Poor Diana

Diary of the last 20 hours

Last night

Watching The Crown, and thinking poor Diana.

Approximately 94 million people have been writing this week about The Crown and its historical accuracy, and it’s a fair enough question but also, poor old history. If it got as much attention as it deserves there would have been a lot more people asking the same question in the preceding seasons. Now as it reaches the years of more recent living recent memory a whole lot more people are saying what a minute, what's this?

And some of them are not at all happy to see history being misstated or misrepresented in the name of dramatic licence and if this should leave people with wrong and dangerous misunderstandings that would be not at all good, obviously.

Another possibility is: it all just goes whooshing by. Those who binge watch TV series are doomed to repeat them just to remember what happened three weeks ago. We loved Babylon Berlin but when the new season arrived this year we found we needed to see the first two again just to piece it all back together.

There’s been plenty in The Crown, right from the start, to make you wonder: Really? What's the truth of that? I don't recall reading any of this.

The putative coup by Mountbatten was news to me. No doubt the Tories would have been not best pleased to see Harold Wilson in charge. But a coup? Surely you exaggerate. Surely they did, but it seemed quite an effective device for conveying a sense of being Lord Mountbatten.

They live amongst us in plain sight, the royals, but they remain completely unknowable. The historic fidelity is really the least of it when the aim is to evoke the experience of being one of those deeply strange and different people. Present a scenario, see how these people respond. Never mind the truth of the story, look at the players. What kind of person are we seeing here? What kind of life?

We tend to reach the end of each episode saying the same thing: that is such a fucking weird way to live.

I have a royal story. I was standing on Ghuznee Street waiting to cross, holding my chicken roll lunch when down the road came the convoy going back to Government house and who’s that in the back seat? Only Diana the Prince of Wales! 

And our eyes met. Two young people in their twenties, a princess, in the back of a Rolls Royce, me with a paper bag taking my lunch back to my desk at Access Marketing. A moment, me and the Princess of Wales. I don't think she wanted my chicken roll. It just felt as though she was imagining not being the one in the car.

That’s my royal story. Poor Diana.

8.00am

Walking the maunga, topping up bait stations, and thinking about the traplines in Annie Proulx’s writing. A bartender says: Hell a coyote can smell the exhaust from your vehicle a hundred yards downwind three days after you come through. They can see like a goddam eagle and they’re smart enough to write you a sarcastic note in the dirt.

The rats on my run have taken a few chunks out of the bait in stations 1 and 8 and 11. Nothing yet from the others. Possibly they're canny. Possibly we're steadily running down the numbers. At this point, they’re not writing any notes.

9.15am

One of my favourite writers on Twitter is venting about Fox News and saying: they're just the monkey, let's take a look at the organ grinder.

Every theory Fox amplifies is a conspiracy that gained its popularity on Facebook. Facebook is the head of the snake. And until we seriously start tackling this, more people will die.

She goes on: 

Keep in mind I have no idea what to do about this. That’s the scariest and most frustrating part of this whole thing. Even our elected officials feel powerless in the face of these social media giants.

And she lands more or less inevitably at dejection.

I don’t think we’ll ever get people to stop using Facebook. Sure, *we* can quit Facebook to “send a message” or whatever. But your aunt who wants to see what her kids are up to won’t stop using Facebook. She wants to see her family. All we can do is clean up Facebook imo.

I have a proposal that might be legally difficult and probably quite loopy but I don't care at all. Here it is:

Make Aotoaroa Facebook free. Not by going cold turkey, but by making our own one. It would be more or less identical, but it would have the evil taken out. 

The government would create an alternative, Facebook Aotoearoa, freely copying all the formatting and layout of Facebook that enables everyone to communicate with one another. We would invite friends and families from around the world to join as well. And there would be none of the evil algorithms that generate the so-called engagement that shares and amplifies evil bullshit. 

Yes I know we couldn't get our hands on any of that proprietorial code. Don't need it. I just mean copy the look and feel of Facebook and do your own back end. The aim would be just to make it familiar enough so that everyone feels like they're still using the indispensable Facebook, only not evil.

Then you ban Facebook here and get everyone to migrate over to Facebook Aotoearoa.

And you would give the operation sufficient resources to take down all the wrong shit that gets posted. Or contract TradeMe to do it. Whatever. Mere details. You get the idea. Facebook, only good. Government-run, like the NZBC. Like broadcasting here, before Stephen Joyce got near it.

Our government could say to the world come visit Facebook free Aotearoa online! It could make this our nuclear free moment. It could get absolutely stuck in while we wait for it to make the environment or affordable housing our other nuclear free moments. 

Of course Facebook would object. Of course they have vast resources at their disposal to challenge us on the basis of, oh, off the top of my head, stealing their IP. 

But I propose a vehement and unyielding response, namely: get fucked, we’re a government and we're doing it. Your IP is making life bad and wrong in more ways than we can count. People are dying. They died in Myanmar, they are dying of Covid because of your toxic algorithm amplifying and spreading dangerous and wrong ideas that undermine the work of everyone who is trying to protect us. Populists and authoritarians get an armchair ride and democracy is withering thanks to you. To repeat: get fucked, see you in court, if we don't see you in the Hague first. 

Yes I get that international treaties might stop us. But let's do it anyway and see how we go. Facebook might be nice for swapping birthday party photos but in its present form it is bad for the world in the worst way.

1.00pm

Many thanks to More Than A Feilding reader Jaq Tweedie for alerting me to this. 

🦃Ricardo Duran Burner 🇲🇽🦃 @Ricardohhhh

I am crying.

There are many things you could say about it, maybe the most useful is this by Annie Proulx.

[The industrial revolution] booted a species – selfish, clever creatures with poor impulse control, suited to hunt, gather and scratch a little agriculture – into a savagely technological civilization that got rapidly out of hand and sent them blundering toward The End.

We must hope at this hour that the clever ones can get hold of things. It looks like the ones with poor impulse control are about to get completely out of hand.