Supply and Demand. How could something so simple, so pure, lead to so much misery? It links the smallest pleasure to the greatest pain. It is death by a thousand tiny cuts. It supports the global trade in licit and illicit materials. It upholds the questionable regimes that enable that trade. War, slavery, apartheid, holocaust can all be traced back to individual people making seemingly inconsequential decisions. But each of those decisions is taken at the expense of something. Each time we choose convenience, each time we think first and foremost of ourselves, we empower the forces in the world that when unleashed bring forth devastation. Our deference towards supposed authority has empowered crusades, holy wars, 'civilising' missions, the conquest and annihilation of indigenous peoples, the destruction of the natural world and the dominion of the machine age. We made this world in the name of convenience. We chose far too often not what was right or good, but what was easy. It is easier to anaesthetise ourselves with religion and television than it is to face the world we've made. We are appalled by the deeds of the bankers and the tabloid journalists not because of what they did, but because of what we allowed them to do. Supply and Demand.
So, the News of the World. Hacking phones. Very bad. And what was it all for? Information. Pure and simple. Information that we demanded as payment for having made the 'victims' of phone hacking - that is to say, for the most part, dubious celebrities - famous in the first place. People come along with ambition and we feed it and fuel it and make them a star, but we know all along that it's a hollow fame. We know, likewise, that they have a shelf-life. We impose it on them. We lure them in, make them comfortable, lay our trap and lie in wait and then pounce like jackals, like wild dogs on a stricken animal. Then there comes a feeding frenzy and then only a carcass, stripped bare of all its flesh, remains to testify that anything had ever happened there. Our celebrity blood lust drives the stakes of the game ever upwards. It used to be enough to have blurred photos shot with telephoto lenses from far away. But as we made more and more celebrities, as they rolled off the production lines of Big Brother and the X Factor, we demanded more and more from our bounty hunters. We began to hound them in the street, lurk outside their homes and then, eventually, inside their homes with hidden cameras.
They were paying the price of their own vacuous celebrity. We made them who they are, we should be able to know everything about them. It's only fair, right? But it all went to shit. They took it too far. The News of the World went after a 'real' person, one of us. A missing (murdered) teenage girl no less. The straw that broke the camel's back? I sincerely doubt it. More like the anvil that broke the camel's back. In a way it was bound to happen. There was no way we could control the force that we'd released upon the world. But will we learn? No.
We never learn. We never learn that if you allow banks to operate with anything other than total regulation, they will end up running amok and bringing our national, and now global economies crashing to the ground. We have never learned this. Nor have we learned that media needs to be in some way controlled in order to prevent the News of the World hacking into mobile phones and Fox News spreading actual lies twenty-four hours a day. We will not learn that when times are tough, we must think of the greater good rather than selfishly taking the easy way out. As a species, we're doomed. Doomed to be consumed by the rampant forces that we, ourselves, have empowered. Congratulations are in order I think, and more billion dollar bonuses on Wall Street.
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