Category: Everything Political

The missing final chapter from ‘Dirty Work’

Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work is a slender book with an ambitious purpose: to call attention to a damaging influence on NZ democracy. The book amounts to a detailed explanation of the activities of an extremely visible network of lobby groups, all run by Jordan Williams, and all serving the same underlying agenda.

I found it arresting. I particularly appreciated the section covering one of the first persuasion campaigns undertaken by Williams in New Zealand, the 2012 effort by British American Tobacco to push against the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes. Longtime readers of the blog may remember it as something I wrote about at the time, largely concerning myself with how mystifying this campaign was, as it was clearly conducted at huge expense, and clearly destined to fail. (The two big posts were this one, and this one.)

Among the political and media class, however, the book has received a mixed reception. Many journalists have found it underwhelming. Hager’s exposure of how the Williams network operates is not a revelation, it seems; everything described is routine and ordinary politics. This is just what lobbying is. And the book has little else of note, lacking Hager’s customary revelations. (See this summary of media reactions by Bryce Edwards.)

I do think the book is incomplete, but not for these reasons. To be clear, Dirty Work‘s clear description of the Williams network is sufficiently notable in its own right. Tze Ming Mok summarized the value of the book extremely well: It is for the public, to have summarised in one place, the story of an influential lobby group with the context, analysis and moral judgment that our gallery reporters have no incentive to provide. (From a fantastic thread on Bluesky, read it all.)

The missing piece of this book, in my eyes, is a clear-eyed look at the other half of this ecoystem. Hager describes clearly how the Williams spiderweb produces and circulates a set of toxic messages, but does not similarly expose the operation of the media channels through which this propaganda spreads. Why is there no incentive for our media to provide a framework in which we can appreciate the nature of such a powerful influence operation?

These two components, the Williams cinematic universe and political media, cannot properly be considered in isolation. They have evolved to fit together like host and parasite. This is where I wanted more than Dirty Work gave me. I wanted exposure of the media context in which Williams operates.

One piece is social media. Williams’s multiplex of lobby groups exploits the vectors for propaganda and recruitment that are all that is left of the world’s two major social media channels, Facebook and Twitter/X. These platforms are now set up to serve the goals of dark money operatives, who cultivate anger through manipulative and even misleading messaging. There is a developing global conversation on this subject, but the scale of it is out of scope for Hager’s meticulous local investigative reporting, so we can similarly set it aside for now.

The other piece concerns our news media and the commentariat the exists around it. The tactics of the Taxpayers Union and related groups have been developed and refined specifically for our local messaging environment, not just to spread there, but in fact to influence these environments to make their messages more successful. This, then, is what I see as the missing chapter of Dirty Work: how our news media allow themselves to be gamed by Williams.

(Yes I know, it is the same thing I always want to talk about.)

What is actually missing

Before continuing, I should make explicit that I don’t really think there is a missing chapter in any practical sense. Hager’s focus in this book is crystal clear and appropriate, and as I have noted above, the book stands alone perfectly well. Furthermore, this piece isn’t ignored; it appears throughout Dirty Work, in the ragged edges of stories and down in the secondary paragraphs. Hager’s focus throughout is on Williams, and he is not here to expose journalism and media, particularly given he is part of both (albeit a contentious part).

I call it a missing chapter because drawing together these threads and edges into something clear and strong would add immeasurably to our understanding of what is taking place here, and round off the narrative of the book in a way that would give readers a better understanding of its significance. And if not as part of the book, these matters can be addressed by the discourse around it. Unfortunately, so far this has not happened at all. It’s not surprising as to why: the media are in no hurry to indict themselves.

I think there is a call for both a descriptive and an investigative angle to our hypothetical missing chapter:

  • What is observable about the functioning of our news media and commentariat that makes the Williams method so effective? What patterns are observable in the things that are not reported and not widely understood about the Williams spiderweb? What should the public know and understand that they do not?
  • What is happening inside newsrooms and editorial conversations to create these patterns of emphasis and de-emphasis? What are the effects of ownership influence that might serve the goals of the Williams Performing Circus of Wonders? How seriously does the media take its mission of informing the public, how self-reflective is it regarding its limitations, and how does it balance these concerns with the increasing commercial pressures of operating an era where clicks mean survival?

Why the media exist at all

Maybe some first principles, to ensure we proceed from a solid foundation.

Democracy requires deliberation. It is designed to generate a series of acceptable compromises to protect everybody, heading off the possibility of tyrannny, fascism, and any number of other forms of society that load misery unequally.

Deliberation, in turn, requires information and analysis. The complexity of human society is such that this has to be, well, mediated. There is too much for citizens ever to appraise themselves of directly. To be successful, democracy requires a system that surfaces important issues and allows the filtering of the key arguments across them, so the voting populace can make an informed choice on the essentials.

Obviously that’s not going to happen. But we can at least try. And the Jordan Williams technique described in Dirty Work does nothing except hijack the processes we have to massively overrepresent one specific perspective: opposing any limit or burden on the wealthy by undermining the institution of government itself.

An example of the problems

In the days immediately following the release of Dirty Work, we saw an example of the very phenomenon it discusses.

The Parents Alliance is a new lobby group launched in September 2026. It has no direct connection to the Williamsborg (at least, none identified so far) but there are some second-order links, not least the involvement of David Farrar and Jonathan Ayling. This lobby group claims to speak for parents, with a platform of “common sense” positions arrived at by extensive polling.

And maybe they are exactly as they seem! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is, at least in part, a group which has been constructed to pursue a particular political agenda matching the direction of every Williams-linked group. Education is a particular focus of energised activism on the right, mostly oriented towards classic subjects and onerous testing, unbounded parental choice, and avenues for charter schools and private capture of educational funds. There are strong “common sense” arguments for all these things which downplay or occlude the significant costs associated with each of them.

To take just one example: on the post announcing his involvement with this new group, Farrar says his impetus for involvement was “when the “experts” produced a draft science curriculum that did not mention physics, biology or chemistry. This is when I realised that parents needed to speak up.” The scare quotes around “experts” is a tell. The 2023 curriculum was ambitious, embedding new critical approaches that were strongly based on robust evidence. However, these changes could be attacked in soundbites that excerpted small pieces and challenged “common sense”, and that is exactly what happened; the curriculum became an attack vector for a reactionary right ecosystem that was hungry for anything they could label “woke”. Nothing in the criticism at the time, and indeed in the whole replacement curriculum rushed through since, has been given equivalent evidence-based consideration.

