“Speaking truth to power”, standing up and being counted, doesn’t always make a difference, even though it may take immense courage. We love it because it embodies and celebrates the ideas we most value in the modern age: integrity and strength of the self: the verbal demonstration of identity^[1]. 

Power, being power, can often choose to ignore your truth and carry on as normal (sometimes after an initial retreat.) No matter how many gladiators and slaves stood up and claimed they were Spartacus, they were all still crucified along the Apian way, and the Roman empire continued for centuries, with slaves and gladiators. The leaders of the peasants’ revolt were executed; The Arab Spring led to widespread suppression, death and suffering. The Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring were brutally suppressed. 

Rebellions that work do so by being even more brutal than the regimes they replace. Rebellions that fail prove less ruthless than their governments. Without the claim to maintain order and peace, without a convincing charade of ruling by consensus, violence and fear become the only currencies of power.

In Syria Basher al-Assad butchered thousands of his citizens to stay in power. Nobody dared intervene once it became clear that he was being supported by Russia and Iran, despite huge amounts of press coverage and millions and millions of online condemnations. 

Slightly less dramatically, after decades and decades of scientific proof, almost complete consensus, and billions of online denunciations, very little is still being done to combat climate change. Vested interests have been perfectly happy to ignore the condemnation until it dawned on them that they might be personally and immediately threatened. And, even now, we lag catastrophically behind the most conservative targets for repairing our planet.

Of course, communication, dialogue, demonstration: all are vital for creating a better, fairer world. But you can’t just make a complaint to the management and demand that they sort it out. Without constructive plans and actions for reform within existing societies, without hard work and applied thought, protest is merely virtue-signalling and tribal identity; revolution is just vandalism^[2].

So, push your chair back from your computer terminal, or your phone, and all those deep-throated roars of disapproval start to diminish, to sound tinny and shrill. The words become undifferentiated lines of black specks soiling the otherwise serene glow of the screen. Look around. There’s a big world wrapped all around you. You might even hear birdsong. Or, depending where you are (really, truly are, geographically), the snarling of engines as the tanks (literal, actual tanks) roll into position…

…Now imagine you are sitting in the ruins of your home in Homs, or another bombed out city, as the corpses of your loved ones decay beneath the rubble… How supportive are the tweets and hashtags? How powerful does the chanting sound, from there? 

Sorry. I’m ranting. I’ll stop.

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^[1] The celebration of these ideas explains, I think, #MeToo, a campaign where simply speaking out in solidarity was immensely successful. It also motivated the pre-internet protest slogan “Not in My Name” which was used in early protests against the Iraq war. Here it made less sense. Why, of all possible slogans, pick that one? Surely the main issue at stake was the lives of the Iraqi people, not the right of a bunch of British protestors to maintain a complacent sense of their own innocence. 

^[2] And, no, I don’t practice what I preach. That doesn’t make me a hypocrite. I know I should. It makes me a spineless arsehole, but what I’m saying is still true. You know this. 

It’s Christmas day! Happy Christmas, dudes. 

During the Christmas holidays I would normally lose weight, while still managing to have a taste of turkey, roasties, stuffing, pigs in blankets, Christmas pudding… I would just tweak the exercise a little higher during the holiday period, and tweak all the other meals a little downwards, and have truly the tiniest amounts of the delicious, poisonous Christmas foods. (Sorry, that sounds a bit Pro-ana…)

Nowadays, I’m “in the green band”, so my weight is normal, but I’m still faced with the usual food-dilemmas. I still have to keep rigidly to meal plans to stop my weight going down, but rigidity is a symptom of disordered thinking about food. On Christmas Day, can I ditch my mid-morning snack, to make room for the heavy Christmas lunch? (I know I’ll try to be as frugal as possible with it) Or does this put pressure on me to eat more (a horrifying idea)? But doesn’t having a snack on top of CHRISTMAS DINNER, of all things, sound like MADNESS!? Why does this feel like an important decision? 

Who can I persuade to eat all the Christmas  pudding , so that I don’t lose my head completely and eat THE WHOLE THING myself, in one sitting?

Am I over-thinking things? (Yes. Yes, I am.)

“The philosopher Bertrand Russel is said to have remarked ‘metaphysicians, like savages, think words are things.’ … Under some circumstances, words are indeed things – useful things, as Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Winston Churchill demonstrated – but their importance can be overrated as compared with solid and enduring accomplishments. Great political leaders are remembered for their deeds, not their words. Few today would bother to quote even Winston Churchill’s magnificent speeches if Britain had lost the war.” – Anthony King^[1]

The internet, has an unprecedented capacity for multiple connections and communications.   It has had an enormous beneficial effect on the co-ordination and organisation of aid efforts, medical research, the sharing of vital information across continents. And we all know the glamorous narrative of the internet-enabling dissent: computer nerds hacking the system, guiding flash-mobs around riot-police; the Arab spring.

