Anti-social behaviour

I blame Tim Lovejoy. His raving about Twitter, 14 years ago, convinced me to dive in. Such was his endorsement of the social media platform on BBC2’s Something For The Weekend (before it transferred to Channel 4 as Sunday Brunch) that I had to give it a go. 

It was a bit of a laugh back then, with people posting stupid cat videos and making witty remarks about their breakfast. With tweets originally restricted to 140 characters, it started the culture of ‘micro blogging’. Over time, it evolved into an invaluable source of almost immediate information generated by media organisations and businesses, as well as individuals disseminating Things They Know. It created its own luminaries, too - must-read accounts authored by smart, witty people who could write with erudition (and knew the difference between “your” and “you’re”, as well as the role a possessive apostrophe plays in basic grammar). Most of all, it was free. Free! 

But, then – and I’m conveniently truncating history here – Donald Trump came along, and his deranged early morning, stream of consciousness, all-caps tweets (written, we assumed, while he was conducting the day’s first ablutions) started to take Twitter into a very different direction. We had entered the ‘post-truth’ era, and before you knew it, Twitter had become bad for your mental health - especially if you’re susceptible to the grifting of certain politicians and their equally gaslighting acolytes. Views long-banished to the darkened recesses of society were propelled to the surface, or near enough.

Oddly, though, that hasn’t been the worst development. That arguably occurred when Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the platform last October, set about firing half of its employees, and introduced a new subscription model in a clumsy attempt to make it generate more income. Ever since, Twitter has been a raging bin fire of functional and policy changes – believed to be instigated by ‘Space Karen’ himself – that have made the platform a significantly less fun place to be.

For some, this last Saturday may have proven to be the final straw. “Rate limit exceeded – Please wait a few moments then try again” appeared in the place of up-to-the-minute missives about whatever. Twitter appeared to be down. The hashtags #ratelimitexceeded and #twitterdown started trending, except no-one could read the tweets born by them. No-one – with perhaps the exception of Musk – knew what the hell was going on. Twitter wasn’t down - it had been intentionally broken by its owner.

In, oddly, one of the few tweets you could read, Musk later explained what had happened: “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day; - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; - New unverified accounts to 300/day.”

Immediately there was a collective realisation that Musk was having another dummy-spitting episode about something. He was doing it knowingly, too. Twitter (or Musk) would later raise the restrictions to 8,000/800/400 tweets viewed and then 10,000/1,000/500 respectively, with the South African billionaire clearly finding the whole exercise – and the brouhaha it generated - funny. 

“You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” he wrote in another tweet. He then trolled users further by posting: “Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits,” after people had exceeded their cap by posting the “Rate limited exceeded” message and asking what it meant. Many concluded that “data scraping” and “system manipulation” claims had something to do with AI harvesting (other social media platforms have expressed similar concerns) and didn’t want anyone or anything else to profit from Twitter. 

However, given that Saturday’s action effectively shut off Twitter’s basic functionality to its users - and therefore eyeballs belonging to the platform’s lucrative advertising audience - the whole exercise seemed like another gallon of petrol thrown in the blazing bin. Industry analysts said the latest chaos would not help maintain advertisers’ interest in the platform, with one saying that the stunt was “remarkably bad” for them. “This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return [to Twitter]. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told Reuters, a point of view backed by media buying agencies openly advising clients against using the platform.

Only last month former NBC-Universal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino started work as Twitter CEO with a brief of improving the company’s commercial activity. In fact, according to the Financial Times, Yaccarino had been specifically tasked with restoring relationships with the advertising community, relationships that had been strained since Musk’s takeover and his subsequent tinkering. One industry figure told Reuters that Yaccarino represented the “last best hope” of saving Twitter, which has seen its market value drop to just a quarter of what Musk paid for it.

Key to advertisers staying with Twitter is it continuing to deliver those eyeballs, but in that, no knows for certain how many accounts the platform has, or how many have been closed down since Musk’s takeover (the company no longer discloses how many accounts it has - the last time it did it reported 330 million active monthly users). Several high profile figures, like Sir Elton John have, though, stopped using it since October. 

But for some end users, however, Saturday may well have been the final straw following months of constant, clumsy tinkering: the provocative adoption of Musk’s “free speech absolutism”; introducing the ‘curated’ For You channel no one had asked for (but is oddly addictive); bringing in ‘verified’, subscription-based accounts, replacing previous Blue Tick arrangement for prominent account holders; the arrival of a Wild West of spam and even illegal advertising. 

