Drawn together by our unhappy endings

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

If you know nothing about Exit West before you read it, you’ll have a surprise about what kind of novel it is on page 99 (out of 229 in my edition). You may be pleased or confused by the author’s audacity or you may feel a little cheated. I felt cheated - well, at least that the writer had given up on providing a powerful insight into the experience of the breakdown of civil society in favour of something more fanciful. But after a few pages, I got used to the way the novel was turning out and was back on board, as gripped as I had been before Hamid whisked me off into a different kind of world.

Hamid writes in long but simple sentences, without much dialogue and with a sense of biblical universality which is disorienting when the subject matter is so vividly real. (Does he use an unusually high proportion of single syllable words?) The reader is constantly flipping between consuming the story as reportage and responding to the cadences of allegory or fable.

I saw Hamid talk about the book, saying he thought the author only has to write “half a novel” (or maybe it was “only half-write a novel” – which is better): the other half is provided by the reader. Indeed, while that makes sense for novels generally, it feels especially true of his book. Although he sketches his characters and incidents with precision, he doesn’t colour in all the detail: that’s up to you.

About the lack of dialogue, he said that with movies and television being specialists in dialogue - in seeing events “from the outside” - he prefers his novels to do what only they can do, which is telling a story from the inside of their characters’ minds. He thinks “books should be more bookish”.

There are many contemporary themes: mobile phones, immigrants, relations between generations, the fragility of order in society. But they are set against a timeless backdrop of human relations, prayer and, especially, mortality. In his talk, Hamid said that our shared humanity rests on a shared sadness about inevitable death, and that we are all immigrants, in that we are constantly arriving at new and different stages of our own lives where we find ourselves strangers, even to ourselves. We construct a narrative about ourselves, but it isn’t always plausible (such as when we try to exclude an incident from it by explaining that “I wasn’t myself”).

Only the two main characters have names and the city they come from isn’t named either - although Hamid says he was imagining his home, Lahore. But London and US locations are given names, some quite specific. Palace Gardens Terrace in Notting Hill, for instance, is described, with its cherry trees in blossom; but its big houses are not how their owners would like to see them. Sausalito, near San Francisco is also in a bad way.

In his talk, Hamid referred to the magic of his phone, as a portal to the world, a tool that confuses us about where we are and who we’re with. It blurs allegiances and ideas of belonging - which is why it’s also central to emotions around immigration. “Nativists” is one of his favourite words – meaning both ‘original residents’ and people with a defensive attitude to those outside of their group. The book was written before the vote for Brexit or the election of Trump but might have been inspired by both. Hamid find the same issues in Pakistan, where signs of being loyal to religious groupings are the equivalent of nationalist and racial group identities.

But this isn’t a tract; it’s a gripping story that might make you cry. Hamid revealed (or at least that’s how I saw it) that his novel compresses time, to show us what the Western world will be like in a couple of centuries. Even though it’s only made of paper (if you’re using old-fashioned technology), the book, like the phone, is a portal to a world that you can step into and step out of, a world where your identity is mixed with that of a writer you’ve probably never met. But I imagine he’d say it’s the reader and the writer who provide the magic, not the technology.

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Over-trained by the BBC

Today my BBC email has been switched off, a week after I took voluntary redundancy from my staff job as a Senior Broadcast Journalist at the BBC Academy. It's the cutting of my last official link with the Corporation.

Leaving wasn't a difficult decision. Having worked in London, mostly for the BBC, for more than 30 years, my department was moved to Birmingham three years ago. We were all offered the choice between taking redundancy, having help to relocate or claiming subsidised travel for 18 months. I chose the latter, but to reduce the commuting, I was also allowed to go part-time, spending initially two and later one day a week writing and making videos for a startup in London.

Now my department is being reorganised again, with another redundancy programme, and this time I accepted. The only other option would be turning up in the Birmingham office much more often, perhaps every day.

