At Phibber, we await the data.

 

We think it is an interesting experiment over the last ten to fifteen years to see whether a combination of education, censorship and nudging can result in wider happiness and prosperity. There is certainly intense economic investment in the area, and a huge and growing tranche of people who've been lifted up out of

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The trouble is with this approach is that there's a significant 'honesty deficit'. What do we mean by this?

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There are also indications that too much success in this approach has worrying implications for what have become, over the centuries, standard freedoms and rights for individuals. If we look at the truckers in Canada, 

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- assuming Stewart Lee wasn't having a clever bit of fun here, which is always the danger (as it is with jazz music) - 

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There is no question that there is dynamic activity and investment in ECN. Many hundreds of thousands of median-income people have been empowered to climb significant mid-sections of ladder, raising wealth and confidence where before only average income and average confidence existed. It remains an approach to watch, particulalry if it can deal with the honesty deficit

 

What do you do about a phib that's one-sided propagandistic trash barely disguising the author's rancid prejudices? Same thing we've always done about agitprop. Point out it's bad art. This may be more difficult now because our allegience is no longer to art but to being right about everything. But anyway, that's the aim. Perhaps the format of Phibber will help, but you'll have to do the hard work.

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If, however, you've been directed here because you're offended by what a particular character in a particular phib believes or says, then you have missed the point - deliberately - and the following once-only response is for you.

 

Shut up, it's for your own good. And you fucking well know it.

 

Writers are on your side. Writers who invent greedy, power-mad, malevolent, subversive, stylish, jealous, violent, manipulative, petty, expedient, deceptive, bigoted, stupid people in their fictions are on your side. You think government censors, identity academics and various 'hate speech' vultures seriously envisage your imminent escape from the depredations of bigots and bullies with a really good push into making them behave? Do you really think they think this? No. It would have them out of business for goodness sake. It's essential that you're always subject to You're their victim for life. By contrast writers take seriously their responsibility to you. Why? (1) such people exist and (2) harmony and concord will never be won by advising such people to 'be kind'. It's a damned lie. An insult to you. If writers thought harmony could be won like this, they wouldn't write. They would join the regulators and concern-showers, the censors in working for a world where depicting these nasty characters is redundant since they wouldn't exist and life would consist entirely of polite people unrelentingly thinking the noblest thoughts. But writers don't think this. They've never thought this. Over thousands of years of intense self-analysis, Instead, they've developed a tradition of championed contestation. 

 

Phibber abides by this long tradition. On the internet. Looking like social media. Which is also for your own good.

 

What the hell has happened to you since social media took over? You stopped meeting up with one or more of your friends because it was easier to chat online. You gave up being with them for the convenience of having their raw words on a screen. Do you realise what you gave up? You gave up seeing small tells of insecurity, subtle changes of emphasis, unexpected darts of conversation that only quick mouths can do, sudden mutual revelations. You gave up being with an actual person because you were a fucking slob who couldn't shift off the sofa. Ok, you managed initially to maintain some level of freindliness and knowingness in your texts, but over months and years keyboard spontaneaity gets hard. It's a slog. You pare things down. And now you send terse, almost legalistic arguments at each other. You traded a friend for an argument. Now all you do for company is gaze at a small collection of pixels in the shape of a thumbs-up. Worse, you developed the nasty habit of high-status grief, self-nursing around notions of toxic speech and fears of growing far-right malevolence. You cultivated a sensitive online identity over and above anything based in the real world.

 

You fucking moron, with all due respect.

 

Socila media slinked in, whispered in your ear about 'community' and 'connection', took all your data, got so rich they dictate national policies, leaving you sit there, a pathetic, quivering wreck, assailed by demons, imagined threats, agorophobic, frightened of someone who only a few years ago was a good friend but who now, apparently, is a card-carrying member of some extreme guerrilla outfit that wants you and your way of life snuffed out. None of it is true. It's all fantasy.

 

And now you're offended by fictional characters, invented by writers, saying naughty things? The scale of embezzlement! The swindle!

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Poets, Shelley said - really talking about novelists, playwrights, tv dramatists and phibbers - are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He was right. Good writing lays the foundations of beauty and truth upon which all other things can be stacked, at which point there may be some role for government. Don't let the bastards persuade you they should do any more than that. No government can or should discover beauty and truth on your behalf. The absolute damned cheek of it.

 

Think a phib has been dishonest or sly or a travesty? Go after it with merciless criticism. Even better, tear it to pieces with a phib and cast of characters of your own. Write or perform with brutal honesty. Stand up for yourself. Stop being frightened of unfrightening people. To hell with the wealthy and tyrannical sucking the life out of us for their good life. Let's have it out together and cut off their supply chain. Our differences are not so deep: it is smoke and mirrors by vampires in tech and government that make them seem so. End their grift.

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That is the point.