Then on Saturday it hit me: the armchair epidemiologists, #boristhebutcher hashtaggers and all-round political tinfoil-hatters back-seat-driving national policy are doing it because they think that is what ‘helping’ looks like. In an ever more fragmented society, the only remaining space where mass action even feels possible is social media.
Contributing to the like-and-share spectacle of social media gives us an illusory closeness to national decision-making, and a sense of contributing to matters of state. So as the systems that underpin our society of spectacle fall away one by one, millions flock to help in the only way the spectacle has to offer: “the debate”. But while Sir Patrick Valance’s decisions are now very high stakes, I have nothing useful to add to them. Debating his decisions on that front, or offering my own alternative policies, was doing little save to heighten my sense of helplessness.
When I realised that, I got off Twitter and talked to my next-door neighbour instead. She told me she had deleted social media from her phone: it was just making her anxious. We agreed on the need to do something concrete and local instead, and decided for us that meant contacting everyone on our street and offering to support anyone needing to isolate.
We made a leaflet, and then my neighbour and I and our children posted them on Sunday. At the time of writing, 48 hours since we posted the leaflets, we have heard from around half of the households on the street. We get a few more messages every hour or so. Everyone is keen to pitch in. We have a WhatsApp group, which is strikingly calm compared to the pandemonium on social media. Updates so far have been on practical matters, such as help with dog walking or where to buy infant formula. It feels grounded, sane and – importantly – human-scale. It has saved my sanity.
Similar groups are now forming all over the country, as people realise that to cope in this strange new reality we need less performative outrage and more practical offline action. Cheeringly, a growing chorus of voices is challenging those still stuck on politics-as-performance. Ever more of us are opting to “stop being angry and scared on Twitter and do something more useful”, as Centre for Policy Studies director Robert Colvile put it.
The internet is the locus for a culture of performative outrage that feels increasingly ill-suited to a time of national crisis. But it also has phenomenal power to connect people in practical ways, to do things in real life. We are seeing social media increasingly used in service of local networks, rather than replacing them.
Rightly so. As normal life comes to a standstill, meaningful action does not look like shouting at the government, who are making balance of probabilities decisions in good faith, with a rapidly evolving situation and enormously high stakes. It looks like supporting people near us, in our families, apartment blocks or streets.
And, this is taking place, quietly, beneath the surface. Though we are being told to stay physically apart, connections are being formed. Local groups are beginning to coalesce into larger-scale hub-and-spoke networks, and organisers are sharing ideas and best practice via groups such as Covid-19 Mutual Aid or the list hosted by the anarchist website Freedom News.
My prediction is that this will be significant. Our nation has had its civil society capacity reduced by both the right and left, in the name of (respectively) market and state, and this outbreak of new, mutualistic networks could have a powerful effect well beyond the coronavirus crisis.
Its emergence will raise many new questions. What is the right scale for a peer-organised support group? I would give someone who I know lives on my street a tenner to pick up my shopping, but someone from the next street over? Perhaps not. How can volunteer capacity support state systems without being exploited (as happened under Cameron) as a cheap replacement? What is the appropriate scale for safeguarding regulations to kick in? These and more are questions we will do well to consider in coming weeks.
But we should take the time to do so, because these green shoots of civil society regrowth that are beginning to appear may become increasingly valuable. The 21st century will be an era of confronting limits, whether of economic growth or natural resources, and we are likely to find ourselves needing to learn once again how — or when, or in what manner — to trust our neighbours.
The hologram is flickering. We are catching glimpses of a different society beneath the spectacle, one that is more place-bound, more mutualistic and more viscerally focused on everyday survival. Growing numbers are turning away from the spectacle and seeking to refocus the power of the internet on enabling real, meaningful offline networks. We should nurture those networks, because we are likely to need them during a difficult and trying time.
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