The product is fear

I was at the kitchen table with the second coffee, and I was talking, with some confidence, about the Bank of England’s monetary policy. R. was making toast. The five-year-old was at the table doing something violent to a banana. I was explaining why the Bank had got it wrong - rates too high for too long, the housing market punished for the inflation problem of an entirely different country, et cetera.

I had read a thread that morning. One thread. By somebody whose qualifications I had not checked, citing figures I had not verified, written in the smooth, lightly furious cadence of a person paid to have opinions about things on a daily basis. I had absorbed it in about ninety seconds with my first coffee, and now, with my second, I was recycling it back into the room as if I had thought it.

R., to her credit, kept buttering. The five-year-old, to his, kept dismantling the banana. Nobody asked me to stop. I stopped on my own, mid-sentence, because I realised that I had just become the thing I had been complaining about for two years.

The thing I had been complaining about is the same thing everybody is complaining about, which is that the conversation has gone strange. People who never used to have strong opinions about Ukraine now have strong opinions about Ukraine. People who could not have placed Gaza on a map five years ago now have a position on Gaza that admits no compromise. People who would have said I do not know enough about that in any other decade have, in this one, lost that sentence entirely.

I include myself. That is the point.

The reason for this is not that we have all become stupid. We have not. The reason is that the medium has changed, and the medium is the message, and the message of the present medium is be angry about this right now. The thread I read was not designed to inform me. It was designed to make me feel a small, energising flush of indignation strong enough to make me share it. I did not share it. But I did do worse. I performed it at my own breakfast table to my own wife, who had not asked.

The instrument that does this to us is not new. The instrument is fear, ancient and reliable. What is new is the delivery system. Twenty years ago, fear arrived through a paper your father bought once a day and which a sub-editor had at least skimmed for sense. Now fear arrives every six minutes, and the editor is an algorithm whose only objective is to keep you scrolling. The algorithm does not know what is true. It knows what holds your attention, and what holds your attention, in almost every species of mammal ever tested, is the suggestion that something is about to hurt you.

So the thing being sold to us, every morning, is the suggestion that something is about to hurt us. That is the product. Outrage is the packaging. Identity is the loyalty card. Whichever side of any given quarrel you happen to land on, the underlying transaction is the same: you exchange a small amount of equanimity for a small amount of belonging, and the platform makes its pennies in the middle.

I do not think this is a conspiracy. I think it is what happens when you take a species that evolved to scan the savannah for predators and put it on a phone that pings every ninety seconds with a new predator. There is nothing wicked in the wiring. It is just that the wiring is being used.

The cost of this is not, mostly, that we have wrong opinions. We have always had wrong opinions. The cost is that we have more opinions, on subjects we know less and less about, and the opinions are held with a heat that used to be reserved for things that touched our actual lives. I have watched parents at the school gate, people I like, people whose children I would trust with mine, get heated about something that happened on a different continent to people none of us will ever meet. They are decent people. They have just been topped up, this morning, with the daily ration.

The ration is the problem. Not the news. The ration.

The other quiet cost is that the sentence I do not know enough about this to have a view has gone almost extinct. I miss it. It used to be a sign of seriousness. Now it reads as evasion, as if having no view were a kind of cowardice. The sentence is hygiene, actually, of a particularly old-fashioned kind. It is what reasonable adults do when somebody asks them to commit to an opinion about a country they have never been to, a war they cannot follow, or a policy whose mechanics they would not be able to summarise without looking them up. I do not know enough to say is, in 2026, a small act of resistance. I am trying to bring it back.

The medium has a second move, after the fear, which is loneliness. The whole apparatus is built to be consumed alone. Even when it is shared, it is shared at a distance, in comment threads with strangers, where the only available registers are agreement and disagreement and no third option. There is no kitchen, in there. There is no banana. There is no wife buttering toast and not asking. The room is missing.

When I caught myself at the table that morning, what I had really done was bring the lonely medium into the room and try to play it as a person. R. did the kindest thing she could have done, which was nothing. She let it run out of road.

I am not going to pretend I have a solution. I am going to say what worked for me, which is small and unimpressive and probably the only honest answer.

I started checking the news twice a day instead of constantly. I stopped reading threads about subjects I would not be tested on. I noticed which writers made me feel cleverer after I read them and which made me feel angrier, and I unfollowed the second sort, regardless of which side they were on. I stopped having opinions about American politics out loud, because I do not vote in America and my opinions about it were costing me about half an hour a day in mental rent for no return. I put the phone in another room during meals.

None of this is heroic. It is just turning the tap down. Most of what was coming through the tap was not water.

What you get back, when you do this, is not enlightenment. It is just the room. The kitchen, the toast, the kid with the banana, the wife who is patient with you. The texture of the morning returns. You start noticing the things that are actually happening to you, in the actual house you live in, with the actual people who live in it.

The morning I caught myself is the morning this book started. I was talking with great confidence about a central bank’s mistakes whilst missing the entire breakfast.

That seemed worth fixing, before anything else.