Economic Anxiety and Donald Trump

How to understand the rise of populist politics? In a time of unprecedented social peace, how can large numbers of people turn away from the sensible, managerial mainstream and find the simple answers of crackpots and charlatans beguiling? How is it a third of French voters supported a fascist last Sunday? How did we get President Donald Trump? All kinds of explanations are in play, but the one that's done the running is anxiety, which is usually (and unhelpfully) separated out into economic and cultural anxiety. This has spawned an interminable zero-sum debate over what matters the most and, as per political debates, there are other stakes in play. If the economic argument is correct, then the Clintonian/Blairist and the still-shiny Macronite Third Way is wonky flimflam and the socialist critique, including emphasis on the importance of interests, is substantially correct. And if cultural anxiety is the explanation, then all the pundits and leading politicians are on the money, we have to carry on listening to them, and the horrible stuff about class and things can be boxed away.

There is nothing the social world throws up that can't be analysed, explained and, if needs be, critiqued. Indeed, we need to understand the world in order to change it, and that means taking it as we find it. That must be the starting point of any kind of progressive politics, or it's something else. That in mind, I'm interested in the latest intervention in the anxiety debate, covered here by Emma Green of The Atlantic. According to research by the Public Religion Research Institute (original findings here), the best predictor of support for Donald Trump after self-identified party affiliation is cultural anxiety. According to the research, some 68% of white working class Americans from the mid-western states believed the American way of life was under threat by foreign influences, and 79% of this group were set on voting Trump. 62% of the same group believed immigration represented a cultural threat and they are sceptical, by 54%, of the merits of a college education (rising to 61% among the men).

This refutes the claims of economic anxiety how? Well, quoting direct from the PRRI piece:

Despite the conventional wisdom that Trump attracted financially depressed voters, white working-class Americans who report being in good or excellent financial shape are significantly more likely to say that Trump understands their problems than those who report their financial condition as being fair or poor (48% vs. 39%, respectively). A majority (55%) of white working-class Americans in fair or poor shape say Trump does not understand the problems facing their communities well.

This is incredible and revealing. Incredible because the entire claim of the research that cultural anxiety matters more than economic anxiety hangs on this passage. Revealing because they reduce the question of economic anxiety solely to being poor. Despite themselves, they confirm the relevance of class, of the better off who disproportionately helped Donald Trump to victory, just like some of us have argued from the beginning. It is, for example, entirely possible to be poor and not feel insecure. Millions of people run very tight budgets but secure in the knowledge that their wages are due to be paid on x day of the month. Insecurity however will set in when their job is under threat, or whether the firm wants to introduce flexible/reduced hours, and so on. Meanwhile, a well paid manager whose remuneration is fixed to continual monitoring performance reviews, a successful small business person who frets over her competitors, the megabucks professional worried about the drying up of their consultancies, all these people are much better off than low paid working class people, but are likely to also suffer higher instances of economic anxiety. Their default setting is an existential craving for stability and certainty. And who can blame them, they are human after all. Yet that can, and has, taken them down some very dark paths. Generations of socialists have known that these demographics disproportionately fill out the support of reactionary parties and movements, confirmed again by the PRRI in the case of Trump. Economic anxiety therefore isn't just a matter of being poor, it's about the content of your relationship to the means of existence and how that frames your outlook. Or, if you prefer, your relationship to the means of production, and that the content of that being conditions consciousness.

In addition to the conceptual muddle, there is a strange issue with how the report is presented as well. For all the stressing of cultural anxiety, we have vignettes culled from interviews that capture the working class experience quite succinctly:

"It’s that kind of mentality with the businesses that we work for these days that they know they can get away with paying us nothing half the time because they know we have nowhere to go."

"The middle class can’t survive in today’s economy because there really isn’t a middle class anymore. You’ve got poverty level, and you’ve got your one, two percent. You don’t have a middle class anymore like you had in the ’70s and ’80s. My dad started at Cinco making a buck ten an hour. When he retired he was making $45 an hour. It took him 40 years, but he did it. You can’t find that today; there’s no job that exists like that today."

“I feel enslaved by the student debt that I have, and I don’t have a degree, and I feel that any job that I may get I will never pay it off in my lifetime.”

“My fianc矇’s worked for the same company for 21 years, and it’s a union [job], and they are hiring Mexicans. And I don’t want to be racial, but that’s all that they’re hiring. He makes like $31 an hour, and they’re coming in at making like $8 an hour.”

“I’m tired of the minimum wage being offered so low it makes it impossible to provide for your family no matter how hard you break your back."

Not the quotations I would have chosen if I wanted to prove cultural anxiety mattered and the economic was phooey.

Despite itself, the report establishes a link between economic status and interest. For instance, asked about whether the national minimum wage should be more than doubled from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, by 53% to 44% respondents agreed. Split by gender, however, we find that men oppose it by 50% to 45% while women support it 60% to 37%. It also notes support rises to 82% among black workers and 77% for hispanics. Cultural issues? Or the fact that the latter three groups are more likely to work minimum wage jobs than white working class men and would, therefore, directly materially benefit from a raise?

As we have seen, there are some findings here that are useful, but what absolutely isn't is their steadfast failure to place them in a social context. While the sampling is pretty robust, their conclusions are on dodgy ground because their variables are not connected with one another. Each is set up as an independent variable without any relationship to the others. So the view that the American way of life is under threat only tells us that people who believe that are more likely to vote for the candidate who shares the belief. How does that help? It does not explain how this works with other variables, of who believes this, nor offer hypotheses as to why they might believe it. It's a bit like stating people voted for Brexit because of immigration without trying to explain why that was a powerful motivator. And the quotes, why? These strike something of a Freudian note as the repressed breaks through to put question marks over their argument.

The biggest problem with the report is their failure to define what they mean by economic anxiety, which they simply identify with being poor. And because poor people tended not to vote for Trump, (which, as any Marxist would have said, like duh), they conclude economics has nothing to do with it. It's almost as if the data was written up with a determination to prove the culturalist argument. That it would be blandly passed off as fact rather than interrogated by journalists. As far as I'm concerned, this is an opportunity missed for a few petty Beltway points. The truth is with a bit more care and intellectual honesty, a complex, interesting, and accurate picture of how anxiety works, of how the experience of economic realities - which goes beyond wages and jobs and combines with culture - can be gleaned from the data. It's just that, instead, the PRRI have given us a hatchet job.

How Opinion Polling Works

Which of these is most representative of public opinion at large? A heavily gamed voluntary poll of 160,000-odd people done on the behest of This Morning that shows a commanding lead enjoyed by Jeremy Corbyn over Theresa May; or any of the recent spate of polls by professional polling companies who show very much the opposite consistently on the basis of samples between 1,000 and 1,800 people. I have to ask because lots of people have been pushing ITV's poll as more representative than anything YouGov can come up with. After all, it covers more people. The latter? Pah. It was founded by a couple of Tories and provides findings politically convenient for Jeremy Corbyn's opponents. If they were free and fair it would show more support for Labour because I know loads of people who support Labour.

If you happen to share these views, you're wrong. The methodology of opinion polling has been refined over decades of research, and why pollsters and other researchers (including distinctly un-Tory sociologists like me) can make confident generalisations from seemingly small pools of people. This operation has two dimensions to it, but both kinds of test deal with probabilities.

