Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life

Multinational oil corporations trumpet their green credentials. Shadowy billionaires orchestrate ‘grassroots’ political movements. Public-spending cuts that target the poor are billed as ‘giving power to the people’. Casually dressed employees play table football in airy open-plan offices, but work longer hours than ever before.

These are just a few examples of the growing gap between appearance and reality in modern life. With the melting away of the conflicts between East and West and Right and Left, the old ideologies were supposedly consigned to history. But this book argues that they never really went away – they just went undercover, creating a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and crude vested interests appear in seductive new disguises. A world of illusion, persuasion and coercion which aims to conceal the truth and beguile us all. It’s time to radically alter the way we perceive the world, to raise a sceptical yet optimistic eyebrow.

Get Real is a passionate and entertaining guide to spotting and decoding the delusions we live under – from ‘revolutionary’ plus-size models to ‘world-saving’ organic vegetables; from heavily scripted and edited ‘reality’ TV to ‘life-changing’ iPhone apps. Busting the jargon and unravelling the spin, Get Real reveals the secrets about modern life that we were never supposed to know. It’s an insider’s guide to understanding the present which puts the truth and the power to choose firmly in our hands. Only by telling it like it is can we improve – and maybe even save – our world for real.

About me...

I am a writer, radio producer, and an associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. I write on a wide range of aspects of politics and culture. My new book Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions was published by Fourth Estate on March 15 2012. I have written for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, and I speak at conferences, festivals and in the media about my ideas and research.

You can contact me via my Birkbeck webpage here.

A selection of my articles is below...

Trendy Twitter, groovy Google and funky Facebook wield formidable power

Twitter's suspension of a British journalist shows we should beware the commercial interests and huge power of social media sites. Their cuddly and revolutionary image is a smokescreen. 

The Guardian
Wednesday 1 August 2012

You can read the article here.

Milking Austerity

I'd rather have Thatcher's explicit ideology than the disavowed politics of coalition, cutting milk while claiming to care

The Guardian
Tuesday 19 June 2012

You can read the article here.

Why People Act Against Their Best Interests

'People aren't stupid. It sounds egalitarian, but it's actually reactionary'. This article explores the unfashionable idea of false consciousness and argues that it is key to addressing inequalities of power and status.

The Guardian
Thursday 29 March 2012

You can read the article here.