An interview with self-proclaimed Internet fiend: Hussein Kesvani
Everything from growing up in the miserable outskirts of London, to Muslim Twitter, to platform capitalism, to BTS as civil servants.
Hello party people. We are back with another interview. This one I am super excited to share with you as it is with one of my favourite writers on the topic of internet culture.
Hussein Kesvani is a podcaster, author, and currently studying a Masters in Digital Anthropology at University College London. Most of you will know Hussein for his tweets but in this wide-ranging interview we delve deeper into his career, his first book ‘Follow Me Akhi’, posting, Clubhouse, the logic of platforms, and so much more. We also finally get an answer as to why Jungkook’s silence was so deafening.
This interview, conducted live via zoom. was edited and condensed for clarity.
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AR: So the way I would explain you to a friend, is as somebody who writes about the online world and I refer to you as an ‘online guy’. Have you always been that person and if not, what was Hussein like before becoming an online guy?
HK: This is such a good question. Because a while ago I probably wouldn't have considered myself in that way. but the more I think about it, the more I'm like, yes, I was always an online guy but in different capacities.
You have to understand the place I grew up in, this town called Dartford in Kent, which I tweet about sometimes as one of the most miserable places in the UK. Miserable in the sense that, it's not one of those derelict high street towns, but it's completely characterless. You can't afford a house there because they're still really expensive, and all the arts has been gutted, all the community clubs that used to be there have been gutted and turned into property. It's a place where public transport doesn't really exist and you have to have a car. This is one of those places that exists so people can buy assets and go to work in London.
Which is to say that, there wasn't really a lot to do there. And unless you went out at night and just hung around at corner shops when you were younger and then as you grow older hanging out in pubs, there really wasn't anything to do.
So I spent a lot of my social life on the internet, also my family ran a news agent as well. So obviously I was expected to work there. So that would mean early morning starts. So a lot of my social life basically took place on a computer in some forms. It began with fan sites and I was really into anime back then.
From that it developed into MySpace and I spent a lot of time on MySpace and I was 13-15 when MySpace was a big thing. So that was a big way of discovering types of music that I liked. And often that type of music was not the type of music that, my cousins who lived in North London and had a much more multicultural experience, were into. In Dartford, it was very much emo music. I'm not really convinced I actually liked it but was just trying to fit in.
That then turned into Facebook, but these platforms were really always the centre of my social life and the centre of a very limited social life I was allowed to have. I think during that time, I not only kind of understood the value of platforms in terms of what they meant to particular forms of people, but they played a very central part in how I viewed myself as someone who was separate from this identity that my parents had given me, or my religion had given me, and all these things I was already contending with anyway.
So now I think about online culture much more deeply and I work in that space. I think a lot of it makes more sense because I've seen what it used to be like and I know why some people find it so important. And by extension, why others find it so frivolous. So I think I have the benefit of hindsight to conceptualize things in a way that maybe a lot of other people can't do.
AR: That's interesting that you say that. I understanding the fascination with the online world, but being the person that you are, how do you relate to when people find it so frivolous?
HK: Even back in the day my parents would say “You should be studying more. Why are you spending so much time on the computer? Why are you playing games?” For them it was the case of you should follow a particular track and maybe they were right. But I think at the same time, I was very much like, “well, why?” What is the purpose of me doing this thing? What is the purpose of me working really hard so I can go become a solicitor and work endless hours. My cousin who had just become a corporate solicitor at the time was working until 10:00 - 11:00 PM. My thinking was I'm already doing late nights and early mornings and it sucks. Why do I want to do that? Why would I want to do that in a suit? But at the same time, my parents didn't really know much else. So for them it was a case of the professional track was more about securing a future. I think this is a really interesting conversation to have at a time when everyone's futures are really insecure and we are having this really big, introspective think about what should work be and what should it actually do.
AR: Yeah. I think especially with South Asians and the type of backgrounds we come from. I think you tweeted about this recently that there's only a limited amount of professions Brown men can do, or that can be the ambition for them. Did you find that projected on you? And then you have gone on to do journalism but studied History at York before that. Why History? Why York?
HK: Okay. I'll try to tackle three things.
So what was it projected to me? Yes, but I don't disparage that. I know there's a lot of certain Asian people who do poetry about how they were only allowed to have three jobs. I am not that kind of person. I think for my parents, it was very much they knew a particular kind of world, in which work was really a struggle of independence. Right. So they came from Uganda as immigrants after the expulsion, there was a limited number of jobs that they were actually allowed to do for cultural/educational reasons. Working really hard was a way of owning their own businesses and asserting their own independence in a world where they didn't want to be dependent on anyone. So for them, there was a narrative around freedom and being in this country that made it very difficult to do that in any other way.
