By winning a local vote Farage aims to silence accusations of corruption that have slowed Reform’s momentum in recent months. Ever since The Guardian newspaper showed he accepted £5mn from a British cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. It was the largest donation to an individual in UK political history. Murky details of other, undeclared ‘private’ donations have since come to light, related to cryptocurrency sources and convicted fraudsters. Farage did not declare the donations, he says, because at the time he was just a simple, private citizen, widely considered to be the most influential political figure of his generation – a humble broadcast journalist and co-founder of Reform UK. Curiously, just days after receiving the Harborne’s donation in April 2024, Farage declared his very public and very political intention to be a Member of Parliament and party leader. He thinks we should see the donation and his political activities as two, separate events, to be held together by coincidence.

As the UK’s economic crisis continues, public revelations about Farage’s private finances are viewed with weary anger. Opponents label his resignation and by-election campaign a distracting farce, a stunt. Farage expected the ‘establishment’ to be obedient, to play along. But then the other major UK political parties refused to participate, leaving Farage to contest his ‘People vs Establishment’ election with a parody character called Count Binface, who dresses in a black cape and wears a large mask shaped like a bin.

Reform UK’s nationalist cocktail of free-market extremism, climate denial, and anti-immigration is being offered as the antidote to the mundane, janitorial politics personified by Keir Starmer and the Labour government. Reform have topped most electoral surveys for over a year, and their popularity has grown despite criticism, name-calling and ridicule. During local elections in May Reform won over 1400 seats. In the face of such trends the British resort to a carnival tradition of whacky satire and silliness, one that aims to undo the spectacle of legitimacy and common sense.

Another controversial strategy splashed over the heads of the far-right and had a big influence on how right-wing populism reaches the streets. This was ‘milkshaking’ – the bizarre and consequential protest trend that first struck British politics in 2019. That year, the verb “to milkshake” – the act of dousing public figures with a dairy drink – entered the Collins Dictionary. But milkshakes were not for every public figure. They flew for a previously untouchable class of political personality – the populist far right.

Targets of milkshaking included the street-fighting fraudster currently known as Tommy Robinson – milkshaked on consecutive days. Afterwards he claimed that “No amount of punches, milkshakes, attacks, is going to stop me.” But the electorate gave him just 2.2% of the vote in the 2019 European Parliament elections. The same month, Carl Benjamin, a contrarian YouTuber best known for publishing repellent rape jokes, was hit multiple times in different picturesque rural towns. The press enjoyed printing the pictures.

Attempts to ban the sale of milkshakes could not protect Nigel Farage, who was struck by a banana-and-salted-caramel flavour milkshake in the city of Newcastle. Afterwards he said he was surprised at “the sheer level of hatred” people felt towards him, and complained that “normal campaigning is becoming very difficult.” Days later, Farage met with a crowd of protestors holding milkshakes, like rebellious peasants, lofting milky pitchforks and frothed torches at the castle’s gates. England’s sweet riot. Farage refused to leave his bus.

The emotional aesthetics of milkshaking is tightly interwoven with modern social media – fast, funny, memeable, and chaotic – and ready to douse the energy of internet blowhards and braggarts into a comic sadness. The angry man, who inspires political violence in other angry men, can be humbled in seconds; made to look a clown and his noisy politics of loss and revenge ages like milk.

Costume candidates rarely change political culture. They have been part of English elections since the 1960s. But the milkshaking trend made a powerful contribution to the ‘People v Establishment’ by-election we are seeing in 2026. On his first day campaigning in the 2024 UK General Election, Farage was milkshaked by a 25-year-old OnlyFans content creator. After the incident Farage responded with a confusing mix of anguish and defiance, describing the incident as “terrifying” while joking on social media, holding a milkshake. Right-wing populists dream of being everywhere. They also remain wedded to old-fashioned vestments of party power and masculine glory, flag-waving, honorifics, blue suits, the needy-want of Barbour-wearing respectability. “I’m going to make one promise to you and the tens of thousands watching this live online and the media …” said Farage after being milkshaked in 2024, “I will not surrender to the mob. I will not stop campaigning.” To produce content, to capture attention online and in person, Farage flies throughout the UK in a helicopter, usually in the company of four security staff and as many as 12 security guards at larger events. Being a divisive firebrand is expensive, and this is where the donations matter. Harborne, who witnessed Farage get milkshaked in 2019, said his £5mn donation to Farage was motivated “to support Nigel’s security not just now, but for the rest of his life.” One bizarre legacy of throwing milkshakes at the far-right has been to reinvigorate the older tactic of ‘permanent campaigning’ first described by political scientists in the 1980s, a kind of Helicopter Populism that aims to put one person in front of as many cameras as possible. And when the campaign is Nigel Farage – his personal character, image, and myth – milkshaking threatens to expose a political movement whose early success is based on a fragile personality cult.

This paradox of Helicopter Populism is that it removes political figures from the people they say they know better than anyone else. They look more elite, aloof, and scarcely in touch with the world they say is in dire decline. Another novelty candidate. It is interesting that the people who promise to protect and avenge the masses are also the people who trade the sweet touch of common folk for comfort and luxury. This is the Faustian bargain that shadows every power-hungry man. It is his weakness as a self-appointed tribune of the people. The dream of permanent campaigning is a smooth-talking fantasy, forged in the clouds, and out of range of flying milkshakes. Democracy needs testing in the streets. And at the ballot box.

This article originally featured in Il Foglio Europeo under the title Il potere di un frappè. I am grateful to Livia Chiriatti and her colleagues for permission to publish an adapted, English language version on The Kiosk.

I now look back and recognise a pattern of illness. But in the moment there was no pattern other than a wild energy, one that was like being plugged into the electrical mains, and this was frequently accompanied by the acute feeling that reality was striking me very hard in the face. I was soon to learn that my most ecstatic and seemingly authentic experiences – those that filled me with a sense of curiosity, wonder or fascination – were intertwined with institutional histories and other impersonal practices, histories of doing or making that often had little to do with my being. In a period turning towards ‘lived experience’ as a basis for politicising and individualising truth, Consortium students were weighing a cultural freight we found in so-called personal knowledge.

During that first term we were shown that histories of collecting need to slice through time to tell a story of origins and foundations. Where does collecting come from? Why do we have places we call museums? The questions followed a way of organising our focus. And so into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we leapt to recognise an acquisitive and aristocratic brand of curiosity, one that drew history’s protagonists close or closer to madness, God, or science.

European collectors once stored some of their prized objects in ‘cabinets of curiosity’ (also known as Wunderkammern or ‘wonder rooms’). In these they displayed gorgeous gems and the finest crafts conserved in furniture the size of rooms. They were things built for the envious show of other exquisite, surprising or fashionable things.

It is important to note that cabinets were built in the wings of European imperialism, they were technologies used to establish and preserve meaning. They drew on trade routes and other geographies of conquest, extraction and spectacle, and these were political relations bundled into material things that were borrowed or bought, stolen or made. Anticipating later artistic tendencies concerned with unmaking or decontextualising material objects, cabinets of curiosity displayed wonders of nature as a ready-made – to inspire learned European sensibilities, and to consolidate social relations between people and planet. With some hindsight it might be inevitable that some the first museum makers collected cabinets, too.

Cabinets also helped to develop an exclusive and acquisitive set of practices that situated others as outsiders. According to historians and philosophers of collecting, the period materialised Eurocentricism in cabinets that treated the world’s natural and unnatural things as if on a table, placing every object in a series that ranked things by their sameness and difference to others.5 Cabinet history met the thresholds of national history, and Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) built a reputation at these imagined thresholds, transforming the business of private collecting to national advantage. As a physician, collector and colonial governor, the 71,000 items he gathered into his private cabinets were later left to the British nation and were the foundation of the British Museum in 1753. Never before had a nation possessed such a vast and various collection, or opened a museum to a national population. But as enclosures-in-miniature, cabinets pre-existed these nationalist projects. And in them we can find clues about countervailing narratives of display that I think are poetically and politically useful.

While James Salter (d.1728) is something of a minor figure in the history of museums he is occasionally credited with having created the first ‘public’ museum in Britain.1 Anticipating the commercial relationship between coffee and art, Salter opened a coffee house in the 1690s, where he nurtured a reputation as a “gimcrack whim collector.”2 Over coffee and a bun, amused visitors to Salter’s coffee house had their wits sharpened and assumptions challenged.

About 50 years after the cafe opened Salter published a catalogue. It lists 420 items that he allegedly kept in his cabinets. These range from the ordinary to the bizarre:

Petrified crab from China; The Worm that eats into the Piles in Holland; A piece of rotten wood not to be consumed by fire; A pair of Nun’s stockings; A Nun’s Whip; the Pope’s infallible candle; A little Lobster; A curious snuff box, adorn’d with ivory figures; the Hand of an Egyptian Mummy; An Ostritch’s Leg; A Cat of Mountain; A Whale’s pizzle [viz. penis]: A Batt with four Ears…

We learn of Salter’s infamously funny claim to possess, “Pontius Pilate’s Wife’s Chambermaid’s Sister’s Hat”, “A Necklace of Job’s Tears”, and the “Fragments of the Fam’d Bob Crusoe”. The cabinets have a bat-shit crazy, spit-your-coffee quality that has curious interest in the encyclopaedic display of rationality, or the assumption that such cabinets represent the Bad Mother to the Enlightenment.3 They were idiomatic, mixed with stuff that was both marvellous and mundane, and sometimes an unsteady combination of both.

The catalogue records another history of museums and a different era of discovery, one that arrests curiosity’s relationship to education and to power. It testifies to an era of silliness and satire, as it teases the idea of dispassionate reason and its absurd investments in provenance and authenticity. Instead, there comes something incredible and high and aerated, a creative history that refuses control or capture.

In parallel to the historical evolution of museums as places of conservation, where the norms of imperialist extraction and exhibition extended from empire’s centres and peripheries, we feel the parody and dissent in Salter’s collection, and the mischievous desire to ridicule the institutions of the future.

The cultivation of curiosity was not only conservative, it was also aimed to test the artful and rational limits of classificatory systems, and this could involve curios on the margins of specimen and spoil, nature and art. James Salter would later refashion his public persona as a maverick impresario. Today we might call this a kind of performance art and Salter a performance artist. He took the name ‘Don Saltero’ and presented himself as Chelsea’s great purveyor of finely caffeinated perspectives.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, too, artists have displayed (and made art from) objects of low or questionable value – objects of waste among them. They understood that its exhibition displays a power, since waste mediates power relations and codes systems of production and disposal. Different terms have been used for ways of working with waste – objet trove, arte povera, mungo, junk or trash art – but each art movement negotiates the display of waste objects thanks to an engagement with the histories of display outlined above.4

For 10 months The Museum Collects Itself (2023) by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis diverted things from municipal infrastructures of disposal and entered them into a gallery space. The work made visible some of the unseen practices of resource extraction, exploitation and ecological harm, key to how museums produce art as a service. The work also teaches viewers to question the persistent emphasis in modern society that equates waste with personal responsibility, behaviours and individual choices. Instead it pictures the production of waste within social systems that are simultaneously relations of power and inequality.5

If you stood and looked in the window of 1414 Monterey Street during the summer of 2023 then what else did you see? And if you did not see the waste pile up and pile higher through the glass, what else do think you missed? And if waste art engages our attention by simply querying the endurance of art, then it may also highlight the investments we make in individual and collective durations, too – the untimely ideas of preservation and care that make museums both a filter and foil of narrative value.

Art that uses waste is itself temporary or ephemeral in its exhibition. It would be wrong to view this engagement as a natural state of affairs – it is one outcome of a long history of collecting, whose margins are also known in wastes. Museums endure conditionally in this dialogue, their sense of time can also be viewed as a ground on which waste art flows.

In some sense questions of value posed in The Museum Collects Itself must but go unanswered, at least in any definitive way. The artwork collects the material consequences of museum activities. The traces of various and occasionally intangible powers of seeing, learning and knowing. As a result, it is not only the purpose and significance of the museum that can be re-evaluated. The strategic defamiliarisation of commodity values is put through a revolving door – waste objects become collectable by virtue of their display and conservation. The status of waste, whose definitions may traditionally be tied to ruins and fragments, chaos and disorder, evolves as they passes through the museum’s white cube.

Walking in my London neighbourhood during the summer of 2023 I made regular visits to the narrow streets where Salter’s coffee house once stood. I could not look in the window of these private houses or the Mattress Factory 3700 miles away in Pittsburgh, PA. The inventory memorialises a lot that will pass through the museum and become data. I am moved to read about the “Miscellaneous manila folder for former interns and employees, 2015-onwards”.6 Though ‘manila’ describes a colour it also describes a type of paper invented in America in the 1830s. Papermakers turned to old rope made from Manila hemp, the US colonisation of the Philippines in the 1890s ensured ‘manila’ paper became a commonplace and disposable part of twentieth and twenty-first century capitalism.7 Captured and also indexed by this tangent is a long list of names written on the folder, and later recorded by a museum worker who has helped create the exhibition inventory in 2023. Inscribed is the memory of those that worked at the Mattress Factory but do so no longer. Doubly inscribed, both on the folder and the inventory, I wonder if this fragment is still ‘Miscellaneous’ – in the sense of anonymous, mass produced, unremarkable – now it has become somehow resonant with the tasks required of paid and unpaid museum labourers, past and present, whose work would otherwise go unseen. Invisible, were it not for this miscellaneous manila folder charting its ghost passage through a museum.

Amidst the cascading shelves of paper and card, metals and plastics and electrical and other goods, temporarily retained, an opportunity arose to tabulate things off-grid. Do we or can we encounter another kind of cabinet? Another future for the museum, perhaps, or another way of composing its past? Strangeness may not easily blend individuals into groups or us give the confidence for answers or unambiguous action. Beyond an historical and political analysis of power, another kind of lyrical critique might be required.

The spirit of Don Saltero reappears as we read on in the inventory kept diligently by museum staff: “1 witch’s broom”, “Hohmann Mail featuring envelope with depictions of giant metal babies”; “Laminated post it note with drawing of little circle face with long legs”. I read this list and I think of the how personal and cultural memories are conserved within systems of disposal, so much more than the things that find their way to the floor of the Mattress Factory. These are the imaginative collectives that picture a museum as a modern factory that wastes.

A shorter version of this essay titled Pontius Pilate’s Wife’s Chambermaid’s Sister’s Hat was first published in the catalogue Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, The Museum Collects Itself (2025). More information about the artwork and the catalogue can be found here. I am very grateful to both artists for their kindness and the opportunity to engage in their work, and for their permission to adapt and reproduce this essay.

One feature of contemporary politics is that outrageous melodramas are forced on us and these condition a need for a subplot, many subplots, for us to believe some layer of conspiracy can give meaning to all the destructive stupidity. The contradictions come so fast, are too enormous, that they begin to format the desire for simple explanations. Only a year ago Trump wrote a foreword to a reissue of Meloni’s memoir, I Am Giorgia: My Roots, My Principles, and he lauded her working class roots and her fight against, “the globalist elite … to become one of the most powerful leaders in the world.” Now Meloni takes to social media to tell him “my popularity is none of your concern, I suggest you focus on yours.”

Meloni’s reputation as a ‘Trump Whisperer’ was always unstable, so long as Trump’s America First strategy embraced authoritarianism, corruption, and militarism. This latest blow-up may be confected, and part of U.S. efforts to shape Europe in its image. Letting Meloni raise her voice against Trump about trivial matters like a photo, keeps Trump at the centre of the spectacle, and gives her the chance to talk about Italian national character. With Italians going to the polls next year, Meloni is looking for re-election with a fragile coalition of far-right partners. In public she has mastered a weary brand of intolerance, like a childless aunt who hates her brother’s children. After four years in power she is the second longest serving prime minister, and she will be re-elected if she makes everyone around her look weak, vulnerable or temporary. Calling out Trump plays well. And in the meantime Italian bases carry on supporting U.S. combat missions over Iran. Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte highlighted as many as U.S. 500 missions flown from Italy in recent months. Italy doesn’t beg and can’t. It has given home to U.S. nuclear weapons since 1957.

The sovereignist balance between national self-determination and submission to U.S. hegemony wobbled in January 2026, when the Italian Government confirmed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers would work at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Until this point, ICE officers had lived in the European mind as a local U.S. power projected to small screens and sliced together with ads on social media. Many Italians had watched the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti from a distance, they watched from many angles and in slow motion; it was happening over there, far away. Suddenly they feared an armed force on the streets of Milan.

Tens of thousands took to the streets to voice their opposition. The Mayor of Milan was first to state that ICE agents were not welcome, describing ICE as a deadly “militia.” Elly Schlein, leader of the official opposition, compared ICE to le squadracce – finding an historical reference to Fascist paramilitary squadristi of the 1920s. Italian protestors reacted to the fading distinction between U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and the warped sense that the ghosts of history were walking back from a frontier.

Meloni reassured Italians they were safe, since visiting ICE agents had no legal powers. When people seemed to not believe her – ICE having established a solid reputation for ignoring the law - she told Italians their criticism was contradictory, “make a fuss about ICE, but then ask the United States to take care of our national defence.” This unfussy defence of the status quo includes the admission that Meloni will repress dissent at home because she also wants the United States to be responsible for Italian national defence. In two years, the U.S. has threatened to absorb Canada, annex Greenland, overthrown a Venezuelan government, continued support of Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, and continues to be at war with Iran. Protestors on the streets of Milan were not making a fuss about ICE but Italian relations with the U.S. government, including the glib idea that the U.S. must continue to take a role in Italian national defence while undermining the security of large parts of world.

When tradition is used to defend extraordinary uses of force, outside the rule of international law, then local fantasises of expulsion, purges, and pogroms are more likely to become a reality. Extremists want our streets under the protection of vigilante groups – self-selecting terror organisations that are little more than bandit gangs, licensed or simply allowed to use uncompromising violence.

