The Self Preservation Society

We’re all learning to keep our big mouths shut.

I heard about a new (to me) messaging app this week.

No, not Threads. We’ll come to that in a bit.

I’m talking about Signal.

Amongst the Parlers, Mastadons, Truth Socials, Telegrams, Discords and the rest, it can be tricky to keep up.

These social media apps are like those extra channels mouldering unloved next to big boys, Netflix, Prime and Disney Plus, on the ‘apps’ page of your smart TV.

Crunchy Roll anyone? Hulu? Tubi?  Nope. Me neither.

Signal might be pretty niche, with only a million or so users, but it is worth a moment of our time for a couple of reasons.

Firstly because its encryption software is the same uncrackable code which powers the much more famous WhatsApp.

And secondly because its boss, Meredith Whittaker, is one of the few social media chiefs to put her head above the parapet, and call out the British Government’s Online Safety Bill for what it is.

And what it is, is the most ill thought through piece of jack booted, freedom repelling, human rights abusing, government overreach since….well, since the last one.

So that’ll be all that ridiculous Covid stuff then.

(Meredith Whittaker was a little more circumspect in her criticism of course. Though not much more. And I don’t want to misrepresent her. So here’s what she actually said. Worth reading the whole thing.)

But still, yeah, the Online Safety Bill. It’s bad.

I’ve already written about why the Online Safety Bill is a Cannibal Holocaust here. But Whittaker has more particular anxieties.

They concern OFCOM, Britain’s ‘Telly Police’ turned ‘Internet Gestapo’, (Bit strong? Maybe, but if the Death’s Head cap fits…), and its plans to instal special surveillance code,- ‘accredited software’, on all our messaging apps.

That’s essentially a digital back door, which would allow OFCOM to sneak in and eavesdrop on all our private communications, to listen in on our every chat, to look over our shoulder as we write every text message, to snoop into every aspect of our digital lives.

Of course that’s not how they put it.

According to sponsors of the bill, all they want to do is ‘scan’ our conversations for terrorist chat and child abuse images. Seems reasonable. Everyone hates pedos and terrorists right?

So what’s the problem?

Well I don’t want to seem overly cynical, but the last time the people of Rotherham, Croydon, Telford, Rochdale, Oxford, Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle, and Peterborough asked that their towns be ‘scanned for pedophiles and terrorists’ in the form of industrial scale grooming gangs, no one at OFCOM, or the government at large, let alone the police service, seemed remotely interested.

You don’t need a hacker’s special secret code to track down the nation’s pedos. Just log on to Google Maps.

So forgive me if I share Meredith Whittaker’s worry that the forces of the state won’t simply limit their vast new unfettered, unaccountable and sweeping powers, to solely catching the really bad guys. I worry they will instead, turn them immediately, and inevitably, on the rest of us.

And sneak around like cyber busy bodies, spying on our relationships, snuffing out our privacy, curtailing our freedoms, and perhaps selling our data to big business. Again.

Or maybe they’ll just use their unlimited access to hit us up with a fine, or pop us into prison, anytime we step over the line.

‘Your recent WhatsApp message to your mum breached three different online safety laws. For your own protection. You have been fined £160’

Oh no. Heaven forfend says the government. Who could think such a thing?

We could, we say. Because that’s what you always do. Every. Single. Time.

Remember the last time you demanded vital new ‘anti terrorist’ powers? And then instead of using them to stop people blowing up pop concerts, or stabbing gay people in Reading, you used them to spy on parents who were supposedly trying to cheat their kids into the catchment area of the one good local school? Well I do.

(When I was checking that article, I found out the child they were using these robust new anti-terrorist powers to spy on back in 2008, was only three years old!)

If the government overtly demanded the right to open our every snail mail parcel, to read every birthday card from Nana, to listen to our every phone call, to rummage daily through our post boxes, then the public would rightly be up in arms.