So when I was growing up, my parents would always talk to me about my uncle, he's now kind of a retired solicitor consultant - but he was a solicitor at the time. And, they always had a lot of respect for him and a lot of respect for his family. For my parents it was the perspective that ‘okay you don’t have a natural inclination for science or medicine, so you probably can't be a doctor. And you find maths tricky, but okay. You like reading and you can think a little bit deeply. So, logically you should go become a lawyer.’
And at the time I didn't really know what other jobs are really out there. I went to this grammar school where education was really hammered, but it was very much that grammar school culture still projects certain jobs onto you in the same way Asian parents do. But those types of jobs is expanded a little bit. So you didn't have to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer- you can be a teacher or you can be an architect. There was really a lack of imagination even then. So, it was really limiting. I was just like ‘yeah, okay I'll go become a lawyer’ because that seems to be most logical thing I should do.
So to circle back to your questions, then I got into King's College London to study Law. I did the IB (International Baccalaureate) program, which is a type of international A-Levels. Very, very intense. I did quite well in year 12, but in year 13, I look back now and I definitely had depression and no one realized that I was really depressed. So I notice that I just didn't really have enough energy to do very much and I was stuck in my head a lot . So in the end, I did well in my IB exams, but I didn't do well enough to get into King's College London.
So here's a funny story I'd gotten into Queen Mary University of London and I did not necessarily really want to go to Queen Mary, but I think in hindsight, I probably should have been encouraged to. But again, my uncle was very much like ‘Oh Queen Mary isn't a good university. He won't get into the magic circle law firms.’ So I was convinced to go resit some exams to try and get into King's College London. Now the problem was a lot of these upper tier schools, Kings College London, UCL, etc, would not accept resit students for particular kinds of courses.
So I found that, even though I did better in my IB exams during my resits, I still couldn't apply to any of these schools. So I thought the subject I did best in at school was history. I really like reading. There are lots of barristers who have studied history before they went on to law. So why don't I just do that rather than go to law school knowing I'm going to dislike it. So that's how I got into history at York.
I also just wanted to be away from London. During the year I was doing my resits I was working at my parents' shop and I realized that if I went to a school in London, I would still have to do the same thing. And I was thinking, I do not want to work in the shop anymore. So I am going to go away so that I can't be ‘coerced’ into doing it. And that is how I ended up at York University.
AR: If you'd went to Queen Mary, then I'm sure a lot of the content in ‘Follow me Akhi’ could have been written there.
HK: Yeah. Funnily enough, It could have been, and a lot of interviews I did were actually around the Queen Mary campus, Mile End and Bethnal Green, etc.
AR: And going on to your university experience, were you at all involved in the ISOC or I think they call it Absoc? And what was your university experience like in general?
HK: There wasn't an Absoc because there wasn't enough Shias, but there was an ISOC. I wasn't really actively involved in it.
At the time I also had this very weird relationship with my religion. So I’m Khoja Shia Muslim which is a particular demographic of African Asians and most of my community live in Streatham and Croydon, all these places really far away from where I was and where I grew up. So I didn't really feel any affinity to that particular aspect.
And then by extension, because I wasn't a Sunni Muslim, it was really difficult to relate to that. So when I used to go to the ISOC it would be for Friday prayers and for lectures. They would do lecture series on Thursdays and I used to find that pretty intellectually stimulating. But I wasn't really involved in e.g. the bake sale, charity drives etc.
I was also very career focused. So for me, all the societies that I did were in the service of I want to achieve X or Y thing. So I was part of the international finance society, law society, I was a competitive debater. In my last two years I worked on the student newspaper as an assistant editor and then as a section editor. Again, that was really just to try amp up my CV. But I realized I really enjoy writing and I really enjoy doing reporting. And there was a really nice camaraderie in York- there are a lot of media people who come out of York university, so there's a real media culture. So even when I was doing my applications to law firms there was part of me that thinking I'd really just like to work in TV or work at a newspaper.
AR: I think if you had gone to a London university and involved in an ISOC it might not have been a great experience. Personally, I couldn't stand East London boys at university just because they were so intense and quite cliquey.
HK: It was actually very chill and very small at York. But I can definitely imagine that at London universities there's a lot of different people with strong personalities.