On Saturday evening, many people - including me - went scurrying off to look for alternative social media outlets that could do the job Twitter had, until relatively recently, done pretty well. The truth is, there aren’t any or, at least, weren’t. There are venerable discussion platforms like Reddit, Tumblr and Mastodon, which has a similar interface to Twitter. There are rivals in development, too, like Bluesky, the semi-available app being developed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. 

None, however, appear to offer the immediacy and – when it was good – reliability of Twitter to keep abreast of world events in real time. Which is why, despite Saturday’s nonsense, many users I know, as well as most of the accounts I follow, were operating as usual yesterday. But with the threat of Musk continuing to tamper with what had once been perfectly good (it just struggled to make any money), there is still an open opportunity for someone to offer a direct rival.

Step forward, then, the direct rival – Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and, now, CEO of the Meta empire that owns that original social network, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, will this week launch Threads. 

Available to download from the Apple App Store on Thursday, it will be functionally very similar to Twitter by being -  according to App Store blurb - a “text-based conversation app,” and a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today, to what’ll be trending tomorrow.” 

Threads will enable users to post short messages, with images and links to web pages, as well as engage with them through likes reshares. Given that many people on Twitter also have Instagram accounts, Threads users will be able to easily connect to the accounts they follow on that platform.

Given that Musk is said to have challenged Zuckerberg to an actual cage fight, Threads could be the Meta boss’s ultimate counter-strike. According to The Verge, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, said at a recent company meeting that Threads will be “our response to Twitter”, adding that it was being developed in response to “creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” a barb clearly aimed at Musk.

Not that a Meta-run version of Twitter will be perfect. In its pursuit of profits, Facebook has become, at times, an impenetrable forest of sponsored accounts no one asked for, with functional tinkering of its own making it less of a chronological timeline of posts as a miasma of random items and spam ads. And, to cap it all, ads clearly generated by deep mining of browser activities on devices using Facebook and Instagram. 

It’s safe to assume that Threads will make use of the same algorithms. Nor would you bet against Meta applying a tier-based subscription model to it as Musk has done with Twitter. The problem with free stuff is that sooner or later someone decides that it needs paying for.

However, what might determine Threads’ success is the loyalty with which Twitter users remain attached to it. Even after Saturday’s events, and my own search for an alternative (largely to ensure I have something to look at when Musk breaks Twitter for good), it’s a difficult opiate to be weaned off. 

Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom will have access to newswires constantly churning out headlines – click bait before the phrase was even coined – and the Twitter death scroll has fulfilled much the same service. Even in Musk’s batshit-mad world of peppering your feed with ads for things you have no interest in at all (yes, you, Omaze and your bloody million pound house!), it is still, mostly, populated by tweets from organisations we can be individually interested in or, if you choose the ‘For You’ channel, tweets you have an uncannily unexpected appreciation of.

However, with each new belligerent act by Musk, regardless of whether he is genuinely trying to introduce some commercial reality to the platform (or just being disruptive for larks), the Twitter experience gets ever more wearisome. Zuckerberg knows this. He has considerable muscle (Instagram has around two billion monthly active users, according to Meta), but has also shown himself to be very adept at assimilating concepts from elsewhere (Facebook’s feature for ‘disappearing’ stories seemed to have been lifted from Snapchat, just as short-form video ‘reels’ looked a lot like TikTok). So, if anyone can break the Twitter habit, surely it will be him.

Put out that fire before it takes hold again

Things had been going so well. A month of football festivity that began with Andrea Bocelli at the Stadio Olimpico performing Nessun Dorma, the anthem of that glorious summer of 1990 when football was a regal festival that brought the nation together (up until the point when it went pear-shaped on penalties, of course). England’s progress through Euro 2020 has been a thing of joy, too, not just because they kept winning (and winning well), but because we had, or so we thought, an England team to got behind as a nation. An England team that was about youthful exuberance, a wealth of squad-deep talent, a manager whose past pain was felt by everyone, but whose enduring humility and all-round niceness carried through a vision for his side. 

Even the moronic booing when England players - black and white - took the knee in their opening Group D game against Croatia, eventually gave way to cheers from fans more genuinely inclined to get behind their players, as the privilege of having a ticket to a Wembley international should require. But, clearly, we’d been lulled into a false sense of security. For all our pride at football coming home to where it began, we’ve had a painful reminder of the neanderthal tendencies that lurk not far from the surface. 

