Well, they conceal information like that in books
Sorry this took so long. I moved house. And I was sick too, for a bit. The scary thing about nature is not that it's malevolent, but that it doesn't care about you one way or another.
Disclaimer: a big chunk of this post is reworked from a talk I gave at a Marketing Association meetup, at Special Wellington, on Tuesday 1 July. If you heard that talk, feel free to engage here and tell me where I’ve been inconsistent.
When I was at university, I saw a patch sewn on a backpack that depicted a whole bunch of disembodied, homogenised heads looking wide-eyed at a static-y TV. Underneath the image was the dark legend, IDIOT NATION.
This is the kind of thing you see a lot on university campuses. Or it used to be (it’s been a while, man). Once, this passed for a kind of edge-lord punk-rock sensibility - it identified you as someone smarter than everyone else. Because, you knew television was for idiots!
Now, when I think about that image, I try to imagine the student that wore it at nineteen, now probably in his or her forties, silent and alone, watching Reacher on a massive TV, while scrolling TikTok. Tomorrow, they’ll go to work, and ask their colleagues if they’ve seen it, and no one will have. Someone else will have been watching White Lotus while scrolling Insta, other(s?) re-watching The Middle, while they scroll Netflix on their phone for something… else.
They’ll remember that patch and think, far out: the idea of everyone looking at one thing is pretty comforting. Togetherness is pretty damn comforting.
The death of the monoculture
You see it everywhere now: people trying to defeat technology. But we are powerless to it. The VICE piece I referenced in my last post was doing it in 2019; Carraway’s erudite railing against the phone and its filthy crust. In more recent times, I’ve seen Alex Casey at the Spinoff asking if the powers that be could please ban her from social media, describing her craven and furtive swiping and scrolling in dark rooms. And, podcasting maven PJ Vogt, going deep on phone addiction and the role of physical barriers to access and use of these infernal devices. These are just examples cherry picked from the torrent. They’re everywhere, now.
So: what are we all looking for?
Oh yeah, that’s right. We’re all looking for what we were sold. We only want what we were sold, right?
We were sold creation and connection.
Not only were we told we’d get this from the hardware, which, did you know, is capable of actual bona-fide peer-to-peer communications? Couldn’t blame you if you’d forgotten that. But, also, we were told we’d get it from the software - the apps, the glittering feeds, the silent and nauseating toilet Pachinko.
What we got was consumption.
Endless, mostly solo consumption.
What we got was the prison of our own minds, with one wee rectangular window.
What we got was the evaporation of arguably the most important element of the human communications system: making meaning together. Something that can only happen, if you have the ability to pay attention.
Do you like me?
So much has been written about Adolescence but most of it focuses on its content - misogyny, murder, incel culture, parenting nowadays, kids nowadays and, oh yeah, Instagram. What I think is so important about it - and why the creators ended up with a special holy shit meeting with the UK PM and members of his Cabinet - is the role of a media text like this as an effective vector for message delivery in the mid 2020s.
It’s monocultural production in a post-monocultural world.
I’m not going to get into what the show is about, because by now everyone knows. Everyone also knows it’s fucking brilliant. This four episode programme inspired everything from commentary around online community (for good or ill) to whether or not the fact that boys don’t read books anymore (because they can’t, because of attention spans) leads to young women being stabbed to death in carparks.
But, what it inspired in me was… awe. Because of one epic slow comms device: the one-take episodes.
Stephen Graham must be a fan, because Boiling Point was the same - or maybe he just likes looking like a boxer walking from the dressing room to the ring, which is the inevitable effect of being followed by a camera crew. Either way, it’s hugely effective because it gives a sense of pace and immediacy that carries the viewer along.
Why is this so important and effective? It mimics the pace and immediacy we get from the endless scroll. There’s always something on the next screen down, and you’re never, ever (ever) expected to wait for it - or even really find it yourself. You never find yourself peering into the scene. It just keeps on unspooling.
What Adolescence really gets right in communicating the urgency of the very heavy shit with which it deals, is storytelling through that one physical device. Never mind that the script was amazing and the acting incredible. What it did was ensure as much as possible that it kept the attention of its audience by never giving them a reason - or a chance - to look away. That constant flow is comforting to us now - that constant stimulus. Or if it’s not comforting, it’s at least commanding in a way in which we are so willing to submit.
