As expected, social media went ballistic. Most posts were standard fare – grumpy middle-aged men staunchly defending their team or condemning the other – but one intervention reminded me of a lecture Professor William Davies gave for the London Review of Books (available on YouTube). The lecture, published in the LRB (‘The Reaction Economy’, 2 March), ruminated on how so-called ‘reaction chains’ damaged public debate. Reaction chains, according to Davies, are cases where the social media responses to an incident – such as the slap actor Will Smith meted out to comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars – snowballs and almost everyone with a smartphone seems to weigh in to cancel or be woke or thumb whatever missive is likely to generate the most attention. ‘Seasoned characters,’ Davies said, ‘such as [former Murdoch editor] Piers Morgan are cynically aware that what will keep them in the spotlight is the force, distinctiveness and watchability of their kneejerk responses, which are essentially designed to ignite reaction chains.’

Within minutes of the Bairstow dismissal, Morgan seemed determined to prove Davies’ thesis – taking to Twitter to shitpost about the ‘spirit of cricket’. His kneejerk response provoked an immediate reaction from sleep-deprived Australians; unsurprisingly, the Aussie baiting continued for weeks in an increasingly asinine reaction chain.

My concern here is not the much-ado-about-a-stumping but the social behaviour it reveals. As Davies said, digital platforms such as Twitter ‘are anti-forgiveness machines by design’. They are designed to hook users on an addictive cycle of doomscrolling and shitposting as we overreact for and against everything from slaps to stumpings. Most importantly, because users respond more to outrage, digital platforms tend to amplify conflict. With Bairstow, the conflict was largely benign, but it can be malignant. As Davies explained:

Much of the anxiety promoted by today’s reaction economy consists in the possibility that, in our desperate hunt for feedback and our need to give feedback to others, we allow ourselves to be steered in directions we did not consent to, and may not wish to go … We are drawn towards controversy, absurd public spectacles, endless mutating memes, trolling, etc.

What Davies alluded to with ‘etc.’ was the conspiracy theories that swirl online, and, occasionally, spill over into the real world. Before Covid-19, these often violent incidents, such as PizzaGate¹, were largely an American phenomenon. However, the social traumas of Covid, combined with the economic traumas of neoliberalism, changed all that.

During the first two years of Covid, many Australians – especially those of us who lived through Victoria’s epic lockdowns – found themselves in a claustrophobic new world where each Groundhog Day revolved around the ritual of watching marathon media conferences about case numbers. People responded to this anxiety in a variety of ways: some exercised, some binged, some baked; others raged.

Unbottled rage is why viral online conspiracies increasingly have real-world consequences in Australia. I believe this because I’ve felt its repercussions. In fact, you could say conspiracy theories cancelled my birthday.

Let me explain. Normally, my family stages an open house to mark a birthday. Poached chicken sandwiches, sushi, and cakes are served; coffees, chocolates, and drinks are consumed; and family members mill about in the kitchen and spill into the lounge and courtyard while our portly dog, Berkeley, loiters for scraps. Covid interrupted these clan gatherings, but they were slated to return – until two family members fell out. In a nutshell, one relative refused to be vaccinated, the other disagreed, and things became heated. Long story short, one family member no longer wants to see the other. This civil war left me with a choice. I could invite one warring faction to the birthday party. Or I could invite neither. Or I could call the whole thing off.

I cancelled.

There is far more to this familial Brexit than my sketchy outline suggests. It is not just about cabin fever from shutdowns and culture wars over the pandemic; the pandemic may have been the trigger, but the murky, multifaceted genesis of the rupture goes back decades. Much the same can be said of the societal conflagrations that flared up in the aftermath of the summer of 2019–20 – the apocalyptic December and January when monstrous bushfires caused the skies of south-eastern Australia to glower orange-red and, as in a climate-change Dunkirk, the Royal Australian Navy rescued holidaymakers from the beaches of Mallacoota. Likewise, there is a multifaceted source of the collective rage firing everything from the ‘freedom’ protests that erupted in Melbourne in 2021 to the hateful campaigns against transgender rights and drag queens, the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis, the crypto-racist dog whistles against the First Nations Voice to parliament, and the rise of sovereign citizen groups. Yes, Covid is an accelerant of the unrest – after all, as my family demonstrates, the claustrophobia and anxiety of Covid lockdowns inflamed conspiracy theories and conflict – but, much like the rage that drove the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the storming of the United States Capitol, the social and economic fuel for these social bushfires was lying about, waiting to spark, long before Australia’s first recorded Covid case in January 2020.

