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.