I spent last Monday engaged in that modern-day equivalent of a Sisyphean task – trying to make a complex point on social media. It was about the wage disclosures at the BBC, and how it could be both good that the BBC had been forced to reveal the pay gap between the genders, but bad that the BBC were being forced to reveal information not required of their rivals. “This is a mixed grill,” I was basically saying. “There are two issues here – not one. Doh! Tricky!”
Anyway, I’ll not bore you – it was, as I say, a Sisyphean task, because there’s little to be gained in making a nuanced point in what is basically a medieval marketplace, where the briskest trade in retweets is either people shouting, “OUTRAGE! OUTRAGE! COME AND GET MY LOVELY FRESH OUTRAGE! THREE SCREAMING EXCLAMATION MARKS FOR £1!”, or the stall selling that gif of a parrot opening a box with an aggravated kitten in it, and then closing the box again. I know how Twitter works.
But what surprised me, in all my replies, was the sheer number of people, from the left and the right, who were convinced the BBC was a wholly corrupt news organisation, devoted to perverting the truth and screwing the public.
“The BBC is a mouthpiece for the government.” “Its lefty bias constantly revises British history, and the British way of life.” “It’s a WEAPON OF MASS DELUSION – owned by banker$$$$.”
My favourite was the caption “IN IT TOGETHER!” under a collage consisting of Huw Edwards and the logos for Fox News and Russia Today – quite the dinner party line-up, politically.
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There is, it seems, a solid wedge of people who believe the BBC – the gold standard, globally, for impartiality – is basically Pravda, broadcasting from the Death Star.
Now, I’ve seen no statistics on conspiracy theories – perhaps because there’s a conspiracy to stifle them, yeah? – but I’ve noticed how, over the past few years, social media appears to have ushered in a golden age of paranoia. Mainstream media collusion, the abduction of Madeleine McCann, 9/11, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, any one of a number of plots involving “the Jews” – it hasn’t mattered what I’m tweeting about, theories about all of these are common replies, as people sitting on the internet, under an unprecedented waterfall of information and opinion, seem to fall prey to a feeling that everything’s interconnected, huge things are going on without us seeing and shadowy organisations work constantly to manipulate us and shape the world around us.
I was an hour into sifting through all these interesting theories when the internet suddenly stopped working. We’d had a power cut.
Within half an hour, two huge vans had pulled up in the street, and a team of five men were pacing up and down trying to locate the source of the fault. It started to rain at 11pm, but they began drilling ten minutes later, and they worked through until 2.30am, when all the lights went back on, the TV burst back into life and I was able to go back online and catch up with the past five hours of conspiracy theories about the BBC. The guys in the van drove off, unthanked – presumably to the next blackout, somewhere else in London.
And I thought again about conspiracy theories – about this growing sense that there is some vast, hidden organisation working around us. I thought about it while the bin lorries came at 5am, to empty the rubbish, and at 9am, when the nurse made her weekly visit to the old lady over the road, and at 10am, when a police helicopter hovered overhead – as they often do, these days, since the incident at the mosque at Finsbury Park in June. And I thought about how, while of course there are malign conspiracies actually happening out there – as there have been through history, because we are humans and humans are conspiring creatures – that these malign conspiracies are dwarfed, every day, by benign conspiracies: health and safety officials drafting guidelines on new wiring; cancer and HIV specialists meeting to pool research; operations managers coming up with new, fast procedures to mend power blackouts. Society, basically. Civilisation.
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Our biggest failing, at this point in time, is that we still haven’t found a way to show the beautiful story of our every day: this network of comfort, goodness and progress that never stops and never rests. There is nowhere we can see how most humans – from the littlest job to the biggest – are involved in a conspiracy to make things better. The slow, steady machinery of this breathtaking century – with its medicines and miracles and freedoms – is, frustratingly, almost always invisible: there is no book you can read or website you can go on to see the billion things around you that make modern life so very calm and convenient. You don’t see anyone shouting about it on Twitter. You don’t see anyone trying to “uncover” that. You only notice it when the power goes off.
caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk