Last week I decided to watch the Fyre Festival documentary because, much like my decision to binge watch The Office during quarantine, I'm always about 5 years late to pop culture.
There are plenty of images from that documentary that stick with you long after you shut your computer: the FEMA tents sitting on gravel, influencers getting hounded by wild pigs on their magical trip to Pig Island, the general first-grader-on-picture-day smile of Billy McFarland in every scene. But the lingering memory I have is that of news reporters having a riot on air laughing at all these entitled, too-rich-for-their-own-good Millennials learning the hard way that there's no weekend worth a second mortgage.
We like seeing bad things happen to people much wealthier or more entitled than us. In an era where class disparities in America seem more and more dependent on good luck rather than good work, there's something wonderfully laughable about the luckiest people getting smacked over the head with the unluckiest circumstances. It's poetic justice. It's the same reason I find it absolutely hysterical that, despite Steve Cohen spending $344 million dollars in payroll this year to Make the Mets Great Again, the Mets are currently 34-40, good enough for fourth place in their division of five teams. Screw you, Steve Cohen.
So it didn't really surprise me when the missing Titanic submarine became literally The Internet for the last 48 hours. It wasn't even worth switching between Instagram and Twitter and The New York Times and probably Pornhub because literally every site was talking about the same thing. Because, once again, there's something inherently fascinating about really wealthy people doing things only really wealthy people do and it going really poorly. Especially when that headline is, "Submarine of Billionaires Goes Missing on Expedition to Titanic Ruins." This is the kind of stuff you teach in SEO masterclasses.
But it was the memes that left a weird taste in my mouth. Sure, the press definitely overreacted, and the Blink-182 concert was certainly a choice. But five people just died. They're gone. And even a cursory glimpse at social media over the last few days would make you think we've literally rewired our brains as a species to "Input Tragedy -> Output Memes."
I just can't get behind this idea of tragedy as content. It feels inhuman. If I had to place myself in one camp or the other, I would say I'm a humor absolutist; I don't think there's really any topics that can't be joked about. But as I've written before, I don't like the idea of our culture as Americans or just as humans being defined entirely by humor. It's lazy and uninteresting and heartless. And it's in moments like these where I go, "Yikes...maybe it's too late."
Comments