The genius is that “attention” is really at the heart of the series: what boys are paying attention to online, where they apply emotional energy, the attention they feel they’re owed, the real-life attention and feedback they’re getting, and how keenly adults are paying attention to the kids - especially parents of young men. And this is communicated to us by holding our attention. No mean feat.
Adolescence said from its first breath, do not look away.
Starmer picks up on this, as you can see in the clip attached to the story linked above, using the language “grips you from the first of the one shot take and holds you there…”
That design choice was communications strategy at its very finest. How else would they have ever got their point across?
This river can kill you in a thousand ways
The anaconda squeeze of the algo is real. We’re all feeling it, we’re all feeding it, and we’re all snapping at whatever goes past on what we used to call the information super highway. Now it’s more like the highway verge; littered with rubbish and blown out tyres and and upside down bathtub you really shouldn’t move.
We are human, so, we are in a constant quest for story.
This is how the endless scroll gets us, but individual recommendations are driving us away from collective moments. The story has been juiced out. The modern internet is to story what McDonalds is to food.
Connection and creation has been juiced out, too.
Professional communicators: it’s this consumption state that describes the context our audiences are in. They are all braving the torrent.
No one likes this state of affairs, as evidenced by the constant stream of articles, podcasts and books about what damage this engagement with a fake world is doing to our brains and relationships.
This is the big problem with social media’s use as a communications medium. Its appeal as a reliable method of mass-broadcast is waning; perhaps its last big outing was Covid, and although I have never tested this, I bet if you ask around, it was the 1pm briefing that did the heavy lifting there. That was our last flirtation with the monoculture.
The algorithm has now spent more than a decade learning what you like; the interaction with these mediums is frictionless, so, whenever you’re facing friction in your life (a RED LIGHT ffs) you pull your phone out and start… melting.
We are constantly eschewing the real world for the one in our phones; we are greasing ourselves up and losing blocks of time we could use being… human. There is nothing more human than a quest for story, and a quest for togetherness and community, but nothing less human that the craven slavishness to our devices and the acres of absolute dross inside them.
All of the things we’re constantly told are good about the internet and our ability to connect and - yeah, consume - online are ABSOLUTE EXCEPTIONS.
When was the last time you made a genuine, meaningful connection online? When was the last time you created something? And I mean really used the tools at your disposal for creative expression or starting a real discussion about an issue you actually wanted to solve (not a Reddit shitpost - and not a prompt for ChatGPT; I said actually wanted to solve, not wanted solved for you in the most thumbs up, finger-guns, right-on yet vacuous and asinine way possible).
So? Fuckin… when?
We’re gonna need a bigger boat
This is the appeal, for me, in a slow comms movement.
It re-introduces friction - firstly, because we have to force ourselves to engage. It forces us to recognise this threat and come together to address it. This is the nexus of community - the organic response to the inorganic ruction in the systems we know.
The data I have seen says that we can not tell the difference between real and fake anymore. So, what’s the point?
We’re like rats continuing to get zapped even though there’s no treats coming out. We all hate it here. This is fine. Gestures broadly at everything. Etc.
And we’ve lost the sense of togetherness we had in the days of a monoculture.
This is terrible for communicators (marketers, advertisers, PR people, in-house or agency-side, solo consultants… the lot) because these platforms that have already been steadily declining in practical reach and use for the last decade or so, are now being doubly targeted by AI slop.
It’s a uselessness double-whammy, and we can all sense it getting worse. We are all told its getting worse. We are all told agentic AI is coming to deliver clarity and purity and more frictionlessness than we could ever handle… but not before generative AI blurs everything out.
This is how things like Adolescence cut through: they’re bigger than the internet, bigger than social media - they’re a feeder for real, actual people getting together to discuss change. They’re a catalyst for everyone from policy-makers to families to stop, arrested, and wonder what the hell is going wrong.
Beyond the monoculture, we’re all in serious trouble.
The jungle has gone quiet, and we are about to get eaten.
So, we need to do what we always do best; magic.
We need our human magic.
Cooperation. Conversation. Connection. Community. These are all things we’ve been told we can have from behind the screen.
But it’s not true. And you know it.