Before anything, we need to start with the ‘null hypothesis’. This is the assumption that when we approach two social phenomena there is no relationship. The maths underpinning statistics are set up to confirm or refute this hypothesis. In the case of polling, tests of statistical significance show the likelihood that claims of no relationship between the cases under study and the results can be rejected. Hence when a poll is compiled, characteristics reflective of the population at large are selected for. For a typical poll, the sample group of, say 1,000 respondents, represents in miniature the population at large or the segment of the population the operation wishes to survey. If we don't do this, then a huge validity question mark hangs over the subsequent claims made. A sample should approximate as much as possible the age, income, gender, ethnicity, etc. profiles of the group or sub-group to be studied. If 30% of the population are over the age of 60, then that should be the case with the sample. If 10% are from a non-white ethnic background, it needs to be reflected. I’m sure you get the picture. Selection then is never completely random but is within the parameters set by the research design. If you’ve never been contacted by a polling company, don’t take it personally!

We have our pool of demographically representative respondents then, but how can we surmise that the views of the sample are equally as representative? This is where tests of statistical significance come in. These are mathematical procedures designed to establish the likelihood that observed characteristics – in this case political opinions – are random (i.e. the null hypothesis is true) or infer a pattern of views that really exist “out there” in wider society. All surveys compute statistical significance tests, which you can usually find by burrowing into the data sets polling companies release along with their results. These tests ask a simple question: if a hundred representative samples were taken, what number of the observed results could be put down to chance alone? If the computed figure returns 0.6, then 60% of cases can be put down to randomness, for example. If it’s 0.05, then five per cent of the sample cases are likely to be random, and so on. The lower the level of significance, the more confident researchers can be that observed data reflects real proportions existing in real populations. When it comes to statements about samples, researchers typically use either 0.05 or 0.01 depending on sample sizes (large for the latter, small for the former). i.e. We are 95% or 99% certain that observed patterns really do exist and are not an artefact of the maths.

This isn’t the only test of statistical significance available. Instead, one can produce an ‘interval estimate’ which, instead of identifying the probability of sample patterns mirroring those of general patterns, looks at errors in sampling. For instance, if 48% of our sample say they’re going to vote Conservative, and such polls have done the rounds recently, how close to the real figure is this finding? This can be inferred by computing a standard error statistic. This means multiplying the Tory figure (48) by the non-Tory figure (52). This gives us 2,496, which is then divided by the sample size. Assuming a sample of 1,000, this equals 2.496. We then apply a square root, which gives us 1.578. This is all very well, but why? This standard error can be used to suggest the real number will be circa 1.6% above or below the polling figure. We have already seen that >0.05 (or 95%) is taken as an acceptable level of certainty in our previous significance test providing, of course, the sample is representative. If it is, we can say with 95% confidence that the numbers of people planning to vote Conservative will be 48%, +/- 1.6%. For example, this is why pollsters in the lead up to the first round of the French presidential election found it very difficult to call because the four front runners were, at times, all within the margin of error of one another.

Sometimes pollsters weight their samples in a particular direction. For example, rather than going for an accurate snapshot of the general population, they sometimes ensure older people are over represented and younger people underrepresented because, as we know, the old are much more likely to vote than the young. Likewise, people from low income backgrounds, have lower levels of formal qualifications, and so on might be scaled down for exactly the same reason.

There you have a very basic overview of polling. There are criticisms of significance testing, and in this age of Big Data a growing clamour suggesting that sampling of this sort may have had its day now huge data sets are available (though, it has to be said, most of these are under the lock and key of public bureaucracies and private business). There are specific criticisms one can make of polling companies. YouGov, for example, is reliant on a database of voluntary sign-ups. There are about 800,000 who’ve joined their UK panel, so while they are likely to not reflect the general population the company has enough data about their demographic characteristics and preferences to construct representative samples out of them. However, they have got into murky waters when they’ve tried polling members of organisations. For one, they have no hard data on the characteristics of their wider membership and so have difficulties generating representative samples. And also, they sometimes have very low numbers of people belonging to certain organisations. I can remember them conducting a poll on Jeremy Corbyn’s support among trade union panel members, and arrived at the CWU’s result after asking just 50-odd people. The union has around 190,000 dues payers.

As a mathematical discipline, statistics have two centuries of scholarship behind it. Polling might get it wrong occasionally, but again that's because it deals with probabilities. Researchers and pollsters can learn from these mistakes, methods can be refined, techniques can be calibrated, improved. Unfortunately, rejection of polling because a leading firm is owned by Tories, because they are used for self-serving political reasons, and because they show Labour plumbing the depths doesn't mean they're wrong. To pretend they have to be because they contradict your experience and views is naive cynicism. The problem is this gets us nowhere. Clinging to illusions is only setting yourself up for a fall when reality crashes in.

If we want to change the world, we have to ask questions, analyse, think, and explain. If things aren't going our way, why? And on that basis, what are we going to do about it? That's the route to making things better because it's the only way.

Postcapitalism - A Belated Review

Is capitalism coming to an end? Perhaps not its end, but it is facing a number of difficulties. These aren't episodic issues that can simply be reformed away by enlightened politicians or ironed out by a spot of Keynesian demand management here and there. They are structural, fundamental, and would require a political struggle and defeat of whole sections of capital for them to be sorted out. This, however, is not a counsel for despair. The development of capitalism has brought forth new relationships and technologies that give a glimpse into a future beyond the market, beyond wage labour, beyond the despoliation of the environment. At least this is the image Paul Mason provides us in his well received book, Postcapitalism.

That capitalism allows for the possibility for a different, freer society is hardly a new or original observation. It's the key premise of Marx's analysis and critique of political economy. Individual capitals, or businesses in everyday language, are compelled to innovate and develop to survive. For one, it's bound up with the class relationships underpinning the system. Capital employs labour power to make commodities, be they material, like the laptop I'm writing this blog post on, or immaterial, like knowledge or a service. The worker, or proletarian, receives a wage or salary for their time doing whatever their employer asks of them - an experience, ultimately, not without serious consequences. However, from the point of view of the worker a great deal of time spent in the workplace is completely unnecessary. Say in a five day week, our worker produces £2,500 worth of commodities and receives £500/week in wages, the value of their labour power has been generated on day one. Effectively, for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday they're undertaking surplus labour. Labour, that is surplus to their requirements. When these commodities are sold, that extra value, surplus value, accrues to the employer. Some of it is advanced to cover the next round of wages. Other bits pay off loans, rent, etc. Some is put aside for reinvestment, and what is left is squirreled away as profit.

For Marxism the struggle over the disposal of this socially produced but privately appropriated wealth is the stuff of class struggle. Workers have a clear interest in receiving more of the value they generate but, more often than not, employers are the ones who succeed in drive down the workers' share so they can have an even bigger slice of the surplus. This is not because of greed, though there are plenty of business owners who fit that archetype, but because a business ultimately is compelled to do so. Returns on investments depends on the selling of one's wares. If there is a warehouse filled up with goods, then the capital is effectively frozen. The surplus value a business depends on is stuck and cannot be realised until they're sold off, and that depends on the variables of the market a business sells to. It depends on the competition coming from other capitals. Unless a business is a monopoly and can corner a market, all it can do in response is to extract as much surplus as possible either by lengthening the working day or cutting wages and other liabilities (such as pensions). That route is potentially costly as it runs the risk of stoking a dispute with the workforce. Or by more intensive methods, such as the development and introduction of new production techniques and technologies. Instead of £2,500 worth being produced over five days, the application of new machinery sees the run double. Even if the workers are granted a modest pay rise, the amount of surplus value up for grabs increases. Which means when those goods reach the market they will return more if they are sold at their value, or, to compete, the price is lowered more quantities of surplus value can be realised at the expense of a firm's competitors.

