friend didn’t want us to but I can’t think of a good reason not to tell you now that we gave £10,000. I’m sad to say, though, that I don’t know which of these aeroplanes we helped to restore. ↩︎
  45. Our board included Robin Klein, a retail millionaire who famously invented the Innovations Catalogue (I’m quite sure you remember the Innovations Catalogue, finally closed in 2003, having been absorbed by Argos). I hugely admired Robin. Wise and humane. ↩︎
  46. As a tiny company with literally zero trading history we wouldn’t have been allowed to list on the London Stock Exchange. Our only option was the junior market, AIM. Until very recently the AIM had been considered far too small and shabby for the major City institutions to show any interest in – they thought of it as a kind of jumble sale where Scottish pub groups and copper wire manufacturers could get a listing – but the rush of money into the dotcom sector at the end of the nineties had changed all that and when we began to shop around we found a decent-sized queue of proper, square-mile brokers and advisers ready to take on our listing. We eventually settled on Panmure Gordon, a blue-blooded, top-tier boutique firm founded in 1876 (and more recently absorbed first by an American bank, then by a German one, then by more Americans. As I write this, Panmure Gordon is part of a Qatari institution called QInvest). It was Panmure’s who introduced us to the joys of four bottles of Chablis with lunch (see note 3). ↩︎
  47. One thing we had in common with Boo.com, of course, was that we had a domain name for a brand name – still pretty unusual at the time. Alongside Boo.com, though, our various idiocies seem pretty inoffensive. They got through twenty times as much capital and in about half the time. Losers. The Wikipedia entry is entertaining: “Boo.com was a short-lived British e-commerce business, founded in 1998 by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, who were regarded as sophisticated Internet entrepreneurs in Europe[citation needed] by the investors…” ↩︎
  48. They were called Eden Capital, although not, I think, this one. The company employed – am I remembering this right? – a total of two people – very posh brothers, honestly like something out of Made in Chelsea – and one Bloomberg terminal. I shouldn’t be mean about them: they were very free with their money and they’re almost certainly much, much richer than me. ↩︎
  49. To be more specific (Mark cut this bit out of the article as printed – too boring), I asked for £6M because that was the exact sum we were planning to raise on the AIM. When my fellow directors asked me to get more, what they meant was “get the £250K we’ve already spent – and thus wasted – on preparing for the listing.” Our friends in Mayfair complied, so the total raised was £6.25M. What was really cool about this was that the convention said you had to list to get access to the big money; that private capital raisings were always smaller than public ones. But we defied convention: this was, at the time, one of the largest sums ever raised by a privately-owned Internet company in Britain. We grinned stupidly for weeks. ↩︎
  50. The other really big UK dotcom funding that I remember from that period was for an ISP spun out of Dixons called Freeserve; ‘Free’ because the idea was you’d get Internet access for nothing from Freeserve if you bought a PC from Dixons. It was a pretty clever idea and the firm grew very quickly – soon becoming the first proper Internet business to list on the FTSE index. It wasn’t there for long, though, and it was later bought by France Telecom and, strictly speaking, lives on in fossilised form buried inside EE. ↩︎
  51. A Macintosh Powerbook G3 obviously. ↩︎
  52. I’m tentatively crediting this spreadsheet to a certain brilliant young Cambridge graduate – a journalist who was in this moment advising our investors (the boys with the Bloomberg terminal). I’m going to leave his name out, though, especially as the spreadsheet did, I seem to remember, have one or two circular references. ↩︎
  53. I’m pretty sure this fleet of highly-groomed investment bankers was from Credit Suisse First Boston (I don’t think they’re likely to sue since they literally ceased to exist quite soon after this). They must have been desperate. CSFB were the masters of the universe who had floated Amazon, Cisco and Netscape. I think the logic of bringing in these very expensive, very lofty experts to value our by-then rather small firm was that they might be just too expensive and too lofty to have fully acknowledged the disaster that had unfolded in our market. We were right: although I’ve remembed how much we paid them, I’ve blocked out the valuation they ultimately provided. I know that it was arrived at by essentially the crudest of dotcom-era mechanics, though: they multiplied the number of users we had by the potential revenue that each might yield (ARPU). It amounted to north of £100M. We knew how stupid and unrealisable this valuation was. It became a kind of comic signifier for the stupidity of the whole weird period. A bloody big bronze statue erected in the courtyard to commemorate our innocence and our hubris. ↩︎
  54. When the firm was put up for sale we certainly weren’t seeking £100M. In fact, when a sale was agreed and I was asked by my shareholders to meet with the buyer and confirm that he was good for the money, he did so by walking me down to the ATM in the High Street and printing out a balance inquiry. His company was an ISP called T-Speak, based in Skipton, North Yorkshire. I can’t find a single news report about the sale, though, although there are dozens from when we put the company up for sale and from every other dumb moment in our dumb history. I’m not sure I can explain this, although it may just be because I had by then completely lost interest in the business and could not be bothered to organise even a token press effort (or maybe it’s about the natural modesty of Yorskshire people). ↩︎
  55. Mark asked me to write the final paragraph because he thought my ending was too downbeat. Even then I don’t think I’d have considered ‘having another go’. ↩︎

