The Bluestocking, vol 152
Preying on the woo-curious.
Happy Friday!
This week, I have woken up every day, checked the news overnight from America, and thought: oh crap. Zoom out a little bit: Trump has presided over an objectively bad pandemic response. The US economy is shaken: high unemployment, sketchy plans to get back to normal, millions without health insurance or adequate child care. Several members of Trump’s team are now either in prison, out of prison, or potentially going to prison. A serving member of the military sacrificed his career to allege that Trump had committed an impeachable offence, and it just . . . slid off. More than a dozen women have made credible allegations of sexual assault against him. The White House staff turnover looks like a plague hospital after someone coughed on the break-room biscuits. Dozens of officials from previous Republican campaigns and administrations have warned that he is a threat: Colin Powell spoke at the Democrat convention. After the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold revealed how much the Trump Organisation is profiting from taxpayer cash (charging the Secret Service room fees while Trump golfs at his own resorts, for example), the OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE was to say it was compiling a “dossier” on Fahrenthold for “interfering” in a private business.
People talk a lot about the smugness and complacency of the liberals who didn’t see Trump coming in 2016. Now, that smugness and complacency is the entire property of people who don’t want to acknowledge that Trump’s instincts are naturally authoritarian, and they have no obvious limit. Things aren’t going to snap back to “normal” whatever happens in November. Given a second term, there is no reason to suspect he won’t be worse.
And then you realise - well, that’s my reality. Over to Kevin Roose at the NYT: “Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.” The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has had 56 million interactions on his Facebook page in the last 30 days, more than the “main pages of ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR combined”.
In the Sunday Times last week, I wrote about the QAnon conspiracy theory, of which two things are equally true: it sounds bonkers to outsiders, and it has hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of believers.
Actually, one other thing is true: QAnon wouldn’t exist in the form it does without social media platforms. The targeting algorithms of YouTube, Facebook and the rest have identified all the people with a susceptibility to its core message (that you can’t trust the media, that the “Deep State” is running the world) by fishing in the pools of smaller fringe beliefs. You watch a video on reiki, or poltergeists, or some weird diet, and five videos later, someone is telling you that elites are harvesting children’s blood.
Social media algorithms identify the woo-curious. Not all of the QAnon supporters once believed that, say, crop circles were made by aliens. But they probably thought the lack of explanation for them was intriguing. There is a sizeable part of the population which is deeply sceptical of information gatekeepers, and thinks “there’s no smoke without fire.” Isn’t it a bit strange the flag on the Moon landing pictures looks like it’s fluttering in a breeze? Could Kennedy really have been shot by a lone gunman? People say horoscopes are bunk, but I sure sound like a Virgo! Take the woo-curious, and feed them a constant media diet of 5G conspiracies, Soros memes and anti-vaxx propaganda, and suddenly: Toto, they’re not theorising about ley lines any more.
The worst thing is that no one, even the people who think deeply about this subject, has any real idea how you undo it. Here’s a great thread about “epistemic closure” - the people I described above aren’t just in an echo chamber, not hearing contrary facts. They are locked in a belief system where any contrary facts can be easily explained away. (As Julian Sanchez puts it, if someone tells you the Illuminati don’t control the world, you can just assume they’re working for the Illuminati.)
All the realistic ways to tackle the infodemic would involve stuff like Facebook changing its algorithm to reduce virality, or the company committing to enforcing its own platform rules against misinformation, aggressively and consistently. The former would be asking Facebook to make its product less compelling to users, and less good at making money. The latter would be a) expensive; b) asymmetric, because the right has been far more successful at cultivating this ecosystem of bullshit. I’m not sure I see the mechanism for convincing Facebook to do any of these things, outside of US government intervention (unlikely) or a massive consumer revolt (ditto).
To stop myself from wallowing in despair, I have mostly been watching Harlots, the Hulu series now available on the BBC. From the start, I wondered how it would manage the tone: would it go full Belle de Jour and imply that selling sex is a whirl of glamorous dress-up and drinking cocktails with men who are inexplicably visiting a hooker despite clearly being very attractive and socially adept?
