When we fall, we reach out our hands to all of humanity, going back even to that first wacky keystone couple who slipped on an apple peel and fell flat on their faces, Adam and Eve. I tell my kids that no one ever learned anything from success except how to imprison yourself trying to repeat it. I also tell them to try hard and work their asses off, that work is its own reward. Talk about mixed messages. It must be confusing. This makes me sound like kind of a bummer dad, but I assure you that this is all funny stuff. And that Beckett is as funny as the finest stand-up.
Drunk birds in North Texas BoingBoing
At a workshop in a London hotel, Eliot Higgins teaches his tradecraft
The proof that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons came from an unemployed blogger working from his sofa in
Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins: ‘We’re on the precipice of the misinformation age’
The internet investigator on his ‘people’s intelligence agency’, unmasking Navalny’s poisoners — and why he isn’t another Assange
Ten years ago I would have found a call like this unbearable,” Eliot Higgins tells me. It’s not the most promising basis for a relaxed lunch. When Higgins was young, he felt everyone was watching him. He was too nervous to speak up, too self-conscious to go to the pub. Even now, aged 42, he struggles to stress how extreme his anxiety was: “really terrible”, “really severe”, “tremendous”. Every few months, he’d have a panic attack. “I’d feel dizzy and my heart would start pounding . . . When it’s so much part of your life, you don’t even realise it’s unusual. I think it held me back a lot.”
The irony is that Higgins now watches other people — in a way that should make them even more anxious. For a decade, he and his collaborators have trail-blazed detective techniques that stitch together social media posts, satellite data and confidential databases. Their feats are remarkable. They proved that Syria’s regime used chemical weapons against its citizens. They unmasked the Russian “kill teams” who poisoned defector Sergei Skripal and opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Vladimir Putin has changed the law to try to stop similar embarrassments.
The past decade — from the collapse of the Arab spring to QAnon — led many people to despair. For Higgins, peering into the dark corners of the internet allowed him to find himself. The more he tracks the west’s nervous breakdown on screen, the less anxious he feels. His new confidence is such that he has to stop himself slipping into interview mode. “We’re sitting on the precipice of the misinformation age: from the information age to the misinformation age,” he says, with quiet, precise urgency. Higgins lives in Leicester, but we are meeting in his spiritual home: the internet. He fills my screen with a thick brown-and-grey beard (“every time I’m about to get it cut, there’s another lockdown announced”). It’s a few days after the storming of the US Capitol. That event proved that, when people unhinge themselves from reality, reality itself is in danger. It was a showcase for Higgins’s obsessive fact-finding. He stared at footage until he spotted a man dragging a police officer to the ground to be beaten. “It was virtually invisible until you realised what was happening, because it was partly covered by people’s arms and legs.”
Bellingcat, his investigative group, analysed Twitter posts by a woman killed by police as she tried to enter the House chamber. It found she had backed Barack Obama, before becoming taken by conspiracy theories.
In the past we were looking at radicalisation of people who joined Isis. It’s the same kind of process that’s happened with these Trump supporters. Instead of worshipping Allah, they’re worshipping Trump.” John le Carré demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has demystified intelligence gathering itself: his workings are published online for anyone to check. While le Carré’s novels oozed factual and moral uncertainty, Higgins’ blog posts are less poetic and less pessimistic. Their ethos is that truths can be verified, and that sleuthing can help us to escape our political quagmires. Navalny described one Bellingcat investigator, Christo Grozev, as “a modern day Sherlock Holmes”. Higgins calls his non-profit outfit “an intelligence agency for the people”. In his new memoir, We Are Bellingcat, he writes, “This is only the start.” The start of what? Of online detective work? Or of something more ominous — the chaos that has necessitated the detective work in the first place? Even in the Biden era, powerful autocracies, state-backed misinformation and fact-free extremism may continue to thrive. Higgins is one of the internet’s good guys — a champion of truth in a post-truth world. Is he destined to be outnumbered?