Never a dull moment on this platform“Elon Musk tweeted on Wednesday after his AI-Bot Grok had shamelessly spread anti-Semitic texts and cited Hitler as a shining example.
I often disagree with Elon Musk, so now. X has become boring, with many subjects you can draw the tweets in advance. Pendant Bluesky is also boring, just like the entire political debate. This may sound strange, because crazy things happen in the news, far from boring things. A consultancy firm that calculates how expensive it is to turn Gaza into a Rivièra. An American president who leaves trivial support to Ukraine depends on his mood. A Dutch party leader who hires citizens to rebel against local politics. No topics that the news follower soothes, on the contrary: with me they evoke physical sensations, from fear to anger to disgust.
At the same time, I think it’s boring to follow the news and especially the opinions about the news. What happens and is said is often so terribly predictable.
Often heard: “Activists have to do work with which they solve the climate crisis instead of occupying a highway.” As if climate activists are on the asphalt for the entire working week. As if they can’t work at the same time in technical professions. And as if you can only demonstrate if you also make yourself useful.
Also often heard: “Asylum is a made -up problem, it is only about 11 percent of immigration.” As if 11 percent of more than 300,000 people are nothing, especially when you consider that they are given priority on the housing market and certainly depends on benefits in the first years. In the longer term, the percentage is higher, because status holders stay here more often than study and labor migrants.
A debate only becomes exciting when someone delves into the arguments of the counterparty, questions his own assumptions and has an eye for the tragic clash of values, as the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it. Everyone who talks about asylum shelter without acknowledging that there is a conflict between national and international solidarity is boring. You cannot pretend that solidarity with refugees is free and cannot be at the expense of solidarity with fewer prosperity in their own country. After all, it is often people at the ‘bottom’ who compete for living space and facilities with newcomers, or are at least afraid of that.
Whoever sees that value collision is soon nuanced and therefore ‘boring’. But actually the opposite is boring: fully automatic opinion formation. Only where moral dilemmas are recognized, it becomes exciting and interesting.
I have to think of the book of former VVD campaign leader Bas Erlings, which I recently wrote. From 2017, the VVD campaign is aiming for the ‘fast brain’ of the voter, writes Erlings: the party tries to activate emotions through simple imaging and thus bypassing the slow ratio. Eight years later, the entire public debate seems to work that way. This is also due to social media and algorithms: they flourish in conflict between people, not in conflict within people. The second is intellectually interesting, but worthless for the earnings model. That is why we get less and less doubt and progressive insight and more and more complacency and indignation.
The result: after half an hour of scrolling my body in panic mode, but my head has a bore-out. I also experienced this at the parliamentary debate, more than a month ago, about the fall of the cabinet. No shortage of emotions and big words, but it was all so predictable that after a few hours I was lying on my back like a dried turtle.
The only moment I was careing was during an interruption debate between Esther Ouwehand and Henri Bontenbal about the dilemmas concerning support to the Schoof cabinet. Ouwehand blamed the CDA too constructive, on which Bontenbal said that the Party for the Animals had also supported motions of the coalition parties. That had to admit that: “I acknowledge with Mr Bontenbal that you are also in a dilemma. You can’t vote everything that might be a bit of an improvement.” In principle, they did the same, concluded Bontenbal: trying to find a defensible middle. “We were talking about every group meeting: what do we support and what do we not support, when is it enough for us?”
Perhaps not very exciting exchange, but for me the least boring moment of the debate. Both politicians acknowledged that there is no ideal course of action for the opposition of a (radical) right cabinet. As a viewer I did not feel played, but made thinking. Elon Musk has never succeeded.
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC