BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
A few weeks ago, I noticed that it was possible to listen in anonymously to live Twitter group audio chats. I believe the function is called X Spaces and I’m told it’s been around a while. I listened in on a few chats this way using the Country Squire Magazine account and this is what I discovered:
The UK Wannabe Revolutionaries
This chat started out tamely enough. One of the admins was a mild fellow with a South African accent called Roger – he was a competent chair. The first speaker talked about ‘consent of the governed’ referring to the idea that a government’s legitimacy and moral right to use state power are justified and lawful only when consented to by the people. Hardly revolutionary stuff. When he finished there was little feedback as group members were no doubt still plucking lint from their belly buttons (you can be off screen on these chats). Then the subject of Pakistani grooming gangs cropped up and things spiralled rapidly out of control. One attendee was passed the microphone and she had terrible tales to tell about how she ‘was attacked by Muslim animals and raped’. Another speaker backed her up but with less emotion. Then the microphone returned to the poor, raped lady who bellowed down her microphone, “I am not against Hitler. At least Hitler cared about his own people. He was a nationalist. This lot (she meant the current crop of UK politicians) only care about themselves. Look, Sunak’s wife’s a billionaire!” That Hitler remark came in after only 29 minutes of the chat. We had gone from peaceful democratic revolution to mass-murdering autocracy in just 29 minutes. I left for a dog walk at this point wondering if SIS were the other anonymous listener on the group and whether our account was now on a watchlist. On return I was surprised to see the chat was ongoing, well into its second hour. I saw that the Hitler fan had been muted but she was still able to text comment a load of sweary bile. One of the admins was talking about ‘the next steps’ – one participant saying she was thinking about becoming a councillor, while another attendee discussed joining the police but ‘the forms to fill in were too woke’ and how ‘they weeded out anyone anti-woke’. I left for supper. I felt this group was less ‘up the revolution’ and more a case of desperate disillusion. I felt sorry for them. They were unhappy. Most of them meant well.
The Rejoiner Diehards
This was a painful listen. When I joined the chat, an elderly gentleman was mid-rant about how he couldn’t visit his grandchildren in Germany like he used to and how he hadn’t seen them for many years now as it’s so much hassle getting there with the queues and the pet passport problems. I smelt BS from the get-go. Leave your dog at a kennels and get on a Ryanair flight like loads of people do every day from Britain to Germany, you muppet. The microphone was then passed to a young activist woman who was veritably charming, gleefully reeling off statistics about expectant Brexiteer deaths and how by 2035 the UK population would be 75% Rejoin anyway and that, even though ‘just waiting was not an option, there is an inevitability about the UK’s return to the EU’. After that ‘good news’, there was more of the same. Hitler got a mention after just 12 minutes as soon as the name of Beelzebub himself – Farage – cropped up. The group was highly expectant of a pro-European Labour government and thought that a Lab-SNP-Lib coalition would be dreamy for them. There was a sense of ‘we’re cleverer than the rest’ on this group which I had sensed, to a lesser degree, on the wannabe revolutionaries’ chat. My piss was boiling at this point so I went outside deep into the garden for some fresh air and I weed up into the night sky in the vain hope of splashing a yellow star.
The Trans Activists
Never have I heard such back-biting in my life as on this group. The conversation was about legislation and getting trans rights forced into the law books via lawfare – at least it was to start with. A KC, whose name I shall not mention, was advising the chat and the members were going nuts on their text chats. A brilliant and articulate speaker then grabbed the microphone and won the floor with their wit and charm until they (I do not know their preferred pronoun so best stick with ‘they’) mentioned some bloke(?) called Freddy McConnell and his babies. The group then turned into a mass brawl. ‘Babies are just WRONG’ one commenter posted using a few expletives to boot. Hitler was mentioned after 43 minutes. I left after an hour and a half of this divisive – intersectional, even – group for a cuppa. I dunked my ginger nut into my mug of tea as if it were a solidaric rusk.
The Animal Rightists
This group seemed to be a blend of PETA types and loopy on-the-ground activists of the Joey Carbstrong variety. For those that don’t know Carbstrong, he’s an ‘ex-gang member’ now ‘a decade sober’ who – rather than choosing to repent and do good in society – has turned into an ‘animal defender’ (animal rights terrorist/extremist) and doesn’t approve of animal slaughter or bacon sarnies (by the look of him his carbs leave him looking puny and weak). The sort of a fellow a good many might refer to as a wankpot.