Without dismissing it, the drunken yobbishness at Wembley (and in Leicester Square) was tragically inevitable. An 8pm kickoff, you say, for the biggest game in 55 years? Great! When do we start drinking? What has emerged as more disturbing is the motivation amongst those who violently tailgated their way into Wembley Stadium on Sunday evening in truly disgraceful scenes that would have ruined many genuine fans’ experience before a ball had even been kicked. Sadly, though, worse was to come in the wake of the final kick.

Picture: Twitter/England

The racist abuse directed at teenager Bakayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho after their penalties missed should shock everyone, but sadly, they come as no surprise. That booing at Wembley, a month ago today, was a warning that for all our belief that football has become a more inclusive place, after the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s, this country’s culture wars have given rise to it once more. 

Some time ago I likened the febrile mood in Britain to that of New York in Ghostbusters. I didn’t make the comparison to be flippant, but to analogously illustrate how the emergence of cultural division and nastiness was like the film’s fissures and cracks in Manhattan sidewalks revealing the pink slime bubbling up from the underworld. Since the European referendum, there seems to have been a legitimisation of hate on grounds other than just binary politics. The murder of Jo Cox was a sign, as was the desecration of a Polish cultural centre in West London not soon after the vote. The faceless keyboard warriors who posted disgusting abuse on the England players’ social media accounts (not to mention the astonishing volume of people who ‘liked’ those comments), can be directly traced to the UK’s culture war, legitimised by politicians who’ve facilitated and even encouraged the ongoing assault on wokeism, and given licence to the right-wing media and the gobshite rent-a-quote controversialists that provide them with clickbait.

Footballers are normally relatively timid when it comes to their public proclamations. Asked if they’d be in a starting line-up and the doctrinal response is always: “That’s up to the manager - I’m just happy to be a part of the squad.” So it is “extraordinary and unprecedented,” in the words this morning of political correspondent Chris Mason on BBC Breakfast, “that we have an England footballer in Tyrone Mings - in a direct and public and unequivocal way - taking on one of the most senior politicians in the country, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.” 

Patel - who’ll I’ll readily describe as being thick as mince - gave her tacit approval of the knee taking at Wembley being booed by branding it as “gesture politics”, tapping into the frequent message of the right associating the practice by footballers with the alleged Marxist beliefs of America’s core Black Lives Matter movement. Asked by GB News if she would criticise booing fans, she said: “That's a choice for them, quite frankly”. The Aston Villa player - who has previously met Patel to discuss issues of racism - had enough last night, tweeting: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as 'Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against, happens.". He is, Mason correctly described, “boiling with anger”. He’s not alone: Anton Ferdinand - caught up in that ugly racism episode involving my own club’s John Terry a few years ago - added to the debate on the BBC, citing his own experience of the racist abuse he’s had to endure in his football career, calling on the government to something about the social media platforms facilitating the abuse. 

Whether you take the flimsy view that those responsible were just drunken idiots mouthing off, or you see it as the thin edge of a nefarious wedge that seeks to dehumanise minorities, and history has taught us where that leads, it all boils down to the same thing: that any form of abuse, directed at any minority or, for that matter, majority, is symptomatic of a lack of respect for fellow humans. I understand how some people believe that political correctness goes too far, and that wokeism or cancel culture can be irritating, but I’ve never understood how just being kind should come to being wrong. That lies at the heart of online abuse, that social media has enabled commentary that invariably wouldn’t be made to someone’s face. Not to labour the point, but abusing someone for not scoring in a penalty shootout is nothing short of cowardice in the face of bravery. 

Inevitably, the online comments on Sunday night have reignited the debate over social media platforms being unable to police themselves, and that legislation - such as the UK government’s proposed Online Safety Bill forcing Twitter, Facebook and all the rest to make social media a safer place for everyone. The counter to this is that it would effectively be a form of censorship. At the time of writing, a petition calling for greater governance of social media in the wake of the England players’ treatment had reached 500,000 signatures. I can only expect that number to get bigger.

The trouble is that even with Boris Johnson yesterday calling on the footballers’ abusers to “crawl back under the rock from which you emerged”, his own lack of condemnation for those booing England players at Wembley will count amongst the abusers themselves. Patel’s comments, compounded by the tweet that launched Mings’ into orbit, will only have worsened things.

The sad part of this is that a football tournament that, mostly, provided a beacon of hope for inclusion and social cohesion, ended with a stark return to the behaviour that most right-minded people had hoped had disappeared. Of course, it hadn’t, and like a resurgent disease, had simply found somewhere to lay low. On Sunday it erupted. It was sad enough to lose a final on penalties, but nothing - nothing - in any players’ miss, whether Saka, Rashford or Sancho this time, Chris Waddle and Stuart Pearce in 1990, or Gareth Southgate himself in 1996, warrants the level of ferocity that now, in the age of social media anonymity, has been directed at the latest three players. Even more so the colour of their skin. 

