THE CAPTCHA OF CIVILISATION

The modern world, we are solemnly informed, is a triumph of convenience. One has only to observe the average citizen attempting to withdraw twenty pounds or purchase a cheese sandwich to appreciate the full magnificence of this claim. Where once a simple transaction required little more than a human being, a scrap of paper and a mutual understanding that the paper represented something of value, the same modest ambition now demands a small digital opera of passwords last recalled in a previous geological epoch, authentication codes that arrive precisely after the app has locked itself in a fit of pique, and a captcha contest in which one must identify every blurred bicycle with the solemnity of a wartime aircraft spotter. The chatbot, when finally summoned, assures one that it understands one’s frustration. 

It does not, of course. Understanding is not among its subroutines. Polite dismissal is. Buying lunch once involved the exchange of money for food in the presence of another person. That arrangement, though primitive, possessed a certain clarity. Today the same modest hunger frequently requires a stable Wi-Fi signal, a QR code that expired forty-seven seconds earlier, two-factor authentication, and a telephone whose battery has declined to one per cent while an algorithm decides whether one’s face is sufficiently human to be allowed to pay for its own sandwich. The face, it should be noted, belongs to the same person who has been wearing it without incident for several decades. The algorithm remains unconvinced. Progress, we are told, consists in submitting to this ritual of self-doubt before one may eat.

There was a time when losing one’s keys resulted in the inconvenience of being locked out of one’s house. The modern equivalent is more refined. One may now be locked out of one’s own telephone because a password has been forgotten or because the device, after prolonged and intimate acquaintance with its owner’s physiognomy, has developed doubts about the authenticity of the face presented to it. The telephone, having been granted the power to recognise its master, exercises that power with the capriciousness of a minor deity. The owner is left standing in the street, staring at a darkened screen, contemplating the philosophical implications of being rejected by a piece of glass and aluminium that contains, among other things, photographs of his children and the only record of his bank balance.

Navigation, once a matter of asking a stranger for directions and receiving an answer of greater or lesser accuracy, has been replaced by the blue dot. One stares at this blue dot until the signal expires, at which point one discovers that one has no idea which way is north. The satellite navigation system, for its part, would like to know one’s precise location for the rest of eternity in exchange for the privilege of being occasionally wrong. The stranger in the street has been rendered obsolete; the algorithm has not yet learned manners. Customer service has undergone a similar elevation. Where once there stood a person capable of answering a specific question, there now exists a vast FAQ delivered by a robot that has never seen the product in question. The exchange concludes with the inevitable inquiry, “Was this helpful?”, followed by a survey about the survey concerning the standard of customer service. The queue, in the old days, contained human beings. The chatbot contains a script and an almost supernatural incapacity to address the particular. 

One is left with the sensation of having been processed rather than assisted. We have traded paper maps for telephones that require a signal, paper tickets for applications that crash at the precise moment one reaches the barrier, and paper books for subscriptions that evaporate the instant a company “updates its terms.” Meanwhile the countryside is steadily paved with data centres so that an algorithm may generate an image of a cat wearing a tiny hat. One continues, nevertheless, to receive hosepipe bans after four consecutive sunny days, even as those same data centres consume water with the enthusiasm of a desert caravan. The irony is not lost on the algorithm, for the simple reason that the algorithm does not notice irony.

Friendship itself has been quietly reorganised. Social life now consists largely of a group chat in which no one has suggested the pub since March. The elderly, wishing merely to consult a doctor, require an adult child, a login credential and a working knowledge of information technology. Banks close their doors. General practitioners retreat behind applications. Parking, menus, council tax, pensions and the electricity bill all demand another code, another verification, another demonstration that one is not a robot attempting to settle one’s own heating account. The cumulative effect is a population that is less free, more thoroughly tracked, constantly interrupted, and still late because the parking application has crashed for want of a reliable signal in the street.

And yet, after all this, one may take comfort in the knowledge that one correctly identified the online traffic lights in a captcha grid and thereby proved, to the satisfaction of an unseen machine, that one is human. Progress, apparently, consists in repeatedly establishing this elementary fact to entities that themselves possess no humanity at all. Clive James might have observed that civilisation advances by increasing the number of things one must prove before one is permitted to live. On present evidence, he would not have been far wrong.

