Erin Patterson's trial revealed our need for moral certainty in uncertain times

It is an odd conundrum of modern life that the more frenzied the proliferation of information with which we are pelted daily, on every subject imaginable, the more voracious and unreasonable becomes our appetite for moral clarity.

Of the data presently available on the internet worldwide, approximately 90 per cent was created in the last two years.

Probably not even a fifth of that data comprises hot takes on the Mushroom Murders, but the trial of Erin Patterson certainly provides a neat example of how humans behave when swamped with too much information.

The escalating daily assault of data on our brains — war, horror, destruction, dead sea creatures on Adelaide beaches, dead children in Texas rivers, Italian brain-rot, the power-sucking zombie creep of AI — what does it really make us feel like doing?

Turns out it makes millions of us feel like getting to the bottom of whether Patterson really did have mismatched plates. That's what.

The pursuit of certainty

The only solution, perhaps, to this misery of overwhelm and huge things, is to pursue aggressive certainty about smaller things. And to find ourselves in company with others who also are sure.

How odd, that an endless torrent of context and nuance should inflame, in humans, an urgent need to abolish all traces of doubt.

We need people to be good, or to be evil. We need a cause to be unimpeachable, or reprehensible.

How else to explain the unscratchable itch that the trial of Erin Patterson has become for humans all over the world?

It's not the blamelessness of the dead generating traffic volumes here; Patterson's three victims and sole survivor are surely that, but their names swirl quickly away in the tally of humans who have died horribly and unfairly, even in this week alone.

And while chat forums and podcasts discussing the case often carry a virtuous disclaimer that the real tragedy here is of course the loss of innocent life, there's no doubt at all that the juice in the system of this content behemoth is the perfidy or otherwise of the chef herself.

A distinctly modern trial

The trial unfurled the kind of detail that is now common in murder trials and would have been inconceivable a generation ago: hot-tempered exchanges that once would have wafted away on the air are now immortalised by messaging apps. Pings from mobile phone towers point an accusatory finger. Closed circuit TV sequences are excavated, along with the damning, unscrubbable images of a dehydrator. A Facebook thread in which an outburst about in-laws, suspended forever like a mosquito in amber, suddenly reanimates and buzzes back to torment its author.

This wealth of detail, along with DNA technology, makes the job of detectives and juries easier of course, in one sense. There's more evidence.

But the jobs of "detective" and "juror" are harder now, too, simply by virtue of the fact that they're contestable now.

We're all detectives. We're all jurors.

The justice system — like so many institutions, whether their business be public policy or news reporting or weather forecasting or epidemiology — has been violently democratised by disruptive technology.

The jury system was originally conceived to ensure that defendants would be judged not by elites but by a group of utterly unremarkable peers.

But now, jurors are remarkable in one key respect: they're the only humans during a criminal trial who aren't allowed to google the key players and undertake a spot of online sleuthing.

'Small, necessary groups'

The rest of us — having not only access to the trial evidence in real time but also the ability to form our own opinions without much by way of structural constraint — are free to succumb to that uniquely modern act of self-soothing, the sorting of ourselves into prejudicial tribes.

In his 2020 book Why We Are Polarised, Ezra Klein argues that the formation of tribes has to do with the human brain's incapacity to accommodate the vast new tides of information that swamp the world.

"We are exquisitely tuned to understand and manage our role in the small, necessary groups that defined our world as hunter-gatherers, but we've not had long to adjust to the digitised, globalised, accelerated world we've built," Klein writes.

"The sensitivities that helped us thrive within the interplay of a few groups of a few hundred people can drive us mad when exposed to the scale, noise, and sophisticated manipulations of modern capitalism and politics."

How mad?

In the case of the criminal trial of the moment, this hunger for simplicity, for clarity, for fellow feeling, for quiet, might lead us to Reddit threads or podcasts or scans of iNaturalist in search of the exhilaration that accompanies the certainty that another human being is absolutely black of heart.

In other more extreme contexts that same hunger might lead us to dox someone, or storm a building, or trash a synagogue.

The jury in the Patterson trial — a dozen Gippsland locals whose names we don't know — were sequestered for a week. They delivered an answer on Monday and were allowed to go home with the commendation of the presiding judge.

Unlike American jurors, they cannot be identified by name or give interviews. Unlike judges who hear criminal cases in the Australian jurisdictions that allow trials by judge alone (NSW, SA, WA, Queensland and the ACT), they are not required to provide grounds for their decision.

So juries, in Australia, find themselves in a weird situation. The job they do is publicly, flappingly contestable.

They may find themselves — as did the Morwell Twelve — at the centre of a live-action drama commanding global attention. But their own reasoning, unlike that of every pub galah on Reddit, stays hidden forever.

Only conjecture — or painstaking simulations, like Tosca Looby's recent SBS series, Jury: Death On The Staircase, in which cameras monitored the decision-making process of a jury for whom the entire real-life criminal trial of a Sydney man was recreated by actors — can summon their arguments, their reasons, their midnight moments of self-doubt or epiphany.

They remain anonymous. Their job is done.

But the vast and clanking business of Mushroom Investigation Inc is unlikely to be crimped by anything so trifling as a verdict supplied by the relevant legal authority.

There are documentaries to be made, and a fresh-fallen snowdrift of evidence from the court files to be romped through; messages exchanged between the accused and her victims, and new CCTV of Patterson visiting a service station whilst simultaneously wearing white trousers and experiencing explosive diarrhoea (a detail that launched a thousand opinions).

Each new detail delivers a spark of certainty for someone; filaments of context that delivers us, one by one, from evil, having established that it lives in the hearts of others.