[Diggers350] London’s War on Informality, what seven hours in London taught me about surveillance capitalism

[Tony Gosling]

London’s War on Informality, what seven hours in 
London taught me about surveillance capitalism – Brett Scott

<https://tlio.org.uk/londons-war-on-informality-what-seven-hours-in-london-taught-me-about-surveillance-capitalism-brett-scott/>27Dec23 
<https://tlio.org.uk/londons-war-on-informality-what-seven-hours-in-london-taught-me-about-surveillance-capitalism-brett-scott/#respond>Leave 
a comment
Emacs!


The War on Informality - (via Diggers350 list at www.tlio.org.uk)


<https://brettscott.substack.com/p/the-war-on-informality>What 
seven hours in London teaches me about 
surveillance capitalism – Brett Scott – 19 Dec 
2023 – <https://brettscott.substack.com/>Brett’s Substack

https://tlio.org.uk/londons-war-on-informality-what-seven-hours-in-london-taught-me-about-surveillance-capitalism-brett-scott/

I lived in London for 11 years, and hold a deep 
affection for the city, but when I visit now I 
feel physically uneasy. As I disembark at Gatwick 
airport and step into the terminal, I’m hit with 
the punch of an invisible forcefield. Alarms 
start ringing in my nervous system, like those 
birds that cause a racket when danger is approaching.

A friend tells me it’s because I’m an ‘economic 
empath’. She means it half-jokingly, but it’s 
true that I sense a creeping darkness looming in 
the city that I can’t easily put words to, but 
feel in my body. It must be something subliminal 
I’m picking up, but what? It starts when I see 
the HSBC billboards that line the passage to the 
passport control, with pictures of grandparents 
and kids alongside slogans like ‘together we 
thrive’. It builds as I force myself to look into 
the facial recognition cameras to trigger the 
e-gates through the border. It spikes further as 
I try to avoid looking at the MFlow cameras from 
Human Recognition Systems Ltd, their swirling 
lights trying to attract my attention so they can 
log my iris and track me around the airport to optimise crowd control.

Then there’s the feeling of being held hostage in 
the Gatwick shuttle train where they force me to 
listen to easyJet deals read by someone 
pretending to be my friend, selected by an 
advertising company that used consumer research 
that told them a working-class voice sounds more 
trustworthy when trying to sell things. Then 
comes the moment I dread most. The clipped voice 
over the loudspeakers at the National Rail 
station that says, “If you see something 
suspicious, report it to a member of the British 
Transport Police
” At that point I violently 
scrabble for my headphones, because I want to 
drown out what’s coming next. Shit, I’m too slow. Here it comes



‘SEE IT, SAY IT, SORTED’, the voice says.

That phrase, which is repeated every five minutes 
on British transport, send those inner birds of 
mine into a scream. I think about the kids 
growing up in this environment, having this 
repetitive mantra coded into the deepest parts of 
their neural circuits as ‘normal’. I also think 
about the economic structure behind it. I picture 
the brainstorming sessions with the AML Group, 
the advertising agency that was paid a shed-tonne 
of money to create that slogan. They’re quite proud of it:

The AML Group execs reckon they’re pretty edgy 
with their Sin City aesthetics. The website 
profile photos of their leadership team are set 
against a backdrop of street art – presumably to 
show their creativity – while they boast that 
their campaign has led to a 365% increase in 
paranoid reports about ‘suspicious behaviour’. In 
London, you can get paid a lot to make creativity 
and conformity work hand in hand.


Being held by the handrail

So, within an hour of arriving in the UK, my 
emotional Geiger-counter is registering high 
ambient toxicity in the environment, but the 
triggering goes on. The journey from Gatwick into 
central London is one long string of directives 
to be a conscientious good citizen, playing in 
the background as I’m told to be a conscientious 
good consumer by the Santander billboards on the 
Tube platform, the fintech adverts in the 
carriage, and the Barclays posters on the 
escalators that pass me while the voice tells me to ‘please hold the handrail’.

Emacs!


London is a city of endless helpful requests 
coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside 
matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make 
corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. When I 
lived here, this mix of dripping corporate 
inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was 
there like a suffocating blanket, but the city 
had a strong counterculture to balance it out. I 
was born at the tail-end of the authoritarian 
apartheid regime in South Africa, so when I 
arrived London seemed a city of exhilarating 
experimentation and freedom. I lived in the 
neighbourhood of Brixton from 2008-2013, where 
every day the street market was a multicultural 
carnival with home-made ginger beer, ska music 
and the smell of weed. London seemed to have a 
decent balance of power between the formal 
corporate and state sphere, and the informal 
street life that teemed around it in the cracks. 
There was, as it were, a vibrant outside to the suffocating blanket.