The relationship between production and consumption is the circuit of capital. There can be and are more complex permutations, but the basic outline here will do. It follows then for Marxists that capital constantly revolutionises the means of production, that class struggle and competition enforces an innovate or die imperative. And so capitalism taken as a global, self-expanding social system tends to develop the productive forces, which are the techniques, technologies, the social capacities and knowledges of human beings. This is where the key plank of Mason's argument comes in. He argues this history comes in waves. Drawing on the work of Nikolai Kondratiev, a brilliant Soviet economist who fell victim to Stalin's purges, he makes the case for capitalist development to be periodised. Each of these waves unleash a tide of innovation, and are comprised by the cumulative effects of new business models, new knowledge, new technology and, crucially, new markets. As Mason puts it,

... a long wave takes off because large amounts of cheap capital have been accumulated, centralised and mobilised in the financial system, usually accompanied by a rise in the supply of money, which is needed to fund the investment boom. Grandiose investments are begun - canals and factories in the late 18th century, railways and urban infrastructures in the mid-nineteenth century. New technology is deployed and new business models created, leading to a struggle for new markets - which stimulates the intensification of wars as rivalries over colonial settlements increase. New social groups associated with the rising industries and technologies clash with the old elites, producing social unrest. (2015, pp 37-8)

Following Kondratiev's work, Mason suggests that, as a rule of thumb, each wave or cycle lasts for about 50 years. In the most dynamic upswing phase, recessions tend to be short and shallow as the most productive sectors of the economy attract the most capital. This doesn't last forever, a saturation point is reach and the wave starts winding down. The new markets are saturated, the opportunities for profit are fewer, the quick returns offered by financial alchemy prove attractive, leading to short-lived credit booms, and recessions grow long and deep before a whole range of capital, physical and financial, is liquidated in a slump. Mason believes there have been four such waves since the advent of industrial capitalism. The most recent, the fourth, was uncharacteristically long, its durability preserved by state management of economies and its active intervention to create new markets. The upswing phase of the fourth wave began at the end of the Second World War and comprised Keynesian demand management, the foundation of the welfare state and, in most of the developed countries, some form of historic compromise in which the state, business, and organised labour collaborated. As the wave crested in the 1970s, so crisis set in followed by the downswing. This was still marked by the revolutionising of technique, knowledge, and technology, but ultimately the wave ate itself as capital increasingly parasited off the structures put in place by the post-war boom. For example, mass privatisations and the colonisation of public services by markets, driven through everywhere by states in the teeth of opposition, increasingly saw capital drain away from productive investment in favour of the short term gains of the money and property markets. That is, until, the stock markets crashed.

Mason's key argument is that with the close of the fourth wave, we should be looking to a fifth wave to lift capitalism out of the doldrums and deliver another 50 year cycle of growth, development and crisis. But where is it? The first part has a great deal to do with the character of the late period of the last cycle. Neoliberalism regardless of variant is congenitally hostile to labour movements and does all it can to undermine the collective strength and potential resistance of workers. Where Labour and social democratic governments have dropped payloads of neoliberal policies, without exception they're punished by electorates, sometimes severely. The result in too many key advanced countries is that workers are atomised, insecure, and not strong enough to force capital to innovate. Remember, the struggle for capital to accrue ever more of the social surplus is limited by the capacity of labour to resist. Where labour is strong, as per the post-war period with its huge union battalions of combative, at least on bread and butter issues, workers, militancy exerted its own pressure on the transformation of the productive forces. Capital had to innovate not just because of competition, but so it could exert more control over the labour process. And this meant displacing living labour by dead labour, the replacement of human toil by machines. With weak labour movements, that pressure is absent from the dynamics of development. And so we have the situation we have now where large chunks of British business prefer to employ record numbers of part-time, casualised workers. And because the market place is stock full of businesses doing the same, innovation has slowed.

The second and more controversial feature of Mason's argument is the changed character of commodities. The central importance of the knowledge economy for capitalism has been generally acknowledged since the 1970s. The spread of information technology and computing power married to the internet and the complex of networks it has facilitated has reconfigured the economy. The production of knowledge and knowledge-related commodities (such as professional services) are increasingly the, for want of a better phrase, hegemonic commodity form. Consider software, music, film, all these these can be downloaded and filed away. They no longer require physical media beyond a device that can play them. These, like the masses of corporate and state documents regularly dumped on the internet, are no longer qualitatively different from one another. It's all machine code. As such, it resists containment because each is infinitely reproducible with virtually no labour time required. And this presents capital with a problem. How can the circuit of capital be completed if, at the end, a good chunk of value stays unrealised because the resultant information commodity is copied and passed it on. If someone sends me a naughty pdf of a book I want to read, I'm not then going to go out and buy it. Hence the pay walls, the crackdowns on pirate sites, the rising cultural clamour of "support your favourite band/author/software house!". And with the strides being made regarding 3D printing, it's only a matter of time before producers of material goods are similarly affected.

The fifth wave of capitalism is stuck, but the first wave of a new system might be appearing. The mercurial ontology of information surges through the circuits the internet built. Innovation then is shifting away from capital and toward the commons, reversing a key feature of capitalist development: its tendency to concentrate knowledge in cadres of managers and other specialists. Once centralised, it's becoming socially diffuse. Effectively our times are caught at the crossroads of two possible futures, between stagnant capitalism and the emerging power of peer-to-peer networks. And this itself is radically configuring the relationship between capital and labour. Drawing on the work of Moulier Boutang's Cognitive Capitalism, which itself is heavily influenced by Hardt and Negri's Empire (a bit more here), increasingly the capacities and skills of labour are self-generating thanks to the ceaseless circulation of social knowledge, and so capital active in the tech and professional service sectors have to go cap in hand to try and ponce off that expertise. Think firms utterly reliant on bedroom coders and hackers, for instance. Mason suggests that Boutang, Hardt and Negri overemphasise this point but does nevertheless point toward a coming irreversible tilt in the relation of capital to labour. Labour as a collective has always been a force of production, but the networks allow for the possibility of it becoming conscious and a potential for its rewiring the social. The only options available for capital to stave this off would be increasing monopolisation (Mason notes the social media and IT giants are only profitable because they have cornered their respective markets. There cannot be multiple Facebooks, YouTubes, Googles and the rest), and/or finding more markets, which would entail an even greater commercialisation of social life.

This would be difficult at the best of times, but centuries of capitalism have stored up a series of problems that are now starting to bite. How inopportune for us. The mass migration of peoples, ageing populations, climate change, and energy source depletion are building up to crisis levels that require concerted action and the overcoming of sectional interest, but the old apparatuses and parties are dimly aware of their urgency, or uninterested in doing what needs to be done. By not having answers to these crucial questions, a political opportunity is offered. Here, Mason offers a number of prescriptions for condensing the consciousness of the networks and encourage discussion (and experimentation) when it comes to the resolution of these problems. And there are a number of political struggles vis a vis the state that includes the defeat and reversal of neoliberal policies, the reshaping of markets around environmentally and socially just outcomes, the production of an economic plan (which owes a bit more to a digital Keynes than a cyber Stalin), and a plan to deal with the mountain of debt piling up against countries, banks, business, and individuals' current accounts. Simple!

