Being an influencer is risky business.
My son’s bug-eating suggestion sparks a wild mix of parenting worries and electric bike misadventures.
Yesterday evening, just before we started to round the kids up for bed, my five year old son Ted uncharacteristically curled up on the sofa in silence. He sat there hugging his knees while we tidied away the remains of dinner, and it soon became clear he was concerned about something.
He wouldn’t tell us what it was because he was worried we’d tell him off, so we let him go to bed and didn’t push the issue: it’d come out when he felt able to tell us.
This morning, we heard the full story:
At school that day, he bumped into another kid who apparently “loves killing bugs”. Ted suggested to the other boy that he should, er, eat a woodlouse alive. “Because that would kill it too,” Ted explained to us.
Incredibly, the other kid went along with this plan, and somewhere in South Birmingham, an innocent woodlouse met its maker. Having once been a young boy, I can only assume that the bug-eating kid became the hero of the playground for the remainder of the day.
Ted was worried, though. Not because of the ethical dilemma of eating an arthropod for entertainment, and not because of the disturbing realisation of his powers of persuasion. No, he was worried because he thought his friend might die after eating a live woodlouse.
Let’s ask Professor Google
At moments like this, I turn to the internet to help answer questions of science. I should know better by now: when I made the mistake of telling Ted about the existence of Japanese spider crabs, he became worried that one might eat him. I reassured him that he was completely safe, while opening a YouTube video about the crabs. In the opening sentence, the video host said “a spider crab would never be able to eat a human – except possibly a child”. Ted was traumatised.
In the case of the unlucky woodlouse, we asked our Google Home for support: “is it safe to eat woodlice?”. To our horror, Google’s AI responded by quoting some esoteric website which advised wannabe insect-eaters to cook them first. Ted was horror-stricken: they didn’t cook the woodlouse!
We reassured him his friend would be fine, and emphasised the need for Ted to go and apologise to him the next time he saw him. But it reminded me of something we’d first observed when he was still a toddler at nursery: he has an ability to influence and manipulate other people.
We all have this, to a degree: in a game of D&D this would just represent your Charisma stat, which measures your “force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness.” If you’re very fortunate then you’ll be great at all these things, and soon find yourself able to get people to do things you want them to do. It must be addictive.
A five-year-old is a dangerous wielder of such powers, but they’re worse when focused in the hands of politicians, media figures and tech CEOs. Perhaps worse of all, though, is “influencers” – because they’re not bound by any ethical code or legal framework like most of the above roles. Discovering that you can use your good looks and force of personality to make people buy sweatshop goods or enter crypto pyramid schemes is a recipe for disaster.
It made me wonder about whether I have any of these traits. I manage people for a living and I often worry about what the more forceful aspects of my personality does to the people who report to me. I’m becoming increasingly outspoken at work about AI, for example, and I’m seeing this reflected back at me from my team. Is this just because we’re similar people with similar values? Or am I using my position of authority to nudge them down the path of AI scepticism, because that’s what I think people should value?
For the record, I’ve never asked my team to eat bugs, but just to fix them – we’re software engineers. And I don’t equate them to infant schoolkids unable to resist an older kid telling them what to do. But I do worry sometimes about charismatic individuals and the power they hold over the rest of us. Ted was worried his friend would get sick, but I can imagine him holding court in some corner of the playground, with everyone hanging on his words and doing what he suggested. Hopefully as I agonise about this myself, I can use my own influence to nudge him away from this path, before I end up consuming creepy crawlies myself.
Mini-feels this week
Mental health day
I had the day off work today, in recognition of yesterday’s World Mental Health Day. It was mainly chore-focused: a good trip to the recycling centre (which I’m rapidly becoming a regular at) and a trip to town to buy travel luggage.
In the morning, though, I dropped Robin off at nursery on the newest electric cargo bike we’re hiring. I saw the battery indicator only had a single bar left, and with all the arrogance of a man who rarely gets his comeuppance, I set off on the six mile round trip. It was only when we were halfway there that I uncomfortably noticed the display unit saying “1 mile range”. I quickly turned the electric motor setting down from “TURBO” to “ECO”.
We reached nursery and I dropped her off and remounted the bike. Riding an electric bike is a joyous experience: the first time you feel the pedal-assist motor kick in, you feel like you’re in ET, riding away into the air. As I hit the road, though, I felt the unmistakeable clunk of the motor disengaging and saw the battery light flashing angrily back at me for not charging it. I was now propelling this 34kg machine under my own steam.
I chugged slowly along until I reached the mild hill before home. I gamely tried to power my way up it but almost immediately gave up when I saw the pitifully-low speedometer data mocking me from the screen. I had to suffer the indignity of getting off and pushing, no mean feat in itself given the weight of the bike.
I got home suitably chastened and put the bike on to charge. A sweaty lesson in not flying too close to the sun.
That’s all for this week – apologies for the slightly late email (I had to clean all the woodlice remains out of the grill). Have a great weekend!
— Matt