Italians and Americans have a rich tradition of celebrating the achievements of violent paramilitary groups, and this is one reason why far-right politicians such as Trump and Meloni are suspicious of a rules-based geopolitical system or even a rule-based idea of political history. Nationalism often supports myths that justify a kind of nationalist violence that can be revised or reconfigured, reincorporated into national stories of liberation. The Italian national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi has been portrayed as a cowboy liberator and nation-builder, mounted on a celebrated horse, Marsala, wrapped in a poncho and wearing an old rancher’s hat. He took Rome with guerrilla tactics he learned from fighting alongside gaucho militias in Argentina, southern Brazil and Uruguay. Mussolini claimed that Garibaldi was “the purest expression of the warrior spirit of the Italian people.” Garibaldi’s spirit was nationalised during the rise of Italian Fascism, used to attack liberals by any means necessary with a patriotism capable of hunting its enemies.

Cowboys are historical figures amenable to modern populists because they promise the violent clarity of black and white in a technicoloured world. William Frederick Cody, the U.S. cowboy (better known by his stage name Buffalo Bill), came to Italy in 1890. Bill commercialised the archetype of a cowboy lifestyle, even while that lifestyle developed and frontier culture flourished. He brought to Europe the violent myths of the Wild West, and he set about monetising them through a celebrated stage show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a 10-strong wagon train of horses and men, sharpshooters and cowboys and Native Americans. Roman audiences complained Bill’s show was expensive and they accused the Native Americans of being frauds - working-class Sicilians, picked up from the streets. It is unclear if these hostilities were the cause of Bill’s troubles in Italy or merely confirmed his critical opinion of Italians but, during interviews later given to U.S. newspapers, Bill spoke of Italian people as “decaying” and “regressive”, comparable to the “primitivism” of Native Americans.

Research by Paola Bonifazio shows that Bill was contributing to what was called the ‘Southern Question’ or Meridionalismo, the growing gap between Northern industrial wealth and Southern poverty. The discourse had an international dimension, and class and race-based prejudice was not confined to how Italians talked about each other in local or regional commentaries, but was an international language used to talk about social groups in universal terms. As a consequence, the Italian South was typically viewed by the North as a backward place – ‘African’, corrupt, ungovernable. “We like the Italians of the upper classes,” The New York Times quoted Bill, “but the lower classes are mean and not to be trusted.” His sharpshooting co-star, Annie Oakley, reported a similar difference: “Italy was agreeable, and Milan and Florence, but Rome – oh the people were like heathens there.”

The sense of racial difference and national disunity are a context for an Italian American immigration story, these are the charred grounds from which U.S. citizens want to recover an ‘Italian American’ identity. The American press of the 1890s thought Italians coming to the U.S. were “descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country … a pest without mitigations.” Having been treated as trouble to a unified Italy, Southern Italian immigrants became a scapegoat for a variety of U.S. social problems. In time this 19th century outlaw status would be shrugged off and put on the next immigrant community, in a circular system of scapegoating that shaped immigration policy for over a hundred years and remains in the hands of ICE agents. And so, for some Italian Americans, it has been important to establish an independent dual nationalism, with which to cleave from both racial and class-based prejudice into a trans-Atlantic nationalism based on American prosperity and European Whiteness.

The film industry transformed the status and meaning of the American cowboy by touching it with the Italian idea of the old-time maverick, making him a figure fit for a multimedia and international age. In the first half of the 20th century images of the Wild West became so strong in Italian magazines and comics, books, radio and film that by the 1950s and 1960s it was possible for Italian filmmakers to ‘remake’ the West and sell it back to U.S. audiences as an augmented reality, melding the aesthetic and moral terrain of the genre with a new set of codes. Italians layered the U.S. frontier with those of the spiritual and geopolitical ruin of Europe, featuring unresolved wartime struggles between oppressed bands of partisans and shadowy agents of a tyrannical state. In this period, the ‘Zapata Western’, set during the U.S.-Mexican border wars, became an anti-imperial speciality.

Directors such as Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima made iconic movies, often with scores by Sergio Morricone. They aimed to reinvent the visual and musical texture of post-War alienation, infusing the old Western frontier with contemporary, revolutionary politics from Europe, North Africa and Asia, especially the ‘hot’ Cold War front, whose depression lingered on the Italian peninsula. As U.S. military and intelligence agencies used Italy as its base, Italian hippies, anarchists and other counterculturalists turned to the figure of Native American and indigenous peoples for inspiration.

Art historian Martina Caruso examines how Italian activists of the 1970s embraced ‘ethnic drag’ by appropriating the figure of the Native American to oppose repressive Italian neo-fascist and U.S. imperialist forces. They also turned to indigenous peoples to interpret the internationalisation of the Southern question – the prejudice shown to southern Italians, internal immigrants and the working poor, and Italy’s formerly colonised subjects. As Caruso shows in her research, the image of Native peoples circulated widely, signalling victimhood and a desire to strike back, while often preserving the racial ‘otherness’ given to Native Americans. Who places themselves inside or beyond political frontiers, and how oppressed peoples are represented, remains a matter of power, and perspective.

In the summer of 1890 Sitting Bull returned to America after performing with Buffalo Bill in Rome. During the moral panic stoked by politicians and local media about the dangers posed to settlers by Native American communities, police officers raided Sitting Bull’s home and dragged him outside. There was a struggle and he was murdered. Despite attempts to use Buffalo Bill as a mediator, the killing of Sitting Bill led to The Wounded Knee Massacre weeks later, as hundreds of Lakota men, women and children were slaughtered by U.S. government forces. The events of 1890, condensed as they are, also date the closure of the frontier, the consolidation of a U.S. homeland, and the end of armed resistance to settler colonialists by Native peoples. The frontier struggle over land could shift back to securitising borders and controlling the movement of people. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration was established the following year, 1891, the precursor to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that coordinates ICE. Thanks to these historical ricochets we know nationalism is iterative. It creates both the rationale and infrastructure for future struggles, and this ensures that inequalities come preformatted by the nation state, and not by any other container, movement or spirit. Each expression of frontier politics draws on and prepares the conditions for further frontier struggles, compelling us towards deadly force and the nation as a natural and reasonable unit for political citizenship.

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The Department of Homeland Security received $170 billion for border and interior enforcement in 2025 – a sum greater than the combined yearly budgets of all local and state law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. Its hiring practices have changed, 12,000 new agents were hired in less than a year, training has dropped from six months to approximately 42–47 days, applicants are accepted as young as 18, and new hires are promised $50,000 in bonuses. DHS access geofenced data to serve ads to phones in specific locations – ­college campuses, gun and trade shows, military bases, and sports events. Modern ad-tech surveillance technologies fuse with the formative histories of U.S. genocide and dispossession, and the heroic mythologies that contort those histories. The messages communicated to prospective recruits are saturated by the language and imagery of the Old West, imploring recruits to do their ‘sacred duty’ and ‘defend the homeland’ by repelling ‘foreign invaders.’ In July 2025, the Department posted John Gast’s painting American Progress (1872) on social media. It was captioned, ‘A Heritage to be Proud of, a Homeland worth Defending’.

The painting depicts Columbia, an allegorical, white, winged female figure, leading settlers west and displacing Native Americans and wildlife. Other ads of this time carried well-known white nationalist and neofascist slogans that have circulated in the U.S. for many years, and are now part of official U.S. government communications, such as ‘America for Americans’ (a phrase strongly associated with the Ku Klux Klan). In the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, a recruitment post promised ‘We’ll Have Our Home Again’. This is the title of a song popular with white nationalists. The accompanying image shows a lone Stealth bomber crossing a mountain range, at ground level gallops a lone rider.

In the U.S. the Old West is used as inspiration for contemporary mass detention and deportation. It proves that in the post-progressive, post-shame world of Trump America, cruelty calls out to cruelty. The latter-day Meridionalismo has inflamed extremists. These groups profess to care for law and order, and particularly the safety of ‘women and girls’ but they also believe human rights law is the single greatest obstacle to the violent removal of immigrants (‘women and girls’ included). They present reimmigration as the solution to every political, social, moral and spiritual problem, and push liberals, moderates and others closer and closer to accepting that political extremism is the answer.

Italy is an example of a nationalist government losing ground to reimmigration extremists. Once enabled by neofascist groups such as CasaPound, Giorgia Meloni’s 2022 election was won by promising to halt immigration and the ‘mass extinction’ of Italian people. Now her allies and adversaries pressure her to expel immigrants. If she looks to the U.S. for guidance she will find a violent frontier, and a remapping using the rhetoric of white nationalism updated with semi-automated surveillance technologies. If she looks to Italy’s past she will find a rogue’s gallery drawn from a wrecking ball history – Garibaldini, Legionari, squadristi, brigatti and other militanti.

The protest against ICE was also a protest against Meloni’s friendly relationship with Trump and his administration. This has been a relationship that has provided arms to Israel in its catastrophic wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Gaza. In a rhetorical manoeuvre characteristic of Meloni’s desire to look locally tough and internationally weak at the same time, she also asks Italians if they want a world built in the Cold War or another, that does not legitimise American violence. Demanding that world means confronting the legacies of Italian frontiers of racial prejudice and socio-economic injustice, and breaking with the iterative loops of nationalist fear that has justified a cowboy nationalism. The cowboy nationalism Italians helped to build.