In his transition from mainstream to campaigning journalist, Mason has attracted exasperated comment from his peers ensconced in the established (and establishment) outlets. And unless one understands the theoretical infrastructure underpinning his politics, his positions can appear idiosyncratic and a bit strange. But this, ultimately, is because despite capitalism's internal problems and the difficult, possibly existential crises lying in wait, his view has that rarest of qualities in contemporary radicalism: optimism. Reading the tendencies, he has produced a compelling Marxist, yes, Marxist, narrative that locates the current impasse in the long-run structures and contradictions of our social system. Whatever one thinks of Kondratiev's waves, and there are decades of debate about them, his diagnosis of what is happening now is persuasive and fits the facts much better than the nonsense produced by mainstream economics. His explanation of capital's ongoing investment strike fills in the gaps a view that relies on the dearth of profit-making opportunities cannot. His caveated appropriation of Negri et al also seems sensible, but underplaying it runs the risk of ignoring how the bulk of networked workers actually reproduce themselves and their families in jobs to which the network is tangential or not at all present, and how this is changing their cognitive apprehension and appreciation of the world. The warehouse worker is as likely to be on social media as the IT worker.

The big problem, however, is one of agency. Mason spent a great deal of his media career reporting from the front line of global capital, of where the system met its limits and was contested by a wide array of social movements. Power begets resistance, as Foucault often noted, and capitalism is doomed to struggle with the nightmare of its obsolete future as it breaks up labour movements, drives down wages, and vainly seeks to capture the value of peer-to-peer production. But Mason's counterpower, if you like, the network itself is diffuse and incoherent. While on paper the balance is tilting from capital to labour, and in time the consciousness of labour will be conditioned by that social fact, the crises he identifies do not allow for the luxury of slow development. In the mean time, those networked workers have all kinds of views, and while individuated and atomised at the same time as they're linked with others, their politics are all over the place. Opposing networked humanity to capital is all very well, but networked humanity doesn't make for a coherent political project. But there is a potential vehicle. The labour movement with its strange rituals and out-of-time practices is an unlikely condenser, but its rootedness in the realities of work at the sharp end of the changes described in this book make it ideal as the focus. But the exploration of that relationship is going to have to wait for another time.

In sum, Paul Mason's Postcapitalism is an essential work that deserves to be widely read. To reverse a cliche, while the point is to change the world you cannot hope to succeed without understanding it.

Celebrations: A Comparative Analysis

Last year, Ravi launched his important Fair Celebrations campaign. Yours truly chimed in last Christmas with an exposure of Cadbury's Heroes. This year, there's none of that sugared down Kraft Foods muck as Santa has brought us two tins of Celebrations. Never one to miss an opportunity to advance the frontiers of human knowledge, here's the break down of each of the two tins.

My, there isn't much variation between the two tins, but there is still plenty of inequality. We're not talking Britain-since-1979 levels of injustice here, but a noticeable shortchanging guaranteed to upset Twix fans. Peter Mannion MP would be upset.

This year the campaign has stepped up its activity with mainstream regional coverage courtesy of the Birmingham Mail. Next year, Newsnight? Join the campaign by tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, tumblring your Celebrations reality and hashtagging them #FairCelebrations (plus #FairHeroes, #FairQualityStreet, etc.). And don't forget to @RaviSubbie too.

Forward to Victory!

A Load of Old Dick

2016 has proven awful for all kinds of reasons, but where things have actually gone well is in science. Among the many discoveries to have made the headlines this year, this little tiddler copped some media attention in recent days. A problem that has long befuddled students of primate biology is why all our cousins possess a baculum - a penis bone - and we, or at least half of us homo sapiens, haven't. And now there is a solution. Apparently.

According to the original paper, 'Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores' (here), the absence of said bone apparently has something to do with mating habits. The authors suggest there is a relationship between the baculum and the duration of sexual activity. Basically, the shorter the bonk, the less need there is for a bone. They suggest that long sex allows the penetrating male to fend off other suitors while making conception more likely. They surmise that it disappeared in humans because our ancestors started practicing monogamous relationships some 1.9m years ago, therefore our forefathers didn't have to fend off amorous others.

This is a perfect example of ideology masking itself as scientifically informed speculation. It probably wasn't intentional on the part of the authors, but it is worth noting how the rules of evidence and rigor governing scientific study are entirely suspended when one moves into speculation about matters social.

The first point is you can't stick fossilised social relationships from prehistory under the microscope. There is no surviving evidence about the courtship, mating, and familial habits of our ancient ancestors. We can have a guess by having a look at the behaviour of our primate cousins, but as their mating and clan practices show some variation within as well as between species, it doesn't matter how informed the guesswork is.

Second, our scientist friends have come up with an explanation that neglects another defining characteristic of the male member in humans. What we lack in bone we more than make up in length and girth. Yes, it's seldom known but among the primates we are less King Kong, and more King Dong. Gorillas are packing an average 3cm (fully erect), chimps at 8cm, and humans measure up with around 13cm. Why? There are a couple of explanations that sound pretty tendentious. Allow me to indulge some speculation: as the female orgasm is linked to ovulation, and was likely the case in our ancestor species, it is possible evolution selected for bigger penises because sex was more satisfying for our foremothers, who then tended to couple with more endowed males. Therefore men have women to thank for their meat and two veg ... possibly. I haven't a clue, but it sounds at least as plausible as any evolutionary psychologist nonsense. Either way, a convincing explanation of the baculum's disappearance has to address the Big Willy Problem too.

Third, coming back to the monogamy question, our authors suggest we moved to monogamous behaviour to combat the transmission of STIs. This is also unconvincing, seeing as hyper-brainy homo sapiens are still prone to this problem, despite the risks and dangers of disease being well understood. And, again, this is ventured in the complete absence of evidence.

Lastly, when monogamy, or at least the control of women's fertility by male partners did become the dominant reproductive strategy for our species, we're talking 10-11,000 years ago. All the available archaeological evidence points to a coincidence between the development of agriculture, the foundation of permanent households, the production of surpluses over and above the needs of the settled population, the foundation of class societies, and the subordination of women within a sexual division of labour. All of which indicates monogamy became the norm relatively recently in the story of modern humans, and within a blink of an eye if you count our ancestor species. And also, by this time, our baculums had disappeared. In fact, they had vanished completely some 100-200,000 years previously.

This isn't a diatribe against scientific investigation, or a suggestion that oh so wise sociology is king (which, of course, it is). But, again, it's another egregious example of someone in the name of science sallying forth from their discipline and making themselves and those who swallow their speculation look ridiculous. Simultaneously, they're lending scientific credence to and naturalising a set of social relationships that have underpinned the oppression of women as a sex class, and that means their conclusions must be challenged.

Work and the Second Machine Age

Albert Dock has seen a bit in its time. A centre piece of the industrial revolution, the goods of trade and the spoils of empire were offloaded, stored, and transported from here to all over the country. Long after the dockers had gone, it symbolised the sort of go-getting regeneration Thatcher and friends pined for in the 1980s - at the same time Liverpool was making headlines for the city's defiance of the government and all its works. Showcased by Richard and Judy, and the weatherman we can't really talk about anymore, Albert Docks was now a place for media companies, cafes, entrepreneurialism, and reinvention. Apt that it should play host to a joint TUC/Fabian fringe on the future of work. Titled 'A second machine age or business as usual?', Jim Waterson of Buzzfeed presided over a discussion with TUC Genereal Secretary Frances O'Grady and Yvette Cooper. Readers may recall that rather late in the day, Yvette tried seizing the white heat of technology mantle from, well, no one to distinguish her 2015 leadership campaign. It's something she has variously associated herself with since.

In her opening remarks, she suggested that the new wave of automation is here and, for a movement with work at its core, presents us a series of difficult challenges. Part of this is understanding the intertwining of opportunities and threat, of understanding that new, exciting businesses can dissolve existing power structures and offer the potential of greater autonomy for workers, such as self-determination of work hours and control over work/life balance. The positives, however, cannot be fully harnessed if we ignore the fact networked workers face new forms of exploitation, a fragmentation of solidarity, and new levels of precarity - Yvette cited a report that stated up to 15 million jobs could be at risk, concentrated primarily in white collar occupations. With a two-tier workforce pretty much a reality already (and the subject of much forecasting in the 80s), the policy and organising challenge is looking at new laws, the use of investment, and thinking about what constitutes new, fulfilling jobs (and how to encourage their creation).

