Chicken farming or grievance farming: which pays better?
Plus the latest from the AI tsunami, in brief
In November, the News Agents podcast—the new post-BBC life of Emily Maitlis (ex-Newsnight, who did that interiew with Prince Andrew), Jon Sopel (ex-US political editor) and Lewis Goodall (also ex-Newsnight)—did an extended interview with a chicken, sheep and pig farmer who also has a thousand acres for arables. He explained how incredibly difficult it is to make money from farming animals: you’re dealing with so many variables, such as the price of feed (goes up when energy prices go up), heating costs (ditto), how much national and international competition you face (random), how much supermarkets and other retailers are willing to pay (which has nothing to do with how much they sell stuff for).
He’s quite well-off, so he was able to buy his way into farming, but even so he wanted to make money. So how much profit did he make in his first year, to the end of 2020? £144.
Farming, you understand, is a tough business. And this year, the farmer explained, things have been even tougher: energy and fuel prices have soared, and then there’s been the added anti-bonus of avian flu, which meant he had to kill off the chickens (or they would just die of it). The chance of making a profit in 2022 is vanishing.
You may have heard of the farmer: his name’s Jeremy Clarkson, and he has (enterprisingly enough) turned his travails on the farm into an Amazon Prime series, which returns for its second season in February. How much he gets paid for that, and whether that gets fed into the farm accounts, we don’t know. (You can look at the various companies for which Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson is a director: there’s quite an assortment, but a lot of them are too small to require full profit/loss accounting. Chump Productions (now dissolved) and Digital Tribe are two of the ones which do P+L because they have big cashflows, because James May and Richard Hammond, his former Top Gear and then Grand Tour screenfellows, are directors. But even Digital Tribe recently had to declare its solvency: balancing its assets and liabilities would leave a few hundred pounds in the bank.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Jeremy Clarkson makes a ton of money. But not from farming chickens.
Cross that road when you come to it
You know where he does make a profit. Clarkson has been in the news for decades for things that are not animal or arable farming. As for most of his 62 years, he makes his money from writing newspaper columns and presenting TV series.
Last week he wrote his regular column in The Sun, and decided to jump on the topic du jour. Yes, he suggested that Michelle Mone, aka “Baroness Bra”, who is suspected of creaming off profits from PPE companies which provided useless products, should be paraded through the streets:
She, though, is a different story. I hate her.
Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level.
At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.
Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.
Oh, no, wait—I’m hearing that, let me see, ah, in fact his column wasn’t about Michelle Mone at all. The “she” being referred to was Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, one of the Royal Family by marriage. Hefty stuff.
You probably saw and heard the way that social media reacted to that segment in particular, which was deemed racist and misogynist, and cruel, and unkind, and so important that questions had to be asked of the Prime Minister (his reply: “language matters”). Ofcom got more complaints than it normally gets in a year; the Met Police were asked to investigate whether his article constituted hate speech. A Change.org petition was started. In another age, he would have been in the Tower of London awaiting the executioner’s attention. In this age, the axe takes the form of a million cuts in the form of outraged tweets:
I hadn’t read Clarkson’s column, and as he later requested it be taken down, had to dig it out at the Internet Archive. The Harry/Meghan stuff (a lot of which is very rude about Prince Harry, though nobody seems vexed about that) is only part of what he wrote. In another segment he says he wants the (controversial) coalmine planned for Whitehaven in Cumbria, to mine coking coal, to go ahead:
Partly because I’m from Doncaster so have coal in my blood – and fireplace – but mostly because Sir Starmer and his Labour luvvies will have to close it down.
This will cause the miners to go on strike, which in turn will force Starmer to send an army of Met Police officers up North to beat some sense into them with their truncheons.
If you don’t get the references to Met Police officers and truncheons, don’t worry: it’s 38 years old, a trope from the Orgreave confrontation during the 1984 miners’ strike.
The third segment of his column begins thus:
FOR 25 years, schools have hosted a play in which an actor, dressed as Hitler, stands in front of a swastika and shows how easy it is to manipulate the mind of a crowd by craftily getting pupils to make Nazi salutes.
It’s critically acclaimed and clever and exactly what kids need to learn.
But not any more, of course. Now, it’s “disgraceful” and it makes people “feel sick”.
And one school which put it on has been forced to say they will ensure it never happens again.
Perhaps I’m badly out of the loop, but I thought this must be a reference to The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui. Except it isn’t. Even The Sun hasn’t covered the story: a search on “Nazi salute school” turns up nothing in this year. Instead this seems to be a reference to a story from The Times (£) last week, which began
A leading private school has apologised after pupils performed Sieg Heil salutes during a play about Adolf Hitler.