The genuinely frightening thing, however, is that in a country where I’d thought myriad minority cultures are accepted and integrated, and in particular, the offensive attitudes towards black football players that blighted the British game as recently as the 1980s, are still there, and they have an outlet. And it’s all part and parcel of a country that has become divided by the politicians who are meant to lead and unite us. It comes from the top. 

The day football came back...briefly

I don’t know about you, but I’m passing the extended lockdown by noting anniversaries of the otherwise mundane: the last time I had a coffee at Caffé Nero, the last time I went swimming, the last time I saw someone in the flesh who wasn’t a member of my immediate household. That sort of thing. For example, Easter Sunday marked an exact month since my last haircut, and given my barnet’s normal growth rate, I’m surprised I'm not yet resembling Tom Hanks in Castaway.

It is now six weeks - SIX - since I last saw a football being kicked in anger, (Chelsea's 4-0 battering of Everton, since you ask, easily the best game I've seen this season). In other circumstances this might have bothered me, but like so many aspects of the viral crisis, there are other things that now take priority and, frankly, football is not one of them. Not that football isn’t perfectly capable of crowbarring itself back into consciousness, whether it is the idiot Kyle Walker getting caught in flagrante with a couple of “sex workers” who clearly weren’t members of his household, or his former club Tottenham Hotspur digging itself into a hole by placing half of its 550 non-playing staff under the government’s furlough scheme and imposing 20% pay cuts on other employees (despite being the world’s eighth-richest football club which recently posted record annual revenues of £461 million and a profit of around £70 million). Facing a backlash from its own fans and even some players, Spurs have wisely made a U-turn, with Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman (who earned a cool £7 million last year) announcing that all non-playing staff will now get paid in full for April and May, with only the board taking a pay cut. Last week Liverpool staged a similar volte face. In truth, clubs like Tottenham and Liverpool - 8th and 7th, respectively, for global club revenues last season - can most afford it. Others, like Bournemouth and Norwich City probably can’t and have carried on with drawing on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

We are on shaky moral ground, here. Elite football generates - and spends - ridiculous amounts of money, money it earns, if it is a Premier League or Championship team, from they eye-watering deals done with television companies. Matchday gate receipts and income from merchandise and sales of dodgy burgers is, for some clubs at this level, something of a bonus. For clubs lower down, however, every last bottle of Coke sold could be the difference between a bleak future or not when this thing is all over. Here, like so many businesses across the spectrum of enterprise, there are people working at these football clubs who earn a mere fraction of the sums trawled by the players they serve. That said, Spurs should never have put themselves in the spotlight with such a PR disaster.

In a club statement Levy said: "The criticism the Club has received over the last week has been felt all the more keenly because of our track record of good works and our huge sense of responsibility to care for those that rely on us, particularly locally. It was never our intent, as custodians, to do anything other than put measures in place to protect jobs whilst the Club sought to continue to operate in a self-sufficient manner during uncertain times.” Be that as it may, but when the businesses of the very fans who keep these clubs going are facing very uncertain futures, Spurs' unnecessary insertion in the coronavirus news cycle was ill-thought through especially, without little fanfare, while other clubs have simply been getting on with it (Leeds United’s first-team squad have agreed wage cuts to assist others at the club, Juventus players have taken a four-month pay cut and Barcelona players have agreed to a 70% pay cut).

Picture: Nike

Were it not for this brouhaha, football would have dropped completely from view. I am, though, inclined to care less about whether the current season ends, or whether Liverpool’s somewhat justifiable receipt of the Premier League title, happens or not. "Staying in, saving lives" has replaced everything else in my consciousness. Last Monday I started a new job, which at least managed to supplant days framed largely by an unhealthy diet of rolling news and watching delivery vans out of the living room window speed up and down the road. Covid-19 has rapidly reshaped our priorities and interests, not that football was exactly an obsession. But I've now realised how much of my time was, pre-crisis, spent on watching, reading, WhatsApping, tweeting and blogging about football. And then, nothing. Like I'd reached the end of the universe and discovered that beyond it, there is nowt. Well, there was, until Easter Sunday when, in much the same manner as EastEnders' Nasty Nick appearing out of the blue to say "'Ello Ma, fancy a cuppa?", the football void was momentarily broken by a bittersweet memory. On Sunday afternoon the BBC cast our minds back to something which, despite coming 30 years ago, still fills football fans with tear-inducing nostalgia: Italia ’90.