But how much good can you do in the hermetically sealed, self-referential world of the social media, where words are the only substance?

Here, people don’t use the internet to facilitate their work; here, words are actions: all acts are speech acts.  Activists are influencers and demagogues. Their activity is “speaking out” and calling other people to arms. To be armed is to have words. To act is to employ words to call out, cancel or petition.

The enervated denizens of affluent countries, languishing in petulant online anomie, are most easily influenced by your words, or inspired by your ardour. I guess it passes the time, and it’s easy for them to join your campaigns. It’s easy for you, too: You are preaching to the choir.

Those who rely on social media for their career, or communities, or their sense of self-worth and importance are also the most vulnerable to being abused or cancelled. Attacks can have a devastating effect on them. If they say unacceptable things they can quickly be brought to heel. 

So, yes, internet campaigns can have great influence on celebrities and businesses that value their online brand image. The landscape of relationships on social media can change daily, and this can cause real change in the world. 

However, to affect somebody with your words, they need to be receptive. They must be partly on-message already, so how deep rooted and lasting these changes will be remains to be seen. Because, sometimes, your opponents aren’t online, or don’t care. Or just aren’t listening. 

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^[1] Who Governs Britain? 2015 London: Penguin, pp280-1. King is cautioning parliamentary politicians who are sometimes able to make substantive changes to how nations operate.

Before the internet, we often wanted, passionately, to act on social justice issues but didn’t know where to start, especially if we didn’t live in the big cities, where groups met and protests were held. 

Now you can find something out, become incensed, sign the petition, donate, and share this information on twitter and Facebook^[1], all in a few seconds, without leaving your chair, then you can wander off to make a sandwich, secure in the knowledge that you’ve done something good today.

This is great for Causes, but it’s possibly less good for the soul. Activism is cheapened by being so easy. You don’t have to give much thought to what you’re advocating, let alone the consequences of your disdainful rebuttals. It’s a sort of Off-hand or absent-minded Activism, as if pitched battles were being fought by combatants who wander onto the battlefield, unleash a devastating torrent of gunfire from highly sophisticated weaponry they found lying around, then wandered home for their tea. 

Perhaps this partly explains the vehemence-and-anguish-inflation online. If you want to show more than lip-service commitment to a cause, you need to intensify the language you use. 

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^[1] My two favourite neologisms are “Virtue-signalling” and “Humble-brag”. Aren’t they great? They precisely describe very modern, very internet-y versions of age-old behaviours.

In the absence of official positions, Activists’ online authority comes from their piety, their moral absolutism and their indignation. It gives them a flavour of authenticity, and authenticity-flavour is the closest internet users get to the real thing. Like prawn cocktail crisps. 

Central to the Liberal-Humanist project is the defence of the individual, who is, inevitably, threatened by domineering, impersonal forces and institutions. The Righteous Activists are the underdogs, standing up for the natural rights of the oppressed and voiceless.  

This moral elite can’t be identified by their behaviour or actions, because there are no actions or behaviours, online. Instead, they seem identifiable by their status as the aggrieved or, failing that, as the defenders of the aggrieved. It’s their experience of persecution, and the strength of feeling this causes, that wins them their position.

I guess their blogs and posts exemplify the Liberal principle of individualism: the selves displayed are unique and unprecedented, pure expressions of souls, that, due to the hardships they endure, are made of a superior moral substance to that of the rest of us privileged bastards. They have achieved their successes by their own abilities and hard work, not by having success handed to them on a platter. 

Some battles have already been won. Society is more egalitarian than it used to be. Modern minority groups in Britain don’t tend to encounter open, legal persecution. Instead, they experience limiting expectations and what are now called “micro-aggressions”. 

Even if these are only a small number of a person’s encounters^[1], the cumulative effect of constantly managing even surmountable barriers and mild hostilities, the constant effort of resisting, is so wearing, that it amounts, in Otegha Uwagba’s words, to “trauma.”^[2]. Activists have both the right and the duty to bear witness to this.

The history of discrimination has also left a legacy of expectations and practices (but I guess all societies favour majorities and their perspectives). These histories allow the internet warriors to inherit righteous indignation from their even more persecuted forebears. 