Rome’s neofascist memorial events outline the local work required for collective memory to be renewed. While these memorial events happen all over Italy, each year neofascists gather by torchlight on Via Acca Larentia, part of the city’s eastern suburbs, to commemorate the deaths of three young activists murdered in 1978. Two were killed by members of the paramilitary left and another in a gun battle with the police. No one was prosecuted for the Acca Larentia killings, and the event has legendary status within histories of the long, civil conflict known as Anni di piombo, or ‘Years of Lead’ – an armed struggle that defined Italy’s post-1945 history.

Every 7 January neofascist groups from across Italy and Europe march in a military formation, and they raise their arms in fascist salute. The names of the dead are called out and the crowd replies presente! in unison. The dead are declared ‘present’ in a ritual of modern martyrdom, honoured through a living tradition.

It is tempting to dismiss neofascist vigils as political pageantry or a kind of hyperbole, complete with exaggerated hand gestures. But the event typifies how extremist organisations associate with and support each other’s activities. Memorial rallies are key to what it means to be a fascist in the 20th and 21st century, and the events are platforms for radicalisation. Although the promotion of fascism is illegal in Italy (according to the Scelba Law, 1952) the commemoration of fascist history is not, at least according to a recent High Court ruling. This legal separation of poltical promotion and commemoration - political support versus political memory – generates the nostalgic greyzone in which Italians do a lot of annual memorial work. This is also true on 25 April, known as Liberation Day or Anniversario della Resistenza, used to mark the historic end of Nazi occupation and Fascist control over Italy in 1945. Liberation Day is used to celebrate Italian political resistance in past and present. This year’s Liberation Day saw street protests against Giorgia Meloni’s government, and opposition to US and Israeli wars in the Middle East. The purpose of these examples is to underline how national mourning and national identity are continuous activities, carried forward by different political communities based on different qualities of civic participation and memorialisation. This is one reason why Italy is full of what Carmen Belmonte calls ‘difficult heritage’ - preserved artifacts of ideological struggles that continue as a site of ongoing political contestation.

As I want to show, Rome is also shoring up difficult heritage for the future. A modern memorial appears on the walls of the Jewish School in Rome. What it remembers - its technique of remembrance – enters the greyzone between supporting a cause and remembering the dead that have fallen defending that cause. Its construction appears simple – small, rectangular stickers, containing a picture and a simple text in Hebrew. Look closely and you might be surprised that there are no Italian nationals remembered here, all the stickers remember young Israelis.

The stickers commemorate the lives and deaths of foreign soldiers, serving with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) during or after the attacks on October 7, 2023. Each sticker traces a life, and together they make an unofficial memorial, dedicated to those killed in a conflict in which Italy has no direct part. The stickers appeared in the cities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and others in 2023 and 2024. The presence of memorial stickers in Rome is a testimony to dedicated networks of bereaved family members and friends, some of them also ex-IDF soldiers, who bring stickers with them on their European vacations.

Jeff Weiss is a US-Israeli citizen living in Tel Aviv that runs a printing service and a website called Stickers of Meaning. Weiss told me he wants to “amplify the inspirational messages that are found on the stickers – messages of hope, joy, love, shared responsibility, daring, overcoming adversity,” he said. In contrast to the uniformity of military cemeteries, the stickers celebrate life in a personalised way, remembering an individual son or brother, a cherished friend. “Life is unpredictable,” reads one, “the power to choose how to deal with it is in your hands.” These motivational maxims – “every struggle is an opportunity”– shape adversity into a test of character. Hebrew readers are told to “be the person you would like to meet” and “fight and achieve your goal”.

The management of the Jewish School in Rome have decided that these stickers extend the school’s educational aims. Like other public signs they communicate different things to different members of a Jewish community, as they also signal values to Rome’s non-Jewish residents and to millions of tourists that visit Rome each year. In other countries stickers are taken down by government authorities or activists, who view them as the illegal propaganda of a militarised society that is committed to ethnonationalist and religious violence. The stickers elicit memorial compassion for conscripted members of a military organisation responsible for approximately 72,000 civilian deaths, including 20,000 children. Those that survive in Gaza live as refugees in a land “where no human being can exist,” according to Giora Eiland, a former Major General of the IDF.

If “every struggle is an opportunity” then let us be inspired to ask – what opportunities have been gained from Israel’s wars across the region? Surely not the conditions for an enduring peace. Under ceasefire agreements and international treaties, Israeli settlers on the West Bank continue to evict Palestinians from their homes and land. 1,096 Palestinian civilians have been killed on the West Bank as Israeli military or security forces fail to uphold international law. Many thousands more civilians have been killed in Southern Lebanon, where ceasefire agreements have not stopped constant IDF bombings in civilian areas.

In June 2025 a British YouGov poll found that just 6% of Italians supported Israel’s military response to the October 7 attacks. And yet in Italy memorial stickers remembering the IDF’s fallen soldiers remain fixed to a wall. Paradoxically, the low level of public support might also be key to explaining why Rome’s memorial stickers remain. Rome’s Jewish school promotes a strong identification between its pupils and the Israeli state, and the Israeli flag flies alongside that of the European Union over the school door. The return of Israeli tourism to Rome in 2025 and the presence of Italian military personnel on Via del Portico d’Ottavia gives this contentious memorial a degree of protection.

As we have seen on many occasions during recent conflicts involving Israel, political conservatives argue that the cause of the nation is synonymous with the wellbeing of Jewish people everywhere. The classic defence of Israel’s militarism relies on a shared identity of victimhood and vulnerability with the diaspora, where collective losses are redeemed in the security of a promised homeland. But Jewish safety and a military conquest for territorial sovereignty are not the same, and conflating the two makes every member of the Jewish diaspora a shield for the Israeli government’s policies.

Acts of remembrance involve a fear of loss. Noam Lesham, a university professor and political historian of Israel, explained that the stickers communicate a deeper fear. “In contrast with the idea that Israel makes all Jews secure,” he told me, “the stickers recall Israel’s vulnerability, and the danger it has created for all.” Political engagement with these stickers helps to unglue some of the ideas that politicians bind together, such as the idea that a military from one country protects and advances the interests of school children in another.

National history involves different kinds of magical thinking, especially the kind that makes power itself invisible. For some nationalists, such as those nationalists that use ethnic or racial categories to elevate and persecute different groups of people, the history of human difference must be handled very carefully. It is here that biological monuments - memorial matter like DNA - get airbrushed and laundered, scrubbed of their political and historical formation, including the basic requirement for biological difference to be technically invented. Nationalists want citizens to have a natural right to the land, so each member and non-member of a nation must be viewed as regular as a national day. From this point of view they can be chosen to stand shoulder to shoulder, with their kin. Raise a hand or a flag, a gun or a sticker.

The more the value of an event or memorial is challenged, the more its truthfulness is contested, then more discipline is required from rank and file believers to insist that their ideas should win. In every Roman anniversary is a political tension, I think, the internal contradiction between a universal truth, presented in natural time, and the scenographic work of diligent conservation and preservation, which insists that time itself is viewed as natural. But political struggle can look upstream into the timewarp. Promoting peace means advocating for political solutions in advance of Rome’s memorial cadence, only then can we hope to stem the tide of militarism that keeps stickers coming to Rome.

This post contains a version of an article first published with Wanted in Rome. I thank the editors for their support and encouragement.

I followed these morning drinkers like I followed my grandfather Ben, an enormous man who hated holidays and airports in particular. His wife took a different opinion and forced him to join her on a holiday at least once a year. On one occasion, they took with them a 15-year-old boy I will call Luke, a companion for their son. Presumably they hoped that this Luke, with his privately-educated hair and improbably small bag, would provide junior members of the family some entertainment while my grandfather could suffer some quality time by the pool in the company of Wisden or a well-thumbed novel by P.G. Wodehouse. But after they had all passed through airport security Luke went missing. My disabled grandfather and his wife were compelled to hunt for the boy throughout the airport’s sprawling terminus, until they finally found him, with just minutes before the gate closed.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?” bawled his guardians. “We’re going to miss the bloody plane!” It is alleged that Luke turned slowly on his bar stool, a wry smile creeping over a teenage face. “I am awfully sorry,” Luke said, without seeming to be very sorry. “But, you see, I never fly without a Bloody Mary.”

I think I am describing two versions of what I take to be the same influential pastime. Each differently classed, and involving different airports, destinations and different drinks. But each tugs at a rope that brings British people to a joyous poison, the alcoholic experience they can call freedom.

Airport drinking has been in the news recently. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary called for an end to early morning boozing. He revealed that, on average, one Ryanair flight a day will be diverted because a drunk passenger has caused havoc on a plane. And as another blood-hot summer awaits the eager British, wanting the shores and islands of Spain, Greece and Turkey, O’Leary aims to clip the wings of airport licensees and safeguard the company’s €1.5 billion annual profit.

