1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,162
Well, well, well, it's Saturday the
14th of June, and this is episode 25

2
00:00:04,162 --> 00:00:09,804
14 of 3 0 1 ly moved online, a personal
podcast, 301 seconds in length, written,

3
00:00:09,819 --> 00:00:12,211
recorded, and edited by me at the jmo.

4
00:00:13,715 --> 00:00:17,854
Growing up in Britain in the 1990s,
America felt like a country that existed

5
00:00:17,914 --> 00:00:20,164
only on television and in toy boxes.

6
00:00:20,250 --> 00:00:24,600
A place across the pond that shared
a language, but also seemed so alien.

7
00:00:24,768 --> 00:00:28,158
America was the source of things,
cartoons, comics, and the music I

8
00:00:28,158 --> 00:00:31,355
listened to and along with Japan,
the computer games I played.

9
00:00:31,423 --> 00:00:35,263
And then there was Phoebe on TV playing
guitar again in a coffee shop in a

10
00:00:35,263 --> 00:00:36,816
city I'd never thought I'd visit.

11
00:00:36,898 --> 00:00:40,938
All these cultural products felt like they
arrived from nowhere created by no one.

12
00:00:41,024 --> 00:00:42,831
They simply just were.

13
00:00:43,019 --> 00:00:46,384
I had no notion that their
creators, authors, or the musicians

14
00:00:46,384 --> 00:00:48,004
in bands were real people.

15
00:00:48,004 --> 00:00:50,463
US presidents were
characters on The Simpsons.

16
00:00:50,530 --> 00:00:53,920
Bill Clinton was a man who did not
have sexual relations with a woman

17
00:00:54,012 --> 00:00:57,066
Even my young understanding of
US politics felt like a fiction.

18
00:00:57,128 --> 00:01:00,608
The first Iraq war played out in grainy
Green Night vision on the evening

19
00:01:00,608 --> 00:01:04,986
news, a conflict conducted by a far
away country in another far away land.

20
00:01:05,078 --> 00:01:08,828
Later a teacher told my class that
democracy in America was dead because

21
00:01:08,828 --> 00:01:12,158
a man in Florida had ruled on the
election and given it to his brother.

22
00:01:12,257 --> 00:01:14,057
Far away news from another planet.

23
00:01:14,146 --> 00:01:17,686
And yet its cultural empire was present
in the action figures on my floor.

24
00:01:17,686 --> 00:01:19,906
But the country itself, a distant myth.

25
00:01:19,956 --> 00:01:22,296
And then the towers fell
and everything changed.

26
00:01:22,361 --> 00:01:25,781
America didn't just lose its
mind, it exported its crisis.

27
00:01:25,849 --> 00:01:29,948
Its abstract anxieties became our
domestic policy too: mass surveillance,

28
00:01:29,948 --> 00:01:33,423
invasive security, and a creeping
authoritarianism under Blair.

29
00:01:33,498 --> 00:01:35,318
Justified by an American war.

30
00:01:35,529 --> 00:01:38,109
The conflict was no
longer a grainy TV show.

31
00:01:38,188 --> 00:01:41,586
Friends, older brothers from school went
off to fight, and as the war on terror,

32
00:01:41,586 --> 00:01:43,776
ground on my own friends went too.

33
00:01:43,794 --> 00:01:44,859
And some of them died.

34
00:01:45,031 --> 00:01:48,001
The American Empire arrived
in the two thousands and it

35
00:01:48,001 --> 00:01:49,983
was no longer an abstraction.

36
00:01:50,138 --> 00:01:53,063
At the same time, a different
kind of proximity was collapsing

37
00:01:53,063 --> 00:01:54,716
the distance on MySpace.

38
00:01:54,716 --> 00:01:58,376
I exchanged dms with a member of one
of my favorite American emo bands.

39
00:01:58,443 --> 00:02:01,976
For the first time, I realized
Americans were real people living

40
00:02:01,976 --> 00:02:03,738
real lives in a real place.

41
00:02:03,910 --> 00:02:05,890
And thus began a decades long tension.

42
00:02:05,919 --> 00:02:10,011
Its Empire Crept closer impersonally,
while its people came closer too.

43
00:02:10,213 --> 00:02:13,213
For me, the early 2010s were
the years of convergence.

44
00:02:13,264 --> 00:02:17,154
Occupy emerged shortly after our own
student protests, and it felt like we're

45
00:02:17,154 --> 00:02:21,069
all part of the same conversation, the
same struggle happening in London, New

46
00:02:21,069 --> 00:02:23,154
York, Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, et cetera.

47
00:02:23,289 --> 00:02:25,357
Everyday Americans felt closer than ever.

48
00:02:25,446 --> 00:02:29,976
The Web 2.0, internet and the iPhone
erasing the final feelings of distance.