AR: Yeah. And I think a lot of egos as well, personally speaking from my experience with LSE people. I mean I hated my three years there, and a lot of people that were there were very up themselves unfortunately. But I would have thought that people involved in the ISOC would have exercised more humility.
Anyways moving on to the next thing, which is your book ‘Follow Me Akhi’.
So the book came this morning and I was going to read it in preparation after you said yes to the interview. But it only came this morning, so I read the introduction. So one of my questions was where did the idea come from but you kind of go into that in the book. I don't want to rehash old ground. So I want into more focus on the process of writing it. What surprised you about writing the book? What did you like when you started it? What did you expect to find and what deviated from that expectation?
HK: I haven't spoken about the book for a while, so it's interesting to look back on it now. So after I graduated from university, I went to a journalism trade school. When I got out my dream of working as a political reporter for The Times or BBC Parliament never happened. It was not even close to happening and I really had to figure out what I was going to do.
So I worked at a trade publication, which was related to supermarkets and in my free time I was filing freelance stories and all the freelance stories that I was doing were really about Muslim culture. I went to a seminar where I was basically told that the way that you get commissions is by writing what you know, and the only thing I really knew and I had access to was Muslim related stuff. Which I feel is a very systemic problem in journalism generally, but that's a different subject.
Eventually that type of reporting and just being able to find interesting stories about outsiders and how they wrestle with their identity in a way, which isn't just about throwing it away, but actively engaging with it in ways that can be pretty polarizing.
So one of my first stories for Vice was about the Council of ex Muslims who were a very small, very controversial group that were full of people who had just left Islam. But they called themselves ex-Muslims because they felt that their cultural identity was rooted rejecting Islam as a societal organizing principle, rather than just a religion.
So I used to the file a bunch of these stories. I ended up getting hired by Buzzfeed News in 2014. And they were looking for a religion reporter, but they were really looking for someone who would tell stories about British Muslims they felt like no one else was really doing. So I took the job because it was a salary job and I really wanted one of those. I had a pension plan and everything, and I was just like, wow! When I started I got a lot of free range to just do whatever, but I didn't really know what I was doing because covering British Muslims is such a big issue. And I don't want to do these identity related stories about ‘Epic Muslim hijabi clap-back’, and stuff like that. I did ended up having to do a few of them, but it wasn't stuff I was really into it. But at the same time, I didn't want to do these hit pieces about people who supposedly had connections with extremist groups when those connections were not only really tenuous, but at the same time has caused a lot of tension and issues with Muslims in the media more broadly. So I was trying to find that balance between that and it was an extremely difficult task. I decided to try focus on young people. And I was looking at how young people express their religious identity in various forms.
Now I left Buzzfeed - after a year - on the basis that there was a disagreement about what my beat should be. So for my bosses, they wanted to get scoops. They wanted to get ISIS related scoops because it was in Vogue at the time. These are more security questions, and not questions about faith or questions about cultures of faith etc. But by extension, the stories that I brought were often features that were much more about people and people led stories. But these things were not part of what the Buzzfeed news strategy was.
When I left, I took this notebook with me and in the notebook I used to have all these stories that I thought were really interesting. When I was looking through them, I was thinking to myself the through line is that these are all about young Muslims who are in some way or another, using the internet as a way of navigating and negotiating their identity. And no one's really talking about this. I went to Waterstones that day and I was looking at books about British Muslims and all of them were these studies where you would have a journalist parachuted into Bradford and they would interview a bunch of people to figure out what British Muslim communities were thinking about issue X, Y, Z. That's not to say that those pieces of work don’t have value, but it was very much as case of they are interviewing the same types of people. They're all about the same kind of age. And we're also saying the same sorts of things. So we're dealing with the same sorts of questions over and over again. And maybe it's because we're looking in the wrong place.
So I then went to go meet with Michael Dwyer, who is the publisher at Hurst and is a good friend of mine. I said look I have this idea of doing a book about British Muslims and I think no one's really looking in the right places. And he thought it would be an interesting idea to try flesh out into a book and that's how it happened. And then over two years, um, I was, I was working a day job and then on weekends I would go do field work or I would go do interviews.
AR: So what surprised you really about writing that book? What expectations deviated?
HK: So in some ways there wasn't a lot that surprised me because I’m an internet fiend. So I had seen all this stuff beforehand when I first started. I had this very clear roadmap of where I'd really want to look or this is the type of person I'd really want to talk to. It was surprising how fast the plan actually came together. Even though big sections of that plan never came into being for various different reasons. But I knew where I was going and I knew what I was expecting as well.
