Margaret Atwood on Doomscrolling: ‘I Want to Keep Up With the Latest Doom’

Well, yes, they can participate in Jordan Peterson discussion groups.

But that’s not a very stable platform.

But if society is not taking the voices of young men seriously and we are increasingly suppressing the voices and the success of women, I would argue…

Yes.

Whose voices do you think are being taken seriously?

Exactly. Well, I think you’re probably better placed to answer that question than I am. But every time Elon Musk opens his mouth, people take that seriously. So I would say tech bro billionaires are taken seriously. Who else? I don’t know. Are we gonna count, quote, “influencers”? I think a lot of podcasters have pretty devoted followings. But again, it’s very fractured.

I think you just nailed it, though, and I’m actually working through this while we talk. Everyone takes someone’s voice seriously. But it is a fractured ecosystem. So we are all looking to a different source of truth.

Yeah, that’s true. And that happened at the end of the 19th century with the literary community, which had been pretty monolithic in the middle of that century. By the end of it, it was pretty divided up. So I think anytime you introduce a new communications technology, you’re gonna get a lot of disruption. Let me just mention the Gutenberg press followed by 300 years of sectarian religious warfare.

When WIRED’s Kate Knibbs interviewed you a few years ago, you said “I am not counting the United States out.”

No, and I’m still not.

You know, everybody wants a little bit of hope.

Well, first of all, Canadians shouldn’t be mad at Americans.

Well, you tell that to my dad’s wife.

All Americans didn’t do this.

Well, she’s not mad at me. There are just many people in my life in Canada who don’t want to come to the United States anymore.

They’re scared.

Yeah. It’s hard.

Yeah, especially with this new thing that you have to bring five years of social media information…

Disqualifying for many, many people.

So yeah, they’re scared, they’re apprehensive, and they don’t want to take the chance. That’s not the same as being mad at all American people, which is just stupid.

Of course. I have actually been surprised in the last year at how little resistance, relatively speaking, we are seeing in the United States. You know, employees at the big tech companies that we cover at WIRED, they have essentially been silenced.

They don’t wanna be fired.

They don’t wanna be fired. The executives running those companies are having fancy palace dinners with the president of the United States. Everyday Americans are protesting here and there. We’ve seen some really substantial protests at times, but what would a revolutionary moment in this country look like?

First of all, the resistance is visible in the polls, which I’m sure you’re tracking.

Yeah. Of course.

They’ve been going down, down, down, down, down. So if you’re afraid of getting fired and don’t want the death threats and all the rest of it because you spoke out in public, you can express your opinion at the ballot box and in an anonymous poll. We are seeing that, we are seeing all those Democrats that got elected, and we’re seeing the polls going down. So, it’s there. But again, you have to understand that ordinary people are not billionaires and they have jobs.