No.1 - Victory in a meaningless war

Ding dong. The witch is dead. The cycle of recycled pop fluff has been broken and the dominion of the X Factor over the Christmas number one lies in tatters,

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More than half a million people rose up against the musical overlord Simon Cowell and screamed in one voice: "I won't do what you tell me".

The victory of Rage Against the Machine in the race for Christmas number one was not about young Joe McElderry, who at 18-years-old now has £150,000 in the bank and a number two selling single with enough sales to have taken the top slot any other week of the year.

Cowell himself won't care one jot of course. He is hardly the wrinkled Sith emperor, slumped and wheezing as the power of the dark side deserts him and 500,000 Luke Skywalkers refuse to "let the hate" flow through us.

He will survive and he will become more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

But it matters not. Today we revel in our victory. We have toppled the X Factor after five years of oppression and predictability, six bland cover versions that sold simply because TV had spent three months brainwashing us to do it.

The power is ours. It has always been ours. And Facebook and Twitter, they showed us the way. We combined like the kids with the rings in Captain Planet and we summoned forth a force of unimaginable power and brilliance to bring a song 17 years old out of bargain bins of HMV and to the top of the charts.

But think for a moment. All this power. All this ability to change the outcome of things set into motion by people with more money and influence than us.

Yes I know I encouraged all this last week but I have to ask you to imagine if we actually used it on something important. Apathy has always been the biggest winner. More than 958,000 people joined the Facebook group calling for Rage to make it to number one, but only half of those actually bought the single.

Over on the Number 10 website the most popular petition has just over 93,000 signatures, and calls for childcare vouchers not to be scrapped – 10 per cent of the people who expressed an opinion about this chart battle.

Why is it we seem to care more about who gets a number one single than we do about the decisions that affect every aspect of our lives?

Of course the victory of RATM has done a lot of good. The homeless charity Shelter is £60,000 better off. The charts were worth listening to again for one night. Hundreds of thousands of people get to feel superior to Simon Cowell.

It's just that there are things out there that we could be doing something about. Voter turnout is down from 84 per cent in 1950 to 61 per cent in 2005. When it comes down to the important things we just don't seem to care.

* Dan Wainwright's podcast is available for free at http://danwainwright.podbean.com or by searching for Dan Wainwright on iTunes.