The first speakers on this group (middle-aged, middle-class women comprised 9 in 10 of the group attendees) chuntered on about sheep agony as if they were re-experiencing childbirths. They were so dull I left the room for half an hour to take a call and returned having clearly missed nothing. Then a young activist girl made the chat a bit more interesting. She came up with the idea of replacing Animal Rebellion with a new group which neutered farm animals thus ending the enslavement of farm animals. Now this was intriguing. To diminish pain just end the bloodline. Some members of the chat had no doubt laid down their Hello magazines at this point and were paying attention. ‘We could find pills for this and feed them grass pellets,’ one member suggested. ‘What about dosing raisins like in that Dahl book? Danny Champion of the World did that successfully with pheasants!’ ‘We could call the group Neuter Friendly’ suggested another. Alas, the chat mic then reverted to a another bore, no doubt bedecked in Karrimor, going on about the sentience of pigs. But the suggestions kept on appearing in the text chat: ‘we can inject them at night’, ‘injections hurt. We can’t do that, why not add a sterilisation drug to their water?’ ‘best to recruit a load of vets in secret’ and ‘we could use drones?’ Hitler did not get a mention although I felt – even as an anonymous member of this group – that I had become part of an evil animal extinction plot and I left wanting to hug a lamb … I soon got real and I had lamb chops for supper instead.
The Far Leftists
This group chat was a blend of White Lightning Citizen Smith types (followers of Ash Sarkar, Owen Jones and other Trots) with a sprinkling of Guardianista/Byline/New European/Good Law Project cranks and nose-pickers. Rachel from Swindon meets Otto English – the sort of people accidentally dropped on their heads as babies – the kind of dinner party invitation one carelessly misplaces or allows the dog to eat. I joined anonymously at the point where one comrade was having a pop at Keir Starmer. Oh, my word! Sir Keir is not a popular man amongst these pinkos and Luxemburgers. There was little mention of the Tories. Enemy Number One was clearly Starmer and Lord Mandelson ran him a close second. To be fair Hitler did not get a mention but one felt that Nationalsozialismus was not far around the curvature of the linear spectrum at all times (with its axis bent into a circle of course). The chat was not at all about Israel or Gaza, which somewhat surprised me. Speakers took their turn to lay into Starmer with one honourable exception who put up a comprehensible argument for why, if you believe in open borders, voter ID could be perceived as an unacceptable intrusion. Quote of the night: ‘Starmer was responsible for Julian Assange going to jail. So Starmer should go to jail because Julian should be freed.’ Such logic does one’s head in. I left for a much-needed swig of vodka.
Conclusions
- Each of these X Space chats was an echo chamber. The UK revolutionaries highlighted the futility of echo chambers when action requests were made. What use will one lady becoming a councillor (for which party?) be?
- Each group claimed to have the answers. They felt they were cleverer than those not engaged in their group. “Thick as two short planks” was a regular refrain – a short-cutting projection point?
- Although there were times during each of the chats that the participants would have felt there was a feeling of solidarity with the other group members – they were there for the title of their respective groups after all – I felt they would have left the chats feeling more disempowered and lonelier.
- Each of the groups talked of ‘They’ a lot. ‘They’ were to blame for everything. ‘They’ often meant the government. To the Labour Group ‘they’ meant New Labour and Starmer’s iteration of New Labour. But let’s say ‘they’ were the government, the groups were giving far too much credit to the government as if it were some cohesive, scheming entity. (As anyone who has worked in Westminster knows, politicians tend to be selfish and very fallible individuals not capable of being whipped into one world view let alone a conspiracy. If anything, business runs government. Yes, BlackRock and Amazon are vast but the last thing they want is mass political instability or to whittle down their customer base).
- Social media sites polarise. They are hi-tech ad brokers using algorithms designed to reinforce stereotypes. Many group users had clearly swallowed propaganda as a feedback loop. It’s a new illness for which there is still no antidote. Control the feedback, and you control the news = $$$$ for social media companies like X which now fire data-driven algorithmic ads at users repetitively.
- Although governments and the military-tech complex are in pursuit of data like these groups provide, and such groups are useful in that they are mere echo chambers in which revolutionaries can let off steam rather than petrol bombs, I felt I was protruding on others’ privacy by eavesdropping – creating a surveillance time-machine would be way too sinister but no doubt AI will purpose itself to do so if it is not engaged already.
- Such chat groups would be better off using alternative tech. One day soon their rants will be stored, and possibly used against them, by entities far more intelligent than humans. Today, Signal is far less porous although it would not suit such large chats. Even Signal will not stop a powerful AI let alone an AGI.
- There’s a lot of anger out there. This is a tragedy. Whether it is the fault of government, business or algorithms, someone will be picking up the tab. At the moment these echo chambers provide sufficient resistance to any resistance.
- Godwin’s Law persists.