The right kind of outrage

Plus the trouble with TikTok (which is the trouble with us)

Toby Jones and Julie Hesmondhalgh play key roles in ITV’s drama about the wrongful convictions caused by the Post Office’s trust in its Horizon system. Photo: ITV

Earlier this week I was sitting around with some friends after a tennis game. Somehow or other the conversation turned towards the topic du jour, the Post Office/ Horizon/ Fujitsu screwup, and the monumental injustice visited on hundreds of sub-postmasters and -mistresses. (Such an arcane word; I wish I knew a better one.)

My friends were incandescent about what had happened: the people who had lost reputations, livelihoods, their freedom, in some cases who had taken their lives when the Post Office used its power to instigate prosecutions (a power held by very few government bodies; Customs used to, but saw that rescinded because it abused it). The manifest unfairness of believing a computer system over hundreds of people who had never given any cause for suspicion in the past infuriated them: obviously the people in charge of the system and the Post Office should themselves be prosecuted, locked up, dragged through the streets. (OK, maybe not the last bit.)

You can read about what happened in plenty of places - Private Eye and Computer Weekly (the trade paper where I had my first long-ago full time job in journalism) made all the running from 2009 onwards. But what I wanted to know was: why were my friends so exercised about this now?

The answer is known to anyone in the UK: over the Christmas break, the main commercial channel, ITV, broadcast a four-part dramatisation of the events in the case: the wrongful prosecutions and then how bit by bit, one of the postmasters called Alan Bates (played in the TV series by the actor Toby Jones) managed to resist and turn back the juggernaut, in part by getting others to understand that they were not alone, and that the problems they were seeing—with huge amounts of cash apparently going missing from the accounts they were running—were common to many, rather than being unique to them.

And yes, my friends had seen the series. It was why they were so furious. (The full press release from ITV, especially the quotes by the writer, is a good read in itself.)

So, I asked, did you know about this before ITV got involved? Did you know there were all these people who were being convicted, whose convictions then had to be quashed, who were having to line up for compensation that might come years after they had been cleared?

“Oh yes,” said one. “It’s been rumbling on for years! There’s been stuff in the papers and so on.”

Which prompts the obvious question: why have I never heard you complaining about this injustice before? Why does it take a TV dramatisation in the quiet period of the year to get everyone worked up? And make no mistake, people are really worked up about this since the broadcast. Every MP and minister, right up to the Prime Minister, has been required to have an Earnest Quote about making sure that Things Are Put Right As Soon As Possible. There’s discussion about passing a law that would exonerate all the people who were convicted. You’d think the government was being assailed by people with cattle prods.

What’s driving this, apparently, is a flood of emails to MPs’ inboxes from constituents who have seen the TV programme. People, just like my friends, are outraged.

This has provoked a certain amount of teeth-gnashing and holding of heads in hands among some journalists (not, it should be said, the Computer Weekly and Private Eye ones) along the lines of “But we told you! Does nobody read what we write?”

The answer is that, yes, people read it, but there’s a key difference. The news reports are factual, intellectual, reasoned. The TV drama works on an emotional level: it introduces you to people, and then shows their lives being ruined in detail, in a way that sparks your empathy. And once the emotions are engaged, you are prompted to feeling outraged; even to taking action, such as writing to your MP or of course posting on social media about how outraged you feel.

This differing response was neatly satirised by the comedian Rosie Holt, who took on her character of the blue-suited Tory MP who pops up to speak for whatever foolishness the government has got into this week (or day) to blame someone else, and explain why the government hadn’t come up with plans for laws to quash all the convictions sooner: there hadn’t been a drama with Toby Jones until now.

This is where outrage has a positive value: it makes us collectively point to what we see as bad and deserving of being thrown out or excluded from our group. Which is a very ancient response. The neuroscientist Molly Crockett wrote one of the key papers on this, a 2017 comment in Nature Human Behaviour called “Moral outrage in the digital age”, which notes that moral outrage is “an ancient emotion that is now widespread on digital media and online social networks”; in a 2019 seminar, Crockett expanded on that premise, noting that

moral outrage has been an important evolutionary tool for humans …acting as a deterrent to future transgressions and creating a sense of social cohesion.

(Crockett’s work was really fundamental to my hypothesis about social warming, and how it works and how it spreads.) Arguably, outrage contributes to survival: if you’re in a small tribe and you need everyone to do their part in order to get through the next few freezing months, outrage at those who don’t pull their weight—and the threat of exclusion, which could be deadly to those left on their own—acts as a powerful incentive to stay in line with the group’s moral order.

Of course in this case the outrage is all pointed at the Post Office. The problem is that there’s so much that’s deserving of our outrage, but which we just don’t have the energy to respond to. Social media can feel exhausting because it’s one outrage after another, all demanding our immediate and maximal response. But we can’t; there’s only so much energy we can devote to something that isn’t directly what we’re interested in. Israeli hostages, injured Gazan babies, sick dogs, rapacious billionaires, what are we meant to focus on? And so in general we don’t actually do anything, apart perhaps from posting and maybe sending a little money if we can afford it. Part of the problem is the atomisation of social media: we can’t be entirely sure quite how many people are agreeing with us about something—that is, how big our “tribe” at any moment is.

Unless, of course, the object for our emotional involvement is on a medium where we know millions of other people are seeing exactly the same thing at the same time. Then we can feel that we’re part of the tribe, and we are effectively told what to feel. (It’s like being part of a football crowd composed only of home supporters.) Then, we can effect change. Already since the TV drama went out, Paula Vennells, who ran the Post Office for a number of years and was given a CBE in 2019 has volunteered to give the award back; Fujitsu’s current boss has said the company has a “moral obligation” (interesting choice of words) to contribute to the compensation being paid to those who were wronged; and Fujitsu is voluntarily withdrawing from bidding for government work while the public inquiry continues. (I suppose the next step is to change the company name in the UK to something completely unrelated such as Gramdon or Sasment in the hope that the phrase “formerly known as Fujitsu” will eventually die out.)

But for the wronged people who were only trying to adjust to new computers, outrage has at least done the right thing. Perhaps now we can see why this emotion has survived so well.

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Glimpses of the AI tsunami

(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)

• OpenAI quietly lets itself provide services for the military. Next stop Dark Star?

• Also OpenAI: it says the NY Times lawsuit against it is without merit. Mandy Rice-Davies would like a word.

• AI (well, machine learning) can link fingerprints from prints not on file to those which are. At least, the trainers think so (with 88% confidence). A challenge to the idea that every fingerprint is unique.

• Google News is starting to include garbage AI rewrites. And doesn’t show much sign of getting to grips with them.

• ChatGPT wants a Farmville moment—like Facebook had early on—with its new ChatGPT Store of specialised bots. Because that would get people engaged, even if it isn’t how the full future turns out.

• TikTik is a time bomb. Very thoughtful essay (typical of its author) about how TikTok essentially uses its AI system to reinforce our weaknesses for content we find compelling. Which was sort of the original point of this section, but Gurwinder says it with more depth and breadth.

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