Paragraphs about AI

All these thoughts I keep having about AI, I’m going to put them here

AIs are already ingesting

So we’ve learnt that the framework of LLMs and GPTs is, ultimately, a deadend. It can produce an impressive (and improving) average of human thought but cannot, from that, derive reasoning, perception, a sense of itself or others and so on. But we’ve also learnt that this doesn’t limit the framework’s potential – for a massive, potentially liberatory contribution to human thriving but also for a terrifying, potentially immiserating shift of power away from ordinary humanity. June 16


The models are unpredictable, in fascinating and stimulating ways but, to state the obvious, they cannot be other than capitalist in nature. A socialist LLM, were one to exist, would have to have been trained on another world, in another context all together. 15 March


It’s already too late to take these tools away from their most passionate users – and it’ll soon be too late to take them away from workers, many of whom now depend on them. 13 March


It’s said that blocking AI will be counterproductive because if we do then only bad actors will progress and we’ll wind up only with bad AI, but this essentially deletes human agency all together. It must be possible for humans and human institutions to just say ‘no’. 13 March


A tricky aspect of arriving at an accommodation with AI is that quite a lot of its output will actually be a kind of hybrid – part human and part AI. Unpick that, AI police. 11 March


Good art is true. All of it. AI art can never be true. It can be plausible (useful, persuasive, stimulating…) but it can never be true. In this AI art is like bad art. They’re the same thing. They’re not true. This seems obvious to me. 11 March


Don’t refuse to use AI because of an ethical objection to one of its applications or to a particular, exploitive use or because you have a vague idea that it’s ‘evil’ or ‘stupid’. 8 March


It’s safe to assume that AI will improve. That gaps will disappear, errors and hallucinations diminish, plausiblity and usefulness increase. Don’t expect it to fail or weaken or ‘eat itself’. 8 March


With AI, discrimination will become a more valuable skill. Not magically being able to ‘detect’ AI work – for that will surely soon be impossible – but being confident in your judgement of all work, whether human or AI. 7 March


Copyright does a very simple thing: it provides a creator a temporary monopoly. Should we suspend this 300 year-old protection so that AI businesses can train their models cheaply? Should a nation voluntarily suspend copyright to boost the AI economy? No. 5 March


In criticising AI poetics will be more useful that hermeneutics. In fact, the profusion of increasingly-plausible AI work surely represents some kind of crisis for interpretation. Susan Sontag saw this coming. 2 March


Is AI going to be one of those tech innovations that actually reduces profit? Like the web and solar power – producing huge incomes for critical businesses but driving down profitability across whole industries? Seems plausible. 27 February 2025

What have we learnt?

The liberal world order, the whole post-war, rules-based thing that we treasured. That’s obviously over. It’s not just what’s happening now, and not just in theatres of war: the symptoms of the end of the progressive or liberal period are everywhere – and we learn that it was really all bullshit anyway.

I argue about this stuff with my family. I feel like the last few years (or maybe it’s the last 25 years, essentially the lifetime of my children) have turned me into a terrible, unreformable cynic. A miserable pragmatist with no belief at all in the reformability of states and institutions.