In the past three years, I've spent more time than I ever expected to on trains between London and Birmingham. These are tickets from just some of the journeys (for most I used a phone app instead of a printed ticket):

If you need to take the train from London to Birmingham, I'd recommend using Marylebone instead of Euston. It's slower than the Virgin service from Euston but Marylebone and the trains are both much more peaceful than the Euston alternatives - as I discovered after a year or so. Sitting in an almost empty carriage in the morning with good free wifi and a view of the passing countryside was one of the pleasures of my Birmingham life.

I haven't decided what to do next, but it's only been a week. I've printed some business cards, made a website, applied for some jobs and to study for a masters - probably too many ideas. I have a strong desire to find something locally, preferably no more than a bike ride from home. That worked when I looked for a startup to escape too many Birmingham trips, so maybe it will again. If anyone in South West London has any ideas, please let me know.

My exciting new website: bit.ly/charlesblairmiller

Anatomy of the tech giants: an entrepreneur's take on FAGA

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, now running a company that advises businesses on how to succeed against the subjects of his book - four seemingly unstoppable tech giants. He also teaches, and it's easy to imagine much of the book being loosely adapted either from slick presentations to his business customers or lecture notes to his students.

That said, I had a better impression of the book by the end than I feared at the start. Galloway has an offputting 'down with the kids' style, throwing in the odd obscenity for emphasis every few pages - like he's trying to make me relate to him as a chum rather than an expert or teacher.

There's a certain amount of familiar stuff about just how successful Google and co actually are: "Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history"; "If size matters (it does), Facebook may be the most successful thing in the history of humankind"; Apple enjoys "gargantuan profit and luxury margins at the scale of a low-cost producer".

When you've got through that, Galloway sets out his stall with some neat, Powerpointy characterisations of each of his four companies: Google is a religion (it's omniscient, like God); Apple sells luxury; Facebook offers human connection (it 'appeals to the heart'); and Amazon satisfies our hunter-gatherer instinct. It's provocative and you're challenged to think how it can't really be as simple as that.

I was more interested in Galloway's ideas about what the four have in common. For instance, he says all great companies needs a story that people can believe in. And "the best storyteller of our age, sans maybe Steven Spielberg" is Jeff Bezos. He's persuaded investors that Amazon doesn't need to make profits and that it should spend their money on crazy-sounding projects ("including a flying warehouse or systems that protect drones from bow and arrow. They’ve filed patents for both"). Amazon shareholders "love these stories; it makes them feel like they’re part of an exciting adventure".

More broadly, story-telling shades into image-building, where being a company that everyone likes (starting with Google's child-like logo) is important both commercially and politically, the latter even more so as these giants become increasingly entangled with regulators. Galloway characterises a formula within the companies that acts as a kind of shield against images of what they really are: "foster a progressive brand among leadership, embrace multi-culturalism, run the whole place on renewable energy - but, meanwhile, pursue a Darwinian, rapacious path to profits and ignore the job destruction taking place at your hands every day".

Then there's vertical integration: that means being able to control every aspect of your customers' dealings with you. It explains Apple's opening of retail stores, against the grain for tech companies which otherwise saw 'bricks and mortar' as old-fashioned and inefficient. Amazon, similarly, controls the whole experience, even inviting third party sellers to keep their products in Amazon warehouses and pay Amazon to pack and deliver them.

Galloway has an interesting take on 'the death of the brand': on Amazon, you're just looking at prices, a picture or two and customer reviews. Heavy spending on ads to build an image is increasingly ineffective, and as Amazon evolves, that trend will be accentuated: "death, for brands, has a name … Alexa."

The final part of the book is odd: it's advice to young people about how to manage their careers in the world he's just described. At least, that's the justification for some home truths such as "it’s never been a better time to be exceptional, or a worse time to be average" and "don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it."

I had a suspicion that the word count wasn't quite up to what was needed and that Galloway turned to some of his teaching notes to fill in. It's all interesting stuff, but perhaps not quite what was on the tin.

