One of my kids just turned sixteen and immediately began driving nearly eight-hundred miles a week, traveling from Portland to Seattle to play for a pretty prestigious basketball program. Paling in comparison to the time my seventeen-year-old daughter traveled across Scandinavia and Europe by herself, these epic trips to basketball practice have been, nevertheless, a source of great anxiety. Each trip seems to involve at least one panic-inducing phone call.
A recent call stood out. This one took place during a gas stop. A gentleman stopped my son on his way into the store to ask the time. When my son walked back out of the store only a few minutes later, he found the same guy in full flight, running from an ever-growing army of police officers. As more police cars arrived, the man fled first around the gas station proper, then expanded out into neighboring parking lots and wooded areas. This was, of course, being narrated to me in the bemused tone of a teenager, who described an increasingly erratic scene. Eventually some quick calculus on the part of the man being chased led him to shed his clothing, presuming, we could only guess, advantages in terms of both dexterity and aerodynamics. This decision escalated the situation from “man running” to “naked man running,” which in turn led to the arrival of even more cop cars. While we can’t know exactly how the pursuit ended, that last scene my son narrated while getting back into the car described the naked man running into a Denny’s restaurant, where, presumably, the situation deteriorated.
“Oh damn, damn,” the kid said, which caused a, “What? What?” from me. “He just ran into the a Denny’s restaurant, no pants or anything. That’s a bold move.”
This story reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite place until Elon Musk tweeted that he’d made an offer to buy Twitter.
If it hadn’t become obvious during the mind-melting reign of America’s first openly criminal president, social media has done more than make humanity increasingly petty and cruel. It’s removed our off switch.
The prevailing critique of social media is that the algorithms serving content routinely isolate and radicalize people, trapping us in our own echo chambers. But I’d personally like to argue for a little more isolation. In particular, right now I would deeply appreciate some kind of next-level noise-canceling headphones that are magically capable of removing Elon Musk’s global gas station antics from my consciousness.
There will be those who say, “So ignore him.”
Right.
Should I manage to find a habitable island or frozen outpost somewhere, chances are it’s already owned by one of the people I’m trying to escape anyway, and the only thing worse than endless coverage of inane shit Elon Musk tweets might be actually meeting Sir Richard Branson.
These people are culturally unavoidable, because their platforms are becoming what passes for the culture itself.
“Mr Carter, If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”
Charles Foster Kane
It isn’t that I dislike Mr. Musk. (If given a chance, I suspect I would, but nothing is certain these days.) It’s just that I’m currently unable to find any type of cultural off button for people like this, and it appears I’m not the only one. At this point, we begin to question whether a certain strain of professionally obnoxious and algorithmically-advantaged, disproportionately old white guys are even subject to any governments and laws–provided they can sustain a certain level of perpetual cultural distraction.
I believe there’s more to the collective paralysis we all experience in watching people like Elon Musk move from one bat-shit crazy tweet to another than our world is currently able to process. (This art of perpetual distraction as get-out-of-jail-free card was practically trademarked by Trump to such devastating effect that, sometime in 2050, a delayed reaction of pure horror may lead humanity to sentence his cryogenically-preserved hair to death.) Sure, there have always been cults of personality, and it’s no fun to imagine how popular some of history’s most destructive people would have been on social media channels, but some vestigial tail of awareness tells me that previously, I had at least some ability to regulate my exposure to obnoxiousness. Assholes are now entirely unavoidable. Twitter takes great pains to warn me if I’m about to see disturbing imagery, but doesn’t offer even a half-hearted heads up for all the content that destroys my faith in humanity.
Narcissists have always had a way with communication technology, but I’m starting to get the impression that even they’ve lost control at this point. Whatever it is that compells Elon Musk to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin to “single combat” for control of Ukraine hardly seems to be within even Elon Musk’s control. Whether running from an SEC probe or just trying to escape his own last tweet by throwing out another, Musk honestly seems as unable to stop as we are at avoiding him. We don’t fully understand even the product that this perpetual motion machine is producing, let alone the by-products. I don’t know where this ends for civilization, but I’m pretty sure it involves a Denny’s.