The play is called “Adolf”, features the actor/playwright Pip Utton who performs it in front of a large Nazi flag while dressed as Hitler. At the end, Utton got the audience (at Millfield school) to perform sort-of sieg heil salutes to thank the technicians. Parents suitably outraged once informed. Play banned. (Maybe schedule Arturo Ui in its place?)
One column, three topics in which Clarkson tries, each time, to trigger either a bit of outrage from people who don’t agree with him, or—given that he’s writing in The Sun—to get all the readers to agree with him.
Here’s the reality. What the editors actually want is for the readers of The Sun to all agree with him while everyone else disagrees: that’s the tribalism that creates loyal readers. Nobody wants a columnist who’s sweet and reasonable; they’re called agony aunts, and they get paid relative peanuts. For decades, Clarkson, like columnists up and down Fleet Street, has been writing columns that try to hit that outrage sweet spot. Occasionally he succeeds, usually not. When he hits the spot, the grievance farming can begin, harvesting all those angry people to come and fume at what he’s done.
Harvest time
With this particular column, he did precisely that, through just one particular turn of phrase. Though reading this with an editor’s hat on, I think he’s reaching too hard for the metaphor. Yes, the scene in Game of Thrones where Cersei, the deposed queen, is forced to walk naked through King’s Landing, is incredibly powerful. But in the programme the punishment is proportional to how Cersei’s crimes are perceived. Clarkson suggesting the same for Meghan Markle is overambitious. As an editor, I’d say “OK, so you say you hate her, but isn’t there a more apposite punishment that you could wish on her? Obliged to watch GB News forever? Never allowed to live in California? Exiled to Balmoral? Something that’s a bit witty and current, rather than a scene that aired seven years ago from a series that’s long since finished? It’s a bit too much.”
But Clarkson doesn’t do witty and current. The reason though why (at least) two editors approved the piece before publication is probably that they considered that too much is just what you want. Sure, the references are so old that some of them could have children. But that’s what the readers want, because a lot of those readers are old enough to know those references. And they want to be stirred up. I was in the pub with some friends, all male, from my sports club earlier this week, and this article came up, and opinions were divided. The only thing worse for a columnist than being talked about is not being talked about. Clarkson won the attention medal this week. And this in a week when there’s been a lot of rivalry even if you exclude Elon Musk.
Remember: social media, and especially outrage on social media, is all about performance. So many of the people expressing their anger at Clarkson were using their own versions of the sort of characterisation they claim he made: “doughy, aging, racist, misogynistic white men from the UK”. The Dom Joly tweet above doesn’t hold back: “vile… disgusting… utter piece of trash”. As I noted in Social Warming, outrage is the emotion that travels fastest and furthest on social networks. Look at the tweets that turn up when you search for those with the words “Clarkson Meghan”. They’re peppered with outrage words. Have you ever felt manipulated? First the column, then the reaction.
To me, Clarkson represents a certain clapped-out British sense of humour that reminds me strongly of Richard Ingrams, the founding editor of Private Eye. He approved a cover in 1971, as Japan’s emperor made a state visit, with the caption “Hirohito Flies In: Nasty Nip in the Air. The Eye says Piss off, Bandy-Knees”. Not very sophisticated, is it? Clarkson’s humour, to my ear, has stayed stuck in that era, never getting more subtle, never discovering the idea of humour that incorporates equality, always certain that his opinion is right. He’s not going to change.
When that sort of mindset collides with a generation brought up on and living through the internet, you’re going to get sparks. Clarkson’s acknowledgement took a few days, but it came:
Note that he doesn’t apologise to Harry or Meghan, but to the “great many people” who were hurt. He’ll be “more careful”—though you can imagine that his editors might prefer that he’s just as incautious as ever. Social media storms are the water that irrigates modern publications. If you can get the right people annoyed—that is, the people who aren’t in power, but are online—then you’re glowing. Everyone clicks, everyone talks about you, and the people who agree with you dig in deeper than before, more loyal than ever.
Clarkson’s not going to change; the only thing that might change is the publications that choose to hire him. But that probably won’t change for a couple of decades, by which time he’ll be in his 80s, and perhaps bored with provoking people.
Popularity contest
There’s one other little bit in that column extract above that’s worth examining: the last sentence quoted, about Meghan: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.”
