Human beings have always been aware of their differences but we live in an age where, for various reasons, we're not so much aware of them as we are alert to them. In recent years this alertness has been honed to a fine, piercing point by social media.

   There are only two possible responses to the political and cultural polarisation currently oozing out of social media into real life: find it energising and enjoyable because a clear and pre-sentient enemy has amassed opposite who deserve, and in fact desperately need, the brutal education you're about to give them in the 60-70 coruscating tweets you've got brewing for the day; or find it utterly depressing because there was a time, not so long ago, when you could be thoroughly irritated by someone but still recognise some shred of humanity within them, and that doesn't happen anymore.

   The first of these responses - finding it enjoyably enraging - is by far the most popular. So popular, in fact, even the people who feel utterly depressed about social media only feel like this in between longer stretches of feeling thrillingly enraged. After all, whose to blame for where we find ourselves now? Maybe 3% you - we all have our off days don't we? - but unquestionably 97% is, absolutely no doubt, those pig-headed, vicious, bullying, lying, hypocritical, crooked, pissy sods on the other side: the Brexit-lovers, the Trump-voters, the pink-faced, slow-witted gammons, or the , fuck them to hell, and then fuck them back up out of hell so that they can go and fuck themselves with a gondola oar. The. Absolute. Shower. Of. Fucking. Cunts. 

   Given the pre-existing trend towards heightened alertness about difference and identity, you could say the arrival of the internet and social media couldn't have been more badly timed, but this maybe to dissentangle what can't be dissintengled. Whatever: as a tool for occupying the territory of the internet social media seems inexorably drawn to making that occupation highly defensive and brittle. Which is extraordinary when you consider next year sees the 30th anniversary of the creation of this vast bubble of spacetime. Surely thirty years is long enough to get through the spears-raised, fighting-for-your-own-plot-of-land phase of colonisation and got to the next phase of mutually acceptable rules of ownership and trade facilitating peaceful co-operation? What's the delay?

   Comedy scavenges for meagre scraps of matter to produce barely-there millijoules of amusement: re-enactments of the extended-over-the-desk body language of Jon Stewart in tedious descriptions of Bad Things (‘Seriously, this—this is how insane it is!’); arch, slightly skewed pedantry delivered in a sniping tone (‘aren’t I clever and reflective, aren’t you exactly… none of those things’); the apparent callousness and clownishness of conservatives (‘while Jacob Rees Mogg isn’t a nazi, he is a… oh wait, he is a nazi isn’t he?’). It’s heartbreaking to watch it plunge so low. But also enraging, because one thing comedy-attempters shouldn’t be is careless with the potential of comedy. It’s too good to let unserious people toss it away like this, and to praise them as exciting and new is practically callous. But this is what you get when institutions panic - desperate, half-arsed, careless decision-making justified by self-serving appeals to ‘relevance’. Arse-covering. Still ‘feeding your funny’! Like fuck - and while we’re at it, stop trying to sell me comedy with stupid, wacky-new-category advert language like ‘feed my funny’. Why are you selling me things? WHY? Go and do your identity-wanking back in the junior common-room, you insufferable twats.

   
Noise is necessary but not sufficient for music: you have to make noise to make music, but not all noise makes music. A further step is required. You have to notice patterns in the noise. If you don't start noticing patterns in the noise, or rather, that there are patterns in the noise, you can't develop the patterns into music. It will stay as noise with the potential to be music.

 

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