The 1990 FIFA World Cup, to give it its full name was, for England fans at least, a moment of mass cultural change. Football was still in the doghouse after the 1985 Heysel disaster and, just a year before, the Hillsborough tragedy in Sheffield. The game didn’t exactly disappear, but it certainly wasn’t where it is now - or at least was before that nasty little virus arrived on these shores. Italia ’90 was a football tournament, obviously, but it managed to transcend that in England, largely thanks to the BBC’s coverage of it. Fronted by the smoother-than-silk Des Lynam (“Desmond”, as commentator John Motson consistently referred to him), the Beeb bought into the dreamy Italian vibe with Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma from Puccini's opera Turandot as its theme tune. “You’ll be humming it soon – you’ll know the words to it by July 8”, Lynam quipped on the opening day, setting an incongruously cultured tone to coverage of a tournament normally less sophisticated. I’m not going to recall the whole thing here - Roger Milla corner flag dance and Totò Schillaci’s eye-bulging reaction to scoring a winner notwithstanding - rather than reminisce over last Sunday’s unexpected flashback: West Germany-v-England.

By 1990 England had been bereft of international footballing success for a full 24 years (“30 years of hurt” would prevail beyond Euro ’96), so England reaching a semi-final against Frans Beckenbauer’s pre-unification West Germany was a big deal. Before the tournament had begun the usual negativity surrounding England had been added to by news that manager Bobby Robson would leave after the competition to join PSV Eindhoven. Then came England’s opening game, a dismal 1-1 draw against Ireland. For the next match, against the Dutch, Robson changed the system around, allowing the-then 23-year-old Paul Gascoigne’s talents fully into the fray. England would win their group, raising prospects - “could this be the year, finally?”. Gazza became a joy to behold and easily England’s breakout tournament start. His supply to David Platt in the last-16 tie against Belgium, enabling the striker to volley spectacularly into the goal with seconds to spare in extra time, marked the youngster as the one to watch. Next came Cameroon in a quarter-final, from which England progressed, just. By this time of the World Cup, Italia ’90 fever had reached its peak. As Des had predicted, Nessun Dorma had become the soundtrack of the summer (along with New Order's World In Motion). Coupled with England’s run, with a team comprised of players in their prime, like Gary Lineker, John Barnes, Des Walker and even Peter Shilton, who seemed old in 1990 (he retired soonafter) but looked absolutely rock-solid between the sticks, we were lured by the charms of the Italian peninsular, its islands and its football culture. Channel 4's Football Italia would come not long after (and could be a whole separate blog post, as I waxed on about James Richardson laconic Saturday morning magazine show).

In that Italian excursion in the summer of 1990 there was one last challenge: that semi-final, on Wednesday, 4 July at the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin. The last group of Englishmen to get out of the northern Italian city with their dignity intact was probably Charlie Croker’s men in The Italian Job, but here was Bobby Robson’s team, on the back of lucky but scintillating results, facing the mighty Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer, and his imperious collection of blond, mullet-haired grafters. I could go on lengthily about that game, except that I won’t. If you missed Sunday’s streamed broadcast then I hope the BBC will dig it out again sometime, and you’ll be able to relive what felt like the first truly romantic football experience of my life. It had highs and lows, and some of the best England football I’d seen at that stage, Gazza in particular proving to be so inventive through the middle, until his rashness showed through and ‘Gazza’s Tears’ became as much an icon of Italia ’90 as Pavarotti’s aria. And the lows? England hitting the inside of the German upright in normal time and then again in the extended period after Lineker’s 80th minute strike had kept them in the game, only for the penalty shootout to end in disappointment for Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle (though lucrative commercials for Pizza Hut must have alleviated the pain for the England left back).

Sunday’s airing of the 1990 semi-final brought back the memory that, in some small way, football had been excused, especially in England. It was OK to talk about the sport again amongst friends and colleagues. England hadn’t just come close to their first final in a generation - indeed, closest to winning the World Cup on foreign soil than any England side before or since - they also played with an aplomb the national side’s critics had hitherto been bating them for. Some might argue that the euphoria of England hosting the Euros six years later - and suffering a similar fate to the Germans… - beats the Italian World Cup in 1990. I just see it as a turning point in football’s reputation, when the classical surroundings of stunning Italian cities, some broadly decent games sprinkled with era-defining moments, did much to restore football. You could even say that Italia ’90 recovered the sport from the neanderthal ugliness that had periodically impaired its profile in the '70s and '80s. It was fun to be transported back 30 years to that July evening. Strangely, it didn’t make me hanker for football to return yet in 2020. Football will come back, like everything else - going to the pub, shopping for clothes, going to the gym - when it’s the right time. Yes, some clubs will suffer. Many will even go out of business, like so many other commercial activities. But it will come back.

