I can make you hate (30 page)

And unlike columnists, they often aim their comments at an individual by addressing their username directly: the equivalent of texting hate mail straight to their phone. I’ve never understood the mentality behind this, but then I write to entertain crowds, not harass individuals. I’ve never donned a mask and poked dogshit through someone’s letterbox either. Maybe it’s their sole source of happiness. Who knows?

Certainly, the more insecure the tweeter, the more unhinged their behaviour seems to be. Some of the most virulent Rebecca Black abuse came from teenage girls showing off to their mates by tweeting the singer directly to gloatingly wish death upon her.

Hilariously, many of them attacked the wrong Rebecca Black, and were actually beaming their hatred at an etiquette coach of the same name, a woman who regularly appears on US TV to discuss the merits of civil discourse. The worse their abuse, the more gracefully she responded, which somehow made them look infinitely more small-minded than they already were.

Who, out of everyone, was the slimiest turd in the ‘Friday’ soufflé? Impossible to say, thanks to the sheer number of participants. Which is the final thing online hateswarms fail to take into account: their collective mass, which causes a nasty imbalance of power and often results in a self-righteous lack of restraint that can reach far beyond the verbal. When Jan Moir wrote her Stephen Gately article, I penned a vicious response as an individual. When I saw people angrily posting her home address online, I felt like part of a mob. Those idiots spoiled it for everybody.

In summary: bitch all you like. Just don’t be a dick about it. Poise, people. Poise.

So a few weeks ago I was on television, doing a little comic ‘bit’ about unfocused online haters, the climax of which involved me going into a diatribe wherein I angrily imagined one of them toiling away behind the counter of a fast-food restaurant. And shortly after it aired I received tweets and comments from people complaining I was a snob: that I was in effect saying anyone who works in a burger bar is a scummy non-person; a grunting subservient ape-slave deserving nothing but open scorn and the occasional kick to the face, provided it’s their birthday.

That hadn’t been my intention, but I can see why some people interpreted it that way (thanks to some clumsy writing on my part, and an absent ‘qualifying’ section, which got excised at the last minute). Anyway, it bugged me. It bugged me because although I’ve never worked in a fast-food restaurant, I did spend several years working as a shop assistant – and during that time I learned, as anyone who spends their week standing behind a counter quickly learns, that the worst kind of customers are the ones who think they’re automatically superior to you just because you’re serving them. The ones who pop into Debenhams and suddenly think they’re Henry VIII inspecting the serfs.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one. The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.

The first surprise is that when it comes to arrogant customers, class isn’t as big a factor as you might assume. True, I’d occasionally
get a stereotypical ex-public-schoolboy blurting requests in my direction as though addressing a programmable service droid, or openly scolding me as if I was a failing member of his personal waiting staff – but the most overtly boorish behaviour came courtesy of people who weren’t posh at all, but seemed to want to increase their own social standing by treating the person serving them like scum.

Then there were the people for whom even basic civility was an alien concept. I vividly recall one guy who sloped in wearing a loose pair of tracksuit trousers, absentmindedly playing with his own bollocks as he entered. He stood at the counter, scanning the display behind me and obliviously juggling his goolies – at one point literally reaching inside to re-arrange his collection – and then wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sucked the slime off it, pointed at an item he was interested in and said: ‘Show me that.’ Moments later he started an argument about how much it cost, demanded a discount, and, when I refused, called me an arsehole and knocked a load of boxes off a shelf by the door as he left. Based on that one five-minute encounter, more than seventeen years ago, I’d be prepared to bet that man is today either dead or in jail. And probably still playing with his nuts.

But incidents like that were few and far between, partly because there was one major difference between the shop I was working in and almost every other shop in the world: you were allowed to talk back to the customers. In fact a certain level of sweary
piss-taking
was actively encouraged. It gave the place character, made the working day more fun, and reminded the frazzled shopper, on autopilot after several hours on Oxford Street, that they were dealing with a fellow human being.

Everyone who works in a shop should be allowed to openly take the piss out of their customers. It’s far more British than the strain of imported corporate civility-by-numbers that megachain staff are sometimes forced to recite: the robotic ‘How can I help
you?’ mantras that only really make sense in America, because they’re so friendly they actually mean it. The words don’t feel false in their mouths. If I ran a national burger franchise – which I don’t – I’d make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words, and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.

Yes, laughing staff. That’s the other irritating assumption people make about working in shops, especially burger bars – that the job must be so dismal, every single employee shuffles about in a perpetual state of misery, actively welcoming death. That only the utterly desperate or dumb could possibly stick it out. These characteristics could apply to almost any job, of course. What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn’t the occasional snooty customer, or the shop, or the hours, but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant – their automatic assumption that I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t particularly enjoy my life at the time, but I did enjoy the job. Not every day, not constantly – but I liked it more than I disliked it. Maybe I’m odd. Maybe I was lucky and had unusually entertaining co-workers. Or maybe there are far, far worse things you could do.

Like judging people.

Unless you’re a judge.

In which case, continue.

Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we’ve grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester. VHS, the Walkman, fax
machines, CD-Roms, pagers, dial-up modems … all consigned to the same wing of the museum housing the mangle and the horse-drawn plough.

The junk mountain grows by the day. If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen. Everyone’s opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.

Now it’s almost time to hurl another outmoded device down the historical garbage chute: your body. Last week, researchers at Washington University unveiled a new mind-control computer system. Traditional mind-control systems – and the fact that any mind-control system can be referred to as ‘traditional’ shows you how nuts-deep into the future we already are – require the user to don an EEG skullcap before thinking very hard about specific actions. The resultant brainwaves are then crudely interpreted and the device reacts accordingly. But practical use is severely restricted thanks to the human skull, which muffles some signals and amplifies others. It’s like trying to work out what your neighbours are up to by pressing your ear against the wall: fun, but often wildly misleading.

Which is where electrocorticography comes in.
Electrocorticography
basically means ‘sticking sensors directly on to the surface of the brain’. Once you’ve done that, you get a far more reliable signal. Already they’ve had volunteers controlling an onscreen cursor by imagining different vowel sounds. As soon as they refine it further, giving the user the ability to steer the pointer around and click on things, the days of mass-market Wi-Fi
mind-controlled
iPads will be upon us before you can smother your kids in their sleep to protect them from precisely such a future.

But is this really so sinister? All computers are mind-controlled already. My hand may steer the mouse and my fingers may punch the keys, but none of this takes place without my mental say-so. My brain runs things round here. Surely all a mind-controlled interface does is cut out the corporeal middleman, leaving your fingers free to do something more useful, such as plugging your ears so you can’t hear the horrified screams spontaneously exploding from your facehole? What’s the problem?

The problem is that the body is the final, crucial buffer between the skittish human mind and the slavish machine servant. Think of how many furious email responses you’ve composed in haste, only to halt and reflect at the final moment as your finger hovers over the ‘send’ button. The simple fact that a small physical action is required to actually deliver the damn thing is often enough to give pause for thought.