Margaret Atwood on Doomscrolling: “I want to keep up with the latest doomscrolling”

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

But this is not a very stable platform.

But if society doesn’t take youth voices seriously, and we increasingly suppress women’s voices and success, then I argue…

Yes.

Whose voices do you think are taken seriously?

exactly. Well, I think you’re probably in a better position to answer this question than me. But every time Elon Musk opens his mouth, people take it seriously. So I would say that tech billionaires are taken very seriously. Who else? I don’t know. Are we going to count, quote, “influencers”? I think a lot of podcasters have very loyal followings. But again, it’s too broken.

I think you just nailed it, and I’m actually working on this as we speak. Everyone takes someone’s voice seriously. But it’s a broken ecosystem. So we are all looking to a different source of truth.

Yes, this is correct. This happened at the end of the nineteenth century with the literary community, which was very homogeneous in the middle of that century. By the end of it, it was pretty divided. So I think any time you introduce a new communications technology, you’re going to get a lot of disruption. Let me just mention the Gutenberg press which was followed by 300 years of sectarian religious war.

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

No, and I still don’t.

You know, everyone wants a little hope.

Well, first, Canadians shouldn’t be angry with Americans.

Well, tell that to my stepmother.

All Americans did not do this.

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

They are afraid.

Yes. It’s hard.

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

Ineligibility of many, many people.

So, yeah, they’re afraid, they’re apprehensive, they don’t want to take the chance. This is not the same as anger from all the American people, which is just stupid.

naturally. I was actually surprised last year by how relatively little resistance we saw in the United States. As you know, employees at the big tech companies we cover at WIRED have been silenced.

They don’t want to be fired.

They don’t want to be fired. The executives who run these companies host lavish dinners at the palace with the President of the United States. Americans protest here and there every day. We’ve seen some really big protests at times, but what would a revolutionary moment look like in this country?

First of all, the resistance is evident at the polls, as I’m sure you’re following.

Yes. naturally.

They were going down, down, down, down, down. So, if you’re afraid of being fired and don’t want death threats and all the rest of it because you spoke out, you can voice your opinion at the ballot box and in an anonymous poll. We’re seeing it, we’re seeing all these Democrats getting elected, 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.