But one thing I was really surprised with was how, the relationship lots of young Muslims have with the internet is aspirational.
So I remember interviewing this guy I found on Twitter. This was a guy who gave out Islamic reminders e.g. this is how you should act brothers, this is how you should dress etc. So I said I'm doing this book and it's for an academic publisher I'd really like to talk to you because I think your account's really interesting. Now I expected this guy to be really religious. I was expecting him to have the beard, thobe and all that stuff. He comes in wearing skinny jeans and a fashionable t-shirt and just looking like an ordinary young kid. He smelled of cigarettes so obviously he had been smoking outside - I did not expect that at all. And I said, “are you sure you run this account? Are you messing around with me?” He confirmed he ran the account. So I said “I don’t want to come across as superficial but I expected you to look a certain way.” And he told me he used his Twitter account as an aspirational identity. His perspective was “I send these reminders as more reminders to myself of how I should act. And I'm not like a perfect Muslim by any means.”
It was an interesting way of looking at how your online identity is almost an aspirational form of living and you never quite match up to it in real life. The aesthetic gives you that reason for trying to get to that point. And for him, it was very much case of, I just want to be this type of Muslim that I've constructed and I'm trying to work towards that using the technology available.
And it's really interesting because I think to myself, well, that really operates in different ways as well. The way that we present ourselves on Twitter or on various social media platforms, e.g. Instagram, Facebook. We all know that they're not reflections of who we actually are as people in offline spaces, but at the same time we can't necessarily say that those are inauthentic representations because they are grounded in at least some sort of, aspirational truth. So it's not this binary of this is real and this is not, it's this grey area.
One thing I've been thinking about while I've been doing my master's degree, is the degree, to which we perform online in different capacities and how on platforms like Twitter and Facebook where they're these huge stages where everyone can see what you're doing or who you're talking to. This is very far from online forums, for example, and how you could fashion your identity as a completely anonymous being within a very particular community. Anonymity was really the key to all that and you would develop your status based on your contributions. Whereas now, we all exist on one of a few websites and people can see what we're doing and how we perform in those spaces. And our performances are really based on what stage we're performing on.
We were talking about recruitment before and how when we pad out CVs we’re performing to a very particular audience. It’s a situation where you have to figure out how to frame yourself within this particular context, knowing that these eyes are watching me and they're expecting me to say, or do certain things in certain ways.
And I think Muslim Twitter is a really good example of this. Because the thing about Muslim Twitter is it has all the surveillance infrastructure of a platform like Twitter, but there's also this different moral logic, which is one where you have to perform in a way that is considered to be halal. But, there hasn't really been this broader question of well, how do you be halal online? So this is again, just a really grey area that people can interpret in so many ways.
And it's one of these things where physical institutions, such as Masjids and Madrassahs don't really know how to answer it. I'm not saying I know the answer. In the book I’m saying I have no answers to anything here are just some stories. But it was an example of the reason why a lot of the characters in my book do the things that they do or they listen to the people they listen to is because the institutions they are told to respect don't have the answers that they were looking for.
AR: Talking about Muslim Twitter, what was the reaction to the book. And in a two-way interaction: how do you see yourself in the online Muslim community, and how do they see you?
HK: I feel like actually a lot of Muslim Twitter just didn't read it. They didn't really engage with it and that's fine. Because I feel, number one, lots of Muslim Twitter and most of Twitter is young people and reading nonfiction, ethnographic studies is not necessarily something that I would have wanted to do when I was 16 and 17.
There were some people who said really nice things about it e.g. “I'm really glad that certain stories are out there.” There was some criticism about it being written by a bourgeois Muslim who doesn't come from the community he is talking about. And I thought that was a really interesting criticism because I always viewed my field site, i.e. my place of study as being the internet. So there are lots of different people who come from lots of different worlds who exist in this same space and they call themselves Muslims, but the way in which they act on it or the way in which they perform on it is very different. But for them it was very much they really associated online behaviour with the geographic location in which people were in. And that was a really interesting way of observing how people use the internet, which again is one of the cool questions that is in my book.
But also just in the course of my studies, which is when we talk about online culture, are we talking about the internet just as an entity within itself or are we saying it is attached to offline spaces and that offline spaces do shape how we interact with the web. I think that question has really been asked a lot more during the pandemic. So they actually touched on a question that's really interesting, even though I don't think that they're aware of why that question is interesting.
