Now how did that go again, the one about the sack of rice that tips over in China and the world doesn’t care?
When this odd phrase first turned up in planet Earth history, the world wasn’t nearly as chained together as it is today. Otherwise there would have been a hailstorm of exploding TikTok dance clips, furious X posts, and picturesque Instagram posts condemning that sack of rice into the ground.
What’s gotten into the old sack, falling over in a country like China? He could have done the very same thing in America.
A country that knows its way around sacks pretty well.
What does any of this have to do with the reaction of chains? Quite simply: nothing! The sack had neither a chain nor a network in its portfolio to trigger any global, or even local, events. And yet the sack of rice got itself an extended edition. A sack of rice tips over in China, and somewhere on planet Earth a butterfly flicks its wings, and suddenly there’s a storm.
The effect is made up, but it got defined as the butterfly effect anyway.
Why?
Ask the sack of rice.
I’ve never been particularly fond of chains, even though they can set off reactions. How did that go again with chain-smoking?
Widespread for a good while, but then it went up in smoke after all.
Still, there are a few chain reactions that do show a particular effect.
When a human chain is built for the climate, or for justice in the world — yes, by humans — then quite a few reactions turn up in the leafy groves of the world press. Which was, in the end, the whole point of chains of that kind.
This week’s newest chain reaction came from a direction nobody expected.
When Ukraine and its drone army swooped down on a number of data centres in Russia and wrecked them, things suddenly got rather quiet on social media.
The usual provoking, ugly tirades, conspiracy theories, and false reports stopped flowing through the net like some rhetorical waterfall.
Wait a minute — what do data centres in Russia have to do with the silence on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok? Aha. So the source of many of those bots was sitting in Russia all along.
Who would have thought.
The funniest statement online was the accusation from Republicans in the US that President Zelenskyy was using this attack to influence the midterms in November.
Come again?
That, quite surprisingly, is the most honest statement I’ve heard from the right in a long time.
The chain of reactions seems to have worked very well indeed.
Still, I don’t find the chain, with its tangled links, any more captivating for it. Those are too freedom-robbing and confining.
Should the impression have arisen that I suspect any human reactions lurking behind this particular chain, let me say: that’s wrong.
The sack in China thinks so too.
Rice included.
