A couple of weeks ago, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old American, allegedly shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of a major health insurer in the US. Suddenly, a lot of the ideas I’d be gently noodling with on this show were being discussed as potential sources of violence. Was Mangione a Luddite? Someone who felt that technology had atomised a generation? Or was he, in fact, an accelerationist who believed that artificial intelligence would expand human capability? And, ultimately, did any of this matter?

Now, disaffected young men pick up guns with shocking frequency. They perpetrate violence with shocking frequency. They veil this horror under the cloak of ideology with shocking frequency. In a way, Mangione is no different.

But, in another way, he is very different. Just look at how the violence has been received. For days, Mangione was on the run, seemingly shielded by an American public whose anger over an exploitative healthcare industry was spilling over. He became a pin-up, for a moment, of a generational anxiety. There were echoes of how the Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was received by some climate activists. Violence might not be an answer, but sometimes it make a point. In big capital letters.

But looking at Mangione – and his digital footprint – only confused me more. This didn’t feel like a revolutionary left-winger lashing out at a social evil. In fact, the more I saw, the more I felt like I was seeing someone quite familiar. Basically conservative, intellectually ambitious, in thrall to the technological structures that they also blamed for our ills. Is this just the modern aspect of the age-old libertarianism that has been a constant companion in tech circles?

To discuss all these things – at Ned’s suggestion – I dialled up Io Dodds, a British journalist based in San Francisco, who’s currently a Senior Reporter at The Independent. She had written on Mangione and, in particular, his relationship with an ill-defined movement called the “grey tribe”. In this episode, we’ll try and unravel some of that and put together a definition, however boggling, of what could be a very consequential movement.

Music: Internet Song by Apes of the State

Artwork: Tom Humberstone

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Julio Vincent Gambuto is a New York based author and marketing professional. His new book is Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a Relentless World. As you’ll hear from our conversation, most of the ideas that Julio posits in the book are things that came to him during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020, when the intricate structures of the world where exposed for all to see. But Julio’s book is not really about decluttering your inbox. It’s not even about stopping yourself from paying £30 a month for watery high street mochas. It’s about using that word – unsubscribe – as a manifesto.

I asked Ned, quickly, what they thought about this idea of an unsubscribe culture, and whether we might be at a turning point. I will caveat their response by saying that they – like me, to be fair – have some business interests at stake in that not happening.

“NICK, ALL THE DATA SHOWS THAT SUBSCRIPTION GOES IN ONE DIRECTION: UP. THIS QUESTION OF DECLUTTER AND DISENTANGLE IS ONE ONLY DISCUSSED IN SPECIFIC CIRCLES – THE SORT OF CIRCLES WHERE GUYS ARE BUYING 500 DOLLAR DUMB PHONES AND GOING ON WORDLESS YOGA RETREATS THAT COST THE ANNUAL SALARY OF SOME BLUE COLLAR SCHMUCK. AND THE INTERNET HAS MADE RELATIONSHIP SUBSCRIPTION – AS YOU PUT IT – ALL THE MORE COMMON AND VALUABLE. HOW MANY OF YOUR HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS ARE YOU STILL LINKED TO, EVEN VIA INSTAGRAM OR FACEOOK, NOW, AS OPPOSED TO YOUR PARENTS GENERATION WHO WILL BE TAKEN TOTALLY OFF GUARD WHEN THEY HEAR THAT THEIR KIDDIE BEST FRIEND ACTUALLY DIED FIVE YEARS AGO? CONNECT, CONNECT, CONNECT; SUBSCRIBE, SUBSCRIBE, SUBSCRIBE. LIKE IT OR NOT THIS IS THE FLOW OF TRAVEL.”

Even though I don’t really disagree with the premise that people’s subscription obsession and consequent connectivity is broadly still trending upwards, I don’t think the move to Marie Kondo our digital worlds is unique to technological toffs. It’s a bandwidth issue as much as anything. Maintaining a multi-platform social media habit, listening to podcasts and watching YouTube and reading newsletters, keeping on top of your work email, your personal email, the email you just use to get fresh voucher codes. It’s a lot. And people aren’t just actively rebelling against it – they’re running out of time.

So I do think we should think more proactively about what we subscribe to, and that’s where Julio comes in. He spoke to me last week from a house in New Jersey, and hopefully you’ll glean something useful from our chat.

Presented by Nick Hilton.

Music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.

Artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

NEDLUDDLIVES.COM

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Here in the UK we have an estimated adult literacy rate of 99%, which the US is at 86%. Amongst UN member states, the average is 86.7%. Adult literacy has been one of the great triumphs of the 20th century, but it has also become a productive necessity as the service and information economies have grown. It is hard to conduct business without being able to read.

And yet the pleasure of reading is something that is being steadily eroded. Book markets are being dominated by celebrity memoirs, self-help books and children’s fiction. On the latter, it is striking that children’s books make up a third of all book sales in the UK despite children making up, firstly, about 21% of the population and, secondly, being largely unable to read. What is the point of buying children all these books, focusing so much on teaching them to read, if they don’t grow up to be readers?

This is why I dialled up Tom Rowley. Tom is a former Economist journalist who gave up his very successful career at the mag to start a bookshop: Backstory. He’s been chronicling this for the past couple of years, as Backstory has gone from a glint in the milkman’s eye to a very real shop on the high street in London. In this wide ranging discussion, we’ll look at reading, books and bookshops in a digital age, and how maybe – just maybe – they’re defying some of the anticipated trends….

Presented by Nick Hilton.

Sound mixing by Ewan Cameron.

Theme song by Apes of the State.

Cover artwork by Tom Humberstone.

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