So we have right-wing activists intimately involved in this project, and an appeal to “common sense” which has often been used as cover for a project of throwing red meat to their online base while pursuing their fundamental ideology. That, to me, is more than enough to call for some consideration of what is happening here. We rely on the media to help us determine what is happening. Instead, no questions have been asked, and this new group has been welcomed in media coverage entirely at face value.

Again, I’m not making any claim that this group is anything but earnest. Nor am I saying that the criticisms of the 2023 curriculum that launched Farrar’s piece of the project should be dismissed out of hand. But I am saying simply accepting its self-presentation is naive. Given the lacklustre track record of existing media coverage of education issues, a group such as this could significantly push public opinion further away from evidence.

Another layer of consideration: even if this is a genuine representation of a plethora of parental voices, we should consider also how it can be deployed in media disputes going forward. It is expressly positioned as a voice for parents, in opposition to teachers or public servants. What this will mean in practice, it seems likely, is that every time something new is introduced to the education system, the media will balance out the teacher or ministry explanation with a Parents Alliance reply. Detailed research and evidence-based conclusions will be held to the standard of “common sense”. And that, de facto, will serve the greater project of the right, undermining the idea of government itself.

All of these concerns are clearly prompted by the narrative account in Dirty Work. And they are, evidently, absent in how the Parents Alliance has been received and how it will be managed in the media going forward.

How the rules get played

The media is not a dispassionate observer, watching as if from a moon colony and reporting factually about the events of the day. It is an active social and political force. And the news media’s methods of accounting for this are underwhelming at best.

Consider by comparison the art of online discussion moderation. It is well understood that if you run a forum, comment section, chat group, etc, then eventually you will attract troublemakers. You need behaviour rules for your space, to set standards of expectation, or you will de facto exclude a bunch of people who do not want to be bullied or abused. But as soon as you have rules, the trolls will cheerfully find ways to walk the exact line of what is allowable to make life awful for others, and ideally to trick them into violating those very behavioural rules set up to protect them.

Bad actors do not care about the spirit of the place. They do not care about a shared purpose or a greater goal. They just want to have their fun, or spam their particular message, or whatever it is, and they will use every devious means they can to do so without violating any abstract rule. To moderate effectively, you can’t rely on the rule and say that does the job. You need to exercise judgement, constantly, and you need to aggressively make decisions that uphold the principles of your community. Part of this is accepting that sometimes you will over-police someone who is just having a bad day, or who expressed their ideas poorly, or whatever. Tough for them.

Journalism and the wider world of media really seems to believe that its code of balance and neutrality is a shield against exploitation and bias. In reality the bad actors trying to exploit media channels are going to use every trick they can to tilt media coverage their way, all without breaking a single rule.

“It is essential to cover both sides of an issue” is laudable but fraudulent, and led, for decades, to climate change scientists being balanced out in the media by fossil fuel spokespeople, or that species of rare scientist who doubts mainstream consensus and who has been coddled and funded and raised up by fossil fuel dollars. This still goes on across many issues of public interest; and this persistence is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.

“If both left and right are mad at us we’re probably doing okay” is convincing until you realize that the forces of wealth will never be satisfied and will never stop loudly complaining about even the tiniest misrepresentation, even in coverage that flatters them by adopting their priors; and this dissatisfaction is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.

“We just report the facts and let the audience decide” is convincing until you recognize that the production and distribution of facts is not neutral, and cannot be neutral, and agencies underwritten by bad actors work to flood the public space with facts carefully selected to reinforce their self-serving construction of reality, and to at least cast doubt on if not drown out any factual production that threatens it; and this flood is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.

“Opinion from journalists is fine as long as it’s clearly marked” is a sound principle except for how it has enabled extremely partisan voices to rise in media prominence by exploiting simplistic populism, and then have their political worldviews implicitly stamped with authority by the media apparatus around them that treats them as major figures of legitimate journalism (radio hosts Mike Hosking and Heather du Plessis-Allan are the most visibly examples of this, but the same phenomenon was present in how Cam Slater was treated until Hager’s previous Dirty book revealed some connivance in the background of his work; all three are of course recipients of NZ Media Awards, presumably for doing journalism the right way).

“Weight your coverage towards the political issues the population cares about” makes sense except the ways to discover the issues the whole population cares about are flawed and gameable, and the care of the population can itself be manipulated, by agents who work to shape both things without accountability or visibility; and this invisibility is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.

Our neutral media apparatus presents built-in affordances for exploitation, and the Dirty Work of Hager’s book exposes a paid strategist working successfully to exploit them. But the book is limited by not examining these affordances directly. They are not inevitable and natural. They are choices made and reinforced by specific people within the media hierarchy. Like weak moderators who let trolls run rampant on their platform because they never quite step over the arbitrary line of the rules, the editorial cohort in media is (wittingly or not) complicit in allowing malign forces to twist our democracy to anti-democratic ends.

And this is only one aspect of the larger puzzle. Commercial pressures on news media have never been more intense than in this era of global tech hegemony and economic austerity. Billionaires purchasing and consolidating news media and then taking an activist stance to this ownership have led to an unprecedented open tilt to media perspective, one that doesn’t even pretend to the flawed neutrality discussed above. Competing sources of information filled with cheaply-made provocative lies are able to financially sustain themselves on the proceeds of ragebait, and crowd out traditional media channels. It’s tough out there.

Things to do

So, you’re a citizen. What to do?

Protect public media ownership. The wealthy would love to destroy public media. The BBC has been both boxed in and deeply wounded and is gasping in an alley right now. The Trump administration is aggressively attacking funding for and the legitimacy of PBS and NPR. Here in Aotearoa, TVNZ and RNZ have been targets for waves of accusation, undermining, and reform for many years. The present straitened media landscape provides perfect cover for thinning out public broadcasting, just as it is more essential than ever. There is no compromise here: once gone, these institutions will be lost for generations, perhaps forever. (As it is, recovering their strength is probably the work of multiple generations.) These are however high-visibility institutions, and the public attention and voice on their fate is strong. This means resistance from ordinary people can make a real difference. Join the fight.

Demand a citizen’s agenda. The citizen’s agenda was devised by Prof Jay Rosen. It is a toolkit approach for a media org to shift its approach to political coverage so, instead of being lost in the horserace-called-from-the-moon of neutral reporting, conducts a process to identify a set of policies that are of public significance and importance, and then uses its coverage to hold these as a measure for everything that happens in the election period. It is a responsible approach that would transform coverage. This is just one model, of course; the important point is that the path of least resistance employed at present is leading to exploitation.

Engage, carefully, with a fifth estate. If the media are not going to challenge themselves, then we must look elsewhere for a force that will hold them to account. Unfortunately, the world of media analysis and critique is rich with wild voices and conspiracism, and every conspiracy theorist from Trump on down is dubious about the mainstream media and its biased production. Devising a solid rubric to sort the good from the bad is beyond scope of this blog post but probably imperative. Perhaps there already exist some good criteria to apply?

Talk with real people. Ultimately these influence operations work by infecting the everyday conversations that happen all around our society. The only way to counter at that level is to add good messages into this conversational exchange. Chat to the hairdresser and the shop assistant and the person waiting in line to see the film. Be normal. And should any of these issues naturally come up, say what you think. It has an impact.

Dirty Work is available at bookshops and libraries all over. It’s a quick read, and a good one. Thanks, Nicky Hager.

A visit from Nicky

‘Twas the night before Hagermas, and all through the motu
Folks posted their reckons, some random, some thought through;
The liveblogs were hung on the news-sites with care,
In hopes that our Nicholas soon would be there.

The Bluesky crowd nestled all snug in their bubble
And dreamed of the TPU getting in trouble;
While Unity Booksellers laid out the seating,
Preparing for crowds at the book-launching meeting.

Then out on the street there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the curtains and opened the sash.

The streetlights were shining and down on the road,
A van had skid-spun around, spilling its load
Then what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a bright eager man with some tiny rein-deer.

He set to reloading with movements so quick,
I knew then and there that he must be our Nick.
His boxes of books had been tossed all about,
So he set his fine coursers to work with a shout:

“Now, Tipster! now, Finder! now Searcher and Sneaker!
On, Ethics! on, Standards! on, Rawshark and Leaker!
Restack this book load, put the carriage to wheel!
We must be on time for our cover reveal!”

In a magical flurry the coursers set to,
Leaving books neatly stacked looking creaseless and new,
And the heavy van righted, quite ready to drive,
Now I knew the new Nicky would safely arrive.

Hager spoke not a word, but went hard to his work,
And surveilled the vehicle; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger to rest on his lips,
He fixed his eyes on me, and silenced my quips.

Then he sprang to his van, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like a deer-guided missile.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he raced out of sight—
“Merry Hagermas all, and to all a good night!”

[International friends: Nicky Hager is an independent journalist down here in Aotearoa who likes to drop a book of explosive revelations on the eve of an election. As is traditional, no-one has any idea what tomorrow’s book will be about.]

How NZ media launders right-wing extremism

I continue to despair at the state of local media, a longstanding concern as the venerable mediawatch category on this blog shows. As the information environment has eroded into its present miserable state, the failure of the media to rise to the occasion grows ever more inexcusable. Today delivered a particularly egregious example of how unthinking journalists can cheerfully serve the needs of some of the worst people in the world. These bad actors know exactly how to take advantage of our media, and yet in 2026, well into the era of Trump 2, with fascism on the rise and right-wing authoritarianism stronger than it has been since the Second World War, somehow our fourth estate remains completely vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.

At issue is this story in Stuff, one of Aotearoa’s primary news sources: MP defends knitting in Parliament: ‘I find it calming and makes it easier to concentrate’

Lloyd Burr has turned in a light-hearted story about MP Deborah Russell, who can sometimes be observed knitting while at her seat in Parliament.

Russell’s act of knitting prompted some feedback into Stuff’s inbox. One of them said “I’m outraged at the footage of a Labour MP knitting in Question Time. These people!!! Knitting!!!!”

Is it really such an outrageous thing to do during Question Time?

Burr then reported the Speaker of the House’s confirmation that knitting is explicitly allowed in the House, and has been for decades, finishing the para with a light touch: he jokingly added that “it may lead to too much uneven tension in the knit”.

Deborah Russell is quoted saying she finds it helps her concentrate, and we get extra context: lots of MPs are texting or doing social media or games on their phones; a number of other MPs from all sides of politics have knitted while in the House, including several current MPs. The piece ends with a classic human-interest light touch finale: “The funny thing is, I’m actually not that much of a good knitter,” she laughs.

What a charming story! A few grumpy phone calls have been comprehensively dismissed with the addition of good-humoured context!

Except.

Stuff also put on the page [EDITED TO CLARIFY: on their home page, devoid of context] an interactive poll, complete with the cutesy use of a knitting needle in place of the usual pointer. And that has generated tens of thousands of votes, which show the takeaway from the story is not as benign as the cute tone suggests. In spite of long-standing rules, cross-party precedent, testimonial of benefit, and the fact the entire story presents this as fine and dandy, 20,000 people (as I type) still think it’s not OK. Hundreds of comments on the story also include plenty of aggrieved voices who find this completely unacceptable.

Despite the cheerful tone of Burr’s article, and the jaunty energy of the knitting needle pointer, the material effect of this story is to introduce thousands and thousands of people to a fresh justification for furious anger towards (left-wing) politicians.

Lloyd Burr and Stuff just circulated hate propaganda.

This is not a surprise. It was, in fact, completely obvious, so obvious a simpleminded blogger like me could call it. And that’s exactly what happened. I encountered the story on Bluesky, where Hayley/writagal (an excellent follow BTW) shared it expressing entirely appropriate frustration.

I’m going to feature my reply in full because I called it exactly right, and I say this not to show how clever I am (hahahanope) but the opposite: that it was completely obvious to anyone who is paying attention to how any of this shit works now.

This story looks to me like it has come out of one of the outrage mines. Some RW trollmonger on X or in a toxic FB group has seized on it and drummed it up into an issue, and now Stuff is obediently repeating it as "people are concerned". Exactly what the troll accounts wanted, well done Stuff

I expected it was some chud on X who had noticed Deborah knitting and decided to make a thing of it. A couple hours later I braved the feotid waters of X, plugging “knitting parliament nz” into the search function. This incredible investigative skill was rewarded with the culprit: some chud on X who had noticed Deborah knitting and decided to make a thing of it.

But wait, there’s more. By using the advanced investigative technique of “scrolling down slightly” I found even more shocking evidence: this wasn’t even the first time! Back in July the same poster had made almost exactly the same post!

These posts had generated lots of engagement on renowned hate site X dot com, but the first one hadn’t made it out of the troll ecosystem. This time, however, someone had actually sent an email to the Stuff website, and that was all it took. Suddenly it was A Story.