So I would say ultimately I think the reception to the book was pretty good. I didn't get super negative reviews. I have a two star from someone on Good Reads saying this book doesn't have enough Quran in it. And I was just like come on!
But I also try not to read reviews. I will never search myself on the internet so maybe you have seen reviews I haven't.
AR: From my understanding, and I don't mean this in a bad way, no one really from my friendship groups knows who you are.
HK: That's really good. I really want more people to be like that.
AR: Yeah. It's funny. So at LSE, people were Facebook people, not Twitter people. So when my friends slowly start making Twitter, they would say ‘Adnan who should I follow?’ One of the first recommendations is two internet people: you and Taylor Lorenz in America. So I'm slowly directing followers to you - for good or for bad.
Going back to the conversation before: do you see yourself having a particular role in the online Muslim community, or do they see you as having a role?
HK: No, I don’t think so. I don't think I've ever been influential in online Muslim spaces and I never really set out to be.
I'm just genuinely interested in how people move in the world in different ways and how they interact with each other in ways that can conflict. I think for me, it was very much I'm more of an observer and someone who's trying piece together particular story about a particular moment in time.
I think it's also worth bearing in mind that this book was written about the years of 2016 - 2018. There's not a single reference to TikTok in that book, for example. So in a lot of ways it's a really outdated book - Muslim internet culture moves really fast. And by extension, the challenges that young Muslims are confronted with in relation to these faith-based problems on different platforms also changes.
I documented a particular moment in time, which might be useful for people trying to study that moment or trying to study what young Muslims felt during that time.
AR: That makes sense. I never felt you were trying to get into those spaces or be a part of them. So, that kind of checks out with my own understanding.
Moving on away from the book, to the big one that I was really eager to speak to you about, which is all things posting.
So to start with, what caused your fascination with posting? when did you realize posting quote-on-quote was a thing?
HK: We talked about it early on in the conversation. My fascination with posting has come from being on the internet for a long time and seeing how the internet has really shaped people in ways that they don't quite understand just yet. I wouldn't say there was a revelation or a Eureka moment, but it was more a build up over time.
So a part about was this Adam Curtis documentary called ‘By Machines of Loving Grace’ about the relationship between politics, power and technology. And in this series, he talks about the rise of big tech and how people were beginning to operate and think about power in the form of machines. In addition, how platform capitalism - the dominance of e.g. Facebook - were inducing particular forms of behaviour that we hadn't quite seen yet. The other aspect was working at Buzzfeed and looking at how much particular traffic metrics in particular trends informed forms of discourse.
When the pandemic happened, everyone moves online. Everyone was organizing their life around Zoom calls and HouseParty etc. That was a really interesting moment because our lives were being integrated with tech anyway. But at least previously you could say it was ‘augmented’ in the sense there was an offline world too. But then what happens when everything moves online?
Over time you were just seeing really bizarre tweets about various things - and we’ve covered a lot of them on the pod. But even before then I was speaking to my friend Phoebe about this and we realised if you think about Twitter as a form of publishing and a form of writing, it becomes really interesting because tweets live on beyond themselves. They become different things. They become appropriated. You lose control of it really fast and this is really changing the way in which conversations happen. The best example of this is obviously all the woke nonsense happening right now. i.e. this manufactured culture war that has become front and centre of government policy and has become the preoccupation of TV news, journalists etc.
Even if you aren't someone who spends your entire life on the internet at some point in time, you will have to confront that. You will have to confront those conversations and the moment you confront those conversations, you become part of this online discourse, whether you like it or not. So people are inadvertently being walked into what is essentially just conversations that used to happen among anonymous Tumblr accounts. And it's always very fun to dunk on someone and make a joke about someone but you're also adding fuel to the fire, so to speak.
Both Phoebe and I are writers by trade and then we came up with the idea of doing a podcast on it. And it seems to be something that people to be enjoying. We're still quite young. So, we'll see how that goes.
After I did my first book I thought what happens next? And my thinking was always I want to look at the internet as a whole and its relationship to platforms and how that's changing the way in which we socialize with each other. So it's a much more broader anthropological look at how online communities form and breakdown.
AR: Okay. Okay. I do not expect that answer. I was more expecting a ‘eureka moment’ explanation as to how this came about as opposed to being gradual build up.