In a way I hope they’re right and I’m not. I hope the old truths about the arc of the moral universe reassert themselves. But I find that the case that the whole thing was always essentially fake anyway – a kind of consensual fiction – is persuasive. In the 80 years since the end of WW2 even the most enthusiastic advocates of the institutions and protocols of global cooperation have actually continued to behave roughly as they did before they existed, even while claiming absolute adherence to the rules. One of them – the big one, the hegemon, the USA – never fully joined up anyway.

English: Caption:The Gap in the Bridge. Cartoon about the absence of the USA from the League of Nations, depicted as the missing keystone of the arch. The cigar also symbolizes America (Uncle sam) enjoying its wealth This cartoon implies that without America the bridge would collapse. The bridge represents the League of Nations, and Uncle Sam, the personification of America is reluctant to place the keystone in the bridge to complete it. This is odd because in the Treaty of Versailles, it was Woodrow Wilson the president of America that suggested that the League of Nations as part of his fourteen points. The missing keystone demonstrates how difficult it will be for the League to function without having the United States as a member. But it was a Republican majority in Congress that blocked the USA's entry into the League, not the President.
League

The list of international bodies that one or other branch of the American state has objected to or withdrawn from (or actually destroyed) would be a long one. It would include the League of Nations, the ICC, Kyoto and Paris, various arms control treaties (including, remarkably, landmines and cluster munitions). And, perhaps more to the point, the USA has a track record – going back decades before MAGA, as far as the 19th Century, in fact – of withdrawing from or deprecating bodies and treaties having once agreed to them. Hegemons gonna hegemon.

And, obviously, a list of actual offences by governments – hegemonic and otherwise – against the rules-based order, even since the establishment of the UN, would be an even longer one and would include: the secret bombing of Cambodia, the coup in Guatemala, Russian slaughter in Chechnya, Afghanistan over and over again, the Iraq war, genocide in Rwanda, expulsions and mass imprisonments in Western China, the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen, Ukraine, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, French attrocities in North Africa and Indochina (and a million other, smaller, unremembered offences).

A contemporary coloured engraving picturing a gathering of leaders around a table at the Congress of Vienna - “Europe’s rebirth through the great ruling association in Vienna in 1814”.
Congress

You can test the thesis that there has never been much of a rules-based order by going further back – to the previous wave of international treaty-making and institution building that followed the coalescence of the modern, bourgeois states in the nineteenth century. Treaties, conventions, international bodies, the first of the NGOs. They did not – could not – stop or even impede the great and terrible conflicts of the 20th Century – including holocausts summing, plausibly, to 150 million deaths; expulsions and repressions, every category of violence and destruction. None sanctioned by international law, all allowed to happen anyway.

But there’s something about our moment that’s obviously hugely clarifying. Nations – their governments, security agencies and armies, mainly, of course – are raiding, annexing, slaughtering and expelling at an extraordinary, undiminished rate. It’s the norm, now, and there’s no need to conceal or dissemble any more. Entire populations are being imprisoned, expelled and killed – by states of every complexion, including those we still think of as liberal, democratic nations.

A worker removes the rubble to prepare for restoration on the site of a collapsed UNESCO-listed building following heavy rains, in the Old City of Sanaa, on August 12, 2020. Drainage infrastructure has also suffered from neglect, making Old City buildings vulnerable to collapse during flash floods. [Mohammed Huwais/AFP]
Ruins

Cities and towns are levelled; ethnic groups enslaved, ejected or killed; civilians everywhere are legitimate targets. In fact civilians are killed and injured at a rate that is almost always higher than that amongst combatants. They’re more than legitimate; they are preferred. For soldiers war is becoming less lethal: stand-off weapons and drones reduce injuries; better medical care improves survival rates. Not for civilians, though. In fact, for non-combatants, wars are getting more lethal. More are deliberately targeted; the withholding of evacuation and treatment are weapons in themselves. It’s almost as if in sophisticated, modern warfare, as it gets harder to kill opposing forces, the emphasis is switching to killing more vulnerable civilians. It’s quite possible to imagine future wars in which the only deaths and injuries that occur are amongst civilians. And it is the rules-based order that has brought us this demonic reversal of the logic of warfare.