Frances noted that our discussion about change is nothing new. In the 1930s there was talk about leisure-based societies in which the fruits of technology are shared out. The 80s saw a different kind of industrial change driven by political calculation, and one in which our communities were left to rot. What's worrying now is not just the pace of change, which seems to be intensifying, but how they're multiplying exploitation and unjust working practices. The new business models are all too often about increased surveillance at work, zero hours, and making workers slaves to their apps. This is just not sustainable. From the standpoint of social security, how can people access support when their incomes are so unpredictable? And what happens when workers can neither pay into a pension, nor acquire a property that could later be sold to provide care in their old age?

Asked whether demand would be enough to create new jobs and this is an ado about little, for Yvette the problem is the pace of change is so fast that workers cannot acquire skills fast enough. And where is the opportunity for them to do so? We've also seen that left to its own devices, the market prefers to churn out lower paid, insecure jobs in greater numbers. However, where there is one area of work that will appear resistant to automation for some time is care - it is massively undervalued and needs to undergo a huge expansion. On the perennial question of training, Frances notes that we already have an over-trained, over-educated workforce. If there was an industrial strategy in place, the kinds of mismatches whereby graduates are undertaking unskilled work because there's nothing else on offer can be overcome.

Other unintended consequences of the new economy is the concentration of these kinds of businesses in cities, not towns, even though they could be done anywhere. As such towns are getting left behind, and this was one of the feeders into the Brexit vote. Another consequence is the combination of old school with new organising techniques. Citing the example of North Sea divers, who recently won a hefty pay hike from the employer, this variegated and otherwise atomised group of workers networked and discussed matters through Facebook. Likewise, social media was and is a useful adjunct to organising in Sports Direct.

There followed a number of questions about education at school, the nationalisation of robots, industrial democracy, care, and our old friend the basic income. For Frances, the robots question forces us to focus on where the state should intervene and where it shouldn't: if infrastructure is essential, be it digital or automotive, then isn't there a case? On industrial democracy, having elected workers on boards would only bring Britain into the mainstream of European policy, and it has a proven track record of ensuring businesses make more rounded investment decisions that tend to benefit the company as a whole. On the basic income, for Frances it's pretty clear the jury is out. While passed at the latest TUC congress, it was with the proviso of undertaking a detailed consideration of what it would mean. Yvette was more dismissive. Acknowledging the problems raised by the sceptical questioner (she noted how it wouldn't address unpaid domestic labour, which still falls heavier on women, nor how the poorer would lose out), she didn't think it would be helpful for the party of work "to give up on work". i.e. Because there won't be enough jobs to go around doesn't mean Labour should give up and opt for what amounts to a welfare solution instead. As far as I'm concerned, while there are difficulties attached and more work has to be done about the level it should be set at, affordability, impacts on existing social security recipients and so on, I don't think leaving millions at the tender mercies of the DWP and capricious employers is much of a starter.

Overall, a very interesting discussion. It seemed to me Frances showed greater awareness and radicalism than our future-facing Yvette, perhaps because her bread and butter is organising and attending to the concerns of working people. For Yvette, unfortunately, while absolutely right on care and the creative destruction wrought by the new technologies, her unthought dismissal of the basic income shows she's not just strait-jacketed by the old politics, she's grown snug and comfortable in it.

Debunking the Yeti

When I was much younger my mind was so open you could have driven a bus through it. Not that I was gullible (I always knew that was a word in the dictionary), but when it came to strange phenomena you could sign me up for every cranky belief going. UFO's and the conspiracies surrounding them were a favourite, but everything else - Loch Ness Monster, ghoulies and ghosties, supernaturally things, I was game for the lot. Now (much) older and wiser, a part of me is gratified whenever long-standing mysteries are debunked and sensible, scientific explanations are offered. And so Channel 4's Yeti: Myth, Man or Beast? with former kids' naturalist, Mark Evans ticked my boxes because, beyond all reasonable doubt, it appears the myth of the abominable snowman was finally, properly been put to bed.

We know the stories and the photos of suspect-looking footprints, and the folklore of Himalayan people. There are also the slightly suspect artefacts of fur, bones, and preserved body parts Tibetan and Nepalese villagers have waved in front of Western cameras for decades. So clearly there is something going on. The mythology of the Yeti is based on something, but what? Mark advanced two hypotheses: that a species of Himalayan bear is the not-so-fantastical basis of many sightings for mountain climbers and local people, or that there is a prehistoric species of human rattling around the roof of the world. Which is it to be? Well, a bit of both.

Much of the programme is spent driving to remote villages, wallowing in breathtaking panoramas, interrogating Tibetans about their local legends, and hanging around labs explaining DNA analysis. For added padding, Mark meets the celebrated mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who happened to have a brush with our elusive friend on an expedition 30 years ago. Having done a great deal of research, he came to conclusion his Yeti could be a hitherto undiscovered species of bear. Au contraire thinks Steve Berry, another professional climber. Presenting a photograph of a set of footprints in the snow, he was adamant only a bipedal creature could have produced them - though when Mark asks a villager, he straight out says they were snow leopard tracks. Darn the cats!

Getting to the nitty gritty, we get back DNA results for fur, bone, and a bit of a dessicated paw and, alas, genetics say no. The Yeti relics were either lowland black bears or highland brown bears. No new species of human then. And yet the alternative hypothesis isn't entirely dead. In a bit of a left field twist, Mark makes mention of recent findings in Denisova cave in southern Siberia. Between 2000 and 2014 archaeologists unearthed fossils pointing to a new species of prehistoric human, who apparently lived alongside Neanderthals and overlapped with modern humans. Mark hypothesised that tales of the Yeti might be folk memory stretching back to these encounters. This begs the obvious question: if that's the case, then why are the legends confined to the Himalaya and not the surrounding lowlands?

In previous analysis of Denisovan fossil DNA, Mark argued that they shared a specific mutation with modern humans living in the highlands: the EPAS1 gene. He explains how non-Himalayans adapt to altitude my producing more red blood cells to carry oxygen throughout the body. However, over a long period this can lead to blood becoming more viscous and result in a number of potentially serious health problems. EPAS1 prevents blood from coagulating at altitude, which allows modern day Himalayans to live without any ill-effects. Mark suggests that this mutation could have been passed into the local population back in the dim and distant through interbreeding with Denisovans, and explains why the legends are particular to Himalayan peoples. This isn't entirely fanciful: there is evidence our ancestors did with Neanderthals. Taking DNA samples from Tibetan volunteers from a previous programme to a Californian lab, Mark was keen to pin down the date when such interbreeding could have taken place - and the result was stunning. The date range was between 40,000 and 7,000 years ago. Amazing.

Case closed then? Bears are responsible for contemporary sightings, and the interaction/interbreeding between our ancestors and Denisovans underpin the mythology. Seems pretty airtight. Yes, but one problem with Mark's "science bit". According to the work underpinning the identification of the EPAS1 gene, its emergence is far more recent in time. 3,000 years to be exact, and it's an independent evolutionary adaptation to a previously unhealthy environment - not the result of interbreeding. That the Denisovans had this too shouldn't be a surprise - nature is littered with examples of convergent and coincident evolution. For instance, combination of different genes had the same effects in the Andean and Ethiopian highlands too without the need of an exotic intervention from another species of human.

