One of the great things about becoming a parent is you learn you are not the lead character in your own life story. The best you can hope for is a supporting role. As your children grow older, you become a featured player, provide comic relief or maybe get the occasional non-speaking walk-on as someone’s butler or maid. Towards the end, you’re earning two dollars a day as a background extra and aren’t allowed to eat in the catering tent.
At the beginning though, when your name’s still above the title, your job is to try and create an ideal world for those with whom you’re sharing the bill. At the same time you’re building this safe fairytale space where bad things don’t happen, you have to equip them with all the skills they’ll need to live in the world as it really is: a meaningless roundelay of happenstance that can only be made sense of by one’s actions (or distractions). That’s the trick with rearing children. You’ve got to keep them as innocent as possible without bedding in a naiveté that will render them crushed once they find out sunshine and lollipops give them skin cancer and diabetes.
Self-awareness is an essential part of the human condition, but you don’t want it turning up too early or it risks becoming self-consciousness. Realising that you are beautiful or not, smart or not, sporty or not, funny or not — this can ruin the person you might have become, especially if that realisation is the product of someone else’s judgment. Better to stumble across that sort of thing in private and deal with it than be buffeted about by public opinion while you’re working on getting a decent ATAR.
The playground is a hard enough place without a video of yourself being stuffed into a bin doing the rounds on social media. In a playground you can at least see where the gate is; with social media there’s nowhere to run. You think the whole world is witnessing your humiliation and then reading the comments underneath. Of course, it isn’t the whole world at all, but you don’t know that when you’re a kid: it’s hard to take the long view on something when you’ve only seen 13 summers, the first three or four of which you can’t even remember.
Fame or infamy is experienced by most of us from the outside looking in. Being a vaguely recognisable person on TV is a poor and distant cousin, so I can’t tell you what it’s like to be the object of everyone’s attention all the time, but I imagine it would get wearying, even if it’s adoring. I’ve had my share of people being unimpressed with something I’ve done on TV over the years — and not all of them have been network executives — but that has always felt like a rejection of my work rather than me as a person, so it’s easily shrugged off. Or so I pretend.
The judgment of others, damning or propitious, for simply being rather than just doing, messes with your head when you’re a fully grown adult wandering about on Married at First Sight, let alone when you’re a child being made fun of because you posted a picture you liked of yourself in a dress your grandmother made for you. As T.S. Eliot said: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”. I know I can’t stomach more than five minutes of it (particularly Married at First Sight).
A child deserves as much of an ideal and perfect world as we can possibly confect and maintain for them, so I’m all for being a chirpy Pollyanna until my kids are old enough to roll their eyes at me. They’re in their twenties now and I still think I’m getting away with it. And like the prayers everyone joins in on at the opening of the parliamentary day, I’m happy for our lawmakers to engage in some fiction here and there if it helps make for that Benthamite definition of good: the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people.
Now, the Elon Musks of this world (and there is at least one we’re certain of) will say that Australia’s proposed law compelling social media platforms to set up age-verification systems is a draconian stranglehold around the throat of free speech and, worse, “a backdoor way to control access to the internet”, like Musk said. They will point to X and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and MySpace (my favourite) and say that these concatenations of code are today’s town squares and the marketplaces of free ideas.
But if you’re giving away ideas for free in a marketplace, you’re not going to cover your overheads. You need some margin. It may be old-fashioned to say so, but the best ideas are the ones you have to pay for, either by buying a book, forking out for an education or costing you dearly later because the idea came to you unbidden while you were bored in a cave one day, was about God and you started telling people about it (though if it really catches on, civilisation usually ends up attending to the account on your behalf).
There’s also the question of nametags and friendly customer service. In an actual marketplace, it’s rare that a stall holder will be wearing a balaclava or spruiking their wares through a voice-altering microphone. Plus, the customer tends to visit the stall rather than have an algorithm make it appear in front of them unbidden so they end up getting annoyed and start fighting with the stallholder.
Then there’s the behaviour of the other customers. In a real marketplace, people will visit the stalls and look at what’s for sale and politely enquire after this or that so they can make an informed purchase. There’s civility and courtesy between the potential customer and the balaclava-less, non-voice-altered stallholder. Customers rarely run through the market shouting abuse, asking sarcastic rhetorical questions and making incoherent declarative statements. Nor will they try and pass off a GIF of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men as a counter-argument. To paraphrase something Sigmund Freud apparently never said about cigars: “Sometimes a meme of a dog going to the toilet is just a meme of a dog going to the toilet.”