The UK news cycle has the integrity of those airplane sandwiches, served in a puffy, plastic bag. And so Tom Swarbrick, a journalist and former advisor to hapless Prime Minister Teresa May, used his regular slot on LBC radio to take a stand: “there is nothing more subversive,” he said, while soundtracked to a euphoric Brit pop anthem, “than having a pint at 5 o’clock in the morning … this is a point in my life when I feel free.” In a performance that has been viewed a million of times on social media, Swarbrick gathered the kind of energy I associate with internet philosophers and climate change deniers. Drinking pints in airports, he claimed, was nothing short of the foundation of humanity itself: “to deny you an early morning pint at an airport, I think, is to deny you the sense of what it is to be human.”

For many years after passing through Newcastle International Airport and hearing about Luke’s teenage antics, I vowed never to fly without having a Bloody Mary. I realised I also liked to follow it up with a couple of gins, and a few beers, on the flight. If I was challenged on this behaviour, I would say it was all in honour of my grandfather who, after narrowly averting disaster at an airport years ago, never flew without first having a Bloody Mary. Following in his footsteps made me feel I was participating in a family tradition. I also enjoyed sharing grandparental advice to whoever would listen - a bit of inter-generational wisdom, I reasoned, never did anyone harm.

At a more subterranean level, I understood this to be my grandfather’s idea of transforming freedom and pleasure into a kind of discipline, his way of turning stories, catchphrases and one-liners into a way of living. He was a man who believed there was no better rule than a rule he had given to himself. That was his idea of freedom. And I was the sort of person who thought that other people’s rules could be acted on, and a performance of freedom could be just as good, maybe better.

Travel and alcohol give a unique sort of release, and also the hope of learning and relearning. Travelling libations help make Western literature’s great epics. Perhaps this is what Swarbrick had in mind, when he talked about what it means to be human. But if we cannot name or measure the pressure put on us by work, the economic and political conditions that fling people towards a freedom in travel and alcohol, then I think there might be a risk that we view early morning, pre-holiday drinking as an moral or even aesthetic choice, made by individuals, rather than as a reflex to life that is squeezed tight by economic survival. London’s shock-jocks call this drinking freedom but it comes with debts, headaches and hangovers, return flights and work on a Monday morning.

Greek epic and twelve-step recovery programmes have a few things in common – they render chaos into narrative episodes that in time can be resolved into islands of meaning, and after some years, they may form pretty archipelagos whose sense of place relate to older oral traditions. They say you should keep a good yarn spun to land a home truth, and keep some with you if you want to get yourself out of a labyrinthe.

Somewhere in Ulysses James Joyce’s everyman, Leopold Bloom, muses on a problem familiar to addicts who resolve to fix their problems by heading out on a big trip: “think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Alcoholics call these frustrated flights ‘geographicals’ to name the risk of becoming the kind of weary traveller who looks themselves in the mirror and suddenly recognises the bloodshot eyes of a person they thought they left at home. The test shared by Greek epic and recovery only occurs when the hero returns home, nostos as fulfillment of the past rather than its repetition. And each story in recovery contains the juggling of memory and fabulation, the moving forward that is core to travel fiction that propels readers onwards and not back.

My last book, Twinkind: The Singular Signifcance of Twins, was published two years ago. And this week ends with our birthday. My brother, who wrote a lovely foreword for the book, will come to visit us in Rome. I expect we will go out into town for our annual, celebratory lunch. I picture us enjoying the weekend together – the jasmine under the Roman sun, a swirlling buzz of traffic over the cobbles – watching him tuck into a big bowl of pasta, a greedy satisfaction spreading over his face. I will think then, as I do now, that unless we are involved in the same fatal accident, only one of us will survive the other. And the twin that remains will have to decide what to do with his twin relationship with its sad future and mottled past, to decide what this great severence should mean.

Twins have given many people a way to illuminate life’s edges, ways to think about the threshold between living and dying that have shaped other, intimate relationships, including the intimate relationships we are expected to have with new social, biological, and digital technologies. So if you think that I am morbid about my brother and his pasta then I agree. I only want to add that I am living by a history of thinking about twins that wants them to be talismanic and animate creatures.

Keeping time like two watches
For thousands of years, human twins have shaped religious and philosophical practices in uncertain worlds; they were taken as signs, portents, instruments of divination. Imagining twins as a figure or metaphor has helped to form a cultural history that has withstood rapid changes in how twins are valued in Europe and North America. Twins have been useful to human societies, “good to think with” – according to anthropologists of the twentieth century. What is important, I think, is to note continuities in thinking with twins, so that scientific and artistic practices that produce twins in new ways also resonate with ancient cultural values and practices. In the modern era, they have been the subject of scientific experiments, used as subjects of science and sources of data, used to calculate what personhood amounts to, and for whom it endures.

The history of putting twin people into scientific studies is usually traced back to Francis Galton (1822–1911), the British eugenicist. Galton’s studies of twins in the 1870s led him to conclude that twins grew dissimilar owing to the “development of natural characteristics” or “continue their lives, keeping time like two watches, hardly to be thrown out of accord except by some physical jar.” Galton promoted using twins as a new method to support a biometric and eugenic approach to scientific research. Ever since, scientists and other experts have valued twins as “natural experiments” and “living laboratories” – nature’s gift to scientific reason.

Evidence from twin studies has been used to measure, control, and manipulate how society is organised. Motivated by eugenic race science, German scientists of the 1920s separated twins into ‘identical’ (monozygotic) and ‘fraternal’ (dizygotic) control groups. They observed and quantified traits based on biological and environmental differences between twin pairs and groups made up of twin pairs.

These experiments pioneered the technical and organisational research principles still used today in twin studies. Subsequent generations of twin researcher may seek distance from these histories and reinvent reasons to study twins. But the treatment of twins as a ‘useful’ community to be studied continues today.

Twin paradox
History renders twins heroes, gods and monsters, evidence of faith and speculative reason. For Christian theologians like St. Augustine, for example, twins were evidence of free will’s triumph over the zodiac. Look at twins, argued Augustine, they are born beneath the same stars yet lead different lives and die at different times. Augustine used twins as proof against fate in his fight with astrologers.

Several hundred years later, physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Henri Bergson used twins to debate the nature of time. In Einstein’s thought experiment, known as his ‘Twin Paradox’, one twin travels into space close to the speed of light. Because of speed’s relation to the physics of time, they would return to Earth younger than their twin sibling who stayed home. Bergson argued that time could not be understood simply in terms of science, truth is and always will be a matter of human debate, argued Bergson. Their public debates were attracted huge audiences who were invigorated, again, by the idea that twin dramas can ground new truths about our existence.

Twins have given instruction and entertainment in Holy Scriptures, medieval folktales, theatre, and television; they still inform geopolitics. When the modern state of Israel wages war against ‘Amalek’ it refers to the descendants of Esau, whose natural state is one of conflict with Israel’s founding patriarch, and Esau’s twin, Jacob. Religious twin history preserves a community and makes a twin-genealogy that is used to legitimise the slaughter of civilians.

On their own these twin histories might look singular or even natural. But comparing differences and similarlities across cultures means we can refuse the way cultures can present their values about twins as inevitable or necessary. Instead we can recognise how twins are singled out to do important cultural work, while noting that the kinds of work they do is varied.

Another recurring story imagines the reunion of twins, it involves twins who are separated but eventually restored to a state of harmony. Such twins ‘reared apart’ became the basis for another scientific method developed by German scientists in the 1920s and 1930s that has been used to explore the relationship between nature and nurture.

Three Identical Strangers (2018) is a documentary about triplets Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman who were separated at birth but found each other by chance in the 1980s. They joined the Minnesota Study for Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA), one of the largest and most influential reared-apart studies and later discovered that they were part of a another, covert study of separated twins being conducted by Dr Peter Neubauer in New York. Neubauer recorded the lives of twins and triplets who had been separated at birth by an adoption agency, which believed that they would develop their own identities if kept apart. Neither the adoptive families nor the children were told that they were twins or triplets. The film explored the ethics of keeping the study a secret. It also raised questions relevant to all so-called natural experiments: to what degree do researchers shape the subjects they observe?

One at a time
On 6 June 1981 Stephen and Amanda Mays were the world’s first twins to be born, conceived thanks to in vitro fertilisation. As more sophisticated medical techniques and fertility markets developed in the last decades of the 20^th century, twin birth rates increased dramatically, up 40 per cent in some countries.

Twin pregnancies and births increase many health risks, however, and the practice of implanting multiple embryos during IVF treatment pregnancies led to a complex public health dilemma.

By the early 2000s the industry regulator in the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, reported excess deaths linked to twin pregnancies. It now runs a campaign to educate medical professionals and parents about the risks to mother and baby from implanting multiple embryos during fertilisation treatment.

Twins were also made following a controversial procedure that produced the world’s first genetically modified humans. In November 2018, the birth of Lulu and Nana was announced at a press conference to a shocked audience. A team of Chinese scientists led by He Jiankui used a gene-editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9 to bioengineer their embryos in an attempt to lessen Lulu and Nana’s vulnerability to the HIV virus.

When He announced the birth of the twins, the procedure was widely criticised for the risks posed to the childre, and the damage to the trust placed in science and scientists. He was later jailed. The scientific community has struggled to apportion collective responsibility for experiments such as these. As for Lulu and Nana, they have been have been hidden from public view to protect them from the repercussions of the illegal and controversial experiment that led to their birth.

In 2015 NASA made the Kellys, twin brothers and fellow astronauts, the subject of a case study in which Scott Kelly went into space and his brother Mark remained on Earth as a control case for comparison. For a year NASA’s Twin Study collected data to test how spaceflight affects oxygen deprivation stress, increased inflammation, and changes in nutrients that influence gene expression. One of the things they discovered was that while high-speed space travel does indeed affect time, it also shapes how time affects the functions of the human body.

Data doubles and digital twins
We may be slowly getting used to the idea of avatars of ourselves in the virtual world but a digital twin promises more. It is hoped that these ‘data doubles’ would use data to track and predict our future health conditions. They could test ‘what-if’ scenarios such as surgical procedures on a digital model of your heart, for example. It is hoped that medical teams could use this digital twin to assess the likely outcome of different therapies.

For what-if predictions to be standardised every digital twin must perform according to great data collectives of other digital twins. Although the selling point of a digital twin is the likeness of a real-time data double, ‘personal to you’, each digital twin would also be an aggregate produced by a model – a virtual ‘living laboratory’ of many. Every digital twin would combine the data of an individual and all other individuals, a vast mix of data types. So, in order for every person to have a digital twin, then, a new social experiment or ‘living laboratory’ will be required that coerces many members of society into an enormous digital twin study, where data is constantly extracted, computed, and used to picture our next steps. How should we recognise ourselves if we reach such a point? And what kind of twin would survive? Where there are questions like these twins will be at hand - their usefulness is an ancient art.

This post has adapted material first published under a CC BY 4.0 license by the Wellcome Collection. It appeared under the title “A History of Twins in Science” in 2022 and I am grateful to editors at the Wellcome Collection for their help and support.

Things move quickly. Sullivan and his friends trap an older man they suspect of being a sex offender. Off-screen, they beat him, then return to our screens looking unnerved. They realise the older man is innocent, “just some random man.”

Welcome to the manosphere.

Throughout this documentary we see a combination of sexual and financial avarice. But by doing so, Inside the Manosphere exposes a tension it cannot uncoil. On the one hand, Theroux wants to red-flag content creators as baddies, to warn people of their power over the minds of young men. On the other hand, the documentary returns to scenes of chaos and contradiction, a bullshit silliness appealing to a 12 year old’s slapstick sense of humour. We are told to fear the absurd, to be entertained by a threat, and to marvel at manipulators whose content is rarely under control.

Reviewers comment on the threats posed by dangerous men on the internet. Some are wanted in multiple countries, on a number of serious charges. I won’t rehearse these concerns further, other than to remark on the familiarity I feel when I see versions of a masculinity that were widely available in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, in pre- and post-internet eras. Grit, grift, and sexual satisfaction, the promise of fast cars, muscles, and girls in bikinis. It is a version of success so generic, so lacking in original fantasy, that it would be easy to find in a softcore magazine, or an old Bond movie.

Take, for example, the followers of Miami “success coach” Justin Waller, who are giddy with excitement about meeting their hero. They repeat the manosphere mantra, “shut up and nut up” - advice they use to participate in Waller’s rugged masculinity and construction-industry swagger, a rags-to-riches story that illuminates the economic stakes at the heart of these and other macho traditions, newly wrapped in a grey suit and loafers. For modern influencers, the economic fortunes attatched to content creation makes life urgent and existential, and the biological definition of gender throws them into a bleakly violent, Darwinian universe, where only the fit survive by assaulting old men for likes, comments, and follows.

I think it might be helpful to compare the men of the 21st century manosphere to travelling stageshow or circus performers of the early 20th century. People like Captain Jack Bonavita, star of Coney Island’s Dreamland and famous for a muscular and fearless stageshow known as The Armchair. In this performance, Bonavita surrounded himself with up to 27 lions at a time. In 1904, one lion called Baltimore had enough. Baltimore bit off Captain Jack’s right arm. The local and national press lamented as well as celebrated Jack’s bravery. And so Captain Jack carried on with one arm, until an enormous polar bear called Piccolo mauled him to death. The local and national press lamented and celebrated Jack’s bravery.

Despite the cult of personality that they may crave, a critical view of these manopshere men must conclude that they are also stage performers, whose travel arrangements are foreshortened by the digital platforms on which they appear. Influencers can create enormous excitement within small bubbles, and some condemnation. They promise success in terms of replication and have short careers. Be like me, they say, put your head in a lion’s mouth.

Fast forward 20 years, to a bar somewhere in the suburbs, and you meet Mike; a guy who claims to have slept with 100 girls in a night and bench-pressed a Rottweiler. The work on his face was done a long ago, and it has disfigured him terribly. His confidence has not diminished while everything else has declined around him, face included. Mike could pass for a military veteran or someone with a rare genetic disease. He is not so different to the man who sits on a different bar stool, and claims to have been on the books at Chelsea Football Club. Injury held him back, he says, and his work clothes are now covered in paint and plaster. If not them then someone else - the politician in a Barbour jacket who claims to have worked the metal exchange, and knows the real world of business. He wants to send the foriegners back, and seems to think this is the solution to your problems. The manosphere is this barroom atmosphere, constructed from years of fantasy and failure, promise and sadistic intent. It mixes in unseen pools of historical difficulty, like stale beer. Don’t be fooled by the technology, that’s not it.

When viewers meet U.S. influencer Amrou Fudl, known online as Myron Gaines, we find him living in an apartment surrounded by studio equipment. Gaines appears anxious about letting Theroux into this, his private kingdom. In clips spliced together in ways that seem designed to make this African-American man appear irrational and angry, he is seen berating women in outlandishly offensive terms, declaring himself a “dictator” and the women around him are his “subordinates.” The documentary cannot say anything meaningful about the racial politics of the manosphere, or articulate a position on U.S. racism. And this is odd. Especially when racial prejudice is foregrounded later, and Theroux stands accused of being a Zionist.

The show’s opaque silences over racial politics feel uniquely American, since financial advancement has been naturalised into a pure state of being, natural to men, and competition strictly coded according to market forces. What once was called class struggle has been deeply repressed, such that racism surfaces in places where an understanding of labour relations would have once mattered. This is how the MAGA movement has individuated economic and racial injustice in America, and forged a political alliance between male influencers of diverse backgrounds.

When mothers, wives and girlfriends appear in Theroux’s documentary, as one does in Gaines’ cramped home, another dynamic takes hold, as contradictions emerge that suggest Gaines cannot dictate a loving relationship. Influencers often claim to be ‘protecting’ their loved ones from Theroux, who is a threat to them, and viewed with suspicion. The strength of these women is a unique vulnerability to content creator men, whose digital brand is based on maintaining the illusion of emotional independence. While the manosphere is feared to be an epic, man-to-man fantasy battle, a fight for a more empowered and more manly society, viewers also observe a mundane reality, whose intimate relations involve being together and living for each other. “I know it’s not good,” concludes a pensive Sullivan, “if I just done good things I would never have blown up on social media in the first place … I’m not living for other people. I’m living for myself.” Sullivan’s mother shows up later, commenting on his appearance and admonishing him for the dirty condition of his apartment. His mother warns him, “don’t be rude. Don’t embarrass me. Because that reflects on me.”

Louis Theroux talks about the “inflationary spiral of racism and bigotry in order to get people’s attention.” But inflation is destructive, a spiral where asset values tend to collapse. And the content is not the point, it’s the bait. On the hook are subscriptions and a lot of unregulated gambling. Over the course of making the documentary we watch Theroux lose £500 as he invests in one of Sullivan’s investment schemes. The manosphere market is short-term. There’s only so many times you can lose your client’s cash before they go back to the bookies, or some other male-owned addiction service. The documentary occipies the inflationary spiral it warns viewers about.

Consider U.S. influencer, Nico Kenn De Balinthazy a.k.a. Sneako, who says the manosphere has ‘graduated’ to selling ideology. Ok, we might think, so what does the ideology contain? Sneako can’t go out in the streets of New York without wearing a mask. But in a New York deli he explains to Theroux that the world is threatened by a Satanist cabal, a one-world government that controls politicians and celebrities. Paranoid, feverish conspiracies are similarly expressed by Ed Matthews, a British influencer, who informs Theroux of the negative vibrations controlled by Jews and other dark forces. At the documentary’s chaotic close, Sullivan accuses Theroux of being a “puppet” under Jewish control. In this, one of the film’s more ambiguous and arresting sequences, Sullivan points out that they are all content creators, including Theroux, who is using Sullivan to get paid.

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill ... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” It is puzzling how this scene from the movie The Matrix (1999), and the source for the idea of ‘red pilling’ popular on the political right, clarifies a kind of moral choice rather than bad-faith coercion.