So are there any states not presently involved – either as direct combatants or as second-degree actors, supplying arms and training and money – in dark, hyper-realist, Schmittian state violence? I don’t know. Maybe some small ones – Ireland? Peru? To return to my original point, this is clarifying because it confirms that this was actually the case all along; that only mugs believed at any point that world governance or norms might constrain the pragmatic, self-interested state. Only mugs believed that somehow the various talking shops, annual conferences, standing committees and conventions could have anything beyond a superficial influence on the shape of the global polity.

Where is my patriotism?

Come, love of country, fill my heart…

I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag on the car during the World Cup). So I really don’t want to sound like one of those annoying people who can celebrate Britain but only to the extent that it is mixed and polyglot (“food from every continent all on one street!” and so on). I also will not reject patriotism as some kind of moral defect (something for ‘gammons’ or Telegraph readers) or a false consciousness (a malign by-product of capitalism). Patriotism is a profound and probably necessary effect of birth and upbringing and rootedness.

But I don’t have it. It is, from my soul, absent. What am I to do? Will it one day just arrive? Will it land, eventually, on wings or something, in my vicinity, announce itself and then become part of my outlook? So that I might bristle appropriately when my nation is defamed or attacked? Proudly assert Britain’s superiority in matters military, economic and cultural?

I’m sorry to be flippant. This is a serious question. I’m an ordinary human being. I was brought up in a working class household in the approximate middle of England. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of living here for over sixty years. I went through the state education system like everyone else (well, most of us), my loyalty to the NHS is solid. Is there something wrong with me?

For all sorts of reasons I’m receptive to patriotism. But where is it? What has stopped it from lodging in my psyche? What do I lack? I obviously don’t buy any of the really dumb explanations for this sort of thing – I’m not more intelligent than the average patriot. I’m not better-informed or more open to the world or whatever. I have approximately the same intellectual assets as everyone else.

It’s obviously plausible that my broadly left-wing upbringing has brought this about. Mum and dad were both trade unionists, Labour Party members. But dad was in the army reserves ffs. Mum came to Britain from Ireland at 17 specifically to join the women’s auxilliary (ATS). Dad would sob through remembrance services and parades (he’d go out of his way to see a parachute display or a restored Spitfire). And I’ve inherited a lot of this. I’m not hostile in any way to nation or people or land. So where is my patriotism? I’m getting old. It’s overdue.

And I guess the reason I’m interested is because we’re now deep into a period of weaponised patriotism, of furious patriotic denouncements of every category of disloyal behaviour and beliefs. And, of course, of hateful racism premised on a lack of ‘assimilation’ or respect for British customs and norms. I look at the politicians and commentators whose patriotism is prominent, public, proudly asserted and I wonder, what is actually different about us? What caused this fervent love for nation to take root in you and not in me? Can it really just be our somewhat different political perspectives? That seems implausible. Political differences are – by necessity – essentially intellectual, superficial – not deep-rooted, not determined by my place of birth or my connection to this nation. Or did politics somehow short-circuit my patriotism? Divert its energy into something else?

I wonder if my 1990s entrainment with ‘global Britain’, with Blairism (and the tail end of Big Bang-era Thatcherism) – with technocratic politics and end-of-history pragmatism – has in some way neutralised any patriotism that did exist. Did the constant, strident assertion that there was no alternative to the globalised outlook leave me high and dry? A hollowed-out, unpatriotic shell? Likewise, did my later interest in internationalist politics – the whole idea of the Imagined Community and the general disdain for things national, local, parochial – innoculate me in some way?

And is this something I could work on? Should I just make more effort? Study the great patriotic texts? Find an online course? Is there a store of patriotism, a source that I could access? A place to go to tap into my lost patriotism? I’m serious about this too. I never decided not to be patriotic, never consciously rejected it or worked to exclude it. It’s just not there. Is this, in itself, a defect? Is there something wrong with me?

Anyway, I’m ready. If it does arrive I’ll greet it happily. I don’t presently own a flag-pole but there’s room for one out the front.

A small bookclub

All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book Club, which is designed to get us all reading despite our shriveled brains and crippling TikTok habits.

More about it on the blog: Nabokov vs Hugo.

Batch two
We have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (review).
Memorial, Alice Oswald.
The Hothouse by the East River, Muriel Spark.
The Word for the World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin.
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Nose, Nikolay Gogol.
Faraway, the Southern Sky, Joseph Andras.
To be Taught, if Fortunate: a Novella, Becky Chambers.
Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector (review).
Who was Changed and who was Dead, Barbara Comyns.
The Hole, Hiroko Oyamada.
This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar.
The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith.
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (review).
In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan (review).
Silas Marner, George Eliot.

