Captive Audience

A modest proposal for peace and quiet.

The Human Condition — René Magritte (1933)

I cannot be alone in my moderate conviction that anyone who plays their music on public transport—or in public—should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for the hygiene of the gene pool.

Perhaps I’m just a touch cynical.

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As Great Britain insists on degrading into a basket case, I’ve decided to chronicle our decline—a national suicide note in weekly chapters—from the confines of a pub.

One character, who spends more time in this pub than the carpet, recently asked me one of those questions that swirl and souse around the skull after the seventh pint. For shame, this question comes from the American, and utterly inferior version of The Office—ineluctable proof of British decline, irrelevance, and anomie.

“Right,” he goes. “If you were in a room with Hitler and Stalin, and you had a handgun with just one bullet, who would you kill?”

As the character dispensed this inquiry, a spiv who likely lost all his money on the recent revelation that cryptocurrency is just astrology for gym bros, gabbed incessantly into his iPhone.

“Yeah? Yeah… Yeah?! Yeah!”

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Hitler or Stalin? One bullet. I thought about it awhile. If I had to rewrite history and save the world from either two of the most grotesque of creatures—save millions of lives, reverse decades of torment, and erase a stain from which our civilisation will never recover—to whom would I deliver the bullet?

The answer? Neither. You see, to kill Hitler would leave Stalin. To kill Stalin would leave Hitler.

The question commits the Evil Man fallacy: the comforting delusion that such unique and industrious evil is buried within the brains of one or two monsters. Like all horrors and atrocities, the one-third of the population called ‘latent authoritarians’ make possible such industrial horror. Some revel in the opportunity to maltreat others. Others in the luxury of turning a blind eye to such unspeakable horrors.

 Kill Hitler: up pops Himmler. Kill Stalin: up pops Lavrenty Beria. Both men were creatures so hideous they’d doubtless have innovated and economised upon the murderous work of their superiors. The second-in-command does little else but mentally ‘improve’ upon the work of his master.

Anyway, I compromised. If Hitler, Stalin, and the bloke who invented the loudspeaker were all in a room, and I had three bullets, I’d deliver all three as politely and humanely to the inventor.  

Walter L. Shaw was a telecommunications engineer and inventor of the loudspeaker found on today’s smartphones. He invented numerous gizmos which plague mankind today and will plague mankind forever.

Thanks to Shaw’s devilish ingenuity, the prospect of peace and quiet in our time is remote.

Shaw, then, is responsible for the form of civilised waterboarding known as ‘talking on loudspeaker in public.’

When you’re sitting on the subway or strolling a cart around a store or walking down the street, the cacophony of babble emitting from the phones of millions is Shaw’s gift to civilisation.

Walter L. Shaw unleashed upon us moderns the twin plagues of vanity and sloth.

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From beyond the grave, Shaw dements the living. From his inventions, we ingest the poisoned fruits of our culture of narcissism.

On the subway recently, I enjoyed the music of someone I’d never met and will never see again. My musical vocabulary doesn’t quite capture the brilliance. If I had to describe it, I’d say it sounded like a brick in a washing machine. A washing machine beached upon one’s chest. No, it sounded like the onset of paranoid schizophrenia.

Without Shaw’s inventions, the other worst contraption known to man would not have bubbled from Dante’s eighth circle. The selfie camera.

Blocking selfie camera technology would cure ninety-nine percent of modern maladies.

Why? Because such technology has enabled the marginalia of life to masquerade as the meat. Such technology has rendered everything into a performance and everyone into a performer.

In this culture of condiments and no food, we now spend our offline lives creating ‘content’ for our online lives.

Such technology has abolished privacy. A curious detail of the modern world is not only the expectation to tolerate others but the expectation to play the part of a captive audience in a theatre of strangers.

Walk down any block in New York. Is that a crazy person gabbing to himself? Oh, no. It’s an influencer informing his followers that he is indeed walking down the street at this present time.

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Back in 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first detonation of his invention, the atom bomb. As he watched on, a slither of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad Gita ran through his mind: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer didn’t destroy the world. Walter L. Shaw did.

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