It happens slowly and then all at once, and the strange part is that the vocabulary changes before the opinions do. A man who has spent seventy years describing things in the plain English of a Suffolk garage will suddenly use a phrase he has never used in his life, delivered slightly carefully, like a word learned from a book rather than from people. You hear it across the table at Sunday lunch and something in you goes still.
That is the first sign, and once you have noticed it you cannot stop noticing it. The rest arrive in a rough order, though not always the same one and by the time you have counted five you are usually past the point where a conversation can fix it.
I want to be clear about who this is aimed at before we start, because it is not aimed at him. He is not the villain of this piece.
He is, in most cases, a man who got lonely and was found by a machine before he was found by any of us. The villain is the machine, and the people who built it, and the people who feed it, and none of them are sitting in an armchair in Kidderminster.
So here are the seven. Not to win an argument with him. To know what you are looking at.
1. The new words
Globalist. Legacy media. A they that never gets defined and never needs to. Words that arrive fully formed, without the hedging he applies to everything else. This is a man who has opinions about his own guttering that are more carefully qualified than this. Ask him what the gutter needs and you get a considered answer with a caveat about the weather. Ask him who they are and you get the word, again, slightly louder.
The tell is not the politics. It is the fluency. Nobody arrives at a new vocabulary on their own at seventy two. It has been supplied, in a form that was designed to be repeated, by people who understood that the first thing you change is not what a man thinks but what he says, because the saying does the thinking for him afterwards.
If you hear it, do not correct the word. Ask him where he heard it. He will not remember, and that is the answer.
2. It is always somewhere else
He has become extremely angry about an incident in a country he has never visited, reported by an outlet he could not name, involving people he will never meet, filmed by someone whose motives he has not considered. Meanwhile the bus route that actually affects him was cut in March and he has not mentioned it once, because nobody has put the bus route in front of him at six in the morning with a caption.
This is the mechanism in one paragraph. The feed does not care about his life. It cares about his attention, and attention is cheapest to buy with things that are far away, because far away things cannot be checked, cannot be fixed and cannot run out. The bus route has an answer. Sweden does not.
If you hear it, ask about the bus and mean it. Ask what he thinks should happen about the bus. Watch a man who has strong views on Malmö discover he has none on the 47.
3. The pictures have gone wrong
Look at the photographs he shares. Really look, the way you would look at a banknote. Count the fingers. Check the hands. Read the writing on the signs in the background, which will be in no language that has ever existed.
Somewhere in the last two years the images stopped being photographs and started being generated, and the giveaway is that everyone in them is slightly too clean, the light is from nowhere and there are nine soldiers with eleven boots.
He cannot see it. This is not a failure of intelligence. He spent seventy years in a world where a photograph was a record of something that happened, and that world ended without anybody telling him, and the people who ended it have no interest in telling him because the not knowing is the product.
If you see one, do not say it is fake. Say, isn't it strange that the flag has the wrong number of stripes. Let him find it. A man who finds it himself remembers. A man who is told forgets by Tuesday.
Fact box
Engagement is highest on content that provokes anger, and platforms rank by engagement.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it is the stated design. A feed optimising for time on site will learn, without being told to, that outrage keeps a person scrolling and calm does not. Nobody sat down and decided to radicalise your grandad. They decided to maximise a number, and he was in the way of it.
4. Six in the morning
The forwards arrive early. Between five and seven, every day, which tells you he is waking up and reaching for it before the kettle, before the dog, before the curtains. That is not a political development.
That is a sleep pattern, and it is the bit I would actually worry about, because a man who reaches for the feed before the kettle is a man who is not sleeping, and a man who is not sleeping will believe anything by lunchtime.
I have seen the timestamps on enough family group chats now to say this with some confidence. The radicalisation is downstream of the insomnia. The insomnia is downstream of something else, and it is usually something nobody has asked about.
If you see it, do not reply to the six o'clock forward. Ring him at ten and ask how he slept. You will learn more in that call than in a year of fact checks.