Regardless of Burr’s and Stuff Editorial’s intentions, covering this story at all was handing a win to the right-wing haters. Of course it does! The whole story is about something that looks like a distraction! That’s why there was a need for a specific rule allowing it! That’s why the same subject has been covered in the media in the past! The most salient point of the story is that the negative first reaction is wrong!

This point was completely lost.

As soon as you put an image or video (which Stuff also posted under a separate header!!) of something that, at first glance, looks like a politician failing in their duties… then you’re inviting hate. Especially if they’re on the left. ESPECIALLY if they’re a woman.

The tone of the story, the exonerating facts, all of the words Lloyd Burr put in that story are so much dust in the wind compared to the communicative force of raising it as an issue at all, with images and a reader poll to boot. And this was completely obviously the case right from the start.

So far, so bad. Turning this grumpy email into a story was phenomenally ill-judged, and the story itself was wrapped and presented in a way that would only deliver terrible consequences.

But instead of stopping there, I’m going to use my completely self-taught journalistic skills to take my background investigation to a higher level, with the extremely advanced technique of “clicking on their profile picture”.

Gross.

Just to decode for anyone blessed enough not to know: “Socialists & Globalists” here is a reference to Jews, and relates to grotesque conspiratorial thinking about left-wing ideas that is frequently used to justify all kinds of hatred and atrocities. Gab is a social media site utterly dominated by extreme right ideologies. This guy is a fascist troll hiding his identity, with thousands and thousands of followers, enthusiastically connected to global comms channels that promote hatred and conspiracy.

This is the guy who is looking to make Deborah Russell the target of political and media approprobrium.

Lloyd Burr has done exactly what this fascist prick wanted. Stuff Editorial has done exactly what he wanted.

There was no need to cover this at all. Covering this story was losing. A pathetic self-inflicted failure of journalistic standards, once again, and at the expense of a woman in politics, once again.

And how much media coverage of the extensive community of hatemongers who spread their conspiracy and stoke outrage and try to undermine democracy? None.

Not good enough.

Facebook: Rules of Engagement

(original photo by Makeen M.Alaa on Unsplash)

Facebook has become a crucial battleground in politics.

On Facebook, waves of comments expressing toxic views create an illusion of mainstream agreement, establishing dangerous social norms.

On Facebook, deliberately contrived propaganda is carried into regular communities to harm positive and progressive causes.

On Facebook, soundbite opinions about political events are circulated, spread, and refined.

If you’re still on Facebook, you’ve seen how wild it gets over there. It can feel like reality has been swamped by bots and monsters. Take heart! The troll army is smaller and weaker than it seems. We can push back, and make a (small but mighty) difference.

(1) Why Facebook matters

The internet has changed a great deal in the last decade, and now we are dealing with a single overwhelmingly important truth: Facebook is the only social media platform where regular people talk to each other.

Other big social media sites (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.) are broadcast channels for receiving content as an audience. Other talk-based social media sites (Reddit, X/Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads) are small next to Facebook, and do not really attract a membership of regular people. (Users tend to be ‘very online’.) Specialist community social media (Neighbourly in NZ, Nextdoor in the US, the NeighbourhApp in Dignity Falls) gets close but doesn’t have the reach.

Regular people go to Facebook and use it daily for regular person reasons:

  • It has a peer-to-peer marketplace that dominates informal selling.
  • It is the online front door of many small and medium businesses.
  • It has an events system that makes it easy to organize parties, special occasions, public events, and more.
  • It shows you what your friends and family are up to, and lets you share your activities with them. (Although this functionality has been degraded, it still works enough to keep people on the site.)
  • And, crucially, it has interest group spaces, where you can see and join discussions about whatever you’re interested in. (This is the only aspect of Facebook that genuinely works well.)

One of the most popular interest group types is the local community group, where a broad cross-section of people in your city, town, or suburb can report lost pets, complain about driving, and discuss the news. On the entire internet, Facebook is the only place this happens at scale.

This makes Facebook crucially important for societies and communities. Politics happens there in a way that it does not happen anywhere else online.

We’d better not abandon it to the right wing machines.

(2) On Facebook, influence is tilted.

In the New Zealand election 2026, Facebook posts and comments will directly influence the voting decisions and political beliefs of countless Kiwi voters.

That influence will be overwhelmingly tilted in favour of reactionary, conservative, and paranoid right-wing parties.

The right has several advantages that help create this tilt:

  • They have the money to place their messages into the platform’s machinery. The political parties directly, but also lobby groups such as the Taxpayers Union and the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
  • They benefit from the structure of the platform. Hot take posts with a simple message provoking a negative emotional reaction generate the kind of activity that leads to circulation via the algorithm. These kinds of post suit right-wing politics much more than left-wing politics.
  • They have the global moment in their favour. Reactionary forces have not been so dominant around the world for over half a century. International messages are delivered into local context by the algorithm.
  • They might also have international interference operations in their favour. Russian activity is real, and while it remains to be seen whether this will a factor in the coming election, it was a factor in the last one.
  • They have the benefit of mendacity. Knowingly false or extravagantly exaggerated claims can easily be illustrated with AI slop and thrown into the algorithm to powerful effect; these kinds of posts serve right-wing messaging much more than left.

These advantages give right wing forces high visibility on Facebook.

There are many Facebook interest groups founded on social fear. Groups spring up expressing worry about immigration, or new health measures, or governance changes. Some are created deliberately by malign actors working to a strategic plan, but others form genuinely as grass-roots actions by concerned people who hold on to social fears.

These groups can become thick with discussion about what is feared, and spread worry and anxiety. Discussion in these groups is almost never about limiting worry or calming members down. The direction of travel is always towards greater fear, and more extreme views. In this way, these groups become entry points into more extreme message groups, which promote ever more elaborate and toxic views of the world.

The distance from a toxic fear group to a busy local community group is small. For those caught up in these fear beliefs, all of these items appear in the same scroll on their Facebook feed. They see paranoid hatred towards Jacinda Ardern that deems her a mass-murdering globalist, and just below, a National Party member scaremongering about the dangers of the Labour government. It all becomes one thing.

Inevitably, then, fear messages from these toxic communities make their way into regular discussion. They come from genuine members of these communities who earnestly hold these beliefs and express them; they come from cynical provocateurs who enjoy stirring up trouble by poking at the ‘do-gooders’ of the world; they come from bad faith political actors who have no actual beliefs to speak of but recognize these messages serve their ends; they come from fake accounts operated by foreign actors seeking to harvest engagement or stir up trouble.