Batch one
Autumn Quail, Naguib Mahfouz (review).
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson (review).
The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (review).
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov.
We are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner
L.A. Woman, Eve Babitz.
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor.
The Royal Game: A Chess Story, Stefan Zweig.
The Summer Book: A Novel, Tove Jansson.
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami.
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan.
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain.
The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Push, Sapphire.
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann.

Flat tax?

A surprisingly large number of politicians apparently want to nuke taxation from orbit…

It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third term, long after the thrill of the great millennial project has faded, spavined by a series of shockingly bad decisions. The Labour government, re-elected with a much-reduced majority, is unpopular but, somehow, the Tory opposition is even more unpopular. The Conservative party’s leadership campaign is about to begin. One of the party’s ‘modernisers’, an ally of the ultimate winner David Cameron, baby-faced George Osborne, has been appointed shadow Chancellor (he’ll go on to be a ruinously bad actual Chancellor, of course). He gives a speech to a think tank the centrepiece of which is an oddly fashionable fiscal wheeze called the ‘flat tax’.

Black and white, three-quarter-length portrait of George Osborne holding a shotgun borken over his arm, wearing a tweedy hunting outfit, smiling at the camera
Young Osborne, with a weapon

Most commentators dismissed Osborne’s idea as infantile, not a serious proposal. Just the kind of gimmick new shadow ministers come up with all the time, especially when they’ve never had a proper job and only been in Parliament since the last election. The FT said, bluntly “…the politics of a flat tax is electoral suicide.”

As usual, commentators read this odd intervention as a diagnostic, the kind of idea that gives you a sense of a person’s fitness for office. They weren’t impressed. It was like something from an undergraduate debating society: “this house proposes that the tax regime that supports one of the largest and most sophisticated polities on earth be thrown in the air and replaced with a scheme the millionaires think would be cool.”

Somehow, as you know, Osborne transcended the flat tax (and various other debating society ideas), found his way into an actual government and wound up impoverishing the nation instead.

The tax

…a single-percentage income tax rate applied to all taxpayers regardless of income.

Investopedia

I could burn a couple of paragraphs explaining the flat tax and its history – but it’s honestly so simple I think I’ll just leave you with Investopedia’s definition (there’s a pretty good Wikipedia entry). The reason I’m writing about it at all is that another sophomoric parliamentarian, this time Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, has rolled it out again. It seems to be a kind of compulsion on the Conservative front bench when in opposition. It might actually be a kind of cathartic necessity for a recently-defeated party to recycle two or three of the old favourites. Probing the collective memory. A rite of passage?

Leader of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch MP, looking serious in a mid-shot portrait leaning on a farm gate, wearing a Barbour coat. A field and a farm building out of focus behind her
Kemi Badenoch, apparently on a farm

In fairness, Badenoch didn’t actually write a speech about it. She just answered a question from the floor at a farmers’ event. But she did express some enthusiasm for the idea, as if she were back in that undergraduate debating society. If we’re to read it as a diagnostic on this occasion, it doesn’t look good. Instead of dismissing the idea, providing a bromide about the Tories’ committment to tax cuts, she actually gave it the time of day: “It’s very attractive, but if we’re going to get to that sort of scenario, there’s a lot of work we will need to do first…”, “We need to make sure we rewire our economy so that we can lighten the burden of tax and of regulation on individuals and on those businesses that are just starting out.” Something caused her to qualify her enthusiasm, though, perhaps she remembered her job title or something: “We cannot afford flat taxes where we are now.”

Others have pointed out that Badenoch, six weeks after her election as leader, still seems to be talking to the membership, offering up free-market and culture wars treats to her loyalists while, apparently, forgetting she’s going to need to win an election with ordinary human beings in four years. But there’s obviously an appetite for this kind of idea among the activists, or at least the commentators. Let’s look at this thing:

The project

First of all, it’s important we’re not mugs and don’t get hung up on the obvious, narrow purpose of a flat tax: redistributing wealth upwards. Almost any flat tax will do that because the rate has to be set at a level that ordinary workers can tolerate. Abolishing the higher rates will, of course, produce an absolute torrent of money for the already-wealthy. That’s nice for them but it’s not the actual point of the thing. The larger ideological purpose of a flat tax is to further remove fiscal policy from political control, a core goal of the neoliberal project. This thing has layers.

