I have, as I’m sure many of us do, a memory of being five or six years old and waking in the dead of night. In my memory, I lay stock still in bed. Somewhere in my bedroom, a red light blinks. The house is silent. I am petrified.

As an adult, I know that red light is simply my alarm clock. The house is silent not because my family has abandoned me, but because they are simply sleeping. The sensation of waking in a grip of panic is one I haven’t felt in years. Until, that is, I saw Skinamarink.

Director Kyle Ball has managed distill the hollow dread of waking up in a strange room, and boy do I want to get drunk on it. The success of Skinamarink owes much to its ambiguity. The premise is straightforward: two children (Kevin, 4; Kaylee, 6) wake one night to find that their parents have vanished, as have many of their house’s doors, windows, and other necessities. The television blares at random; the telephone’s busy signal has been replaced with an eerie drone. A window flashes in and out of existence, then is gone, leaving only an obscene stretch of blank wall. I understand the basics of what’s happening to these kids. Beyond that, I’m lost. I don’t know where their family is, I don’t ever know what time it is, and I have no idea where in the country they are. I can’t answer Kevin when he asks, of the bathroom door, “Where did it go?”

Even the contents of the frame are frequently unclear. Is that a body slumped in a corner, or just a pile of laundry? Is that a man’s shoulder obscuring the light, or is it the back of a chair? The bumps in the night may be the house settling, but they could also be the strange spirit that’s tormenting these characters. As a watcher, I was reduced to a kid — imagining monsters in corners, dreading peeking under the bed.

This sensation is only heightened by Ball’s excellent command of the camera. A great deal of the movie is shot from the POV of the children, meaning we are only about three feet off the ground. Doorknobs loom above us; hallways seem to stretch for miles. Other shots are from bizarre, high-up angles, giving the viewer the impression that we are viewing the house through a security camera. In some shots, we are an active participant in the action; in others, a passive observer of it. In either scenario, we are completely helpless.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, I suddenly found myself living in my childhood home. I was about to move across the country for graduate school, but for 6 months or so, I would be sleeping in my childhood bed. The house I grew up in — a house I hadn’t lived in for years — was suddenly strange to me. The contents of the kitchen cupboards had been rearranged. The bedroom I’d occupied as a teenager was still mine, but I now shared it with a coat rack that cast long shadows across the floor in the wee hours. Like everyone else, I was stuck in my home. The front door may as well have disappeared, for all the good it was doing me. My mother, an essential worker, vanished to work every day. All I could do was keep my fingers crossed that she’d come back. I found myself digging through boxes of old clothes, old toys, and old photographs. My sister and I were living together for the first time in ages. My girlhood nipped at my ankles. I kept odd hours. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be the only person awake long after midnight, lying face-up in my childhood bed, trying to make sense of the shadows that patterned the ceiling. Frequently, I came up short. I lay in bed, in the dark and the quiet, with only the strange noises that echoed through the house to keep me company.

Skinamarink is available in select theatres

On the evening of November 5, 2021, eight people were suffocated during a crowd crush at Astroworld, a music festival in Houston, Texas. Two more people, one only nine years old, would die in the following days. It was the deadliest crush in the United States in nearly 20 years, and the causes for it have since been clearly explained. Security was understaffed and undertrained, supplies were desperately low, and systems that were ostensibly put in place to protect concertgoers were quickly overrun.

At least, that’s what official reports are saying. If you ask some users on Twitter or TikTok, you’ll hear a different story; namely, that the Devil had a hand in it.

The influence of Satan goes back, uh, a while, but it seems like he’s been around a lot more recently. Whether he’s running child trafficking rings or encouraging Travis Scott (Astroworld’s headliner) to “[do] a sacrifice,” the Devil’s had a lot on his plate in the past couple years. Not since the height of the Satanic Panic have we seen such a moral outcry about the Prince of Darkness.

How does the Devil creep into the public square? And what are the consequences when he does? This is exactly what I’ve set out to examine. This paper investigates what believers say the Devil’s influence is, what they’re ignoring by saying that, and what role, if any, the Devil plays in a healthy society.

Because Astroworld is such a recent example, I spend a large portion of my time focusing on it. I investigate the root of the conspiracy that surrounds the disaster and discuss how genuine these posts actually are. I then turn my attention to QAnon, that bizarre and deeply antisemitic conspiracy theory that posits, among other things, that many prominent members of the Democratic party are participating in Satanic rites to prolong their lives. Using the findings from these two examples, I discuss a theory I’m calling the Fetish of Evil, which compares the role of Evil to Marx’s definition of commodity form. Finally, through the lens of Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, I discuss the ways we can use the Devil to legitimately explain and process pain and suffering.

