Parting thoughts, 2023
There are three types of stories in the world: those we should read, those we want to read and those we do read. Most algorithms funnel us towards the latter, at the expense of stories that really matter. As a species we face a challenge of storytelling; how do we communicate complex, consequential and nuanced news to people who have become hooked on click bait and Tik Tok videos?
This is a question that has been troubling me all year, because everywhere I look, I see superficial distractions, something that a review of the most read stories of 2023 confirms:
Let’s take a closer look at the top 5 most read new stories globally in descending order, and insert those important and consequential stories that failed to get much coverage.
1. Matthew Perry’s death
For anyone over 30 it felt like the loss of an old friend, someone you had lost touch with, but who had nevertheless made an impression on your life. There was something deeply nostalgic in reliving Chandler Bing’s best one liners, and something deeply sad about how addiction wrecked a talented actors life.
2. Titanic Submersible vs migrant boats
Five rich dudes go missing on a doomed quest to see the wreckage of the Titanic, and the world’s media is compelled to follow it in real time. At the same time nearly 800 Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian and Palestinian refugees were sinking aboard an overloaded old fishing boat in the Mediterranean, with Greek coastguards observing, but not intervening. “Stop the boats” has become a political slogan in the UK, and across Europe. The truth is that thousands of people went missing on migrant boats along the Atlantic migration route from Senegal to Spain this year, with near to zero media coverage.
What is important and consequential, is that these voyages are a canary in the coal mine of what is to come. The number of climate refugees is forecast to reach 1.2Bn people by 2050, that comes in addition to so-called economic migration, which amounts to the whole of China being on the move from food insecurity, water stress, natural disasters and civil unrest — in search of a brighter future. Developed nations and especially EU member states are ill equipped to deal with immigration as a political issue which is the main reason why we are seeing the rise of the far right in the Netherlands (Wilders), Sweden (Sweden Democrats), Italy (Meloni), Hungary (Orban), France (Le Pen), Austria (FPÖ) and Germany (AfD). Meanwhile the Conservatives in the UK, although not far right, are invoking the language of fascism (“floods”, “hurricanes” and “swarms” of migrants) whilst pursuing a strategy of performative cruelty to try and deter people trying to enter the U.K. (think illegal deportations to Rwanda and floating barges where desperate people are taking their own lives), without doing anything to tackle net migration numbers.
3. Endless, trivial Elon Musk stories vs Billionaire shadow rule
Love him or loathe him, Elon Musk is fast becoming a great man of history. He also has a knack for never being out of the headlines. As Walter Isaacson’s biography lays bare, he is a man of many contradictions. He is an impulsive, petulant man-child; an attention seeking megalomaniac; a technological visionary; an indefatigable workaholic; a polyprogenitive father; the world’s richest man; and a shadow statesman who has the Pentagon, Putin and Xi on speed dial. He is also the man behind six companies with a combined enterprise value exceeding $1 Trillion (even if he is doing his damndest to drive X into the ground). But for all the coverage this year, there was only one, truly insightful story written about Musk. Thank you Ronan Farrow. With this exception, most commentators fail to see the entirety of his “power network”, choosing instead to focus on his erratic behaviour, or outsized influence on individual industries like EVs or low earth orbit satellites. Yes, he has transformed Automotive, Space Transportation, Social Media, 5G Infrastructure, and may soon do the same to Neurotechnology and AI, but it’s the synergies between these businesses, and their ability to collect real-time data that are truly frightening:
His tweet is almost boastfully Trumpian, but unlike Trump, he is not exaggerating. Billionaire shadow rule is the story we should be tuning into, the rest we should be filtering out.
4. War in Israel and Gaza vs other wars
October 7th marked a historical turning point in the long running and fractious Israel — Palestine conflict. It was rightly top of the news agenda for the best part of a month. But, it highlighted a tendency for single stories to completely dominate media coverage at the expense of other important stories. There are many other wars the world forgot in 2023, amongst them the genocide in Darfur (Sudan), and of course the war in Ukraine which is suffering the effects of war fatigue.
5. Barbenheimer
The same day release of two highly anticipated blockbusters led to a popular culture meltdown. Further evidence of how plastic mainstream culture has become. But perhaps not as plastic as what Google Trends reveals. The top organic search in Germany this year was not “Why is there a war in the Middle East?”, but the infinitely more important question “Why were fake lashes invented?”. Don’t even think about Googling that.
The Top 5 of Tik Tok
German search preferences look like enlightenment inquiry when compared to the mass lobotomisation of Tik Tok’s top 5 videos of 2023:
1. 554 Million Views : Food ASMR.
Or what looks like a really disgusting, bbq flavoured crisp coated chicken fillet. I am glad I only had to hear it, not taste it.
2. 504 Million Views : Someone putting on makeup.
Thrilling, and predictable. I had hoped a Non-Playable Character (NPC) creator like Pinkydoll would have made it to number 1. Her viral Tik Tok from earlier in the year feels more representative of our anxieties and desires in 2023 — and speak to how many individuals, most of them young men, have sought the opportunity to control another human being in a mash up of gamer culture and cam girl influencing, whilst claiming to do it in irony, for hours on end, at significant cost.
3. 418 Million Views. Some dude spray painting iron man on his ceiling before installing a new light in his chest.
Yes, I watched this bored marvel comic lovers Tik Tok to the end, and my brain is that much softer for it. I couldn’t bring myself to embed this crock of sh*t here.
4. 394 Million Views. Woman holding a massive cat.
This is more like it. Cat videos are what made YouTube during Web 1.0, so it’s reassuring to see that they are still popular, even if they need to be the size of a labrador to get our attention. Inflated expectations if you ask me.
5. 210 Million Views. Bloke singing in a parkhouse.
At least he has a modicum of talent and the song he chooses is an absolute banger. Yet, I didn’t feel like “we” were in heaven.
It is easy to sneer at Tik Tok content, but not the commercial juggernaut behind it. That’s ByteDance btw. Last week, it became the first non-game mobile app to generate $10 billion in consumer spending across the Apple App Store and Google Play, combined. As data.ai, the authors behind this analysis, describe
“the next-closest applications to the $10 billion milestone are Tinder and YouTube, but they trail TikTok by between $2 and $3 billion as the year comes to a close.”
What is truly remarkable is it’s e-commerce flywheel; discover on social, get a trusted endorsement from a creator you love, and buy. (The shoppable button in the feed is dangerously easy). In comparison to other brands, Tik Tok needed longer to reach its first $1 billion in consumer spend (79 months) compared to Candy Crush Saga, which got there in just 12 months. But it has taken Tik Tok only 15 months to go from $5Bn to $10Bn, marking a pronounced acceleration in consumer spending growth that is unmatched by its gaming peers.
Kiss of death
We can debate whose passing in 2023 was the saddest (Tina Turner, Shane MacGowan, Jane Birkin, Gianluca Vialli or Sinéad O’Connor), but none of these names can match Henry Kissinger for influence in the 20th Century. The most accurate obituary of Henry Kissinger I read wasn’t written by a major newspaper or foreign policy weekly, but by a music magazine, The Rolling Stone. They ran with : “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies”.
Greg Grandin, a Yale historian who is quoted in the article, estimates that Kissinger’s decisions and actions between 1968–1976, his time in office, cost between 3–4 million lives. That puts him behind Mao, Stalin and Hitler, but in the same league. It should have landed him in the European courts of human rights, a fate he was able to avoid during his lifetime.
The charge sheet against him is long, but let me recount it to you briefly:
1. Chile (1973)
The personal suborning and planned murder of a senior constitutional officer (Rene Schneider) and funding of military agitators in order to topple a democratically elected President (Salvador Allende) and replace him with a murderous, authoritarian, military dictator (Augusto Pinochet) more amenable to US interests in the region. 31,686 human rights violations have been recorded; 28,456 Chileans tortured, 2,125 Chileans assassinated including my own auntie, and 1,102 disappeared. Over 200,000 Chileans fled their country in fear of their safety, including my own family.
2. Bangladesh (1970)
The deliberate collusion in mass murder and assassination. After 1970 elections yielded a democratic victory for Bengali nationalists, a crisis ensued that culminated in a vicious crackdown by the Pakistani military on East Pakistanis — a campaign that turned into a mass slaughter of minority Hindus, students, dissidents and anyone else in the crosshairs of the army and collaborator-led death squads. As Gary Bass explains in an Atlantic article published shortly after Kissinger’s death, neither Nixon nor Kissinger exercised any of their considerable leverage to restrain Pakistan’s generals. Instead, they covertly rushed arms to the Pakistanis — in violation of a congressional arms embargo. He concludes, “For all the praise of Kissinger’s insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are noteworthy for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world.” So we must continue.
3. Vietnam (1968)
Kissinger sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace negotiations by promising South Vietnamese military leaders that an incoming Republican government, led by Richard Nixon, would offer them a better deal than the one on the table from the Democrats. (At the time he was a Democrat). This chicanery helped Kissinger secure the role of national security advisor under Nixon. He was then awarded the Nobel peace prize for ending a war that he helped prolong, on the same terms that had been on offer four years previously, and which cost the lives of 20,000 American servicemen and countless Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.
4. Cyprus (1974)
A complicated and disputed sequence of events, well summarised by Christoper Hitchens in an extract from his seminal book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, led Kissinger to the view that “There is no American reason why the Turks should not have one-third of Cyprus”. His implicit support for this bloody invasion has had long lasting consequences for Greeks Cypriots.
5. East Timor (1974)
The incitement and enabling of genocide arising from the foreknowledge of an Indonesian invasion led by Suharto.
In his many books, speeches and essays Kissinger was very careful never to admit culpability for his decisions and actions. Some will claim that there was simply no room for human rights in his realpolitik and worldview. I am more inclined to conclude that a
“A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory”.
Those words belong to a man Kissinger never had the balls to confront directly, the late Christopher Hitchens. We must now accept that his body of lies will rest with him for eternity, a compromise Kissinger was always willing to accept in order to preserve his legacy.
