Trying to make sense of a senseless week in Sydney
Like all of you, I have spent much of this week processing the two horror events that have cast a pall over Sydney and the nation. After a lot of thought – and yes, some tears – I keep coming back to one word to sum it all up: senseless.
Last Saturday’s stabbing rampage at Westfield Bondi Junction claimed the lives of six people: new mum and osteopath Ashlee Good, young bride-to-be Dawn Singleton, architect and mother-of-two Jade Young, artist Pikria Darchia, Chinese student Yixuan Cheng and Westfield security guard Faraz Tahir. A shocking 18 people were stabbed in total, including Good’s nine-month-old baby. I still can’t get my head around how someone could stab anyone, let alone a baby in a pram, and doubt any of us ever will.
Of all the things said over the past week, the statement that rung most true came from the MP for the federal seat of Wentworth, Allegra Spender. “There was one guy who was trying to do enormous harm,” she said of the attack in her electorate. “But there were hundreds of people who were doing all they could to look after each other and keep each other safe.”
This is something we should all cling to over the coming days as we work through our disbelief, grief and anger at what happened.
The bravery of Inspector Amy Scott in running towards the attacker, Joel Cauchi, and shooting him dead before he could kill others is staggering. Equally brave is Damien Guerot, who is now universally known as “bollard man” due to his actions in challenging Cauchi on an escalator.
The security guards who confronted Cauchi also deserve our thanks. Tahir, who usually worked night shifts but had been asked to help out that day, died in the shopping centre. He was just 30. His colleague, Muhammad Taha, was stabbed but survived. Scott, Guerot and Taha should receive bravery medals, and Tahir should be awarded one posthumously.
Other unsung heroes are everywhere: the paramedics, doctors, nurses and surgeons who helped the victims, store staff who helped protect their customers behind locked doors, and the mental health workers who have been roaming around Bondi to help people struggling to come to terms with what happened. Our political leaders, particularly NSW Premier Chris Minns, have also handled the fallout with great sensitivity and empathy.
I am also extremely grateful to the Herald team for covering this terrible event and its aftermath. Within minutes of the attack, dozens of reporters, photographers, editors, designers and digital specialists volunteered to head to the scene, come into the office or log on from home. Their motivation was to make sure as many people in Sydney were as informed as possible. There are far too many to name, but they did an incredible job, and I am so proud of all of them.
Sydney , and the Herald newsroom, had no time to pause and regroup before a 16-year-old walked into Christ The Good Shepherd Church in the western Sydney suburb of Wakeley on Monday and stabbed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at least six times. The attack was particularly confronting given it was broadcast live via the church’s livestream.
The attack triggered a riot as up to 2000 people, predominantly young men, descended on the streets outside the church while the attacker was being treated inside. Dozens of police officers were injured, nearly 100 cars were damaged and six paramedics had to seek shelter in the church.
The violence on Monday night was as disgusting as it was perplexing, given the police were there to help Bishop Emmanuel and to investigate his stabbing.
The attack was quickly declared to be terrorism, further rattling nerves across Sydney. The attacker was charged on Thursday night with a terrorism offence. Some Sydney suburbs are a tinderbox of religious and ethnic tensions, and police, politicians and community leaders are doing everything they can to calm things down. The media has a role to play here, too.
Both attacks were very different, but I have at times struggled with the discrepancy between the rapid declaration of the Wakeley attack as a terrorism incident, particularly given the apparent mental health history of the teenager, and the equally speedy assurance that the Bondi attack was not.
Columnist Waleed Aly delved into this topic for us on Thursday, noting he understood why some people had views about how various events are labelled.
“I well understand the objections,” he wrote. “Each is anchored in bitter experience, and seeks to tell a certain truth. The Bondi attack crystallises the sense, indeed the terror, shared by countless women for decades that violence against them is constant, everywhere and downplayed. And similarly, Muslims have spent this century enduring flatly incorrect canards from politicians and pundits such as ‘not every Muslim is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim’. Every Muslim is familiar with the ritual of public figures declaring attacks to be Islamist based on no information, and then turning out to be wrong.
“But the real problem isn’t the definition of terrorism. It’s in the fact that the label over-determines our response. That it looms so large in our cultural imagination that it eclipses so much else. What happened at Bondi Junction isn’t made any less horrific if we conclude it isn’t terrorism. The victims are no less dead, and their deaths are no less tragic. The problem of violence against women isn’t any less serious. And if the Wakeley church attack is an act of terrorism, that doesn’t suddenly make it worse than the Port Arthur massacre.
“Terrorism is an atrocity, but it is not the only one. We shouldn’t need to apply that label to register our outrage or demonstrate our moral seriousness. We should be capable of being serious enough without it. And if not, that’s something to which we really should object.”
In a week lacking much sense, Waleed’s take comes about as close to it as I’ve seen.
