MEDIA + CULTURE
Madness By Demand
What about social media interaction that brings out the worst in us, more so in some?
Spoiler alert: This essay discusses Netflix’s 2019 docuseries ‘Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer’.
We’ve heard it all before: social media is bad for us. That’s just a blanket statement. How bad is it? Let me count the ways. Before I do, let’s admit the fact that we remain online for many reasons that put us in an ambivalent position. Most of which are selfish and self-serving. Was it designed to be this way? Or has our basic instincts triggered us to another level?
In virtual spheres, even the tiniest speck of our hidden self has a chance to be un-ignored. But are you really who you are online? Or are you just a persona, or a few? How many fake accounts do you have? Did you create an account to stalk people? Do you enjoy stalking your exes? Do you have a need to? Why are you reluctant to have your real updated photo in your profile? Are you out to fuck around with people’s psyche? I’m not even talking about online dating sites. That’s a separate landmine.
If offline we struggle to be seen, online, we can be heard. Loudly. Heck, we could put on a macho act and get away with it. But what if I told you we’ve become so greedy in our pursuit to be heard on social media that we’re causing others to be killed?
To support the frown you’ve got on, let’s start with the basics.
One reason that’s hard to ignore is social media — whichever size or platform — connects us to the world. It’s like oxygen. Nothing is more critical than the need to connect, or at least have an active link to the outside world.
When I left Twitter, I felt a black hole not in my life, but in my brain. Twitter, setting aside Elon Musk and people’s untamed behavior, was the fastest form of getting information on what’s happening. The immediacy of knowing 10,000 miles from ground zero was a blood rush. Beyonce would be performing live at a concert, trips on stage and have a wardrobe malfunction, and before she could get up and compose herself, that whole incident would have been recorded and shared with the world.
Sixty thousand fans who paid good money to attend, would be screaming support to her “Queen Bey, we love you!”. Another three million not at the concert would be discussing how she slipped, what could have been prevented (whose fault that was), who designed her outfit (love it/ hate it), to how much the outfit costs (love it/ fuck we could feed the poor). A host of misers would be going, “Such an overrated b*tch. Hate Beyonce!” or drag her husband into it, “Jay-Z’s ugly for the likes of Beyonce”.
In fact that’s what happened recently when their daughter Blue Ivy was happily dancing on stage at her mother’s concerts and netizens turned unsolicited dance experts worse than the judges on ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ dismissing the poor girl for dancing with the talent of a stick.
Welcome to the cesspool of social media interaction. Yes, it connects us to the borderless, fast and immediate world journalist and author Thomas Friedman (of ‘The World is Flat’ fame) describes as ‘globalization’ and ‘reducing geographical spacing’ to grand advantages.
Those are true. Unfortunately, being borderless has created many new disadvantages. It’s like moving into a charming neighborhood only to realize you have citizens from hell who don’t clean their yard, have rabid dogs who bark incessantly at everything that breathes, and squabbling families at each other’s throats pierce into the stillness of the night. Oh look, a Jeffrey Dahmer look-alike lives alone three doors down. Very assuring.
What about social media that brings out the worst in us, more so in some? Why is it that we simply cannot help ourselves?
Janice Harayda’s essay ‘The Problem With Social Media Platforms That Reward ‘Engagement’’ starts off on that note:
“A cascade of recent stories has described an alarming paradox: Social media platforms were supposed to bring us together but are driving us apart.”
Turns out, social connection is not ‘the’ business model according to experts. It’s the engagement. To do that is like how the Sicilians used to prepare for a vendetta: starve a dog while giving it the scent of your enemy. When the right time comes, the dog is delirious, angry and ready to attack. Whoever has that scent is no longer the enemy, he is food. Attack is straight to the jugular, no mercy.
“Unfortunately, what is most engaging isn’t always aligned with what we value,” says Harayda summarizing what’s been shared by Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-host of the podcast ‘Your Undivided Attention’.
It makes sense. The more polarized we are about a subject, the more chatter we create. It’s the illusion of discourse rather than the actual discourse bringing profit to the table that feeds engagement. You can produce a movie of epic proportion, but if no one watches it, did you even make it? Who lives to tell, more so talk about it?
We’re also still susceptible to shiny objects.
