Jonathan Cook Substack
A tech dystopia of surveillance and control is unfolding before our eyes. We think we are powerless to stop it only because we’ve been groomed into acceptance, into passivity, into helplessness
There is something going all too obviously unnoticed as the latest scandal breaks about a celebrity engaging in sexually abusive behaviour – this time concerning the comedian and children’s author David Walliams.
Days after fellow comedian Russell Brand was sentenced to 10 years for rape and sexual assault – and there are already indications that the cases heard in his trial may be just the tip of an iceberg – Walliams is accused of a long history of grooming teenage girls.
Perhaps the most shocking scene in an ITV documentary that broke the story this week is of fellow comedian Jonathan Ross joking at the 2004 Comedy Awards: “The comedy awards is 15 years old – 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.”
Shocking because his comment precedes most of the cases of alleged grooming uncovered by the documentary.
Shocking because the author, or authors, of Jonathan Ross’s “joke” – Ross denies he wrote it – knew full well what Walliams was up to and thought it worthy of being turned into a joke.
Shocking because the audience at the awards ceremony – including many people dear to the public’s heart – appeared to be in on the “joke” and found it uproariously funny.
And shocking because Walliams himself responded to the “joke” as if it were a pat on the back rather than any kind of rebuke, or as if there were any real danger of exposure.
In ITV’s documentary, let us note, Ross is also shown in a photo of a group of celebrity friends on a night out that includes Walliams accompanied by one of his young accusers – a teenage model who, alone among the group, appears not to be having a good time. She looks deeply uncomfortable, more like a hostage.
And of course, Jonathan Ross was the other participant in a notorious 2008 BBC radio-show “prank” that backfired disastrously. For the first time, it got the self-confessed sex addict Russell Brand into trouble.
Brand left messages on the answerphone of ageing actor Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Faulty Towers – revealing that Brand had had sex with Sachs’ granddaughter.
Ross got off relatively lightly from that affair, dubbed Sachsgate, with only a short suspension. He’s been a staple on TV ever since.
Power imbalance
We have been here before. Many times.
And just as happened in 2011 after posthumous revelations emerged – again that had been widely known for years – of Jimmy Savile’s decades-long sexual abuse of children, we have been delivered the same predictable responses.
Those closest to Walliams have hastily denounced him and distanced themselves from his behaviour. Institutions and companies that profited from his TV work and books are making no less plausible claims that they did not know what was going on, as well as empty promises that lessons will be learnt.
None of this should be taken seriously. The industry that creates the Saviles, the Brands and the Walliams – and the culture that stands behind it – is not about to change or be reformed. Too much money is at stake.
We will continue to act outraged when such people are outed. But they are very much products of a culture we helped create and that we continue to venerate. We made them. We are the Dr Frankensteins to their monster.
Not surprisingly, sex is the medium through which these male celebrities’ particular depravity was expressed.
But sex as a weapon – rather than as intimacy – is not really about sex, as the feminist movement explained to us decades ago. It is about power.
Brand’s expression of power crossed the line into illegality. It is not yet clear whether Walliams did the same.
What the women in the Walliams’ documentary keep noting is the power imbalance in his relationships.
As one, “Alex”, notes:
OK, it’s legal to have sex when you’re 17, 18 – 16, even. But the context of who you’re having sex with – if that person is double your age, if that person has known you from a young age and promised you things and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, in stature and size, like, everything, I really don’t think that’s OK.
She’s right. It’s not okay. And she’s right that it is the imbalance of power that is the problem, not some arbitrary legal definition of a sex crime. That power imbalance clears the way to exploitation, manipulation, abuse and violence.
Celebrating depravity
TV and newspapers are not averse to exposing a celebrity sexual predator – especially one who is near his sell-by date, when his most profitable years are behind him.
Earlier, the media cashed in on Russell Brand by celebrating his sex addiction. We the public were meant to marvel at his “antics”, either in admiration or envy.
The media are now cashing in on Brand’s humiliation over the abusive acts his sex addiction inevitably spawned. This time we are meant to be consoled by his downfall, by his comeuppance.