Methodology

I found the majority of my primary sources (mainly Tweets) by creating a burner account. I used this burner to ensure that the algorithm of my personal accounts wouldn’t interfere with the results I found. I searched the keywords “Astroworld” + “Devil” and “Astroworld” + “Satanic” on both TikTok and Twitter. Because TikTok uses hashtags, I was able to use these to follow the rabbit hole down, as it were, from there. Twitter, in the interest of facilitating conversation, I guess, encourages its users to create threads, and I used these to stumble across new content. I performed similar searches using the keywords “#TheStorm” + “Q;” “Q” + “Satanic;” and “#SaveOurChildren” to find QAnon content. I used Twitter’s “recommended users” feature to find new content and users. I was looking specifically for content that discussed Satanism, demonic rituals, or the Devil himself. It’s my intent to identify a trend, not comprehensively examine these posts and videos.

Travis Scott Did a Sacrifice

The Astroworld Festival returned for its third year last November and was originally scheduled for the weekend of November 5–6, 2021. The name comes from musician Travis Scott’s sophomore album, which is in turn named after the now-defunct theme park Six Flags AstroWorld. 2021 festival tickets, all 100,000 of them, sold out in thirty minutes, even as prices skyrocketed to over $700. Scott performed on the festival’s first night, which followed a full week of events, including celebrity softball and golf games, a host of pop-up stores, and the unveiling of a community garden. Fans began to line up around NRG Park at 5 o’clock on the morning of the 5th, and by 10 a.m., people were joining massive queues for merchandise. Fans began to wriggle under fences and hop barricades to get into festival grounds. By the time the music started, 5,000 extra attendees had snuck in.

At 2 o’clock in the afternoon, a group of 200 fans burst through the main entrance, knocking down barricades and running past metal detectors and security personnel. A video shows concertgoers swarming the entrance of the grounds, where they were met by security, who stepped into the flow of people only to push or drag concertgoers to the ground. In the afternoon leading up to Scott’s headline performance, security was totally overrun. Moreover, they were desperately undertrained. Samuel Bush, who worked security for the festival, said he’d read an online posting for a job: “all [I] needed to do was… show up at NRG [park], wearing all black.” Although Texas requires security guards to receive at least six hours of training and a license, festival organizers didn’t bother to check if hourly workers had either of these things. “No training or nothing,” Bush said. “We just went to work.” Bush and his uncle, who also worked security that night, have since filed a suit against the festival’s sub-contractor security company, claiming that work conditions were unsafe and that they did not receive the pay they were promised. The elder Bush broke his right hand as he attempted to pull people from the crowd. The younger “begged” concert goers to let him pull them clear of the crush, but they “declined his offer.” He could only watch, helpless, as attendees were swept away in a wave of bodies.

All day, there were warning signs and flagrant missteps. Barricades created pens that would later trap concertgoers. There was no official response plan to a crush, which led to confusion and extended suffering long after the kill switch could have been thrown. For 37 minutes after the concert had been declared a “mass casualty event,” the music continued to blare. The blame for ten deaths and hundreds of injuries rests squarely on the shoulders of event organizers, who continue to defend their procedures and planning. Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said he was capable of handling the crowd, but hesitated to stop the show “for fear of sparking a riot his department could not control.” However, The Houston Chronicle, which has produced some of the best journalism about Astroworld in the wake of the crush, has revealed some concerning gaps in organizers’ stories:

Two veteran concert promoters of major shows — one with experience in Texas — said the plans and procedures between promoters, showrunners and local officials outline exactly how to pull the plug on a show. Neither would comment publicly because Live Nation, the company that managed Astroworld, is a dominant force in entertainment booking.

Live Nation has a stranglehold on the live event and concert market. A 2019 report in the Los Angeles Business Journal claims that Live Nation makes more money in ticket sales than its top 15 competitors combined. This figure doesn’t even include the subsidiaries and acquisitions Live Nation has consumed in recent years. Live Nation controls a significant portion of the live entertainment market but fails to protect its customers. Over 200 people have been fatally ground between the gears of Live Nation’s machine in the past decade. Somehow, disasters like Astroworld don’t put a dent in its profits. December 2021 was Live Nation’s best month ever for ticket sales. 2021 Q4 operating income was up 118% from 2019. Live Nation’s website is currently offering its customers the promising of “two hours at a packed club, or an entire weekend of sets at a festival.” This, six months after that “packed” atmosphere turned deadly. Live Nation, at least, has moved on.

