Digital madness of the crowd

Our politicians have become addicted to the real-time feedback of social media.

Adam Bandt and partner Claudia Perkins arriveat the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Most of the country understands the need to separate students from their mobile phones during the school day. The reasons are obvious; the harm of distraction, time-wasting on pointless platforms, the toxic impact of mindless memes, fake news, body-shaming, violence, pornography, hatred and bullying.

The world would be a better place if we could curate and filter this content in real time, but that horse has bolted. And when the bell rings, students collect their mobiles and step back into a world where smartphones and social media run rampant. God help them.

Still, it occurs to me that our politicians might benefit from some of the discipline we impose on the kids. Keep them away from their devices.

When journalists, analysts and lobby groups are ushered into budget lockup they surrender their smartphones at the door, like gunslingers at a wild west tavern. We ought to get security to do the same at the Parliament House entrances every day, to turn our centres of government into phone-free zones.

Instead, we have a TikTok post from Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy this week showing him walking out of the chamber after “holding Daniel Andrews to account” while a French house song, Lady, blares away: “Lady, hear me tonight, cos my feeling is just so right.”

Where do you begin with this stuff? Will this win a vote for Guy, boost his follower tally or merely undermine the intellectual integrity of liberal democracy?

It seems our politicians want attention, any attention – hits and follows are all that matter. On this criteria Malcolm Fraser losing his trousers in Memphis would have been a publicity coup, a social media hit.

The Prime Minister posts dog pictures and youthful snaps of himself. Anthony Albanese also posted a list of six achievements after his first 100 days in office and one of them was: “Started building a better future.”

Give it another 100 days and I guess he will tell Twitter that Labor has built a better future. I am a little more sceptical.

The point about the world of social media is that it is dominated by the people who have least impact in the real world. We are talking about the most ill-informed, radical and insubstantial among us, with a heavy weighting towards youth and away from the productive elements of society.

Twitter is journalists, political staffers, university activists, embittered former journalists, Crikey correspondents and weirdos in their underwear sitting in the basements of their parents’ homes, all seeking to impress each other with their wokeness. Twitter is the daily newspaper for the climate freaks gluing themselves to the road.

But political operatives, journalists and activists often see this digital debate as a virtuous circle, a place to have their progressive views affirmed. It bears a greater resemblance to Dante’s nine circles of hell.

Yet politicians pander to this crowd, mainly because they crave instant approval and become addicted to the real-time feedback. Mainstream media too, especially the public broadcasters, allow their editorial and political judgments to be shaped by the cyberspace vibe.

Politicians have always chased media approval and tried to balance the demands of policy against the necessity of popularity – it is the nature of the beast. Digital media has turbocharged the process and narrowed the sampling.

At a time of irrational mass behaviour, it is worth considering the role of digital media. We have seen unprecedented lockdowns willingly accepted by compliant populations; citizens of Western liberal democracies have been phlegmatic about pressing security and economic threats while climate catastrophism has triggered irrational urgency.

This propensity for “Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds” is nothing new; it was detailed in the book of that name by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds,” wrote Mackay. “It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Mackay’s seminal work in group psychology looked at financial bubbles, alchemy and witch trials as examples of the “madness of crowds”. We need only to think of The Crucible and its contemporary inspiration of 1950s McCarthyism to see a modern case study.

“During seasons of great pestilence men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world has come,” observed Mackay. “Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity.”

This rings true when it comes to the pandemic. And it speaks also to the hysterical reactions from climate alarmists to all natural disasters; as if they are new and as if we can ever be immune from them.

Into this heady and depressingly repetitive cycle of human behaviour we have added social media. Pictures, memes, facts and fallacies can now be communicated to millions in a few seconds.

How much more quickly can we spread fear, greed, misinformation or paranoia? All without human interaction, no chance to judge the cocked eyebrow or the flushed cheeks – just news and views in digital disassociation.

Children are confronted with the floods, fires and droughts that have always bedevilled us, beamed in from parts of the world we previously would not hear from, handheld, close-ups and terrifyingly personal perspectives dressed up as a looming climate cataclysm, apparently visited upon us by our own actions. It puts the fire and brimstone of the old-school preachers or the Cold War doom of my generation into the shade.

No wonder Greta Thunberg looks and sounds maniacal. And instead of soothing her with facts, we get social media amplification and endorsement so that her frenzy strengthens her reach.

And she is echoed by gormless politicians, royals, celebrities and other virtue-signallers craving virtual popularity.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks on stage in Scotland.

What hope a sober and rational debate?

To illustrate the point, think about how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has 384,000 followers on its Twitter account, the NASA climate centre has 350,000 and Thunberg has five million followers. What hope the facts?

Numbers tell only part of the story. Social media thrives on virtue signalling, with ribbons and hashtags associating users with fashionable causes, pressuring others to join in and shaming those who do not.

It is peer-group pressure on steroids. Cyberspace conformity.

Then there is the vigilantism, where the phone camera pinpoints those who dare to leave their homes, test the limits of lockdown rules or, perish the thought, go for a walk without a mask. Sure, this stems from the perpetual fallibility of the human condition, but digital media weaponises it.

At the height of the pandemic NSW police minister David Elliott recognised that dobbing was essentially “un-Australian” while simultaneously boasting about thousands of citizens turning in their neighbours. What would the Stasi have done to place a smartphone in the palm of every East German?

All this plays acutely into identity politics, by whipping people into a digital lather. Proclaim your moral superiority on Instagram or be denounced.

Major organisations fall victim to this sanctimony. This week we learned that an understaffed and underperforming Victorian Ambulance Service managed to spend more than $750,000 employing six diversity managers. Never mind people to answer the emergency calls, do we have enough people transitioning their genders?

The digital age has intensified the pressure on politicians, it has both hurried them and enticed them into a more superficial disposition. Picture : NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

In Ireland a teacher was imprisoned after refusing to address a boy student by the girl’s name to which he was transitioning.

Much is wrong with our politics and our society, and in my view the pernicious impact of social media and digital devices is central. This technology is exaggerating, amplifying and accelerating age-old human failings.

The pace of this digital world reduces the opportunity for correctives to emerge. One of my earliest and most enduring lessons from working at senior levels in the Howard government was the simple proposition of sleeping on decisions. I went into politics with the journalist’s deadline-driven propensity for urgency. Up close and personal I saw John Howard, senior ministers and advisers take the appropriate time, even in a media maelstrom, to try to ensure they chose the appropriate path or response.

In politics perfection is impossible, but time and pertinent consultation will get you as close as possible, most of the time. The digital age has intensified the pressure on politicians, it has both hurried them and enticed them into a more superficial disposition.

It is a significant problem. As Lionel Shriver described it in The Spectator this week, the waves keep coming, whole populations have been manic about Covid and lockdowns, and #MeTooism and #BlackLivesMatter, and climate, and all the rest of it.

“If we step back to gain a modicum of perspective,” she wrote, “what’s most disturbing about the past ten years is a different kind of climate change: a sequence of social manias that have swept the world like back-to-back sandstorms.”

Shriver is right, and people are to blame, but social media is their accomplice, and their new enabler.

The psychology of crowds has always been a worry and has always pushed politicians around. But digital media is crack for crowds.