One channel through the fields

Outside a village in Fayoum, a dozen farms draw water from one irrigation channel, and lately the farmers spend more time arguing about it on their phones than walking it.

It began with a short video. A man upstream filmed a blocked gate and posted that the families at the far end never clear their stretch. The far end answered that the upstream farms take water out of turn at night. By evening there were sides, nicknames and the clip passed round two neighbouring villages. Nobody had ever paid so much attention to the channel.

That is no accident. Arguments travel faster than agreements. A post saying the people downstream are cheating draws dozens of replies; a post saying the gate was cleared draws a thumbs up or two. Anything that feeds on our attention learns to prefer the first kind, and slowly, so do we.

Meanwhile the channel keeps working only because of the opposite. Water reaches the last field because every farm along the way keeps its stretch clean and opens its gate on its day. The arrangement gets better the more families take part in it, and worse with every one that pulls away.

There is also nowhere else to farm. Whichever end wins the argument still depends on the same water, the same hot summers, the same silt that has to be dug out by hand.

Outrage is very good at producing a them. It cannot produce a second channel.

Before anyone settles who cleared what, somebody has to say the plain thing the argument seems built to make everyone forget: whichever end of the channel we farm, we are in this together.