Perhaps what my nervous system now registers is a 
shift in that balance. The vibrancy still exists, 
but it’s on the retreat as the outside space is 
eaten up. In the great ongoing war between 
bureaucratic corporate surveillance capitalism 
and the human soul, the former is gaining ground.


Entering the production line

Within two hours an emotional motif has emerged. 
It’s the feeling that London increasingly 
operates as a series of optimised production (and 
consumption) lines presided over by authorities, 
corporations and technology. People cram off the 
Tube to cram into Pret for coffee to cram into 
work, before cramming into the self-service 
checkouts at Tesco for lunch. You’ll never see 
the bosses or shareholders of the production 
lines, but you will see a series of CCTV cameras, 
touch-screens, QR codes and employees, with the 
latter increasingly subordinated to the technology.

As people cram into the bars in the evening, 
they’ll leave their Pret cups and Sainsbury’s 
sushi containers crammed into bins. Those will be 
emptied before dawn by an army of unseen 
cleaners, many of them immigrants, who will 
un-cram the city so the process can continue when 
everyone drains from the catchment area of the 
suburbs into the trains again. Once on the 
platform, our minds can get crammed afresh with 
the cutting edge of automation ideology, which in 
London means pervasive fintech ads, like this one 
from the automated investment manager Nutmeg.

Emacs!


Ah, Nutmeg. I remember this crew. I was involved 
in the London ‘alternative finance’ scene around 
2011 when Nutmeg was founded, and the team would 
turn up at events I attended. Like most fintech 
players, they claimed to be pioneering a 
‘revolution’ against the banks. Here’s their old billboard.

Spot the difference? Glance to the bottom left of 
their newer ad, and you’ll see that the 
‘investing without the bankers’ company has been 
bought by J.P. Morgan. Their former CEO’s 
LinkedIn page says he’s ‘taking a break’, which 
is unsurprising given that he probably no longer 
needs to work after getting paid to sell out. 
Then again, selling out was always the plan. 
Nutmeg was backed from the start by firms like 
Armada Investment Group, Balderton Capital and 
Schroders, who would make damn sure the CEO 
‘takes a break’ if the likes of J.P. Morgan made 
an offer. The inauthenticity in Nutmeg’s vision was always there.

At some level everyone here knows that every 
claim around them is laced with a streak of the 
fake. False revolutions are marketed constantly. 
Some are even named after revolutions, like Revolut.

It’s ironic that Revolut chooses this image, 
because 9 out of the 11 people in their 
leadership team are white men, and there are no 
black women, but commercial inauthenticity is so 
normal that Londoners expect to be lied to. The 
start-up phase of a company is just like the 
start-up phase of an unfinished product on a 
production line. In the early phase, the start-up 
gets to say scrappy rebellious things, but by the 
end they’re ready to be sold to J.P. Morgan. 
Revolut is backed by some of the same venture 
firms as Nutmeg was, so don’t be surprised if it 
ends up swallowed. The fintech scene primarily 
exists for one thing: to help bridge the gap between Big Finance and Big Tech.


The soundtrack of techno-feudalism

By hour three, the latest theme tune of London’s 
corporate takeover rises into my consciousness. 
It’s an incessant beeping sound. Beep. Beep. 
Beep. It’s the sound of people tapping their 
cards or phones on contactless payments 
terminals, in Pret, in the Tube, on the bus, in 
Sainsbury’s, everywhere. It’s the sound of a 
message being sent by the smart-chip on their 
card via the merchant’s bank to Visa’s fortress 
data-centres to their bank’s data-centres and 
back. It’s also the sound of Visa, Mastercard and 
the banking sector getting richer. More 
generally, it’s the sound of us being processed 
by a system that wants to accelerate its production and consumption lines.

Henry Ford famously quipped that ‘any customer 
can have a car painted any colour, so long as it 
is black’. The bosses of London increasingly say 
‘use whatever form of payment you want, so long 
as it’s digital and corporate’. Indeed, the rise 
of contactless payment in London was kickstarted 
by the TfL transport system, which not only 
started blocking people from using cash, but 
partnered with Barclaycard to promote contactless 
payments. In true inauthenticity-maximization 
style, they ran a phoney charity drive to onboard 
people with the help of former mayor Boris 
Johnson and the advertising giant M&C Saatchi. 
The initiative, which was called ‘Penny for 
London’, claimed you could be a humanitarian by 
using contactless payment, because the system 
would automatically donate 1p from your train 
fare to underprivileged young Londoners if you did so.

