We are the fifth estate [cross-post from New Statesman]

Apologies for being scant in cross-posting and monitoring comments - I'm currently trying to work three jobs whilst living out of a suitcase and healing a broken heart, and it's all got a bit melodramatic. I'll be blogging about the budget tonight, once I can work out something more coherent to write than 'fuck', 800 times over. Anyone else feel like they've been kicked in the soul? Yeah, me too.

****

Remember hard copy? Your kids might not. This week it emerged that newspaper sales are plummeting in Britain, with only 33% of the population now claiming to be regular readers of analogue news. As more and more of us cherry-pick our media online, drawing little distinction between the mainstream press and the popular blogosphere, industry insiders are beginning to panic, predicting the violent death of quality commentary and investigative journalism at the multiferous hands of the internet.

On several baffling occasions in recent months, I have found myself at snooty media events where hosts introduce me and my colleagues as gingerly as ‘bloggers’, rather as if we were the grinning emissaries of a rogue state, ambassadors from a territory of violent cultural change which the authorities might soon see fit to brutally suppress but which, for now, must be appeased with canapés and party invitations. Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.

This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne. Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done. Whilst the media establishment guards its borders with paranoid rigour, snobbishly distinguishing between 'bloggers' and 'journalists', people from the internet have already infiltrated the mainstream. Many influential writers now work across both camps, such as author, blogger and digital activist Cory Doctorow, who observed that the blogosphere need not threaten paid comment journalism:

“Commercially speaking, newspapers can make enough money from advertising to pay reasonable rates for opinion,” said Doctorow. “I know of at least one that does, and that's my site, BoingBoing, which reaches millions of readers every month. By operating efficiently, we can more than match the fees paid by the New York Times, for example, which always pays peanuts for op-eds because the glory of being published in the NYT is meant to be its own reward.

"After you take away the adverts, the personals, the filler and the pieces hacked together from press releases, the average paper contains about fifteen column inches of decent investigative journalism and commentary,” said Doctorow. “And the internet is more than capable of financing fifteen column inches a day.”

What the blogosphere threatens is not the survival of comment journalism itself: it threatens the monopoly of the media elite, holding the self-important fourth estate to a higher standard than bourgeois columnists and editors find comfortable. We are, in effect, a fifth estate, scrutinising the mainstream media and challenging its assumptions.

Last month, when Danny Dyer appeared to advise a reader of Zoo magazine to cut his girlfriend's face, the feminist arm of the fifth estate responded angrily, prompted a retraction and apology from Zoo and successfully organised a donation drive to raised more money for women’s refuge charities than the discredited Dyer’s violently misogynist film Pimp made in its first week of release. That’s the type of power that scares the wits out of the dinosaurs in analogue media.

Every day, the British blogosphere becomes less amateurish and more relevant. This weekend the popular forum Liberal Conspiracy will host Blog Nation, an event bringing together bloggers, journalists and politicians on the left to determine how the internet can build progressive campaigns to fight public sector cuts. “We have a strong community that can do activism and provide niche information that escapes mainstream newspapers,” said Liberal Conspiracy editor Sunny Hundal. “We want to use the net to get the left to think more about strategy and action - and get people to work together, better!”

The long-term effect of the internet on human cultural production may not be ascertained in my lifetime. Certainly the baby boomers who currently control most major news outlets will not live to see what change may come. "Where we end up in five years isn't where we are today," said Doctorow. " We're not headed towards a period of technological stability where we'll know what our media will look like, we're headed for more technological change.”

Doctorow is right to suggest that we are living through what Marx and Engels might term a “permanent technological revolution”. This weekend, in an incisive essay in The Guardian, John Naughton observed that being a consumer of media and journalism during the radical transformation of today's communications environment is a little

"like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us.”

One thing, however, is certain: journalism is changing forever. The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly-paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair. The internet is a many-to-many medium, and those who write and comment here are not media insiders, nor are we the mob. We are something altogether new.

We are the fifth estate, and we are forging a path through the miasma of technological change towards more a honest, democratic model of commentary - alongside a lot of porn and some pictures of amusing cats. The media revolution is ongoing. Whatever comes next, the bloggers' battle-cry must be the permanent technological revolution.



Cory Doctorow's new novel about gaming and digital organisation, For The Win, is published by Harper Voyager. You can register here for this Saturday's Blog Nation

Full interview with Ken MacLeod

"Science fiction is a laboratory of thought experiments," says Ken MacLeod, sipping his coffee. The 55-year-old Scottish novelist is adamant that "you can do a great deal with science fiction that you can only do in a very strained, constrained way in more mainstream journalism and literary fiction."

I meet MacLeod at EasterCon 2010, Britain's biggest annual convention for science-fiction writers, readers and fans.

With two hours to go before the opening ceremony, the Radisson hotel in Heathrow is packed with oddly dressed people giddy with sugar and anticipation, clutching laptops and novelty stuffed toys and chattering excitedly.

