This time, the motoring sound overhead said “police helicopter” and thus “desperate criminal”, and my teenage daughter had just left the house. I was getting ready to worry, but then a parent-friend texted me a local news article that might have eased my mind. There wasn’t a desperado on the loose where my daughter was out walking, according to the headline. There was merely “Major Police Activity” at our local elementary school. A dire feeling spread through my chest. For Americans, such a headline means one thing — Mass shooter. It’s happening, I thought. It’s really happening here. But then I read the article, and suddenly I wanted to do some desperate crime on whoever wrote that damn headline. There was no mass shooter at our little school. There was just a bomb threat.

The threat was false, of course. No one located a bomb hidden around the school, not even the police 1,000 feet up in a helicopter. (Generalising from the many bomb-threat stories I’m familiar with, a pretty good way to be confident you’re not going to be bombed is if you’ve just had a bomb threat.) But the bomb threat wasn’t the only trouble to visit the school that day. The school office and several school parents also received a barrage of angry and sometimes racist and threatening emails written in response to… well, in response to a playdate.

This is what happened: someone claiming to be the parent of one or more kids at the school — which my three kids attended from 2011 to 2022 — made a Reddit post. The post lamented that, once again, the “Equity and Inclusion Committee” of the school’s parent organisation was hosting a weekend “Playdate Social for Black, Brown, and API Families” on the school’s playground. (API means “Asian and Pacific Islander”.) This parent attached the flyer for the playdate alongside his Reddit post (which has been deleted), and this flyer, along with a screenshot of his post, was picked up by the popular Twitter account Libs of TikTok.

Libs of TikTok generally tweets about things that are alien and alarming to people who have not signed on to the recent revolution in culture and morals — sexually explicit books written for young children, a transgender activist encouraging children to run away from home, a school system hiring a drag queen and accused paedophile to be its new middle-school principal. The account has 3.4 million followers, and since any collection of 3.4 million people is going to contain some number of unbalanced and violent psyches, and since Libs of TikTok followers have self-selected based on an appetite for things that make them angry and disgusted, you’d expect the typical post from this account to generate a wave of unwelcome correspondence to its starring character.

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But Libs of TikTok added something extra to its tweet about our local playdate. The outrage effect of its tweets typically owes to the primary source documents they contain — videos, photographs, book pages. That’s why it’s called “Libs of Tiktok” — its moral revolutionaries beclowning themselves, no commentary needed. But in this case, it gave its own gloss on the playdate, without which there would have been far less outrage, a much smaller number of angry emails that would have been far less openly racist, and probably no bomb threat at all. “A California elementary school,” the tweet says, “reportedly held a race segregated ‘playdate social’ for all students except the white kids.”

But the flyer doesn’t say “all students except the white kids”. It says, “for Black, Brown, and API families”. I’m not trying to be clever or sophistical here. It’s true that, if you add up all the official racial and ethnic categories of family comprised by the phrase “Black, Brown, and API”, no other category is left out besides “white” (no other category that I can think of; the taxonomy here comes from diversity bureaucrats, not logicians or set theorists). But there’s a distinction in the difference that would have been meaningful to the readers of the flyer whose kids go to the school.

To put it a different way: for (white) parents in the school community it would have meant something much more pointed and hostile if the flyer had actually said “for all students except the white kids”, or “no whites families allowed”, or something similar. Since the flier didn’t say those things, since no one was seeming to aim an intentional poke in their eyes, they could go on with their day after seeing the flyer, entirely unoffended and unriled, even if in their private thoughts they lamented some aspect of this flyer, this implied logic of excluding white families, the larger mindset it expresses, the politics that issue from this mindset. They could do this not because they’re squishy Californians or moral relativists or political cowards, but because this is their community, and it was a playdate. It was families at a schoolyard on a Saturday, families they know, parents they like, kids who are in class with their kids, friends with their kids. There was literally no way to openly make those critical points that didn’t threaten to blow up — so to speak — all those relationships, to blow apart the school’s community, and there is nothing in the supposed provocation that made it minimally worthwhile to try. That’s why the guy who started all this registered his objections on a Subreddit, under a pseudonym, instead of angrily waving a sign in front of the school.

