If you do not harbour at least a smidgen of existential dread about the world we are leaving behind for our children, this beautiful boiling rock of overlapping catastrophes and bountiful television streaming services, then you are either not paying attention or are benefitting from the ruin in some nefarious, misbegotten, moustache-twirling fashion.

I have no idea what the appropriate degree of angst to be feeling right now is, but consider in the last three weeks alone: the IDF killed Australian Zomi Frankcom, adding a local body to the more than 200 humanitarian aid workers slaughtered by Israel since October 7, 2023; Peter Dutton compared a pro-Palestine rally to the Port Arthur Massacre, a very different, far more murderous type of event that claimed the lives of 35 Australians and featured far fewer speeches on geo-politics in the Middle East; a 40-year-old man in an Australian Rugby jersey with a history of domestic violence murdered five women and one man with a knife in the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre; a few days later the 30th Australian woman was murdered by her domestic partner this year and it’s only fucking April; Israel attacked an Iranian embassy; Iran fired rockets at Israel in retaliation; and a priest was stabbed inside a Sydney Assyrian Church by a 16-year-old in what is being described as a terror attack. 

All of these events are troubling in isolation, and either desensitising or debilitating when experienced in quick succession, present life circumstances and past traumas permitting. During these existential clobberings, attaching your eyeballs to the pulsating nozzle of news and attempting to swallow every scungy drop of what’shappening is as ill-advised as suing the woman you plied with alcohol, inflicted your obnoxious pasty company upon, and then raped inside Parliament House. 

Is that too specific a metaphor to be relatable? I’ll get there, writing isn’t a science. Regardless, standing in front of the pipeline and allowing its murky excrement to smack you in the eyeballs when things are this cooked does take a toll, and it is extremely likely people near and dear to you are feeling things, remembering things, processing things – maybe things they’ve never told anyone before. And just like Channel 7’s receipts for golf trips, cocaine and sex workers for Australia’s highest profile rapist, it all eventually adds up. 

Out of this moment of cascading crises, the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader have found common cause. This is rarely a good thing. When Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton agree with each other, it is typically on matters that preserve the most destructive pillars of a toxic, inegalitarian society, the goo sacks from which both political leaders have emerged from, feasted upon, and now aspire to protect, the uselessness of parliament as an avenue for saving the world on full display in these moments. Bipartisan support is usually found in things like approving new coal power plants, selling weapons components to a genocidal regime in full bloodlust mode, the AUKUS industrial complex, ensuring property owners and Murdoch hacks are as appeased and negatively geared as possible, and passing harsher, more draconian laws against protesters trying to save the world and refugees trying to survive it. But this week, in the wake of far too many horrific recent events to process in a healthy manner, Dud and Spud have found common cause, a shared enemy to direct blame and community anger/grief towards: social media.

Make no mistake about it: social media does fucking suck. Not exclusively – it does do some important things beautifully – but fucking sucks nonetheless. Facebook has become the place for our most conspiratorial minds to mingle with large masses of our most concussed minds. Xwitter is ever increasingly placing its greasy fingers on the world’s political scales, hypocritical in its application of “free speech”, negligent in its approach to hate speech, all the while normalising its billionaire owner’s nutty libertarian, anti-worker, “anti-woke”, racist dog-whistles and political beliefs. TikTok might ultimately prove to be a data harvesting tool for the Chinese Government, just as Facebook is for corporate America, but it is certainly eroding the attention spans and dopamine stores of entire generations. And I can’t remember my MySpace password but I’m sure it’s awful there too. Misinformation is rife on social media, and it spreads faster than any society is prepared for. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Bondi Junction murders, social media accounts with massive potential reach posted speculation and misinformation about the attacker’s identity and religious-ethnic background – people seemingly impatient to have their prejudices and biases confirmed, claiming the killer was either Muslim or Jewish when the only thing immediately obvious was that he was wearing an Australian Rugby jersey. (No one sought out community leaders representing white 40-year-old football fans with misogyny in their bones for comment and condemnation.)

