How to become a misanthrope

Here’s a fun game to play in an environment where most people are looking at their phones: imagine that all of them are using Twitter. That goth-looking woman in her mid-30s, for example, has just told to get a complete stranger to get fucked because they stated that human rights are universal and inalienable. The besuited gentleman in his 60s is having an incensed ‘debate’ about climate change which involves denying the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, while the teenage boy in the lurid Nike sneakers has just posted a meme which claims that the Democrats knew in advance that the New York attacks would take place. Meanwhile, the person to your right, whose face you can’t really see but who is wearing Gucci spectacles and using a Huawei phone, is trolling a sports celebrity who happened to trip up at a crucial moment of a game, repeating a malicious and unfounded rumour that another player on the same team has been sleeping with his wife by calling him a ‘cuck’. The teacherly looking woman opposite you is retweeting a video she knows to be faked of Hillary Clinton calling black people lazy, and the person next to her is scowling as he defends the prime minister of his country against accusations of corruption by calling his opponents cockroaches and foreign devils. Two people sitting on either side of the door of the train carriage or hospital waiting room or wherever you happen to be have, quite by chance, both just liked a tweet by a prominent Twitter user closely connected to the White House which advocates the genocide of all non-white peoples, while the woman to your left is chuckling as she scrolls through responses from people outraged by her repeated insistence that those who mobilise to oppose openly racist groups are in the pay of one or other of the world’s most prominent Jewish people and that the protestor murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in Charlottesville actually died of a heart attack.

Now, take out your own phone, open the memo app and type the following:

‘Here’s a fun game to play…’

Within twenty or so minutes you’ll be all set to post it on Twitter and see what sort of response it provokes.