The Echo

"The whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless its in a newspaper. [...] And so our children begin to feel that they don't exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers, and the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime. Then you'll be photographed and you'll appear in court and everybody will notice you. It really happened if it was recorded - in other words, if you shout and there doesn’t come back an echo, then it didn’t happen. Its a real hang up.“

That quote is from "Out of Your Mind" - a series of lectures recorded by Alan Watts in the late 1960s¹. Perhaps in the 1980s or 1990s he would have talked about getting your face on television instead of your name in the newspapers. Surely today, he'd be talking about being in people's social media feeds. But the story stays the same - the insight here isn't really about 'media'- its about people.

I don't pretend to understand why someone would go into a school with a gun and start shooting, or why it happens more in America than anywhere else. Obviously, how easy it is to get hold of a gun is part of it - and I think its absolutely right that gun control comes under scrutiny.

But I don't think that's the whole of the picture - it addresses the "how this happens"- and perhaps the "what can we do to stop it", but it doesn't really deal with the "why this happens in the first place."

My gut feeling is that what Alan Watts was talking about here in the 1960s goes some way to explaining the "why".

In the 1960s, society or culture's "echo" came from "the media"; today, its social media- we can't pin the blame on the broadcasters or journalists any more. We can try to blame the online platforms - but the fact is, this is us. This is a problem that predates social media - but we still blame guns, gun laws, media, the social media echo chamber... I think the underlying problem isn't the content of these new echo chambers - its the part of human nature that seeks out the echo in the first place. The desire that Alan Watts pointed out in the 1960s, but that we still like to convince ourselves is a 21st century phenomenon.

We can talk about things like "Poster's Disease"- but its just a modern-day symptom of a decades-old disease. Its the reason why people are more likely to 'correct' a wrong answer than to answer a question - again, they are more likely to get that echo (a fact of human nature that Dave Trott illustrates with a Sherlock Holmes story from the 19th Century.)

But what might be different in the 21st Century is that its a symptom that is being weaponised at scale today. To take a very recent example, we can share the cringe-inducing Nadine Dorries TikTok rap, laugh about how cringeworthy it is and enjoy that echo, and the validation from the resonance we get with our wider 'digital culture' (its far easier to resonate with the collective than to empathise with individuals)- while ignoring the fact that what we're doing is giving free publicity to a politician we oppose, sharing a message that is so utterly beyond parody that we have to share the original (quickly- always best to be first!) So more people hear about the online safety bill she's promoting that they probably hadn't heard of before- which, surely, is the whole point of making the TikTok in the first place. Does anyone actually believe that she's trying to be cool? No - she's using the Echo to her advantage.

Its the same strategy that framed Boris for years as a bumbling oaf - a bit of a rascal who can sometimes bend the truth a bit, and then get suprised when he continually lies through his teeth and gets away with it. (Lets all talk about his silly hair. Lets all talk about his untucked shirt. Lets all talk about his children. But lets not pay too much attention to his actual politics...) Now it seems we are falling into the same trap again - conflating the public persona of a 'harmless fool' with a powerful politican. (Shall we talk about how the minister for Digital said "Downstreaming a video"? Or the minister for Sport said "Tennis pitches"? Or shall we talk about what's happening to the BBC...) All the while imagining that there isn't a fortune getting spent on an army of the best strategists money can buy, carefully crafting that public persona we're talking about.

I can only imagine what its like to be a Tory, watching as Twitter works itself into an utterly harmless froth about Nadine Dorries' TikTok.

It must be nice.

1. I've had the audiobook in my Audible library for months, but just started listening to it yesterday. The prompt was watching "Her" last week on Netflix - a film about a man's relationship with his AI personal assistant- no spoilers here, but Alan Watts gets namechecked. (I thought I was clever in recognising a reference to one of the godfathers of computing - then realised I was confusing him with Alan Kay); the actual reference is... cleverer.) ↩