In the age of the individual, why is everything so impersonal?

Do you love being naked?

No matter if you don’t (or, indeed, if you do). If you’ve travelled by bus in London recently, there’s a good chance that a big arrow labelled “likes to get naked” pointed you out so passers-by would know exactly what to think about you and your proclivities. It should be the new motto of London Transport.

See London! Be labelled an exhibitionist…

The problem with Channel 4’s latest advertising wheeze for its show, Naked Attraction, is all too obvious. Before London Transport had second thoughts and scrapped the ads last week, the campaign made “clever” use of the bus windows, to make passengers part of “the sell”. Innocent commuters in London were being picked out and identified by “funny” lines regarding their propensity to get naked. It’s all splendidly modern in the way it blurs the line between the real and imaginary. It is also awfully modern the way the public continues to intrude on the private. 

One can understand why people got angry. “Good products can be sold by honest adverting”, said David Ogilvy, the so-called “father of advertising”, in his book, Confessions of Advertising Man. “If you tell lies, or weasel, you do your client a disservice, you increase your load of guilt, and you fan the flames of public resentment against the whole business of advertising.

Sadly, Ogilvy isn’t around to give his opinion of the Channel 4 ads, but they certainly did “fan the flames”. It’s not just that the arrows might make women even more vulnerable and could sexualise anybody under the age of 16 sitting in those seats. The message was so off-brand, even for this shoddy product. It seemed to say: “We believe you should be at home with who you are, so we’ll publicly ridicule who you are…”

We live in strange times, both deeply prurient but also conspicuously puritanical. The two forces vie against each other across the battleground of our culture. We are supposedly more aware of “body shape” and are routinely told to feel less embarrassed by being non-standard in size or shape, yet these shows exist so that puerile sniggering can continue in the privacy of every home that tunes into this most exploitative form of TV. Now that full-frontal nudity, in HD no less, with gratuitous close-ups of genitalia, is considered acceptable for terrestrial TV, should we be surprised to learn that dysmorphia is a growing problem, now among men who are doing everything legal and illegal to attain big necks, huge biceps, thick shoulders?

It’s all part of a media that feeds our worst phobias. The result is cultural psychosis, a schizoid abstraction from real life. People strive for health in unhealthy ways, learn to love themselves in ways that make them abhor everything about themselves. Sex is now supposedly natural and healthy, yet has never been so unnatural and unhealthy. Forget coy glances across the room when you (and Anna Richardson) can inspect a potential partner more intimately than their GP.

Yet when love can be reduced to a promotional campaign, one begins to wonder whether “progress” is more a matter of salesmanship than achievement. We are told that our youth are more educated yet in ways that seem to diminish what they know. As a people, we supposedly grow into wisdom even as we seem to grow into stupidity. Scientific research would save us from a pandemic except for all those people who have “done their research” and engaged in “critical thinking” only to reach conclusions that wouldn’t have been out of place at a 16th-century witch-burning.

We have lost our way.

The Channel 4 ad is much more than a clever idea, badly executed. It is emblematic of how, in a quippy, hyper-zingy, wry-about-everything world, we are too often stripped of our identity. This is the age of The Individual when individuals no longer matter. Watching Anna Richardson and guest critiquing a body (Yes, I did it – cringingly, briefly, regretfully, so you wouldn’t have to) left even this old atheist wondering where the concept of the soul exists in a world devoted to materialism. Can you really fall in love with a pierced nipple alone? To paraphrase the Bard:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it shaved pubis finds…

Abstracting the person from the body seems ridiculous until one begins to recognise this process of depersonalisation at work across our daily lives. Corporations might ride the wave of personalisation and peddle a narrative of individual engagement, yet the reality is that they are increasingly removing their real-world addresses and phone numbers from their websites. They instead erect elaborate AI personalities to deal with our problems so that they never need to deal with us as human beings. GPs, too, are increasingly about triage than treatment, relying on inaccurate blood tests to diagnose what should be obvious by examination. This, after all, is the era of Big Data, when the individual likes and dislikes of millions can be boiled down to personality types. It is surely by design, not accident, that life’s problems increasingly fall between the options given on any complaint form.

As for people sitting on the top deck of the number 47 crossing London Bridge, who cares what they think so long as the data shows that people given to sitting on the top deck of the number 47 crossing London Bridge make up a small fraction of any important demographic? It’s not us as unique individuals that matter as much as the idealised individual that lives out there in the data-modelled space between our idiosyncrasies. We – as far as we’re stubbornly different – might as well not exist.