Mrs Luva‑Luva

‘Turn a different corner and we never would have met’
— George Michael, A Different Corner, 1986

I love this song, partly for the casual drop of the quantum Many Worlds theory of reality. Every potential action, turning a different corner, creates a new branching universe. In this one, at this time, I’ve walked into Coopers Townhouse, into the live streaming of their reality, and a man with a deep tan who’s giving off serious Elvis energy is belting out this stone cold classic, pitch perfect. They’re not his words or the tune he wrote, but it’s his voice, and in that voice I believe he’s a man who truly understands the fear of being made vulnerable through love, though it may well be that he simply has a great voice and knows how to use it. The line of authenticity is blurring. I’m here because my YouTube algorithm suggested this place. It was right. Turns out it’s very comforting knowing just down the road from me there’s people singing and boozing and having fun all day every day. At 15:30 on a Friday I’m joining them.

‘Take me back in time, maybe I can forget’

I order a drink and take a seat. I don’t realise at the time but I’ve bumped into someone next to me, and her and her bloke look a bit annoyed; my focus is elsewhere. It’s only watching the footage back afterwards that I clock it. None of the 392 people watching online notice either. They’re discussing George Michael and Ghost. A stream of semi coherent running commentary, sometimes interacting with each other, sometimes not, but clearly sharing a knowledge of the various characters who drink at Coopers.

There’s something so beautifully hedonistic about a group of people permanently caught in boozy song, dance, laughter, and shared experience. To be part of it is, in some ways, to be stepping out of time and place, into a little portal that’s held firm through the decades. From its 1920s renaming after its landlady and licencee, the much loved Ada Cooper, to surviving its peculiar fate of now jutting out the side of a 1980s Liverpool shopping centre, stepping inside is a long way from the existential concerns of my Tech Power and Society book club, and from the general slightly doomy feeling I’ve been walking around with of late.

‘I would promise you all of my life’

There are counters on the wall showing TikTok, Insta and YouTube follower numbers. Aside from that, it’s not obvious anywhere that we’re being piped out across the world. No one in the pub shows any awareness of it either. Somewhere within the gradual normalisation of surveillance packaged as entertainment, of endless streams of reality as content, I’ve developed the ability to shut it out, which surprises me.

Privacy matters to me. There’s a risk in sharing parts of yourself only for them to be picked up, interpreted, and reframed by others, and a mentally healthy place probably sits somewhere between being buttoned up and spewing out a continual stream of images of your life to strangers. The thought of being watched by hundreds of invisible eyes and hidden commentators feels both creepy and as if dimensions have been hacked, slightly loosening the grip of reality. But there’s also something about being part of a group rather than an individual that makes it feel strangely comfortable.

‘Little by little you’ve brought me to my knees’

How did the boundaries between public and private get so blurred? It perhaps began, or at least became visible, in 1996 with the “godmother” of the live stream, a nineteen year old student, Jennifer Ringley. Using an early Logitech QuickCam, she wrote a script to capture a single frame every few minutes and upload it to her site, updating the page so viewers always saw her latest image. Through this, Jennicam, an early iteration of the live stream, was conceived.

She described it as a technical challenge, mainly to show her mates, but then it started to grow into something else, an experiment in everyday life as material, way before the term “content” was coined for this uploading of ourselves. Over time she became acclimatised to being watched and left the camera running, setting herself a rule to conduct her life as if it didn’t exist. A couple of years after that her site was generating millions of views and she began charging people to watch. Then in 2003 she stopped entirely and went dark. Dark before the rise of MySpace and dark through everything that followed.

However immune you imagine yourself to be to invisible eyes, it’s hard to believe that kind of exposure doesn’t build up somehow, like toxins forming glitches in the brain. Privacy used to feel like a human right. We keep finding ways to trade it away for money, attention, visibility, connection. To strip someone of privacy has long been a way of asserting power over them. George Michael knew something about that. While celebrities welcomed the chance to regain some autonomy over their own image, the general public increasingly embraced the chance to become visible in the same way. Then came the Kardashian era and the onset of influencer culture: of people as brands, of hybrid identities where online selves inform offline realities.

That’s the social landscape Coopers exists in. Meta glasses are already here. You can be filmed through someone’s lenses without even knowing it. Our recorded faces stare back at us while we do the shopping. Have we passed the point where privacy feels like something we are entitled to, and becomes something we opt into?

‘And if all that there is is this fear of being used
I should go back to being lonely and confused’

Later in the evening a woman gives me her necklace. I’m taken aback. I don’t know why she’s done this and I feel profoundly uncomfortable at this act of puzzling generosity from a total stranger. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a southerner and I just don’t understand it. My friend Rhonda handles it much better, has a dance with her, and the woman gives her a ring. These random acts of human kindness, of connection, of love through shared humanity, can be felt in these small pods of real life in a way online ‘communities’ can’t replicate.

Partly down to the sheer anonymity of online space, the ability to log off at any time, and the lack of physical presence that our social instincts are built around. In real life we can hold the reality of diverse thought without simplifying one another down to good or bad people. Online that capacity collapses. Even the Coopers feed, commentary on a cheerful pub, tilts toward the extreme and the provocative. Something about existing as audience with no agency over the performance legitimises the angrier, louder voices.

Increasingly I feel that surviving what is coming, whether AI or climate, depends on being part of a group, on looking after each other. I’ve carried on going to Coopers on Fridays. I’ve picked up the mic pissed and felt the pure serotonin of being alive with friends and a load of randoms. It’s a magical thing.

‘I’d say love was a magical thing
I’d say love would keep us from pain
Had I been there
Had I been there’