HK: It kind of comes in drips and drops. An example: when you see an MP talking about woke culture and you recognize that this is a Tumblr thing. Or when someone with big posters brain like Brendan O'Neill has all his articles about “this is what I'm mad about online today.” All the woke social justice warriors are talking about Mr. Potato Head. In reality you've just seen a few tweets and you've decided that this is going to be your column today because you're mad about it and you know that you can get other people mad about it.
So then you realise a particular kind of poster can monetize his posters brain and others can’t. Obviously there's a political impetus as to why one group can't. But it's this idea ultimately everyone is sort poisoned by the internet in some capacity.
AR: Yeah. Okay. But then using Brendan O'Neill as an example do you think he's actually angry about these things? Or do you just think, this is going to be his shtick for the day? Honestly, I genuinely can't imagine anybody getting super outraged about Mr. Potato Head or whatever nonsense it is on the day. Maybe it's my own lack of thinking, but I just can't imagine that.
HK: Yes. But I think that also he understands the logic of platforms as well. So he knows that this is annoying, but I'm going to overblow it. I think there are other people who do it entirely for clicks e.g. online personalities, YouTube, Instagram personalities, who do have a whole anti social justice warrior thing entirely. Then there are some people who genuinely believe that they are in culture war that they have to win and also no one else is taking it seriously. So I think you do have a sliding scale.
AR: Okay. Thank you. That makes sense. So one thing I was fascinated by is you have seen recently the rise of Clubhouse and audio platforms. How do you think that impacts posting, where do you see it going with the rise of audio generated content?
HK: It's really interesting. So I am on Clubhouse and I do not like it. I don't like it as a platform. I think it's very messy.
There's a couple ways this could go: this could just be a fad because ultimately I think that people still really underestimate written text as a format of communication. There's this idea about that no one likes to read anymore, so we should have videos and audio. But, if you look at really successful content, almost all of it has a written component of some sort. Influencers can post beautiful pictures of themselves but ultimately lots of people engage with the captions that they write and often they hire professional copywriters. If you look at Instagram meme pages, for example, so many of the really popular meme pages are not just pictures but pictures with words as well. So I feel people underestimate how valuable written words are in terms of differentiating content.
One weakness of Clubhouse is just having to listen to people all the time on really janky audio. I think a lot of the audio is really bad because all of it is just Apple headphones and really noisy backgrounds.
If there were more influencers doing workshops/lectures on Clubhouse, would it work? Yeah. It could work in a limited form. But also how does this type of app work in a climate where people are allowed to go out. So at a time when we spent a year and a bit being deprived of social communications, will anyone actually want to communicate via Zoom or Clubhouse?
Taylor Lorenz had a really interesting piece about the first set of audio influencers, that got me thinking about a story that I did for Mel last year about custom ASMR artists. So they would go on Fiverr and for $5-$15 they will record whatever you want in particular types of ASMR or particular types of customized audio. So you basically produce audio as a service as part of a digitalized experience economy. I think this has done well during the pandemic but again, it's a case of these things work really well in a pandemic because we're all sitting on our own and we're looking for different forms of social experiences. Post-pandemic I’m not entirely sure.
So all of which is to say, I think that Clubhouse has a lot of potential. I don't think it's going to exist in its current form. I think it will spin off either into a type of conferencing service which is designed for business people and people who work in rise and grind industries rather than a mass social media platform. Or it'll go into podcasting. But what I can say is that both Instagram and Facebook are launching their own rivals to it. So I think Instagram is about to launch a service where you can have up to six people in Instagram Live. Twitter, funnily enough, they've tried doing their own version of stories and I don't think it's gone particularly well. But they recently bought a newsletter company so they're betting on long form written word content.
AR: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So my final posting related question is how do you handle some of the heat from your posts? So whether it's the doctors whispering into the ears or any number of posts, you will get heat from it. Does it ever have an impact on your mental health or as you said before, you don't search your name, so you're kind of oblivious to it.
HK: It's a good question. I'm actually writing an essay about doctor tweet right now for an academic journal about trolling. So the Pie and Nonce stuff there's been no backlash to that. I think for the most part it's been so stupid and ridiculous, that no one can really relate it back to me.
So the doctors tweets, I think is a good example and I did a 10K Posts on this, but it's one of those tweets that keeps coming back to me in really unexpected ways. So you mentioned earlier in this interview about whether I consider myself to be part of Muslims Twitter or not. It's one of those times where my presence as a semi well-known British Muslim journalist means there’s somewhat of a metaphorical target on my back, whether I like it or not. I won't go too much into what the doctor tweet was, but it was based off a particular format of tweet where it was ‘I love being a leftist service worker at Starbucks and writing X or Y message on the Starbucks cups when I hand it to you.’ The idea was that you would always get a certain demographic really mad because they would just buy into the idea that the whole world was against them in ways that no one else was really appreciating and only they could see.
