The awareness event horizon

Let’s call time on the idea that the internet raising awareness will lead to significant improvements in world events.

I can watch bomb shockwaves blow an emaciated 8-year-olds’ body into a burning, spasming heap in real time. I can find it streamed conveniently from someone’s phone or GoPro adventure camera.

That is, assuming the camera survives the blast from the $100,000 US-made AGM-114 “Hellfire” missile. You know, those ones the Land of the Free likes to sell on bulk discount to the world’s mass murderers.

Or maybe, probably a few years from now, Wikileaks or whatever replaces it, releases the cockpit video of the pilot and co-pilot. They’re whooping and hollering, fittingly, like cowboys. They’re wrestling their $52 million “Apache” helicopter around the skies to ensure they kill all the frightened children in the tents below. Like Smaug incinerating the Hobbiton Scout jamboree. Like Prince Harry in Afghanistan.

Then the rule of law will finally act.

They’ll imprison the person who released the video. Just like last time.

And I don’t care.

Not really.

I’ve not shed one tear for that child. Or the emaciated child I saw yesterday morning, beseechingly holding up an empty battered tin cup to the camera as I binged on Dark Ghana chocolate and Yorkshire Tea in the upper middle class comfort of Working From Home. Or the parents I’ve seen clawing at the wreckage of their homes trying to find their children, or at least the remnants of their tiny broken bodies to bury. I didn’t really care about them either.

Did you? Really?

Awareness, of course, is only required when you’re far away. Consider the families with the misfortune to live, and be imprisoned, in the slaughterhouse that was Gaza. They don’t need to be ‘made aware’ that they’re the targets of a genocide. 9kg of high explosive has a way of making you acutely aware of such things.

And it doesn’t even make me sad. Not really.

Of course, I would say I am sad and angry about it. In the same way that people say they’re delighted to attend the 19th New Zealand Convention on Plumbing Logistics. And I suppose I am sad and angry, in a way - way, way in the background of my life.

But it literally doesn’t affect me.

That doesn’t make me a monster. That makes me like most of you. Just someone trying to do my best and enjoy myself. That, for most of us, thankfully, involves staying as far away as possible, physically and mentally, from the dirty, bloody business of ending the young lives of the children of people we don’t like. Even on the frequent occasions that it’s done by the governments we vote for to keep our countries rich enough to maintain the fragile social contract. To supply Dark Ghana chocolate and English tea to some remote islands in the Pacific, for example. In other words, to keep us rich enough to be passive.

To mean anything, caring has to be a verb.

Consider, for example, if I said: “I’m caring for my elderly mother.” (I’m not. I moved literally as far as humanly possible away from her, despite loving and respecting her deeply.) You’d envisage all sorts of unpleasantness with adult nappies, painkillers and ministrations in the witching hours. (My Mum does not need this. Cruising into her 80s, she’s still in that especially rude sort of British health where you complain continuously while smoking like a wrecked tank and listing the ailments of all your friends.)

You wouldn’t expect me to be thousands of miles away from her, watching her suffer on YouTube so as to not get too bored while eating my lunch.

Let’s consider YouTube. Today, it’s a chief means of this “awareness raising.” My “feed” looks like the media nosebag of a mentally ill person with co-occurring ADHD. It appeals directly to the very worst aspects of me that it can slip through the content filtering, the passwords for which I get my partner to control in my more lucid moments.

I avoided owning a television for decades. Now I carry one around with me everywhere I go. Literally everywhere.

Guns. Bits of films from the 80s with a lot of guns in them. Some stand up comedy. A dab of politics that, in the words of Stewart Lee, I can “agree the fuck out of.” More guns. People jumping off or over things. People falling over.

It’s like I’ve plugged myself into that machine in A Clockwork Orange. Or set myself up with the visual shock tests Jon Ronson exposed the mendacious ex-SAS man Andy McNab to, to ascertain if he was a “useful psychopath”.

Check your “feed”. What does it reinforce in you?

So yep, some people might not know about the bad things, in absolute terms. They may not yet have the information I have after 30 years working and researching the environmental movement. But anyone with a modicum of education and a wifi connection can now not only know the basics, they can access any and all of the details they want to.

If they want to. Because, yes, it’s overload, and yes, our Fire Ape brains were not designed for it. And emotionally, those that can’t numb themselves in some ways must avoid the full bore truth instead.

But the idea that people need to be made “aware” of things in 2025 is like suggesting they could’ve done with a smidgen more religion in the Middle Ages.

I understand some will point to misinformation and disinformation. They’ll say it’s now all empowered by “AI” anyway, which we’re allowing to blur the last remnants of sense-making into oblivion. And I’d agree. But perhaps these distractions will never be so empowered by AI as they already are by our willingness, even naked desire, to accept anything, anything, that absolves us of responsibility, of our actual need or requirement to know.

The public gets what the public wants. Apparently the public has been maneuvered into a position where we want to base our lives on various forms of pornography, violence, self-indulgence and automatic bullshit machines, while our finest comedians retire to cake shows.

Because we don’t want to know. We’d much rather believe. When belief is so often just a selection of the most convenient and comforting lies we tell ourselves.

Believe in “solutions”. In “The Great Turning”. In cherry picked parts of distant religions. In heroes. In technology. That your two tonne electric car is “saving the planet”. That we’re on the cusp of a “transition to a sustainable future”.

Because the reality, just like those tiny melted Nike trainers smouldering in Rafah, doesn’t really matter to us right now. Does it?