GoKawiilThere was a remarkable video going around the Scottish socials yesterday which led to quite a bit of media coverage. It’s a four-minute long video showing some furious Scotrail passengers confronting a drunk middle-aged pervert who is quietly filming a group of quiet, sober 16- and 17-year old girls heading home from a night out.
It really is worth a watch, because it’s a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses, holding perpetrators to account, centering the victims, and somehow staying calm and focused even when you want to batter the fuck out of someone who has it coming.
(Disclaimer: the spoken dialogue in the video is not in the King’s English, it’s in our local Glaswegian dialect, which…some of you seem to struggle with. As you’re also aware by now, in our dialect, we use obscenities like other people use punctuation. Just so you know.)
Of course the pervert turns out to be a senior legal officer at Edinburgh City Council. Of course he was. Hold on to that thought, it matters.
Right then Heather, what on earth does a video of an alkie on a train have to do with tech policy?
A lot, as it turns out.
The first point is that the passengers instinctively confront and document the person inflicting the harm. At no time do they castigate the teenage girls being filmed without their knowledge or consent – young women who are absolutely entitled to any night out they please – or imply that it’s the girls’ conduct at fault. The whole train has the girls’ backs.
This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.
The second point is that as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases. If the girls on a night out are allowed to have a phone at all – and there are areas of British society which do not believe they should – then their usage of them must be strictly controlled, censored, and curtailed, allegedly for their own protection.
Those policy arguments are shielded in the need to take back control from Big Tech. But what happened on that train, as you saw, had nothing to do with Big Tech, aside from the video of the incident being shared there. That incident was about the dynamics of power, privilege, and dominance, as they play out every day in the real world.
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