So….The Today Show aired a segment on July 10, 2023 in which it reported that a rescue squad guy in Alabama claimed that people were jumping off boats in his state and dying because they were doing a TikTok challenge.
Apparently, it’s not a good idea to jump off a moving boat into a crystal clear Alabama lake. Who knew?
Seemingly, most people in Alabama knew, since they were not in fact jumping off boats and accidentally killing themselves by imitating something on TikTok. Presumably, they were instead killing themselves in good old-fashioned ways like getting really drunk, falling off a boat and drowning. Or whatever old school method they preferred.
So the Today Show, after warning of the dangers of this challenge, retracted the segment and said ‘never mind’, and the rescue guy said ‘never mind’ as well.
This is the tiniest, the itsy-bitsyiest, of ripples in the gigantasaurus ocean of useless information modern American humans are subjected to on a daily basis. And yet…
This itsy-bitsy ripple in the information ecosystem touches on so many of the absurdities of our current society. Let’s indulge ourselves in some absurdity-bashing just for fun. Now then, in no particular order…
Absurdity #1: Broadcast Media endlessly fucking warning us of dangers
Maybe I shouldn’t pick on broadcast media. Every type of media seems to have devoted itself to the idea that nothing sells like warning people of an innumerable set of dangers that they will never face. Every fucking thing that could possibly go wrong is pitched to the public as something to be afraid of and avoided at all costs.
What should you be afraid of today? AI? Vaping? Peach pie? Heart disease? Social media? Aspartame? Forever chemicals? Your kids getting into your marijuana gummies? Disney movies turning your kids into perverts? Transgender folks participating in sports? Being overweight? Germs on your refrigerator door handle? Meteors? Vaccination? The next pandemic? Fentanyl? Sugar? Type 2 diabetes? Stroke? Marjorie Taylor Greene? TikTok challenges? Hearing loss? Toenail fungus? Heatwaves? Floods? Mark Zuckerberg? Spending too much time on your phone? Sitting down? Video games? Cardi B? Gay people? Immigrants? School shootings? Mall shootings? Imposter syndrome? 5G? Jewish space lasers? Fires and floods? Energy drinks promoted by Logan Paul? Violent crime? Sleep apnea? Keto diets? Clones? The surveillance state? Your swollen ankles? The collapse of democracy? A recession? Dating apps? What your dog just ate (why oh why does he do that?)? Alzheimer’s and dementia? Identity theft? Puppy yoga? That someone is going to take your guns away? Liberals? Conservatives? Men? Women?
And on and on it goes. A friend of mine refers to the anchor of ABC News, David Muir, as ‘deadly’ David Muir because he manages to describe almost everything in any newscast as deadly. She’s not wrong.
The thing about this is – if everything is dangerous, then nothing is. Well not exactly, but it becomes extraordinarily hard for people to prioritize addressing what is both important and urgent instead of what is neither important nor urgent.
It’s as though the West’s corporate overlords (Rupert Murdoch, I’m looking at you) have decided the single most desirable state for humanity is a state of perpetual confused fear of dangers that are neither relevant nor imminent – as that will prevent humanity from doing anything about the dangers that are relevant and imminent. Not to mention that heightened arousal (like, you know, fear) disinhibits people, clouds their judgement, and makes them prone to make impulsive decisions, purchases, and link-clicking.
It’s fucked up.
It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t always this way. Not that fear has ever gone out of style or ever will. Some people just love the sensation of it. But we weren’t always bombarded with so much of it and we weren’t always led to believe both that a) we should be taking diligent steps to protect ourselves from Alzheimer’s, heart disease, germs, cancer, social media, burnout, insomnia, hearing loss, loneliness, processed foods, debt, weight gain, forever chemicals and whatever the hell else systemic ills our society is foisting on us, and b) that, let’s face it, there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about most of it.