The initiative raised little money for charity, 
but that was never the point. The point was to 
shift people’s payments behaviour. The directors 
of the now-dissolved Penny for London Ltd 
included Boris Johnson’s Mayor’s Fund, former 
Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, and hedge fund mogul 
and Conservative Party peer, Baron Stanley Fink. 
Isn’t it strange that a bunch of financial elites 
were invited to sit on the board. Someone should 
report that to the See It, Say It, Sorted 
help-line as suspicious behaviour. I fantasize 
about calling the operator and saying:

‘I’ve noticed London has been taken over by two 
colossal American payments firms working in 
conjunction with Big Finance and Tech, and people 
don’t seem to notice. Suspicious?’

I can imagine the operator looking for ‘corporate 
takeover’ and ‘apathy towards ruling class 
hegemony’ in the list of threats to UK democracy. 
‘No, sorry, we only act upon terrorist threats, 
homeless people, brown people, and people who take photos of our CCTV cameras’.

Emacs!


My French friend Victor takes glee in telling me 
that the UK has a lingering feudal mindset, 
because the country never had a true revolution 
like his. Certainly, parts of UK society seem to 
welcome in domination by techno-feudalism with 
minimal resistance. Behind the beeps on the 
contactless terminals I can see the grinning 
faces of the execs at Barclaycard, Visa and 
ApplePay, watching all the ‘cashless’ feedback 
loops accelerate, entrenching their platforms as 
the only means of survival in this environment. 
Their hegemony is amplified by state authorities, 
museums, universities, theatres and other 
institutions of cultural clout that add their 
official blessing to this takeover by ‘going cashless’.

Still, when I first lived in London, cultural 
immunity to this was higher. Using cash was 
normal, and it was also the currency of the 
informal underground that provided a counterpower 
to the formal sphere. Very few people experienced 
cash as ‘inconvenient’ in 2008, but even back 
then payments firms were working to shift that 
perception. I can hear the Visa UK marketing team 
popping the champagne cork on the night they 
released their 2016 ‘cashfree and proud’ 
campaign. Voiced by the much loved actor Brian 
Blessed, it had the objective of making cash seem 
‘peculiar’ in the city by 2020.

Just like AML Group amplified British paranoia by 
365%, these guys amplified the take-over of Big 
Finance-Tech with remarkable speed. Visa wanted 
Londoners ‘liberated’ from cash, but so-called 
‘cashless payment’ is just transfers of 
bank-issued digital casino chips. Put 
differently, they wanted us liberated from our 
lack of reliance on banks. They wanted the cash 
economy to get metabolized by a corporate oligopoly.

This mentality of capture was presented as 
progressive: like our chuffed man in the ad 
above, we were supposed to feel a ‘sense of 
achievement’ when welcoming this in. Most 
notably, this mentality flourished in a 
particular strata of middle-class professionals. 
You don’t need to be a social scientist to see 
that wherever gentrification goes, cashlessness 
follows. The old ‘cash or card’ question asked by 
bartenders was silenced, and replaced by them 
shoving the POS terminal at you. This was the 
true ‘cashfree’ situation Visa desired, and yes, 
they are very proud that businesses will promote 
them by removing your choice to use their physical competitor.


Sterilisation by gentrification

By hour four in London I must find safe harbour. 
I retreat to the The Montagu Pyke on Charing 
Cross Road on the edge of Soho. It’s a 
Wetherspoons pub, and Wetherspoons is an 
interesting beast. One the one hand, it’s a 
stock-market listed company that consolidates 
pubs into a corporate chain. On the other, it 
uses its market power to protect stuff that might 
otherwise be undermined by market forces, like 
traditional real ale. Wetherspoons is notable for 
supporting CAMRA – the Campaign for Real Ale – 
and The Montagu Pyke is bastion for old London 
geezers who don’t want to be shamed for using 
cash or talking in a cockney accent.