While systematic genetic analysis of these populations are ongoing, it's fair to conclude that bigfoot is dead, and has been for tens of thousands of years. Another mystery has been peeled back, and once more what was previously strange phenomena is something interesting but entirely explicable. As unreason spreads its wings and infects too many people with magical thinking, conspiratorial nonsense, and a desire to believe the weird and fantastical, Mark and Channel Four deserve praise for reminding its audience that we have the wherewithal to explain the world without the need for modern day pixies.

For Accelerationism

What does radical politics in the 21st century look like?

The internet has projected onto a wider canvas a rerun of America's culture wars. Partying hard since the late 1980s, postmodern self-theorised subject positions face off against self-theorised subject positions in battles for recognition and cultural space vis a vis each other rather than those who hold economic and political power. Related to this is the resurgence of a radically-tinged liberal feminism, a movement so varied and inchoate that prominent activists can challenge sexism and male violence one day, and collect a gong the next. Sitting uneasily with the 'new' feminism is a fast-gaining trans-insurgency around cultural acceptance, against violence by men (again), and access to responsive health care. The new politics of race and lesbian and gay equality are now so utterly mainstream that conservative governments can champion same sex marriage. That is, unless one is a Muslim.

On the environmentalist spectrum, key tenets of green thought have been adopted by radical politics. These include the environmental consequences of capitalism, the critique of economic growth, a concern for biodoversity, and the acceptance of climate science twinned with scepticism towards science and claims of progress. All too often, the critique of capitalism is subsumed in a rage against technologically advanced society itself, and finds expression away from mainstream greenism in back-to-the-land primitivism and refusenik communities cut adrift from history.

Traditional revolutionary leftism is still around, if you know where to look. In the British case, the groups laying claim to the mantle of Marx and Lenin have long abandoned the struggle to organise the mass of working people as a political party (if they ever did). They instead pursue a species of postmodern identity politics. Resting on an immaculately shaped grouping of no social weight, they appeal nostalgically to a working class that hasn't existed since the mid-1970s, or intervene in an amorphous "movement" with all the subtlety of a Ken Livingstone debating Israel, and repel those they seek to attract.

The distinctly untrendy bread and butter politics, which never went away, come and go, albeit now with more input from 'social movement trade unionism'. Manifesting in campaigns to defend public services, to resist gentrification, to protest the strip mining of the welfare state, and the taking of industrial action, the subterranean struggle of people upon whom the media gaze seldom falls bubbles up always and everywhere, but tends toward the episodic and sectional, drawing in only the immediately-affected. The trace each campaign leaves, whether successful or not, activates only a small minority for wider politics.

And now social democracy, or at least parts of it are undergoing radicalisation. Having ditched political principle for colourless managerialism, centre left parties across the West have lost out to populist right wing surges, and are now facing leftist challenges from within. This return of the repressed however is not matched, at least yet, by shifts in wider movements at large. It is a recomposition within an existing tendency overlapping all of the above. This includes existing party and labour movement activists, and a section of its passive support. As the institutional and constituency bases of social democracy and labourism corrode, the new leftism is a body shock realisation that it faces disintegration. By identifying its key drivers - neoliberal capital, government-enforced austerity, galloping inequality, and the political abandonment of our people - old warhorses like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders speak to anxieties provoked by a shifting and destabilising position and have proved in spectacular fashion that it can mobilise. Meanwhile, the old masters of the social democratic universe are left scratching their heads. Cocooned by parliaments, cushioned by the media, and swaddled by self-importance, they never saw the insurgency coming, and its that lack of foresight that condemns them to the political wilderness. Yet the question remains, as a product of decline, can a partially radicalised centre left arrest the decline?

This is, more or less, how it stands, and all are variously networked and bound by the here today gone tomorrow connectivity of social media. But how might a 21st century radicalism look like? I think it should look like Accelerationism.

As with all trends and movements, a lot of crap has been written about accelerationism. Some see it as the creed of Spiked/the RCP and its cadre of professional contrarians, a tendency that fetishises technology as is and pushes for its fullest development for the benefits to trickle down. Where have we heard that one before? Others, with a touch more naivete and without tedious opinion pieces to sell, lapse into a 19th century inevitablism, that somehow the new society will spring automatically from space telescopes and nuclear reactors. As an adulation of the technical, a celebration of the speeding up and compression of social life, the worship of the accomplished fact is no foundation for the radical: it is a mere affirmation of what is.

The accelerationist does not submit to the world but probes, analyses, asks questions, identifies trends, and strives to make concrete all progressive potentials. The object of accelerationism is not the digital trinketisation of social life, but social life itself. It stands for the ruthless criticism of all that exists not because it's fun, and/or allows one to pass as superficially radical, but to change the world. It eschews utopianism because the material conditions for everyone to live freely and deeply already exist. The job of accelerationist politics is to accelerate the human potentials capitalism has cultivated and realise the epoch of freedom that lies within our reach.

Yet as a politics accelerationism is a potential too. Its clearest and earliest expression was in the works of Marx and Engels, and as their insights have diffused, fragmented, and become vulgarised and embedded. Particulates of accelerationism are scattered over established radical politics and manifest partially and unevenly. Yet the core relationships identified and critiqued by classical Marxism have conformed to the prognoses declared 150 years ago: the more they change, the more they stay the same. Accelerationism is fortunate in the sense that while other forms of radical politics desperately seek a subject, its potential constituency of billions of propertyless wage and salary earners, the very people who labour, who think, who create this world have never been greater in number, been as inclusive of all social categories, nor wielded as much social power. In as far as established radicalisms tap into, express, and organise these interests, the task of the accelerationist is to be there and accelerate things by dealing with the politics as they express themselves. There is no time to be dazzled by illusion, especially those we conjure ourselves.

Accelerationism's ambitions are vaulting. It is not a fringe pursuit, but the distillation of really-existing trends that point beyond capitalism's antiquated limits. As such, accelerationism cannot help but be the avant garde of the avant garde. It demands to be a movement of movements, of the conscious activity of the immense majority acting for the immense majority. Therefore accelerationism is a synthesis. It imbibes the best and discards everything that is rotten about existing radicalism. It valorises the human, celebrating our capacity to think, to feel, to love, and to create. It has no time for misanthropic miserablism nor romantic rubbish that sees positivity in the poverty of ages past. It is resolutely anti-capitalist, though not averse to using capitalism against itself and bourgeois interests. And most of all, accelerationism stands for a better life for everybody, a world in which the scars of want are banished, where alienating work is done, and the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. It is everything that is best about technologically advanced civilisation, and then some.

The challenges this century is stacking up are terrifying, and left unchecked spell doom and ruination for billions. The despoliation of the environment and climate change don't just threaten standards of living: they put into question the possibility of living. Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Dealing with our problems is not beyond our ability, but they cannot be seriously addressed for as long as capitalism holds us back. If our species is to enter the 22nd century in better shape than it did the 21st, accelerationism, the politics of potential and promise, has to succeed.

Science in The Martian

The Martian has two very unique features not shared by your average big budget blockbuster. First, it has Sean Bean in it and his character lives. Second, as a science fiction piece it is virtually alone in projecting forward a non-dystopian future in which scientific endeavour comes out smelling of roses. Before you read any further, this review is a touch spoilerific, so stay away if you're saving The Martian up for a rainy evening.

That said, I don't think there's any need to dwell on the plot as it's not a particularly deep film. Set at some unspecified point in the near future, Matt Damon gets left for dead on the Red Planet as a dust storm swoops in on a NASA landing site. The next couple of hours are spent trying to get him back home while Damon has to "science the shit" out of his meagre supplies and technology to stay alive. Okay, scraping up vac-packed faeces and mixing it with Martian soil might not produce the kind of potato crop we see in the film, at least not straight away, but it has enough pseudo-realism for it to be plausible. And puncturing one's space suit to use it for propulsion is a bit iffy, but again, it sounds just about right for it to work.