The way Facebook works right now, these messages propagate on neutral spaces in numbers that vastly overrepresent the actual social presence of these beliefs.

They make it seem like there are lots of them. Like their views are extremely common, even the majority. They are not, not even close.

That discrepancy is territory we have ceded.

We can push back.

(3) Rules of engagement for Facebook

On the largest scale, there is not much to be done that will change this election. These factors on Facebook are locked in place. The playing field is tilted. That can’t be fixed in the next few months. It’s an important battle, but the best thing to do for it right now is strive to get the best people for that fight into government.

But there is a huge amount that can be achieved as part of our everyday engagement with our social media environment.

Whenever you visit Facebook, aim to make it just a little bit more pleasant and a little bit more real.

Here’s how to make your contributions most effective, and avoid making things accidentally worse.

[NOTE: Am I missing something? Is something wrong? Let me know so I can improve this list.]

How to engage depends on the kind of post you are looking at:

Posts from right-wing sources: Scroll past any post from a right-wing source. National/ACT/NZ First politicians, Destiny Church, lobby groups… Don’t engage. This just promotes their messages and gets the algorithm humming. They want battles under their posts, do not give them such. (Hardcore options: Read to identify key messages; screenshot and reply elsewhere without sending views to the original post.)

Neutral media sources: Under media sources, e.g. political news articles from RNZ or The Spinoff or NZ Herald, we can comment without driving engagement to RW messages. Particular things to do:
* take messages from the story that resonate and restate them in your own words. Many people won’t click the link.
* directly quote key lines from the story, with a comment like “this is the most important bit”.
* respond to a political message with a real world example from your life. (Don’t make one up!) “This policy would make a huge difference to my brother who does X, Y, Z.”
* reply to other people saying positive messages with more positive messages, particularly if they are getting shitty replies.
* if there are racist/hate messages in the comments (surprisingly common), make a comment (not a reply to an offender) asking for comment moderation.

Things to avoid:
* replying to RW troll/propaganda/negative messages. The engagement just pushes their comments to the top of the heap so people scrolling by will see them first. In fact, the “Most Relevant” filter will often hide your comment and just show theirs.

Friendly sources: Under posts by left-bloc politicians and parties, science outlets commenting on issues of concern, progressive activist folks, etc, you can get stuck in in support. Any action here will help the algorithm push this further. Particular things to do:
* heart and like reacts for the main post
* respond with any kind of positive personal message, something very ordinary is good to set the tone (but not revealing! Don’t open yourself to targeting by trolls!)
* reproduce and celebrate specific points made that you agree with
* wherever possible, emphasise how these politics are extremely normal in the global context. Giving NZ a chance to catch up with other countries is always a great message. Something having worked well in other countries similar.
* reply to any post with hateful subtext not with rage or disgust, that’s what they want. Dismissive contempt is the way. Don’t let hate sit unremarked, but don’t give it heat either, chill the temperature down until everything is icy cold.
* if you want to reply to less offensive troll posts with dunks, mocking rebuttals, sad GIFs, or whatever, this is the place to do it. Can’t do much damage here.

Things to avoid:
* don’t get over your skis, going too hard and overstating how amazing someone is. Regular people react badly to puffery. If you have a personal story of how someone genuinely did something amazing, then go for it, but if it’s just generalised cheerleading, watch the tone.
* don’t get so caught up in fighting trolls that you start to hate the internet and yourself. There is a cohort of people out there who are literally playing a game where they win by emotionally exhausting you. You can always ignore them, and should do so forever.
* by the same token, if a troll account challenges you to prove something or say something or whatever, don’t do it. Even if you do have the answer, just don’t do it. Treating these asks seriously is giving them respect they do not deserve and prolonging a conversation that helps them more than you. Just leave them hanging, like they don’t matter to you in the least. They hate that.
* (if it’s a normal person asking for more info, then go for it, keep chatting. You have to use your judgment about who is normal and who is troll. Some people have aspects of both, humans are complex!)

Local community groups: In these spaces, you can definitely make a difference. Here are some things to do:

* Share political posts from good sources into the group, with a context note about how it will affect local services or local people. Advanced mode: in the context note, instead of saying the thing, ask everyone a question about how the subject might help your community. You want the question to close off avenues for troll/shitpost responses as much as possible.
* Uphold an expectation of respect and kindness in your community. Every community wants to see itself as respectful and kind. Call out instances where kindness fails or respect has not been shown; “here in X town, we show respect to each other.” Don’t come in too hard, but don’t waver either.
* Be present and supportive in non-politics posts too. Community members will remember your name from post to post.

Things to avoid:
* International politics issues. Trans discrimination in the UK, the death toll in Gaza, freedom of speech in the US… Local people just don’t want to see these invoked. Even if they are relevant to what you’re discussing, don’t bring them up. Find another way to deal with the real topics. Yes these things matter! But you are not being negligent by not bringing them up as part of this process.
* Criticising people who don’t get everything right. Sometimes people are wrong on the internet, let it go. You have bigger targets.

(4) Look after yourself

Remember to log off. If you are not used to getting involved in this kind of talk on Facebook, it can be… unpleasant. People act awful online, much more so than in real life. Comments can feel very personal even if they’re not. And sometimes they will be personal, and that’s not okay! Don’t wreck your wellbeing for the sake of a few Facebook comments, that’s not helping anyone.

Find some friendly support. Any Facebook friends who are on the same page as you? Give them a message. Have each others’ back out there.

Consider locking down your account, especially if you are anything other than a white guy.

Accept that you will never see any proof it helped. There’s no way around that. You’re working to shift an invisible vibe among lurking users. There’s no way to see if it works. You just need to trust that it does, because real people are on Facebook and then those people vote. No matter what you do, the laugh react guys will keep laugh reacting, but you can be confident voters have seen your signal too.

That’s it. Repeat until the election. Good luck.

(Thanks to Kelly Whyte for some very helpful advice.)

Why I’m Tired

I posted on Bluesky about the state of society, politics, media, all of it. Reproducing it here with slight edits for readability.

I start by quoting the following post from Russel Norman, former leader of the NZ Greens so not just some internet rando: “We now know that within the Prime Ministers Office there was a political lobbying pathway operating via the PM’s Chief Policy Advisor’s private email. Fonterra says it was told to send the lobbying docs via this pathway. It may still be operating via other staffers private email addresses.”

Part of why I/we are feeling so tired is that there is so much obviously unacceptable shit happening and the channels for even pointing it out have narrowed to what feels like a limit.

