Unmurky: politician Lucy Powell's transparent Instagram world Author: Terence Rajivan Edward, (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps) Abstract. I compare politician Lucy Powell's Instagram site with my own. Powell has about 110 to 120 videos. Most videos have viewings in the 1000s or 2000s. One video has over 9000 views. It seems easy to explain why: she is in parliament and she is making a series of references to the popular rock'n'roll band Oasis. My own Instagram site has one video viewed significantly more than others, but why is a mystery to me. Also what will get more viewings and what will get less for me is mysterious. Draft version: version 3 (29 May 2026 opening paragraph added, minor edit, text refers to situation in October 2025; version 2 17th October 2025, confusing sentence cut) Software used (freeware): Google docs, Instagram, jspaint.app PDF at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396563264_Unmurky_politician_Lucy_Powell's_transparent_Instagram_world It was underneath a silken moon That I devised my own cartoon Scientists discover the laws of the universe, or they try to, or that is what they seem to be up to anyway. Schoolbook examples: every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. What about scientists of human society? Do they discover the laws of society? I don't mean the contents of a given legal system. I mean laws such as if demand for a product increases, prices will increase. If they even are laws! Maybe the social world is more lawlike for some than others, or displays greater regularity and predictability. Experiences that led me to this thought are the subject of this essay, Wyoming. In late 2024, I joined a community of stand up comedians based in Manchester, United Kingdom. I started performing stand up comedy in December. Many of my fellow comedians have Instagram sites - a website for sharing videos and photos with other members, wherever in the world they are, and even strangers. (With our current technology, they can almost instantly be shared.) I had not really paid attention to Instagram before and had only a dim awareness of it, but I decided to follow their lead and get an account. I uploaded a photograph and since then uploaded only videos, with one exception. Videos seem to get more views and also the site provides me with a count of how many views a given video has received. Today I visited the Instagram site of a politician based in Manchester, namely Lucy Powell. Hers has many more photos than mine does. It has about 110 to 120 videos. I am able to view the Instagram site's viewing counts for her videos and I am struck by the difference in how easy it is to make sense of her viewing counts compared to mine, or so it seems to me. After setting it up, I soon decided that the account was for sharing one line jokes that I wrote. I made a video which shared this punning joke which I composed: "Two kinds of 'career' women: North Korea women and South Korea women." It has received viewings in the 600s: 611 to be exact. (But it would not be surprising if it has been devised by someone before. A person keen on making one line jokes may well look through the list of countries and what jokes can exploit the name of each country.) I then made a video telling this joke: "What's it like being a dog without a bone? Quite soft I imagine." In the UK, the United Kingdom, we stereotype dogs as loving a bone to hold in their mouth, if you don't understand this joke. This joke has viewings in the 1800s. I made some other videos of myself telling one liners I composed, one of which scored in the 3000s and is my most popular video by some distance (I have one other video in the 1000s): "Why don't the Japanese say, "Sorry"? They are not English speakers." I have no idea why this is so much more popular. After 8 one liner videos, I abandoned my decision and used my Instagram site mainly to share comedy sketch ideas, starting with this one: there is a creature with the body of a fish but the head of a woman and she says, "I used to be a Mermaid too, but Disney will never tell my story." It got 325 views, which seems a tiny number, but Instagram informed me that it has got more views than normal. It also has 5 likes, which is quite a high number for me. Most of my videos since score in the 100s or the 200s, in terms of viewings, if score be the right word. Occasionally I present academic material. On 5 or so occasions, I have presented comedy sketches I have found from others on Instagram. It is convenient, so you would expect these to score highly, but the last one I put online scored 8 views - oh, it has suddenly moved to 13, after I began writing this. I have also presented a few more one liners, for example this rather gruesome one: "Why do some murderers devour their victims? It solves the problem of what to do with the body." (By the way, some videos feature me speaking as someone else, notably I pretend to be a voice coming from the radio which represents a philosopher.) Most of Powell's videos have viewing counts in the 1000s or the 2000s. She has one video in the 5000s and one in the 9000s. The explanation for the 9000+ video seems obvious: she is in parliament, referring to the popular rock'n'roll band Oasis, associated with the city of Manchester, which she represents. That combination is a hit with viewers! But maybe the number of references is crucial too. The correct explanation is a member of this set! I am struck by how unmysterious her viewings are compared to mine. My videos, with perhaps a few exceptions, seem to be consistently of the same standard. Why one video should have so many more viewings than is the norm for me is baffling? I wonder whether Lucy Powell in general moves in a world in which a lot of things make a lot more sense than the world I move in. (I paid for EE wifi for two months in a row and now, surprisingly, I have EE wifi for free, but it flickers a lot. The bus company charges me 20 pence for travel, bizarrely cheap. Google Docs, the online word processor, does "its own thing" from time to time, such as wrongly dating the last use of a document of mine collecting online haikus by others to 11th September 2024. This is a surprising thing for a machine to do. Etc.) Perhaps I have moved out of my social class and this nothing-functions-as-it-should is what happens then! Perhaps if Lucy Powell gets out of her proper place in the world, as various others think of it, she will experience something similar! I don't know. Probably my favourite quotation is from Flora Nwapa's novel One is Enough (as some of you know or suspect): "Her files went missing each time she finished a job. When she learnt what was expected of her, her files no longer got lost." (1992 [1986]: 45) References https://paint.js.org/ (Who makes freeware such as this and why?) Alpha from the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner). 1924. On a Finger-Post. From Many Furrows. 1927 edition, J.M. Dent, London and Toronto, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74243/pg74243-images.html ("Wyoming" reference - I saw a person wearing a top saying Wyoming in Manchester and thought of this essay and of rewriting this in Alpha from the Plough style; "Unmurky" influenced by Stormzy.) Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2024-25. Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/terence_r_e_onelinerjokes/ Nwapa, Flora. 1992. One is Enough. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. Powell, Lucy. 2017-25. Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/lucympowell/ Further reading Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Lucy Powell Rule Number 79 maybe. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/144309787/Lucy_Powell_rule_number_79_maybe Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Politician Lucy Powell and I as economists: I win! Available at: https://www.academia.edu/144335009/Politician_Lucy_Powell_and_I_as_economists_I_win_ Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. On the paradox of free computer software: two solutions (BASIC code in appendix). Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWOTP.pdf