Simultaneous responsibility and powerlessness are the messages that media of all sorts are drilling into us. And it’s not entirely an accident. Behemoth corporate interests like oil companies have honed the fine art of sowing doubt, confusion, fear, suspicion and mistrust into a well-oiled factory production line. Their motive was persuading people that it was just superfine and dandy to let oil companies do whatever the hell profitable things they want to, regardless of the effects on anyone and anything else. But oil companies are far from the only corporate behemoths who have engaged in disingenuous pushing of individual responsibility combined with real helplessness. Like pushing individual recycling as a viable eco-friendly alternative to profitable corporations not fucking up the environment in the first place.
And Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News Channel, has honed sowing doubt, helplessness and rage into something of a whiny orgasmic fun fest – at least I guess it’s fun for him. Maybe not. He’s a tool, though, in multiple senses of the word.
So, as always, it’s time to get pretty fed up. It’s time to start yelling at your Facebook friends (if you have any) that if you see another goddamn post warning you of some danger that you either can’t or shouldn’t do anything about that you’re going pitch a fit.
Actually, forget that. Just pitch a fit! Go on TikTok and make a viral video about all the stupid things you see people being warned about and point out that it’s stupid and it prevents people from doing anything about the shit they should be doing stuff about. Like demanding a change in the system that produces so many fucking dangers in the first place.
Ahem. Go forth and pitch a mighty fit! You’ll be doing god’s work.
Absurdity #2: Social Media and the Fear of Social Media
Everyone hates social media. It’s a noxious mess. Also people like social media. Cuz sometimes it’s a fun and entertaining noxious mess. What to do if you want to indulge in something you know is both toxic and delicious? Well, apparently, you complain about it endlessly and talk about how dangerous it is.
That seems like a pretty normal reaction to me.
It’s also probably pretty normal to be afraid of something you can’t understand, and if anyone on earth actually understands the phenomenon that is social media, that person is incredibly weird. Because none of the rest of us can.
Furthermore, social media is somehow associated with youth, and if there is one thing on earth that terrifies old people, it’s young people. As far as old people are concerned, young people are not only incomprehensible, they’re energetic. And bound to fuck things up in ways their elders didn’t think of while they were young and busy fucking things up in ways that we’re all paying for now. Being old is scary partly because it involves being aware of young people.
But it’s still absurd. Social media absolutely absurd. If you don’t believe me, participate in it for a bit. And the fear of social media is absurd too. ‘Kids are doing stupid things because other kids are doing stupid things!’ Honey, all people are doing stupid things because other people are doing stupid things. You ain’t gonna fix stupid by getting rid of social media.
Now, could you do the world some good if you grabbed Meta, Google, Elon Musk, and ByteDance by the balls and squeezed so hard their algorithms started dribbling down their chins. You could do some good in the world if you attacked their business models so hard that they fell over clutching their market capitalizations while moaning pitifully. You could do the world some good if you erased the concept of ‘engagement’ from their excess-profit-seeking brains. You could do some good if you accidentally made targeted advertising impossible. It’s not that things couldn’t be improved. They absolutely could be.
Ya just can’t get those improvements to come about by airing or consuming segments about how stupid people on social media are and how dangerous it is that idiotic things are trending. It’s more about setting up a structure where the idiotic thing that trends is ‘Gangnam Style’ instead of Botox for dogs or whatever.
Remember Gangnam Style? Catchy and harmless. Before social media was so ruthlessly monetized.
To sum up: Fight the power. And don’t jump out of a rapidly moving boat.
Absurdity #3: Social Media Challenges and Trends
I get it. People, especially young people, need to challenge themselves. And trends allow lots of people to experience the same thing more or less contemporaneously. Which is hard to do in today’s fragmented world. Something’s gotta be popular. A long time ago it was seeing how many coeds you could stuff into a VW bug or something.
But we’re at the point where all media that is not social seems to have become, well a medium for reporting on what is happening on social media. Endless articles on who’s getting dragged on Twitter or who created a firestorm on Instagram or how people on TikTok are checking out how they’ll look when they’re old or they’re cats or when they mate with their dogs or if they were generated by AI or whatever.
A little social media absurdity is fun. Once upon a time, there was a lawyer who accidentally showed up for a virtual hearing as a Snapchat cat. That went viral. That was fun.
