Well, well, well, it's Saturday the 14th of June, and this is episode 25
14 of 3 0 1 ly moved online, a personal podcast, 301 seconds in length, written,
recorded, and edited by me at the jmo.
Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed
only on television and in toy boxes.
A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien.
America was the source of things, cartoons, comics, and the music I
listened to and along with Japan, the computer games I played.
And then there was Phoebe on TV playing guitar again in a coffee shop in a
city I'd never thought I'd visit.
All these cultural products felt like they arrived from nowhere created by no one.
They simply just were.
I had no notion that their creators, authors, or the musicians
in bands were real people.
US presidents were characters on The Simpsons.
Bill Clinton was a man who did not have sexual relations with a woman
Even my young understanding of US politics felt like a fiction.
The first Iraq war played out in grainy Green Night vision on the evening
news, a conflict conducted by a far away country in another far away land.
Later a teacher told my class that democracy in America was dead because
a man in Florida had ruled on the election and given it to his brother.
Far away news from another planet.
And yet its cultural empire was present in the action figures on my floor.
But the country itself, a distant myth.
And then the towers fell and everything changed.
America didn't just lose its mind, it exported its crisis.
Its abstract anxieties became our domestic policy too: mass surveillance,
invasive security, and a creeping authoritarianism under Blair.
Justified by an American war.
The conflict was no longer a grainy TV show.
Friends, older brothers from school went off to fight, and as the war on terror,
ground on my own friends went too.
And some of them died.
The American Empire arrived in the two thousands and it
was no longer an abstraction.
At the same time, a different kind of proximity was collapsing
the distance on MySpace.
I exchanged dms with a member of one of my favorite American emo bands.
For the first time, I realized Americans were real people living
real lives in a real place.
And thus began a decades long tension.
Its Empire Crept closer impersonally, while its people came closer too.
For me, the early 2010s were the years of convergence.
Occupy emerged shortly after our own student protests, and it felt like we're
all part of the same conversation, the same struggle happening in London, New
York, Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, et cetera.
Everyday Americans felt closer than ever.
The Web 2.0, internet and the iPhone erasing the final feelings of distance.
American voices became a constant presence in my life.
Strangers on screen, literally inches from my face.
Their thoughts and arguments unfolding right alongside
messages from family and friends.
During the last decade, American culture, politics, and thinking
seeped into global consciousness.
Looking back, 2016 feels like the high watermark.
In the uk, the national trauma of Brexit blurred into the
American spectacle of Trump 1.
Online it felt like the same psychic battle waged on two fronts.
The media narratives, the populist anger, the cultural divisions
were all reflections in a mirror.
Proximity was total.
The empire wasn't just influencing us.
Its platforms have become the code spaces in which we lived our lives.
Every movement in the US cultural sphere moved us in the UK too.
We were all captured in totality by empire.
I started checking out, but the pandemic sealed it.
2020 was a truly shared global experience, perhaps for the first time
in history, but it revealed just how differently everyone processed it.
No longer a distant myth, but an alienating alternate reality.
That summer when protests erupted across Britain following the murder of George
Floyd in Minneapolis America, the shared InfoSphere caused Brits to adopt the
language and framework of American struggle in our own policing protests.
I could only understand it as events in the imperial core
spuring unrest out in the colonies.
To me, today, the United States as a country feels more distant than ever.
I look in on social media and see Americans still posting a disconcerting
culture, hysterical and strange.
They speak English, but they aren't like me.
And yet, America's material empire is closer than ever.
I walk down the high street and there's a Starbucks, a Wendy's, a five Guys.
I use American platforms to host my blog, check my email, and watch cat videos.
This is all a paradox to me.
I'm surrounded by the material and digital infrastructure of the American Empire, yet
its state of mind is half a world away.
Middle class Brits who fixate on American politics believe they're
being international, but really it's a symptom of being provincial, living
so deep inside the imperial bubble.
You can't see anything else.
I resent the last 15 years of cultural exhaust.
UK newspapers report blow by blow accounts of drama 5,000 miles away.
Yet because of the colonization and destruction of the info environment,
I have no idea why three ambulances, two fire engines, and the police were
at the train station the other night.
There is trouble here in airstrip one two, but many eyes still look elsewhere
across the pond, at an empire that is everywhere yet still very far away.
I struggle with the American state of mind versus America as state.