This is, ironically, a form of entitlement. Suffering, and the history of suffering they are heir to, gives them moral infallibility, a trump card in any debate about society. Because they have been treated badly, they must be right, when it comes to interpreting the world, it’s political power-structures and oppressions. 

This is all attested to by the Activists themselves. They identify as Being in The Right. That is their truth. In a world of words, something exists by being stated. By reputation. In a realm that celebrates the individual, the primacy of personal experience trumps objective facts^[3]. 

How this experience makes you feel is its only important meaning. And you are the only authority on that^[4].

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^[1] We are all guilty of cherry-picking negative experiences to prove that we’ve been having a bad time, but if you are part of a marginalised group, it only takes one unkind comment from a member of the in-group to make you feel completely alienated, however much welcoming positivity you may have encountered before that. This is something I do know from my own experience, although only in a very mild form.

^[2] The Guardian Review, Saturday 14/11/20. This seemed a hyperbolic use of the word to me, at first, given its meaning to surgeons and paramedics, but I have no authority to speak about the experience of ethnic minority Brits, being white, male and university-educated. Or should I say, unhealthily pinky-yellow and bloodshot, y-chromosomed and having been to university, although I’ve forgotten everything I learned. 

^[3] I’m paraphrasing David Goodhart, here (BBC Radio 4: A Point of View, Sunday, 22 November, 2020). 

^[4] Although blame for it can still be outsourced to other people, for some reason, whose motives can be dismissed as slavishly hegemonic, or as an inexplicable commitment to causing harm. 

All rebel and crusader kingdoms feel vulnerable. They are threatened by reactionaries, Secret Rightists who are attempting to sabotage and corrupt the Glorious Project. This is particularly true of the internet, because it is open to all.

It’s true that trolls scuttle like vermin through its warren of back-streets; cabals of paedophiles, misogynists and the far right^[1] meet in open secret, take over whole neighbourhoods and transform them into toxic, hate-filled ghettoes^[2]. 

The Activists are the self-appointed Lawmen^[3] of this lawless frontier country, its Texas Rangers. It is their job to police their neighbourhoods, protecting internet users from harm by enforcing internet values. 

They can’t deny anyone entry: they don’t own the sites, and anyway, that would go against their principles of free speech and equality of opportunity^[4], so instead they try to expose and isolate any enemies they uncover, and shame them into silence. They denounce and encourage others to do the same. In the absence of effective laws or judge-managed juries, they organise kangaroo courts and lynch-mobs. 

In other words, they impose the internet’s Neo-Liberal hegemony on their online communities, its metaphysical-ethical mind-set.

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^[1] Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women (2020), claims there is a direct link between violent Misogyny and the far-right: Far-Right supporters are violent misogynists. And vice versa.

^[2] In fact, I suspect the trolls have the most proportional and realistic understanding of the internet. They don’t rely on it. For them, it is just another playground to despoil, monopolising the swings and sabotaging the roundabout. If you shut it down completely, they’d be annoyed but they’d just wander off, disconsolately, to cause trouble elsewhere, as they used to. Whereas we would be horrified, seeing it as a victory for the controlling state. 

^[3] The term is archaic and hence gendered.

^[4] Internet users tend to be opposed to government regulation, for this reason. They resist incursions by traditional hegemonic institutions. They are classic liberals who believe the state is a threat to liberty and individuality and so should have a very limited role in their lives, if any. 

On the other hand, Internet Warriors are released from the fear of actually meeting somebody and having to deal with the consequences of their words. The digital mediated atomisation of society acts like the hunters’ masks in Lord of the Flies. Behind the mask of algorithms, we are freed from responsibility, even though the mask bears our signature. “Liberated from shame and self-consciousness”^[1], we can indulge our dark impulses with plausible deniability, even to ourselves. 

The trolls, plain and simple, revel in the freedom to be offensive and get away with it. I guess they are the kids who, before the internet, would roam around waste-ground smashing things. Now they’re middle-aged and have broadband but are still bewildered by their own lack of empathy. They are still experimenting with language and its impacts, as they did when they were tormenting the sensitive children at school. They are the most like Golding’s choir-boy hunters, shouting “Bollocks to the Rules!”^[2]; shouting “BUM!!” at a funeral to see what happens. 

In contrast, The Internet Warriors are defenders of a faith. They are self-defined Activists, inspired by principles. The faith is, of course, Classical Liberalism, the creed that underpins most nominally right or left-wing positions, at least in the Western Democracies. The principles are belief in the individual, its inherent virtue, and the virtue of self-definition and self-development, freedom of expression. 