But so much of it is not fun. It is deadly serious. Or absurdly vitriolic. Or absurdly mean. Bile triggered by trivia. As I write this, someone is being dragged (seriously) for having a dinner party. Some millions of people on social media are consuming content critical of someone for having a dinner party.
Okay, so maybe vitriol is kind of fun. Cuz everyone is feeling vitriolic these days and maybe watching it get spewed can be an outlet for that. But it is still undeniably absurd that is has become not only a legitimate way to spend time but an almost inescapable way to spend time.
And all of this would be well, just an element of the bad-mood vibe of current times, but a lot of this shit is connected to money. People – content creators, and social media behemoths – get paid for this. Creators feel a need to go viral, trend, challenge, and whatever, so that they can get absolutely fabulously rich and miserable at the same time. Witness Andrew Tate who turned this into both a business strategy and an arrest warrant. The system incentivizes being a maniac weirdo asshole for misery and profit. You get what you incentivize and what is being incentivized is destruction in various forms.
There are lots of content creators who do wonderful things at high cost to themselves and big profit for the shareholder class. And there are lots of content creators who do terrible things at high cost to themselves and big profit for the shareholder class. One of them just got her M.D. license revoked for fucking up surgery live on TikTok.
It’s all – what’s the word I’m searching for? Oh yeah. Absurd.
So here’s my impractical proposal. Lower the stakes for trending. Like a lot. And start getting shit trending that is more like goofy dancing than ‘I crashed my plane for social media likes’ (a real thing, by the way, that actually happened, and led, you guessed it, to an arrest).
Absurdity #4: Social Media Trying to Police Itself. Ha Ha Ha
So, TikTok ”said in a statement to NBC News it has added warnings on some of its videos that note “participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt.”” If you know that participating in this activity could get people hurt, why are you displaying it? For the dollars, of course.
Social media companies, such as they are, apparently make all kinds of absurdly futile attempts to police the content that appears on their sites, much to the detriment of the people attempting to do the policing. They supposedly try to stop child trafficking, and illicit drug sales, and election interference and disinformation campaigns and death threats and other things that cause demonstrable harm to individuals and society.
Ha ha ha, no they don’t. They try to stop harmful shit on their sites just like the president of Mexico tries to stop drug cartels. They try to police themselves just like China tries to stop fentanyl from getting to the US. Which means – they don’t really try at all. Social media companies get paid for that harmful shit. It’s lucrative. They periodically try to get people to stop making an annoying public stink about stuff on their sites but that’s about as far as it really goes.
Partly because they don’t want to engage in ‘censorship’ but mostly because they just want to be left in peace to make absurd amounts of money. Because the way things are set up, they can make absurd amounts of money. This set of affairs doesn’t really make anyone happy except the people who make their own small fortunes selling drugs or people or lies.
To boil this down, people (and let’s not forget that corporations are people!) will do what they can get away with. The absurdity at the heart of all this is thinking that they won’t and that they’ll walk away from literal billions of dollars if they don’t have to.
My proposal? The next time any social media company talks about its efforts to mitigate the harms it causes, laugh loudly and rudely in its face. If a person like, let’s say Mark Zuckerberg, testifies before Congress about privacy or Meta’s efforts to, you know, not be evil, all the Congresspeople need to burst into raucous laughter at once and shout ‘What a crock of shit!’
We all need to start doing this all the time. We don’t need to be earnest, we just need to call bullshit and start laughing at and rejecting their claims that they are doing the best that they can. Nonstop derision of corporate leaders could be a wonderful tonic for our de-energized times.
Also, any time Elon Musk ever says anything at all, a poop emoji needs to be thrown at it. If he’s on TV, put it in the chyron or over his head. If he’s on a podcast, splice in the words ‘poop emoji’ every 7 words or so. It he tweets, make it everyone’s auto reply. If he’s quoted in a print publication, the phrase ‘Musk’s words were countered by a poop emoji from his many critics’ needs to appear. And so on. And we need to keep doing this until he never says anything ever again at all. Amen.
Discover more from Get Pretty Fed Up
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.