Dreaming of an Exodus
Subscribers' call on Thursday – and an end-of-year thought
There comes a point in December when it’s time to draw a line under the year, so I put on my Christmas jumper (the one with the fa-la-la-la-la-la-llamas that my sister gave me sometime last decade), stop trying to add anything of substance to the projects I’ve been working on, and set up a few calls with people whose faces I’d like to see before the holidays.
This year, I’d like to invite all of you who are supporting my work through paid subscriptions on Substack to join me for a call.
We’ll get together on Thursday at 8.15pm Central European Time. (Apologies for the short notice, I blame the llamas.) There’s no agenda as such, but I can share some news from the writing desk, make time for any questions you want to ask – and, if people are up for it, we’ll break into breakout rooms for a bit, in the latter part of the call, so there’s a chance to meet some other Writing Home subscribers.
This is all by way of a thank you for your support during what I know has been a quiet season on here, as most of my writing energy is going into the new book. I’m aiming to complete a manuscript by April. Meanwhile, thanks to all of you who have stuck with me on this journey, and I look forward to seeing what we can grow together in the next phase of Writing Home, once this book is written.
If you already have a paid subscription, you’ll find the Zoom link for Thursday at the bottom of this post, below the paywall – and if you don’t, but you’d like to join us, then you can take out an annual subscription at a discount on the regular rate between now and Christmas Day.
The other day, a letter arrived in the post, clearly typed by hand on an old typewriter. A few weeks earlier, I had received a long, handwritten letter from a reader. Both correspondents were a generation younger than me, young enough to have lived their entire lives in a world pervaded by electronic communication.
I don’t imagine my readers are particularly representative, but these deliveries left an impression, and they were still on my mind when I read John Harris’s recent column for the Guardian in which he wonders if this year has been a turning point. Nightclubs and concert venues are banning phones, social media use is dropping – especially amongst younger generations – and online dating apps are losing users.
Based on this, he voices “a somewhat dreamy, utopian suggestion”:
Might some of the people whose chronic internet use has left them isolated and introverted – and sometimes angry and paranoid – sooner or later dance and socialise themselves into something better? That’s pretty much what happened at the end of the 1980s, when the combination of ecstasy and dance music quickly known as acid house began to change the cold, atomised country created by Thatcherism with profound consequences.
I’m too young to have experienced that end-of-the-80s vibe shift, but I’ve known people whose lives were profoundly altered by it. One of them went into the Summer of Love as a football hooligan and came out a dedicated, lifelong community activist. One could wish a similar transformation for young men under the spell of Tommy Robinson or Andrew Tate today.
History is not made up only of forces that run unstoppably in one direction, though hindsight makes it easy to narrate things that way. Much of the time, there are movements running in opposite directions, just as the wind can be blowing in different directions in higher and lower layers of the atmosphere. Only later does it become clear, or somewhat clearer, where all the turbulence took us.
Suppose for a moment that Harris is onto something and the tide of “onlineness” has turned. For the past twenty or thirty years, one of the more effective ways to anticipate where things are headed more generally in society has been to pay attention to the habits, behaviours and opinions of the “very online”: at least some of their weirdnesses will turn out to be a sign of where everyone is headed, six months or six years down the line. But there’s no law of nature that makes it so. If the tide were to turn, then these might be the last people to notice, the ones left stranded furthest up the beach, least able to make sense of the world in which we had ended up.
Seven or eight years ago, the Architecture and Design Museum in Stockholm had a call for proposals to create a project around a near-future scenario. I sent them a proposal based around a scenario called “The Exodus” in which the spell of the internet broke, the amount of time people spent at their screens began to fall, and new kinds of in-person gathering and space began to spread. They didn’t go for it, but what I remember is the fierceness of the response from a leftwing activist friend, when I mentioned my proposal in (the irony, I know) a Facebook post. “Why would you want to propose such a reactionary scenario?” they demanded.
If some kind of exodus did happen, if it should turn out in hindsight to have been happening under our noses even now, then this wouldn’t take us back to some earlier point in the timeline. Much of what fuels the anger and paranoia that is bred and spread online would still be here, but we might be in better shape to respond to it.
On which note, thank you once again for reading and supporting Writing Home in 2025. The Zoom link for Thursday’s call is below the paywall at the bottom of this post.
There will probably be one more post before year’s end, as the conversation I recorded with Ivan Illich’s friend and pupil Sajay Samuel is due to go online shortly.
Meanwhile, let me take the opportunity to share a couple of pieces of reading from earlier Decembers that you might appreciate:
Writing Home Subscribers’ Call
Thursday 18 December
8.15pm CET • 7.15pm GMT • 2.15pm East Coast • 11.15am West Coast