The internet is the Utopia they have created for themselves, founded on these principles, fostering these principles: a caliphate, a sort of digital Outremer^[3].

And, like that crusader kingdom, they have planted it, defiantly, right in the midst of hostile polities, as a bulwark against them. 

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^[1] William Golding, 1962, Lord of the Flies, (1996 edition), London: Faber & Faber, p.80

^[2] ibid, p.114

^[3] A collection of Christian crusader states established around the eastern Mediterranean coastline after the first crusade(1098-9), and ending with the fall of Acre in 1291. 

Our online support networks help us foster identities that leave us partially nourished, existentially, spiritually, or, at least, malnourished but not starving, so that we can survive with fewer contacts and a more threadbare community in the real world. 

But that isn’t enough, these fleeting exchanges; glancing jousts in forest glades with chance-met knights; brief flings, and misty, perpetually-dissolving alliances. They always leave us alone in the end.

We are social creatures and crave society. A large part of our identity resides in being recognised by another living, breathing person whose judgement we trust because they have seen a much fuller version of us than the edited highlights we allow online. They were with us, doubled up with laughter, when we puked outside The Prince of Wales; they’ve heard us burp and say the dimmest things. We must be worth something if they still want to be friends with us. 

Maybe the anger of the internet warriors is driven by this frustration: the lack of genuine relationships. Perhaps they need the passion and intensity to substitute for actual, physical companionship, “Just being with another guy”, as Crooks calls it, in Of Mice and Men, which is really a study of loneliness^[1]. People go a bit weird when they’re starving. I should know. 

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^[1] John Steinbeck (originally 1937), Penguin Red Classics, 2006,

What’s been lost in the internet wars is kindness, flexibility, empathy, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and the desirability of that; the finding of common ground: valuing others. 

Admittedly, these qualities have always been in short supply, but in the real, corporeal world, you have to compromise, occasionally, or hold your tongue while casting your eyes to heaven, because you have to live with these people. Often the biggest arsehole, spewing the most awful Nazi shit, is your own dad, who loves you. To destroy him would be intolerable: not just horribly ungrateful and disloyal, but also just embarrassing, embarrassingly raw and personal – humiliating for both of you.

Or it’s your boss or your tutor. In the flesh, you are at other people’s mercy. They can harm you physically, emotionally, professionally, socially. They know who you are. They know where you live, what you look like.

Being in someone’s actual, physical presence, in the flesh, involves much more than registering their words, the bald, factual meaning of them. There’s inflection, of course, tone of voice, rapidity of speech, but there’s also timbre, pitch and quality of sound, facial expression, eye contact or lack of it, gesture and body language, how a person is dressed and groomed, the rate, depth and sound of their breathing, its smell. Then there are other smells – fart, deodorant, sweat, washing powder, shampoo. There’s skin tone, flushes, rashes, sweatiness, subconsciously registered pheromones (probably), body warmth…all the meanings and messages of their physicality. 

This is self, made manifest, this is force of person-ality. We don’t absorb all this data passively, either. We process it and analyse it; we align it with previous knowledge and expectations to plan and predict, to understand and empathise. 

We spend a lot of our time acknowledging that we’ve upset someone and making amends: giving them a hug and reminding them that we still like them. We say these conciliatory and consoling things because we have to, and not just because no-one wants a punch on the nose. (Or to be sacked, or to fail, or to be hated). They are part of a framework of shared humanity, which is the reason and purpose of communicating at all. 

And saying it reminds us that we mean it, and in between the spats there is usually time for the odd gesture of affection, a kind word, a shared moment.

Not so, online. Here, we enter each other’s lives as just a few lines of text on a screen, and for the sole purpose of being a prick. (Or, of course, to offer some platitudinous, disingenuous support, that nobody values.) So, there’s no need for reconciliation or relenting. We don’t know these people; we don’t need them; we owe them nothing. Far from being an act of communication, speech becomes merely an assertion of self, because you are typing into a void. You are talking to blankness^[1]

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^[1] You could be responding to a bot…

We run the risk of losing our moral compass, in all of this. In their virulence and fury, some righteous defences become very personal attacks. Coming on one of these exchanges out of context, it’s difficult to say who the good guys are, because you don’t know who started it or who is upholding the right.  

Who started it makes a poor excuse, anyway. Surely morality must be more than a sequencing issue. Hatred in one direction, in response, looks pretty much like hatred in another, unprovoked. The difference between trolls and defenders of the faith becomes lost, because the primary injunction in all our moral codes isn’t “Be Second”, it’s “Be kind”.

As an individual addressing another individual: be kind.

And we’re not.