Historically, Australian governments have tended towards the parental; they liked telling their citizens what to do. The universalist tendency of Australian governments – evident in past and present laws on everything from voting to drinking to seatbelts to smoking to healthcare to superannuation – reflects the collectivism that drove many of the best and worst acts during the infancy of the Federation, such as the arbitration system (best) and the White Australia policy (worst).

That tendency began to change during the reform period of the Hawke and Keating governments. Arguably, the turning point was the Keating government’s Working Nation white paper. Released in 1994, Working Nation included ambitious strategies to create a more inclusive society, but also – for the first time since 1945 – stopped short of committing to full employment. Under Working Nation, unemployment was no longer a societal issue; it was an individual issue to be solved by market forces. After John Howard was elected prime minister in 1996, Keating’s inclusive society was abandoned by the Commonwealth and the unemployed became fiscal cannon fodder, used as a buffer to manage inflation. The labour movement, meanwhile, lost its nerve – backing away from the social and economic progress embodied in the Prices and Income Accord. Former Labor leader Simon Crean – speaking to me in a 2022 interview – explained the machinations:

Once we lost in ‘96 unions started [saying] ‘Oh, you know, the Accord held us back’ – this bullshit argument. And then the argument became with the Rudd and Gillard government about pattern bargaining, moving away from the very principles that took it [forward]. Everyone said, ‘The Accord’s past its time.’ That was almost a given.

With Labor retreating from the progressive vehicle of the Accord and the Coalition holding power for twenty years between 1996 and 2022, Australian governments have, while mouthing weasel words like ‘mutual obligation’, kept telling their citizens what to do while, in return, doing less for them. The low-water mark of this one-way traffic came during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, when the Morrison government partly privatised the economic stimulus package by, instead of properly supporting people in financial strife, allowing 3.4 million Australians to drain $35.8 billion from their superannuation funds, putting millions of low-income earners at greater risk of retiring in poverty.

Raiding superannuation was a quick fix that failed. What the Commonwealth could have done instead was begin to tackle intergenerational inequities such as negative gearing, under-investment in social housing, and the gig economy. Like every other federal government since 2001, though, the Morrison government squibbed, which is one of the reasons why – in addition to corporate profiteering and the war in Ukraine – the Albanese government is confronted by a cost-of-living crisis. According to a Resolve Political Monitor poll, carried out for The Age in July, fifty-one per cent of respondents said they would struggle to meet an unexpected expense – up from forty-one per cent in February. What polls such as these point to – other than the medium-term issue of inflation – is the fact that the economic well-being of working Australians is in long-term decline.

It wasn’t always this way. Up until the Global Financial Crisis, Australian middle-income earners were comparatively better off than their British and US counterparts, who had suffered decades of real-wage stagnation. After the GFC, business profits soared while workers’ wages stagnated, successive governments allowed the housing bubble to harden into a housing crisis, the Reserve Bank promised to not increase interest rates then raised them twelve times, intergenerational disadvantage was ignored, and instead of tackling climate change the Coalition resorted to tricky accounting methods to avoid cutting carbon emissions.

What this meant was that governments stopped holding up their end of the quid pro quo that underwrote the great Australian fair go. They created too many holes in the social safety net and stopped intervening in the market in the interests of the community through investments such as public housing. As a result, many Australians – especially low-income earners – were entitled to feel they weren’t getting enough in return for putting up with nagging, parental governments. In addition, the mythology of the Australian ‘fair go’ was exposed by a series of scandals involving everything from corporate wage theft to the illegalities of Robodebt to the criminal misconduct of PwC.

Those failures damaged the social licence of government at a time when Australia was entering, as the historian Tony Judt foresaw in 2011, ‘an age of insecurity – economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity’. That’s why some angry Australians are beginning to sound like angry Americans. Robert F. Kennedy Jr – the extremist trying to do a Donald Trump and hijack the US Democratic Party – understands this grassroots anger. Speaking to the New Yorker in June, Kennedy said: ‘Everybody realises they’re not living in a democracy anymore. They’ve lost sovereignty of their lives and their futures … are hopeless. I think it all flows from a cynicism and despair that flows from this corrupt merger of state-corporate power.’

