taCity

In the early 2000s, before the global financial crash ripped the world apart and the latent fascistic tumult was cloaked in a burial shroud of capitalist realism, the soon-to-be outgoing Labour government was not immune to the heady allure of the privatisation drug. In their sights was the clumsy, but reliable 192 directory inquiry services; an off shoot of BT’s earlier days as the guardian of pretty much everyone’s phone number and address that you could phone up and easily ask for (doxxing wasn’t a thing then, clearly).

With some egging on by the EU, the UK government sold off the service to a host of small companies, all of them eager to make money from the public’s hunger for information, but not smart enough to realise google was around, and would soon put them out of business. So from around 2002, there was an explosion of 118 (plus three other numbers) services, some even operating out of a garden shed (who could forget the infamous Gay-Lo Directories operates from a hut behind the reception area of a kennels?!)

But what is interesting to me is that the UK’s 118 directory enquiries services emerged not merely as a banal consumer product that was clearly already out-of-date given the internet’s surge in functionality, usability and crucially, it’s mobility, but as a symptom of something deeper; a terminal contradiction at the heart of late capitalism’s cultural logic and a particular feature of the pre-GFC neoliberal schema. 118 services were designed to be functional: privatised replacements for the old state-run 192 telephone directory assistance (that used people thumbing through phonebooks, microfiches and later, digital databases), reimagined through the rhetoric of the usual capitalist tropes of choice, competition, and efficiency. But lurking underneath was something else entirely, namely the collapse of public utility into spectacle, and the hollowing-out of information into kitsch. In many ways then, it was a precursor to the enshittification of the internet 20 years later.

What the 118 experiment ultimately revealed was that despite what the gospels of neoliberalism told us, deregulation is not always innovation. Indeed, I would argue it is more theatircal: a pantomime of progress masking the decay of what was a collective, if clumsy, infrastructure. Where once you could dial a number and access a public good, now you entered a marketplace of absurdity, with dozens of competing providers offering the same basic service for vastly inflated prices. Such fragmentation is of course deliberate; confusion is baked into this kind of business model. In a deregulated field, the absence of clarity creates profit for those swift footed enough to ‘move fast and break things people’. So for the consumer, we become disoriented rather than liberated.

Enter the infamous 118 118. Marketed by two moustachioed men in retro athletic wear, jogging through a cultural landscape that no longer required their service. These characters were pure hauntology: ghosts of a bygone era of certainty and legibility, now recycled into a loop of ironic repetition often parodying film sequences, and in some cases, even roping in guest appearances from the cultural icons themselves (Ray Parker Jnr as a bus conductor because why not?) They weren’t just marketing a phone number; they were performing a pastiche of collective memory because the service, they must have known, was ultimately redundant because of the spectre of Google on the horizon (which by then was already an established server of free information, albeit while tethered to desktop computer). Even some of their later adverts tried to posit them as ‘quicker’ than waiting for mobile data.

In many ways, 118118 represent, no, ARE, the peculiar genius of a Fisherian capitalist realism: even when a service is structurally pointless, it can still be culturally productive. The 118 campaign didn’t succeed because people needed it, it succeeded because people remembered it and copied it (I distinctly remember many a drunken cricket fan in 118 get up in the Western Terrace during the 2005 Ashes Tour). It was affective surplus with no infrastructural base. A Baudrillardian signifier unmoored from any need to signify. Just as Blairism relied on the image of reform without its substance, so too did 118 services present the aesthetic of utility without any meaningful use. It was privatisation as simulacrum.

But all this cultural chicanery is financially useless without a workable pricing model, so the eye-wateringly obscene call charges were masked by the cheery jingles and moustache-based whimsy. This, too, is a lesson in neoliberal affect of the pre-GFC era. You are not supposed to notice the exploitation, only to vibe with it because after all, there was no enemy to this constant growth anywhere to seen right? We were all middle class, affluent, and crashes, cost-of-living crises, pandemics, fascism and climate catastrophe were just Ballardian dystopian fictions that would never materialise because capitalism had won. For 118 services, when the scam is finally revealed (i.e. when you find out you paid £10 to be told something Google could give you in seconds), there is no avenue for redress. The contract was already signed, the market already cleared. It is your fault for not adapting. In this sense, 118 services were early indicators of what would become the dominant mode of digital capitalism: the extraction of value from confusion, latency, and interface friction.

In retrospect, 118 services were doomed to fail not because they were useless, but because they were too accurate a reflection of the system that birthed them. They were parasitic on a public good they helped destroy. They replaced clarity with brand noise, function with irony, and solidarity with atomised “choice.” But despite this – and all the world’s tumultuous that separates them from us – they endure not as services, but as cultural artefacts. They haunt the cultural memory like an advertising fossil: the echo of a number no one needs to call anymore, but which still somehow lingers in the back of the mind via memes, pub chatter, YouTube clips and in other fragmentary hauntings.

Like so many other pieces of capitalist realism, 118 services remind us not just of what we lost, but of how easily loss can be commodified, set to music, and played back to us as if it were entertainment. They exist as part of the feedback loop of the peak neoliberal era. They remind us that imaging having a future is a thing of the past.