Industry, Season Three
A review
Industry is the only British television show I have seen in which conservative Millennial culture has bled through to screen. The chief writers of the show, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both attended Oxford in the late noughties, putting them around the age of 35. The views which they espouse in the medium are closely linked, at least in my mind, to that of the Fence Magazine. It is not a coincidence that the Telegraph Journalist referenced in the second episode of the third series is none other than Ed Cumming - he is featured in a later episode - who bills himself as ‘Free Lunch Editor’ at the Fence. Ed Cumming is, as far as I can tell, on friendly terms with the creators of the show, they are more or less of the same milieu.
The Fence Magazine is emblematic of a wider caucus of individuals, mostly in their early 30s, who populate various magazines including in particular ‘The New Statesmen’ and ‘The Times’ but also ‘The Spectator’ and to some extent ‘UnHerd’. It is difficult to place these people politically but most of them share something of a right-leaning inclination. They are, in the main, too caught up in the financial difficulties of renting in London to identify with the status quo and tend to have a wan appearance on account of all the haggling over unpaid freelance commissions. They mostly restrict their political commentary to cultural critiques - theirs is a self conscious Urbanism - and this allows them to retain a haughty, pessimistic indifference to party politics and avoid exposing a worldview which could be criticised.
The close relationship that the writers of this show evidently have to such people thus offers a novel opportunity to explore their ideas, as Industry is the first of their cultural products.
There’s a querulous perspective offered on Woke - in the first season of the show, a British Indian woman attempts the soppy ‘Women need to rise together’ before being dispatched on the grounds that she is a waffling diversity hire. This critique is continued in season three where a major plot device revolves around the financial firm’s (Pierpoint) decision to invest heavily in ESG, propounded by a vacuous and later treacherous woman. The scene where this mistake is made sees an amiable old boy denounce ESG as a load of Woke nonsense (‘giving money to any black lesbian’ or words to that effect). The show does present ESG as a scam, the main investment that Pierpoint makes is in a company headed by a malign yet trivial posh shyster played by Kit Harrington.
After his fall from grace he is drawn into psychedelic drugs and attempts to rebrand himself as spiritual. His love interest, Yasmin, an Osbornite no-nonsense Middle Eastern woman, rebuffs his new identity as escapist fantasy. In a sense this is reflective (if not derivative) of the ethos of ‘Peep Show’, which I have no doubt was a major influence on the two writers, and is indeed a pervasive cultural totem of the Fence generation. This touches on an aggressive strand of haughty social conformism within Millenials which bleeds through to their political analysis. “James Cleverly told the Tories to stop being Weird, so of course, they didn’t choose him”. This crude intolerance is particularly sour when it comes from people who work in Journalism, nearly all of whom were at least ‘lightly teased’ at school.
This television show represents a reconciliation between the worst excesses of Woke and the cultural taboo around explicit repudiation of Woke mores. Mickey Down, Konrad Kay, Rachel Cunliffe, Marie Le Conte, Ed Cumming et al., were all teenagers at the time of genuine Woke radicalism in the early 2010s, when ‘free the nipple’ marches were an annual occurrence, ‘Health at Every Size’ was in it’s heyday and accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ were being levelled at White teenage girls for wearing a Bindi to a festival. At the same time, a vituperative reaction was taking place online, best embodied in the figure of ‘Sargon of Akkad’, Gamergate and the /POL/ board on 4chan.
My diagnosis of the Fencers is that they were caught between these two forces during their adolescent development. One the one hand, Woke, which they had misgivings about, on the other hand, the Online Right, which due to their own middling social status, they felt too insecure to identify themselves with, and occasionally had to punch down towards. Thus, the retreat in to writing about ‘culture’, invariably food, television (at a stretch light literature), since these do not require any deep cultural fluency to write about, whilst limiting themselves to following a few slightly dark accounts on X formerly Twitter.
As their thinking causes them shame the worldview which they have is not coherent enough to translate into meaningful political change, at best you might trace some support towards extant ‘YIMBYism’ or broader intergenerational unfairness but it mostly takes the form of myopic cynicism not dissimilar to that which is expressed in Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. That is not to say that their collective output is without merit. There are flashes of ability and a select few should be counted amongst the better prose-writers of their generation, but insofar as I have found their writing worthy it has been acerbic criticisms of other people’s work.
Such people will not have an intellectual legacy if they do not find a constructive purpose or cause to pen defences of during their career. No Hitchens (Chris or Peter), nor Aaronovitches, theirs will be a generation of Will Selfs flinging their limbs about and gurgling in Kennington Park - unless the implicit is made explicit. Janan Ganesh writes beautiful nonsense but his corpus of work would not stick in my mind if it was not rooted in the lost cause of 2011 Liberalism. Evelyn Waugh has an aesthetic style which survives him to this day, Auberon, the King of ‘epic takedowns’ is remembered only in the Speccie-verse, bubbling amongst the treacle of ‘Defences of’ (and more honestly) “Praises of” Kemi Badenoch and vaping.
Retreating from politics, as did Rimbaud or Mallarmé into symbolism, may have been acceptable during the Belle Époque but it is not what this historical moment demands of individuals in vague proximity to power in the 21st century. Our contemporary cultural tapestry is one of Jimmy Savile and Wayne Rooney, not Ibsen, Proust or Chekhov - the Times Literary Supplement is read only in theory, not in practice. It is no use being decadent in an ugly society. You are occupying a space which should be used by somebody with a more vigorous attitude. A rabble rousing demagogue, such as myself.