Everyone wants to talk about the big flamethrowers of the day. Will we build pipelines? What will happen with tariffs? Where can big tech plug in their data centers, preferably by noon tomorrow?
It’s totally understandable that people are curious about these things; the impact of any could be very significant. There are endless forums in which to debate odds of success for any of these, or estimate timelines. I can’t even guess at them so am not going to try, and instead maybe distract y’all by trying to get to the root of these problems – why does everything seem so freaking bad, in general?
There are ebbs and flows to most things. Few things are ever permanently good, or bad. Things change. Circumstances change. Politicians change.
But lately things just seem to be heading for perma-bad. We lunge from crisis to crisis, animosity to animosity. And it’s not local anymore. We do have local issues to worry about, but the whole world’s troubles have been brought to our door. Live. 24/7/365. Flip open any news source or social media platform and welcome to hell. If tariffs and regulations and global uncertainty don’t crush you, AI will, wiping out all jobs and building robot armies that start out doing the laundry but end up enslaving us. Can’t wait!
Part of that is the reporting disease whereby bad news and disasters bring in the most clicks. The old media saying, or rule of thumb, whatever it is, seems true: If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead. That’s just the way it is, unfortunately. In the absence of actual blood, the default is doomsday scenarios about anything that can instill fear. No one has any idea what AI will look like in 3 years, just as we don’t know what the weather will be. Stay calm.
Social media amps this up to 11. And it has become so addictive that most people with an electronic device, which includes everyone over the age of 6 months, can hardly shield themselves from it all.
There is a way out of this mess. But before talking to that, it’s worth ‘building a base’ of understanding as to why it is so awful, to understand the not-accidental mechanics of why a tiny wondrous device that can do almost anything can also destroy your day in 20 seconds flat without ever leaving your chair.
As we all know, social media can be beneficial, but most times it is not; not just because it is often like a bus terminal toilet but because it is so addicting in spite of that. Here’s a sad and perverse little social media vignette that helps explain both traits: A guy named Nikita Bier is the “head of product” at X/Twitter, and therefore has about as good a view as exists about the inner workings of social media. He made a startling comment the other day: “The Chinese government floods X search results with porn whenever there is political unrest—to prevent their citizens from finding out real-time information. This has been a difficult problem to solve but we are aware & working on it.” Bier notes that the Chinese government has a pool of 5-10 million accounts set up “before I locked down signup.”
That whole scheme is just almost gleefully brazen and stupid, and yet presumably works, and one has to wonder: What other players junk up the comms arteries for whatever their pet project is? How much of the angst and crassly provocative junk on the web is part of similar programs, placed there solely to distract or enrage or tear apart? It is human nature to become inflamed at provocative statements…so what is the toll on the collective human psyche by succumbing to it? The answer isn’t to ban social media, that is just as perverted as the porn wave, but to become self aware.
On a similar theme, another random poster accumulated a not insignificant 15,000 followers by posting…well, he said it best: “I got 15k following me by cursing at the state of markets, economy & societies on X every day for the past 5 years…I literally never said anything optimistic. What does that tell you about people?” He’s dead right. Rage generates views, it’s just a sad fact (and so does porn, murmurs the Chinese government quietly).
But rage doesn’t just generate views, it is a valuable accelerants just like gasoline to a dumpster fire. Something Mr. Bier doesn’t talk about quite so much are reports that X’s algorithm boosts divisive content by a factor of up to 150 times (what X refers to as “highly engaging” content). Many people earn money from X activity, and of course the more the activity the higher the $, so for someone looking for a way to pay rent, the finger hovers over the tweet of a sunset picture, but then more often slides over to the other option of calling someone a stupid rat bastard, and launches that instead, because sunset pictures don’t pay the rent.
Before we are all AI’ed either to death or out of jobs, the biggest advancement we can make collectively is to begin thinking about these things on our daily doom scroll. To try to distance ourselves, because we’ve all been driven to raging lunatics by it all. Yeah, we can blame politics, and politicians, and pseudo-politicians, and that’s a big part of it. But those clowns only get you so far. True, epic rage usually boils over from ever more frantic echo chambers.
No one knows this better than energy industry participants. The existing energy system, the incredibly complex and expensive one that was built over a century and that keeps 8 billion people alive, was deemed to be unnecessary and dangerous, and veritable armies of bots and fanatics took to the web to ram home their case. Social media strategists with literally nothing better to do all day – because that is what they were paid to do – tilted the discussion so badly that any utterance against a rapid energy transition was flooded with outrage and ‘denier’ tags. Children were actually organized into marching protest groups, skipping school to ramp up tensions just a little bit more. All because emotion trumped hardware.
That became a major ebb and flow in the energy world, which is tough enough as it is, thank you very much, due to commodity price volatility that is the equivalent of a human heart oscillating between 30 and 200 beats per minute.
The energy world watched, dumbfounded, as countries such as Germany shut down their fuel supplies, causing mass de-industrialization, and then had the peculiar sense to boast about reducing emissions. No one anywhere ever in the history of mankind would have thought that to be a good idea, but with the power of social media filling its sails, with tens or hundreds of thousands of voices cheering this all on as a ‘good thing’, happen it did.
In the energy world, this ‘battle’ was tiresome and not fun, but was actually tolerable, because it was obvious how it would end. No one, no matter how hard they tried, no matter how many global alliances they formed, no matter how much money governments threw at it, no one was going to make something as obtuse as “Net Zero 2050” happen without burning the whole thing down. Which Germany and a few other jurisdictions tried to do, admittedly. But even Germany’s leaders now woefully admit their mistakes. (Hey, has anyone seen Captain GFANZ lately? Used to be around… dead? Homeless? Scheming in plain sight? Curious minds want to know). In other words, the energy drama would resolve itself, albeit with significant damage caused along the way. The shape-shifters, the manipulators, would not/could not succeed in the energy world, not against stone cold reality.
But in the political world? Lord help us all. There is no self-righting mechanism as there was with energy. How do the Chinese people ‘fight back’ against a tidal wave of governmental porn? How do regular people ‘fight back’ against rage farmers? You can’t. To engage is lunacy; you will rapidly devolve to chimp state just like the antagonists, except they might not be agitated at all, just paid to make you so. So best to ignore it if possible; we just let it wash over us like industrial waste dumping on our heads, or we exit.
It helps to remember that there are multiple levels, multiple planes, to everything. It helps to think that way and clarify what is so upsetting. It is a great habit to get into.
The world is endlessly complex, and any proposed solution to a big problem needs to start with a calm “It’s complicated” opener, because most things are. Not necessarily complicated in that it is hard to tell what the right thing to do is, but complicated in the tangle of conflicting interests wielding their power, with the battlegrounds enflamed by unscrupulous actors rage baiting the entire population. If we let them.
There is a pathway out. There is a foolproof way to deal with all this insanity. The answer is mind-blowingly simple, and yet few will achieve it. Here it is, courtesy of a true legend, Warren Buffett. Write this down, print it out in 44-font and paste it to your wall, remember it always, just do it:
“You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.”
True bravery is buying something like this for Valentine’s Day. Show the world what you’re made of by picking up a copy. At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)