I actually used to work in an old CAMRA pub 
called The St. Radegund. The roguish but loveable 
old boss was called Terry, who in his twenties 
had travelled for years through Asia in a beat-up 
van. I walked in, asked for a job, and the next 
night I was working, no questions asked. His 
policy was to serve no lagers, allow no 
smartphones, and accept no card payments. At the 
end of the evening I’d lock the pub up and take 
my wages in cash out of the till for myself. He 
simply trusted I’d take the right amount.


St Radegund regulars

The Radegund felt ‘homely’, but what does this 
mean? In a corporate office you’re only allowed 
you to express a limited part of yourself, but in 
a home all aspects of your being are allowed to 
reside. Things we call ‘homely’, then, have a 
certain level of holism. The Radegund was part of 
the capitalist economy – it sold beers for profit 
– but that was but one part of its spirit. It was 
also a community meeting space, a place for 
lonely widowers to find company, and for Terry to 
tell long stories to the regulars.

The Radegund’s most notable feature was the 
banning of phones, which prevented people from 
accessing a tool they might otherwise use to mine 
their environment for emotional commodities that 
could be pushed into an attention marketplace. 
Even the image I managed to sneak above was a 
partial infraction on that spirit. Phones are 
designed to make it technically easy for us to 
make audio-visual objects out of feelings and 
experiences that otherwise would resist 
objectification, and at this time Facebook was 
trying to lure me in with little dopamine rewards 
to get me to hand these objects over to them, so 
it could be displayed back to me from the outside.

At first glance the phone ban seemed restrictive 
– even draconian – but actually it protected the 
space from a mentality of commodification that 
might otherwise take root. Arguably, holding that 
mentality at bay is what makes things feel 
‘underground’. One of the darkest possibilities 
facing us right now is that our phones may be 
like trojan horses invited into realms we may 
want protected from commodification. They slowly 
erode the sense that the underground resides within us.

Needless to say, the non-commodified holism that 
made the Radegund feel homely is the same thing 
that makes entire neighbourhoods feel homely. The 
old Brixton market, for example, played host to 
all manner of non-commercial values that 
co-existed alongside market activities. There was 
a diversity of spirit, which is what people end 
up calling ‘vibrant’. The more you push the 
needle towards non-commercial logics, the more 
‘alternative’ a place seems. What we call 
‘counterculture’ is a mentality that revels in 
de-prioritizing commercial logic, rather than foregrounding it.

Brixton’s gentrification really kicked off in 
2011, when the Tory government broke the 
squatting scene and cleared out a big chunk of 
the informal culture. In the years since, a 
Wetherspoons pub called the Beehive has operated 
like a shelter, taking in fugitives pushed out by 
the rise of cashless wine bars and craft beer 
breweries. Soho, where the Montagu Pyke stands, 
was lost to gentrification way before that, but 
the pub is hosted in the building that once 
housed the old Marquee Club. Back in the late 
60s, the venue was home to nascent stars like Led 
Zeppelin and David Bowie. The pub has a small exhibit commemorating this:

When I first moved to London, I got a thrill from 
listening to the Dire Straits song Wild West End, 
in which Mark Knopfler sings about walking the 
grimy streets of Soho before the area was turned 
into a simulacrum of itself to be sold to 
tourists. I never got to experience Mark’s Soho. 
One of the classic symptoms of deep urban 
commodification is that the identity of a place 
gets ripped away from those who live there and 
displayed back to them from the outside. You 
don’t host the spirit of Soho. You consume it. 
You live inside a product, and the local 
authorities begin to view themselves as product managers.

Many so-called ‘global cities’ face this problem. 
Amsterdam and Barcelona, for example, 
increasingly feel like managed products, which is 
why neighbourhoods like Gracia in Barcelona have 
graffiti saying ‘TOURISTS GO HOME, YOU’RE NOT 
WELCOME’. People who live in a home don’t like 
sensing they’re living in a production line for 
experiential commodities to be sold to outsiders, 
but London authorities have long given up the 
idea that the city is primarily a home. No, it’s 
primarily a venue to attract foreign investment, 
a tourist package, or a canvas of opportunities for property developers.

I saw this first hand when I worked in the 
financial sector from 2008-2011. I specialised in 
flogging exotic derivative contracts to property 
investment funds and developers. I saw how they 
saw the city as a series of spreadsheets. 
Buildings were just the intersection of input 
costs and output revenue, existing only to yield 
that residual essence called profit. Of course, 
these values of efficiency and accumulation feel 
sterile, so the developers would constantly try 
to cloak their profit-extraction endeavours in 
non-commercial imagery of friends, family, fun, 
adventure, weirdness, rebellion and so on. This 
is a more general feature of capitalism, which 
always must seek to appropriate non-commercial 
logics, and this is what ends up making things feel ‘gentrified’.

Gentrification is best understood as a 
pacification process, in which the marketable 
elements of some holistic thing are split off 
from its threatening elements. It’s like skinning 
a tiger. You’re left with an exotic, novel and 
aesthetically-pleasing skin, without any of the 
substance in its original context. Interestingly, 
if you study the Montagu Pyke exhibit above, it 
references backlashes to this phenomenon in music:

In reaction to celebrity rock, and to music run 
by record companies as a branded consumer 
product, the streets broke through again in the form of Punk Rock

‘The streets’ is an interesting phrase, but the 
last bastion of punk rock in London was a place 
called Camden, which no longer exists. Well, it 
technically exists, but what people call ‘Camden’ 
right now is actually the skin of the old punk 
neighbourhood, thrown over a commercial machine 
that sells the image of punk culture back to both 
the residents and a sea of tourists.

Trying to be a 1970s punk in a 2023 London is 
like trying to be a wild ferment in pasteurised 
milk. What makes a place feel ‘commercial’ is 
when the values of efficiency, ‘convenience’ and 
accumulation take over from all others, and the 
holistic spirit is slowly evicted. Commercial 
culture sterilises – or pasteurises – the 
environment of any parts of the human spirit that 
don’t act to support its aims.

All watched over by benevolent intermediaries


Young Mark Knopfler

In Wild West End Mark Knopfler sings about 
‘getting a pickup for his steel guitar’ in Soho’s 
music Mecca, Denmark Street. By hour five in 
London I’ll inevitably end up there. I go to 
Wunjo Guitars and pretend to be in the market for 
a National Resonator. A staff member plays along, 
saying “give it try!” The Wunjo staff are all 
passionate guitar geeks, and – while they 
wouldn’t mind making a sale – they’re just as 
excited to share their love for the topic with 
anyone who turns up. Denmark Street retains some 
of the spirit of Mark’s time, but other things are being lost.

One of Mark’s most gutsy songs is Walk of Life. 
It’s about a busker called Johnny who plays “down 
in the tunnels, trying to make it pay”. Busking 
is a classic informal economy activity. You set 
up on the street, get moved on by cops, set up 
someone else, and collect coins as you go. I 
remember a busker called Flame Proof Moth who’d 
play down on the banks of the Thames next to a 
big target for people to chuck coins at.

Let’s map Flame Proof Moth on an economic systems 
diagram. If you imagine an economy as a giant 
interdependent mesh of players, ranging from tiny 
to gigantic, it would look something like the 
diagram below. The big corporate oligopolies sit 
in a centre, with smaller SMEs further down the 
chain, and then the millions of employees, 
freelancers and precarious workers forming rings 
around this. The ‘informal economy’ is always in 
the periphery. As I chuck a coin to Flame Proof 
Moth, it’s like two tiny nodes interacting on the outskirts.

Imagine now I live in a world where my brain has 
become convinced that progress means being 
totally dependent on Visa. Flame Proof Moth has 
been forced to come up from the River Thames and 
to set up one of those iZettle payments terminals 
next to him, so my card can call out via his bank 
and Visa to my bank and ask them to transfer 50p 
in digital casino chips to him (minus fees). Now, 
the tiny nodes no longer interact. Rather, we 
route our relationship through the central oligopoly.

If we rendered this image in 3D, tapping that card might look like this.

We’re now part of the formal economy. The 
‘formal’ sector is the realm where bureaucratic 
values of hierarchal order preside. Formalization 
often entails intermediation, with small players 
routing through large players, a process that 
requires authentication. The ‘informal sector’, 
by contrast, operates on more horizontal and 
peer-to-peer lines. Amazon is formal. Large parts 
of the old Brixton market were informal. Many other businesses are a hybrid.

People whose minds have become excessively 
formalised will often demonise the informal 
sector with names like ‘the black market’. They 
may insist we ‘bring people in’ to the formal 
market, because they imagine that those who rely 
on street-level relations are out in the cold, 
and that corporate capitalism is like a kindly 
parental entity waiting to cuddle them. The 
informal market stands in opposition to corporate 
capitalism, so is branded as ‘inefficient’, 
precisely because it holds space for 
non-commercial values. It’s some grungy guy on 
the banks of the Thames who wants you to throw 
coins at him. He obviously has yet to understand 
that ‘liberation’ follows if he agrees to pay 
fees to Mastercard for the privilege of survival.