If we picture society as individuals, choosing between pills of oblivion or truth, we may never recognise how media organisations play a role in a confessional culture, one where the answers to hopes and problems are delegated to the control of media companies.

In the modern era, social media is one among other intermediaries that binds a confessor to confessing groups. The content shared is less relevant, perhaps, than the direction and control of data between the powerful and the weak. Penitents may seek short-term solace or enlightenment before these anonymous, surveillance machines, dishing out metaphorical pills, but we should always pay attention to the decisions of state and corporate organisations that support the role of confession in the first instance. These are the organisations that justify inequality, too, and who insist we can only change our circumstances by choosing between unattractive or degraded futures, that they control.

Despite Inside the Manosphere being a film about social risk it circulates fear. Rather than confront the consequences of sexual violence and financial coercion it puts a spotlight on a series of circus acts, not the audience or the owners profiting from the circus. There are no direct victims named in this documentary; few women or girls, men or boys who tell of the damage being done to them. We are asked to think about implied harms, abstract or hypothetical pain. This is why the film circulates fear. It is a fearful media, the kind that raises an alarm. It does not want you to see how or why or where the fire rages.

As the film passes over old photos of children, we are told to note the absence of childhood father figures. If we do this, says Theroux, we can understand content creators as “wounded” individuals who are “projecting their trauma onto the wider world.” The diagnosis feels distant and promotes the controversial idea that individuals should be accountable for the past actions of others, while also advocating for strong father figures, and traditional family structures. Moreover, and in the effort to account for online misogyny as “an ideology based on trauma,” Theroux fails to identify a history of media technology – print, telephone, radio, cinema, television – that shows how men have used media to dominate and control the lives of others.

No responsibility is taken by legacy media or newer, technology companies, among them Meta, Google, X, Netflix, or the crypto gambling site Stake.com, whose owners own the streaming platform Kick. Their absence does nothing to expand our critical understanding of media power. But, above all, the idea that the dangers posed by our media environment should be tackled by individuals, who should make better choices, reflect the tactics perfected by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, and the U.S. gun lobby. Media platforms, such as the BBC and Netflix, will keep talented and well-respected priests like Louis Theroux in the limelight, so long as he keeps up his moral-matador routine before angry young men. It’s entertaining and useful, so long as he helps to hold out the pills or stand accused of being a conspirator puppet. So long, maybe, as media organisations are never named. And so long as the risks of these services are socialised to the many, whole their profits continue to be held by the few.

Prominent political wearers of the Barbour include ex-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, far-right showman Nigel Farage and garrulous warlord Steve Bannon. Is the Barbour politically left or politically right? Calenda’s groupies asked. He assured them it was neither. Barbour resists political tribalism – Il Barbour, he said, è country.

Globalisation can meddle with the intimate past. For me Barbour jackets evoke an idea of English country living that is hard and inelegant. Barbour is the smell of paraffin wrapped around a body like a shield and it belongs to the adults I knew as a child, people like my parents, who lived and worked on a small English farm in Dorset. They wore Barbour as an antidote to foul weather and a muddy walk under a slate sky, a companion on outings that left your cheeks flushed and hands stinging. Barbour’s England was culturally small, unfashionable and partially rotten; sleeves shredded, pockets torn.

Barbour used to make the kind of jackets that attached to unpopular boys at school, or to uncles with dangerous reputations. No one wanting popularity would ever wear such a thing.

So, when you review Barbour’s broader history you find it ricocheting through the English class system in ways that Italians tend not to understand. Far from being ‘traditional’ to the English countryside the Bedale, Beaufort and the Border jackets were introduced in the early 1980s. The Barbour company had humble beginnings. Founded in the late 1800s in the North-East of England, John Barbour began importing oil-cloth and selling raincoats to North Sea mariners. Rugged, working class men put to sea in Barbour because it stopped them getting wet. Early on, sales of oilskin outerwear expanded locally to rural workers, with a strict emphasis on functionality and affordability, and gradually expanded in the 1910s to reach national and overseas markets via mail order. The designs were basic and quite unlike the jackets we know today. In the 1930s the brand added motorcycling and military wear. Each Barbour generation added an inflection, an accent or function. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that waxed-cotton jackets received Royal Warrants and became the elite mainstays of English royalty, worn at country residences – Balmoral, Highgrove, Sandringham and so on – and never in the city.

By the 1980s young men and women mocked as ‘Sloane Rangers’ for their association with rich areas of London like Sloane Square found they could stuff bottles of champagne in a Beaufort ‘poachers pocket’. It was from this point that Barbour sparred with an urban idea of luxury and glamour.

Profits declined in the 1990s and Barbour’s limelight dimmed. It would take a handful of celebrities – Arctic Monkey’s Alex Turner, Kate Moss, Daniel Craig as James Bond in Skyfall, among others - that turned Barbour into a luxury brand, with international appeal. Contemporary, casual, classic, elite. Then came Season 4 of the Netflix series The Crown known as “Barbour-jacket porn”, where every member of the British Royal Family was represented in the brand. It is this recent wave of international exposure via online media that led to Barbour’s sales exploding in the 2020s. Now it is everywhere and into everything – hats, shirts, bags, underwear, pet accessories.

The younger sort of Italian man wears his Barbour comically tight, the sleeves short, giving him the appearance of a stage magician with nothing to hide. The fashion editor and stylist Jacob Kjeldgaard notes they are playing with a family tree, wanting to taste the glamour of the 1980s Barbour rather than the grit of the 1990s. They use it as “a status symbol” he says, “the Italian version of the Sloanie”. We can think of it as a shortcut through time, an “old-money look” that for Kjeldgaard means “dressing like their granddads”. Barbour’s historic connection to English rural work becomes ever more distant but never goes away; the rural is transformed into a vague country.

Today, Italians face a changing climate. Barbour’s strapline – “the best clothing for the worst weather” – hits different during a 15°c Roman winter. Likewise, last year, Calenda faced down keffiyeh-wearing students at his old alma mater, La Sapienza, wearing a coat of waxed cotton that retails at €445. Over the din of a megaphone he asked them to reason, to debate. When they refused this invitation – they were protesting his presence – he dismissed them as unreasonable people, a mob with nothing to say. This is the country Carlo wants you to enter. But before you respond. Think: why he is wearing his coat indoors?

From an anthropological point of view the Barbour jacket does powerful work – projecting and appropriating national and class traditions for those with a thin understanding of what it means to work the land. Key to this power, I think, is an idea of heritage that is always transforming rather than static, a heritage able to host many competing and contrary protagonists (among them: mariners, farmers, landowners, motorcyclists and infantryman, English royals, urban elites, rock star celebs, finance bros, politicians). The Emperor’s new wardrobe smells of paraffin, and our era of authenticity has adopted the Barbour as its durable, respectable and well-worn livery. Bannon and Farage want you to see the Barbour and see reason and common sense, particularly when what they say is illegal, untrue or insurrectionary. I take some solace in the fact that this politics (like a Barbour jacket) can be taken off. Despite appearances national conservatives are opportunists whose ideas tend to age rapidly under the light of scrutiny. We can look to the Barbour brand as a guide here, too. No social group can call the Barbour theirs for very long.

This article originally featured in Il Foglio Review under the title “Benvenuti a Barbour country.” I am grateful to Livia Chiriatti and her colleagues for permission to publish the English-language version on The Kiosk, albeit with some changes for readers who might be unfamiliar with Italian politics.

I was raised in this environment, given to possess the confidence of a child trapped in an adult’s legal body, and unable to challenge the economic inconsistencies of previous generations. Desiring to participate in a hedonistic culture of emotional extremism, I declared myself seriously ready for love. Prior to all this, my relationships amounted to never more than three months of mad desire before collapsing over obstacles I was too young to understand. With hindsight it’s clear to see why my previous efforts had failed. Still in my teens, and with the mental stability of a mechanical bull, I wanted to be seduced by feeling - the only trustworthy thing our wider culture told us to believe in.

I tended to see the chaos as a stand-in for a higher order of reality, and was left vulnerable to myself and the pretence of others when things went wrong, the reality split into punishment. Rather than examine any of this, though, we used the alchemical vocabulary of millennial dating culture – chemistry, fate, or type – and the astroturfed rules of attraction that rendered every human interaction into the apolitical world of pop psychology. This was why it was believed the good times were imminent, as soon as you found the right person.

I found that after five months of love with a friend I met in university halls, the shortcomings of my previous relationships could be repurposed to seal the quality of a new romance. I demanded more, of course, like an addict with a tenuous grip on reality. So, as the summer arrived, she and I set off to Italy, with a lot of feelings and an openness to experiences that neither of us had before. This was the start of a grand tour, I thought.

Our journey started very badly. Somewhere near Pisa I realised I had left my camera on the plane. Before digital photography those machines had a unique status. Undeveloped film in particular had a magic potential, as both the guarrantee of the memory machine and a time-lapsed revelation of the recent past. None of this went through my mind at the time though, I just thought it would be a good idea to return to the airport to ask for it. Just a matter of retracing our footsteps and asking nicely. We got to the airport, we didn’t get the camera, and so we returned to Pisa rail station to learn that we had missed the last train to Florence. Having no money and less wit, we decided to pass the first night of this romantic weekend lying on the floor of a railway station, waiting for dawn. We were surrounded by a group of equally clueless students from Colombia and representatives from the local homeless community.

