REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - PARIS 🇫🇷

Impressions from recent visit to Paris and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Paris as it is today and the extent to which Paris is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - A lot of what is said about the scale of change in France is true but Paris is such a great city it can still fairly easily accommodate it

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - BUCHAREST 🇷🇴

Impressions from recent visit to Bucharest and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Bucharest as it is today and the extent to which Bucharest is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Bucharest feels comparatively poorer vs other EU capitals but seems to be improving. Relatedly, recently migrants started arriving

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - BRUSSELS 🇧🇪

Impressions from recent visit to Brussels and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Brussels as it is today and the extent to which Brussels is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Brussels is possibly the worst capital in Europe in terms of demographic change, migration has run wild and the city has transformed

VISITING MOLENBEEK, BRUSSELS 🇧🇪🇪🇺

Molenbeek is one of the most infamous municipalities in Europe - right at the edge of the Belgian and European Union capital and known both for its very large migrant community and for producing a large number of Jihadis. I went on a tour 🧵 Molenbeek is the largest migrant enclave in Brussels and one of maybe most known on the European continent given its location in the EU capital. Infamously it has been the home of many Islamists; eg the 2004 Madrid Bombers, Paris 2015 terrorists and Brussels 2017 Station Bomber

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - COPENHAGEN 🇩🇰

Impressions from recent visit to Copenhagen and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Copenhagen as it is today and the extent to which Copenhagen is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Copenhagen’s reputation as about as Basically Fine as you can get is well-deserved but it is too soon to say it is out of the woods

THE YOOKAY AS ART

A short collection of recent photographs of Modern Britain AKA ‘The Yookay’ which have artistic merit and which capture a changing Britain 🧵 THE ADMIRAL

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - STOCKHOLM 🇸🇪

Impressions from recent visit to Stockholm and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Stockholm as it is today and the extent to which Stockholm is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Stockholm is a modern, pleasant, high human capital city which to a large extent lets it shrug off its large recent migrant influxes

The year is 2050. Changing demographics have Latinamerica-fied your politics - like in Latin America western countries are now condemned to neverending lurching between two ideological extremes that then only further radicalise in reaction to each other. Which side do you choose? America will fulfil its destiny and become the penultimate Latin American country in the Americas, before Canada which will first become a Subcontinental country and then a Latin American country after the Latinos move up into it from America. Trump is the first American Caudillo

HOW NATIVES THINK - WHY MANY PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK SO IRRATIONALLY 🧵

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was an early 20th century French anthropologist writing before many of the taboos academic anthropology has accumulated today. In his book ‘How Natives Think’ he explores why so many people - and for him especially so many ‘non-civilised’ peoples - seem to be so superstitious. He tries to explain what it is that is happening inside the minds of (he calls them) ‘natives’ when, for example, they appear to have difficulty understanding causality in anything other than in terms of spirits or djinns. Though the work is not without its critics (eg it has been called reductive, eurocentric and generalising) it is an interesting example of taboo-free study on the ubiquity of a kind of magical thinking or djinnbrain Lévy-Bruhl’s core claim is that so-called “primitive” peoples do not think illogically as such, but instead according to different rules. Reasoning is primarily shaped by emotion, symbolism and collective belief, not contradiction or empirical causation

New Article in the Telegraph on ‘The Yookay’ and my @MythoYookay page. “The "Yookay" now has a wider implication too: to suggest … we are now a new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain”

https://twitter.com/davidghfrost/status/1935756709298888836

Article is much more sympathetic than the articles in more left-leaning outlets. Somehow an easy enough concept to grasp when there is less bias

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - ZAGREB 🇭🇷

Impressions from recent visit to Zagreb and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Zagreb as it is today and the extent to which Zagreb is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Zagreb is not as interesting VS Croatia’s coastal areas but it less touristy, a good ‘local’ city. Guest workers recently started to arrive

BBC Journalist asks Danish Politician how Denmark is able to maintain trust in its Democracy - “Give voters what they want. If they want lower immigration lower it” Advanced Techniques for Expert Democracy-Heads (Experts Only) to maintain trust in your Democratic System

• Release all data for transparency, even if the findings are uncomfortable
• If voters want lower immigration, lower immigration
• Don’t allow foreign ghettos to form

https://twitter.com/lucaajw/status/1930259960287400426

☸️ THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM OF SIKKIM

In the C19th and 20th large numbers of Nepali workers were settled in the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, over time becoming a majority - this demographic change providing the impetus for the eventual dissolution of the historic Sikkim state 🧵 Sikkim, once a sovereign Himalayan kingdom, saw its tenability as a state dramatically contested by waves of Nepali migration - initially as labourers, but then as dominant political actors who transformed the state’s demographic and political character, eventually dissolving it

PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF LEICESTER, UK 🇬🇧

I recently visited Leicester - one of the cities in Britain most transformed by immigration and the infamous location of a recent series of intercommunal riots between its Hindu and Muslim communities - to see what it looks like today 🧵 Leicester received more migrants before other British cities because of its textile industry and an influx of Ugandan Asians, creating chain migration incentives. Aside from its infamous community unrest also in recent years Richard III’s body was discovered under a carpark here

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - TBILISI 🇬🇪

Impressions from recent visit to Tbilisi and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Tbilisi as it is today and the extent to which Tbilisi is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Tbilisi is an underrated city where issues affecting the rest of Europe are still novel, politics is more balancing EU & Russia influence

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - PRAGUE 🇨🇿

Impressions from recent visit to Prague and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Prague as it is today and the extent to which Prague is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Prague is a fun Basically Fine city but it can suffer from overtourism. A very limited number of guest workers are now starting to arrive

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - BELGRADE 🇷🇸

Impressions from recent visit to Belgrade and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Belgrade as it is today and the extent to which Belgrade is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Belgrade is a tidy and organised city in an ongoing construction boom. It is a very overtly nationalistic place without much migration

REVIEWING EUROPEAN CITIES - LISBON 🇵🇹

Impressions from recent visit to Lisbon and the ways in which the city is and is not changing in the 2020’s 🧵 This is not a complaining thread, more just to describe Lisbon as it is today and the extent to which Lisbon is or is not changing. ‘TLDR’ - Lisbon has experienced a visible migrant influx and a decline in the public space. Lisbon still often magical but in future may see changes

Two Australian women from the urban ‘Eshay’ subculture (the Australian equivalent of Roadman) explain their favourite slang terms in Multicultural Sydney English “You gronk dog”

New Article published in The New Statesman about ‘The Yookay’. Article makes some attempts to be descriptive but I wanted to make a few comments on it and respond to some of the misconceptions in its framing 🧵 Author describes ‘cackling satirists’ ‘racialising’ critiques of change. It being racialised so-called is inescapable because that is the nature of the change, by normative historical standards this kind of change is remarkable. An ontological point not in and of itself ‘racist’

THOUGHTS ON THE ‘YOOKAY’ AESTHETIC - WHY MODERN BRITAIN IS SO AESTHETICALLY DISORIENTATING

🧵 Britain’s ongoing demographic transformation has in recent years made unavoidable in increasingly larger parts of the country what I and others have called the ‘Yookay Aesthetic’ - a historically novel aesthetic fusion between the aesthetics of disparate new migrant groups, the aesthetics of the worldview that facilitates their immigration into Britain (called variously ‘neoliberalism’, ‘late liberalism’, ‘immigrationisme’, ‘wokeness’ and ‘gay race communism’) and the aesthetics of the Historical Britain receiving the migrants. Its relatively recent aesthetic reification as a distinct new ‘thing’ has produced a fair few quite pronounced emotional reactions and I wanted to comment on why that is, the particular elements of the emerging ‘look’ that people find so provocative.

Many people have remarked that one of the most defining qualities of the aesthetic is how jarring the effect it produces is, its incongruity. The incongruity is something like this - a Samurai in front of the Pyramids, an Aztec on the Great Wall of China, a Bedouin in the Sistine Chapel. The non sequitur effect is jolting, disorientating. Not because it is inherently impossible for distinct worlds to ever ‘cross over’ but because we have such established and normative standards for what we expect to constitute those worlds that the effect when they do meet is discombobulating. That discombobulating effect is of course not a fact about the world, about their inherent incompatibility - the value judgement that the encounter is incongruous or incompatible is an intersubjective one - but it doesn’t emotionally diminish that discombobulating intersubjective valuation. The effect is further compounded too if in response to an aesthetic regarded as unappealing or ugly. Doubly so if there is the dimension of dispossession, the felt feeling of displacement at familiar aesthestics of home and place transmogrified into something that appears conspicuously alien.

