Here’s a topic that’s bound to delight everyone. The best way I can think of to understand the social place of the British monarchy is as a very modern influencer content-marketing and celebrity management operation, the influencer house of Windsor. Starting in the late 1960s, there was a deliberate project to reinvent the institution in…
Read More The monarchy as a content-marketing operationWe live in a crisis of responsibility. Consider this twitter conversation with Lux Alptraum and myself. This was one of those good moments on Twitter; the very different networks in my feed crossed over, generating insight. I had just seen, via Simon Willison’s feed, this embarrassing story about that time futurvangelistic technogger Peter Diamandis presumably…
Read More Links on the crisis of responsibilityThis Time magazine report on the campaign by democratic America (in every sense) to force Trump to respect the election results is well worth your time. This slightly earlier NYT story can be read with it for more colour. The overwhelming, astonishing stand-out here is how close this was to the colour revolution blueprint of…
Read More All that was missing was the colourSo Matt Hancock is doing the rounds of the sundays, dropping hints that will be briefed out in more detail without attribution later. Perhaps this time’s the charm and the virus will be defeated by the sheer might of talking points distribution. Hell, it worked on us to the extent of getting this shower elected…
Read More A big conversation on seagulls, and afterThe Guardian would like to tell you Germans have curious native customs that include opening their windows twice a day, and that even their leader Angela Merkel gives advice about this on television. Now, one of the basic things everyone should know by now about SARS-CoV2 is that it spreads primarily through aerosol transmission in…
Read More SeriousI keep seeing people – usually on the twitter – who believe or behave as if they believe the following two things: Media bias is the dominating fact of British politics The Labour party should always seek confrontation with the media Well, there’s a strong case for the first point, but if you believe that,…
Read More Picking fights with the mediaA bit more on the Independent Group’s accounts. Here’s a chart breaking down their expenses by supplier, which really does show how much of a creation of the advertising/marketing/public relations industry they were: Here’s the daily spending on Facebook advertising: And here’s the history of their spending with The & Partnership, by category: You can…
Read More TIG in chartsI put this on twitter but it ought to be a blog post too, just without the GIFs, even though every GIF takes two years off your subjective age. (I’m following the science.) The Independent Group, aka Change UK, aka The Independent Group for Change, is winding up the private company it created as its…
Read More The Independent Group: envoiEveryone wants to share what came up on The Doorstep. I am quite suspicious of doorstep insights; I can’t think of any campaign when I had the kind of synoptic, oversailing insight people tend to claim. The experience isn’t like that. This time out I campaigned in four different constituencies, and instead of a sense…
Read More Everyone’s doing it so why can’t I? Election introspection, 1If politics is theatre, one of the defining features of the form is the presence of the on-stage critics – the media, or more specifically, the big name opinion leaders. They would like to imagine themselves as a Greek chorus commenting on the drama, but if they are, they’re a Greek chorus composed of unreliable…
Read More The failure of the on-stage critic