The quoted post from Russel Norman is incredibly damning but it’s hard to imagine how it might get the wide attention it deserves.

Mainstream media is incapable of meeting the moment. Well-intended journalistic principles have been thoroughly gamed, resources have been starved, journos crushed with broken incentives, and ownership has been co-opted. Illiberal forces know this is their opportunity and they are going for it.

And outside of that, what is left?

The “bluesky is an echo chamber” complaint isn’t wrong; this is one of the only remaining places where reasonable assessments can even be heard, and so we gather and share those reasonable assessments to reassure ourselves we can see it. Whole place is the 😅 emoji.

Meanwhile, I see local communities doing their best to function on Facebook, doing a good job by and large; but next to them on the feed is an overseas news post about Jacinda Ardern swamped with literally hundreds of comments calling her a horse (or worse). A public square irretrievably poisoned.

Yes, this is the exact same thread i have posted probably a hundred times before, expressing the same lamentations in slightly different words. Only a decade ago all these things worked so much better! The Dirty Politics machine could be countered! But now there’s nothing else.

It makes me so angry to see how far social infrastructure has been allowed to collapse, and how those who’ve retained a voice have largely been content to just sit and watch it happen. Their compliance so easily purchased, not even with flattery or corruption; all that was needed was expectation.

It’s an academic disease to overweight the importance of the thing you know about, but I did a masters degree on the power of social norms and it sure seems to me they are the trivially apparent engine of so much of our dysfunction. We all want to fit in with those around us. We trust the wisdom of our crowd. And that is leveraged against us as the extremely wealthy converge on self-serving messages, and well-resourced malefactors flood social channels to create harmful norms.

We know that actually sitting down with people in our communities reveals much more generous views of each other, and more readiness to think critically and openly. But at scale, that is massively expensive. And in its absence, manipulation rushes in.

So I’m exhausted. This NZ government is the worst we’ve had in many decades. Actively destructive to constitutional principles, heedless of evidence, profoundly undemocratic, willing to entertain and encourage hatred for the sake of its coalition. And I just can’t see how to fight it from here.

The wickednesses of the coalition are precisely aligned with the weaknesses of how we do society in 2026. (The weaknesses of the opposition are likewise aligned with the failings of what we are forced to work with.) We’re left hoping for a thousand viral TikToks to somehow turn the tide.

All we can do is push. Luckily Aotearoa NZ’s elections are proportional, so every vote won makes a difference. So I’ll keep pushing. And I’ll stay in the BlueSky echo chamber, where the norms aren’t toxic. Which you’d think wouldn’t be so special. But 2026 is like that.

Regulatory Standards Bill submission

Finally got around to reading this Bill on the last day subs are open. Made these notes (on Bluesky, thinking out loud).

  • It seems to be “if your legislation doesn’t match ACT-style libertarian principles, you need to admit it and wear a sign saying NOT LIBERTARIAN ENOUGH” which has various emergent consequences if embedded in a system.
  • 8 (l) legislation should be the most effective, efficient, and proportionate response to the issue concerned that is available. Is *this bill* the most effective and efficient response to the (supposed) issue of poor-quality regulation? A new legal obligation and oversight board?
  • Creating regulations is always about complex trade-offs on many dimensions. The Bill’s proposed principles are a narrow set of political priorities, not universal concerns, and as such using them as a universal measuring stick is farcical.
  • Surely a future government would just immediately repeal this rather than repeatedly hold up a “not libertarian enough” sign? And if that’s the case, this whole Bill is a waste of effort, right? You can’t legislate norms
  • The principles by which regulation might be judged are not, probably can’t be, settled. The Regulatory Standards Bill would force subsequent governments to pre-concede a particular political framework. It’s an attempt to win a political argument by legislating that you won.
  • basically, (1) any set of principles is inherently political & contestable, this legislation reaches too far in declaring such a set; (2) where specific principles are widely agreed (e.g. role of courts), this Bill is an extremely heavy-handed way to increase conformity even if such is needed

After thinking about it on a dog walk and then later on another dog walk, I turned that into a submission, which is reproduced below. (Unmentioned in this sub is how disgusted I am by the antics of David Seymour online, encouraging his followers to jeer at people who have voiced opposition to the Bill. He is a grotesque hypocrite and a perpetual irritant.)

My submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill

The Regulatory Standards Bill is bad law. While acknowledging other submissions will raise many areas of concern, I will focus on two that stand out to me as sufficient reason not to progress this poorly-conceived bill into law.

1) The heart of the Bill is the set of Principles given in s8. As designed, the Bill demands all new regulations be tested against these principles, and a clear statement is required when there is an inconsistency.

This set of principles is not a generally accepted set of norms for responsible regulation. To the contrary, the principles contain political stances that are heavily contested within the NZ Parliament. 8(b) in particular is an example of such a political claim. The heavily contested nature of the construction within 8(b) is plainly evident in the response to this Bill, and in years of discussion and argument about how “liberty” should properly be represented in the laws that govern society.

By the same token, other Principles that might be widely held as important to responsible regulation by key constituencies, such as consideration of Te Tiriti or climate crisis, are entirely absent. 

This Bill is an attempt to leapfrog political debate and embed a particular political position within the legislative process. This is improper, in that it treats an active debate as a settled one. It is antidemocratic, in that it attempts to legally privilege some perspectives over others. And finally, and most importantly, it is unwise, in that it will lead inevitably to this legislation either being repealed entirely, or becoming a repository for an endlessly revised set of principles that reflect the political goals of the government of the day. 

This reason alone is enough to strike down this Bill now.

2) Secondly, the Bill proposes a legislative reportiing requirement from Ministers for all proposed new regulations, and then builds an elaborate further system complete with a newly constituted Board, in order to achieve its aims. Even on those principles that might be broadly held (e.g. 8(i) on the importance of consultation with those affected by law), the structure imposed by this Bill would be far in excess of what is demanded by the problem. Principle 8(l) says legislation should be the most effective, efficient, and proportionate response to the issue concerned that is available; this system is none of those things, but instead creates work for a fresh bureaucracy. Other avenues that are more effective, efficient, and proportionate exist: taking the pressure off the public service to do more, faster, with fewer people, for example. Policy makers in public service are highly skilled and highly principled but wildly overstretched, and dealing with that is surely the most obvious first step to address the problem claimed by this Bill.

This reason, too, is sufficient to strike down the Bill.