Now that’s an intriguing claim. Clarkson, at 62, is a boomer (born 1945-1965). Certainly Meghan is not popular with that age group; moreover the YouGov data suggests she’s even less popular with Gen Xers (born late 60s to late 80s).
She’s even less popular with Leave voters (12%), while Remain voters (33%) lag Millennials. Men like her slightly more than women (27% v 26%), though it’s not statistically significant, and Conservative voters far less than Labour (17% v 43%). Only Prince Andrew does worse.
Here’s the thing: Clarkson is addressing that Leave-voting, Conservative-voting, boomer-age demographic. (He’s two of the three.) Scorning Meghan Markle and touchy-feely Netflix sorta-documentaries in his column is an open goal for his readership. Not to mention dissing Prince Harry, whose numbers look much the same, if slightly higher (41% favourable by men, 35% for women). Your social media bubble might tell you one thing, but the data says that the British public doesn’t hold Harry and Meghan in great affection. That’s another reason why the editors at The Sun clearly felt fairly happy putting Clarkson’s column through. Ordure on the Duchess? People already feel that way! (You can argue about how people came to that opinion, but we are where we are.)
The online reaction was fascinating to watch, because it was so predictable. Condemn him loudly and often! Complain to IPSO! Complain to the police! Not so much social warming as a social firestorm.
What’s the IPSO judgement going to be? Obvious: Clarkson is allowed to have and write an opinion, no matter how repugnant you think it is. There’s no case to answer there. The Sun might decide not to employ him any more (as happened with Katie Hopkins), but I think that’s very unlikely.
The Met Police aren’t taking things any further, because it wasn’t hate speech. This too is very easy: hate speech dehumanises (as Hopkins did by referring to desperate asylum seekers as “cockroaches”, as happened in Myanmar where the Buddhist majority would equate the Rohingya with rats or dogs) and “expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation”. None of those applies here. The Met commissioner Mark Rowley told LBC Radio it was not the job of officers to “police people’s ethics” and that “the police should only get involved when speech becomes threatening or incites violence”. This plainly didn’t, despite lots of people including MPs such as Stella Creasy (who I like and respect) saying what we needed was a change to the hate speech laws. (Kneejerk reactions make for bad laws; ask the Dangerous Dogs Act.)
So, to wind right back to my first suggestion, why wasn’t Clarkson writing about his cellular hate for Michelle Mone? Two conjoined reasons: first, there’s no proof that she has done anything wrong, so the corporate lawyers would hoist a gigantic red flag on, second, every part of the column that would have to go ahead of the ordure image to explain who Mone was to the readers, because she’s less well-known. Clarkson aims at easy targets because he isn’t skilful enough to explain who the less well-known ones are within the constraints he faces. (Witness the “Hitler play” example above. Millfield isn’t mentioned, hence my puzzlement.) He tries to punch big holes in the wall because he can’t wield a knife. (For that, you want Marina Hyde.)
But damn, it’s easier than farming.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• All the AI things feature heavily in Ben Thompson’s Stratechery Year in Review. His post on “AI Homework” was his most-read of the year, which is remarkable given that it didn’t appear until December 5. As Ben notes, of an answer about ChatGPT’s response to a question about Thomas Hobbes and separation of powers:
This is a confident answer, complete with supporting evidence and a citation to Hobbes work, and it is completely wrong.
Which is basically the big warning label over anything ChatGPT does: it’s nice, but still untrustworthy.
• Joanna Stern at the WSJ demonstrated this by going back to school and getting ChatGPT to write her essay ($; should be free link) comparing Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
• ChatGPT has infiltrated Twitter replies. This is going to become a form of heavenbanning, I suspect:
“I had a gut feeling but now I proved it,” Levels tweeted shortly after receiving the reply from Tripathi. “People now have A.I. bots running that use ChatGPT to automatically reply to people’s tweets.”
If it isn’t heavenbanning, then it’s just going to be a sort of velveeta, which might be even worse.
• Errr, that’s about it. There hasn’t been a great deal happening this week on this front. Back in 2023!
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy. It’s back on January 9.
But isn't there some sampling bias here, in that this is starting with a very successful "grievance" farmer? After all, the field has a very low barrier to entry, and overall not a lot to differentiate the "product". How much does the AVERAGE (median) "grievance" farmer earn? If the rewards are a power-law, one expects a few very rich ones, and everyone else getting little to nothing. That may be true for chicken farmers too. And writing is easier than any manual labor. But fundamentally, this is genre writing, with those market dynamics.