But somehow when it is the private messages we get on our phones, it is suddenly presented as a perfectly reasonable demand.

It really isn’t. It is a huge encroachment on our freedoms. A massive government overreach which has no place in a democratic, free society.

But as with so much, for the most part we just shrug, and carry on regardless. Still labouring under the mistaken belief, that if we haven’t done anything wrong, we have nothing to fear.

There’s great news for people who are tired of being cancelled on Facebook, shadow banned on Twitter, suspended on Instagram and whatever it is they do to people on LinkedIn.

Now we can ‘go against’ a whole new set of ‘community guidelines’.

Because there’s a new short form microblogging sheriff in town, in the shape of everyone’s favourite totally normal human being, Mark Zuckerberg.

Not content with running Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, - Meta, the rapacious data harvesting vampire behind them all, is moving its tanks onto Twitter’s lawn.

Threads is now live!

It’s clear mission: to crush Elton Musk and his sometimes crack handed and stumbling, but always evil and semi-fascist, attempt to provide internet users with just one, broadly pro free speech, social media platform.

Because it turns out, one broadly pro free speech social media platform, is one too many.

Usually of course, the same disgruntled Blue Checks who are presently egging Zuckerberg on, might be expected to voice shrill concerns about monopolies, and concentrations of power. They might worry about one man gaining an undue influence over the entire, you know, internet.

But this time Meta is taking on Elon Musk, and all the clever people hate Elon Musk. So fuck it.

He might have co founded Pay Pal, created the world’s most valuable car company, (Yep. Tesla is worth more than $67 bn), and revolutionised space travel, but his critics love to dismiss Musk as little more than an evil dictator and dope fiend. A sort of Pol Pot Head.

But it’s not his personal eccentricities that they most object to.  Their big problem is with Twitter, and how, on Musk’s watch, it has become awash with ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’.

Or as you or I might put it, ‘opinions’ and ‘facts’.

But not just any old opinions and facts you understand. The wrong opinions and facts.

Facts about the harms of lockdowns. The differences between men and women. And the climate panic.

Opinions about Covid. The differences between men and women. And Hunter Biden.

You know. All the good stuff.

So it has to go.

Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said his company is simply responding to demands for ‘a platform that is sanely run.’

Well fair enough. Musk is a bit nutso.

But the really crazy thing about Musk is that he actually believed that the powers that be, would just stand back and let him do what he wanted with Twitter.

I mean sure, call your kid X Æ A-12 if you like, build a rocket to Mars if you must, create a fleet of killer robo taxis if you have to, but refuse to suppress the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and we WILL take you down.

But did Zuckerberg even need to bother? Free Speech has very much fallen out of fashion, and most of us are learning to keep our opinions to ourselves.

We keep our mouths shut, offer no resistance and just go with the flow. Nodding along, blank eyed with the madness, as seems expedient.

Like the grim faced citizens of gulag cultures, Soviet Russia and East Germany, we are all developing the self silencing, survivalist habit of self censorship.

Becoming fully paid up members of the Self Preservation Society.

I know I am.

I noticed what I think was a great example a week or so ago while watching Question Time, the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs show.

For the uninitiated, or my America readers (USA! USA!) Here’s a brief recap.

Every week the BBC hefts its cameras up and down the country, parking its monitors for the night in some provincial theatre, pub or bingo hall.

It then invites a balanced cross section of the local populace, to put on their most unfashionable cardigans, and least matching outfits, and grill some of Britain’s smuggest politicians, journalists, industrialists and loudmouths, about the biggest and most contentious topics currently facing the nation.

Over the course of an hour or so of top class entertainment, pinch faced harridans bristle, gammon cheeked blusterers pontificate, rheumy eyed vicars sigh, while angry mums hector and barrack, four eyed incels whine, joyless tubsters prattle, and grey haired loose jowled nanas tut. It’s a great show. All human life is here.