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The playdate, you might say, was the harmless practice of a bad theory. Indeed, this was more or less the Redditor’s point, a man who said he himself fits in the “brown” category (his Reddit handle suggesting that, ethnically, he’s a mix of Iranian and Pakistani). He didn’t mean his post to go viral and feed a national frenzy of racist threats against his kids’ school. He wasn’t really complaining that white families were being injured by this playdate. He was speaking more abstractly. This weekend gathering was an instantiation of a bad model, which blandly self-perpetuates thanks to strong incentives, and to its unchallenged, foundational status in key institutions. It is often tolerated in practice partly because, in individual instances such as our local playdate, you have to put your First Principle glasses on and sort of squint to see what the problem is: “I suppose the effect of such an invitation is to exclude white families from the casual Saturday playdate on the Upper Yard, sort of, I guess. I hadn’t really thought of it like that before.”

In fact, these kinds of racially circumscribed gatherings are happening all the time, with no opposition or controversy, at schools all over the country. I bet they’re happening in Tennessee, in Alabama, in Louisiana, without anyone getting up in arms about them. They’re that innocuous, in themselves. The people who organise and attend them are regular parents, nice people who care about their kids and in no way deserve to be harried and threatened by faceless fanatics from other states. In organising these events as they do, explicitly including some people and leaving others unmentioned in hopes that they won’t show up and make things awkward, they’re simply practising Equity and Inclusion, contradictory as that sounds. Equity and Inclusion is simply the language of the institutions that reach out to them in their demographic specificity and say: “You are special in your worries and struggles, because of your skin colour.” As parents of school-age children, they surely do have worries and struggles, some of which may relate in some plausible way to their skin colour, and so who can blame them for accepting the terms in which their institutional patrons approach them with offers of special consideration? For my part, even though I dislike the Equity and Inclusion model, I’m way angrier about cowardly outsiders coming for my fellow Oakland school parents and my kids’ former school than I am about that weekend playdate.

Still, it is a bad model — which I’ll now give its more common name: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI. DEI is a robust form of public, society-ordering power that is exercised privately, by unelected bodies inventing and enforcing codes of affinity and behaviour rooted not in legislation but in the institutional interests and operational biases of those bodies. It works to analyse and categorise racial and ethnic difference, but also to administer it — that is to treat people differently according to which DEI category they inhabit. Because this goes against deep-seated human conceptions of fairness, DEI methods generate a steady flow of conflict and resistance, which is something else DEI personnel have deputised themselves to administer, often coercively.

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And in this bureaucratic way of seeing and ordering the human subjects within its purview, the DEI model undermines the type of solidarity I felt when my fellow Oakland school parents came under attack from outsiders. This model simply can’t make sense of fully inclusive multiracial affiliations — such as “Oakland school parents” or “Americans” — except as human agglomerations to be taken apart, sectioned and set against each other according to the terms of its programming. In other words, the main paradigm by which virtually all mainstream institutions in the US understand and manage race relations actively promotes social fracture, when the country is already coming apart for other reasons.

This I know leaves me in a sort of paradox, a guy fondly invoking solidarity with a community informed by an ideology that is antagonistic to that solidarity. But I feel no need to resolve the paradox, to line up my sentiments with my pet ideas. Indeed, one of the ways in which I see myself practising solidarity with my fellow Oakland school parents is by peacefully coexisting with the paradox, choosing the people, in moments of conflict or crisis, over the ideas. Another way is by declining to take offence at a little flyer about a casual weekend playdate — unlike the email hysterics and bomb-threateners so eagerly triggered the moment a Twitter account gave them the signal — when no offence was intended.

These days we are accustomed to a somewhat tamed version of drag. But the best performers have always pushed the limits of acceptability: I once appeared at a comedy night at the Edinburgh fringe hosted by a drag queen whose interaction with the punters was not so much waspish as downright libellous. At another, I remember a drag artist smoking liberally during the performance, blowing smoke at a pregnant woman on the front row and saying “I hope you have a miscarriage”. It was a far cry from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Traditional drag is clearly meant for adults. So what explains the growing enthusiasm for “Drag Queen Story Hour”, in which drag queens visit schools, libraries and other council venues to read to young children? For whatever reason, this bizarre subgenre has been championed by celebrities and politicians who wish to be seen as being on “the right side of history”. Last week the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, tweeted about taking her infant son to a show in which a drag queen called Greta Tude “put so much energy into story telling and entertaining local children”. Her colleague Nadia Whittome replied, describing the event as “so wholesome”.

