If Britain is broken, what is to blame – big money and big tech, or graffiti on your train?

The Guardian

2 days ago

Britain, let's face it, is crap. Crap, I mean, in quite a specific sense: we might not be teetering on the brink of civilisational destruction, as the post-Brexit right can often seem to think. But there nonetheless remains a vast, ambient sense of rubbishness. Everything is expensive but nothing works. Our streets are full of potholes; our houses are full of mould. All the shops are shut, except for a Tesco Express, where there are security tags on the eggs. It takes about a million years to build a railway line.
Up to now, the response to Britain's enshittification has, by and large, seemed remarkably fatalistic: Keir Starmer spent the first year in government repeatedly insisting that there just wasn't any money, and so really nothing could be done. Thank God then, one might think, for Looking for Growth, a new campaign group led by young (well, late 20s, early 30s) Londoners Lawrence Newport and Joe Reeve, who have reportedly been advised by Dominic Cummings, and who have taken it on themselves to rid the tube of the scourge of graffiti.
You might have seen the video: riding the Bakerloo line, wearing hi-vis jackets that proclaim they are 'Doing What Sadiq Khant' and accompanied by the GB News presenter Tom Harwood, for some reason, Looking for Growth perform a task that looks so simple only a government might fail to achieve it – apply a bit of spray and a bit of elbow grease – to rid some rolling stock of a litany of ugly tags and scrawls ('It's not even good graffiti!', Harwood exclaims). 'This is shameful. This is not OK. We're done waiting for @MayorofLondon to pull his finger out,' a tweet by Reeve explained.
It's certainly proved an effective publicity stunt, but what exactly are Looking for Growth, and its backers, attempting to drum up publicity for? The campaigners would like to be known as a 'pro-growth' and 'anti-crime'group who defy the traditional left-right political spectrum. However, as a London Centric piece about the group claims, they often reference the French political meme 'Nicolas, 30 ans' that depicts a young professional struggling as he pays taxes toward an older bourgeois couple and a younger immigrant.Reeve is quoted as saying, 'That probably does describe quite a lot of our members.'
Looking for Growth members appear to balance their pessimism about the present state of things with an optimism about what we might broadly call 'tech-driven' solutions: the video displayed on the front page of their website features an image of Michelangelo's God from The Creation of Adam, touching a robot arm. Londoncentric describes many of Looking for Growth's members as 'tech sector-adjacent'; predictably perhaps, their tube clean-up video was retweeted by Elon Musk.
What might we say about all this? Certainly there is a powerful vision here. Britain is crap – and people know it. Mainstream politicians really don't seem to be able to do anything about it: hence why there is clearly so much electoral space for parties not called 'Labour' or 'the Conservatives' to exploit. But the likes of Looking for Growth seem to be entirely mistaken about the nature of Britain's enshittification.
Take graffiti, for instance. TfL has claimed that it's unable to hold back carriages for cleaning and replace them with backups due to government budget cuts, but even if graffiti really were some sort of permanent, intractable problem on the tube – would the mere existence of graffiti be what's making Britain crap? Granted: part of how we know Britain is crap is because it looks crap. Still more profound, surely, is what we might call our sense of institutional crappiness manifested in the fact that all of our transactions are mediated through apps, but then if anything goes wrong you're only able to 'talk to' an AI, never an actual human being. It's expensive and shoddy housing. Crappiness is an elevated utilities bill; crappiness is shrinkflation.
In short, the more we think about how Britain is actually crap, the more we can think about who is actually responsible for its decline. This is stuff being done to us by the venture capitalists who seem to own all our strategic assets; the private landlords we decided to sell all our social housing stock to. It is stuff being done to us by big tech. If anyone actually wants to make anything better, it's those much grander forces we're going to need to find a way of scrubbing off our metaphorical walls.
Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer