Every commuter knows the dismay of realising, after the brief elation of having secured a seat on the bus or the train, that the person next to them has decided to use their phone to play music, or make a video call, or play clips from the bottomless cesspool of internet junk. L’enfer, c’est les autres sur l’autobus avec le TikTok, as Jean-Paul Sartre would have written if he’d ever had to take the N68 to East Croydon.
The normal, British reaction to this behaviour is to quietly press one’s teeth together harder and harder until they explode like porcelain in a meat grinder. An even more extreme reaction, such as asking the offender to wear headphones, is occasionally suggested.
In the run-up to the local elections, the Liberal Democrats proposed a policy in which “headphone dodgers” would be fined up to £1,000. In one sense this is the archetypal Lib Dem policy: hilariously impractical, totally uncosted, designed only to produce headlines. It’s also the opposite of liberal, but it was popular – a YouGov poll found 60 per cent support. When Keir Starmer was asked to support the policy at Prime Minister’s Questions on 30 April, he took it seriously, and lambasted Tories who laughed at the idea.
They were right to laugh, because it is a risible policy. But it is also indicative of a wider tendency in which businesses profit from providing the means for antisocial behaviour – a tendency we might call “public nuisance capitalism”. The principle of public nuisance capitalism is that the less companies are regulated, the more they create the means for one person’s liberty as a consumer to impinge on someone else’s as a citizen. No government wants to intervene in the freedom of companies to sell everyone a miniature loudspeaker connected to an inexhaustible library of noise. So, public transport is filled with cacophony, and unserious politicians suggest fining people for using their devices in exactly the way they’re designed to be used.
Nor does the government want to intervene in the freedom of car manufacturers to sell (to pick one example) an SUV that weighs three tonnes and can reach 193 miles per hour. It is up to the consumer to make sure they do not misuse the enormous power of the machine, although having spent a lot of money buying that power, that is obviously what they’re planning to do. The police, the health service and the pothole-fillers must face consequences of a choice the consumer should never have been able to make.
This creates whole consumer sectors that are abhorrent to other people: the TikTok loudspeaker guy, the careless Lime bike rider, the playground vape dragon, the fast-fashion addict, the SUV speeder, the wood-burning stove devotee. These people have not only been allowed to create a public nuisance, they have been sold the means to do so by a lightly regulated market. The nuisances (pollution, danger) are what economists call “externalities”; the public nuisance capitalism model is that the profits are private, but the externalities are public. This is socially divisive. Going by the coverage of “headphone dodgers” in certain newspapers, Mrs Woodburner is not just annoyed but morally offended by Barry TikTok’s lack of decorum on the train (she’s a hypocrite, though – her public nuisance is far more damaging than his).
Public nuisance capitalism is not a new problem. For more than a century, the American gun lobby has claimed that “guns don’t kill people; people do”. A more accurate version would read: “gun companies aren’t held responsible for shootings; gun consumers are”. But it is now being applied more widely, as technology amplifies everything we do, giving us an ever greater capacity for antisocial behaviour: to blast music and opinions at each other; to use each other as disposable labour or for brief, insincere relationships; to speed through the world with little thought for those who might get in our way. Businesses recognise this – which is why so many companies are “platforms” or “communities” in which responsibility is shared, if not abdicated – but politicians, it seems, do not.
[See also: The English rebel]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion