Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
by Joseph Evans L6P The year is 1660. The ‘Tenures Abolition Act’ has just been passed by the Convention Parliament. It abolishes feudalism, frees everyone from paying fees to the crown to live, frees men from forced conscription, and paves the way for the competition-driven Industrial Revolution. Now in 2024, feudalism is again rearing its ugly head, as inequalities in wealth widen the gap between rich and poor to such an extent as to return to the social conditions of the Middle Ages. Following the 2008/2009 financial crisis, the drop in interest rates to 0.5% should have encouraged borrowing and spending. Borrowing and spending cause growth, and therefore interest rates should have come back up. The best economists in the country predicted an interest rate rise in the next few years, maybe by 2014 at the latest. They remained below 1% for the next 14 years. But why? Surely people should have been spending? Surely growth should have been happening? No. Because the vast majority of th...