Will Self

Dubai, 1.30am. I totter, unsteady as a newborn foal, along the gantry from the Emirates Airbus that drove me here. In the curvilinear spaces, the potted palms and the glass booths full of cigarette smoke I see this: the topological analogue of international jet travel. Here, time, which has been smeared across the heavens, is once more balled up into the simulacrum of place. I note this: the trail, waymarked by cairns of Johnnie Walker Black Label and Dior Addict,which S-bends its way through the duty free, has been designed purposively so that at any point during his journey, the passenger in transit will be able to view the greatest possible amount of merchandise.

In the American criminal justice system, when the notorious accused is led, handcuffed and shackled, before the eyes and camera lenses of the press pack, this is described as “the perp walk” – perp being short for “perpetrator”. It occurs to me, as I stare out over the peaks and valleys of serried giant Toblerone bars, that this is the purch walk, where purch is an abbreviation of “purchaser”.

What to do? What to do? Being a transit passenger skyside in a major international airport in the dead, jet-howling middle of the night is surely the purest possible mode of the modern human condition – and the powers that be in Dubai seem alive to this, for as I slump up an escalator I notice an advertisement for the shopping centre at Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. Its slug line reads: “The Centre of Now”. I stare at it, thrilled by the audacity of the copywriter; to propose the slave-built city of timesharers as the centre of the world is one thing, but to conceive of it as a sort of zeitgeisty black hole, into which the future and the past alike ceaselessly gurgle, requires true vision. This is how commoditisation looks sub specie aeternitatis.

So, I buy some painkillers – a kind of Panadol that will, the pharmacist assures me, knock me out cold on my next flight to London – and head for McDonald’s. To eat McDonald’s skyside of an international airport in the middle of the night is to take the true Communion of our contemporary Church – for do we not fervently believe that as we place the meaty wafer on our tongue, it dissolves into the body of branding? By which I mean that the standardisation of products throughout the world is our version of transcendence: the McDonald’s cheeseburger we paid for may have disappeared, leaving behind a few ketchup smears and a roundel of dill pickle, but the real McDonald’s cheeseburger remains for ever immanent. Looking about me at my fellow human flotsam, all of whom seem to be eating their food with the same guilty spasms as I just did, I am forced to concur: this is indeed the centre of now.

In March 2008, I flew to Dubai from London and walked for two days across this great city of unbecoming. The building sites lay idle. Dusty Baluchis, Afghans and Somalis sat about in the shade; deprived of passports or the wherewithal for a plane ticket, they were, in effect, prisoners in a penal colony equipped with extensive shopping facilities. I spoke to men who cried as they told me that they hadn’t seen their families in years, nor did they expect to for years to come. In retrospect, I wish I’d been able to tell them they were at the centre of now. Instead, I headed out into the desert, navigating with a compass and following a sight line because there were no maps available with the right human scale, and eventually reached Bab al-Shams, a resort hotel where orientation was lain on in the form of a metal roundel screwed into the bedside table indicating the direction in which Mecca lay.

But that was the periphery of then – this, as I believe I’ve already had cause to remark, is the centre of . . . now. And just as time solidifies in these non-places (as Marc Augé typifies them), so it also becomes diffuse – a will-o’-the-wisp. Under such conditions I find it doesn’t matter how many announcements the airport staff make, or how many bits of paper I’m given with departure time and gate printed on them; I still always manage to be the last one to buckle up.

The first officer proudly informs us that there are 18 flight crew members on board this morning and they speak 18 languages. However, he doesn’t clarify this statement, and as the Airbus – which is as long as a cathedral nave – makes its pilgrimage along the runway, I find myself wondering if there’s one polymath among them and 17 monoglots, or if the distribution of tongues is a little more even. This even though Emirates, displaying a sensitivity to physical location that is remarkable in commercial aviation (the central objective of which is to standardise places as if they were cheeseburgers), has placed cameras on the plane’s wings and tail, so that the passengers can experience take-off visually. Or can we? For in the microseconds it takes for these images to reach the brain, we have moved away from the centre of now. My suspicion is that I’ll never return – at least not in this lifetime.

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“Earth hath not anything to show more fair;/Dull would he be of soul who could pass by/A sight so touching in its majesty:/A crowd of highly self-conscious beings behaving like a flock of sheep . . .”