This sense of childish excitement about the future is utterly absent from more bourgeois literary events - you wouldn't find attendees at the Booker prize, for example, dashing through conference rooms and giggling about gay robots while one of the nation's foremost novelists attempts to explain the effect of the evolutionary long-view on socialist thought.

"Science fiction is about prophetic vision - from the most crude and pulpy to the most sophisticated," says MacLeod, who lives in Edinburgh with his wife Carol.

"It's about combining social awareness with elements of scientific truth and speculation."

British writers like MacLeod are universally recognised as working at the cutting edge of science and speculative fiction, a phenomenon MacLeod attributes to the grandfather of British sci-fi - HG Wells.

"The thing about Wells's work that had such an effect on British sci-fi writers is that he was socially conscious," says MacLeod.

"Wells studied biology under Thomas Huxley and assimilated an understanding of human evolution with social speculation, a sense of the transience of human societies within millions and billions of years of deep time."

MacLeod explains that Wells's sense of "deep time" has inspired generations of socially conscious sci-fi writers in Britain, from Arthur C Clarke to Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks - and himself.

"If you have a sense of deep time, you can't possibly think the modes of production we have now are necessarily eternal, or even very long-lasting, on a cosmic scale."

It is this aspect of socio-political prophetic vision that places British sci-fi writers at the coalface of literary innovation.

MacLeod's 15 books may feature robots and Glasgow gangsters in space, but they offer prescient and engaging analyses of anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism and contemporary counter-terrorism.

"Science fiction is necessarily political because it depends on what assumptions you have about the nature of society," he says.

"If you believe that all societies are based on natural hierarchy then you will write one kind of story. And if you think that the market is the fundamental principle that societies tend towards, then you will write another.

"Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, science fiction tended to envision the triumph of the American or Soviet side of the cold war, projected into space, forever. But after the changes of the 1960s, new experiments began to happen in what the future might look like.

"When I started writing my Fall Revolution series, it was against a background of the real fall of the revolution in the late '80s and early '90s.

"I began with a very simple situation - a scientist in the laboratory and a guy with the gun - but I was also thinking about how to create the world they lived in.

"The whole process was informed by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the sense of fragmentation and disintegration.

"Sometime in the backstory of the novels there has been a big swing to the left in the West, which was defeated.

"I no longer define myself as a socialist, but it stuns me that there's a whole generation of growing up - a generation who are younger than my own children - who lack the idea of socialism as an implicit alternative.

"What might a future without any socialism look like? It's not necessarily an attractive prospect."

MacLeod, the son of a Presbytarian minister, was born in Stornoway and worked as a computer programmer before becoming a full-time writer.

As a student at Brunel in the 1970s, he became involved with Trotskyist politics.

"I was a regular reader of the Morning Star back then," admits MacLeod, who fictionalises a future version of this paper in some of his novels.

"For me, in the '80s, the Morning Star was a voice of sanity in a mad world, even if it was sometimes a rather dull voice.

"The second cold war which happened the 1980s was rather frightening and it did look as if the West and the Soviet Union were on a collision course.

"One thing that had a very strong effect on me at the time was the way in which the cold war was actually being fought out in terms of Western-backed counter-revolutions.

"That period hasn't been properly assimilated historically. It was a completely unprecedented, worldwide terrorist campaign by the United States and the United Kingdom against radical regimes."

MacLeod's near-future novels The Execution Channel and The Night Sessions deal directly with what he calls the "blowback" from Western-organised terrorism.

"I've never romanticised terrorism as a strategy, but sometimes it's easy to feel like you have to keep your mouth shut about what you really think - and science fiction can offer a safe space for those discussions," he says.

MacLeod's analysis of far-left movements is far from uncritical. He points out that left-wing movements have been slow to embrace new technologies, in part because the internet "challenges a set of Leninist assumptions that a lot of far-left groups had about how discussions must and should be conducted.

"A lot of the formal rules of the left are still based on 19th-century communications technology - the idea that revolutionary politics are built around a top-level party line set down by a newspaper, which everyone has to agree with. The internet negates that process," he says, adding hastily that "the Star has a head start, in that it allows in voices from outside the party."

MacLeod reserves special disdain for elements of anti-humanist thought in the green movement, which he satirises in several of his novels.

"I think siding with nature against humanity is despicable. The fundamental thing as far as I'm concerned is that you have to judge everything in terms of human interest.

"There is an element in green thinking which rejects this totally and says that the interests of other organisms, and rocks and so forth, need to be taken into account.

"This is not my view at all. I'm quite strongly in favour of humanity developing and improving, and suspicious of the Malthusian logic preached by people like George Monbiot."

So does some green thinking tend towards the fascistic? "It's much worse than that - at least fascism believed in some human beings!"

MacLeod stresses that he does not wish to minimise the seriousness of global warming - merely to critique the anti-human ideology of some green thinkers.

"Global warming is real, it's happening and it's serious, but it's certainly no reason to believe there's more than an outlying possibility of the world coming to an end in this century."

For MacLeod, a central purpose of science fiction is to imagine a future for the human race.

