And what does London do nowadays? The ‘world city’ of London is a global spectacle, largely paid for by the outside world: funded by the millions of international tourists who experience the London scene in person; grant-aided by billions more who stay home to watch The London Show (Reality TV wherever and whenever you want it); zillions the world over who subscribe to pay-per-view London by entering their domestic wealth into the international financial circuits routed through here.
Money that makes the world go round, itself revolves around the spectacle of London.
Young Londoners have never known anything else. They are keen – desperate, even – to be entered into this spectacle. To be featured in it if only, famously, for 15 minutes. For the most part they have nothing to circulate but themselves; and in the attempt to get a showing/gain a hearing, they are under constant pressure to raise the spectacular value of the self – their one and only commodity in the attention economy.
In Woolwich on 22nd May two isolated individuals uploaded a ‘selfie’ that plumbed new depths of desperation and depravity. Not even ‘lone wolf terrorists’, they are best comprehended as pop-up narcissists. An extreme manifestation of what has become London’s guiding principle: manifesto ergo sum; I show myself therefore I am; I am part of the spectacle.
Not terrorism, but a terrible way to say: LOOK AT ME!
Illustration: Emmet McEvoy