We Can't Be Content
In Minneapolis, I remembered that grief and anger are best expressed offline.
We’re now over halfway into the first month of my escape from the Smooth World. This first month, the goal was to severely limit my access to social media apps by using Brick to keep them off my phone and Cold Turkey to severely limit them on my computer and for the first week, I was successful. I spent my days either hanging out with my daughter, bricked phone in my back pocket or working on a desktop that locked me out of all socials after a combined 45 minutes of wasted time. Then, ICE killed an innocent woman in Minnesota.
It’s impossible to overstate the extent of the tragedy taking place in Minneapolis right now. The city is under siege by its own federal government, kids are being held out of school, people are hiding in their homes, and yet more people are dying. It’s awful, unforgivable stuff. In those raw, first, hours after Renee Good was murdered, I’d been overcome with anger at what I was watching unfold. I felt sick seeing the footage make its way across my feed over and over again, watching people analyze the angles and begin writing posts about a woman whose blood still sat on the snow. Staying in my house and continuing to consume this woman’s death like any other piece of current events felt profane to me.
Since the pandemic ramped up everyone’s brain rot, I’ve had a distaste for the way that we talk about tragedy online. Posting, while great for making jokes and sharing basic facts, is not the form human grief is supposed to take. With the layer of removal it grants us, we are emboldened to indulge our basest instincts. We digest terrible things that happen to real people like chunks of bone in our trough, floating alongside podcast drama and videos of cats until the algorithm can learn to pulverize it all just a little bit more next time. How many memes of Jeffery Epstein, who perpetrated such incredible suffering on the world, does one person need to see to understand how good we’ve become at repurposing the worst day of someone’s life into a quarter second’s worth of entertainment?