But do fans of drag really want it to become “wholesome”? The appeal of drag shows is that they revel in sexual dissidence, as the American drag queen Kitty Demure has pointed out:

“I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children… Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child? It makes no sense at all. A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on, and backstage there’s a lot of nudity and sex and drugs. Okay? So I don’t think this is an avenue that you would want your child to explore.”

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The sexual element of drag is impossible to deny. Even the more tepid drag queens, whose repertoire extends no further than lip-synching to Donna Summer, tend to interlace their performances with suggestive gestures, provocative quips and the occasional slut-drop.

That’s not to say drag queens can’t adapt to a younger audience — they are actors after all. It’s perfectly possible for performers of Drag Queen Story Hour to read stories to children without all the eroticised preening and pouting we have come to expect from them. But why would any self-respecting artist want to do it? There is something deeply mystifying about drag queens who choose to anaesthetise their art form in order to regale infants with tales of teddy bears and picnics.

While many drag queens are happy to tone it down, others have made little effort to modify their raunchy style for children. It may be that only a handful of performers fall into this category, but all it takes is a few viral videos for parents’ worst fears to be confirmed. Many such clips have appeared on the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account. The most recent shows a drag queen teaching a small child to dance for tips in Palm Springs, California. A previous video showed a drag show at a club in Dallas attended by children in which the words “It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself!” appeared in large neon lettering on the upstage wall.

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It’s not just American parents who are worried: the trend of sexualised children’s shows spread into Britain well before Drag Queen Story Hour. Last year, Redbridge Council commissioned an event at a local library which featured an actor dressed as a bare-bottomed monkey with a large fake penis attached to his crotch. In April, The Family Sex Show — devised by Bristol-based theatre company ThisEgg — was cancelled after parents discovered that it featured full-frontal nudity and content about masturbation, despite being aimed at children as young as five.

Do these artists have no comprehension of the innocence of childhood? If so, they’re not alone. Sex education theorists seeking to transform the curriculum argue that children ought to be taught about sexuality as early as possible. But it can hardly be considered prudish to object to five-year-olds being urged to “try sexual practices” with their “sexual parts”, as the website of The Family Sex Show suggests.

All this explains why drag performers are struggling to convince parents their intentions are benign. Inevitably, many critics have raised safeguarding concerns. Protesters disrupted a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a library in Reading last week, chanting “paedophile” and accusing the performer of “child grooming”. Such accusations are, of course, unfounded and unhelpful. Yet they also speak to the emotive nature of this debate, in which some reckless artists refuse to observe boundaries around children.

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In response, library staff have been trained to refer to drag queens as “pantomime dames”, as though they were in any way synonymous. This is misleading, and possibly insulting to the acts, as it strips away the political history of the genre and enervates its impact. There is more to drag than cross-dressing; it is a satirical commentary on gender roles and heterosexual norms, a means to stretch the ambit of decorum. If drag is not transgressive, it ceases to be drag. So why would drag queens sanitise their work?

It is difficult to escape the feeling that all of this is a form of goading, a way to provoke those who are perceived as “conservative” and “reactionary” and to increase the visibility and normalisation of the LGBTQ+ movement. Stonewall recently tweeted a claim that “research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity”. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Drag Queen Story Hour is being interpreted as an extension of Stonewall propaganda.

It’s not just the overt sexuality of some children’s drag shows that is alarming. Drag has long been seen as an excuse for men to mock and fetishise what it means to be female — and has even been compared to black-and-white minstrel shows. Feminists can’t be happy that children are watching men aping extreme stereotypes of womanhood. Surely, it would be prudent for local councils to stay out of this fraught debate?

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The organisers of the current UK library tour of Drag Queen Story Hour say they want to “show the world that being different is not a bad thing, and by providing imaginative role models for children to look up to, we can change the world book by book!” While it is not uncommon for children’s stories to convey a moral message, it does seem strange that so many drag queens are keen to undertake a pedagogic role that, in contrast to their typically bacchanalian late-night productions, must seem somewhat insipid.