Yes, yes! The year 2015 begins – as have previous years for readers of this column – with your fearless reporter standing on Westminster Bridge and contemplating the reckless conformity of our fellows. Recall: it was here, in the very omphalos of our noble nation, that I noted the lemming-like glee with which tourists chuck away their euros “playing” the shell game. It was also from this vantage that I contemplated the gaining of “peak photo”, that numinous – but, for all that, profoundly real – summit at which the amount of photographic imagery we produce exceeds our capacity to experience it meaningfully.

They’re still there, the peak photographers, striding up and down the bridge, striking attitudes by the parapet, with the mother of parliaments looming over their shoulders. They’re still holding up iPhones and iPads and all sorts of other digital-camera-enabled devices; and they’re still utterly secure in their delusion that this – and this alone – is the finest image ever captured of a man/woman/child with Big Ben in the background.

But what is this? Something new is to hand in the febrile world of instantaneous simulation. These Iberian proctologists and Swabian veterinary surgeons are armed with fresh kit, to wit: what look like those aluminium grabbers meant for chair- or bed-bound folk which never work quite as well as they should. And what are these Montenegrin web designers and Luxembourgeois dieticians doing with their grabbers? Why, they’re using them to take photographs of themselves, of course, because these are what we must, perforce, call “selfie sticks”.

I’m often asked if I find it odd being called Self – and although this has happened pretty much my entire life I’m still flummoxed. Where to begin? Is it really necessary to explain to anyone capable of cerebration that, having always had this appellation, I’d find it far more peculiar to be called Smith? (Apropos of which, people who recognise me in the street and feel they have to say hello frequently address me as “Will Smith”. Given the obvious disparities in looks and income between me and the actor, I can only assume that human beings must have a misfiring brain centre dedicated to notoriety.)

When the “selfie” appeared in the cultural firmament, it was a matter of weeks before Private Eye published a cartoon showing me holding an outstretched cameraphone while gurning into its lens. The caption read: “Will Selfie.” Fair play – although, in common with most of my age group (the exceptions being “world leaders” such as Obama, B; Cameron, D; and Thorning-Schmidt, H), I’d already done all the self-depiction I’d wanted to long before. Digital cameras with timers have been available for well over a decade and though the first time you pose for yourself may have a certain frisson the novelty soon palls. So, how to explain this latest ratcheting up of – to paraphrase the title of Schopenhauer’s most celebrated philosophic work – the world’s will to misrepresentation?

One way of looking at the selfie stick is that it’s simply a handy little gadget for those friends and families who all want to be in the shot – and why not? Another perspective is, in my case, to take it personally: why else would teeming hordes of Tran­sylvanian dental technicians go equipped with selfie sticks, if not to beat up on poor old Selfie?

From when I stepped on to the bridge by St Thomas’s Hospital until I debouched at Westminster Pier, I must have been smitten at least five times by Cantonese software engineers cack-handedly wielding the bloody things. As I gained the middle of the bridge, I came upon an actual duel being conducted between two tourists armed with selfie sticks; a ring of Viennese patisserie chefs were gathered, chanting: “Töten! Töten! Töten!” From them I learned the fracas had begun when one of the software engineers’ selfie sticks accidentally appeared in the other’s carefully framed shot. As I observed the two men deftly feinting and parrying, it occurred to me that although the selfie stick is, functionally speaking, a prop with which to hold up the great imagistic canopy of the web, it nonetheless has a physical actuality that belies its virtual role.

I have a dream – no, really, I do. I have a dream that all the selfie sticks that were given as Christmas presents this year will be recognised by their recipients as dual-use technology. I have a dream that instead of sticking their cameras on the end of these aluminium poles and wandering around crowded public spaces accidentally poking other people with them, they will adjourn to an open space; dividing into two groups, or “teams”, the quondam photographers will then bowl their smartphones at one another and bat them away with their selfie sticks. I dream of a brave new future in which computers of all sorts will be repurposed as sporting equipment . . . Yes, yes, I know it’s not cricket, or even iHockey, but you don’t need to be Will Smith in order to appreciate that arranging to have yourself constantly filmed represents the very zenith of narcissism.