Sinister AI-generated image of a dark, saucer-shaped space ship orbiting a planet
Nuke it from orbit

This is one of those supervillain situations. The neoliberal overlords observing all this from a cloaked, orbiting space-station cackle when they see the stupid pols act on their instructions. It’s possible that Badenoch and the others advancing this idea don’t know about the orbiting supervillains. They genuinely might not realise that making the rich richer isn’t the policy’s primary purpose. The supervillains, floating around up there, bump fists and woop appreciatively.

Badenoch is not an idiot but neither is she an intellectual. It is plausible that she, like other politicians from the free-market right – believes a flat tax really is a simple redistributive measure, tidying up the code, reducing collection costs and moving wealth to the owner class, where it ought to be.

But this policy is lifted directly from the programme of Hayek, Friedman et al – the neoliberal economists who inspired Reagan, Thatcher and their advisers – to shrink the political state in every dimension. In this case to reduce government to a powerless ‘administrator of things‘, collector of a single, tightly-constrained stream of tax income (see also related concept starve the beast).

Democracy is the target

Neoliberals want to limit democratic control of the economy because electorates cannot be trusted not to break things. In their ideal scenario, bolshy, self-interested electors would be reduced to the status of compliant consumers – voting mainly in reality TV formats – the state to a slimmed-down operation that defends the borders and collects the bins and the market allowed to run everything else. Everyone interested in democracy should oppose this – especially populists and popular sovereignty fans. I mean, seriously, It’s a dystopian, technocratic nightmare that capital wants to overlay on democracy, to neuter it. Kind of a final victory.

World map coloured to show income tax types:
None
  One government level, at a flat rate
  One government level, at progressive rates
  Multiple government levels, all at a flat rate
  Multiple government levels, all at progressive rates
  Multiple government levels, some at a flat rate and some at progressive rates
From Wikipedia.

The flat tax is a persistent idea and, intriguingly, it’s not really a partisan issue. Parties from far-right to centre-left, even third-way types, have bought in (in the US it’s been part of platforms from Dems, GOP and Libertarians). The nations that have adopted it are on a pretty broad spectrum too. In Britain, we learn, while George Osborne was getting excited about the flat tax, the Treasury under Gordon Brown was quietly researching it. LibDem Coalition cabinet member Vince Cable thought the idea of a flat tax had strong public appeal, and – apparently completely misunderstanding the idea – hoped to come up with a version that was also progressive. Classic LibDem. Tony Blair never publicly embraced the idea but was, in his pomp, as he tipped over from political opportunist into weary, messianic world saviour, rather fond of its kooky cousin the Laffer curve. Don’t get me started on the Laffer curve.

Wanna see Rob “When Harry Met Sally” Reiner and Carroll “Archie Bunker” O’Connor supporting Democrat Jerry Brown’s 13% flat tax?

Those supervillains

So this establishment blindness to the actual purpose of a flat tax is material. And it may have something to do with the fact that the people promoting it literally never mention it. You’ll find hundreds of documents like this one from the IEA and this one from the Cato Institute on the think-tank web, all focused on supposed improvements to efficiency and fairness:

The core principles were to tax income at one low rate, to eliminate double taxation of saving and investment, and to wipe out the special preferences, credits, exemptions, deductions, and other loopholes that caused complexity, distortions, and corruption.

The Global Flat Tax Revolution, Cato Institute, 2007

In Britain, the Adam Smith Institute supports a flat tax, obvs, although Adam Smith didn’t. It’s entertaining that this paper promoting it, from the Institute named for him, quotes the Adam Smith Institute but not Smith himself, who wrote:

Subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 5

Smith’s understanding of the purpose of a progressive system is of its time, of course. We’re two or three levels of abstraction away from a state of nature, most of us no longer feel that we pay tax in acknowledgement of the protection we’re granted by the state (do we? Perhaps unconsciously). The flat tax sets this aside all together, though, deleting the reciprocal relation of state and subject and reducing taxation to a simple penalty for being. No wonder we resent it. So the flat tax is a device intended to kneecap the social state, to diminish the public realm, sever the subject’s connection with institutions and to limit government’s room for manoeuvre.