Into the Valley

I seem to have made something of a habit of visiting Silicon Valley at the same time as its wealthiest resident makes a splash. Four years ago this week I was in Santa Clara with a group of French journalists on the day Apple staged its "Wish we could say more" 'special event' a couple of miles down the road in Cupertino. It was during this that Apple launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, as well as gifting 500 million iTunes subscribers an unsolicited copy of U2’s brand new album, Songs Of Innocence, which no one, it turned out, really wanted at all.

So to be sitting in an office, last Wednesday, just 15 minutes' drive from Apple's latest launch had a feeling of déjà vu about it. But, then, so often these Apple events do. Even without paying direct attention to the event, occasionally glancing at the video stream on Twitter, I could see it was exactly the usual format: big black screens, Tim Cook opening with the latest numbers of how many gazillion iOS products have been sold, a slick film with design chief Sir Jony Ive intoning his philosophy on the look, shape and feel of things, followed by marketing chief Phil Schiller’s sales pitch.

Picture: Apple

As impressive - and as eye-wateringly expensive - as the new iPhone XS and XS Max are, they are - along with the fourth generation Apple Watch also announced - merely incremental. A new 'Bionic' chip, better OLED displays and a few more wizzy gizmos under the skin might be enough to send frenzied fanboys out to queue in front of their local Apple stores with a deckchair and a flask of tea, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just this year's new model. If, like me, you’re considering replacing an older model, then, also like me, money will be burning a hole in your pocket. But it’s nothing essential, no matter how Apple pitches it. Wall Street takes a similar view. The new iPhones will, no doubt, trouser Apple another huge pile of cash to add to their existing $260 billion stash, but gone are the days when the company can announce something irresistibly must-have, and see its stock price rocket. In fact, Apple shares have a habit of dropping if financial analysts give a "meh" reaction to another slew of nice but relatively uninteresting new toys.

Now I think about it, gone are the days when Silicon Valley produced anything that made the world sit up and take notice. Google Glass, anyone? No, me neither. When I first professionally entered the technology world in 1995 it was still possible to create something totally new. These were the heady days of the dot com boom, where ideas born in bedrooms and garages could attract the largesse of venture capitalists and, consequently, the attention of Porsche salesmen. Silicon Valley had, when I made my first business visit in the late 90s, taken over from Hollywood, 400 miles further south, as the world's dream factory. Just as I’d marvelled at the sight of studios like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Paramount when I first visited Southern California, I was equally as slack-jawed several years later driving through San Francisco Bay Area cities like Mountain View and Sunnyvale and seeing the logos of Intel, HP and the-then Internet giant Yahoo! emblazoned on corporate real estate.

Then, tech hardware was the thing. Today the Valley is a sea of code as software, data and algorithms churn through its myriad campuses. Whereas once we bought TVs, HiFis, PCs and cameras separately, today all that functionality. can be crammed into a single iPhone, with its monster screen and (as promoted this week as a virtue), high quality speakers with extra wide output (the sort of thing passengers on the London Underground are just going to love...). Those who glue it all together, store it in the cloud and making the networks that deliver all this data and content more efficiently are the burghers of today’s Silicon Valley. Don’t get me wrong, the behemoths are still there - you can’t miss the household brand names who all, to a company, have an R&D presence in the Bay Area (no cheap affair, either, given that the Valley is one of the most expensive places on the planet in which to employ people). But the novelty that exploded in the 90s has worn off. The Dream Factory has given way to a corporate beige.

In the 26 years since I first set foot in Santa Clara County it has cycled through different phases. Dot com excitement and digital tech gave way to health start-ups, who in turn gave way to the green revolution. The dot coms still exist, of course, nestling in and amongst all the other consumer electronics, health tech, IT and telecoms businesses in the Valley. And there is still some sense of innovation. But not a lot of 'new'. Uber and Tesla might be toddlers by comparison to Google or PayPal, and Facebook famously has evolved so far that it is part of two-sevenths of the world's population. Rather than being the startup it once was, with Mark Zuckerburg and a team of coders hunched over their laptops, Facebook is now part of the establishment, as much Valley founding fathers as Intel and HP. Just three years ago Facebook moved into its 430,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters in Menlo Park. Now it is planning an even bigger "mixed-use village" on the same site that will include a supermarket, 1,500 apartments, a 125,000 square feet retail space and 1.75 million square feet of office space. Google can claim a similar expansion with its vast corporate town in Mountain View (when I lived in the Valley between 2001 and 2003 I’d not even heard of Google - Yahoo! was, to all intents and purposes, "The Internet".

