“I want to be Poet Laureate”, the teenage me said to the school careers adviser without a hint of irony or realism. The fact that I did not possess a glimmer of poetic talent didn't factor in my decision, nor did any sense of how one might go about it; I just wanted to convey, at the tender age of 15, that I knew I was destined for literary greatness. Once I discovered the Poet Laureate’s salary was a measly case of wine from the Queen, I swiftly changed my mind and sought stardom elsewhere. Nonetheless, I knew - I thought I knew, at least - where I was headed.
In my day - that is, the 1990s - the world felt full of possibility for young people, which, sadly, I don’t think it does now. Nowadays, young people are more likely to feel despondent about their futures, certainly if they have half an eye on the wider world of climate change, economic hardship and growing conservatism. In the 90s, we had Tony Blair telling us things can only get better - and they did get better and better and better, at least until they didn’t - but what’s Sunak’s message now? What was Johnson’s or May’s or Cameron’s message to the young and lovely and hopeful?
It’s probably also a function of place as well as time. The UK was a pretty exciting, vibrant, increasingly prosperous, creative, modern and liberal place to be in the last decade of the last century. It all reached a glorious crescendo from 1995 to 2000 and we all came within sniffing distance of real hope. The proliferation of art, music and culture brought with it a sense of possibility and a belief in the core value of creativity. Consequently, young people, such as myself, really believed - rightly or wrongly - that we could realise our creative ambitions and, more importantly, that there was the infrastructure around us to enable that. So, wanting to be Poet Laureate didn’t seem all that outrageous.
Looking back, and comparing then to now, it seems obvious to me that they key factor in creating this sense of creative possibility was what I’ll call mobility. I don’t mean social mobility, although Blair did a fair bit to ensure that. I mean people from all walks of life literally moving around from place to place with one another. Being there, in a place, at a time, with loads of other people who were both different from and the same as you. Think about it - without the internet or social media, the only way to get thing done (and that means literally anything) was to go there and do it, which fostered an extraordinary social society where people met and interacted with one another all the time. In this climate, we were brought up to believe that the key to success was being in the right place at the right time, and if we went to enough places at enough times we would, statistically speaking, eventually be discovered. And that was the key - your talent was to be discovered by some mythical, influential industry character whom you hadn’t yet met. If you were in band, for example, you just played gigs everywhere, all the time, and eventually somebody would discover you. And it worked.
So, you see how the 15 year old me thought becoming Poet Laureate wasn’t such a challenge. All I had to do was go to literary parties and poetry salons (notwithstanding the fact that I grew up on the Isle of Wight). To that end, I frequented the local arts centre, where one day I met the legend that is David Gasgoign. You see, as far as I was concerned, that was how it was done and I’d already completed steps one and two - go to literary events and meet a famous poet. The gap between ambition and reality was filled only by chance - a chance meeting, being in the right place at the right time, meeting someone who knows someone. The fact I that didn’t become Poet Laureate, or indeed any kind of literary star, is not the point of the story.
When I moved to London in 2010, this mobility still counted for something. Remember that in 2010 social media was still in its infancy, so going to parties and meeting people was how you got to be known and how you got work. At the time, I was starting out as an art writer, so I went to a lot of private views and warehouse parties in East London and, unbelievable as it now seems, I got a lot of work out it. For years, up until 2016 I’d say, I sustained myself by going out and drinking free booze, talking to people who were much more important than me and generally putting myself out there. And it worked. I mean, I wasn’t famous or able to give my day job, but I had a steady stream of commissions and plenty to keep me occupied.
As the world moved online and social media tangled its tentacles around everything, it all collapsed. There is a part of this where I have to admit that I fell behind because I never got on with or got to grips with social media, but there is a bigger trend apart from my story. Social media killed mobility. It then left in tact for young people the notion of being discovered at the same time as making that possibility so opaque and indistinct as to be meaningless.
Nowadays, young people (and not so young people, of course, because that mobility hardly exists any more) are plying their wares on social media, vying to be discovered or at least noticed; then they look at the few who are successful and take them to be the rule rather than the exceptions. They believe social media will make you famous, but the chances are that it won’t, ever, no matter what you do. And if you try the old fashioned way of going to parties, the first thing anybody asks you is, “Are you on Instagram?”. Consequently, the gap between ambition and reality is a vast, aching gulf that is populated by the insidious promise of social media exposure.
The situation, for young people particularly, is dire. Social media is easy in the sense that it is relatively low cost and effortless to produce and consume content; it makes it easy to feel like you’re doing something or being involved in something by watching, liking, sharing when, in fact you’re not doing anything at all. Indeed, life and and the world are happening out there whilst you are liking it on social media. The fact that something is popular on social media means just that people were drawn to it by an algorithm and they all piled on without thinking about much. It costs nothing, takes no intellectual capacity to hit the like the share buttons, so really it’s utterly meaningless and dumb. The really interesting thing is probably still going on beyond the bounds of social media. Mobility across the cultural sphere has been replaced by spikes of dumb interest in phenomena that the Musks and the Zuckerbergs of the world are ultimately driving.
People - especially young people - are still out there waiting to be discovered, but they are doing it behind a screen without leaving their homes, with no attachment to the things they are trying to connect with. They are putting their content out there like so many others and getting nowhere, nor will they ever win the battle to get noticed in the haze of so much content. It is a futile and vicious game. Say you’re an artist posting your art daily on Instagram, doggedly making reels with trending audio, liking and commenting on others’ posts, interacting with like-minded users, whatever - well, good luck because you are always going to be eclipsed by somebody who has more time and resources than you, or by somebody who is doing something more inherently popular, such a fitness fanatic, a comedian, or a cute cat.
The fact is that social media is a less effective tool than going to parties, and so the very thing that promised to close the gap between ambition and reality has widened it. My hope is that we come full circle and the kids who go to parties find themselves at a tactical advantage; that we will start to value mobility again, not as we did in the 90s because it’s a different century now, but that we will value human presence again. Social media has become so complex and nuanced a tool that you can only thrive if you are extraordinarily skilled at all, which most people aren’t. The thing about going to parties was that anyone could do it, and we need to do something to regain that radical democracy of opportunity before the gap between ambition and reality becomes so wide that only the privileged can traverse it.
The profound casualty is hope; real, tangible hope for anybody who dreams. In a world where we no longer prize human interaction above anything else, there is no real hope because social media is easy and nobody truly values anything that is easy.