But here comes the dark part. The informal realm 
is what maintains the very vibe of a city, the 
sense of aliveness, the sense that its citizens 
are active creators rather than passive 
consumers. Some of the world’s most vibing places 
maintain a healthy balance of power between 
informal and formal. There’s an almost erotic 
interplay between those spheres, but the 
sure-fire way to kill the vibe is to break the 
balance. That’s when the society gets 
pasteurised. That’s when punks become consumers.


Keeping posture in slump culture

It’s hour six, and against my better judgement I 
enter Tesco to get dried fruit to keep my energy 
up. The UK’s biggest supermarket is part of a 
cluster of chain stores that dominate every high 
street. This phenomenon was dubbed ‘Clone Town 
Britain’ by the New Economics Foundation, who 
found that 41% of high streets in Britain were 
indistinguishable from each other in 2007.

Tesco is a champion for the bureaucratic 
streamlining of the UK populace. When I lived in 
London they pioneered self-service checkouts as a 
way to fire their service staff. As I was leaving 
they started piloting cashless stores in certain 
central London locations, aiming to set a new 
cultural precedent. The Guardian uncritically 
reported on this as part of the ‘growing cash 
free revolution’, but we know all about these 
phoney revolutions. Since I left, Tesco has 
pioneered the 
‘make-it-normal-to-surveil-customers revolution’: 
each cashless self-service checkout now sports a 
mini-panopticon camera, to make you feel like you’re being watched.

I look at the people dutifully scanning their 
goods around me. They seem obedient, or is it 
that they’re stressed and preoccupied? Their 
faces seem to say ‘Don’t ask me to think about 
something political. This is progress’.

We’re told that progress is a bold striding into 
the future, but much ‘progress’ is actually a 
type of releasing of resistance. It’s the process 
whereby we either invite in, or relinquish 
resistance to, a narrow set of values that will 
displace a more holistic set. Much like the act 
of me slumping into a chair is me going along 
with gravity (rather than resisting it by holding 
posture), progress is the process by which we 
slump into acceptance of the default systemic 
tendencies in a large-scale capitalist system.

Those default tendencies are expansion and 
acceleration, both of which are elements of the 
economic god of Growth, and automation is a 
crucial component of all. Under a capitalist 
economy, tech just makes our lives faster, rather 
than easier. It’s not like the people in the 
Tesco self-checkout area are chilled out. No, 
they’re being pushed through a bureaucratic 
apparatus that wants them to move faster. Of 
course, Tesco will market this with reference to 
‘convenience’, showcasing some marginal 
short-term benefit, but once a person steps in, 
the alternative will be pulled away from them. 
Self-checkout used to be optional. Now it’s often mandatory.

This is a type of entrapment, but given that 
resistance feels futile, it’s psychologically 
easier to nudge yourself towards believing that a 
self-service surveillance check-out is ‘modern’ 
and ‘progressive’. If nothing else, you’ll 
grudgingly learn that this is the new normal. 
After all, everyone else is doing it. What’s 
actually happening here is that the systemic 
tendencies of capitalism are proliferating 
through a network of people who have no ability 
to push pause to stop and ask if this is what 
they all really want. This is what ‘market 
forces’ are so good at doing: they prioritise a 
small subset of human desire – that momentary 
need to move slightly faster, for example – in 
order to lock in a new state of acceleration that 
you won’t be able to back away from.

This is easy to see, because there are many 
British people who demand physical cash to stay, 
but their demand will never be acted upon. What 
will actually happen is that those who slide into 
digital payment will have their ‘demand’ 
weaponised to recalibrate the infrastructure. 
Just look at all the new cash-blocking ticket 
machines in the National Rail stations. What 
they’re saying is this: From this point on, we 
only accept corporate intermediation. We don’t 
care about your archaic demands for texture. We 
require frictionlessness. We prioritise hierarchy 
over horizontality. They’re basically coercing 
cash users towards the choice that jells with automation.

In the current phase of the global economy, 
you’re told that you will be ‘left behind’ unless 
you leap aboard the platforms required to reach 
the requisite level of automation that everyone’s 
expected to sync up to. As you slump into 
acquiescence, the more likely you are to take on 
the persona of ‘the consumer’. Yes, I’m being 
served by Tesco. They only put these machines here for my convenience.