I would like to say Kennedy is wrong, but he has a point. As Quinn Slobodian points out in Globalists (2018): ‘The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions – not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy.’ That’s why it should come as no surprise, for example, that the latest generation of artificial intelligence was unleashed by the same libertarian billionaires responsible for the proliferation of ‘reaction chains’ – without any regard for the rights or intellectual property of working people. It doesn’t matter that AI writing tools only work because they, without credit or payment, are fed the pilfered work of generations of writers, then, like a food processor, create something stolen-but-sort-of-new by liquefying authorship. In this new gilded age, it seems that all that matters is the aggregation of data, capital, power. Like Elon Musk and his runaway self-driving Teslas, tech bros take no responsibility for the damage they cause. All they seem to care about – other than building their own private Jericho in New Zealand or hacking the human body so they can live forever – is being first. It turns out that futurist Jaron Lanier was right, in You Are Not a Gadget (2011), when he worried that the combination of aggregated humanity and economic hardship could create fascist-style mobs.

The mob reaction to lockdowns in Melbourne is a case in point. Part of the problem with the lockdowns was that public health is, for good reason, the most parental-minded arm of Australian government. I know this because, in the early 1990s, I spent three years as a media officer for the Victorian Health Department’s public health unit. Working with people like then-chief health officer Dr Graham Rouch, I was struck by how they continually balanced public health and private rights. The choices they made – such as whether to involuntarily hospitalise an HIV-positive street worker – were often agonising. During the cost cutting of the then-Kennett government, for example, public health staff took extreme steps – including redundancies – to protect frontline HIV services.

Public health, in other words, operates like the Australian governments of the parental era defined by collectivism, yet many Australians – especially casual and gig workers – live in a neoliberal marketplace defined by individualism. There was always going to be trouble during lockdowns, therefore, because the two groups existed in different eras, if not worlds.

However, the great Australian intemperance is not just a domestic creation. It has American genetics. Take the ‘war on woke’, for example. Countless US politicians, most notably Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have gained mileage by playing Chicken Little and claiming that, in essence, Western civilisation is threatened by non-binary pronouns. This confected rage has, like a contagion, travelled to Britain, where the Orwellian new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act will – rather than protect free speech – constrain free thought because, as Professor Amia Srinivasan pointed out in the LRB on 29 June, it will make it harder for the academy to weed out ‘cranks and shills’ due to ‘disciplinary competence’. The Act will aid and abet misinformation, allowing cranks and shills to, as Trump’s former Svengali Steve Bannon put it, ‘flood the zone with shit’. In Australia, it should come as no surprise that the ‘war on woke’ is one of the current hobby horses of Rupert Murdoch’s altar boys – who are well practised in zone flooding.

To understand the hyperventilation surrounding wokeness go back to Davies’ reaction chains thesis. If all that matters is reaction then, to bastardise Marshall McLuhan, outrage is the message: who cares what people are enraged about – stumpings, slaps, wokeness – so long as they are engaged.

Of course, it helps if there’s a grain of truth in your manufactured outrage. For instance, an argument could be made – not by me – that the Australians should have been more sporting and recalled the straying Bairstow. Likewise, the black-and-white responses to human frailty shown by both progressives and conservatives are as counterproductive and narcissistic as identity politics. In the conclusion of his LRB lecture, Davies turns to Hannah Arendt for an answer, suggesting that forgiveness is the best way to ‘break free of perpetual reaction and counter-reaction’. That’s a nice thought, but understanding comes before forgiveness. The best way to avoid being sucked in by manufactured outrage is to understand why, for instance, cultural conservatives are ambivalent about public morality yet obsessed by private morality – especially sex.

A new paper published in the peer-reviewed Politics and Religion journal by researchers Angus McLeay, Elenie Poulos, and Louise Richardson-Self goes some way to explaining the thinking behind the sex conundrum. According to the paper, it’s all about power. McLeay, Poulos, and Richardson-Self found that the Australian Christian right – much like the American religious right – became increasingly shrill as they became increasingly worried about losing their position of cultural power: ‘The [Australian Christian right] has transitioned from a conservative voice defending the privileges of the Christian majority to a self-described minority seeking to shape social policy to buttress the movement’s conservative sexual ideology.’ The authors said the Australian Christian right, which opposed religious freedom protections when they felt they held the upper hand, now claimed they were victims of persecution even though ‘there seem to be almost no examples of experiences of concrete harm’. Unsurprisingly, the authors concluded that the Christian right’s rhetoric hides ‘a tacit self-interest’.

