Lately, I’ve been lying awake in the small hours, hypnotised by watch repair videos – pinions, train wheel bridges, pallet forks, barrel arbors, the literal works. Am I interested in watches? No. I could only become less interested in horology by slipping into a coma. My wristwatch hasn’t worked in months, and I may never want to know what time it is again – standardised timekeeping just makes people expect things of me and I don’t feel I can currently deliver. I just want to stay quiet and peaceful while people with teeny screwdrivers talk about amplitudes and restore components smaller than the light in a robin’s eye. This is what the 21st century has made of me. I am not a watch person. I already had my own interests: I’m meant to lie awake reading novels, checking on current affairs, bingeing Korean vampire-medical-action-romcom series. (Lordy, Korean vampires are attractive.) Watches? In a reasonable world, I wouldn’t care if you told me your crown gasket was rotten or your balance staff awry. In a reasonable world I wouldn’t know what the Patek Philippe you were talking about.
But this is the world where the internet isn’t binding us together in knowledge and strength – it’s drowning us in the monetised nightmares of a) a child’s drawing of a haunted candle b) a fascistic South African goblin. Wealth addicts farm us for anxiety clicks and radicalise us as race war foot soldiers. Exquisite computer programming, based on top-grade research, helping rid humanity of work and woe? Nope. We get Shit AI. We didn’t want it any more than we wanted Clippy, but here it is, scraping data everywhere all at once, turning the rich tapestry of human achievement into a slurry of plagiarism, racial bias and porn, then serving it up in disturbing beige nuggets. And if I need to write an email, I don’t want AI to “help” make me sound like a cursed mannequin pretending to be an intern, I want to sound like me. In a reasonable world the power to save our planet or boil it away into radioactive misery and blood dust wouldn’t rest in the hands of a Botoxed Russian mobster with a tracksuit fetish, or a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike who’s into mass incarceration and maybe organ harvesting. At least the malignant narcissist Hannibal Lecter fan unable to remember which women he has sexually assaulted probably won’t get near the nuclear football again. But why was that even a possibility?
The great unravelling of Trump is the culmination of so many bad choices. America’s still-fascinated media is watching Donnie come apart like shit in a Jacuzzi, never admitting they helped make him, just as our media amplified Nigel “don’t blame the riots on me” Farage. Nige is still on the Trump train, rather than the Clacton one. Liz Truss is courting Trump’s base, too. Bless. There’s a lot of frankly disturbing wishful thinking about populism and wishes can lead anyone astray, even as the Maga doorway to fame and fortune drops off its hinges. Lizzie and Nigel expressed legitimate concerns about immigration – don’t mention racism – and rose. As influencers distanced themselves from rioters who burned down a library to prove the supremacy of western culture, Truss’s immaculate sense of timing kicked in and she started boosting free speech as the right to say appalling and radicalising things without consequences. Is she aiming to be another Rosa Parks – but for people who might loot Greggs? Failing that, would photo opportunities involving Jimmy Choos and a burning wheelie bin suffice? A gig’s a gig.
Doggedly elevate wealth over sanity, profit over compassion, balance facts with lunacy, and you get Trump, Trussonomics, Musk, and more reclusive, darker disruptors, such as Peter Thiel and Mike Flynn. Disruptors make money by treating reality like a snow globe – shake, shake, shake – until people break. But even obscene wealth can’t overwhelm reality. Eventually, reality always overcomes illusion, but the damage disruption has caused remains. Run enough contrarian thought experiments, suppress all oversight, muffle education, release enough psycho-engineered scare stories, overheat every opinion, and you’ll reach the point where everything has to be relitigated – whether women should speak, whether all people are people, whether starving is a bad thing, whether death is an inevitable byproduct of business and diplomacy, whether dying of preventable diseases is a big deal, whether dying of cold in your own home is… To summarise, the right’s thought experiments are always about death – yours and mine. Prison camps, slavery, torture, nazism, civil war, witch burning, blood libel – there isn’t a filthy idea the 21st century’s public discourse and information overlords haven’t picked at, or swallowed whole. And why do so many wannabe populist demagogues sound like Pennywise having mouth sex with a satnav? Do they think we’ll find that persuasive?
I prefer the watchmakers, the quiet, ordinary voices describing centuries of determined improvement in form and function, a striving for reliability, precision, usefulness. Centuries of improvement are what make the world reasonable. Let me see skilled people treat broken but profoundly useful mechanisms with patient understanding, delicacy and respect – let me see that expertise, tenderness and humility matter. And when I’m tired of people who target beauty and steal joy, let me see a watch case open to show me unanticipated beauties, set there like a happy secret for the sake of functionality, joy in creativity, and the dignity of a craftsperson offering their best to strangers. There are ways of being in the world that welcome the stranger. We’re all the stranger sometimes. And sometimes we’re the people with skills, who know how to make and mend, how to be friends, how to be neighbours. When the world shakes, we need neighbours – all our neighbours. I like the feeling I get when a balance wheel spins again after lost years, breakages, deaths, abandonment. I like believing that determined people who understand the practical applications of love may always be able to restore at least some of what’s broken.
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