The Null Device

The London riots

There have been three days of rioting across London (and now other parts of Britain). The riots started after the fatal shooting by police of a Tottenham man, said to be a responsible family man, though alleged to have current or former gang links. The riots soon spread, with gangs of youths organising through BlackBerry Messaging (which is harder for police to monitor than the internet) and looting shops. Sportswear and consumer electronics were reportedly the most stolen items, though baby buggy shops were broken into (presumably for use carrying stolen goods), while other groups systematically mugged passersby. (One gang stormed a posh Notting Hill restaurant and robbed the patrons.) Meanwhile, another group trashed a gay bookshop in Camden, whilst leaving other businesses alone. Elsewhere, ordinary people were burned out of their homes when shops were torched; a news photograph shows a woman leaping for her life from a burning building in Croydon.

In a sense, this was an aspirational riot. While it may have started with anger over police violence, and mistrust of the police, it soon degenerated into an excuse to stock up on Nikes and plasma TVs, as well as engage in lots of fun ultra-violence (just like a video game, only better!) The conditions for the riot may have been set by the Thatcherite-Blairite ideology of helping the rich get richer and letting the devil take the hindmost, but the riots were an affirmation of these values, filtered through the equally sociopathic antihero mythology of US gang culture, from Scarface, via gangsta rap, to video games (some rioters referred to the police as "the feds", presumably imagining themselves to be 50 Cent or the guy from Grand Theft Auto or something), secondhand Jamaican gang machismo (which could explain attacking gay bookshops) and even half-digested bits of Tea Party-style moronic entitlement (one junior Dagny Taggart with an armful of trainers was heard to say "I'm getting my taxes back"). There was no challenge to the status quo here, only an extrapolation of it.

Meanwhile in North London, the Sony music/video distribution warehouse was burned to the ground, destroying the inventory of dozens of independent music labels and film distributors, among them Beggars/4AD, Domino, Thrill Jockey, FatCat and Soul Jazz. I wonder how many of them, already kicked by the recession, will go under.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police are posting CCTV images of looters to see if anyone can identify them, and so is an independent site. And in riot-hit areas, the local communities have united to clean up after the riot, with volunteers signing on via social networks.

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