Cartoon Gravity 38

Apologies to anyone who was hoping for a deep dive into Personal Knowledge Management, or a discussion of fountain pens (though I have fallen back in love with my TWSBI), that is not what spilled out this morning.

This week, someone shot Charlie Kirk dead using bullets that were engraved with ultra-online slogans. The right blamed the left, the left blamed the right, and both sides covered themselves in absolutely no glory whatsoever.

My exposure to Charlie Kirk was limited but I had listened to interviews and things he had said online, and I don't think I ever heard anything from him that I didn't find entirely disagreeable. Unlike many of his eulogisers on both sides of the aisle, I don't think he was smart, if only because I don't believe it's possible to subscribe to the tenets of white supremacy AND be clever. If you think that one race is superior to another because of skin colour, or you think empathy is a sign of weakness, or you think that gays or trans people are "less than", then the facts are simply not on your side.

None of which is to suggest that Charlie Kirk should have been killed because of his beliefs, his platform, or the company he kept. If it's OK for Charlie Kirk to be killed because you disagree with him, then it's equally OK for someone to kill you for your beliefs.

In the hours following the murder, my Bluesky timeline lit up with people crowing about it. When commentators like Ezra Klein, wrote pieces pointing out that Charlie Kirk's practice of openly debating any and all comers was exactly how politics should be conducted, they were decried as fascist sympathisers. Apparently people with whom we disagree should not be allowed to speak, an argument that is as fundamentally ignorant and dangerous as anything the other side can muster.

We should be free to voice our opinions and others should be free to disagree with them. (To those wondering about the harm done to vulnerable communities by right-wing rhetoric, I'd argue that we need to be better at separating words and deeds - complaining about immigration, however ignorant, is a right; setting fire to a hotel is a crime.)

And so to the thousands of people who descended on Central London yesterday, wrapped in the St George's flag, which seems rapidly to be becoming the English swastika. These people represent the very worst of our population. They know literally nothing about the intricacies of immigration policy, or the geopolitical foundation of the refugee crisis, but their ignorance has been sharpened into anger by the tabloid media, online rage-bait, and by saloon-bar brownshirts like Farage. And then that ignorance and anger is stroked and pandered to by a government that seems woefully incapable of mounting even the simplest of counter-arguments. I hate everything these thousands of racists stand for, but they are, and should be, free to stand for it within the limits of the law.

But then we have Elon Musk on a big screen in Trafalgar Square, inciting violence and urging the overthrow of the British government. And that is where we find ourselves having to dig in a little bit to identify the real problem here.

Because the problem isn't ignorant people being ignorant (they have always existed), it's the people who weaponise that ignorance for profit. I don't doubt that Elon Musk sincerely holds some, to be charitable, "questionable" views, and no one who has listened to what he has to say on any subject these past few years can doubt that the man is as thick as a planet sandwich, but his ludicrous X platform thrives on exactly this kind of rage bait. And those governments who are discussing curtailing platforms like X in the name of online safety are coincidentally the very ones that Elon thinks should be overthrown.

When chaos reigns and everyone is angry, X and Instagram and Facebook and Bluesky flourish, power is easily consolidated by authoritarian figures, and business booms for those who suck up to authority.

Charlie Kirk was both a product of and an agent for that authority, the person who shot him was (likely) a product of the online chaos it nurtures, as are the thousands of poor saps wrapped in flags and chanting nonsense about immigration in London yesterday.

The notion of free speech has become binary and it has been commoditised by people who want to make as much money as possible from anger and chaos, and then retreat to their bunkers in New Zealand when the fires they set start to burn out of control.

But in order to succeed, they need our help. They need our participation. I know you're only on X because of work, and I know you're only on Facebook because of that one knitting group, or the fountain pen people, or the Lovecraft club. But it doesn't matter; Musk and Zuckerberg can count you as a number. Your participation makes their business work. If you're reading this, you probably don't buy a copy of the Daily Mail every day, because you shudder at the thought of putting money into the pockets of those people. But instead, you log into Facebook and put money into the pockets of people who are just as bad, if not actively worse.

The world is not heading in a direction most of us are comfortable with, and we probably feel pretty helpless. But we're not entirely without agency. We don't HAVE to participate in the decline. And it is a certainty that if everyone stopped participating, the decline would be arrested much more quickly.

There is a whole world out there, outside of social media. There are books and movies and galleries and museums and nature walks and hobbies and ACTUAL PEOPLE. There are news sites that you can navigate yourself to, blogs and newsletters and forums about knitting and fountain pens and H.P. Lovecraft. You can find everything you need without ever going near social media and you can take care that the media you consume doesn't benefit billionaires who have made their fortunes from inciting rage and misery and violence.

I don't expect this to change many minds. But maybe one or two readers, next time they access Twitter or Facebook or Bluesky or TikTok or Instagram might just take a moment to wonder if the time they're spending there represents the best use of those few minutes; whether allowing their attention to be farmed, however briefly, is something they get a net benefit from.

I'll leave the last word to Cal Newport who, typically, has managed to sum up all of the above far more directly and succinctly than I could: On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society - Cal Newport

Normal service will be resumed next week.

Fuck it. Send.