Antonio Gramsci would have called this ‘cultural 
hegemony’. It’s when people internalise the value 
set of a ruling class as natural, inevitable, and 
– eventually – their own. This poses a problem 
for me, because when I critique the captor, the 
captives might turn on me. I often have London 
friends shuffling uncomfortably as I insist on 
paying cash in a restaurant, or asking for a menu 
rather than scanning the QR code. They feel I’m 
being unfair on the waiter, who has no power to 
change the decisions made by the faceless bosses. 
It’s not like Tesco CEO Ken Murphy is going to 
turn up when I ask the Tesco assistant why my 
face is now on a screen. Ken answers only to his 
institutional shareholders. If I cause a fuss, I’m the trouble-maker.

Holding posture in this environment takes energy, 
but people are still resistant to the slump. 
Walking away from Tesco I notice that Nationwide 
has picked up on the angst felt by those who are 
being nudged towards digital apps as their bank branches are closed down.

There’s some fine-print at the bottom. If we have 
a branch in your town, we’ll still be there until at least 2026.

Three years. That’s all they’re prepared to 
promise. After that, all deals are off. The 
decision is made, and the key question facing the 
corporate sector is how to slowly mould the ‘laggards’ into compliance.


Searching for the outside

I want to see my old home. It’s a bittersweet way 
to spend my seventh hour, but Brixton was always 
a melting pot for the different clans of the 
‘periphery’. This included immigrants but also 
the countercultures. In the last decade, however, 
Brixton became a battleground between two 
different conceptions of ‘independence’. On the 
one hand, were cash-only informal-vibe diaspora 
shops selling giant African land snails, jerk 
chicken and goats hooves. They authentically were 
pretty independent from the formal corporate 
economy. On the other, were a new crop of 
entrepreneurs opening ‘boutique’ shops with names 
like Champagne+Fromage and Honest Burger.

It was always a class war. The new entrepreneurs 
called themselves ‘indy’ but firmly plugged 
themselves into the digital mega-platforms, both 
in their marketing and operations. Visa was there 
to present itself as a humble servant, while the 
businesses slumped into a Faustian alliance to 
become its ‘cashless’ frontline agents in 
exchange for shaving a percent off their costs. 
They always knew their customers would wilt into 
compliance, after which the adaptable human brain 
could do the work of editing their memories to 
forget that there ever was an outside to Visa.

People ask me why I focus so much on cash. It’s 
because the arrival of so-called cashlessness is 
an eviction notice served to non-commercial 
spirits. The formal sector is slowly 
assassinating the informal economy, like an 
imperial death squad hunting down rebels. The 
creep is like a virus, and old Brixton punks must 
watch as it spreads into the body of the 
neighbourhood that hosts their identity. It 
appears to them as a sedation of the spirit, and 
a great forgetting of a world where solidarity, 
disdain for authority, and acceptance of imperfection were standard.

Their – perhaps reactionary – fear, of course, is 
that young Londoners will be born into this 
situation of capture, with their brain patterns 
calibrated within the formal system, such that 
they can’t recognise an outside. For example, 
many young people no longer have a concept of 
‘money outside the bank’. Money is ApplePay. What 
is friendship without WhatsApp? What is 
directions without Google? There is no world that 
precedes the digital corporate overlay, with its 
filtering, auto-correcting and curating. The very 
concept of un-intermediated life is an endangered species.

I have no way of knowing what it was like to 
arrive in London in the 1700s, with no phone to 
connect to wherever you came from, or what it was 
like being Mark Knopfler arriving in 1973. I 
have, though, experienced what it’s like to 
arrive in 2008 without Silicon Valley laying out 
an all-encompassing digital red carpet. I’ve 
experienced getting paid ‘under the counter’ at 
an old pub, and doing things ‘off the record’. I 
guess I’m worried that 18 year-olds arriving here 
now must be preceded by their bank, by Google, by 
facial recognition, by Whatsapp.

But it would wrong to say that the outside 
doesn’t exist. Everyone has a holistic spirit 
with rebellious, creative and romantic elements, 
even if they increasingly must funnel through 
platforms that fundamentally contain no rebellion 
or romanticism. I know that there’s a team of AI 
engineers right now working on producing 
simulacra of those mystical feelings, so they can 
be wrenched from you and sold back. I’m just hoping they don’t succeed.

Do you feel it?