Ah, no. Even though you can feel it occasionally straining to make a feminist point not justified by the material (Look at this female-dominated world . . . of women dependent on male whims!), it doesn’t shy away from the violence and precarity of the world it depicts. It’s a thin line to walk, and occasionally uncomfortable to watch: the swings from sexy-sex (ooh! ah! Monsieur!) to argh-sex leave you feeling a bit complicit. One minute you’re appreciating the fondant fancy dresses (the 18th century had the best colour scheme of any century) and the next you’re watching someone powerless, caught in real danger. This is a job where rape is an occupational hazard, and is therefore treated fairly casually by the characters.
More happily, Jessica Brown Findlay spends at least half of the first half-dozen episodes eating fruit suggestively and having rows with the posh one from Fleabag and Mamma Mia 2. My other warning would be that you need to have a medium-high tolerance for Period Drama Language. In the last episode I watched, a drunk woman shouted: “I am the Duchess of Quim!” to the street at large. I wonder what the subsidiary titles to that are. Do write in.
Helen
Alan Davies: I’ve Become A Huge Enemy of Silence and Secrecy (Guardian)
When I auditioned to be Jonathan Creek, I was one of 38 white men. When I made the pilot for QI, I was one of five white men on the panel. I was one of five white men on lots of panels, for years. Nowadays, there is a movement to redress the balance, and publishers are looking for more women and people of colour, and in the middle of all that, here are white middle-aged men writing about their actual life, emotions and feelings. They’ve stopped trying to concoct a version of themselves to present to the world. They’ve started to tell the truth.
Like Robert Webb, Alan Davies always carried a faint undertow of sadness, even at his funniest - think of his adorable bloodhound face above a duffel coat in Jonathan Creek. And both of them have taken the honesty that allowed them to plunder their lives and psyches for comedy, and used it in later life to write about their fathers. More of this please. (There’s an extract of the book here.)
Bonus Dad Content: Like many other people, I saw the pictures of Charlie Gilmour dangling off the Cenotaph a few years ago and thought: privileged idiot. Then he pitched me something at the New Statesman (about prisons, I think) and I was bowled over by his prose and his lack of self-pity. His new book is about his runaway father and becoming a father himself. On the strength of this extract, I’m into it.
Blockchain: The Amazing Solution to Almost Nothing (The Correspondent)
The only thing is that there’s a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening. The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.
Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”
Hat-tip to Jonathan, who suggested this. The amount of energy used for mining bitcoin and verifying transactions is nuts.
Is this . . . a fake pineapple? If so, why?
Given my time again, I wouldn’t choose journalism (Unherd)
Being mad was important because the economics of this kind of content required fast output (since timeliness is critical) and high engagement (since this is how editors, and writers, measure success). I write quickly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so people are more likely to share and react. Not everything I wrote when this was my main form of journalism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dishonesty that made me feel ashamed: I was deliberately riling myself so I could rile other people in turn, and the arguments I offered had a kind of incuriosity, a clamshell quality, where the main thing to recommend them was how impervious I could make them to critique.
Sobering piece by Sarah Ditum about the hollowing out of journalism: the structural disease below so many of the symptoms we see in public discussion.
My current answer to the problem of an attention economy (and rage economy) is to try to ignore the noise and plough my own furrow. But then, I’m in a very lucky position. Across the industry, journalists are being laid off by the hundred. Sarah is right: people might hate journalists, but you’ll miss us when we’re gone.
Quick Links
The extracts of Patrick Maguire’s new book on the Corbyn Project, co-authored with Gabriel Pogrund, have been great. Can’t wait to read the whole thing. Disclosure: I knew Patrick when he was a young whippersnapper at the NS. (Now, he’s like . . . 23 or something.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s guest-edit of Vanity Fair: “The Great Fire”.
“I had approved a redesign of the bathroom in all white, which meant the green onyx tub obviously no longer fit. . . impulsively (and partly out of sheer frustration), I said to the team with their clipboards and rulers, ‘Okay, take it out. That's it. I'm done. I'm letting it go.’ They cheered. I fled, trying not to cry.” I was profoundly moved by Oprah’s life lesson here.
“‘Karen does really well for us,’ Kris Seavers, an editor for The Daily Dot, told me. ‘We’re always looking for the latest Karen.’” Who’s making money from all those viral videos of bad behaviour - and driving more people to record them? (Atlantic)
She must have exemplary Vitamin C levels