Australia’s Christian right aren’t the only ones who, out of tacit self-interest, cast themselves as a persecuted minority. Australia’s sovereign citizen movement are also keen to wrap themselves in the stars and stripes – their preference is for Australia’s blood-red maritime flag – and claim dissident status.

The sovereign citizen movement – a loose confederacy of individuals and groups who believe that Australian laws and debts do not apply to them – rose to national prominence during Melbourne’s anti-lockdown demonstrations in 2021. Two years on, many sovereign citizens have ended up associated with My Place Australia.

My Place is not just a creature of the pandemic. It was founded after the 2022 federal election by tradesman Darren Bergwerf. Prior to setting up My Place, Bergwerf stood as an independent in the seat of Casey, receiving 3,698 votes. According to Crikey, his candidacy was endorsed by AustraliaOne, an unregistered political party led by anti-vaccine campaigner Riccardo Bosi. Dunkley was comfortably won by Labor’s Peta Murphy, but, in a bizarre twist, Bergwerf pre-emptively declared himself the winner five days before election day, ‘because I am the only candidate left that is not a corporation and doesn’t have an ABN’. Ironically, the Australian Business Register’s website states that Bergwerf himself has an active ABN. Bergwerf’s threats to take the Australian Electoral Commission to the High Court are yet to be carried out. What he has done instead, by founding My Place in the Melbourne sand-belt suburb of Frankston, is to start a community movement that’s gone viral.

The proliferation of My Place is impressive. The group has more than a hundred online chapters in every state and territory – and many of those Facebook groups claim thousands of members. But what is My Place? Think of the group as a suburban Australian version of Brexit. In essence, My Place believes – as stated in a fever dream of a manifesto that appears to have been cribbed from the American redemption movement – that Australians are sovereign citizens not bound by laws or liable for debts, because their governments are not governments but corporations. According to its national Facebook page, the group aims ‘to implement a project that allows us to step away from the current systems that are not serving our best interests’. In other words, My Place wants to establish a separate society within the Commonwealth of Australia.

Reading the group’s manifesto and following their Facebook accounts, I concluded that Bergwerf is serious. Like Lorne Greene in Battlestar Galactica, he really is trying to steer his rag-tag fugitive fleet of Facebook groups, granola market goers, and anti-vaxxers to a place called Earth. In his national television début, on 7.30 in April, Bergwerf – standing amid the thrum of a My Place community market in suburban Melbourne – exuded the air of an everyman leader. The interview only became tense when journalist Emily Baker pressed Bergwerf about the sharing of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on My Place’s Facebook pages. Bergwerf countered by distancing himself from neo-Nazis, but also claimed that, for him, there was a question mark over the Holocaust, because ‘I wasn’t there.’

7.30 also reported that a My Place strategy document set out the group’s plans to target local councils and set up alternative people’s councils. Bergwerf, for instance, was ‘elected’ mayor of the People’s Council of Frankston. Within a month, the extent of My Place’s local government ambitions became apparent. Its supporters have disrupted dozens of local government council meetings, railing against everything from drag queen story-time events to 5G towers to twenty-minute neighbourhoods – the voguish planning mantra that residents should be within a twenty-minute walk of all their daily needs. In Victoria, death threats were made and drag queen events cancelled, council meetings were closed to the public and the police called. Monash council was forced to cancel its drag queen events when it learned that the National Socialist Network, the neo-Nazi group that paraded in front of State Parliament in March, intended to show up in force. David Clark, president of the Municipal Association of Victoria, told ABC Melbourne that ‘what we saw … is a group of people expressing a view about who should be in society and who shouldn’t’.

Clark is right – the targeting of drag queens is a hate campaign – but that doesn’t mean My Place is a hate group. My Place is more like a farmers’ market offering a wide range of organic conspiracies. Some of those conspiracies – such as the anti-trans and anti-Semitic lies – are hateful; others – such as the claim that twenty-minute neighbourhoods are all about population control – are pitiful. What My Place is doing is tapping into post-lockdown anxiety and, intentionally or inadvertently, providing cover for and helping to normalise hate speech.

It is impossible to predict where My Place will end up. It could peter out. But it could also create a political base for Bergwerf, the wannabe politician, to make a second tilt at Federal Parliament. The deciding factor will be whether the My Place faithful maintain their rage. 

Endnote

1. In 2016, twenty-eight-year-old warehouse worker Edgar Maddison Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington, DC, and shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria because he believed an online conspiracy theory – pushed by QAnon – that Democrats such as Hillary Clinton used the restaurant as a front for a child-sex-trafficking ring.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.