"In science fiction, as in politics, imagining armageddon has the nice effect that you don't have to do anything about it because it's all inevitable and fated anyway.

"We don't know what the future will look like - that's one of the reasons writing science fiction is so rewarding. But there's every reason to believe that human civilisation will continue into deep time."

Printed in Morning Star on 21/10/2010. Ken MacLeod's next book, The Restoration Game, is published by Orbit on 1 July.

Geeking the left: Ken Macleod on radical politics and the internet

Like any science fiction writer, lots of Ken MacLeod's prophetic visions have failed to come true. However, one thing he did foresee, as a socialist computer programmer in the 1980s, was that left-wing movements would be slowest to embrace new communications technologies, in part because the internet “challenges a set of Leninist assumptions that a lot of far-left groups had about how discussions must and should be conducted."

"The organised left has taken a very long time to be aware of the internet and start using it properly," commented MacLeod when I met him at EasterCon 2010. "A lot of the formal rules of the left are still based on 19th century communications technology, which meant newspapers. As with Pravda and the Bolshevik revolution, who decides what goes in the newspaper was absolutely crucial, as was everyone pretending to agree was what was in the newspaper.

"The top level instruction was, and for some organisations remains, that you follow the party line set down by the paper -although I should stress that the organisation that produces the Morning Star is not necessarily one of those. It has the great advantage that it allows in other voices from across the left spectrum!

"The idea that revolutionary politics are built around a top-level party line set down by a newspaper, which everyone has to comply with, is antithetical to the digital age."

-This is my favourite bit of the Big Squeeful Ken MacLeod Interview. You can read the whole thing tomorrow in the Morning Star and online.

'If Boris dropped dead tomorrow, I'd run.'

'Has Johnson any politics? No. We thought he did, and that was based on a collection of crazed neocon rubbish he wrote for the Telegraph.' The truth, according to Ken Livingstone, is far worse.

'What's apparent now is that Boris only believes that people like Boris should run the earth. There's no political position he's not prepared to surrender in order to stay powerful. And that makes him very dangerous. In a situation where the far right, for example, could deliver him power, he'd have no hesitation in pandering to them.'

I meet Ken Livingstone in his new office - a window table in a Hampstead branch of Costa Coffee - and he is more than keen to chat. And not just about Boris. We talk about economics, about China and India and the organisation of gender-roles before metalworking developed. Ken talks and talks and his kind blue eyes twinkle and I feel faintly like I'm about to be invited to attend wizard school. And speaking of school -

'I'm writing my autobiography at present, and I've just got to the part where I'm about seventeen. It's horrendous stuff. I remember always being the weedy kid at school, always coming in on the mile run second last, just in front of the fat one. My sports teachers all seemed to be rehabilitated Nazi war criminals who believed that humiliation was a good way to make us improve. It wasn't.'

Ken may be writing his memoirs, but the constant calls from his PA and pile of complex charts balanced on the tiny table doesn't look very much like retirement to me. For more on Livingstone's comeback plans and projects for the activist left, read the full interview in Red Pepper very shortly.


******

As I write, stock markets are falling all over themselves like City boys outside Spearmint Rhinos at 3 am, and the USA seems to have fucked us all over quite royally by a 23-vote margin. Let me express my sincerest hope that you and I still have jobs in the morning.

'I dreamed I was getting finger fucked by Hilary Clinton...'

'I was in Seattle, and I'd just come back from yet another interview for a job I didn't get, when yet again I'd been told I was a stong candidate, that I was qualified, brilliant at what I do - I am brlliant at what I do - and named runner-up. Not one of those people I was beaten by was a person of colour, and not one of them was female. And that night I dreamed that I was in my hotel room, and in walked Hilary Clinton.

'Don't the Jungians say that you're meant to represent every person who appears in your dream? In walked Hilary Clinton, and she was a maid, too, like Jennifer Lopez in that movie, Maid in Manhattan. And I forced her to finger-fuck me. She wasn't enjoying it - I mean, I was practically raping her. It was like -'

At this point, Commie Girl makes a hand gesture that I can't quite bring myself to describe.

'....Anyway, I woke and thought, 'This is it. I'm always going to be getting fucked, I'll never be in charge, and I'll always get raped.'

The delectable Commie Girl and I are at a party full of wankers and hairdos in Regents' Park, talking about women and power and politics. And branding. And Barack Obama. And love, God, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Commie Girl, aka Rebecca Schoenkopf, is one of the most unique and inspiring journalists I've ever had the privilege to meet. A compilation of her columns has just been released by Verso books, the ostensible occasion for this interview, which passes in a haze of cigarette smoke with reasonable quantities of ranting and tears.

The complete interview will be up soon at Red Pepper. My, aren't I the saucy one.


*******

In other news, I've spent the week Building My CV, Networking and smoking furiously outside somebody else's office (I'll just come out and say it like a hussy: work experience) and have, as such, had no time for any independent thought. You can, however, read my first article in a national newspaper here - a scintillating, up-to-the minute piece of socio-political comment if ever there was one.