There’s a scene in V for Vendetta that I think will resonate with all of us right now.
High Chancellor Adam Sutler sits at the head of a long table, surrounded by his cabinet, and he just says the “politically incorrect” truth. He doesn’t manage messaging. He doesn’t consult a communications strategist. He simply gives the evil command…
Manufacture terror. Make every man, woman, and child understand how close they are to chaos. Make them remember why they need us.
It’s chilling because he’s so brutally honest about how little he cares for people. How little he values people. How he considers them pawns in his self-serving game. He’s describing what power has always done; and he’s doing it without the courtesy of a euphemism.
What we’re living through right now is, essentially, that scene. Extended. Distributed. Upgraded.
Our version doesn’t require a centralized broadcast. It doesn’t need a single voice reading prepared remarks from behind a podium – although that happens all the time. It has something far more effective; a networked attention economy that has learned to manufacture crisis on a timeline calibrated to exhaust us.
Even though we do actually have a real-life Chancellor, there doesn’t need to be one. The architecture does the work.
Thoreau wrote that men have become the tools of their tools. He was talking about farmers and their plows, but he could never have imagined the precision and reach of what we’ve built since then. Yet, the observation holds. We built a machine to connect us and it learned (faster than we anticipated) that anxiety is more profitable than peace. That outrage spreads further than nuance. That a population kept slightly off-balance is a population that keeps clicking, keeps consuming, keeps reaching for the next thing that might finally explain what’s happening.
That’s not just a conspiracy – it’s a system doing exactly what systems do; optimizing for the variable it was taught to maximize.
The Chancellor’s genius, in the film, was coordination. One message. Every channel. Simultaneously. Our system doesn’t need precise coordination. It needs only the incentive structure already in place. Thousands of outlets, thousands of voices, thousands of feeds – and they all arrive, independently, at approximately the same conclusion: that you should be afraid, that you should be angry, that the edge of oblivion is close, that the chaos is almost here. You see, fear travels faster than reassurance, and the algorithm serves what travels fast. Then…
The population remembers why it needs someone to be in charge.
This is something Thoreau would have recognized clearly. Not the technology, of course, but the submission. He watched his neighbors march off to jobs they despised, carrying debts they never examined, supporting institutions they never questioned. He thought they were sleepwalking. He thought the machinery of convention had done to them what no tyrant could have managed directly – made them the agents of their own unfreedom.
And we’re sleepwalking too. Just faster. With better graphics. The scroll is the new convention. The feed is the new social contract nobody signed. And the perpetual emergency, the one that is always one news cycle away from resolution, always just urgent enough to keep you from looking away… is the new normal.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying the problems aren’t real. The crises are painfully genuine. Fear is definitely warranted. And the world has always had genuine emergencies; and the people suffering through them have always deserved to be seen. What I am saying is that a system optimized to manufacture urgency cannot distinguish between a genuine emergency and a manufactured one. It will amplify both with equal enthusiasm. And when everything is urgent… what then?
This is the system’s goal: Not to inform you. Not even to frighten you, exactly. But to keep you oriented toward the emergency and away from the question underneath it:
what would I do, what would I build, what would I choose, if I weren’t afraid right now?
The Chancellor doesn’t need a “broadcast”.
He just needs you to keep scrolling and commenting.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.