49
00:02:30,062 --> 00:02:32,852
American voices became a
constant presence in my life.

50
00:02:32,852 --> 00:02:36,032
Strangers on screen,
literally inches from my face.

51
00:02:36,120 --> 00:02:38,550
Their thoughts and arguments
unfolding right alongside

52
00:02:38,550 --> 00:02:40,320
messages from family and friends.

53
00:02:40,419 --> 00:02:43,749
During the last decade, American
culture, politics, and thinking

54
00:02:43,765 --> 00:02:45,861
seeped into global consciousness.

55
00:02:45,861 --> 00:02:48,811
Looking back, 2016 feels
like the high watermark.

56
00:02:48,932 --> 00:02:52,202
In the uk, the national trauma
of Brexit blurred into the

57
00:02:52,202 --> 00:02:53,952
American spectacle of Trump 1.

58
00:02:54,056 --> 00:02:57,639
Online it felt like the same
psychic battle waged on two fronts.

59
00:02:57,660 --> 00:03:00,840
The media narratives, the populist
anger, the cultural divisions

60
00:03:00,852 --> 00:03:02,751
were all reflections in a mirror.

61
00:03:02,851 --> 00:03:04,171
Proximity was total.

62
00:03:04,247 --> 00:03:06,407
The empire wasn't just influencing us.

63
00:03:06,433 --> 00:03:10,137
Its platforms have become the code
spaces in which we lived our lives.

64
00:03:10,219 --> 00:03:13,939
Every movement in the US cultural
sphere moved us in the UK too.

65
00:03:14,009 --> 00:03:16,995
We were all captured
in totality by empire.

66
00:03:17,101 --> 00:03:19,673
I started checking out,
but the pandemic sealed it.

67
00:03:19,699 --> 00:03:23,648
2020 was a truly shared global
experience, perhaps for the first time

68
00:03:23,648 --> 00:03:27,041
in history, but it revealed just how
differently everyone processed it.

69
00:03:27,041 --> 00:03:30,554
No longer a distant myth, but
an alienating alternate reality.

70
00:03:30,671 --> 00:03:34,391
That summer when protests erupted across
Britain following the murder of George

71
00:03:34,391 --> 00:03:38,621
Floyd in Minneapolis America, the shared
InfoSphere caused Brits to adopt the

72
00:03:38,621 --> 00:03:42,461
language and framework of American
struggle in our own policing protests.

73
00:03:42,572 --> 00:03:45,362
I could only understand it as
events in the imperial core

74
00:03:45,362 --> 00:03:47,988
spuring unrest out in the colonies.

75
00:03:48,183 --> 00:03:52,413
To me, today, the United States as a
country feels more distant than ever.

76
00:03:52,522 --> 00:03:56,366
I look in on social media and see
Americans still posting a disconcerting

77
00:03:56,366 --> 00:03:58,316
culture, hysterical and strange.

78
00:03:58,381 --> 00:04:00,541
They speak English, but
they aren't like me.

79
00:04:00,680 --> 00:04:03,777
And yet, America's material
empire is closer than ever.

80
00:04:03,910 --> 00:04:07,730
I walk down the high street and there's
a Starbucks, a Wendy's, a five Guys.

81
00:04:07,805 --> 00:04:12,335
I use American platforms to host my blog,
check my email, and watch cat videos.

82
00:04:12,482 --> 00:04:13,982
This is all a paradox to me.

83
00:04:14,032 --> 00:04:18,533
I'm surrounded by the material and digital
infrastructure of the American Empire, yet

84
00:04:18,533 --> 00:04:20,543
its state of mind is half a world away.

85
00:04:20,629 --> 00:04:24,044
Middle class Brits who fixate on
American politics believe they're

86
00:04:24,049 --> 00:04:27,810
being international, but really it's
a symptom of being provincial, living

87
00:04:27,810 --> 00:04:29,747
so deep inside the imperial bubble.

88
00:04:29,747 --> 00:04:31,127
You can't see anything else.

89
00:04:31,269 --> 00:04:33,801
I resent the last 15
years of cultural exhaust.

90
00:04:33,874 --> 00:04:38,244
UK newspapers report blow by blow
accounts of drama 5,000 miles away.

91
00:04:38,303 --> 00:04:41,808
Yet because of the colonization and
destruction of the info environment,

92
00:04:41,851 --> 00:04:45,977
I have no idea why three ambulances,
two fire engines, and the police were

93
00:04:45,977 --> 00:04:47,477
at the train station the other night.

94
00:04:47,605 --> 00:04:51,870
There is trouble here in airstrip one
two, but many eyes still look elsewhere

95
00:04:51,870 --> 00:04:56,051
across the pond, at an empire that is
everywhere yet still very far away.

96
00:04:56,127 --> 00:05:00,916
I struggle with the American state
of mind versus America as state.