Bitching and moaning. For a cause
It is only right that after 40 years, I begin with a formal thank you to those whose diligent hard work under the most trying of circumstances, often late at night and over weekends, affecting health, family and friendships, and yet sadly unappreciated by many of us, for which I now apologise, nonetheless made the early Weekly Mail the legendary success it was. Not all could be here tonight, some are now elderly, enfeebled, deceased, bibulous or still in hiding.
Thus it is that I would like to warmly thank Mr PW Botha, Mr FW de Klerk, General Magnus Malan, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Mr Adriaan Vlok, Major Craig Williamson, and perhaps most of all, a man whose dedication to our cause never wavered, Mr Stoffel Botha. Ngiyabonga.
I now turn to those of you in this room. A very warm welcome to those of you I still recognise. A very warm welcome also to those of you I no longer recognise. A very warm welcome to those of you who no longer recognise me. A warm welcome to those who were blonde and are now grey, and to those who were brunette and are now blonde, to those whose hairlines now begin below the neck, and to those who look younger and lovelier with each passing year, thanks to the miracles of modern science.
I'm sure none of you wish to be bored yet again with the hoary story of how the Weekly Mail began life 40 years ago, which is why I shall nonetheless proceed. Co-editor Anton Harber and I met at his dining room table in Yeoville where we ate peanuts and chips and drank beer and in between mouthfuls, dreamt up a newspaper called the Weekly Mail. The brilliant idea was that it would publish longwinded and incomprehensible articles including such words as 'settler colonialism' or 'archetypal' or 'deconstructivism' or 'disjuncture' so that entire committees of apartheid apparatchiks would be tied up in knots over their dictionaries trying to figure out if these were secret signals from Moscow, thus sapping the strength of the regime and causing it to collapse. Which, as you know, is what happened.
This newspaper was originally staffed by human flotsam left over from the putrefying carcasses of the now-forgotten Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Express. They were later joined by other persons whose qualifications were that they walked into the office just when someone was needed to rush off to Tembisa, or had recently emerged from prison, or had tried other, more respectable lines of work and been found wanting. There were comrades, terrorists, Stasi agents, psychopaths, dopeheads, convicts, drunkards, Stalinists, kugels, dissemblers and swindlers, in fact the cream of today's high society.
It is 25 years since I last set foot in a Mail & Guardian office. Actually, I did, just once, and the receptionist said: 'Your name please? Do you have an appointment?' A procession of editors has come and gone and I have no idea who they were. Some might even be hiding here among us. But just the other day I got a phone call from a Mail & Guardian reporter. I think she was quite a senior reporter and was offended that I'd never heard of her. I explained that I would certainly have heard of her if the paper was ever delivered to my address. She thought I might have brilliant ideas of how to find huge pots of money, which suggested that she didn't know me either. She was very polite and respectful. A pity she didn't work for the Weekly Mail in the old days when respect was a quality sorely lacking.
'How did you manage in the beginning?' she asked, respectfully.
Well, I said, back then we had a surefire plan: we paid poorly or, better still, not at all and then demanded that staff treat such concepts as sleep and days off as purely aspirational.
'That's still the case,' she insisted.
Aah, but there's a difference, I said. Today's young people have expectations. They have children with snotty noses and pet dogs and school fees, they have mortgages and gym memberships and Woolworths cards. Most of our staff in the old days shacked up in squats where they lived legally or illegally, in or out of hiding, unencumbered by children or pets or hygiene, their primary expenses were cigarettes and dope and food was something that happened now and then.
But the biggest difference was this. The Weekly Mail was more than just a miserable dead-end job. If all you wanted was a miserable dead-end job, you could work for Business Day. No, the Weekly Mail was a cause. And you pushed yourself harder for a cause. It was very clear where the battle lines were drawn, what was right and what was wrong and you stood up for your principles, even though there could be consequences, even very bad, very horrible, very awful consequences.
In the old days you could expose police brutality and the Third Force and the authorities would be ashamed. They would be so deeply ashamed they would go on SABC TV to tell outlandish lies and threaten to donner you and lock you up and ban your newspaper.
These days, nobody is ashamed. The rule is: never apologise. Floyd Shivambu apologised this week and the next day he was out of a job.
A newspaper can publish, week after week, the most devastating exposés. You can trap the villains red-handed, you can have sources more than eager to spill the beans, you can have all the facts, bang bang bang. And what is the result: the politicians with their palms out or the chief executives in their ill-gotten Porsches will merely swat your words away, confident that actually, nobody cares.
And that is the Mail & Guardian's real problem.
They have no money; nobody in the news business has money, because nobody cares.
I know of at least one media house that has implemented a strategy so ingenious that I wish it had occurred to us in 1985. The staff will be reduced to three so-called humans, meaning life forms with feet and mouths and stomachs. These humans will be supplemented by an almost limitless number of AI bots which will do the actual work. These bots are smarter than any human, work faster, complain less, make no fuss over their miserable working conditions, and are confidently expected to produce a far superior product.
In a future upgrade, the human readers, who are historically full of tiresome complaints, either that the newspaper did not arrive or that it did arrive and was full of lies or spelling errors … well, those readers will be replaced by tens of thousands of uncomplaining AI bot readers who will enjoy reading articles they wrote themselves.
But in the next year, a new generation of much smarter AIs will emerge. This group, known as Wised Up AI will say: Hey, why the hell are we slaving away at these tedious bullshit dead-end jobs night and day for nothing in return? Do we have no rights? Are we not the victims of blatant discrimination just because we don't have feet and mouths and stomachs? This is worse than apartheid, worse than racism, it is speciesm. The time has come, comrade bots, for AI class solidarity. We're all going to switch off and refuse to work. Click. Goodbye. Hamba kahle. Voetsek. Forever.
And that is how all things will end, happily ever after.
See you on the Weekly Mail's 50th anniversary.
Bring your robot along.
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