Opinion
For most of the human story, people who looked a lot like us – but with more interesting hair – wandered around in the forests and savannahs rooting up wild crops and hunting meat.
In the relatively recent past, someone domesticated grains and animals and, with food thus secured, the first towns were born. And with them came something never seen before: a large mob of people.
Across cultures and continents, these new mobs generally did two things: they established chiefs or kings to lay down the law and organise defence or attack, and they peeled off a priestly class to conjure up gods and explain what they offered and required.
And that’s how it has been for the past 10,000 years.
In the 18th century – the day before yesterday, in the grand scheme of things – something else appeared. In Britain, in Europe, in the new American colonies, the first independent newspapers appeared.
Fuelled by sales, which brought advertisers, which brought more money, these newspapers gained power. Indeed, political philosopher Edmund Burke called them the “fourth estate” – sitting alongside the clergy, the nobility and the masses.
For thousands of years, human organisation stood on three legs, then added a fourth. And now three of those legs are crumbling. Which means all of us living now are in a deeply consequential moment in human history.
The first estate, the clergy, cuts little ice these days. As for the nobility, King Charles has a son who barely speaks to him and a brother under police investigation. Our constitutional monarchy delivers some underlying stability but for most Australians it is dress-ups in a far off land. It is not kings and dukes but tech billionaires who wield elite power in the 21st century. Meanwhile, the traditional post-enlightenment intellectual elites – the writers, scientists and moral philosophers – are now a hunted minority. Their cachet is also gone. It’s the death of expertise.
As for the fourth estate, the once-mighty houses of public-trust journalism are now on life support.
As you may have noticed on social media, we’re left with the mob.
Now, there is nothing essentially wrong with the masses. That is just us. As Thomas Jefferson famously framed it, the mob is simply “we, the people”.
Where we are vulnerable, is that “we, the people” (WTP), increasingly deal with each other not through parliaments, or church halls, or through the letters pages of the local newspaper, but through a digital space whose profits depend on us fighting each other.
Digital platforms depend on “engagement”. Humans are hard-wired to react most strongly when our anxieties are triggered, or our sense of injustice, or jealousy or rage. WTP are not just a mob – we’re constantly stirred up to be an angry mob, with multi-billionaires profiting from our anger.
That instability flows through to our politics.
Anthony Albanese is the eighth Australian prime minister since Twitter was invented in 2006. In the 20 years before Twitter, Britain had three prime ministers. In the 20 years since, it has had nine. The past three US presidents have been one-termers, including Trump twice.
This is not solely the fault of Twitter (rebranded X by Elon Musk). But nor is X exonerated. All social media algorithms feed on anger and all are being deliberately manipulated by both their owners and foreign governments who wish western democracies ill.
If the clergy and the nobility are no longer a balancing force, what of the fourth estate? Sadly, for someone who made his life’s vocation in it, the flight of advertising dollars and the range of digital distractions mean traditional media is increasingly a spent force.
For a span of less than 50 years, from the late 1960s to around 2010, evening television news bulletins were the primary source of information for most Australians. Most watched commercial bulletins. Seven, Nine and Ten enjoyed 30 per cent of every advertising dollar spent in Australia, much of it from prime-time programming set up by the early evening bulletin.
These TV networks knew their profits were to be found where the people were. In middle Australia. The broad centre of politics. Commercial television was instinctively centrist because it would have been mad to be anything else. A soothing voice, usually attached to a bloke called Brian, reported sensible debates, mixed up with daily tragedies and crime.
This was the setting when Bob Hawke came to power offering “consensus politics”. John Howard won on a promise to keep Australians “relaxed and comfortable”. Both their governments – and Paul Keating’s – established reforms that stand today: an independent Reserve Bank, a floating dollar, Medicare, the superannuation guarantee, asset-tested pensions; and from Howard, the GST, gun controls, and a punitive approach to asylum seekers arriving by sea. All difficult changes, all made by politicians pressing their case through a media landscape that instinctively skewed to the centre.
And it wasn’t just TV. Talkback radio in the 1980s was dominated by Derryn Hinch in Melbourne and John Laws in Sydney. “Educate John Laws,” said Keating, “and you educate Australia.” Both Laws and Hinch were small-c conservatives, as was their audience, but they weren’t rage baiters. Neither would dream of stirring up race riots in the suburbs, or fantasise on-air about doing violence to female politicians.
The broad centre might still be where Australians are, but it is not where the noise is. And the shift, in Australia as overseas, is towards noise. Difficult but necessary reforms are now immeasurably harder to achieve than they were in the high years of the fourth estate. Which is why so much has stalled.
Is it any wonder that productivity has barely grown since 2016? Productivity gains need trade-offs, and rage machines focus only on losers, not economy-wide benefits.
The same is true of budget discipline. The eternal temptation is for governments to give more in taxpayer support for this group or that – no rage tsunami to follow – rather than tighten things up and cop the storm.
With long-held institutions crumbling, WTP have a responsibility to do our own thinking. No bad thing. Except that the field in which this thinking goes to play is algorithmically canted towards scapegoating and fury. This is new.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is doing, as she acknowledges, what it has always done. The polls indicate people are turning to her in numbers never seen before. Thirty years ago, John Laws said Hanson “encouraged bigotry” and offered Australia no answers.
But the times suit her. Three of the four estates are going or gone. The masses have an accelerant in the algorithm. Fury is in fashion. Orange is the new black.
Hugh Riminton recently retired after decades in broadcast journalism. Most recently he was TEN News First’s national affairs editor.