BY JUSTIN CATES
The beast of virality has taken on multiple troubling meanings in the modern age, especially now.
Certainly there’s the 50/50 proposition that exists on the Internet where a wonderful and heartwarming cause has the same chance as an utterly opposite and vile sentiment to take off and burrow into the public consciousness.
There’s also the omnipresent sickness that’s been hanging in the air over every living being waiting to strike for the past year and change.
We have no easy or immediate solution to either of these problems— though oddly we’ve made far more progress with the unprecedented disease than the hateful comments and damaging theories posted carelessly online.
Almost from the start of the pandemic they managed to intertwine with one another.
Largely due to the frequent bloviation of America’s most recent former president, a number of mitigation methods recommended by professionals in the healthcare field have been radicalized and deemed incorrect or even sinister. They’re thought by some to be a form of overbearing government control masquerading under the guise of public safety. This thinking has been pushed largely by lunatics who exist almost entirely to be ‘mad online’.
There are also cranky old men who scream at grocery clerks, but what they lack in technical knowhow they share in spirit with the furious ‘red pill bros’ retweeting right wing grifters and sputtering out ill-formed sentence fragments of their own design.
The center of this Venn-diagram is an ugly place to be.
And yet, it’s where America resides these days. Caught between a deadly plague and an online sickness, both of which can spread at a dizzying pace.
What the online masses choose to launch to the forefront of the current zeitgeist varies by the hour. It can leave one feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle if they take even the shortest break from it all, but the breaks are crucial.
We simply aren’t meant to suffer the slings and arrows of the 24 hour news cycle. Now, the cycle turns over even faster with several warped storylines dominating our consciousness each day. This only seems to have accelerated during the pandemic.
I often find myself clutching desperately to hang on as the daily ride spins out of control. The routine onslaught of deeply troubling pandemic news has taken on a more positive lilt as of late, but that doesn’t slow the spinning in our digital carnival.
Frequently a harmful message is pushed not only by those who support it but by the many who completely disagree. They falsely believe that by publicly chastising those thoughts and thinkers that they can fix them. In reality, this behavior only serves to amplify the curdled message far beyond the reach of the original statement.
You can’t win that way. These people have no shame. Their moral compasses spin faster than the news cycle.
And so I walk the dog, I pick up rogue trash fluttering by on a gust of poisoned air, I wear a mask even after getting vaccinated, I limit my intake of social media and news. I attempt to manage the things within my control because the bigger picture is simply overwhelming and often unhelpful. I hug my family and periodically send snappy wisecracks out into the online void. Not because I think they make a difference, but because it gives me a moment of fleeting satisfaction before the focus of the moment shifts to something else entirely.
It’s perfectly understandable to feed the beast in this way. Just don’t get too close to its powerful jaws.
