The looming shadow
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“The best photographers know what not to photograph.”
- Bill Jay
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Long Read of the Day
What If Echo Chambers Work?
This is a really striking essay because it addresses a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Years ago (2012 onwards, to be precise), the political theorist David Runciman, the historian Richard Evans and I ran a a research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ during which we saw the way conspiracists and alt-right groups had built powerful online networks over many years. We also realised that they had done this for rational reasons: in a media landscape dominated by traditional editorial gatekeepers they has effectively been kept out of public view for decades. But since the Internet had no gatekeepers it was a no-brainer to go there to hook up with likeminded folk. Which they did, on a massive scale.
After Brexit and the Trump victory in 2016 the mainstream world woke up to this, but rapidly adopted a disdainful view of the way in which those ‘deplorables’ congregated in online ‘echo chambers’ in which it was supposed that they would be caught in cognitive whirlpools and never have any substantive impact on the democratic world. That complacency was unwarranted from 2016 onwards, but important role that Elon Musk’s ‘X’ network played in Trump’s comeback should have put paid to that complacency.
The truth is that it’s the alt-right which has masterfully weaponised online media, leaving the liberal world speechless and dazed. So isn’t there a lesson here for us too? That’s the question this essay addresses. And it’s why I think it’s worth your time.
Bluesky feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways…
Yesterday’s Observer column:
As I write, there’s a window on my laptop screen that is providing a live view of a stampede. It’s logging the numbers of people joining the social network Bluesky. At the moment, the number of registered users is 20.5 million. By the time you read this there will be more than 30 million of them, judging by the rate that people are currently joining.
The proximate cause of it is the role that Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter), played in the election of Donald Trump, when a significant proportion of the platform’s 200 million-plus users realised that they’d been had – that they had, in effect, been useful idiots for Musk on his path to the centre of political power…
I’m @jjn1.bsky.social if you’re interested.
My commonplace booklet
Utility in Britain Offers Free Electricity to Grow Clean Energy
Isn’t it interesting that the New York Times sometimes seems to pay more attention to good stuff that’s happening in the UK than homegrown media do. This piece is a good example. It opens in Bronte country:
Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.
OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.
But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October.
The Bradleys plugged in their electric Kia, started a load of laundry and set to work on their most delectable energy-guzzling project: the Christmas fruitcake, which is made weeks in advance of the holidays. “As this takes four hours to cook in my electric oven, this is the perfect timing!” Laura Bradley said…
Funnily enough on Saturday we received a similar ping: free electricity (from Octopus) between 15:00 and 17:00. So the car went on to charge, the Christmas cake went into the oven, the dishwasher was stacked and turned on, and so was the washing machine. So whenever we hear rumours of storms coming westward towards the UK, we expect a ping. My only complaint that our EV can’t feed electricity back to the grid when it needs power to meet surges.
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