All of this is very true and very troublesome, but if social media is a “sewer” filled with “sewer rats”, as Sky News’ latest crank Chris Uhlmann once sneered, the smelliest turds circling its drains are often shat out by traditional mainstream media. 

It did not take not take long at all for Channel 7 News to jump on the trend and incorrectly name a Jewish man as the Bondi killer, no fact checking, no patience, no journalistic rigour from an organisation that professes to be above the murk but has shown repeatedly of late  to be yet another variety of septic system for parasites to find nourishment from.  

It was certainly not social media that decided to turn Australia’s highest profile rapist into a culture war icon, a champion of the anti-woke, a warrior for reason and truth – for the way things are and should always remain. That was very much a mainstream news thing. 

Perhaps, just perhaps, the stuff on television and the dim-witted, morally depraved, ethically wanting shitstains that produce it could try waaaaaayyy less hard to enable dangerous little creeps for a hot fucking minute?!? There are few ideas poorer than supplying Australia’s most notorious and entitled creepy little fuck with a year’s rent, mountains of cocaine and sex workers in exchange for the exclusive opportunity to also provide him with a platform to lie to everyone about how he didn’t rape the woman he raped inside Parliament House. That too was very much a mainstream news thing. 

As is the blind cheerleading and normalisation of the massacres of 14,000 Palestinian children, “both-sided” and made acceptable with skewed framing, passive language, context-void history, and endless dehumanisation. Did you know that last week the IDF missiled a fucking playground and killed 11 kids in an instant? Or that Israel is flying drones over Gaza that emit the sound of crying, wounded children, in order to lure rescuers out into the open, who are then sniped for the crime of maintaining a parcel of their humanity? You’d think that sort of thing would be something you’d hear about on the TV a little louder than not at all, especially when the government is maintaining secrecy about its arms deals with Israel because it might “damage its international reputation”, but yeah, nah….. 

Indeed, the only reason we hear from Palestinian journalists is because they have social media. And the reason we are hearing from them less and less is because there are now significantly fewer of them – so effectively Israel has targeted them and their families. And there is precisely zero chance a cowed ABC is going to pick up an iota of that slack. It doesn’t even want to. It would prefer to fire journalists that speak up about Israel’s slaughterfest/coastal apartment redevelopment scheme than pursue the unvarnished truth of why Gaza, its history, and its people are being erased.

If we are talking about how sickness spreads into society from the information it absorbs, let’s not forget about the damage these entirely accepted and mainstream institutions do to our souls and communities, too. Let’s not pretend this sort of shit, times a million, endlessly, over and over again, doesn’t have any impact on the type of society we live in and just how filled with hate, privilege, supremacy and violence certain people are. Focusing on social media – and “computer games”, Peter Dutton unhelpfully threw into the pile on Insiders, neglecting to mention Elvis’ hips, jazz swing dancing, Dungeons & Dragons and paperback novels – at this precise moment is to ignore and excuse too much else. It is to seek a scapegoat, not a solution to systemic injustices and normalised violence. 

People are not shitty enough about Channel 7 and The Australian’s role in the three-year-long public saga of Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann. I know people are shitty, but still not shitty enough. A tut-tutting from Media Watch does not cut it. Because not only has it been reams of gutter journalism at its most pathetic, it has also been the epitome of the patriarchal rape culture that leads scumbags like Lehrmann to feel like they can get away with it. That this man was championed by Seven, by The Australian, by Janet Albrechtsen in particular, is fucking unhinged. Media like this unequivocally bolsters, normalises and reinforces a world where one in five woman are raped and 99 percent of rapists get away with it. 

It is only through the meeting of detached cruelty and monumental ineptitude that Seven and NewsCorp defied such excellent odds and backed one of the one percent of rapists that didn’t get away with it.