The darkness, spreading

Happy January. It's bad.

The darkness, spreading

Happy January. Hollywood burned down, and Mark Zuckerberg decided that facts are too “politically biased” to be allowed on his platforms anymore, and Alberta destroyed the rights of trans people to seek gender-affirming care, and yes — you guessed it — the genocide in Palestine continues, with acts of atrocity committed daily, hourly, which — if they happened to you or anyone you know — would destroy your ability to function, mentally, for the rest of your life.

There was an article by Asawin Suebsaeng earlier this week, on the fourth anniversary of the insurrection in Washington, called “He Got Away With It.” It’s quite good, and though there is no shortage of topics upon which to indict the American people at present, Suebsaeng at least does the history books the kindness of outlining this particular indictable topic with unimpeachable (ha!) fury.

But there could just as easily be — and likely should be — an article called “He Got Away With It” about, say, Netanyahu’s 2024 (this discussion between Isaac Chotiner and Dahlia Scheindlin would serve in the interim); and could be, and should be, such pieces handed down about Elon Musk, and J.K. Rowling, and all the rest of the motherfuckers who have spent the past year, years, decades, etc., getting away with it. The cabal of pure, unstained evil, who are getting away with making life worse (or outright impossible) for all manner of people, right in front of our eyes.

Or, in lieu of, how about this one: “Zuckerberg Wears $900,000 Watch To Announce The End of Meta Fact-Checks.”

To which I ask, plain and simply: how much more blatant do these people need to become, before everyone beneath them on the food chain recognizes that the people running the planet want nothing other than more ways to turn your pain into their money? That they genuinely do not think of you as anything other than a resource to be consumed? That the machine turns tears into coin, and the tears are yours… and if the machine catches your pant leg while you’re crying and chews you into jelly, well, there are 8 billion more resource-packets waiting in line right behind you?

Violence

See, now I’ve done the thing I try not to do. I am, as you may have intuited, angry — angry doesn’t actually cover it — and I’ve expressed that anger above, quite well I think; but now that anger is yours to take on, and perhaps — perhaps! — that isn’t fair of me.

Say, for example, I see a picture on Instagram (a social media app that Mark Zuckerberg designed to sell skin-care products, which it must be doing quite well, given the $900,000 watch) of a child being blown to bits. Seeing such a picture naturally hurts and upsets and grieves me, as such a thing should do; so I post it to my own feed on that selfsame app, so that everyone who follows me is aware of the horror I’ve just witnessed, while I can feel like I’ve “done something.”

There is, of course, a recognizable, though dangerously ephemeral, line between “I’m trying to advocate for an issue that causes me great concern,” and its self-interested flipside, “there is a roaring pain inside me, and I need to push it out, and everyone else should be feeling this bad about this thing anyway, so here, have a picture of a child being blown to bits.”

Is that fair of me? Is being concerned about this dichotomy an effective form of allyship? I don’t know. I don’t know. This is not me judging anyone’s actions but my own. But as I mentioned, I am trying to do less of the latter thing, ideally none of it, because it feels like a form of violence. And honestly, this means that I am also doing less of the former thing too, because once I stop trying to manifest my pain on skin-care apps (or in email newsletters), I very quickly intuit that it’s actually hopeless anyway, I mean, unless one is a member of the cabal I’ve mentioned, whose control of the infosphere is so massive that they are actually able to shape multiple hundreds of millions of minds with a single post. Which I, according to the data, am not.

Regardless, consider this: these hubs of communication were never ours. You’d have to go all the way back to web 1.0, the Geocities days, to find an internet that was — on at least some level — ours. Everything else, every single tool created under the yoke of this oppression, is just a part of the machine that turns tears into coin. The machine doesn’t care if the tears are righteous.

Witness

You probably wanted some kind of arc back around, here, to what’s actually okay in all this and what I’m doing to take things forward; but sorry, I don’t have it.

I keep coming back to the kid, though, who went on TikTok a couple days after various infosphere elders had begun their process of scolding Gen Z for the way they were reacting to the assassination of Brian Thompson; and basically said, get fucked. Get fucked for putting AR-15 sales above human life and now, now that a billionaire’s been capped, asking for some common cause and sense of proportion, rather than mocking memes and Luigi Mangione thirst traps.

The machine they built will keep turning tears into coin. The machine doesn’t care if they’re tears of laughter.