Shouty protesters, Elon Musk and our dumb attempts at democracy

It’s rare for a journalist to be an incidental witness to a newsworthy event. But it happened to me last week at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne when a heckler disrupted a performance by English musician Thom Yorke.

Citizens on X broke the news, and on Wednesday, their owner, Elon Musk, proclaimed that they now write the first draft (or record the first video) of history.

Thom Yorke, captured on video responding to a pro-Palestine heckler.

X got it wrong in Melbourne by missing the telling details and joining the wrong dots. Or maybe, by exaggerating the disruption and reporting that the Radiohead frontman downed tools after being interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest, X was true to its algorithmic mission. A false narrative made headlines around the world, cut and pasted by news outlets who weren’t there. Its effect was to again divide audiences into shouty pro- and anti-Israel encampments. Which means more audience engagement; so X, in getting it wrong, got it right for Musk’s purposes.

No offence to Musk and his democratic news organisation, but here’s what really happened.

Yorke played 20 songs over two hours. He had finished, come back for an encore, played another two songs, and then announced one more. He played the first chords of Radiohead’s iconic Karma Police.

At this point, a man in the extremely expensive seats near the front stood up and began shouting. Only a few dozen people surrounding him could hear what he was saying. Nobody where I was, up in the cheap standing room on the grass, could detect more than a general noise until Yorke replied, “Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to piss on everybody’s night? OK, you do it, see you later.”

Yorke walked off for about a minute while the crowd chanted for him to come back; he returned and played Karma Police. The first verse goes: “Arrest this man/He talks in maths/He buzzes like a fridge/He’s like a detuned radio …”

The lyrics were coincidental, but if shouty man was a stunt support act for Yorke, he earned his $500 seat.

If you were there, the moment left some questions, largely unasked on X or the global news-scrapers who amplified its reportage into the usual trading floor of insults. If the man wanted to disrupt Yorke, why did he wait until the last song? Did he want to get his $500 worth first and enjoy the show before he got himself kicked out? Did he want to offend, but not too much? For that matter, why buy such an expensive ticket and contribute to the show’s commercial success if he so disapproved of the artist?

Still, almost nobody knew what he had said. A protest against the war in Gaza was the default guess, but Yorke’s response implied that it might have been something else, like dissatisfaction with the music. Did the man want a different encore? More value for his ticket? Otherwise, why would Yorke have asked him to come up on stage?

Indecipherable, ineffective and compromised by the commercial transaction, the heckler ticked just about every box for how not to stage a public protest. Most of the 11,000 audience would have been onside with his politics. There are questions about Yorke’s “support” of Israel by not joining a cultural boycott: he performed in Tel Aviv in 2017, his bandmate Jonny Greenwood (who’s not on this tour) has played there, and his wife is Israeli. It is worth debating the artist’s responsibilities to speak out against war crimes. Yorke said in 2017 that he wants to break down barriers: “We don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders, not building them.”

Such a view leaves an open question on who would play in, say, Putin’s Russia. But there’s no cult of personality quite like a rock act. Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi played behind the Iron Curtain after the Eastern Bloc regimes invited them with “guitar-washing” intent. Instead, their shows helped unstopper the youth protest that brought down the Berlin Wall. Yorke speaks through his lyrics, which turn the heart towards humanity, empathy and the potential for deep connection. Once it was clear what the heckler wanted, you might wonder how Yorke could have satisfied him. Apologise for going somewhere seven years ago and spreading a message of compassion and kinship?

We are about to enter an escalated period of protest; registered protests in NSW have increased fourfold in four years. The dumber a protest is, the less its prospects of bringing about change or even laying down a membrane of awareness. What’s dumb protest? Abstaining from voting in an election. Voting against progress because it doesn’t go far enough. Jumping the shark and wearing a black T-shirt to cheer on a criminal-led trade union. Making gestures of anger that help you feel pure but only hand more power to authoritarians.

In his new book Nexus, historian Yuval Noah Harari defines democracy as not just elections but “a distributed information network with strong self-correcting mechanisms”, which include an independent judiciary and a free media holding executive power to account to protect human and civil rights. Self-correcting mechanisms also include public protests, which have brought down autocrats since 1789.

The current historical moment is characterised by two self-correcting mechanisms in the form of protest movements: one loosely called “cancel culture”, and a populist right reaction, led by tinpot conmen, that goes broadly under the slogan “Everything has turned to shit”. The former is often inconsistent, confused, sanctimonious, performative and grist for the Musk mill. Smart people, perhaps, using democratic tools in a dumb way. The Thom Yorke heckler is doubtless a legend in his own lounge room, shouting at someone shouting back at him.

The protest movement of the populist right has just won the houses of federal power in the world’s most powerful democracy. Say what you like about the 73 million fools who have fallen for the con again, but when it came to a choice, the dumb people, perhaps, used democratic tools in a smarter way.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist and an author and a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.