This has been an awful week and the weekend will hopefully give Sydney the chance to reset and recharge. If you or anyone you know needs support, chat to a family member, mate or colleague, or consider calling Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.
Could we all do without social media?
A few times a day I’ll unlock my phone, see a prominent notification bubble over the app icon for Facebook, Instagram or X, and open it up.
Minutes later, I’m watching a video about a Korean art installation or some such; the subject of the notification (often a complete nothing contrived to get me to open the app) totally forgotten.
Most of us understand that social media is more disruptive than beneficial. Indeed, wasting our time with junk notifications and interrupting our productivity with easily accessible distractions is the least of its dangers.
Studies have suggested serious implications for mental health, the apps are likely responsible for a steady decline in the quality of public discourse, and online echo chambers distort world events into propaganda with real-life consequences.
In the wake of a pair of stabbings earlier this month, misinformation and hate on social media platforms made the fallout far worse. And yet, millions of us remain hooked. If we wanted to, could we leave it behind? From experience – and anecdotal evidence – the answer is “not easily”, but it’s worth trying.
To be clear, this isn’t about judging people who use social media, and I’m not saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with bite-sized entertainment in the form of short videos that have been algorithmically chosen for you, or photos and thoughts from your friends and brands that want to market to you.
In the wake of a pair of stabbings earlier this month, misinformation and hate on social media platforms made the fallout far worse. And yet, millions of us remain hooked.
There’s also nothing necessarily wrong with enjoying something we know isn’t the healthiest for us. A lot of us drink coffee every day, which has benefits and risks, just like social media. Sure, some of that is chemical addiction, but some of it is also because it’s pleasant, and it’s become part of our routine, rituals, and our social and family life.
Yet if you found yourself routinely on your sixth cup of coffee before noon, you’d hopefully recognise there’s a problem there. Coffee also never made itself as attractive and genuinely useful as possible for long enough to gain billions of drinkers, before declining massively in quality and wringing as much money out of its users as possible. Which is, to simplify, largely what social media companies have
Let’s look at Facebook as an example. At one point it was a truly revolutionary communications tool which let you keep up to date with all your friends and re-connect with some you might not have seen for ages.
When you received a notification, it was likely because of a genuine interaction with someone you knew. It served us up memories of years past, provided tools to create groups, and became crucial for things such as keeping track of upcoming events and remembering peoples’ birthdays.
Now, 20 years after it first launched, Meta – the new owner-incarnation of Facebook – is a trillion-dollar behemoth largely thanks to its efforts to exploit the massive user base it built with that communication tool, with several major privacy breaches and other scandals along the way.
At its height, Facebook promised new ways to disseminate news and monetise content, which turned out to be a bad deal for everyone but Facebook.
The genuine human interactions may have largely stopped, but the app is still installed on many of our phones, levering artificial intelligence and psychology to lure us back periodically, in the hopes of exposing us to an ad.
Instagram is largely the same. Faces of our friends appear at the top of the feed promising new updates and thoughts, but a video from a brand or influencer will generally appear directly below, hoping to distract you enough that you’ll scroll down through a feed that is at least two-thirds ads and further “suggested for you” videos.
Both platforms, which have the same parent company Meta, exist to serve our eyeballs up to advertisers.
The more I think about the reasons for keeping the apps in my life, the more I realise I’m still thinking about the apps as they were years ago. There’s an irrational fear that I’ll miss out on an important update from a group, or insight from a followed page, or a friend request from someone I’d like to talk to. But those things hardly ever happen.
Twitter is a little different and a somewhat more sinister case. Built as a social network, it organically became a place for news and discussion, before being acquired by someone ideologically opposed to the idea of news media.
Now called X, the platform is populated by a mix of people looking to exploit its lack of checks and balances to spread their messages or ideology, and people who are still using it because there’s no viable alternative.
That said, it is easier to shape the feed you’d like to see on X – as long as you stay in the “Following” tab.
Unlike on Meta’s platforms, you’re not constantly being shown engagement bait and ads, so, as a method of getting messages only from the people and brands you follow, it’s not too bad. The problem is that bad-faith discussions and misinformation are constantly bubbling just out of view, and have a tendency to explode into your feed when any kind of major event occurs.
Would it be possible for each of us, as individuals, to leave social media behind? It depends on how we’ve been using it.
I’ve been trying to think about what I need it for, so I can move those functions to other places that are more under my control.
Instead of getting articles from enthusiast sites and media via their X account, I’ve added them to Feedly (an RSS reader), or Substack. I’ve tracked down communities for my hobbies and interests on Reddit. I’ve made sure I have WhatsApp groups and contact details for the people I care about.
What’s left is the instinct to hit a button on my phone for an instant distraction or dopamine hit, or random daft videos of magicians or American Gladiators, when I’m feeling stressed or bored. That’s a very tough thing to find a replacement for, but might be in itself a good reason to keep looking.
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