Public figure pile-ons...can we be real about our role in them?
right-wing grifters, fragile men, the dreadfully dumb…and us.
It’s a despairing fact of life that if you are a woman (or Indigenous or a member of a minority group) with some kind of public platform or presence then you will cop a public pile-on. Sometimes daily.
I have. Some of you may recall the CocaCola-sponsored personal trainer (they are so often PTs, aren’t they?) David Driscoll who set up fake Twitter accounts to “go after” me. There was the aggressive vegan “Durian Rider” who regularly defaced my books in bookstores and made threatening Youtube videos about me1; the Mamamia-led “croissant gate” incident (and many other bullying episodes); and The Daily Telegraph-led anti-vax smear-fest that led to an entirely unprofessional pile-on by the Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Mail and others2.
They were horribly terrifying and lonely times. But I look back now and realise these have nothing on what plays out today.
You might have caught the pile-on my very good friend Yumi Stynes experienced in recent weeks following the publication of her sex education book for young people. Now, every parent out there can have an opinion on whether they feel such a book is appropriate for their kid. They can then choose to buy it - or not (in the main, 11-year-olds aren’t buying sex-ed books in BigW).
That’s called discerning parenting and the liberal market system doing its thing.
I could bang out a bunch of other caveats and zero-sum takes about the perils of kids learning sex via online porn, and how relevant experts have come out in droves defending the book’s content as responsible, blah blah. But I figure most of you here don’t see worth re-entering such a narrow vortex. (I will, however, include some examples of what Yumi has been sent, as per below, so we can be alive to the reality of what’s going on and, as Yumi puts it, “air the cookers”.)
Instead, let’s cover off a few honest points about pile-ons. Because they are happening under out watch. My ideas start out broad, but build. Stick with me.
Humans are being just so disappointing
If you’re in the public eye and mature enough you do, to a certain extent, know that media attention cuts both ways. You’re fair game, as we’d say in newsrooms. If you’ve frothed to a junior lifestyle reporter for one of those “inside my home” features to promote your latest film, TV show, book etc, then you can’t really bleat when the media sees you as a product and runs a neg’y beat-up down the track. Plus, you do become somewhat hardened to the opinions of strangers and come to rationalise it’s all just fish and chip wrapping tomorrow (although, technology now changes that).
What guts, however, is how disappointing humans are.
It’s fundamentally despairing to see the everyday mum’n’ dad humans who pile on to a media report. And then onto the media report about the pile-on. This shit never gets easier. You open up the accounts of the people writing the vitriol and they are often ordinary folk, with hobbies, who go on picnics and – really very often – claim to be light/wellness/bliss/God lovers. They are also disproportionally personal trainers. They seem so everyday; and sometimes we even share friends. They are people we rely on to keep society ticking along. And yet the force of their spite and hateful fury leaves you worrying where we’ll stand when society legitimately hits skids
Is this us? Is this my fellow species? Am I so naïve to not know that such people exist out there behind their box hedges and under their Goorin Bros caps?
Thinking woman’s crumpet David Brookes just wrote a very long essay for The Atlantic arguing that we are indeed becoming meaner. He cites the stats and then posits that it’s because we are a culture that has not grown up with moral education:
“We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.”
We can all play a role in bringing back what he calls “moral formulation”. He suggests a bunch of ideas for this that would rely on people like you and I bringing to bear, including: encouraging curiosity as a virtue (not as something that kills cats); mandatory social skills training; integenerational service; and asking questions of each other, like,
What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?
Idealistic, but something we can just do starting now, no?
There have always been vitriolic, small-minded people…but mostly we didn’t meet them
Yumi and I talked this out a bit. Pinnicky, petty types have lurked (and they definitely lurk) in every society. Largely they’d have to keep their putrid thoughts to themselves, or they’d be limited to small over-the-back-fence forums. This is because, mostly, our species don’t like pinicky, putrid pettiness up close. We shut it down - it ruins vibes and is not great from an evolutionary POV.
But now, with (sigh) technology and social media, these people can spread their ugly thoughts far, fast and without the up-close filtering of a neighbours’ shunning. So not only do we have to hear from people we’d not otherwise, these offenders are not undergoing any kind of behaviour-modifying filtering back in their home counties. In other words, there aren’t necessarily more nasty people on the planet, it’s just that they are letting rip more of their nastiness and we all have to hear about it. Plus, their worse tendencies are being enabled and, we now know, actively encouraged by the algorithms.
I do know if Yumi and I met any of our trolls up close, they’d not only lack the courage to say what they sent us online, but I doubt they’d feel even a tenth of the ire that drove them to write what they did3.
So what’s going on? What drives?
Pile-onerers DON’T do their own research
I just interviewed
on Wild who’s published a book about mimetic desire, a theory that says none of us have our own desires, opinions or original tattoos.Instead, we are all - always - copying each other. The mimetic desire theory was developed by French philosopher Rene Girard who has suddenly turned hot with the tech bros (in part because Peter Thiel is very vocal about having been inspired by Girard when he became the first investor in Facebook) and, as the podcast chat shows, it can be used to explain so much of social behaviour today.
Luke talks to me about how mimetic desire explains why and how we get into conflict. It’s not because of our differences, it because we’re all mimicking each other back and forth, adhering to tribal belonging protocols.
So these disappointing humans don’t actually disagree with people like me and Yumi, they’re just…piling on.
Which is actually more disappointing.