I have vivid memories of failing to sleep, looking over to an enormous man who had stretched his great frame across the length of the ticket office counter. He was suspended there, levitating like a magician’s assistant, his right testicle swung out the leg of his tiny shorts, as might a whithered purse. I closed my eyes and tried to match my breathing to the man’s volcanic, midnight roar.

We arrived in Florence already beaten. We saw so much Renaissance art that I thought my legs might drop off. My strongest memory, if it is a memory in the conventional sense, is this physical exhaustion; the sensation that our bodies could not take any more standing and looking, walking and looking. The other feeling I remember dominating me in those days was a feeling of profound and alienating ignorance, linked to the sheer quantity of information that was all around us – historical, religious, Classical, and artistic.

Now that I live in Italy, I think a lot about that initial feeling of being unprepared, and how, at the time, I considered this ignorance a personal failing. A class anxiety about thinking I should know; a class anxiety about not being educated at the institutions that would let me know. In time the madness of this knowing (or not-knowing) has become a private pleasure, as well as a motivation to handle the spoils of Florence’s cosmic era. I think that if we accept that contemporary media makes life abundant and confusing, then Renaissance media is also very contradictory, messy, speculative, monopolistic, and riddled with misinformation, desperately needy for conservative art historians to make it sensible, and univocal.

The athletic oddness of Florence was made truly weird by the appearance of Radiohead, who happened to be touring the album Hail to the Thief (2003). We didn’t have tickets for the show but were content to sit in the garden of a nearby hotel, which gave us a view over the wall and into the arena. Up there on Piazzale Michelangelo, overlooking Florence’s domes and towers with takeaway pizza and wine, it was easy for us to recognise we were very much in love. What else had brought us here? And it took time, and more time with pictures in Florence, to know that things like this happen according to a perspective held in time and place; surprise is only romantic if you cannot see life coming, or where it might be going. If I were to access other perspectives, whose overlapping fantasies and realties could put us up and over that wall, I might see the Italian woman with the short brown hair, who was also at that Radiohead concert. She and I would meet in London 5 years later. Until then she was anonymous to me, an unknown person blurred among others, depersonalised by a crowd. But best not get ahead. The point is the whipped mix of first loves made in Italy, whose sense of an ending is a point of view. And like other, generic continental loves, romance cannot have its moment without a unique kind of English death.

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Wallace is unwell

I called my parents when we got back to England. I didn’t send a message or email. It was 2003 and I called them on a landline. I wanted to let them know I was alive. Before smart phones and SMS messaging, a bundle of technologies that needed everyone to own a phone with similar capacities, I guess that 80-90 per cent of telephone conversations simply confirmed the ongoing existence of one or more of those on the line. It was during this call of duty that I heard my mother give her dark report, ‘Wallace is unwell.’

This was newsworthy for various reasons. Wallace, my dog and beagle, was of an iron temperament. He expressed displeasure and raised a snout at those he did not trust. But he was not a sickly creature. His greatest curse was his own beauty. This was also a curse to us. I know what you might be thinking, yes - all dog owners claim their dogs are beautiful, gesturing to the hideous, yapping rat-goblins, whom they push around in prams. But Wallace really was beautiful, and used this beauty to mask his essentially haughty, devious and downright wicked nature. He was any number of Leonardo diCaprio characters blended together. To me this made him a great dog. Not so much a pet (he would not be tamed) but a talisman and a mood, a legend. Wallace was my dog. And he was my first true love.

By the time I got home from Florence, summer love was in bloom and Wallace was in the ground. As one part of my life began another was over. His great, wooden log, the one we used to anchor him – the only way we could stop him raiding the neighbour’s bins – was already on a fire. He had lived very fast (when he wasn’t chained to the log) and died faster, the events that led to his death a blur no one bothered to truly understand. We accepted that the cause of death was likely Wallace’s phenomenal appetite, a greed had destroyed him.

Our farm dogs had mixed diets: canned meats, leftovers, dry food. We put these out in the bowls behind different doors in an attempt to stop Wallace stealing the food of all the other animals. It was never enough for this very hungry beagle. He must have found something else, something chemical or rotten, and very deadly.

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He died doing the thing he loved

I spend time online in the naive belief that I might learn about the world. I learn a lot about social media, and how it pictures the world and my place in it. Here comes a promoted advert, then, suggesting I buy ‘personalised’ dog food from a company called Tails.com. My first reaction on seeing this is to spool out those images of Florence, and the news that Wallace. Dead, the dog is dead. Advertisers price these pangs of sadness, this rush of emotion. They know this chains together distant as well as focal memories, and gives them attention. In my case I strongly associate dog food with the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Thom Yorke, and with a dog that ate himself into an early grave. Is that what the adlads at Tails.com want? Do they even care what people think?

Any product can have the word ‘personalised’ attached to it, including precision bombs and missiles. Tails.com might seek to personalise pet food – the stuff that is proverbially uniform, undifferentiated, derivative – with ingredients selected especially for your dog’s individual needs. Beyond the familiar platitudes that focus on customisation, what is the target of this ‘personalised’ service? What can slice through the affections I had for a dog that died for a suicidal pleasure?

I am a technology pessimist - things are bad. It’s obvious, you don’t need a professor of media or philosophy or some other technologist to convince you that the way we develop, use and cede control to technology has many, many flaws. But in this ad I found grounds for hope. There are always ways to outmaneuvre, dance with and evade the intrusions of our tech overlords, and these ads for dog food remind me to explore the vast and unfathomable gaps between human behaviour, meaning and intention, as well as how media content, the intended target, and all the possible effects of these signs, open space for creative responses and dissenting interpretations. Walk through the Uffizi if you need, stare at hundreds of adoration scenes. Those same gaps exist between parts and the wholes as fractal multitudes, ever changing and as numerous as the people who have become adtech ‘targets’, as capacious and contradictory as human desire. This should give hope to every other technology pessimist, like me, who want more failure, more cracks in the black mirror.

The internet is an asymmetric space where data collection and analysis has become a kind of modern divination, the workings of software is inferred by users and animated like a folk spirit, the algo does this, it wants me to know that. Social media platforms collect data about me and track my interactions with the platform. But what I did to be a candidate for Tails.com will be a mystery I cannot be allowed to unravel. Had I been selected because I associated myself with the weird ‘doggo’ accounts that once filled these media platforms? Surely more sophisticated or factual information is needed? Like, I don’t know, the certainty that I do indeed have a dog? For a relatively new company like Tails.com advertising to new customers must also announce themselves to potential investors. Their ads celebrate their innovation within a market, ‘the tailor-made dog food disrupting the industry’, as well as promising products ‘as unique as your dog’. Whatever made me the ostensive target for this company’s product, the algorithmic trap was sprung. But the trap is not very efficient, and shows us more about digital culture’s inaccuracies and margins for error than it does demonstrate the power and mastery of our adtech overlords. This is how the imprecise qualities of personalised ads for personalised services create opportunities to refuse the model of technology they are built on.

Counting and knowing lost worlds

The past is rarely personalised but welds geopolitical, intimate and impersonal details together in ways that can be suprising, like a Radiohead gig on a hill, unless some effort is made to turn over the mechanism of suprise, to understand how and why we see certain memories and not others. Few people recall the day the internet changed. If such a day exists I nominate the day Google launched its targeted advertising programme, Adsense, June 18, 2003. In the 20 or so years that followed, web-based publishing, and what most people experience as ‘The Internet’ has become our primary media technology, whose primacy depends on hoovering up user data to fuel a real-time bidding bloodsport that defines the attention economy.

One of the most powerful talking points of recent years is to speculate about what kind of jobs an ‘AI future’ would make redundant. It is a debate I treat as powerful, not becuase it is helpful or interesting or even realistic (I happen to think it depends on many fantasies about human value and creativity that are essentially authoritarian in nature), but because it stops us from questioning if this ‘AI future’ is possible or desirable. It stops you from asking how riches are created from this future, and how they will be divided, and it prevents discussion of harms greater than all the imaginary benefits.

As we are compelled to hear others speculate about a future for which there is no consensus, it is harder to visualise and value lost objects, the person or thing that has passed, compared to the excitement of things to come. Our greatest creative acts might required to imagine the worlds we have lost since 2003. Economists idealise this thinking, an undertanding of decision making that names and values foregone choices as ‘opportunity costs’. The revenues taken from internet advertising have defined Google’s monopoly, and secured its position to compete in the current AI arms race. The current valuation of $3.8 trillion is comparabile to the cost of the ending world hunger, the eradication of most known diseases, and the full transition to renewable energy. The alleviation of suffering at a scale that would also make capitalism unimaginable. If we want speculative debates about the future then we may want a future worth debating.

This article uses and elaborates on a project called ‘People Like You’: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation 2018-2022.