The ‘Yookay’ in its birth pangs is a very tonally inconsistent phenomenon. Often a slap-dash blend of incongruous non-sequitur mishmash culture and aesthetic forms - the roadman in the balaclava, puffer jacket and thobe, the old Tudor building adorned with Urdu signage and draped in Palestine flags, Deliveroo riders congregated below a WWI war memorial playing Punjabi music aloud on speakerphone, large populations of Eritreans or Bolivians or Papuans appearing suddenly on the streets of Aberdeen or Aberystwyth etc. Early stage ‘Yookay’ represents a great, undifferentiated throwing together of the world in one place on top of an old and established British culture - whatever its final form it is still something that is very much in the process of being created and consolidated. You have some emerging staples already, the Roadman, the ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids’ brand of Islam, MLE etc. but those new forms as a whole aren’t yet fully, properly settled. There is no historical weight to our encounters with ‘it’, we are unsure how we are supposed to respond to something so novel and incongruous by any normative standard which is still in so much flux. You are asked to engage with these new fusion forms as serious, authentic cultural expressions but you can’t help but meet those cultural expressions as jarring non-sequiturs. Their incredibly recent historical contingency is inescapable. Often too the new forms are not especially aesthetically ‘pleasing’ which only compounds the incongruity, how dispiriting people find them. “What the hell is going on here? What kind of weird mishmash is this?”

[1/3] Of course you can become accustomed to these things over time, they are strange and novel now but they could become less so and far more quotidian and established in the future. They can also appear more strange to Brits than to immigrant diaspora groups, who might already be sentimental and nostalgic about these new forms - particularly where they live in fairly insular communities and have less references for what Historical Britain used to look like or less sentimental attachments to that older idea of Britain. A new aesthetic form that tends to repulse Brits especially when it is accompanied by a strong felt sense of loss might not do so for other groups. See eg, the spread of religious forms like Islam. Where the forms evolve next becomes a tussle between these two kinds of opposing reactions.

A qualification on this emotional response that further clouds our reactions to this novel non-sequitur aesthetic - when I created the ‘Yookay Aesthetics’ page I had expected a reaction to the content but I hadn’t expected the page to grow quite as quickly as it did, for there to be quite as strong a reaction to it as there was. At its core ‘Yookay Aesthetics’ (@MythoYookay) is (and this is my subjective value judgement) a ‘dark comedy’ page and so in its unavoidable in these kinds of curating exercises bias it will tend to prioritise more outrageous or absurd content, though it also has as its remit the aesthetics of the emerging New Britain in all its manifestations whether commonplace or novel in their rarity, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Admittedly tonally inconsistent in that way, much like the ‘Yookay’ itself. For the record and in that sense, it is not supposed to be an “everything this account posts is bad” account. It is an aesthetics account. There is no commentary because implicit or overt judgements often cloud an unmediated aesthetic response (‘is’ vs ‘ought’) but, still, that hasn’t stopped people attempting to read commentary into it - so I wanted to say a little more about the the nature of the reactions people have had to it.

I coined the term ‘Yookay’ in 2023 (probably you can find earlier distinct uses because it is a fairly intuitive comedy transliteration) and it floated around in memes and posts for about a year before it became more conceptually consolidated in 2024. Again, the page is a satire page but I think there is also some merit to the exercise of just exhibiting the aesthetic because it does constitute a real and growing presence in Britain that is mostly otherwise unexplored but which will continue to gradually redefine more and more of the country.

‘Yookay Aesthetics’ gets three main criticisms, the first is that it places a lot of emphasis on the subject of race, the second is that it is depressing, the third is “actually, this image elicits the opposite response in me to ‘the one you were (the detractor claims) trying to provoke’.” I think the effects the images create that invites these criticisms all stem from a similar place. On the first criticism, because the nature of the change in Britain is inescapably race-based it is difficult for the subject to not in some way be race-related. Some people say, does race really matter? You be the judge. Let me say though that this change is happening because for many the answer is that it does not matter - or they at least think it does not matter. Thinking it does not matter in the abstract without a full understanding of what that change entails and then thinking it does not matter after the fact of the change having happened are of course two meaningfully distinct beliefs. Suffice it to say that either way even if a person wants to insist the change is unremarkable the material nature of the change would in any other set of historical circumstances be considered remarkable - even era defining. I don’t think it is inherently ‘bigoted’ to observe these shifts and the aesthetic changes that accompany them, some people will doubtless disagree though.

[2/3]