There’s an idea circulating that a 60 Minutes episode is going to convince people how covid spreads and then finally this will be the thing that convinces people to do something about it. This is absurd.
60 Minutes has done shows pushing the notion that all disabled people are scamming benefits. They brought us people like Lara Logan and John Stossel.
And for this clean air episode, they had GG Allin I mean JG Allen on the show. He’s a covid minimizer who apparently said kids should be back to fully in-person school even without any of his ventilation recommendations. And in none of what I saw about this show was anyone involved wearing masks. So how compelling is what they’re saying anyway if they don’t practice respiratory hygiene themselves?
Everyone knows covid spreads from people’s mouths and noses into the air. My coworkers and I discussed this in early March 2020, and we were not aerosol scientists, nor infectious disease experts. The CDC had already come out with information on aerosol dangers. It’s not a secret and never was. Yes, some people in government try to deny this for legal reasons. But it’s like when Trump lies – nobody is fooled!
The problem isn’t lack of understanding about how to stop the spread. People just don’t think it’s necessary because they’ve been led to believe it only hurts “those other people” anyway. And apparently they’re ok with that. They are often also ignorant of the true risk. But also some think whatever they’re doing is currently worth the risk. People smoke for years knowing the dangers after all. This isn’t some mystery.
I suspect that people on twitter that have audiences they want to keep engaged and focused on their area of expertise, are motivated to want to keep people believing if only their area of interest was “better understood” or people paid more attention to them and their expertise – it would all be fixed!
This is akin to accelerationist fantasy. There’s no tipping point where suddenly people are gonna do the right thing because enough people “wake up” to how covid spreads because they’re now fans of air quality expert social media stars. That’s just not how change happens, change is pushed by a few people who know better and make regulations happen, and then other people hop on board and decades later people take it for granted because they can’t imagine it any other way.
Awareness only gets you so far. The idea that if only enough people know, something will magically happen without me doing anything beyond re-posting something, is sure a really enticing fantasy to justify doom scrolling and doing nothing else.
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.
”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”