Clearly, the lure of profit is too strong. There should be no question about what caused ten people to lose their lives in the crush. Yet, strangely, following the disaster, social media platforms, especially Twitter and TikTok, seethed with conspiracy about the cause of the fiasco. Dozens upon dozens of photos and videos attempted to explain the “imagery” behind the “satanic ritual.” These normally involve a poor understanding of a whole host of art and media, frequently including Christ in Limbo, a painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch; and the Kabbalah. (The antisemitic tendencies of these conspiracies are discussed at length below.)

For example, a tweet from user Bitukamica (@benromotokula) juxtaposes the entrance to Astroworld, a giant inflatable Travis Scott head through the mouth of which attendees walked; with the monster in the follower’s Christ in Limbo; the depiction of Moloch in Metropolis; and an engraving of Henri-Paul Mott’s Baal Moloch dévorant les prisonniers de guerre à Babylone, wrongly attributed to Mott himself. Through the analysis of imagery, the user intends to prove that Scott is a Satanist and the Astroworld festival was a “blatantly obvious… public satanic ritual.”

Unfortunately, the analysis is quite poor. Fantastic and gruesome as Bosch and his followers’ paintings of Hell are, Christ in Limbo depicts the Harrowing of Hell. The damned souls are spilling out of the creature’s mouth, not being consumed by it. Christ has come for them; they’re free from the Devil’s clutches. Metropolis is a critique of capitalism, especially the conditions under which conditions 20th c. factory workers labored. The god Moloch’s maw leads into the factory — workers are literally eaten alive as they’re sacrificed to capital. Ironically, Fritz Lang was making the same argument I am, i.e., that capitalism, not evil, is the root of suffering.

Finally, Mott’s painting is, as most of his work was, based on some fantastic history, not legitimate fact. It is unlikely that human sacrifices were so led so spectacularly into the mouth of some statue to slake the thirst of an angry god. Tweets like this one are the perfect fodder for conspiracy: they have just enough fact in them to sound or look genuine, but they crumble under anything more than a surface-level investigation.

Video posts tend to get more insidious still. A video posted by Twitter user Grant Taylor (@grantltaylor) claims that Astroworld was “clearly designed as a Satanic ritual.” The video cites the “spiraling portal” and “non-human entities” that appeared onstage during Scott’s set, and draws parallels to other events that he claims are demonic or Satanic in nature. So far, this is par for the course. The user is taking images from Astroworld and drawing comparisons — legitimate or not — to other media he considers to be evil. One of these, by the way, is a clip of the festivities surrounding the opening of a railway tunnel in Switzerland. How this tunnel “unleashed… demonic entities” is unclear. About a minute into the video, however, things take a turn for the worse. The speaker claims that the “goal” of the ritual was “depopulation.” He initially proposes that festival security and attendees may have been drugged, a rumor which has been proven to be false. “But isn’t it more likely,” he continues, “given that these are the same reactions we have been seeing from the experimental jabs, that they are one and the same?”

This is where these nonsense videos and posts have the potential to do real damage. “The entire world has become rife with human sacrifice,” the speaker says. No longer content to spout conspiracy limited to Astroworld itself, the speaker, who claims to be affiliated with InfoWars, is attempting to spark panic about the COVID-19 vaccine. We will see these plots of “depopulation,” which are often perpetuated by a “cabal of elites,” more when we begin to investigate QAnon, but suffice it to say that this level of misinformation is treacherous.

There is a real danger in this sort of conspiracy. The majority of posts about Astroworld are overwhelmingly silly, but a few of them have an agenda. The InfoWars video is a perfect example; so is the tweet I cited in the introduction. Twitter user Henrik Palmgren, who claimed that “Travis Scott did a sacrifice,” also uses his platform to warn his 40,000 followers about the dangers of “multiculturalism” and “antifa.” His content either flirts with or outright embraces white supremacy: “Europeans and descendants of Europeans (not [sic] matter where you live), listen up: They hate you and they want your children and grandchildren to bear no resemblance to you and your kin,” reads one tweet. Conspiracists are using a foot-in-the-door method here: if you can get people to believe a small bullshit claim, you can get them to believe a larger bullshit claim. Come for the tweets about the devil, stay for the racist gibberish.