NOT IN MY NAME, ROLY-POLY

There comes a moment in the life of any self-respecting nation when its leaders, having exhausted the usual repertoire of excuses for incompetence, discover that nothing quite concentrates the public mind like the prospect of sending other people’s sons to be blown to pieces. Britain appears to have reached that moment with the quiet efficiency of a man discovering a forgotten bottle of sherry and deciding it will do for breakfast. 

The decision, we are told in the more elevated tones of Whitehall, has already been taken somewhere in the digestive tract of the British establishment: direct conflict with Russia is on the cards. The only remaining task is to frighten the rest of us into regarding this as either a jolly good idea or, at the very least, the sort of weather one simply has to put up with.

It is the old march to 1914, only this time the brass bands have been replaced by solemn briefings and the recruiting posters feature fewer moustaches and more PowerPoint slides. Then, as now, a surprising number of those who once called themselves the left will discover an unexpected fondness for the national colours. Patriotism, it turns out, is the last refuge of the progressive who has run out of progressive things to say. 

They will go along to get along, muttering about solidarity while the generals, the arms manufacturers and the perennial products of Eton prepare to play their favourite game: the one in which young men from the housing estates and the schemes are invited to demonstrate their civic virtue by becoming pawns.

These young men, it must be conceded, have been admirably prepared for the role. Looking out from their estates upon a future that consists largely of the absence of one, they present the authorities with a ready supply of willing volunteers—or, if willingness proves insufficient, of young men who can be persuaded that refusal is somehow unpatriotic. Conscription, whether formal or the softer kind that arrives by way of economic desperation and relentless messaging, has always relied on this convenient coincidence of hopelessness and hierarchy. The system that has created far more problems than it could ever solve now finds itself in need of a war to keep the lid on. 

Eduardo Galeano put it with characteristic economy: the marketplace of fear requires a steady supply of monsters. Putin’s Russia has been cast in the role with all the subtlety of a pantomime villain. Once upon a time parents warned naughty children that the bogeyman would come; now the same service is performed by politicians who assure us the Russians are coming unless we do as we are told.

The enemy without, of course, is useful chiefly for the control it offers within. It is not Moscow that truly keeps the establishment awake at night so much as the low, persistent murmur of domestic discontent. War fever has the great advantage of turning that murmur into a more manageable roar of martial enthusiasm. 

We have been here before. They lied to us about Yugoslavia. They lied to us about Iraq. They lied to us about Libya. They lied to us about Syria. The pattern is so consistent that one begins to suspect it is less a series of unfortunate errors than a governing principle. To believe the current version of events requires a capacity for selective amnesia that would be impressive in a goldfish.

Siegfried Sassoon, who knew something about the difference between the recruiting office and the trench, described war as the hell where youth and laughter go. The observation has not aged. The fight that matters now is the one that prevents the youth of this generation from being packed off into the same hell that claimed the youth of his. 

Conscription—whether by legal instrument or by the quieter coercion of narrative and necessity—is the mechanism by which that packing is achieved. It takes young men who have already been short-changed by the economy and invites them to settle the remaining debt with their lives. The generals will speak of duty; the manufacturers will speak of readiness; the politicians will speak of inevitability. The young men themselves will be expected to speak very little at all.

There is a certain dry comedy in watching a political class that can scarcely organise a reliable train service suddenly discover the moral clarity required for continental war. The comedy, however, is of the sort that ends with someone else paying the bill. Never again is not a slogan for the history books; it is a practical instruction for the present. 

The young men on the estates and the schemes have already been offered a future of no future. They should not be asked to improve upon that offer by dying for it.

MUSK'S CAR FLIES WHILST BRUSSELS TETHERS US

The Tesla Roadster now hurtling through the void is not, strictly speaking, flying. Flying implies purpose, control, and the faint possibility of landing somewhere useful, preferably with the wheels still attached. What Elon Musk achieved in 2018 was rather more ambitious and considerably more American: he took a perfectly good electric sports car, bolted it to the business end of a Falcon Heavy rocket, and flung it into interplanetary space with a mannequin in a spacesuit at the wheel, tuned permanently to David Bowie. The car is currently somewhere between Earth and Mars, doing laps of the solar system like a bored millionaire who has run out of private islands. It is the most expensive piece of space junk in human history, and the most elegant.

