One of the clearest disjunctions between online & the real world is the obsession with class. Online there are many heated discussions about what class Andrew Twentyman/Jess Phillips belong to. Whereas in the real world it is a meaningless abstraction that no one ever talks about

I have lived, for the vast majority of my life, in areas that might described as w/class, or even lumpen-prole for that matter, but no one has ever talked about SE class, in my real-world experiences. It doesnt form part of the organic experience of living in those communities.

The vast majority of ppl who might be considered w/class dont think of themselves that way i.e they don't make sense of themselves & the world around through the prism of politics & economics.

The obsession with ‘class’ then is a marker of political engagement & preoccupation which does not apply to the very majority of ppl in the real world, including ppl who would be accurately described as working class.

In online discourse we occupy an un-real world populated by the self-selected highly politically engaged & can easily forget this: to the vast majority of the population ‘class’ is a meaningless abstraction that means nothing to them.

Im not even saying that class is not a useful category or way of making sense of certain things you understand. What Im saying is that the vast majority of the population dont make sense of themselves & the world through that particular prism.

& I think very online highly political engaged left-wingers sometimes forget this, or even, in some cases, are not even aware of it in the first place.

Im 40. I lived in Wigan for 27yrs. 12 of em on a council estate. No one, literally no one, has ever talked about socio-economic class, not once. To be preoccupied with class then is a marker of a high level of political engagement. Never forget that most ppl are not that engaged.

I could be a bit facetious here & say that there is nothing more middle-class than the obsession with being working-class.

i.e the discourse of ‘class’ is not really a bottom-up & organic process of sense-making but a top-down imposition by the highly politically engaged. There is nothing less ‘working-class’ than being preoccupied about being ‘working-class’ in other words.

‘Working-class’ in the political engaged imagination has become a
a cultural signifier of authenticity more so than an economic category. A form of authenticity prized bc it is felt to represent some kind of inexpressible spiritual truth i.e this is a form of romanticism.

To be ‘working-class’ then - i.e the way the term is often used - is to be ‘authentic’ in the politically engaged imagination. Whereas to be ‘middle-class’ is to be ‘inauthentic.’ What were once economic categories have now largely become ways to signal things about culture.