It is also worth asking if posters, especially the silly ones like Bitukamica, believe in the Devil, or if they’re just trolling. In her 2015 book This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, media scholar Whitney Phillips examines the trend of the bikini bridge, which took the Internet by storm c. 2014.

Thousands of images of slender, almost exclusively white women flooded Twitter and Instagram. These posts frequently feature a woman lying on her back, her hip bones jutting above her (flat) tummy, lifting her bikini or jeans into a “bridge” that exposes a gap above her pubis. It later was revealed that the #BikiniBridge was a manufactured trend started by trolls to create a media uproar. It worked. The Daily Mail freaked out, and a media representative for Dove condemned the trend. The bikini bridge spiraled from a cheap bid for “lulz” into a full-blown frenzy.

Is this the same thing? It certainly could be. After all, it is difficult to swallow that Internet teens are blaming the Devil for death and destruction. Do they really believe that? My question is, does it matter? Whether they genuinely are afraid of Travis Scott’s “demonic rituals” or are just trying to create some faux panic, they’re clogging the pipelines. There was some incredible reporting done on the Astroworld tragedy — The Houston Chronicle’s pieces are a stellar example — but the trolls are always louder. Secondary reporting became less about the crush itself and more about the panic spreading on Twitter. At some point, the intention doesn’t matter, because misinformation and lies blind us either way.

Oh No, Does This Mean We Have to Talk About QAnon?

Unfortunately, we now must turn our attention to QAnon. I say unfortunately because examining QAnon is like watching a car crash: it’s horrific, but I can’t turn away. QAnon is becoming increasingly difficult to define, but at its core, it is a conspiracy theory that posits a “deep state” of “pedophilic elites” are holding “satanic rituals” to advance their shadowy agenda. Adherents fear that dozens, if not hundreds, of children are being trafficked, sexually abused, and ritually murdered for the adrenochrome in their blood. The adrenochrome is then consumed as a drug. The mythology gets hazy here: some believers are convinced the adrenochrome is an “immortality serum” that keeps “the global elitists” young; others are sure of its euphoric and hallucinogenic effects. Adrenochrome has no such effects; it is simply oxidized adrenaline. For a brief period, it was thought to be a factor in schizophrenia, but this has been disproven. Adrenochrome has no medical uses. Regardless, the alleged means for harvesting adrenochrome range from selling children disguised as furniture to Satanic rings run from the basement of pizza parlors.

So, where does the Devil come in? Q’s followers, or bakers, as they are sometimes called, are convinced that they, along with President Donald Trump, are the last defenses against the forces of evil. The Devil is everywhere, according to them. Gimlet-eyed bakers are quick to point out the connections between apparently innocent content and the legions of Hell. A recent example has to do with the acronym GOAT, which stands for greatest of all time and is frequently used to describe athletes. Twitter user Malak of 5th Avenue [@malakof5thave] is sure, however, that it is a reference to the goat-headed figure of Baphomet. “Now you can see it with clear eyes,” she says, referring to the Church of Satan’s 2015 statue of Baphomet. Another user begs his followers to “Save our children from the demonic cult of the left.”

The depopulation myth we saw in the wake of Astroworld comes up again and again. According to the bakers, the “globalist” elites, often represented by Bill Gates, Bill or Hillary Clinton, or George Soros, all of whom are in league with the Devil himself, are planning to murder a large swath of the population. Globalists is a deeply antisemitic term. The American Jewish Committee defines globalist as “a person who advocates the interpretation or planning of economic and foreign policy in relation to events and developments throughout the world.” The notion of globalism is used “to promote the antisemitic conspiracy that Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin… but to some worldwide order- like a global economy or international political system- that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments, and media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one conduit through which conspiracy and paranoia have flowed. The more recent debates surrounding transness and abortion are others. These are, according to the bakers, all connected. A great evil force, led by Satan, is seeking to destroy all that America holds dear. Twitter user HighlandRanger [@pintpipeandcros] warns his followers about the “epidemic” of human trafficking, which is led by the “evil elites.” He says, plainly, “this is the ultimate battle for good and evil.” Evil is a real force to the bakers, and only Godly actions — theirs or Trump’s — can stop it.

