All you really need to know about British online petitions is that the daddy of them all was to reinstate a man who had punched one of his underlings in the workplace. The petition to restore Jeremy Clarkson to Top Gear – featuring more than a million online signatures – was eventually delivered to the BBC in a tank. Literally a tank. The tank contained a smirking political blogger wearing a covert coat by Yves Saint Farage, and a paunchy man dressed as a Fathers4Justice version of the Stig.

This is the ur-petition. It is the event horizon of online petitions. Any petition after this, and basically any before, can now never escape its gravitational field. Like some malarial Cialis advert, it distilled an entire symposium on power, impotence and the managed decline of the British military into a 20-minute stag weekend. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the theory of petition relativity, but whatever is now signed online – even a notional, diametrically opposed petition calling for Clarkson’s sacking – is essentially a signature for the original Clarkson one.

Yet petitions keep happening, more in anger than in sorrow. A couple of weeks ago, a petition against bombing Syria topped out at 182,000. Gaining rapidly on that figure, and destined to overtake it within days, is the one demanding the BBC save the voting public from themselves, by denying them the chance to even see heavyweight champion Tyson Fury’s name on the immeasurably significant Sports Personality of the Year ballot. On the magical metrics of online petitions, this makes whoever is going to lose to Andy Murray considerably more important than going to war. Or it says that Britain’s tendency toward displacement activities has reached clinical levels.

Meanwhile, there’s the petition to ban Donald Trump from entering the UK over his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States – allegedly a sarcastic gesture being pushed by various comedians who obviously disagree with all other bans on free speech, but who know that in Trump they have a target who will be cut by the ironies of this one. Or something. Ideally, it will eventually be delivered to the US embassy in a chariot pulled by Jeremy Clarkson and Tyson Fury.

Unlike browsing the Lakeland sale, signing online petitions is a decent, supposedly empowering communal activity that can be indulged in solitarily in front of your computer. For my money this sort of virtual awayday has its roots in the Russell Brand Sachsgate affair a few years back, when the original Radio 2 broadcast of an on-air prank call to the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs by the comedian and Jonathan Ross elicited 67 listener complaints. By the time the Mail on Sunday and others had finished gingering things along, a further 42,000 people – a vanishingly small number of whom could possibly have heard the programme – had rung the BBC to complain that they were offended by it. Still, it’s skin in the game, isn’t it? Nice to feel part of something. Six months on from almost any petition, it ought really to resemble the 60s. If you can remember why you signed it, you weren’t there.

‘Searching for an analogue of slightness, we could only reasonably alight on Labour’s “four million conversations”.’ Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Generally speaking, these petitions are a massively multiplayer online game of taking offence, allowing participants to enter a synthetic universe in which their mild yet easily stated disapproval matters in and of itself. Yet there are runway models in space that carry more weight than online signatures.

Searching for an analogue of slightness, we could only reasonably alight on Labour’s “four million conversations”. Do you remember this? Let me guide you into the most forgotten reaches of your memory palace, past the room containing the names of all the Go-Gos and the deadlocked cupboard marked “Last Friday Night”. Ed Miliband’s pledge that Labour activists would have four million conversations with the great British public in the run-up to the election last May. The total always seemed intriguingly ambitious to me, but when Labour HQ announced it had been reached with more than a week of the campaign to go, curiosity got the better of even my indolence. I duly spent quite a long time attempting to get them to tell me what constituted a conversation. A three-minute exchange? A one-minute exchange? The handing over of an election leaflet to a muttered “thank you”? After much prickly stonewalling, it eventually became clear that even if you knocked on a door and it was answered with an expletive-laden invitation to do one, that was counted as a conversation. So yes: these four million conversations were some of the absolutely key millions of the 2015 general election, second only to Russell Brand’s millions of Twitter followers.

As for the future of online petitions, they are set to become 2016’s newest parenting tool. Want to go to Legoland? Come back when you’ve got 500 signatures. Meanwhile, it is widely expected that there will soon be apps to hook you up with petitions that deliver the precisely flavoured hit of self-satisfaction you are searching for at any particular moment. There are times when you crave the robust hit of being one of the few hundred thousand people to observe that someone sexist is sexist, for instance, but other moments where you seek the more recherché nano-high obtained by calling for all faith schools to be mandated to offer classes in Wookiee.

So on it goes. Gird your fingers for the next silent disco of opinion! Man the barricades! Or rather, ban the marricades! I’m not sure what marricades are, and consequently my default position is to be sufficiently offended to demand an immediate precautionary ban on them.