Picture: Google

What hasn’t changed over the last couple of decades is the wealth. Some Valley veterans claim that it's less ostentatious now than it was in the boom years, while others maintain that it is actually more obvious. It's hard to tell, really. Cars, a touchstone of disposable wealth, appear to a little more German in the Bay Area than other places in America, probably to the annoyance of the current keeper of the White House (who is descended from German imports, anyway). And property...well let’s just say that property in the region is even more ludicrously expensive than when I rented a two-bedroom 'condo' for $2400 a month, part of which was subsidised by my employer.

The can-do culture, however, is still there. The sight of basketball hoops nailed to notice boards and dudes in surf shorts skateboarding along corridors may be a tad worn these days, but the culture prevails, even in those giants who've long-since seen the days of being pioneers on the frontier of technology. Campuses across the South Bay are casual environments, where employees are worked hard but are also allowed some fun in laid-back offices. California's weather provides some of that relief, with many corporate HQs providing outdoor spaces for lunchtime barbecues and team picnics. Many companies, too, have followed Google's cultural lead by offering employees free food and snacks throughout the day, an investment that keeps them engaged - and enclosed - at the same time.

When I first arrived in the Valley I was given a lot of sage advice from more established ex-pats. First, I would soon grow bored of the permanent sunshine (I didn't). The second, was never to wear a suit, lest I be viewed with suspicion and, subsequently, likely to close down a business in times of trouble. I completely forgot this maxim this week when I entered the offices of my new employer wearing the jacket-and-chinos combo uniform in London. Instantly I was marked out by people's gazes as an outsider, given that even senior executives here wear T-shirts and jeans. It's an environment I'm very at home amongst - I've never been much of a suit wearer.

Picture: Google

Workplace attire not withstanding, these last few days have brought me to a conclusion. Well, perhaps more of a realisation. Something I hadn't fully appreciated when I lived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. It's what makes the Valley tick. In the 15 years since I returned to Europe, I've been immersed in a European corporate culture, working for Dutch, French-American and then Finnish companies. Such companies are often national incumbents, more like civil service organisations than enterprises, nurturing careers from cradle-to-grave. Employees are well rewarded with pensions and holiday allowances, statutory sick leave and other social provisions. And thus they work their way steadily towards retirement, when they cash in their pensions or go off to play a lot of golf. Valley companies, however, run on different view. Even those that have been in business many years still feel like they're on some imaginary frontier, where it is impossible to sit still - dangerous, even - less they leave themselves vulnerable. Life is fast, work is hard, but the work-hard, play-hard spirit is tangible. Even in one of the most expensive regions on the planet to buy or even rent property, people seem engaged and self-purposed. It's an age-old cliche, I know, but here the attitude is 'can do', not 'let's give it some thought'. And I like it.

Unplugging the social network

There is, already, an irony to the post you're about to read, in that it will be promoted on the very social media services it concerns. But that's purely because, like most people who use social media, I can't help but want attention. Which, let's face it, is mainly how social media came about to begin with.

It is also behind the news today that pub chain JD Wetherspoon is departing social media for good. Now, given the state of the world - not least of which, a third world war in the offing... - this is "probably" not big news. But, partly as a result of social media, news that Wetherspoons is calling "timegennelmenpurleaze!" on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is...er...indeed news.

According to the chain's not-particularly publicity-shy chairman, Tim Martin, social media is a waste of time and even a drain on his pub managers' time. Well, that's one possible reason. Two others are that 1) Wetherspoons doesn't exactly have a massive following on any of its social accounts and 2) the chain has been mercilessly trolled for taking a pro-Brexit stance (in November last year it had 500,000 beer mats distributed throughout its 895 pubs in the UK with a three-point "Brexit Manifesto" calling on the leaders of the main political parties to get a move on with leaving the EU). Another suggestion is that this is all just a publicity stunt - which, given the fact I'm blogging about it, would mean 'mission accomplished'.

Either way, Martin has raised a valid question about the role of social media in the commercial world. "We are going against conventional wisdom that these platforms are a vital component of a successful business," he told the BBC, saying that society would be better off if people cut the amount of social media use, adding a clear dig at Facebook with a reference to the "misuse of personal data".

