Have you ever got in the car with a friend and discovered how quickly they become a totally different person behind the wheel? It amazes me how people change when they feel safe and unreachable in their little metal bubble. I’m always on the lookout for the ways that people show their true colours by acting without thinking. We’ve all heard small children and teenagers say;

‘I don’t know why, I just did it’.

They can’t justify their actions because they were acting on impulse or on some misguided often unconscious scheme. Adults are capable of acting in the same way. Especially when they’re in a safe space, alone and the chances of suffering repercussions of one’s actions are low. This often leads to a complete lack of consideration of how your actions could affect the people around you.

In car safe space/ the everyday example

The car represents a safe space. My wife is the best driver I know. She obeys the laws, the speed limits and other people’s space. She drives fast. I call her the Audi Slayer. She is a mild mannered, quiet, 5-foot-tall pocket rocket that you wouldn’t want to cross. If you’re driving your car and you see my wife in hers then you had better indicate, say thank you and keep your distance. Failure to do so will result in an offensive tirade that would make the filthiest sailor blush. Not that you would hear it, but you might be able to lip read. Her favourite words are Twat, Prick, Knobhead, Dickhead and Wanker. Standards of the in-car, safe space rant. She would never say that to your face.

Hiding behind an Online persona/Digital avatar (Warning millennial social media rant)

My (millennial) generation were the first to get mobile phones in the late 90s when a text cost 12p. Most of the kids at my school got £10 credit per month (for emergency use only) and those 80 texts could not be wasted. Then came the smart phone and soon after Facebook and Twitter. I deleted both apps after about two weeks. I thought I would probably get myself into trouble, mainly for bad spelling and grammatical errors. Since then I’ve avoided all social media but it’s increasingly hard to avoid it’s influence, especially when news rooms report on Twitter as if it’s a true reflection of society (and not just a vocal minority shouting in a sad dark corner of the internet). Most commentary podcasts start with ‘have you heard the latest twitter scandal’ or a cursory glance at what had been trending that day. All I hear about is people shouting abuse at others they didn’t like. All from the safety behind their digital avatar or anonymous account. It’s as if we were all in a huge traffic jam and some people are shouting and ranting from the safety of their cars without most of us knowing anything about it. That is until you turn the radio on and hear a report about what the people in their cars are shouting about.

The rich get protection due to extraordinary wealth/how the rich and posh are behind and above the law

So Twitter became a safe space for trolls, activists and commentators to shout their opinions and grievances into the void. Was this a test of the ideal of freedom of speech, a society grappling with a new technology or the selfish gene being played out online for all to see? The altruistic doves among us trying their best to defend common decency and openness while being cancelled, attacked and dragged into hell fire twitter rants. Most good people I know simply deleted the app. The hawks amongst us were revelling in the amplification of their voice and the power they had over the doves. The communication of reasonable ideas, supported by science and data was no match for the logical fallacies that were shouted back as reply. Then the governments of the world start to get involved and now we have to deal with claims of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. Fact checkers and blue checkmarks were politicised to spin and control propaganda on both sides of debates. In the end it seems the hawks have won and the world is a much more divided place.

The hawks have also benefited from the markets and big business, making billions of pounds/dollars in the financial and tech sectors. Billions. How can one person be worth billions? How can we have multiple billionaires and still have people living in poverty? So much for trickle-down economics. Not only is the wealth divide disgusting evidence of corruption and greed it also creates a two-tier society where the people with enough money can afford legal expenses to keep secrets, take down competition and literally get away with murder. Now from their legal safe zones they dream up new schemes to cream even more off the top. If they aren’t building rockets to play in space, they are fighting legal battles over property (intellectual and physical), buying up competition and lobbying governments (domestic and international) in attempts to undermine law and constitutions which would otherwise prevent the flow of capital.

Maybe it’s time we choose to live in the real world instead of online. Or it could be time to make the online world more like the real world, where there are consequences for your actions. Maybe it’s time to distribute some of this wealth. All you have to do is make being rich unbearably troublesome. Let the doves peak away at the safety net. Start to put more and more pressure on the rich to sell assets and share company ownership. We need the papers to reported on what really goes on in the world of business and finance, the waste, the corruption, the environmental impacts, the lobbying and tax evasion. Then the activists could make the rich pay what they were due. We might even clean up the earth while we’re at it.

Maybe it’s time to realise that our actions speak louder than the words we scream from our safe places.