Drag delights in the smashing of taboos. There are many genres and art forms that can be sanitised for a younger audience, but drag has at its heart a lascivious energy, a fuck-you attitude to societal norms. If you strip away all that to make it age-appropriate, what is left? Just a man in a dress. And Widow Twankey already has that covered.

At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence of advertising in the built environment as an unacceptable invasion. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder every three seconds by annoying canvassers while enjoying a quiet ciggie break.

So I set out to see if it was possible to ignore them. It was, it turned out, difficult: advertisers spend a great deal of money on being attention-grabbing, and it took a huge mental effort to tune out all that expensive effort to snag my awareness.

The “attention economy” was first theorised by the economist Herbert Simon in 1971: he called attention to the “bottleneck of human thought” and argued that in a world where this was a scarce resource, the smart money focused on grabbing a slice of it. After all, you can have the best product in the world but if no one has noticed you exist, you’ll still sink without trace. An immense amount of lucrative time and effort goes into the arms race for attention, and the results — not just on the Tube — are often eye-watering.

If it was difficult to swim against the commercial messaging tide two decades ago, it’s even harder now. When I did my Tube experiment, averting my eyes from the tsunami of paid-for messaging became exhausting after a few days. After a while, it was easier just to give in and swim on the tide of people trying to tell me what to buy. And today, the experiment would be harder still, with adverts covering every available surface and sometimes moving as well.

Over the same period, too, something equivalent has happened to the whole media universe. A vast commercial and political industry has developed with the aim of grabbing the punter’s attention and persuading us to buy, say or think something or other. The boundary between PR, journalism and propaganda is blurry to say the least, and flourishes atop an immense ecosystem of opinion-havers. And there’s no outside to it, short of moving to an uninhabited island with no internet access and never talking to anyone.

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As a result, we don’t just have an attention economy. We also have an attention politics: a byproduct of the explosion of content that came with the transition to digital culture. In that politics, what gets noticed isn’t just a bottleneck on the way to commercial success; it’s also the gateway to political power.

In the new attention politics, older information ideals curl up and die. For the liberal framework for thinking about communication dates back to a point before the internet, when information was relatively scarce, and could be suppressed. In that context, liberals wanted to resist such suppression, arguing that “free speech”, would enable a collective search for objective truth via a “marketplace of ideas”.

Along with this came the belief that free information and lively debate carries us all toward objectively agreed truths, while religious faith and moral principles should be as much as possible a private matter. Contemporary defenders of this gestalt gather at Quillette and other such “classical liberal” outlets, ever ready to mount a defence of free speech as a bulwark against bad ideas, or the importance of debate to the scientific method.

Now, though, we all have free speech. In a digital environment, you can’t really suppress it. Ban someone, and they’ll just pop up elsewhere (or in the case of Donald Trump, start their own social media platform). Not unrelatedly, what we have is no longer a scarcity of information but a superabundance.

The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long. So a great deal of soft social effort goes into constraining free speech, while still permitting speech to be (at least nominally) free. We can all say what we like; the battleground is now what gets noticed, and by whom.

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What does or doesn’t make the public eye is managed by a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; what should be boosted by algorithms; and what should make it into the respectable press. Even the original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, has fallen foul of this, after committing the dastardly crime of publicly noticing a Tweet by JK Rowling.

At the same time, too, “facts” have also become visibly unstable. In some cases, they vary dramatically according to local political conditions: for example, according to US officials, “gender affirmation” for children is officially “suicide-prevention care”. Meanwhile, officials in the UK and Sweden are rowing swiftly in the opposite direction.

And even where the facts themselves are not disputed, they aren’t really the main event any more. Instead, they’re data points for curated narratives. “NJ woman who forced daughter she fathered into child porn sentenced to 25 years in prison” is, on its own, just a story; but added to a curated list of related stories such as this one, it looks like a pattern of criminality worthy of notice — or of being deliberately ignored.

