The Two Minutes Hate

Some thoughts on what pile-ons are doing to our brains, because ouch. Also: everything objectively insane about Kash Patel’s “challenge coin”; and meet “ratzilla”.

In his 2011 history of violence The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker theorises that reading led to the “Humanitarian Revolution”: “More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms.”

Pinker is what you might term a “complicated figure”: without paying close attention I’d sort of assumed this was probably the old, old story of what happens to anyone with both lucrative publishing deals and an annoying Twitter presence, but even the most cursory of searches throws up the word “eugenics”, and eesh. Even so, I’ve always found the “reading makes us better” argument compelling. It was once possible to conceptualise those of different faiths or cultures in roughly the same way that Tolkien imagined orcs. But the explosion of mass media, in every form from the Victorian social novel to the Tiktoks sent from Gaza or Kyiv, have served to show that people unlike ourselves are first and foremost people. They act as reminders that these are just us, in a different situation.

Anyway, I worry that social media might be f*cking this right up.

I have my own self-serving reasons for going in on this right now, I admit, because I had one of those weekends. For my New Statesman column last weekend, on the request of an editor, I wrote about the “posting to policy” pipeline first identified by the Economist’s Duncan Robinson, and whether its existence suggested that those of us who abandoned what used to be Twitter have made a mistake in trading influence for peace of mind. My conclusion was “absolutely not”.

Many of those who replied, alas, did not read that conclusion. They saw the headline (“Was the left wrong to leave X for BlueSky?”), which thrillingly left open the possibility that I thought wading through bigotry was in some sense good for you, and I found myself yelled at for, variously, staying on Twitter, berating others for leaving, engaging in ragebait or – my personal favourite – being British. My attempts to explain that the column did not say what they thought it did made little difference. To borrow a line from a great 2020 piece by my OGWN colleague Marie Le Conte, “attendees of a book club have no interest in a book that talks back”.

Perhaps – let’s try to stay humble here – I deserved it. I wasn’t always my best self in the replies (although you try staying civil when you find yourself rebutting the same aggressively made point for the 97th time). Although I didn’t write the headline, I did write the post promoting the article and also, if I’m entirely honest, had I been the editor, I almost certainly would have written that headline. And anyway, I have opinions for money, a career of so little actual value that I’ve long said that in the event of finding myself in a post-apocalyptic situation, the main thing I could offer any campaign to rebuild civilisation would be protein. I’m not really joking.

Even if I did deserve it¹, though, the pile-on had the exact same structure as a dozen others where people absolutely didn’t: consider Threads, a platform that seems to exist entirely for people to judge strangers based on no information whatsoever.²

The unique culture of Threads – Twitter, but for people who’ve never been to the internet before – seems to lie in the fact that it can automatically crosspost from Facebook or Instagram, thus exposing messages intended for a small circle of people you actually know to the full glare of the public attention, without you even knowing that it’s done it.

Which is how, I suspect, I once came to see a personal and heartrending note from a stranger along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing, from memory) “I’m very sorry to tell you that Geoffrey died in the night. My heart is broken.” This was, I assume, a note about the death of a partner, but it could have been a child or beloved pet, I suppose. Whatever it was, it came from someone to whom something unimaginably horrible had just happened.

And the result was an endless queue of people saying things like “Context?” and berating the poor woman for just assuming they’d know who Geoffrey was. I hope and pray she was too busy mourning to remember Threads even existed, but nonetheless – what has gone wrong with us all that anyone for a moment could believe that was an appropriate response?

Someone who certainly did see the people attacking them was Steven Danby, who recently swung by Facebook to explain that his mother had died, and to ask if anyone in the Dallas area knew of any resources to assist in rehoming her 17 year old dog. The entirety of Threads, of course, skipped straight past the fact he’d just lost his mother, and moved instead into telling the guy he was a monster for even contemplating packing a poor, bereaved and elderly dog off to a shelter. The fact Danby himself might too have some feelings at this precise moment did not seem to feature in people’s thinking.

The thing is – as I realised only after sharing my rage in a groupchat, when I bothered to read down the thread – Danby had no intention of doing anything of the sort. He wasn’t in a position to adopt a dog that barely knew him – but he was actively looking for someone who could offer what he could not. This feels like the sort of search for administrative jobs as displacement activity that so often characterises periods of grief. The displacement activity the poor man actually got was the need to spend two days explaining himself to hundreds of strangers during a moment of acute personal distress.³

Why do people do this? Why, in all likelihood, have you, at some point, found yourself outraged by the behaviour of a total stranger in a situation that is simply nothing to do with you? Different platforms have different cultures, of course, but one thing that seems unnervingly universal is the impulse to scream, mock or scold those we will never meet over things that are, in the scheme of things, nothing. The social internet is like the Coliseum, with the crucial difference that everyone is gladiator, spectator and lion all at once: you can never quite be sure today which role you’ll be called on to play today.

The genius of one of the great bits of storytelling ever put to film, David Simon’s The Wire⁴, lies in its deep-seated empathy. Over 60 episodes, the show places you in the shoes of a wide variety of different people, so that you don’t just see but feel the choices facing the dealer and the delinquent, the politician and the cop. It forces you to imagine what you would do in their place. In essence, it works in the same way Pinker argued that early modern literature did.

The internet today does not work in that way. It does something quite close to the opposite – forcing you not to see the world from other perspectives, but to judge the entire world from yours. It encourages you to imagine that everyone is fundamentally like you and yet somehow deficient – then it offers prizes for being the one to highlight that deficiency in the funniest and most damning ways you can.

This feels to me like a huge and under-discussed threat: that whatever the Republic of Letters did, the internet is undoing. We’ve talked a lot about how handing X over to Nazis is going to bring about the end of the world, and it might. I just worry we should probably talk more about the way the internet is systematically stripping us of our capacity to feel empathy, too.

Anyway, this is why you should be nicer to columnists whose articles appear with clickbait headlines. You don’t know how hard they’re finding it. You really don’t.

The Book Bit

Hey you know what you’ve not had in a while? The opportunity to hear me wang on about borders for nigh on an hour. This time it’s to Ian Williams of the Foreign Press Association, who despite being from the fine city of Liverpool is these days based in New York.

If you’d prefer the live version and are in the Cornwall area, you can see me and Tom Phillips discuss at the Falmouth Book Festival this Monday.

Tickets here.

Everything Objectively Insane About Kash Patel’s New Coin

The FBI director has created his own “challenge coin”, to [checks notes] reward good service! I’d missed this until some friends, better plugged into and/or more deranged by US politics than I am, were discussing it in the pub the other night; and it’s not the sort of thing I would normally comment on in this newsletter, but really would you look at this:

Via Ken Dilanian/X.com.

Here are just some ways in which this is objectively entirely insane.