Something broke in me recently.
After 434 episodes of The Adelaide Show, more than a decade of celebrating the people, passion, and ideas that make South Australia genuinely special, I found myself recording an episode I never expected to make.
It wasn’t any single thing. It was the algal bloom handled with deflection rather than urgency. The secret tower deal at peppercorn rent. The golf tournament ripping trees from our parklands. Then more trees for a motorcycle race. And over all of it, a government so well-oiled that nothing sticks, media that has largely lost the gumption to apply friction, and a flood of adorable little ministerial videos making sure we’re all looking over here while the real decisions happen somewhere else entirely.
The peak cynicism, and I genuinely use that phrase, was the announcement of a school program to help students decode media spin. From the most disciplined spin operation this state has seen. You cannot make it up.
I talked it through with David Olney, a former geopolitics lecturer who thinks like a psychologist, and what emerged was both clarifying and sobering. Political theorist Ted Robert Gurr identified two conditions that precede systemic rupture: first, when people stop believing things will get better; second, when they believe things are actively getting worse. I’ve crossed both thresholds. Not about South Australia’s people, I love them unreservedly, but about the way we’re being governed.
In the middle of sitting with all of that, I read Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything by Ed Coper. It gave me a framework I didn’t know I needed.
Ed’s central insight is that the social media platforms we all swim in are not neutral pipes, they are systems mechanically engineered to reward anger, to surface the most inflammatory content, and to keep us in a dopamine loop of manufactured outrage. The people who’ve cracked this code first, and used it most ruthlessly, are not the ones trying to build a better world.
But the most liberating idea in the book is simple: once you can name what’s happening, it loses its power over you. The “A ha — I know what that is” moment.
So I built The Adelaide Show Spin Detector. It’s a trained, AI-powered tool that takes a post, meme, news story, or political speech excerpt and runs it through three lenses:
The tool names the tactic, finds what’s missing, identifies the legitimate grievance underneath the manipulation, and suggests a response that connects at the human level rather than adding fuel.
I want us to be like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes — the one with the curious earnestness to simply ask out loud: why is the emperor naked?
Paste in a post you’re thinking of sharing. Paste in something you’ve seen in your feed that made your blood boil. Find out what’s actually going on before you react.
I invite you to use this freely and share it with anyone you think needs it.
Please note that if you have found a meme or image, this tool only accepts text, so please type in the text of the item you have found, copy in some of the comments, and see what happens. It will not be perfect, but it should give you some great starter ideas.
A small note on costs: There is a processing cost for running each analysis, the AI that powers it charges a small amount per use. If you can afford to make a small donation to help cover those costs, I would be genuinely grateful. But if you can’t, please do not let that stop you. This tool exists to help our community think more clearly, and that matters more than the server bill.
Also note that if the tool has disappeared or is broken, it just means the credit has expired. I will do my best to keep it running. Please bear with me.