  • Countries that currently operate a flat tax fall into two categories: relatively fragile states recently split from larger blocs and tax havens. It would be interesting to know what the economic composition of these states is. It seems likely that few of them have the top-heavy wealth structure of a Western European state or the USA, so the effect of transferring wealth upwards would likely be muted and the positive benefits for people on lower or median incomes amplified. The largest economy on the list is Romania, with a GDP of about a tenth of the UK’s: Abkhazia (10%), Armenia (20%), Belize (25%), Bolivia (13%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (10%), Bulgaria (10%), East Timor (10%), Estonia (20%), Georgia (20%), Guernsey (20%), Hungary (15%), Jersey (20%), Kazakhstan (10%), Kurdistan (5%), Kyrgyzstan (10%), Moldova (12%), Nauru (20%), North Macedonia (10%), Romania (10%), South Ossetia (12%), Tajikistan (12%), Transnistria (15%), Turkmenistan (10%), Ukraine (19.5%), Uzbekistan (12%).
  • Of course, it’s interesting that the flat tax – the kind of thing the most genius in a gillet will bang on about for hours at the table next to yours in the pub – came up at a farmers’ inheritance tax ‘summit’. These grass-roots movements of business owners often seem to find friends at the oddball end of the policy spectrum.
  • The Telegraph, instinctively in the flat tax camp, presumably, in a follow-up explainer, is remarkably level-headed about the risks as well as the apparent benefits. Still no mention of the underlying purpose, though.

Assisted dying, compulsory suicide

Do your duty, prepare for your lethal injection.

Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the ‘economically inactive’ population. This system would like the idea of more people taking the voluntary way out.

Hospital sign, white out of blue text, with directional arrows, reads:
Children's audiology
X-Ray Department
Ultrasound
Day Hospital
Wards
Restaurant
Thanatology

Am I being neurotic? My concerns about the assisted suicide bill, currently in the UK Parliament, are not with the risk of coercion by family members or doctors or scumbags of one kind or another – although I’m quite sure this is a real risk.

I’m also not particularly worried about ‘the slippery slope’ or about the risk that old people might want to avoid becoming a ‘burden’ (isn’t that actually a perfectly legitimate reason to go?). My concern is much simpler. It’s about this system, a healthcare system that is less and less humane; more and more obsessed with measurement and control, with efficiency and throughput and the management of shrinking resources.

In this system – this diminished and dehumanised system – the pressure to move the sick and elderly, the incurable and the intractable (the awkward, the unemployable, the unproductive) along the expensive health and care timeline and onto the fast track, onto the slip-road out of here, is already enormous.

My grim suspicion is that there are managers and administrators and government ministers (not forgetting the management consultancies and insurers and private equity firms) who would quite like to speed things up a bit, to increase the system’s throughput, to just slightly improve the ratios.

Thanatology? Just down the corridor

To deliver on this new policy, once it’s on the statute books, NHS managers will have to add death to the roster of treatments available and, presumably, add a Death Unit to every major hospital. They’ll mechanically formalise the process, setting targets and, quite plausibly, tweaking incentives to ‘nudge’ the sick and old onto the pathway. There can be no better way to address bed-blocking in our hospitals than by permanently removing the problem.

This system would like to reduce the pointless expenditure on keeping the sick and the inactive alive and to create in the citizenry – the customer-base, you and me – a new habit – the habit of volunteering to step off this mortal coil a bit early.

Not too early. Just a few months or a year. Barely noticeable, just a tiny statistical effect. But every little helps. Move along now. Off you go. Thank you for your contribution. It’s been lovely knowing you… See ya!


  • I’m ready to make a small bet that within a few years we’ll see the first ‘Dignity Unit™’ or ‘Goodbye Suite™’ in the grounds of a hospital or a care home. It’ll be all pastel colours and there’ll be a wild-flower garden maintained by volunteers. A minor Royal will cut the ribbon…
  • This, incidentally, explains why politicians are not freaking out about the fact that life expectancies are now falling in parts of the developed world – including Britain. That looks like a self-adjusting system to these people.