Ed Coper

We think it's about the issue at hand.

We think that, okay, this person's really angry about which bathroom trans kids should be able to use in a school, or that this wind turbine is killing whales over there, or that this logo change is destroying everything that we care about.

It's not about those issues.

Those issues are the raw material that people use to get attention in the attention economy.

And so even political movements like MAGA and Trump in America, they don't have a coherent ideology.

They don't exist to say we have a certain view of how the world should be and we are going to fight for that vision and bring people with us and create the world in our image.

That's not what they're doing.

They want power through attention, and they know that the way they do that is to put things out there on social media that make us polarised, angry, outraged, at odds with each other, always in a heightened emotional state, and they don't care what the content of that is.

the algorithms will determine what issues are going to get clicks.

And then the political movements will adopt those issues in order to get those clicks.

Absolutely.

So when I was a kid, all I dreamed about doing was pulling on a Canberra Raiders jersey and being like Mal Meninga or Gary Belcher, right?

That was what I aspired to do when I grew up.

Kids these days aspire to have large followings on social media.

And in order to do that, the best way you can do it is to pick a really abhorrent opinion.

to pick a really fringe take on a mainstream issue or to be more outrageous than all of your other friends or to say something that will generate more reactions than anyone else because you are a slave to the algorithm.

If you went out there and said, hey, I read about this issue and it's got a lot of good points on both sides.

I think it's fairly complex and nuanced.

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