I tweeted it when I was on a fellowship in New York. It was 2 in the morning when I did it and I didn't really think much of it. And I woke up and it had exploded because of a few very well-known right-wing accounts. I deleted it a few hours later because it was getting way out of control. But by that point it had been screenshot. It goes back to the point that these tweets have a life of their own. So even if I've said, this is fake and you (and people in general) know that it's fake it still circulates. And it circulates a lot these days around Hindu nationalist twitter, which I didn't expect in 2018 when I wrote that. This was a tweet very much geared towards Trump supporters or Brexit people - not the fucking Hinduvta psychos who were actually burning down villages.
But because of that circulation it has really made me think about aspects of self censorship I have to swallow because of the nature of social forces that are out of my control. It may be a joke to me but the perception is that it reflects really badly on Muslim communities. There's this fear about Islamophobia is going to increase because of all the fake news. And that's completely right. But then at the same time, I think to myself on the one hand we're talking about not caving in to Islamophobia and trying to be holistic individuals. But at the same time, we're also self-censoring and as a result, you end up having forms of resistance that you are able to exert which are really limited. And they also can be really ineffective.
And this is a conversation more about comedy. I don't know what you think about Muslim comedy in the UK, but I'm not particularly impressed by a lot of it. I feel a lot of it is very bland and it's all the same types of jokes e.g. ‘you think I'm a terrorist, but actually I love watching football and eating pie and mash’. It's not really touching on the root of the problem, which is that, it doesn't matter what you do or whether you wear a British flag on your hijab or not. What we're actually talking about is this inane paranoia that is held by certain people that exists independent of Muslim communities. We've tried for years to tell people like Tommy Robinson, EDL people, that Muslims are normal people and they have normal jobs and they do normal things and lots of them are not practicing and also lots of them know less about Islam than you do. And none of that has worked. It's not like I was trying to prove a point or to try intellectualize it. It was just a dumb thing I did because I was really bored and I had writer's block.
But it did open up this really interesting question about if you're a journalist or you're a comedian or you're someone who works in the creative arts and you're Muslim it's really hard for you to separate that Muslim identity from the work that you do. And a lot of that is involuntarily, it's not just white English people that are demanding certain things of you but also broader Muslim communities that have expectations of you and get really upset when you don't meet those expectations.
And then on the other hand, this context while we’re talking about free speech and the right to be offended it's also really evident again this only applies to certain people. I was speaking to Sadia Azmat who is a very good British Muslim comedian who has gone through similar stuff, where she's made jokes about being a Muslim woman and having sex. She's gotten a lot of heat for that because it's not something that people expect given their bizarre expectations. This then ends up leading you to self-censor. I don't have an answer for this, but it makes you think more about the invisible pressures that are placed on you as a Muslim person however much you want to distance yourself from it. It's really hard to fully detach yourself from it.
AR: Yeah. Okay. That is really interesting the way you've framed it as well. That makes a lot of sense.
The conversation we had before we started the interview around careers can you imagine you're at a magic circle firm interviewing and then they're bringing this up and they're like, what was this about?
HK: I think about this sometimes because have I now crossed the Rubicon where I can never get a sensible job again?
But during the time I wrote this tweet, I was in comedy as well. I wrote a couple of Edinburgh shows for other comedians and a co-writer. When you're a comedian you can often use Twitter as a way of gauging what is successful. By all metrics that's a very successful bit.
The question is very much should these really be haunting? This is where the whole cranky free speech stuff comes in. I think that they do have a point - this is the controversial thing. People do have a point when it comes to the notion about certain things that you say and certain things that you do because of the nature of the internet and the nature of digital writing living beyond the author. At the end of the day it can have these very material affect on you.
But the issue with the free speech people is that they’ll then take this somewhat reasonable point and they'll shoot it into the stratosphere by talking about how it's completely fine to harass a trans person in public by screaming about gender. And if you criticize that you are anti-free speech. So they extrapolate straight into harassment when there are all kinds of reasons to actually critique the nature of how we view the internet.
