How I Almost Became A Bot

Sometimes, it is best to admit defeat.

Sometimes, you have to hold up your hand and say that you do not have the strength to carry on.

Tuesday night, I confess, was a dark night of the soul.

Some context. I have never voted, and would never vote, Conservative. My reasons are my own, personal and profoundly felt, a mixture of things witnessed, lived through and survived. Suffice to say my hopes of the current government overseeing this pandemic with anything like the humanity, bravery and humility needed for any government to help the nation recover were slim.

I tweeted in February that I expected the government’s response to be ideological rather than scientific and that I expected many unnecessary deaths to occur.

Not in my darkest nightmares did I imagine the numbers that have died. Not in any way, shape or form could I imagine a government doing the bare minimum at the last minute in a token effort to keep the death toll down. I knew Johnson was all bluster, a billowing, bellowing shitsack with the integrity of a paper toilet. I had hoped that, like his hero Churchill, he would have risen to this occasion, found an inner statesman that would surprise us all. Hope is important, the currency of optimism, but the well is full of pennies.

Johnson has spent the last 9 weeks either hiding from scrutiny, hospitalised with self-inflicted Covid, or lying to the nation. His slaphead Rasputin, Dominic Cummings, the de facto Prime Minister, ignores the advice he gave to the nation, and smirks in our faces. Laughter is contagious. Today, television viewers were treated to the spectacle of the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, a man at least partly responsible for the many thousands of unnecessary deaths so far, laughing on national television at accusations he’d rushed forward a Track and Trace app to deflect from the Cummings scandal.

I can’t watch the news on television. It angers and sickens me. I don’t read our papers anymore. I get my news from Twitter. Like the BBC before it, Twitter has been effectively labelled a left-wing echo chamber without any evidence to suggest that’s true. I follow a variety of people and news sources on Twitter. The government has always spun stories to favour them, that is politics but, for the first time in my life, the government are lying through their teeth as a matter of course during a national crisis.

Not for the fear of lowering the national mood any further, but for the purpose of staying in power. Armed now with an army of bots, any repudiation of their statistics, any criticism of their policy is now met with identically-scripted tweets to shout you down. It is hard to be angry at an algorithm.

My anger is for those, admittedly few, Tories I know who cannot admit that their vote and their party is responsible for this continuing disaster. This is a very 21^st century problem, this digital tribalism. An inability to admit blame, share the burden of guilt. In a time of sloganeering politics and alternative facts, truth does not matter as much as volume. The louder the shout, the greater the chance of victory. Only power matters. The dead cannot vote.

I’ve had to step away from Twitter, a place that has become 90 percent of my social life in lockdown, because I was turning increasingly poisonous. Writing things that would shame anybody with a conscience and deleting them before posting, I was in danger of becoming a monster, a shrieking, mindless bot of my own volition.

I’ve taken the decision, for the good of my mental health, to stay away from the one thing that was keeping me sane. Our collectively irrational populace don’t need another madman in their ranks. Time to refocus, to regroup, to find the strength for the battles yet to come.