This sort of attention politics, the manipulation of narratives, sounds a death knell for the liberal ideal of politically neutral individuals or institutions. For confronted with an excess of competing and contradictory messaging, most sensible people don’t want to spend all their time working out what’s real. And when attention is scarce, political power accrues to those who are trusted to curate.

Most visibly, legacy media outlets now play this role: filtering the chaos of possible stories for a selection that fits (or at least doesn’t jar too sharply with) the readership’s worldview. But the facts, or stories, or data points we curate add up, cumulatively, to moral choices. If I notice the vulnerability of males who identify as women within all-male prisons, while (deliberately or not) ignoring stories that point to the vulnerability of women to males who claim to identify as women within all-female prisons, this adds up to a statement about what (or who) I think is important.

This variation in what’s emphasised (or mentioned at all) is easy to see across the national press: try toggling between New York Times universe and that of the New York Post, or between the Guardian and the Telegraph. You don’t need a media studies degree to infer the differences in moral framework that drive this differential noticing. And in any case, this isn’t an abstract game for media studies nerds. Our moral choices have real-world consequences.

Which set of “facts” is accepted by officials as true, about the right way to care for gender dysphoric children, will have significant medical consequences for youth in different jurisdictions. Or consider recent news that the state of New York is proposing to legislate for prisoners to be “presumptively placed” in accordance with their “self-attested gender identity unless the person opts out of such placement”. Set that against the list of crime reports above, and the decision to notice or not notice the link between the male sex and sex-offending adds up to a political choice that — as others have noticed — places real women at risk.

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And this is where the politics of noticing grows more contentious. For the general public aren’t mere passive bystanders. Noticing subcultures have swiftly emerged, sometimes sharply at odds with the official ones, and in which an effective curator can have real-world political impact. For example, the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account is credited with having transformed US education debates — simply by collating video statements made by progressive teachers.

In turn, this has spawned a whole meta-industry of NGOs whose remit is to stop unofficial noticers getting out of hand. Recent years have seen a boom in “fact-checking” organisations, who aim to extend the governance of noticing out into the internet badlands, often funded by immensely wealthy philanthropists — many of whom have well-documented political agendas.

This looks variously like an attempt to defend truth from manipulation by bad actors, or else covert censorship riddled with obvious bias. But the internet abounds with people who have assembled truly outlandish narratives from their preferred data points, such as in the QAnon conspiracy. And “misinformation” isn’t just a self-serving elite story: bot farms are routinely used in information warfare, to give the appearance of mass support to overseas messaging operations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that even the US Government is now an overt player in the politics of noticing. Last week, Joe Biden launched a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose job it is to tell the rest of the English-speaking world what is or isn’t real on the internet. Predictably, though, the reaction to this body was cynical. And no wonder: for Biden’s intervention does no more to address the loss of facts, objectivity and truth-seeking driven by information superabundance, than obviously biased “fact-checking” bodies funded by progressive philanthropists.

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But no amount of such “governance” will stop people noticing when narratives are uplifted, deprecated, or transformed from “disinformation” to accepted fact — or prevent them wondering about the context for such shifts.

Many Americans noticed, for example, when the insalubrious contents of a laptop belonging to then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter went from “Russian disinformation” to “authenticated by the Washington Post” in the time it took his father to beat Donald Trump at the polling booth. We’ll never know if burying that story swung the election. But it probably helped: an intuition that is, for many, just one more data point in the pattern of “neutrality” and “objectivity” serving as mere fig-leaves for partisan manoeuvring.

It’s common now to complain about the other side being guilty of “post-truth” politics, or to blame variously “woke tyranny” or “Right-wing authoritarianism” for the sense that truth has been replaced by something dismayingly slippery and chronically biased. But it’s a mistake to imagine that this is all the fault of whoever you consider your political enemies.

Free speech, objectivity, facts and the “marketplace of ideas” really are hopelessly compromised. But what killed them wasn’t Those Bad People Over There; it was the internet. It gave us too much information, and with it came attention politics. Now even the most die-hard defenders of political neutrality might as well lean into their own biases, because even if they don’t people will still notice them.

What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue. That’s ultimately a question of how completely a given elite is able to control the public sphere, in a hyper-mediated culture, if a critical mass of ordinary people doesn’t want to play ball. In any case, I suspect we’re on track to find out.