One thing I've been thinking about in the course of researching a second book is how none of these free speech issues have really changed since the 1990s. But what has changed is both platform consolidation and the idea about we all exist on these big 4 websites. So it's no longer the case you can go on the internet and that’s a separate part of your life to everything else, or it's separated from your labour or separated from other parts of your social wellbeing. It's integrated into everything. Even if you decide that you want to delete your personal account, you can't get away from those metrics which define so much of how the economy works now in a ways that don't make sense. Massive speculation from me, but I think it is very fundamental in understanding how and why we live in the way that we do.
AR: Okay. Going on to personal stuff you mentioned, you're researching for a second book. Can you say what it's about or is it still in the works?
HK: It hasn't even been confirmed yet. My agent is still saying we actually need to have a very short definition of what you're trying to do. But I would say that what it's trying to do is expand the idea of ‘everything is posting’ further. So what I really want to look at is the development of digital language and digital writing and how the commodification of digital writing and various forms has resulted in us communicating with each other and relating to each other in very different and fundamentally more transactional ways.
It's really caused a fundamental shift in how we view our relationships as human beings. And I think it's quite a substantial shift that isn't going to be obvious until much later in our lives.
AR: And then what's your master's experience been like so far? I guess you're doing it all online?
HK: I've only ever visited the UCL campus once and that was to pick up a badge.
I really enjoy the course there’s always really interesting discussions and it's made me think about living online in very different ways and in a way I hadn't really considered before. One of the big aspects of my courses is about whether life is digitally mediated: as in are our social relationships and community forming driven by the technology that we use? And on the one hand they are in the sense of here's X example of a relationship that has been forged digitally. But at the same time, the internet has been designed in a very particular way to fulfil very particular sets of conditions, which means that it can be designed in a different way. It can be designed and rebuilt in ways that don't serve the needs of particular big tech corporations. But because it has been designed in that way, the way in which we act is orientated by those means as well. We shouldn't be blaming technology for that. We should be blaming the people who decide is how the technology should be.
AR: Yeah. It's interesting. You say that because in Shoshana Zuboff’s book, that's basically her point Facebook, Google they'll design the internet for behaviour extraction, data extraction, whatever. And that's why we are where we are. But the important point, and I'm glad you also say is that, another internet as possible, another future is possible.
HK: Funnily enough, going back to Clubhouse, one of the Clubhouse rooms that I went to was considering what the future of the internet will be like? Almost all of it was very much the internet is going to be much more service driven. It's going to be optimized to people’s particular needs. It was very much about facilitating commerce.
The people who run start-ups and have all this VC money lack the imagination to actually think about what the internet could be. So as a result, we ended up with apps where you take all the noise from Twitter and make it audio.
AR: So my final bit was I wanted to do some fun questions or just random things I wanted to ask you.
The first one is, and the most important one is why was Jungkook’s silence so deafening?
HK: Do you know how much do you know how much control is put on K-pop fans?
AR: I've heard they're super put together, it's all orchestrated.
HK: I think BTS have a lot more freedom than other bands. But because the South Korean state is so involved in the development of K-Pop it is basically a state industry. In many ways they're just like civil servants, which I find very funny when you think about it. So they have to be politically neutral. But because they're the biggest band in the world it means that they're also the most powerful cultural force in the world as well.
And they could do a lot of good. I was thinking that one BTS member could probably save the NHS just by tweeting about it and doing a crowdfund. I reckon Jungkook has an alt account somewhere with 200 followers and one day we'll find it and it will be very funny.
AR: The next one was does the Pie and Nonce serve non-alcoholic beer?
HK: Have you ever had non-alcoholic beer before? I had it once and it was horrible. It basically tastes like if you took a bunch of white bread and just blend it then add some salt. It's liquified white bread. So even if the Pie and Nonce did do it, I'll bet you don't want to have it. I would say stick to your Diet Coke and Red Bull.
AR: Is this just the case of the social justice left just denying good non-alcoholic beer?
HK: Look, I'm not denying it. I'm just saying that it's just not worth the time. I have not met a single person who says non-alcoholic beer is delicious.
AR: Those are all the questions I had. Thank you so much.
HK: That was so much fun. I could have gone on for another hour, but there you go.
Once again, a massive thank you to Hussein for speaking to me. Some of the themes discussed are themes I am trying to write about on this blog so his insight has helped me as I think through them.
I highly recommend Hussein’s podcast 10K Posts, and to make sure you don’t miss the next ‘Doctor’ tweet follow Hussein on his Twitter.
So there we go! I really enjoyed the whole process of conducting this interview, if you like what you read let me know by leaving a comment. If there’s anyone in particular you would like to see interviewed let me know!