Somewhat less convincingly, Martin chose to bring up time consumption amongst employees as another reason to leave social platforms behind, saying that "90-to-95%" of his pubs' managers "felt using social media was not helping the business" due to its "addictive nature", adding: "We were also concerned that pub managers were being side-tracked from the real job of serving customers. I don't believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatsoever."

While I'm sure some Wetherspoons customers might have reason to complain about inattentive bar staff, I very much doubt that they are too busy tweeting out special Friday night offers on jugs of sangria (for reasons of transparency, my local when I lived in Paris - The Bowler - once tweeted me personally because I hadn't been in for a few weeks. Now that is customer engagement!).

Time will tell, though, whether the Wetherspoons departure from social media will have any impact. Conventional wisdom does dictate that a digital presence is essential in the modern world, whether to drive sales, corporate reputation, customer loyalty or all three. Many marketeers believe that Facebook, Twitter and its ilk are simply free advertising platforms which can be augmented by so-called "paid promotion" (essentially, the nub of these networks' business models). The issue, however, is that whether you're an advertiser or simply someone desperate to see friends' cat videos, social media is still, by and large, whatever you want to make of it.

As I wrote, some many posts back, Twitter can be a little like the river of demonic ooze running beneath New York in Ghostbusters, if you dare to be sucked into the reactionary trollery and right wing nutjobs lurking barely below the surface. But it can also be a tremendous expression of democracy, or a wonderful outlet for distributing questionable humour, or the most efficient news feed this side of buying a Reuters subscription.

As for Facebook... Well, the almost-original social network (Friends Reunited, anyone?) clearly has its faults. I won't dwell on the Cambridge Analytica debacle, but there is something intrinsically creepy about suddenly seeing promoted posts for travel companies like Thomas Cook and First Choice on my timeline barely a day after I was looking at summer holidays on my iPad with these very companies. As innocent as it might look, the data harvesting practices of social media networks and their clients concerns me more than anything. They are sitting on a vast amount of information about me, my interests and buying habits which, surely, should be mine to know and for commercial organisations to find out when I choose to buy something from them, and not before.

But back to Charles Martin, who rounded out his decision to take Wetherspoons offline by declaring that people would be "mentally and physically better off" if they limited their social media use to just half an hour a day. Here he may have a point. We certainly know that social media has only added to the complications of modern teenage life, especially amongst girls who, on top of all they've always had to go through, now have to put up with social exclusion, fat shaming and even sexual abuse via the various 'must have' social media platforms they sign up to. Adults are not immune, either, with some living vicariously through Facebook and Instagram, while others suffering feelings of inadequacy as a result of pictures posted of their perfect friends living it up.

The question is, could you do without social media? Would your life feel more complete, rather than less, without it? Those older than the Millennial generation will, of course, have enjoyed life pre-digital. We talked to each other, face-to-face or by phone. If we wanted to show off where we'd been on holiday we handed round a packet of prints from Boots or suburban bores invited friends round for a slide show with fondue.

Now we can share the beach vista as we're sitting in it; we Facebook the meal we're about to eat (though, thankfully, not the final third of the digestion process...); and children will live their entire lives, from the moment they burst out of the womb, in Instagram pictures and stories. And we will lap it all up, so to speak. Because, thanks to the smartphone, we have social media at our fingertips constantly. Just look at a train station at rush hour - banks of stooping commuters, thumbing through their timelines.

And it is exactly this point why, I suspect, JD Wetherspoon will be in a very small minority. In the early days of 'websites', digital interaction was via the PC. Now, it's constant via mobile devices - even smart watches. We fill every unaccounted-for eyeball time with social media sites, on trains and buses, as we walk and as we fly. For some, it's their entire world. For others, it's their only means of self expression. And for others, it's simply a way of avoiding talking to others.

The Wetherspoon chairman's assurance that his company would "still be as vocal as ever" might hark back to the pre-digital age when other media platforms gave companies a voice to the outside world, but the reality - the unbearable truth, if you like - is that in 2018, social media is part of the daily fabric. Rather than leaving such services, corporations should be doing more to make social media a safer place to inhabit. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and recent stories about the role social media plays in London's epidemic of drug/gang violence should serve as a warning to the vast majority of corporate concerns who do still believe in social media. If there really is a reason for corporates unplugging from social networks, it's that for all the good these platforms do in connecting friends or allowing those without a voice to have one, there is a dark side not worth associating with. That's the minority who take it too far. Yes, you Mr. President.