A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window…
A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq
He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him buying an EV at all was remarkable. I’d been talking about it with him for a couple of years, and suddenly he just up and did it.
He’s completely blown away by the car. Astonishing performance and premium comfort. /2
He shared the news with friends on social media. And that’s where I got to see again what these platforms have done to our collective life.
The pile-on was swift and brutal. Even his closest friends trotted out all the anti-EV factoids that circulate on SM. It was nasty. /3
Zombies, thinking this was their own considered opinions on the engineering of vehicles, when really they were just regurgitating all of the same sponsored propaganda fossil fuel interests promote online.
And it’s not just about facts. It was vicious. /4
That’s the team sports I talk about. They were defending their team, under threat. Social media turns our entire collective life into this tedious, continuous battle between teams.
Look at energy again this week. Nuclear power. /5
Nobody when I was growing up paid ANY attention to the electricity system. Not for one second. Hideously ugly and polluting coal-fired power stations, and enormous transmission lines were built, sometimes right near towns, with nobody batting an eyelid. /6
Fast forward to today and you can’t build a toilet block without groups ‘mobilising’ on social media to turn it into some sort of apocalyptic crusade.
Conservative politicians tap into this, generating fake fights on everything. There are no public policies, just fights. /7
It’s what Dutton is doing with nuclear. The whole thing is a total engineering and economic fantasy. He doesn’t care, he wants to start a fight. Fights create teams, teams generate votes.
Social media is the greatest gift to politicians like this. /8
They can get a fight to go viral in days, nationwide. No longer the need to employ expensive firms to generate ‘messaging’ and work the levers to try to get that message out. Social media does all of that for them. /9
It’s exhausting, tedious and tragic that collective life is now what Robert Hughes once called a culture of complaint. Of fights. That’s all deliberately done, to win power in ridiculous populist governance systems.
The life is sucked out of every possible joy. /10
And replaced with endless and vicious team sports. It’s not that we all need to be nicer to each other. It’s that we all need to go back to minding our own business.
Do our jobs, and leave others to do theirs. Social media’s mission is to turn us all into busybodies. /11
To encourage the idea that ‘democracy’ is us all having ideas about everything, and then contribute to the democratic debates, on everything.
That’s rubbish. Representative democracies were explicitly set up so that we had to pay no attention AT ALL, to most things. /12
That’s what gave us freedom to live richer lives, delegating responsibility for more and more things to other people to do for us.
Now mass, mobilised ignorance creates pile-ons over every tiny detail of keeping a society running. And these platforms get rich doing it.
/end