Divide and Rule

I’d love to know what sort of Thing it is at Twitter that decides, based on your last tweet, who you should follow….and then makes those three suggestions in the left-hand panel. I suspect I’d also like to know who programs the Thing, if only to avoid them for the rest of my life – and then try to choose an afterlife where they wouldn’t be allowed in without a great deal of unpleasantness behind the maitre d’s rope.

I’ve been tweeting now for what – two years? – and I have never seized upon a single suggestion made by Twitter’s left-hand panel. I suspect this is primarily because, if you are an eclectic contrarian, Twitter’s psychography clerks don’t have the faintest idea what to do with you. It is somewhat unsettling when, within just three panels, you get ‘Adolf Hitler, Bavarian politician’ swiftly followed by ‘Ludwig Itchikov, WRP’. But it’s much more terrifying when the next panel offers a choice between Sue Townshend, Mark Thatcher and The Queen.

It is easy to argue that this says more about me than it does about them, and I would happily plead guilty to that. Most people prefer to belong to a tribe, and so anyone that doesn’t will obviously defy the normal reasoning. In fact I very much want to belong to a tribe, but the problem is I’ve never found enough of us to create one that wouldn’t immediately suffer from dangerous inbreeding.

Inbreeding, by the way, is massively underrated. It seems, as far as I can tell, to bestow upon the resultant children remarkable idiot savant abilities such as playing the banjo at incredible speed throughout an entire movie. But that’s not important right now, because the point I’m making here is that we are a pack/tribal species, and thus seem incapable most of the time of rising above these broadly inaccurate definitions.

Huge numbers of writers, columnists, and social observers have made a fortune from describing such groups. One thinks of Peter York (real name Wallis) and his unforgettable descriptions of Sloane Rangers, those types who had flats paid for by Daddy in the environs of Sloane Square. One of them – Diana Spencer – went on to marry the heir to the throne, with at times hilarious and eventually tragic consequences. I knew Peter quite well at one time (we shared a client in Clark’s Shoes) and like me he is at least partly the result of a market research background. It is indeed in that profession that the obsession with social tribes reached its peak.

In the Eighties, for some time commercial researchers strove to come up with a pscycho-cultural division system that would supercede the classic ABC1C2DE socio-economic system invented by Ealing’s BMRB in the 1960s. The idea was to blend social class with psychographic personality dimensions, and thus prove that there were in fact only five types of people in the world. A cynically accurate American friend of mine at the time used to argue that there were two types of people in the world: those who believed there were two types of people in the world, and those who didn’t. But that’s flippant, and the endeavours of twenty-five or more years ago were rarely that.

The whole project eventually fell flatter than a fart emitted by a two-dimensional being trying hard to squeeze into a one-dimensional universe: its failure was silent, but not deadly. And yet somehow, the attempt continues today. Where there were Dinkies and Yuppies there are now Strivers, Strugglers, Achievers, and very probably Wankers: except the last of three occur across all typologies. Being useless, it seems, isn’t a differentiator….the presence of incompetence is a certainty. There are very few things in market research that are.

At the moment on my Twitter page, the first left-hand-panel suggestion is for me to follow Original Cindy, a dusky lady who purports to be into ‘Fashion, Nicki Minaj, Mariah Carey, I try to dress & look like her, pro-gun, British, Anne Boleyn, O’Reilly, Angela McGlowan, the US, Sarah Palin & Britney. I think if she was following me, I’d be moved to phone Interpol. The second person is a chap called Jeevanvasagar, the Berlin correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. I don’t know what the logic is behind this one, but on his page Twitter is suggesting he follow South West Trains. Let’s hope he’s very fit. And the third suggestion is a TV political show on BBC1, 11.35pm most Thursdays, BBC This Week. It involves Andrew Neil with political and celebrity guests. As you have in that last sentence most things I dislike, the logic of it escapes me completely.

Let me offer you an opinion on how many different types of people there are on the planet: roughly 7.24 billion, which is the number of homo sapiens there were on the planet when I began this paragraph. I’ll go further: that’s a fact. We are all individuals, as Brian told the crowd in the famous Python film…to which they all replied in unison, “We are all individuals”. And therein lies the rub: we all want to be individuals in a tribe, it’s just that a few of us want to lead, most want to foll0w, and one or two trouble-makers are following the leader with an eagle eye on his or her every mistake. In sequence, I could say that examples of each in turn are Nigel Farage, Dan Hannan, and Boris Johnson. As all three of them may well one day find themselves in the same Party, the mind boggles at the mayhem this may produce.

Ultimately, it is the media owners, ISPs, networking sites, politicians, marketing directors and GCHQs of the world who want to lump us into groups: what they want, after all, is a new lumpen proletariat – against which they can be the praetorian guards. It should thus be every citizen’s duty to confuse them at every turn.

Earlier at The Slog: The property market – boom, surge and bollocks.