Shirt: I Think Therefore I Am Not a GB News Viewer · £25.95
5. There are no small opinions left
He used to think the council was a bit useless. It was a small opinion, proportionate to a man who once queued for twenty minutes about a wheelie bin and told the story for a decade. Now the council is part of something.
The old position had a size to it. The new one does not scale to anything, because everything is now the same size, which is enormous, and everything is connected to everything else by a line only he can see.
This is what the feed does to proportion. It takes a man's ordinary, healthy, well-earned scepticism about the people who run things and inflates it until it cannot fit through the door. The scepticism was fine. The scepticism was English. It was the inflation that did the damage.
If you hear it, find the old, small opinion underneath and agree with it. The council is a bit useless. Say so. Then stop, and see whether he can stop too.
Nobody sat down and decided to radicalise your grandad. They decided to maximise a number, and he was in the way of it.
6. He has stopped talking about the things he likes
This is the saddest one and the most reliable. Ask him about the allotment, the darts, the dog, the Wolves result, the model railway, whatever it used to be. If the answer is short and he steers back to the other thing within ninety seconds, the feed has taken the space that the interests used to occupy. It is not that he has new views. It is that he has fewer subjects.
A man with an allotment has somewhere to put his attention that is not a screen. A man with a dog has to go outside twice a day and talk to other people with dogs. The interests were not hobbies. They were the immune system, and they went before the symptoms showed.
If you notice it, ask him to show you something he is good at. Not tell you. Show you. It will take an hour and cost nothing and it is the single most effective thing on this list.
7. He is on his own more than he used to be
Somewhere behind all of this there is usually a bereavement, a retirement, a bad hip, a mate who died, a pub that shut, a daughter who moved to Leeds. He got lonely, and a machine noticed before any of us did. The machine had something to offer.
It offered him company, of a kind, and a purpose, of a kind, and a set of people who were on his side, of a kind, and he took it, because the alternative was the armchair and the silence.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth being honest about, because it means the people to be furious with are not the ones sitting in the armchair. They are running an advertising business. They know exactly who is awake at six in the morning and exactly what to show him, and they show it to him because it works, and it works because nobody rang.
What actually works
Not the fact check. I have watched a hundred family arguments and I have never once seen a link win one. Sending a debunk to a man who has been up since five reading forwards is like posting a letter into a fire, and it makes him feel accused and a man who feels accused goes back to the people who do not accuse him, who are all on the feed.
Shirt: I Think Therefore I Am Not a Reform Voter · £25.95
What works, boringly, is the phone. Ring him about something else. The dog, the darts, the score. Every minute he spends talking to an actual person is a minute the feed does not get, and the feed is the opponent here, not him.
You are not trying to win. You are trying to be more interesting than a screen, which is a low bar and a real one.
Go over. Take the dog out. Ask him to show you how to do something he is good at, which will take an hour and cost nothing and is the single most effective piece of counter-radicalisation available to any of us. It will not feel like politics. That is the point. The feed is counting on nobody turning up. Turn up.
More from Brexit Britain
You Might Also Like
What Has Brexit Actually Cost Britain? The Brexit Bill Itemised
Ten years after the £350m bus we took seven promises from Brexit and checked each one a...
Read more →
Who Actually Owns Reform UK: A Field Guide to the Two Crypto Billionaires Who Bought It
Read more →
What You Can Do About the Threat of AI Wiping Us Out, Ranked by Whether It Works
Read more →
How the East End Stopped Mosley's Blackshirts at Cable Street in 1936
Read more →
Nine Things You Can Actually Do About the Far Right in Britain
Read more →
How Britain's Far-Right Parties Have Always Collapsed, From Mosley to UKIP
Read more →
1 comment
Grest analysis. Sadly it applies to a greater or lesser extent to all of us. Human interaction is is missing (don’t get me started on self check outs! ) It’s the reason that so much vitriol is posted, usually, but not exclusively, by people on the far right who have been radicalised by the machine. As you point out we need to find ways to inject a more human perspective.
Thankyou for making me think.