2514: 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. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/06/14/2514-more-distant-than-ever/

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Well, well, well, it's Saturday the14th of June, and this is episode 25

(00:04):
14 of 3 0 1 ly moved online, a personalpodcast, 301 seconds in length, written,
recorded, and edited by me at the jmo.
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 shareda language, but also seemed so alien.

(00:24):
America was the source of things,cartoons, comics, and the music I
listened to and along with Japan,the computer games I played.
And then there was Phoebe on TV playingguitar again in a coffee shop in a
city I'd never thought I'd visit.
All these cultural products felt like theyarrived from nowhere created by no one.
They simply just were.
I had no notion that theircreators, authors, or the musicians

(00:46):
in bands were real people.
US presidents werecharacters on The Simpsons.
Bill Clinton was a man who did nothave sexual relations with a woman
Even my young understanding ofUS politics felt like a fiction.
The first Iraq war played out in grainyGreen Night vision on the evening
news, a conflict conducted by a faraway country in another far away land.
Later a teacher told my class thatdemocracy in America was dead because

(01:08):
a man in Florida had ruled on theelection and given it to his brother.
Far away news from another planet.
And yet its cultural empire was presentin the action figures on my floor.
But the country itself, a distant myth.
And then the towers felland everything changed.
America didn't just lose itsmind, it exported its crisis.
Its abstract anxieties became ourdomestic policy too: mass surveillance,

(01:29):
invasive security, and a creepingauthoritarianism under Blair.
Justified by an American war.
The conflict was nolonger a grainy TV show.
Friends, older brothers from school wentoff to fight, and as the war on terror,
ground on my own friends went too.
And some of them died.
The American Empire arrivedin the two thousands and it
was no longer an abstraction.

(01:50):
At the same time, a differentkind of proximity was collapsing
the distance on MySpace.
I exchanged dms with a member of oneof my favorite American emo bands.
For the first time, I realizedAmericans were real people living
real lives in a real place.
And thus began a decades long tension.
Its Empire Crept closer impersonally,while its people came closer too.

(02:10):
For me, the early 2010s werethe years of convergence.
Occupy emerged shortly after our ownstudent protests, and it felt like we're
all part of the same conversation, thesame struggle happening in London, New
York, Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, et cetera.
Everyday Americans felt closer than ever.
The Web 2.0, internet and the iPhoneerasing the final feelings of distance.
American voices became aconstant presence in my life.

(02:32):
Strangers on screen,literally inches from my face.
Their thoughts and argumentsunfolding right alongside
messages from family and friends.
During the last decade, Americanculture, politics, and thinking
seeped into global consciousness.
Looking back, 2016 feelslike the high watermark.
In the uk, the national traumaof Brexit blurred into the
American spectacle of Trump 1.

(02:54):
Online it felt like the samepsychic battle waged on two fronts.
The media narratives, the populistanger, the cultural divisions
were all reflections in a mirror.
Proximity was total.
The empire wasn't just influencing us.
Its platforms have become the codespaces in which we lived our lives.
Every movement in the US culturalsphere moved us in the UK too.
We were all capturedin totality by empire.

(03:17):
I started checking out,but the pandemic sealed it.
2020 was a truly shared globalexperience, perhaps for the first time
in history, but it revealed just howdifferently everyone processed it.
No longer a distant myth, butan alienating alternate reality.
That summer when protests erupted acrossBritain following the murder of George
Floyd in Minneapolis America, the sharedInfoSphere caused Brits to adopt the

(03:38):
language and framework of Americanstruggle in our own policing protests.
I could only understand it asevents in the imperial core
spuring unrest out in the colonies.
To me, today, the United States as acountry feels more distant than ever.
I look in on social media and seeAmericans still posting a disconcerting
culture, hysterical and strange.
They speak English, butthey aren't like me.

(04:00):
And yet, America's materialempire is closer than ever.
I walk down the high street and there'sa 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'm surrounded by the material and digitalinfrastructure of the American Empire, yet
its state of mind is half a world away.
Middle class Brits who fixate onAmerican politics believe they're

(04:24):
being international, but really it'sa symptom of being provincial, living
so deep inside the imperial bubble.
You can't see anything else.
I resent the last 15years of cultural exhaust.
UK newspapers report blow by blowaccounts of drama 5,000 miles away.
Yet because of the colonization anddestruction of the info environment,
I have no idea why three ambulances,two fire engines, and the police were

(04:45):
at the train station the other night.
There is trouble here in airstrip onetwo, but many eyes still look elsewhere
across the pond, at an empire that iseverywhere yet still very far away.
I struggle with the American stateof mind versus America as state.