This Bill should not be progressed, as it is improper, antidemocratic, unwise, and unnecessary. It is badly conceived and would make bad law.

Submission on the Treaty Principles Bill

Submitted on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, on the official website. Submissions remain open until 7 January.

The Treaty Principles Bill would be disastrous to the future wellbeing of Aotearoa and should be rejected with sufficient force and clarity as to damage any future attempt to revive it.

I endorse the submissions of many other organisations, and also the advice of the Waitangi Tribunal and the Regulatory Impact Statement from the Ministry of Justice, as to the deficiencies of this Bill. In particular, I oppose this Bill’s attempt to remove indigenous rights by referendum.

Indigenous rights do exist, as an historical fact by virtue of the Treaty arrangement made between two peoples on the European settlement of Aotearoa, as a legal fact by virtue of international jurisprudence around Treaty and colonisation law, and as an ethical fact by virtue of the natural justice that must accrue to the descendants of those harmed and deprived by systematic exploitation approved by the colonial government. The Bill’s purpose is ill-founded.

Furthermore, putting indigenous rights to public referendum is a grotesque proposal given the extensive popular misunderstanding of crucial facts about this nation’s history and the well-founded grievances of Māori. These misunderstandings are loudly encouraged by bad actors fomenting social division for varied self-serving reasons, and by an international context of so-called ‘culture war’ that is clouding our ability to perceive and manage ourselves as a distinct nation. In such an environment of loud but misplaced opinion, a public referendum poses a profound risk of creating injustice.

Even accepting the premise of the Bill that the Treaty Principles should be revised, a good faith effort to do so in the manner proposed could only begin by launching an extensive effort to educate and inform citizens about Aotearoa New Zealand history, de-prioritise contrarian disinformation sources, and speak honestly about what our society really is. In the absence of any attempt at such a project, it is necessary to conclude that this Bill is presented in bad faith, as an attempt to take advantage of misinformed public sentiment to remove the proper rights of a people who remain disadvantaged by profound and systematic harms. 

There is no place for this Bill. It can do no good, only harm. 

Wait did Generation X win??

It is required, whenever you post about Gen X, to include an image of OK Soda, even though OK Soda wouldn’t be remembered at all without the art by Dan Clowes and Charles Burns, OK Soda was in fact a branding success, in this essay I will

On the latest episode of the Why Is This Happening podcast, host Chris Hayes chats with McKay Coppins about the incoherence in the Trump Republicans. It’s a great listen in general, but I took particular note of their suggestion of how Reagan’s three-legged stool has been roundly rejected by US voters. It made my ears perk up because it fed into a line of thought I’ve been stuck in for a while about Generation X, my generation, and the failure of everything we tried to do. Maybe it’s come around a bit more than I realised?

Hayes and Coppins suggest that stool is wobbly these days. The Iraq War took out voter support for the foreign intervention leg, and the GFC wrecked voter support for fiscal hawks, and I can’t help but notice that those are two things Gen X resistance had at its heart. So I dare to wonder, maybe, in a roundabout sort of way, without even trying in the end, Gen X politics won after all?

As much as we had politics! Late Gen X like me came up in a strange moment, as Anil Dash noted resonantly the other day. We had the Battle of Seattle, yes, but mostly we just floated around feeling excluded from power and influence, while quietly waiting for bigotry to die out with the old people who held those views (because, of course, bigotry was something old people did, and would go away by itself).

And this is what I’ve been stuck on, for ages now: just how much we failed. Everything I associate with the political concerns of my cohort just had zero impact. No Logo and Manufacturing Consent and indymedia and One No Many Yeses and the biggest global protest in history and none of it did shit. Every bad thing came true anyway.

(And then it got worse from there.)

The analysis in this podcast (and I am of course predisposed to believe it but also I think it’s evident in the public rhetoric of Trumpist politics) suggests that, as much as it’s hard to perceive, the big picture is that those Gen X politics, my politics, have actually become widespread. Sure, it’s because the world got completely broken twice over, and it doesn’t reflect a principled engagement with the values espoused on the Lilith Fair stage, and it has nothing to do with how persuasive those issues of Adbusters were, but I reckon we can safely put all that under the generationally appropriate headline “ironic”. Despite everything we tried to push the world there, it ended up heading so far in the other direction it looped around to the right sort of place anyway.

The sad thing of course is what has happened to the third leg. Social conservatism has grown huge and vigorous in ways unthinkable to younger me, and even with two stool legs gone, the Republicans remain robust enough to win a popular majority of US voters. Fascism is no longer a weird rump belief system akin to Flat Earth (which, not coincidentally, is also back). Cruelty is in.

I think my point, if I have one, is that maybe I don’t need to feel too despairing about the Gen X project, and all the stuff I cared about, and how I listened so carefully to the lyrics of those Rage Against The Machine songs and pretended not to notice that most people weren’t doing the same as they jumped up and down. Because (munters aside) we were right, and we were proven right, and maybe there are now a lot of people out there who basically agree with what we were trying to say.

And maybe that means that the political conversation can, possibly, move forward?

Maybe… there is a good bit of hope to be had?

I can’t believe that fascism and fear-driven hatred are a sustainable basis for a political project. And without the other legs, the US right wing is surely going to break over it. I hope it happens sooner than later, because while it stands it can and will do tremendous harm.

I hope there are good folks ready to take advantage of that moment, when it comes.

Anyway I went back to this the other day, the 2020 re-up of Fight The Power, and though it already seems like it comes from a million years ago, it felt good. Check it.

Obligatory Trump Post

Everyone with a blog is contractually obliged to write a post about the 2024 U.S. election result, here’s mine.

So that’s how it is.

There’s something kind of freeing about it: we’re in the bad timeline. The majority of U.S. citizens who got off their backside to vote wanted Donald Trump in the chair. Despite. (Or, in a non-trivial-but-unclear-%-of-cases, because.)

“He is a danger to democracy and the world” was true and far outweighed every other thing at stake, but it was apparently poor messaging.

“Inflation and immigrants are out of control” was apparently great messaging. It was also not true.

What we can learn from this is: when fascism is on the rise, it’s important not to say anything about it because it’s a turnoff? hmm doesn’t seem right.

***

Social psychology is my area. I have enough expertise in it to know I don’t have any expertise in it. But here’s what I can say with some confidence:

With rare exceptions, human behaviour isn’t reasoned out from information.

But this doesn’t mean the information environment – Fox News as the background noise of an entire swathe of the U.S.A. – isn’t meaningful or influential. We are all surrounded by stories, and they are extremely powerful.

