‘This month’s Black Friday bargain blitz is going to be bigger than ever!” So ran a headline. Black what? Bargain what? I had to Google Black Friday because I couldn’t remember if it was the 1987 crash or when sterling plunged out of ERM in 1992.
Neither, it turns out – they’re Black Monday and Black Wednesday. Could it be the day Zayn Malik left One Direction? Or the day the release of a Christmas advertisement by a large retail store made headlines in every outlet in the country and what we used to call “the news” rolled over and died?
But, no. Black Friday does not mark the day John Lewis chose to release its £7m campaign and ascend to dizzying new levels of corporate smuggery. (A spokeswoman for the firm suggested it will raise awareness of the plight of lonely, elderly people that… oh you know, I can’t even be bothered. Most people over the age of 11 have a rough idea what advertising is for.)
In fact – thank you, Wikipedia – Black Friday is “the Friday following Thanksgiving” and in the US is “regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season”.
And while I know that we’ve taken the concept of Halloween, as celebrated in suburban New Jersey, into our chilly British hearts, I don’t believe we’ve actually co-opted Thanksgiving yet? Have we? In which case, how can the “day after Thanksgiving” be a thing?
And yet, here we are with the bold claim that it’s the biggest “ever”, ie “since we imported this shallow and vacuous marketing gimmick about two seconds ago”. But then, in some ways, there is something to be said for shallow and vacuous marketing gimmicks so crass they make the Argos catalogue look like the I Ching. Because while adverts might have bled into news, at least we know they’re adverts (not news), unlike an awful lot of what goes on social media and pretty much all of Instagram.
So while most of us over the age of 11 know what an advert looks like, on Instagram, the fastest-growing social network in the world, the fastest-growing demographic is children and young teenagers. Instagram doesn’t release figures, but just ask a tween. They’ll tell you, if they’re not too busy uploading selfies.
Adverts on Instagram don’t look like adverts, they look like people. People who are wearing things they’ve been given, or photographing things they’ve been given, or being paid to wear or eat or display in their homes more or less anything that can be placed inside a stylised frame and pumped out to their thousands of followers.
Essena O’Neill, an Australian teenager, made a splash last week by recaptioning her Instagram selfies to reveal the truth behind the pictures. In one, she wears a backless white dress and runs her fingers through her tousled blonde hair: “I didn’t pay for the dress, took countless photos trying to look hot for Instagram, the formal made me feel incredibly alone.”
She struck out at the “contrived perfection” of Instagram’s hollow heart, but that’s not even the half of it. The invisible money spent on invisible advertising that nobody knows is advertising dwarfs John Lewis’s £7m. Danielle Bernstein, a 23-year-old Instagrammer with 1.3 million followers, has been one of the few to reveal the figures – she explained this year that she gets paid up to $15,000 for a single Instagram post.
It might look like pretty pictures, but Instagram is consumerism on a scale that makes one long for the hallowed sacred space of the Boxing Day sales. As Essena O’Neill points out, Instagram doesn’t do pain or fear or loneliness. If you’re lonely, your best hope is that a large corporate will come along and patronise you in its seasonal campaign. The kids are not just uploading selfies, they’re being gulled. We all are. #corporatemugs.
Enough of the public shaming over poppies
Was it for this that a generation of young men lost their lives in the Flanders mud? So that one day a pretty young woman could be pilloried for failing to wear the correct decorative memorial item? The annual outcry over which newsreaders are or aren’t wearing a poppy – pretty much all of them apart from Jon Snow, who has taken a stance against “poppy fascism” – has now broadened to include anyone at all. Last week, Sienna Miller. This week, who? Kim Kardashian? Peppa Pig? The cast of Animal Hospital?
Miller was forced to respond to criticism that she hadn’t worn one when she appeared on The Graham Norton Show by suggesting it was “a little extreme”. Extreme? A public shaming that included the Sun dredging up a former defence minister, Sir Gerald Howarth, who obligingly said: “There should be no excuse for not wearing one so we can honour the war dead.”
It does make you wonder how many former defence ministers the reporter called before landing on Sir Gerald, It does make you wonder how many former defence ministers the reporter called before landing upon Sir Gerald. But it also makes you wonder if Miller’s real crime was to be young, pretty, female and, a week after Halloween, available for a public pillorying?
One long arm of the law for the rich…
So this is how the future works. There will be cuts to basic services. There will be fewer social workers and nurses and police officers. But as George Osborne says: “We are all in this together.”
Yet I’m alerted to an item in last week’s Ham & High, the newspaper that serves Hampstead and Highgate, two of London’s most expensive postcodes, that the residents are crowdfunding a private police force. Only it’s not private. It’s not some heavies with a dog and a van – they’re raising money to buy three Metropolitan police officers and a sergeant, and in four weeks have raised £180,000.
But then, crowdfunding in a neighbourhood where the average house price (terrace) was £2,095,464 last year or £3,598,514 for a semi-detached is never going to have the same challenges as some places. This, however, is not the most astonishing thing . T – that the rich will get their own fleet of private coppers while the rest will have no choice but to doff our cap at muggers and hope for the best. It’s that a Met spokesman explained: “Local authorities can currently fund their own police under the MOPAC MetPatrol Plus Scheme, whereby police officers are purchased by London boroughs on a buy-one-get-one-free basis.”
It’s bogof, like at Boots with shampoo. Buy a Met policeman and get one free. If that sounds like the punchline to a joke, it isn’t. It’s a loophole that a local lawyer, Jessica Learmond-Criqui, who chairs the Frognal and Fitzjohn’s Safer Neighbourhood panel, has discovered in the Police Act. In fairness, she is showing a canny consumer’s sense in leading the campaign to raise £200,000 a year to fund three officers, with three free ones thrown in.
Why stop there? Will Hampstead have its own riot police? Why not a prison and a couple of tanks? We’ll be paying half, after all. And they may need them, if – when, surely, when – the peasants start revolting.