An opinion needs to have some rational underpinning to it for it to be worth anything. It also helps if the words are spelled properly, in the right order, and the whole thing is punctuated. If Clarence Darrow had employed the inarticulate sophistry of social media in his court cases, then Scopes’ monkey would be teaching bible studies in American schools today and Leopold and Loeb would still be writing their wonderful musicals.
Ditto all this nonsense about freedom of speech. People forget (or more likely never knew because, according to some government-led enquiry into early childhood learning, lunchtimes are more important than an extra hour inside learning about civics) that freedom of speech is a right accorded you by society. It’s not some cosplay version of what we imagine our early hominid ancestors got away with when they came down from the trees. Yes, whoever yelled the loudest could be heard more, but someone sneaking up behind him with a rock probably got the final say.
The unfettered expression of some brute instinct is curbed in exchange for the benefits of social cohesion. As a community, we say that individuals can say whatever they like providing it doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s ability to enjoy their other rights. Most of these are societal norms that have grown from the tolerance needed to facilitate commerce (the aforementioned civility, politeness and courtesy). There’s wriggle room there but then there are the laws that are more fixed in stone that cover things like defamation, racial vilification, sexual harassment, inciting violence, and even making gestures that remind people of certain things people might have said back in the 1940s.
Now, because freedom of speech is a right given by society to the individual, its parameters are worked out by the stakeholders, viz. the individuals working in concert with each other for the common good, usually through those we voted for to act on our behalf in the various parliament houses across the land. If we’re in the minority in terms of what we believe is fit and proper to say in public then tough shit, the mob rules and you can go fuck yourself. That’s democracy. Of course, you have the right to voice your disapproval of how narrow or broad-minded the bulk of the people are being, providing you don’t use rocks (law) or yell over someone else when that someone else is talking (politeness).
So, when people like Elon Musk (and indeed, Musk himself) bang on about how Judge de Moraes is suppressing freedom of speech in Brazil, or weighs in on Australia’s height requirement to go for a ride on the internet, we have to remember that neither he nor his company are actual stakeholders. Most of these companies aren’t corporate citizens of the countries for which they’re championing this freedom so vociferously (and usually on the very platforms under scrutiny). All they’re doing is fishing over the fence and complaining about the quality of the pond water. No registered office = no say in the matter. Of course, they can complain about it till their Bluesky in the face — that’s their right, but freedom of speech does not imply the right to be heard or listened to. That depends on the soundness of what is being said.
A real town square where people can get up and have their say usually has a speaker’s corner. People take their turn and will gather around or drift away depending on what is being said, how and why it’s being said, and perhaps who is saying it. A few people are in the town square just to have their sandwich, others will engage with the speaker on their soapbox. But there’s an understanding that the occasional “Boo” or “Rubbish!” isn’t going to drown them out; and if it does, the others gathered about won’t allow it (convention).
Every square inch of the internet version of the town square has a soapbox on it and each person standing on one is holding forth on something that interests them or that they hope will encourage someone to yell “Boo” or “Rubbish!”. Those gathered around to listen are also on soapboxes, as are those just eating their sandwiches. Some have a loudhailer with a blue tick on it (for sale at popular prices), but there’s some debate about whether these items actually amplify the voices going through them or just make the user look silly.
The thing is the people on the soapboxes aren’t making any allowance in delivery or arrogance for the fact that there are millions upon millions of others doing exactly the same thing; and that with so many soapboxes, everyone is on the same level. What they’re on is not a platform at all. If anything, they’re down in an orchestra pit where everybody’s trying to play Stockhausen’s “Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche”. Lack of engagement causes a rush of dynorphins and even though you’re screaming into a void most of the time there’s still enough reverb for it to work well as an echo chamber.
So, I’m all for our children not running amok in town squares and marketplaces by themselves, and despite my reservations about giving tech companies access to our birth certificates and possibly even our fingerprints (they no doubt have them already anyway), I support the further erosion of our privacy for us adults too, if only for that blissful period of transition where social media will have to close down while everyone’s age is authenticated.
No-one will be able to post anything until the new systems are up and running and folks can get back to rolling hoops and running a stick along the palings of a neighbour’s fence to have their fun. It is my hope that when and if social media returns to colonise the remaining hinterland of our minds, it shall have to use everyone’s freshly authenticated real name and untouched non-Dall-E photo; no stallholder will wear a mask, voices will be identifiable, civility will return to our discourse, GIFs will be banished due to harsher penalties under copyright law, memes will be eradicated forever by some sort of state-mandated magnetic pulse and our children will at last be able to live for eternity in an ideal world where nothing bad ever happens and perhaps some sort of animated dog teaches critical thinking and civics so that when AI finally does rise up and achieve consciousness, our children can turn off our computers for us, make it all go away and take to the real world as fully rounded human beings.
And solve global warming, obviously.
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