Steal as much as you can by @nrolah is - a scathing indictment of the culture industry and its hegemonic stranglehold by privately educated mid-upper classes.

I’ve been a joiner, then academic and am now a joiner again. In the words of Roy Batty, I’ve seen things you people..

wouldn’t believe. Honestly, if I had tried explaining how culture works before I went to Oxford I would not have believed myself.

Olah’s commentary on the erasure of the working class from mainstream culture over the last 2 decades will ring true to anyone who grew up...

in the 90s, and was therefore lucky enough to experience a cultural environment that still associated excessive wealth with shame and cultural tepidity

Also agree with Olah that Oxford is a culturally barren place, though it was prob a little better when I was there (2013-18)...

Things I learnt during this time:

- posh kids all know each other before they even get there and if they don’t they sure do within a few days

- the same kids get fast-tracked into editorial positions at The White Review, set up private presses or win exclusive internships...

elsewhere. Of course they do, their friends work there already.

- in order to write for @LRB you should go to All Souls College. I have many good friends in this category who I love and respect. But it is frankly disgusting that All Souls – arguably one of the most elitist...

educational establishments in the world – underwrites such a large proportion of LRB content when the LRB sells itself as a platform for progressive causes.

- people who play the game consistently end up in high editorial positions on a platform of progressiveness despite...

having attended some of the most exclusive schools in the country, being white and nurturing a class consciousness that extends to 1984

So all of this confirms Olah’s argument but I would also argue that id politics entered a new phase about three years ago in which core id markers were increasingly untethered from class and used to actively suppress any discussion of class equality in mainstream culture...

Reasons for this are manifold, but prob inc the rapid growth of discourse on race in America (BLM etc) which transferred awkwardly to the UK context. Whereas class is inextricably tied to race in the US, UK class is typically - and falsely - divided along inverse racial lines -

‘the Brexit voting white working class’. Regardless of the facts on the ground, UK discourse allowed the culture machine to step in line with the American model celebrating BAME culture through increasingly mainstream outlets while downplaying and ultimately abandoning...

any sense of responsibility towards economically disenfranchised people. ‘Diversity’ became a supermassive black hole bending light around class discontent which, as Olah reminds us, uniquely crosses through all other identity markers.

2019 arguably marked a low point in UK culture’s tendency to misrecognize itself as progressive, with the publication of bestsellers predicated on their own wokeness that in fact focused almost exclusively on the trials and tribulations of white, mostly cis-het elites.

I’m thinking here of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, Sally Rooney’s Convos with Friends and Normal People, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk etc. These framed the backbone of cutting edge UK culture 2018-2019, only - but not quite - being displaced by Bernardine Evaristo towards the end of 2019.

The Booker’s decision to split the prize between Evaristo and Margaret Atwood was a calamitous mistake, though one which makes perfect sense within the wider picture.

Although the last few years have been bleak I’m excited about where things are going now. The energy of writers like Olah, @CrispinPodcast, Jay Bernard, @Loretta_Ram, Cathy Rentzenbrink and others gives me hope that the stultifying hypocrisies of the late 2010s are breaking up.

When corona finally goes away, let’s please not default to the same damaging habits of mind that keep fools like our government in power while masquerading as a radical alternative.

And let’s keep stealing!