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What a shame: Jon Ronson’s tour of the shamed and shamers

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Published in 2015, this book is already quite old in internet terms. Many of the controversies examined in it are long forgotten, except, no doubt, by the unfortunate people at the centre of them.

But its theme, the power of social media to polarise opinion and turn an unintended remark into the focus of an angry public debate, remains as relevant as ever.

Indeed, that effect now seems a microcosm of bigger social divisions that make our collective ability to handle difficult decisions increasingly tricky, or (the US government happens to be closing down today) impossible. Whether social media is the cause or a symptom of that larger phenomenon, who knows?

I’d never read a book by Ronson before but I recognised his style as a British version of Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell and any number of American writer/reporters who tell stories by taking their readers on a ‘journey’ as they recount in a breezy, intelligent style what they found and how they found it.

The paperback edition is plastered with ecstatic reviews, which may have put me off because they promise the book is “incredibly funny”, “amusing” or “very funny”.

I didn’t find it funny but I was impressed with Ronson’s ability to gain access to his subjects, all of whom had had experiences that might make them press delete on any email that begins “I’m a writer and I’m hoping to ask you about your recent humiliating experience of finding yourself in the public eye and the terrible consequences that followed.”

Ronson calls what happened to these people ‘being publicly shamed’, but I’m not convinced that ‘shaming’ is a broad enough term for the range of cases he studies. There’s the PR woman from New York who tweeted what she had intended to be an ironic comment about Africa and AIDS. As she flew to South Africa a global storm gathered to pillory her for being racist. Does ‘being publicly shamed’ cover her case, when her line on it, which Ronson accepts, is that her little joke was misinterpreted?

Since Ronson is in the same game as some of his subjects, the book is constantly in danger of crossing the line into self-examination. One of Ronson’s subjects, Jonah Lehrer, a fellow writer of popular non-fiction books, was found by another journalist to have made up some quotes from Bob Dylan. Ronson tells us about his meeting with both of them. He is asked by Lehrer to take a look at Lehrer’s proposed public apology for his Dylan transgressions, putting him uncomfortably close to being part of the story himself – especially because that apology went horribly wrong.

Then there’s the account of how an early, pre-publication draft of the book somehow got muddled up with the published version on social media. The draft included a passage which someone interpreted as equating rape with a man’s experience of being fired. Ronson had cut the line from the book before it was published because of the danger of that very misinterpretation. And the draft had been sent out under the heading ‘Not for quotation’. But when Ronson tried to explain all that on Twitter, it didn’t cut much ice: “you should never have thought it,” he was told. It’s a tough old world.

Some of Ronson’s work on the history and background to the phenomenon are among the most interesting parts of the book. I particularly enjoyed his debunking of the famous Zimbardo prison experiment which purported to demonstrate that anyone can be turned into a sadistic prison guard just by being put in a team that’s asked to play the guards rather than the volunteers who are asked to play the part of prisoners.

Ronson finds that the sensational deductions drawn from the experiment hinged largely on the performance of one particular volunteer, Dave Eshelman. Ronson tracks him down (he now “runs a home loan company in Saratoga, California”) and Eshelman tells him that at the time of the experiment he’d just seen the movie Cool Hand Luke about a sadistic prison warden. When nothing much happened during the first night of the experiment, Eshelman realised the psychologists were going to be disappointed: “I thought ‘someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they’re not getting any results’. So I thought I’d get some action going.” So maybe it’s not true that human beings are as susceptible to the roles they’re given as conventional wisdom suggests.

This is a compelling, highly readable account of a wonderfully human phenomenon. Its attraction to readers may overlap a little with the voyeuristic thrills that draw social media users to the people in trouble that Ronson is writing about. But Ronson has an answer to that: he’s writing about “us” – the condemning, judgemental public who enjoy nothing more than joining in cruel, self-righteous shamings. It’s not other people you should be deploring: it’s us.

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