People are, it seems, growing increasingly more aware of, and increasingly more wary about, what has come to be called the ‘censorship industrial complex’ – that conglomeration of NGOs, academics, journalists and state entities which seems bent on controlling the diet of information which citizens are permitted to digest. But we have only really begun to grapple with what the ‘disinformation’ movement really signifies. How are we to think about it?
In a recent post I described the essence of tyranny as being a set of consequences of government action, which can be summarised as:
The slow but sure erosion and erasure of private lives, private opinions and private property, and the gradual reduction of the sphere of the social to a desultory rump over which the state exerts total oversight.
Tyranny, in other words, consists in the enervation and vulnerablisation of the populace, achieved through policies which have the effect of dissolving all barriers that exist between state and society, such that each and every individual is sundered from social ties and made utterly reliant on his or her relationship to public authority.
I was amused, then, to be given a glimpse of the type of mentality which breathes life into the ‘tyrannical tendency’ in a recent piece of journalism by the BBC’s resident ‘Disinformation Correspondent’ Marianna Spring. Spring, for those who don’t know of her, is the smiling face of the ‘censorship industrial complex’ in the U.K. – a figure who appears, generally around election time, to hint darkly at the existence of sinister forces (Russian spies, trolls, bots, Brexit supporters) subverting the cause of democracy through various nefarious online activities.
Her most recent concern, it turns out, is that, well, Russian spies, trolls, bots and Brexit Reform U.K. supporters are, er, subverting the cause of democracy through various nefarious online activities. The problem that is particularly exercising her this time around is that people keep popping up in large numbers on TikTok videos to leave comments saying dastardly things like ‘Vote Reform U.K.’ This, she suggests, is evidence that something sinister is going on: the online ‘conversation’ is being somehow ‘shaped’.
You can read the article and decide for yourself whether it is entirely sane and exactly how unhinged it is. But what particularly interested me about it was the ‘tell’ which appears towards the end, in which Spring provides us with an insight into a particular way of understanding democracy that a certain class of people nowadays hold.
“[Online] comments that boost the perceived support for a political party,” Spring tells us in the passage in question, “can embolden more real people to join in” (emphasis mine). She goes on:
It is one more piece of evidence in this election that suggests individual social media users and anonymous accounts have the ability to shape the online conversation just as effectively as the content coming from the political parties themselves.
I am sure Marianna Spring is basically a nice and honest person who wants what is best for the world, but I earlier used the word ‘unhinged’, and it is important to note first of all how divorced from reality the disinformation movement actually is. Since time immemorial, when elections take place, people have chosen to signal their support for one party or another visually by putting up signs in their gardens or living room windows saying things like ‘Vote Labour’ or ‘I’m Voting Conservative’ or ‘Ron Smith for MP’. They have dialled into radio talk shows and appeared on TV in vox pops and written letters to newspapers. And they have also conversed with each other – friends, neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers at bus stops – with regard to whom they are voting for and why. Why, then, would anybody expect them not to do these sorts of things online, and why would anybody, all of a sudden, see anything illegitimate or dangerous in them doing so, when similar activities have never been perceived that way in the past?
So on its face the notion that there is anything sinister going on here is, to put it politely, silly. But there is something deeper at work here. Read Spring’s comment again and pay careful attention to the wording (emphasis mine):
[C]omments that boost the perceived support for a political party – whether they come from U.K. voters or inauthentic accounts – can embolden more real people to join in.It is one more piece of evidence in this election that suggests individual social media users and anonymous accounts have the ability to shape the online conversation just as effectively as the content coming from the political parties themselves.
The implications here are firstly that we should be concerned about real people being “emboldened” to join in the political discussion regardless of their views; and secondly that we should be worried when ordinary people act in such a way as to disrupt “the content coming from the political parties themselves”. We should, in other words, view with suspicion any attempt by the public to connect with each other directly to discuss politics, and we should be especially anxious when people do not simply imbibe the messaging that comes from political parties, but rather seek to have their own ‘conversations’ and indeed seek to ‘shape’ politics themselves.
The disdain for democracy in this is obvious. But more noticeable still to my eye is the tyrannical cast, in the terms in which I have previously described that phenomenon, to Spring’s remarks. This is a person who fundamentally dislikes the idea of ‘emboldening’ people to engage in political discussions with one another. It is also a person who thinks there is something dangerous, disruptive – and, let’s face it, just plain uppity – about ordinary voters refusing merely to listen to their political leaders, and instead trying actively to ‘shape’ political discussion in their own way. The essence of tyranny, remember, is that it always seeks to individualise and totalise – to separate, divide and atomise, and to break down society as an organic barrier to the relationship between individual and state. And an important aspect of that mode of governance is that it should seek to prevent people from developing and expressing private – meaning, really, their own – opinions. Their opinions, such as they have, should simply be given to them from above, handed down by their betters, and should certainly not be developed organically. Opinions, like property, are presumptively best owned by the state, and to be made use of by the population as the state sees fit.
Seen in this light, it is obvious that it is not hyperbole to describe as ‘tyrannical’ the impulse to cast as illegitimate the perfectly normal tendency among human beings to want to discuss politics with one another, however crudely. And it is, then, perfectly natural and indeed unavoidable that we should have to describe the disinformation movement – which seems to eternally seek to realise that end – as an important feature of the tyrannical impulse in our age.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again