The media similarly celebrated Walliams for his creepy, ugly private life – again hiding in plain sight – in exactly the same way it had earlier enthused about the creepy, ugly characters he played on TV.
But the framing of this as individual stars abusing their position, or even as proof of oversight failures by the industry, misses the main story.
This isn’t simply about one man’s abusiveness. It is not even about men and the weaponisation of sex. Nor is it about poor industry practices. It is about something much bigger.
It is about a culture, whole societies, that are built on the basis of deep structural imbalances of power – in every sphere of life – as their most cherished value. Indeed, as their purpose.
We prefer to define the Brand and Walliams problem simply as one of sexual predation, of a power differential in the sexual arena. It is easier for us to corral that behaviour into a category of the grotesque, the abhorrent – and for us to sneer at these deviants.
But the point is they precisely are not deviants. They are the logical culmination, the distillation, of values we colluded in engineering – whether we did so actively or passively.
The Brands and Walliams are what happens when power knows no limits, when power becomes unaccountable, when power is an end in itself, not the means to achieve something better, to realise something more transcendent.
Too big to fail
This isn’t about showbiz, though the media would love you to think it is.
Brand and Walliams’ abuses are just one – the most easily noticed and punished – ripple on the surface of an entire lake of similar abuses, caused by gross disparities of power in every aspect of our lives.
It should hardly need stating that those who chase power are also those with an appetite for it. And those with an appetite for power are the most likely to abuse that power if and when they achieve it. That happens in the entertainment industry, but it also happens in media, in politics, in law, in business.
The creation of deep power imbalances is the very purpose of capitalism. It divides: the “wealth creator” from the worker, the have from the have-not, the landlord from the tenant.
And it measures that difference – rewards it – with money. Greater wealth equals greater power in the political, economic and social systems we in the West are educated to respect and revere.
The rich own the media that acts as our window on the world. Rich donors capture our politics, ensuring that the political priorities of the billionaires – the protection and expansion of their wealth – must also be our political priorities.
The rich wage the wars – wars the rest of us pay for – that steal the wealth of others, of poorer nations. And, as we learnt after the 2008 economic crash, when the rich screw up, when they break the self-enrichment system they themselves devised, our captured governments bail them out with our money.
The rich are too big – too powerful – to fail.
The focus on sexualised abuses of power is intentional. It distracts from these far more systematic and fundamental abuses.
After all, the power imbalances of our societies are not diminishing. They are accelerating like never before. And that growing, yawning gap is something the powerless – the vast majority – are being persuaded to exalt rather than rebel against.
We live in an era that celebrates the very first trillionaires in history – trillionaires whose fortunes have been built on the backs of overseas workers stripped of their dignity in sweatshops and of domestic workers eking out a living on zero-hours contracts.
We live in a time when the billionaire class can unleash AI on us, selling it as our salvation, even as it threatens to bring much human work to an end – and with it our sense of purpose and potentially our ability to survive.
We live in a time when western governments openly collude in the mass slaughter of children abroad, when they arrest and jail people as terrorists for holding placards stating their opposition to a genocide, and when they crush any meaningful criticism of the state carrying out the slaughter as proof of “antisemitism”.
We live in a time when an oil industry grows fat as it destroys the basis for advanced life on our planet – raping the Earth – and when the politicians it owns pass ever more laws designed to make protesting this looming mass extinction event a crime.
We live in a time when the tech industries have more powers than ever to stalk us, to harvest our most intimate thoughts, to control us, and when the state readies its militarised police forces to beat us into submission should we ever try to liberate ourselves.
We are watching this dystopia gradually unfold before our eyes, powerless to stop it because we have been groomed into acceptance, into passivity, into helplessness.
We live in a state of growing precariousness, playthings in the hands of the super-rich. And in contrast to the belated condemnation of Brand and Walliams, our abusers continue to be feted, rewarded and honoured.
But the disease is the same. It is a disease caused by a hierarchy of value. Of people who matter and people who don’t. Of those who have a voice and those who are silenced. Of those who get to choose and those who must submit.
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