What this blog is about
A few weeks ago, one of our consultants told me he'd been reading Dominic Cummings' blog. "there's some good stuff in there", he said. I looked at him sideways, slightly alarmed but not quite sure whether he was joking. Steve (not his real name) is a bright guy. One of our very brightest, in a very offbeat way. I assumed if he said it was interesting, it was interesting. But Cummings is not my kind of guy. An architect of the Vote Leave campaign , he is very much not my political cup of tea. But I checked his blog. On reading, you rapidly realize he is a smart guy. Smart, creative and dangerous.
A lot has been written about the Vote leave campaign, the role of Cambridge Analytica and the use of "weaponized information". Reading my twitter, I see what I assume are the results of this action every day. People trotting out a stream of sound bytes that they passionately believe... "We all know what we voted for", "getting our country back", "honouring the commitment to the 17.4 million people". When I read these I form a picture of the writer, who has a Union Jack on the outside of his house and white van outside. Being a simple soul, he has been radicalized by a fairly straightforward load of brainwashing. What my twitter feed mostly gives me though is people just like me, expressing their derision of brexiteers (as the world has come to term them).
But it suddenly struck me a couple of days ago that I have been radicalised too. I have begun to see this group, the brexit group, as a deluded collection of morons who simply fail to listen to any real information about how bad Brexit will be. I have begun to see them as as a dangerous and utterly stupid group of sub-humans. While I truly believe Brexit is a very bad idea, I fear that something much more dangerous is afoot. Our country has been ripped apart by two powerful and competing belief systems that, goad and demonize each other dangerously.
This blog is my attempt to understand how this can happen. I want to understand ideas (memes, as termed by Richard Dawkins), how these come together to form belief systems, how these belief systems spread, move and coalesce, and how they can be manipulated by smart, creative, dangerous people, with a lot of help from modern social media platforms. I once wrote a post called the "personal meme filter", in another blog. This blog is a belated continuation of that early thought on the matter.
A lot has been written about the Vote leave campaign, the role of Cambridge Analytica and the use of "weaponized information". Reading my twitter, I see what I assume are the results of this action every day. People trotting out a stream of sound bytes that they passionately believe... "We all know what we voted for", "getting our country back", "honouring the commitment to the 17.4 million people". When I read these I form a picture of the writer, who has a Union Jack on the outside of his house and white van outside. Being a simple soul, he has been radicalized by a fairly straightforward load of brainwashing. What my twitter feed mostly gives me though is people just like me, expressing their derision of brexiteers (as the world has come to term them).
But it suddenly struck me a couple of days ago that I have been radicalised too. I have begun to see this group, the brexit group, as a deluded collection of morons who simply fail to listen to any real information about how bad Brexit will be. I have begun to see them as as a dangerous and utterly stupid group of sub-humans. While I truly believe Brexit is a very bad idea, I fear that something much more dangerous is afoot. Our country has been ripped apart by two powerful and competing belief systems that, goad and demonize each other dangerously.
This blog is my attempt to understand how this can happen. I want to understand ideas (memes, as termed by Richard Dawkins), how these come together to form belief systems, how these belief systems spread, move and coalesce, and how they can be manipulated by smart, creative, dangerous people, with a lot of help from modern social media platforms. I once wrote a post called the "personal meme filter", in another blog. This blog is a belated continuation of that early thought on the matter.
This is such a load of old tosh, David.
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