Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed only on television and in toy boxes. A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien.
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More Distant Than Ever
Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed only on television and in toy boxes. A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien.
America was the source of things: cartoons, comics, the music I listened to, and along with Japan, the computer games I played. And then there was Phoebe on TV, playing guitar again, in a coffee shop, in a city I thought I’d never visit. All these cultural products felt like they arrived from nowhere, created by no one. They simply just were. I had no notion that their creators—authors or the musicians in bands—were real people. US Presidents were characters on The Simpsons; Bill Clinton was a man who did not have sexual relations with a woman, and played the saxophone.
Even my young understanding of US politics felt like a fiction. The first Iraq War played out in grainy green night vision on the evening news, a conflict conducted by a faraway country in another faraway land. Later, a teacher told my class that democracy in America was dead, because a man in Florida had ruled on an election and given it to his brother. Far away news from another planet. And yet its cultural empire was present in the action figures on my floor, but the country itself was a distant myth.
Then the towers fell and everything changed. America didn’t just lose its mind; it exported its crisis. Its abstract anxieties became our domestic policy too: mass surveillance, invasive security, and a creeping authoritarianism under Blair, justified by an American war. The conflict was no longer a grainy TV show. Friend’s older brothers from school went off to fight, and as the war on terror ground on, my own friends went too, and some of them died. The American Empire arrived in the 2000’s, and it was / no longer an abstraction.
At the same time, a different kind of proximity was collapsing distance. On MySpace, I exchanged DMs with a member of one of my favourite American emo bands. For the first time, I realised, Americans were real people, living real lives, in a real place.
And thus began a decade’s long tension: it’s empire crept closer impersonally, while its people came closer too.
For me, the early 2010s were the years of convergence. Occupy emerged shortly after our own student protests, and it felt like we were all part of the same conversation. The same struggle happening in London, New York, Egypt, Spain, and Turkey etc. Everyday Americans felt closer than ever. The Web 2.0 internet and the iPhone erasing the final feelings of distance.
American voices became a constant presence in my life, strangers on screen, literally inches from my face. Their thoughts and arguments unfolding right alongside messages from my family and friends.
During the last decade, American culture, politics, and thinking seeped into the global consciousness. Looking back, 2016 feels like the high watermark. In the UK, the national trauma of Brexit blurred into the American spectacle of Trump 1. Online, it felt like the same psychic battle waged on two fronts. The media narratives, the populist anger, the cultural divisions—they were all / reflections in a mirror. Proximity was total.
The empire wasn’t just influencing us; its platforms had become the code spaces in which we lived our lives. Every movement in the American cultural sphere moved us in the UK too. We were all, captured in totality by its Empire.
I started checking out, but the pandemic sealed it. 2020 was a truly shared global experience, perhaps for the first time in history. But it revealed just how differently everyone processed it. No longer a distant myth, but an alienating alternate reality and beginning to drift away.
That summer, when protests erupted across Britain following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, America. The shared info-sphere caused Brits to adopt the language and framework of American struggle in our own policing protests. I could only understand it as events in the Imperial core had spurring unrest out in the colonies.
Today, to me, the United States as a country feels more distant than ever. I look in on social media and see American’s still posting. A disconcerting culture, hysterical, and strange. They speak English, but they aren’t like me. And yet, America’s material empire is closer than ever. I walk down the high street and there’s a Starbucks, a Wendy’s, a Five Guys. I use American platforms to host my blog, check my email, and watch cat videos.
This is all a paradox / to me. I am surrounded by the material and digital infrastructure of the American empire, yet its state of mind is half a world away. Middle-class Brits who fixate on American politics believe they are being international, but really it’s a symptom of being provincial—living so deep inside the imperial bubble you can’t see anything else.
I resent the last fifteen years of cultural exhaust. UK newspapers report blow-by-blow accounts of drama 5,000 miles away, yet because of the colonisation and its destruction of my info-environment, I have no idea why three ambulances, two fire engines, and the police were at the train station the other night.
There is trouble here too in Air Strip One. But many eyes still look elsewhere, across the pond, at an empire that is everywhere, but still very far away.
I struggle with America as state of mind, versus America as… state.
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