We remember stories that explain the emotions we feel when looking at our local situation.

We like the stories that make us feel good about our emotional reactions. We call these stories “important” and “true”.

We dislike the stories that make us feel bad about our emotional reactions. We call these ones “unimportant” or “lies”.

We like it when our neighbours agree with us about which stories are true and which ones are lies. We can repeat those stories a bunch, getting more assertive every time. It’s a way of validating our emotional reactions, and building an alliance with those who share the same feelings.

Fox News and similar are very good at circulating and repeating stories that validate a certain set of emotional reactions, and ridiculing stories that could undermine those emotions. That’s the whole game.

An entire generation has grown up in the bubble of these social norms. The specific stories have changed – a few years ago, the story about Trans people changed in a major way, for example – but the underlying emotions have not.

The information environment is really a normative environment. It’s an enormous permission machine, saying it’s okay to feel angry and afraid and disgusted, in fact it’s expected. All you need to do is look around you. You’re not alone.

The people who voted for President Trump, even the so-called “low-information voters”, know enough about what he is: the consensus choice for people who feel the same as they do.

And feelings don’t care about your facts.

***

It is possible to shift social norms by transforming the information in an information environment, but it’s much easier to do so by transforming the emotions experienced by ordinary folks. Homosexual law changes didn’t arise from information, but from people meeting gay folks in their own lives and finding they were just ordinary folks. Different emotions at ground level changed the whole thing.

It’s bloody hard for a political campaign to shift either emotions or information. The media can, sometimes. Unfortunately 21st century journalism has decided that’s not its job. Easier to report on the horse race than to try and actively shift the profound misunderstandings held by one voting bloc about fundamentals like crime and the economy.

***

It’s not good, is it. But before all is said and done, I reckon a few more Nazis are gonna get punched in the face.

Just Do A Meow Wolf

Photo of Meow Wolf Las Vegas by Kate Russell, taken from this article

Simon Arcus, chief executive of Wellington Chamber and Business Central, thinks the city could do with some new attractions, such as the previously pitched World of WearableArt (WOW) museum or the interactive and immersible creative installations of Meow Wolf, a Sante Fe arts collective.

Cruising the Capital: Why the ‘Must Do’ list needs a shake-up

This paragraph deep into a newspaper article about Wellington’s limited offer to tourists caught my eye, or more correctly, it made both my eyes roll right back into my head while I laughed incredulously. The city’s big business guy throwing down Meow Wolf as a new attraction possibility, even as an aspirational example of original thinking (or however you might generously frame it), lands with a massive clang, the clang of failing to really understand what you’re talking about.

Short version: Arts is hard, business guy.

Meow Wolf is an arts project (originally a collective, they incorporated somewhere in the last decade-half) that specialises in huge, immersive experiences featuring the work of large numbers of artists. Based in Santa Fe, they have also opened permanent exhibition locations in several other US cities. The vibe is like Disneyland meets Philip K. Dick, at least that’s as I understand it from far away, i haven’t been lucky enough to visit a Meow Wolf. They do cool stuff.

Wellington, of course, has a bunch of stuff that directly overlaps with what Meow Wolf do: we have lots of artists here. We have a busy games/tech sector. We have a huge engine for creating fantastic worlds in the Wētā studio system. We have smart creative people. Can’t you just see a Meow Wolf-type thing working in Wellington? I can! It seems to fit right in!

Here’s why the idea clangs: to get a Meow Wolf you need a lot more on your side than ambition.

Most obviously, a Wellington Meow Wolf has a size problem. It has to be big, not just to copy what worked overseas, but because if you’re doing an immersive attraction, it needs to have some breadth to it, or folks are going to wander through in ten minutes. And it also needs some depth to it, or it isn’t delivering on the ‘immersive’ side. So you’re right away looking at a large (not huge, but large) installation, and the investment needed to fit it out to a high standard and keep it refreshed and engagement-ready. Embedding the work of artists, and paying them properly, too. None of this is cheap but that’s fine because we’re going to get an audience of cruise ship passengers and return visit locals and out of towners and…

Not so fast. Scale is the devil for immersive; the economies of scale don’t kick in like they do on other projects. Even when you don’t have performers, as is normal for the Meow Wolf model, you still need to hand-feed every experience to a certain extent, and the more people you include, the more uncertainties dilute the reliability of the experience and make it impossible to actually do what you want to do.

A local Meow Wolf is devilishly hard. We’d need some big installation spaces, and a lot of customers willing to pay significantly to offset the rents and ongoing labour involved, as well as covering off the heavy investment of setup costs. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard.

But this is actually the wrong end of the conversation. Because all this assumes that you are doing a Meow Wolf by taking an overseas success story and just copying it here.

The truth is, you don’t get a Meow Wolf that works without growing it at home. It’s artwork, and artwork has to cook from local ingredients or it’s going to leave a bad taste.

And here’s where the real clang comes from, for me. Because to get a Meow Wolf, you need to cultivate and support a community of artists over many years. You need a city that gives them space to live affordably, and allows them to mix and develop. You need to put money, real money, on the table for artists to try things and explore and do stuff. A lot of those things will fail as commercial attractions.

Put it this way: the road to a local Meow Wolf is through dozens of failed local Meow Wolfs.

So my eyes rolled back when I read Mr. Business Guy tossing out Meow Wolf as a thing we would love to have. Because where is the support for artists in this city? Where are the business leaders advocating for the kinds of conditions that would allow artists to survive? Where are the businesses putting money for emerging artists to make the city more interesting? Where are the business notables lobbying local and central government for the kind of support that would make art viable here? Where are the rich business folk putting money on the table for art collectives to try weird stuff?

It’s easy to say we should have a nice thing. Harder to recognize that the nice thing is the output of years of effort and risk and support. Even harder to say “if we want Wellington to be a good destination we need to invest in our artists”. Ultimate difficulty level to say all that and add “And I’m demanding our government make changes that would help this situation.”

Because that’s it, right? Unless you engage with the politics, it’s all just smoke, You want a better Wellington, business guy, well the National government you love so much isn’t gonna get you there. Be honest about it.

(I’ve been involved in a couple of attempts to develop some kind of immersive something for Wellington. Both of them ran out of steam early on because the difficulties are substantial. But I do think – no, I feel – there’s going to be some clever hack to circumvent all those logistical limits and set something up that could work here in a sustainable way. I haven’t found it yet myself, but, you know, I’m thinking.)