by Nathan Smith

Congratulations, Australia, you now have censorship laws that are nearly identical to post-WWII Germany. Did Australia lose a war? If we’re being honest, it probably did.

The recently passed Australian hate speech legislation could have been a lot worse. For example, apparently, the politician Allegra Spender tried to include an amendment to arrest any associations of a person caught using “hate speech.” So, if someone says naughty words, she wanted to arrest their work colleagues, their friends and their family. To put this into perspective, not even post-WWII Germany went that far.

Plenty more could be said about Australia’s censorship laws, but I want to use it as a way of asking some important questions about opportunity costs and whether all this time spent online is doing us any good.

Australia has always been a testing ground for policy. If it works at scale in Australia, then the logic is that it will also work (with tweaks) in the US, UK, Japan, Europe, New Zealand, etc. If I were a betting man, my chips would be on similar hate speech and social media clampdown laws arriving in everyone’s backyard soon. If you don’t have a personal threshold that, when crossed by your government, warns you to log off the internet for good, then you should create one. You don’t want to go to prison for a tweet.

In fact, I don’t want you to go to prison for a tweet. I’d rather you were outside in the real world, working to make the future better. It would be a huge waste for you to be locked up for words that a few malevolent lobby groups and politicians decided were “hateful.” Losing a genuine ally like you for naughty words would be so deeply absurd that we should all see the Australian censorship laws as a serious wake-up call to put down the smartphones forever.

While you are tweeting, the real world is decaying. The opportunity costs of being online are crippling us. Every minute we spend being a “dissident” online is a minute we can’t spend building communities, relationships and competence in the real world. The reason they censor social media is that they want more people to spend more time online. They want you to spend less time in the real world. They built the simulation; now they want you inside the simulation.

Look at this infographic of news trends in 2025:

These are the echoes of your online life. This is the simulation, the unreal. Gaze into the data of this infographic and despair. Those little bumps are visual representations of interest over time, drawn from data measuring the frequency of internet search queries. The data is clear. One after another, the interest, anger, tears and frustration rise, then fall away completely. A story is urgent, everywhere for a week or two, then disappears.

If you are reading this column, then at least one of those news events in 2025 made you feel some emotion. Some of you might have thought, “they’ve gone too far this time.” I wrote about many of these stories, hopefully giving practical advice on what to do about them. But at least I get paid to follow the news. What’s your excuse? Why do you persist inside the simulation?

Smarter people than I have said that the media is a simulation of reality. According to Jean Baudrillard, a simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself. The online world replaces the real world until you think they are both the same. They are not. But the simulation makes you think they are.

As the new Australian laws prove, social media is a regulated overflow pipe for dissent designed to drain your political energy, identify nodes of opposition and pacify all resistance through the simulation of politics. You think you are “pushing back” or “speaking truth to power,” but you are only spinning your wheels with surrogate activities and rehearsing your own arrest as the regime laughs at you.

The simulation has a single goal: to distract us while the system removes any structure that would compete for our attention. The simulation strives only to become larger and more all-consuming. While you talk to your friends online, you forget that you haven’t seen their real faces for months. You sit at home and watch the latest church service on a livestream, you log in to your job from a room down the hall, order food from your leather couch and check the weather without opening the curtains.

The scariest thing is that the answer isn’t as easy as “just log off.” The real world is not politics either. As the old maxim goes, if voting changed anything, they wouldn’t let us do it. The levers go nowhere. The politicians are all chosen for us, and the policies are all written by bureaucrats. The democracy simulation has been running longer than you can imagine. If you don’t like the direction of politics, pretty much all the pathways that could change it have already been closed off, and you didn’t even notice.

Let me show you the horrible position we are in.

Pick a measurable policy goal that, if changed, would, in your opinion, improve society. For me, I would outlaw abortion, which is what the system euphemistically calls killing children. My victory conditions would be met when a law is passed to stop all abortions. No watering down. No weasel words.

Now, what would be the shortest route to pass this law (or any law)?

Since we don’t live in a monarchy, the fastest path would be to become a member of parliament, then fight my way into the leadership of a party (any will do), ensure this party wins the next election with a supermajority, guarantee full discipline of all party members, draft legislation, force my fellow MPs to vote yes and, abracadabra, abortion would become illegal. Very simple, very straightforward. It’s a wonder any legislative action takes longer than a few days.

Except, I’m sure you’ve noticed a major flaw. What if my fellow MPs decide to defect? Nothing is stopping them from refusing to obey my orders to vote yes. A leader can respect other opinions, but all he really needs is for his MPs to ask, “How high?” when he tells them to jump. Without discipline, any leader is impotent. Each person in this process – from the basic voter to the bench MP to the office staff – would require nothing but strict discipline and to follow my orders to outlaw abortion. What sounds like a simple request turns out to be almost impossible today.

This is because discipline is learned, not innate. We should rewrite the old maxim: If discipline changed anything, they wouldn’t teach it. And guess what? They don’t teach it. Instead, they teach individualism. We are told each of us has a tiny sliver of power. We get to vote, so we get to choose. What is sold as empowering is actually weakness when it comes to getting anything done. “We are all equal!” Today, everyone believes they should be the leader, and no one has the discipline to follow one. All by design.

Every single place where children could learn proper discipline has been eroded or removed. A good example is the Boys’ Brigade. Did you know that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, senior members of the Boys’ Brigade who had completed recognised leadership training could sometimes enter the British Army and be fast-tracked to junior NCO roles? Of course, this was never automatic, and after WWII, this arrangement ended. But the system once recognised that the men emerging from the Boys’ Brigade were not children. They had discipline, and that counted for something.

The Boys’ Brigade of today is a wispy shell of its former structure. It may still inculcate discipline, but when all your peers are encouraged to be “individuals,” it is entirely ineffective. A leader needs an army that will follow his instructions. When each soldier thinks their opinion matters because they are an “individual,” that is not an army; it is a mob. Without discipline, the simplest, clearest, most easily measurable policy goal, like “outlaw abortion”, is impossible.

This is how bad things really are. Getting off the internet is only the first step. It is a wonderful first step, but you must understand that the real world is incredibly, maliciously and insidiously made bereft of any structures that can truly teach discipline to the younger generations. Until and unless these institutions are reformed and reinvigorated, nothing will change because no one will be capable of changing it.

This renewal will take at least 25 years as the generations roll over. But it is important to realise just how far behind we are. The basic human infrastructure required to do anything – discipline – has been quietly but purposefully removed over the last 100 years. Your enemies knew exactly what they were doing.

The Australian hate speech laws should be a warning sign that the opportunity costs of pretending that the internet is real have been too high for too long.

Originally published on Flat Circle.