On a recent edition, among the usual pointless prattling about pot holes, train strikes, Just Stop Oil and Captain Tom, came a question about the government’s attempts to send refugees from war torn France, to find safe haven in the comparatively peaceful African country of Rwanda.

Host Fiona Bruce asked the audience, to reveal, by show of hands, who supported the policy.

It was a perfect tumble weed moment.

The wide shot revealed an audience staunch in its refusal to engage. Shoes were contemplated, middle distances stared into, emergency exit signs scrutinised. But nary a hand went up.

The audience were rewarded by a ‘good on you.’ And polite applause briefly rippled out.

The moment was seized on of course. And held up as proof as to just how unpopular, racist, colonialist, and nasty the Rwandan policy clearly is.

Well maybe.

According to recent polling around 45% of British people support the government’s attempts to send illegal immigrants from countries like Algeria, and Syria, arriving on small boats from France, for processing in Rwanda.

So either the BBC needs to sack whoever is in charge of finding that ‘balanced cross section’. (I know some people who’ve worked on Question Time. And I have no doubt that, and sorry if this doesn’t chime with your assumptions, they really do try very hard to book a representative crowd.)

Or the Question Time audience are simply not idiots.

They’re learning, like all of us, to keep their more dangerous opinions to themselves.

Because when Fiona Bruce asked the audience to put their hands up if they supported the Rwandan policy, what she might as well have been asking is,

Who here is a Nazi?

Who wants to lose their job?

Who wants to be spat at in the street and called Tory scum?

Who wants to be smeared as a racist, dismissed as a bigot and reviled on social media?

Who wants their windows smashed in and dog shit pushed through their letterbox?

Come on put your hands up. It’s a safe space.

Yeah. Funny there were no takers.

We’re constantly told that our rotten society is about to be washed away at any moment, by an unstoppable tsunami of hate.

But it’s not hate which is crippling our lives, gnawing at the edges of every social interaction, hobbling our friendships, sabotaging our relationships, and infecting our workplaces.

It is fear.

Fear that we will accidentally say the wrong thing. Express the wrong opinion. Laugh at the wrong joke. Praise the wrong politician. Desire the wrong outcome.

We stand around giving each other the side eye. Ever vigilant to those with unclean values. Ever on the lookout for anyone carrying an unacceptable viral load of independent thought. Always alert to the merest hint of wrong speak.

And of course we ourselves are constantly on tenter hooks, ready to assure those around us, that we have indeed been double vaxxed against ideas, trained to avoid wrong think, and educated against nuance.

And who can blame us, when the consequences for transgression are so dire?

Identify yourself as a Brexit voter. Point too enthusiastically at the reams of studies showing that lockdown was an unmitigated disaster. Mildly question the validity of any of the letters which come after LGB. Suggest politely that perhaps we need to solve a climate problem, rather than panic about a Climate Apocalypse. And you risk finding yourself jobless, homeless and bank less.

It’s simply not worth it.

We are marching headlong into authoritarianism under the cover of kindness. No one is doing anything to halt it. And for the most part, we don’t even notice.

We all know the (probably apocryphal) story of the frog in boiling water. Someone seems to recount it in half the TV shows I watch these days.

How a frog will jump straight out of scalding water. But if dunked in when the water is tepid, and the heat slowly applied, how it will happily just sit there, until it is boiled to death.

Well the heat is being turned up under each of us every day. Sure we notice it getting a little warmer, but we all still just sit there, too acclimatised to do anything. Too complacent to jump out, as our freedoms, our agency, and our values are slowly, systematically, and cynically, boiled steadily away.

Come on in. The water’s fine.

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Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

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As ever I’ll try to reply in kind to any good faith comments.

I haven’t had time to try Threads yet. Should I sign up?

I generally find Twitter too scary and confrontational for my tastes. But I’m not sure I’m up for Zuckerberg’s Disneyland version either.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks again for reading.

See you next time.