One must admire the sheer theatricality of the gesture. While lesser nations debate the precise angle at which a yoghurt pot lid should be recycled, Musk simply decided that the cosmos needed a cherry-red convertible and made it so. The Roadster’s trajectory is eccentric in every sense. It will, according to the orbital mechanics people who still have jobs, spend the next few million years looping past Earth and Mars, occasionally coming close enough for future generations to wave at it through telescopes, provided they still have telescopes and have not been required to tether them to the observatory for safety reasons.

The humour of the enterprise is pure Musk: a mixture of engineering bravado and adolescent showmanship. Starman, the dummy driver, sits there forever in a posture of studied nonchalance, one hand on the wheel, the other presumably scrolling through the universe’s least useful playlist. The car’s battery will eventually die, the paint will fade under unfiltered solar radiation, and the whole ensemble will become a silent monument to the proposition that if you have enough money and enough rockets, the laws of taste can be temporarily suspended. Clive James once observed that the English talent for understatement was matched only by the American talent for overstatement; here the overstatement has achieved escape velocity.

And this, of course, is the real point. Such magnificent absurdities arise only from the particular soil of American free-market capitalism, that unruly garden in which billionaires are allowed to plant rockets the way other people plant hydrangeas. The same system that produces Silicon Valley’s more tiresome excesses also produces the occasional spectacle of a car doing what cars were never meant to do: leave the planet altogether. One may disapprove of the concentration of wealth, the cult of personality, the tweets that read like unfinished ransom notes. One may still find oneself smiling at the image of a Roadster out there among the asteroids, its headlights permanently off, its radio forever silent, embodying the principle that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing in a manner calculated to annoy the European Commission.

Contrast this with the European Union’s crowning technological achievement of recent years: the tethered bottle cap. After years of deliberation, impact assessments, stakeholder consultations, and the solemn weighing of plastic against planetary survival, Brussels succeeded in ensuring that the lid of your mineral water can never again be lost under the car seat. The cap remains attached by a thin plastic hinge, flapping about like a broken wing whenever you try to drink. It is an innovation of pure negation—an improvement that makes the original object slightly worse while congratulating itself on moral progress. One can almost hear the collective sigh of bureaucratic satisfaction as the directive was signed: another small victory for the precautionary principle, another small defeat for the ordinary human desire to open a bottle without a fight.

The same institutional temperament that gave us the tethered bottle top is incapable of producing a car in space. They can’t even take the top off a biro without commissioning eight separate environmental reports to discuss the implications, and even then they would only come to the conclusion that the top needs to be tethered to the pen, making it impossible to write with. The biro itself would then be subjected to a life-cycle analysis, a carbon-footprint audit, and a public consultation on the ethical implications of ink. By the time the process concluded, the pen would be illegal and the only permitted writing instrument would be a recyclable stylus permanently attached to a government-approved tablet that refuses to turn on unless you have completed a GDPR compliance form.

There is something almost poignant in the comparison. America, for all its chaos and inequality, still retains the capacity for grand, slightly ridiculous gestures. Europe, for all its civilisation and social protections, has perfected the art of the small, slightly ridiculous regulation. One launches cars into the heavens; the other makes sure you cannot lose the lid of your lemonade. Both, in their way, are expressions of national character. One dreams of Mars while arguing on Twitter. The other dreams of a perfectly sorted recycling bin while arguing about the precise definition of a single-use plastic. Musk’s Roadster will, in the fullness of geological time, either collide with something interesting or continue its lonely circuit until the sun expands and swallows it. By then the tethered bottle caps of Europe will have long since been replaced by some even more ingenious form of mandatory attachment—perhaps bottle caps tethered to the user, or users tethered to the European Parliament. 

In the meantime, the car sails on, a silent rebuke to caution, a chrome-and-leather reminder that sometimes the most civilised thing a civilisation can do is waste a perfectly good sports car on a cosmic practical joke. The rest of us are left down here, struggling with our hinged lids, wondering whether the next great leap for mankind will require planning permission.