No Words, No ears (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

People these days walk down the street talking to themselves. Some are in the business of earning a living. Others are off their heads. The distinction is a fine one.

The mobile phone is surely the quintessential image of a society in which nobody talks to anyone, but needs to pass messages to everyone. As humans we walk down our street with heads lowered in ease we are approached by a neighbourly smile—a sure sign of madness in the contemporary capitalist conurbation. As labour-power commodities, going about our business of making rich pigs falter, we talk endlessly into little pocket-sized machines which wire us up invisibly to our slave cages.

On a morning train between Liverpool Street and Cambridge I suddenly had a horrible vision, worsened by the fact that my eyes were open and what I thought I saw was real. More people (or “customers” as we must now known them) were talking to their phones than to each other. A little boy talked to his tired mother, asking why trees were green, but she told him to shut up and then bribed him with a Mars bar. Having attempted without success to talk to the man opposite (something along the lines of “It’s a lousy bloody day, isn’t it? What parasitical crook are you off to make profits for?”) I watched him press his magic buttons, activate the compulsory nasal tones of the travelling twat in middle management, and proceed to talk gobbledcgook all the way to Harlow about sales figures and the need to beef up quality control. Upon arrival in Cambridge he opened an attache ease and very carefully, one-by-one, opened and closed each of his files, glancing only once and with the contempt of a busy man at the novel which was my anachronistic connection to someone else’s mind.

Now, there can be bad novels (such as every one ever written by Jeffrey Archer) and there can be good uses for mobile phone (such as calling 0171-622 3811 in one of those emergencies which we all have when someone asks a tricky question about the break-up of feudalism and you need to get a back-issue of the Socialist Standard in a big rush). But, these points accepted, can it not be said that books and reading are signs that we are human, and capable of consciously realising our own humanity, whereas the mobile phone, with its alienated purpose of allowing commerce to be intrusively articulated everywhere from the cricket stand to the honeymoon suite, is a sign that the profit system is robbing us of the very’ character of our uniqueness as a species: the ability to communicate thoughtfully? Have you ever heard a mobile-phone-user reciting beautiful verse or treating a friend to a song via the mysterious innards of the cordless leash? No. they are too busy nodding verbally to every want and whim of the boss. They connect to a ventriloquist, but never quite realise what that makes them.

Then there are the head machines, purchased cheaply to ensure that the mind in transit is always blocked out by a thumping beat. Take a Walkman and be sure that your mind will never wander. Did Marx ever think that convincing wage-slaves of the need for freeing themselves would involve having first to teach them how to lip-read? On the train from Cambridge back to Liverpool Street where another man in another grey suit and grey face talks greyly into the greyness of another conversation with the commerce that now runs through the air like a plague, another woman with another small boy (not the one who wondered about the trees, for this mother has put a dummy into her boy's mouth, as if preparing him for future life) has her cheap earphones overflowing into the jabbering atmosphere. Listening into your neighbour's conversation these days offers a choice between sales curves and drum machines.

Back in Liverpool Street, a sort of unofficial border zone between the City of London and the East End, I head eastwards to buy a salt beef sandwich (on rye, plenty of mustard) with a sweet-and-sour cucumber. Walking past a doorway there is a woman declaring vociferously to herself that the messiah has come down to earth and is currently living in a bedsit in Brick Lane. Passers-by ignore her or stop to sneer. I stop to ask her whether the messiah would care to enter a public debate at a location of his choosing—the cost of the hall and the collection would be shared. But she persists in ranting to herself and my curiosity is overwhelmed by hunger.

One-way communication is a waste of time. No, worse, it is anti-human. Be they evangelising to themselves, plotting sales or listening to machine-made drum beats, they are so far from communicating as to be speaking the language of the deranged—the new universal language of capitalism. 

Steve Coleman