The folks at Bud Light thought trans activist Dylan Mulvaney’s ten million followers would amplify its reach and engagement. It did, but not the way they expected, because you can conjecture a strategy and draw a list of positives, but audience reaction is a slippery slope, a wild beast, a mist that haul in the poltergeists you didn’t see coming. And when netizens don’t like something, they will pillage the village. What else is there to do online after a long day at work being unrecognized?
When the crisis between Russia and Ukraine broke out, people were quick to use terms synonymous with war. The writings of potential World War III made headlines and columns scaring the hell out of folks who were (still are, actually) battling with a pandemic outbreak. It’s as if we are all too besotted with wartime violence. “United we stand against Russia, provide more weapons for Ukraine” spelled the headlines. Sanctions, boycotts, curtail supply and suffocate energy, economy and pipelines, netizens repeated and suggested in different ways. But who actually suffers? Who receives the hardest and toughest blows from all these dialectics? What happens when truths and fallacies get polluted like an oceanic oil spill?
You tell me.
Let’s not forget the bots and oddities that also creep into the system.
Netflix’s 2019 docuseries ‘Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer’ (DFWC) is a brilliant example of how social media engagement presents an insidious threat to everyone involved in the overlapping social spheres when things spiral out of control. Overlapping social spheres here refers to the subset conversations created from main discussion groups.
DFWC is a true account of a deranged killer who orchestrated a murder in 2010 (maybe two according to investigation grapevine) in a span of several years. The killer triggered social media users by posting a video of him killing two kittens with a plastic bag and a vacuum cleaner.
The video went viral and created a firestorm that led to netizens self-electing themselves as gumshoes to “follow the crime”. Here’s the catch: that’s exactly what the murderer wanted. Soon, it became a pursuit to solve the crime, causing a phenomenon of problematic and consequential confusion.
As the story unfolds, it becomes a cat-and-mouse chase with folks on social media dedicating full-on energy and mental capacity to hunt for the killer. Polarization begins.
Crowd-sourcing expertise led to a perpetrator cornered and identified. Netizens virtually bludgeoned him to death with clubs of death threats and undeserving taunts. At that point it was no longer about evidence but persecution. Two kittens had died, the world screams for justice.
The man took his own life. Unfortunately, it was the wrong man in the wrong part of the world.
This was no longer about two kittens, but by now Frankenstein had been created and set loose. Now out for more blood and vindication, netizens needed to prove they were misled and innocent of a man’s death.
All the while, the killer had manipulated the social media engagement, putting them on a wild goose chase (frenzy is a better word) by planting fake accounts into the conversations, being fully aware of the amateur ongoing investigation. More divisiveness occurred.
The killer then purposely stayed quiet, eased the intensity before he uploaded another gruesome video stirring the turd all over again. It was Gaslighting 101 in the narcissistic, sociopath cookbook.
By now, netizens who have been on the case since the beginning are fully invested in the investigation to the point they even threatened the police authorities.
Citing it as “frustration” the furor and unnecessary outbursts to the authorities caused the police to not take the videos and outrage seriously. In this sense, the netizens had muddied the waters for the real detectives to do their job.
After a dismembered body was found — and much, much more — it all escalated to hell. I’m not going to spoil this for you. But my point here is, what started off as netizens thinking they were acting in solidarity as a global village to hunt an animal killer, turned out to be the opposite.
By the end of it, a trail of deaths had ensued, many innocent folks got thrown under the bus at high speed as folks stroked their keyboards (and ego) like it was all a whodunit video game.
In interviews, one out of the two lead Facebook sleuths of the case had this to say in reflection: “Did we help to worsen the investigation? Maybe it’s time we turned off our machines.”
The killer had once sent her a message which isn’t in the Netflix docuseries. He wrote to her a telling message by Nietzsche:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I had several scary realizations at the end of watching Don’t F**k With Cats: A 28-year-old porn actor from Canada understood the game and played everyone like a fiddle, setting fire online and offline across countries, shocking Canadian political leaders, police authorities, and got Interpol on high alert.
He triggered us with two kittens and the house of cards came tumbling down. What makes us weaker and more easily divisive online? Why is angst easily amplified with freedom and access to more information?
Could it be that there is a monster in us, and that the real business of social media is designed to unleash the kraken and see how far we’d go to destroy each other? It’s interesting — and morbidly disturbing but not impossible — that sociopaths can smell our thirst for blood like leeches.
It’s not artificial intelligence and chatbots we should be worried about. It’s serial killers with access to the internet, and cats. They live among us, they know which buttons to press. Perhaps even here on Medium.