London now manifest in my body as a feeling of 
constriction, but there’s a hint of something 
else. Loneliness. I often get told I’m weird for 
caring about stuff like cash and informal 
economies, and perhaps my greatest angst in 
London is to do with voice. I want to name what’s 
going on, but sense that many others find it 
uncomfortable, even taboo. I’m not even asking 
for Tesco to be anything different from what it 
is. All I want is for them to be authentic for 
once. I just want to walk in and to hear the 
bosses admit that those self-service checkouts 
have got sweet fuck all to do with my interests. 
I want to hear Ken Murphy say: Brett, the 
self-service machines are here for us to process 
you faster, so suck it up and stop standing in 
the way of our profit. Ah, how refreshing that would be.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/attachments/20231227/644e2de0/attachment-0002.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 3d8546.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 383257 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/attachments/20231227/644e2de0/attachment-0004.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 3d85b3.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 169133 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/attachments/20231227/644e2de0/attachment-0005.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 3d85d3.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 161848 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/attachments/20231227/644e2de0/attachment-0006.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 3d85f2.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 189237 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/attachments/20231227/644e2de0/attachment-0007.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
Weekly politics show page http://www.thisweek.org.uk
Radio stream live 5pm Fridays and repeated 
11am/pm UK time http://www.talkradio.org.uk
Also on: NOT The BCfm Politics Show App 
https://apkpure.com/not-the-bcfm-politics-show/com.sweetsmile.bottom_navigation_flutter 


NB please reply with any unsubscribe request in 
the email body, leaving the subject line intact, 
if you do not wish to recieve further emails - thanks
And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, 
he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and 
gave to them. 
<http://biblehub.com/luke/24-31.htm>31 And their 
eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he 
vanished out of their sight.  http://biblehub.com/kjv/luke/24.htm
'Capitalism is institutionalised bribery' TG - 
Cancelled -> https://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry/videos


Albert Pike’s 1871 
<https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/650822/Letter-WW3-200-year-old-islam-final-battle>WWIII 
plan to cancel God – 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in>Accelerationist 
multicrisis: my schoolfriend 
<https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/accelerationism-amphetamine-philosophy-and-the-death-trip>‘Nazi 
Nick’s Dark Enlightenment ‘death trip’ is 
designed to 
<https://qz.com/1007144/the-neo-fascist-philosophy-that-underpins-both-the-alt-right-and-silicon-valley-technophiles>discredit 
all democracy
Essentials: 
<https://www.bitchute.com/video/AH8pJ8vLnpQQ/>Michael 
Hudson | 
<https://www.bitchute.com/video/mlGKutbgByo4/>Blackrock/Vanguard 
| Tony 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAq1q1_swyM>on 
Brexit & 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsxxlpLccE8&pp=ygUWVGhlIFRyYWl0b3JzIG9mIEFybmhlbQ%3D%3D>The 
Traitors of Arnhem | 
<https://www.bitchute.com/video/s3keNigJaj63/>Evolution 
| 
<https://www.bitchute.com/video/Yhv9ZMby68Ig>War 
between God & Lucifer | 
<http://www.itsuandi.org/itsui/downloads/Itsui_Materials/Albert_Pike's_Plan_for_Three_World_Wars.pdf>Plan 
for three World Wars | Armageddonists I have 
known: 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXKz4uwZC_k>Nick 
Land (1975-8) | 
<https://www.bitchute.com/video/pkIIeuailaUt/>George 
Monbiot (1995-8) | Manna for the Revelation 
Generation: 
<https://www.radio4all.net/program/108328>CONSPIRACY 
CLASSICS, longer interviews/lectures

"And I think, in the end, that is the best 
definition of journalism I have heard; to 
challenge authority - all authority - especially 
so when governments and politicians take us to 
war, when they have decided that they will kill 
and others will die. " --Robert Fisk
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMn9GM4atN3t7AHJBbHMR0Q/videos
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://www.thisweek.org.uk
http://www.911forum.org.uk
http://www.tlio.org.uk
Tony's free watermarked books www.bilderberg.org 
- My ebooks https://payhip.com/TonyGosling
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvPbHiqhLtpNWA_cg_1NULw
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMn9GM4atN3t7AHJBbHMR0Q
https://www.twitter.com/TonyGosling
https://www.facebook.com/tony.gosling.16
You can donate to support Tony's work here http://www.bilderberg.org/bcfm.htm
Or buy Tony's three ebooks for £10-£15 here 
https://payhip.com/TonyGosling or paperback here 
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/254963338161
TG mobile +44 7786 952037

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/attachments/20231227/644e2de0/attachment-0003.html>