It goes without saying that the wide panoramic shots of the Martian desert (i.e. Jordan) are stunning, yet the sense of desolation doesn't overcome the film, nor is Mars the "real star". Throughout Matt Damon does a good job of playing Matt Damon, so don't expect much in the way of brooding and existential angst. Thankfully his ubiquity doesn't get tiresome as his adventures in the habitat and on the rover are interspersed with ground control action. Overall it's very watchable. Not a masterpiece by any means, but an entertaining enough update of an Apollo 13 (and an Apollo 13)-style space disaster scenario.

The real hero here has to be science. When it suits, which is often, NASA likes to dress its organisation and its mission up as the repository of all that is best about our species. Its official discourse evokes essentialist notions of exploration, that it is in our very nature to strap ourselves atop a rocket and blast off into infinity. And when it's not reworking old American frontier ideologies, it's presented as an instantiation of the absolute, of a manifestation of reason straight from a late 20th century misreading of Hegel. As such, any film that has official NASA involvement - and this does - the agency has to come out of it looking good. Hence Matt Damon was never in any danger.

Putting that aside, anyone whose politics aren't hitched to the primitivist bandwagon has serious respect for the space science NASA does. Even I follow them on Twitter. And that is shown in the best possible light, here. Matt Damon applies his botanist know-how and astronaut training to grow crops, establish communications with Earth, improvise habitat and suit breach repairs, and lots of other gadgety-things. Meanwhile NASA get their heads together to formulate a rescue plan which, in the best tradition of American schmaltz, a lowly underling at the Jet Propulsion Lab manages to come up with. Whenever a problem presents, all concerned apply ingenuity and the scientific method to arrive at a solution, even if the bounds of credulity take a little stretching.

Nevertheless, this is more than just pro-NASA propaganda. The Martian sets its face against the contemporary wave of dystopian sci-fi that delights in creating misanthropic situations to subject our descendants to. Much harder is to produce a compelling, successful, believable film that ignores the zeitgeist. It shows we have the tools and know how to fix seemingly intractable problems, and that our efforts can be successful. In a world haunted by social problems and looming environmental disaster, give me that message over fashionable fatalism any day.

Alien Megastructures and Sociology

As you get older, life gets more absurd. Or so it seems. The humdrum is occasionally punctuated by something that's really out there, like the Daily Mail standing up against racism and xenophobia. Last week had one of those moments. It was announced that some of the observations of the catchily-named KIC 8462852, a star some 1,400 light years away, might be congruent with an alien megastructure orbiting it. Yes, you read that correctly. Eric Mack over at CNet notes:

Basically, the star's light curve seems to show some strange stuff passing in front of the star, at irregular intervals and sometimes even appearing to shift shape or orientation along the way - this is very different from the relatively predictable orbits we see objects making around our own sun and most other stars that Kepler has observed.

Tabetha Boyajian, the Yale researcher responsible for making observations of the star doesn't mention the possibility of aliens, and it is extremely unlikely that she and her colleagues have observed the industrial operations of an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation beavering away to capture the solar energy of their star. Having a science head and being extremely sceptical about such things, like Eric I'm sold on the anomaly being an extremely large cloud of comets sent hurtling into its inner solar system by the gravitational pushing and pulling by a nearby star. Nevertheless the doings of technologically advanced aliens remains a remote possibility, and that is very exciting.

Let us make some suppositions. SETI have requested time with a powerful radio telescope they want to point at KIC 8462852, and expect to do so around January time. Boyajian and others in the exoplanet hunter community will be refining their observations. And as infrared emissions are generally accepted to be the signature of advanced aliens, let us speculate that this time next year the observations tally together making bug-eyed beasties the most credible explanation, not the least likely. Should that come to pass, what then?

To be sure, it would be a watershed moment in science. It would arguably be the biggest discovery in all of human history, and certainly where astronomy is concerned. What, however would be the impact on human society, on popular culture, and the way we as a civilisation and a species view ourselves? I don't think it would be as profound as those - science and lay - people really into this sort of thing think it might be. Why?

First, there is distance. 1,400 light years is a mind-boggingly vast distance for 21st century humans to comprehend. If we were to beam a message direct to KIC 8462852 it would arrive there as far away in the future as the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Wales lies in our past. The good news for paranoids fearful of bodysnatchers from outer space is that while our technology may be able to detect them, they can't detect us. Yet. Well, they might be able to note the life bearing signatures of our little blue pearl. They could train mighty powerful telescopes in our direction, but all they would see are primitive folk building new cities in Meso-America and various tribes running amok in Europe sacking and burning established settlements. Because of the distance light has to travel, they would be peering into our past. They won't see direct evidence of our own industrial workings for some time yet. Of course, that's true for us as well - we're seeing the doings around their star as it existed quite a bit ago.

Physical distance breeds social distance. As we're not hooked up the the galaxy's hyperspeed broadband service, the collapse in social distance the internet allows for on our puny-sized planet is just not possible. The simulated immediacy that allows us to identify with complete strangers cannot be transferred to aliens we're never likely to meet, let alone have a long-distance conversation with. And that means the impact on our society will be minimal, it's just too airy-fairy for most people to care about. The day after confirmation will go on like any other day. It'll trend on Twitter for an hour or two, make the headlines, but apart from that? Zilch.

We do have some precedent to go on. Back in 1996, for a short period meteorite Allan Hills 84001, a chunk of Mars that fell to Antarctica some 13,000 years ago, was accepted as the vessel of fossilised Martian bacteria. Bill Clinton made his announcement from the White House lawn and front pages all over the world ran the story. Yet religions did not experience an existential crisis and go into meltdown. Everything carried on as it always has done. Perhaps a more apposite comparison to the confirmation of far away aliens would be the arrival of comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. I have fond memories of a summer staggering home from the pub and seeing it blaze away in the firmament. It was a beautiful sight. But apart from increasing the sales of binoculars and telescopes, getting a few more young people into the astronomical sciences, and, unfortunately, triggering the mass suicide of a Californian-based UFO cult, it passed the bulk of the human race by. It was a nice thing to see, that's all.

Confirming an alien megastructure would have fairly similar effects. A few fringe people would start worshipping it, entrepreneurial tykes might crowdfund a generational starship on Indiegogo, KIC 8462852's exploration appears as a staple in the resurgent space-trading genre of video games, of science fiction movies, of novels and space art, the Pope would probably deliver an encyclical on God's children in the heavens. How about an uptick in flying saucer sightings and reported alien abductions? Sociology-types like yours truly might have a fine old time trying to model the social dynamics of our green-skinned friends. And that will probably be your lot. Our place in the universe has radically shifted, and students of human behaviour would barely be able to tell the difference as far as our social structures are concerned. This is because news of beings around another star would not disrupt the rhythms of social life. It demands no collective response from governments, no shift in policy, no readjustment of the mental horizons of the vast majority of people beyond "that's nice" or "that's interesting". One's sense of security-in-the-world remains fundamentally unchallenged.

If, on the other hand, our aliens were to announce their presence in low Earth orbit, then things would be very different ...

Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation

There was a time where new systems needed a whole stable of video game characters to give them that edge over the rivals. In the fourth generation (16-bit) era of games consoles, Nintendo and Sega came out on top partly because each had established a following for their big guns. Nintendo had Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and a range of more minor exclusives to hand. Sega retaliated with Sonic the Hedgehog and a pantheon of titles based around their arcade properties, or built from scratch as a me-tooism. Part of the reason why so many industry pundits bet against Sony to begin with was a) their forays into video game development up until that time, which included the release of some truly awful games on the SNES and MegaDrive, and b) their lack of what we now call unique intellectual properties, or IPs. Sure, they had Namco in their corner and could look forward to Ridge Racer and Tekken conversions, as well as ports of popular PC titles, but before Sony steam rollered their opposition it made a concerted effort to ensure the PlayStation was home to the best and most sought after exclusives.

This is where Crash comes in. Whereas Sega and Nintendo touched off the mascot arms race, virtually every outfit tried getting in on the act. Between 1988 and 1995, practically every software house in the field had tried their hand at mascot video games. Ubisoft - Rayman. Accolade - Bubsy the Bobcat. Gremlin - Zool. Ocean - Mr Nutz. Core - Chuck Rock. Codemasters - Dizzy. Some did alright, but most fell by the wayside and are remembered without affection by gamers of a certain age who've since moved on to other things. Whether developers Naughty Dog (they of Uncharted and The Last of Us fame) thought they were creating Sony's answer to Mario and Sonic for them knew or not, they were nevertheless treading a well-worn path. And Crash was every inch a 90s bandicoot. His character style was zany, as opposed to Mario's stolid dependability and Sonic's ice cool. He cut a countenance that was slightly unhinged - there's a look of panic on Crash's face has he runs toward the screen as the game opens. But it comes with a knowing sensibility as well. Prior to leaping on the back of a boar in the two hog run levels, Crash looks over his shoulders and his eyebrows start twitching as if something improper is about to happen (NB this was a full 19 years before those David Cameron allegations surfaced). You'd also be hard pressed to classify Crash or any of his allies and adversaries as cute. Rather, despite his marsupial origins, Crash has something of a simian gait about his person. He wears nothing but blue shorts and trainers. In other words, our Crash was an anthropomorphic every man who didn't realise the body projections of the teenage boys likely to buy the game, but in some way embodied their ungainly awkwardness with a dash of 90's adolescent attitude.

Shadows cast by Crash's predecessors didn't end there. His spin attack was lifted directly from the Tasmanian Devil (who'd also had two outings on the MegaDrive prior to Crash). His collectible was wumpa fruit - as opposed to coins or rings - that yielded an extra life once a hundred of them were gathered up. Smashing open crates yields them and other goodies, like the masks of Aku Aku that protects Crash from the usual instant death one can expect when colliding with an enemy; or the tokens of his love interest, Tawna, that can transport him to increasingly challenging bonus rounds. And, of course, as the hegemonic game form during the 16-bit era was the platformer, so Naughty Dog's response had to be the same. However, the job of any mascot worth their salt is to showcase the capabilities of the machine it's running on, and Crash did that in spades. The first level has you taking a leisurely 3D stroll down a jungle path. Later levels involve tricky action from the same perspective. Not only was this novel as Crash would have been many gamers' first experience of 3D platforming, it was a completely new gameplaying experience. Naughty Dog, however, had the nous to ease their audience in. Visually arresting 3D levels were broken up with tradition two-dimensional stages. And sometimes they messed with the gamer by introducing 2.5D elements, and mixing 2D and 3D platforming. It demonstrated the PlayStation's raw power advantage over its clunk-looking predecessors, and pointed to the direction gaming was set to subsequently go.

Despite all that, Crash was something of a simple affair. It certainly didn't possess the depth of Super Mario 64, which hit the shelves a few months prior. In this sense, it was the heir to Sonic. While Mario had always prided itself on original game design, elaborate puzzles, and a huge number of secrets to uncover, Sonic was more an A-to-B (at speed) sort of game. Sega did hide a few secrets of their own, and had from the off experimented with multiple routes from start to exit. This is Crash's style, except more linear. There are a few hidden areas where goodies can be found. And bits of levels can be unlocked by collecting gems as you go (you're awarded one if you get through a level having smashed all the crates and without losing a life). If you want to get the "secret" ending, pursuing all the gems is exactly what you need to do. Sounds straight foward? It is, but it's also as tough as old boots. The 3D levels take some getting used to as judging distances with a fixed and not-always-entirely-helpful camera can lead to many needless deaths. There's something to be said for the control scheme as well. I don't know if it's me, but I had the same problems with the game as I did when I got my mitts on a copy 18 years back. Crash at times seems unwieldy and his control scheme over-sensitive. Contemporary gamers used to their thumb sticks would have a hard, frustrating time adapting. If that wasn't enough, some of the level designs are very challenging. Especially the 2D levels gamers of the mid-90s would have some familiarity with. The game isn't cheap, but if you don't take the time to observe the patterns, or learn how to control Crash properly the thing will eat you up. That probably explains why wumpa fruits and extra lives are so plentiful. Things don't seem quite frustrating when you still have 55 lives left in the bag.

There are a few other aspects about Crash that are of interest. The first is the game's naked orientalism. Set on three islands off Australia's coast, the first sees Crash doing battle against grass skirted natives. The first 2D level, Native Fortress, has you avoiding fire pits and spiky polls - as well as a few warriors - while you collect the fruit and make your way to the end. The first boss, Papu Papu, is a headdress-festooned big-bellied chief who fits no south sea islander stereotype at all. Using such locations might have seemed like a good idea at the time, especially as those levels bleed into subsequent tours of exotic-looking ruins (similar to a number of zones to have appeared in the Sonic games), but now one would hope it would be beyond the pail. Less controversial is a common trope in 90s video games: environmental despoliation and out-of-control science. Plenty of platform games mined this seam at the time, including Sonic, and it's something I'll be visiting in the future. Here, all of one's environmental fears find expression. The nemesis, Dr Neo Cortex (consciously modelled on Brain from Pinky and the Brain), is conducting genetic experiments to breed an army of animal soldiers - of which Crash is a result. As you move through the game, you come up against Cortex's other creations as end level bosses. Also, as the map makes pretty clear, your antagonist's mad sciencey efforts are pouring toxic waste into the sea and is threatening the beautiful environments of the levels you've just been through. It's not enough that Cortex is evil with the usual megalomaniacal schemes. He has to be a polluter, also. And a last word on the object of the game: this, like many other platformers, is yet another rescue-the-girl fetch quest. Except this time, Tawna is being kept by Cortex for unspecified observation and experimentation. Grim. However, it is worth noting that marketing objected to this premise and was dropped from future releases. If it was too tired for the mid-90s, why does it still occasionally rear its head now?

Unlike most PlayStation games (with the odd exception), and considering Crash Bandicoot is a relatively early PS1 title, it remains quite a good looking game by contemporary standards. Of course, graphically it doesn't hold a candle to your Super Mario 3D World and suchlike, but it has a certain vibrancy to it suggestive of craftmanship and care. It's a bold, brassy number just like the PlayStation itself. The luscious greens of the tropical levels, the flickering firelight of the caverns, the garish colour clashes of the industrial stages, they work together to crowd out the hard edged polygons characteristic of so many PlayStation games. There's little in the way of the characteristic PS1 flicker as well.

Crash was very well received and spawned sequels well into the succeeding generation of consoles, though now Naughty Dog have bigger fish to fry his IP has fallen into disuse. This is unsurprising because the games were very much of the interregnum between 2D and modern 3D gaming, and there is little more than the nostalgia some might feel that commends Crash's return to the gaming scene. Overall, an important game. A frustrating game. A rare looker of a game for the medium. But one that has more or less fallen into obscurity, and doesn't offer a great deal to warrant its rescuing.