A very fuzzy reception for digital Jeremy and his cybernetic communist
Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn launched a new set of policies designed to “democratise the internet”. I read through them. One of them puzzled me, because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the internet. It promised to protect people from “unjustified surveillance by CCTV”.
It didn’t say in what circumstances CCTV surveillance was unjustified. Perhaps when someone is, for example, pretending they haven’t passed any empty seats on a Virgin train.
Probably it’s just a coincidence that the Labour leader announced this policy a week after Sir Richard Branson used CCTV to embarrass him.
Just like it was a coincidence when, straight after Owen Smith challenged him for the party leadership, Mr Corbyn announced that all medical research should be carried out by the state, not “farmed out to big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer” – the business for which Mr Smith used to work.
The Labour leader was launching his “Digital Democracy Manifesto” in east London.
Labour’s superior online campaigning, Mr Corbyn explained, would help the party reach more voters than rival parties, and thus win the general election. To demonstrate, he broadcast his speech live online on his Facebook page. Unfortunately, viewers complained that the sound quality was terrible, that the picture kept breaking up, and that after a while the whole thing had gone down altogether. Those who still had a picture saw that Mr Corbyn had been joined onstage by an unfamiliar-looking middle-aged man in a pork pie hat. This turned out to be the Labour leader’s new digital guru, Dr Richard Barbrook.
Journalists used their own digital skills to find out more about him online.
They soon discovered that he described himself as a “cybernetic communist”, and promotes a website that “trains the militants of cybernetic revolution to come” and “re-enacts the proletarian struggles of the past in ludic form”. On Twitter, meanwhile, he recently urged his Corbyn-supporting “comrades” to “thwart the Blairite traitors”, who should “shut the f--- up”.
We all know how sternly Mr Corbyn disapproves of divisive and abusive language in politics, so I expect he’ll give his new guru a good talking-to when he finds out.
Dr Barbrook – who in the past has written about such phenomena as “the electronic agora” and “the Promethean possibilities of hypermedia” – had helped Mr Corbyn put together his Digital Democracy Manifesto.
It was full of phrases like “Platform Cooperatives”, “People’s Charter of Digital Liberties”, “Digital Citizen Passports”, and “Massive Multi-Person On-Line Deliberation”.
I watched Mr Corbyn as he spoke about these exciting schemes. Normally, he declaims freely and at length, without need of notes or autocue. Here, he read from his script throughout, without looking up, his voice a mumbling monotone, like that of a schoolboy ordered to read aloud in class from a previously unseen textbook.
Did this suggest that he didn’t completely understand the language of his own policies?
No doubt this will be a subject of massive multi-person online deliberation.