The Antisemitic Origins of Q and the Devil

The myth at the heart of QAnon, that a group of people is killing children and consuming their blood, is not original. It is simply the newest rebranding of an old story: the blood libel. In his superb 1943 book The Devil and the Jews, Joshua Trachtenberg examines the relationship modern antisemitism has to the “medieval conception of the Jew.” Ironically, medieval Jews considered Satan to be “little more than an allegory,” while to the medieval Christian the devil was a “very real personage indeed.” The Devil, godly creature that he once was, now moved among people, whispering in their ears, and luring them into sin. According to Joan O’Grady, author of The Prince of Darkness, “The Christian religion has developed the idea of the Devil more extensively than any other world religion.” The Devil has mastery over “the worldlings who, through their attachments, [make] themselves part of the Devil’s Army.” Medieval Jews were thought to do just this: “Ritual murder,” “the blood accusation,” and service to — if not outright embodiment of — the Devil were associated with medieval Jewry. Peter the Venerable of Cluny described Jews as “the devil’s creature[s]! Not a human being but a demonic, a diabolic beast fighting the forces of truth and salvation with Satan’s weapons.”

We see this still today. Consciously or not, many of the accusations we continue to see lobbied at the alleged enemy have their roots in antisemitism. The blood libel was an easy accusation to levy against anyone “early Christians” deemed to be an enemy. Jews were alleged to steal the blood of Christian blood for all sorts of purposes, including medicine and the baking of matzo. That the consumption of blood is treyf was, apparently, irrelevant. “[In the blood libel] we have,” Trachtenberg continues, “the ultimate combination: murder, blood, [and] magic, in grand alliance aimed at the destruction of Christendom.” Little has changed. Bakers are convinced, just as medieval Christians were, that evil “globalists,” by which they mean Jews, are harvesting the blood of innocent youths — sometimes even fetuses — for use in their evil rituals.

A related myth accused “Jews [of killing] a Christian, [boiling] him, and [throwing] the resulting concoction into various wells in order to poison the water supply.” This too, has resurfaced. Watch the Water, a 2022 conspiracy documentary, claims that COVID-19 is not a respiratory virus, but is in fact a synthetic snake venom that has been dumped into drinking water.

By mixing “the serpent’s, the evil one’s DNA” with our own “God-created” DNA, the documentary continues, “they want to get that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.” The Devil rears his head again.

This may seem like a lengthy diversion, but the antisemitic origins of these myths cannot be ignored. The bakers’ claims and evidence are ludicrous and baseless, respectively, but they have the capacity to cause real harm. Antisemitic violence is at an all-time high, according to the ADL, with incidents jumping 43% from 2020 to 2021. I am not claiming that bakers are responsible for all of this violence, but the increase in popularity of an antisemitic theory is a contributing factor.

The Devil’s Been Around This Block Before

It is tempting to think that this is the first time we’re facing such a bizarre set of conspiracies, but to do so is not only narcissistic but anti-historical. It’s egotistical to assume that we are the first generation to reckon with conspiracy on such a large scale. We would do well to look into the past for help dealing with such high levels of fear and misinformation. This is hardly the first time America has been in the grip of a moral frenzy. The Satanic Panic, which ravaged the nation in the early 1980s, had thousands of otherwise-logical parents convinced their children’s daycare workers were holding pedophilic Black Masses in their basements. Michelle Remembers, the “lurid” book that kicked off the panic, introduced Americans to a league of murderous Canadian Satanists who would stop at nothing to get their hands on children. By 1986, families were “look[ing]… for signs of occult ritual abuse.” Parents were warned about “signs” of Satanic involvement and were told to be on the lookout for “symbols” that might indicate their teen was partaking in evil rituals. No evidence of ritual abuse or slaughter was ever found. Michelle Remembers, and recovered-memory therapy, the technique its authors employed, have since been entirely discredited.

What is especially interesting about the Satanic Panic is that the targets were hardly ever openly “satanic.” The Church of Satan, which had been around for nearly 20 years by the time the panic was in full swing, was not a primary target. Bill Ellis’ 2000 book Raising the Devil explains why:

The crusade against devil-worshippers did not primarily target openly operating occult groups like the Church of Satan, although its leader Anton LeVey showed up regularly in crusaders’ literature as a conspicuous bad example. Rather, the agenda was to justify a hidden source of social evil that would explain the world’s economic, social, and moral problems. (Emphasis mine)

The point of this witch hunt was not to root out practicing Satanists. Similarly, although bakers are ostensibly fighting the influence of the Satanic elite, the wealthy are rarely victims of baker action. Rather, middle- and lower-class people, some of whom are bakers’ family members, have been injured or killed. Workers, especially service workers, have borne the brunt of Q mobilizing. Retail and healthcare workers have been verbally assaulted, kicked, spat upon, andeven killed for enforcing mask mandates, which many bakers are suspicious of. The Pizzagate raid, one of the earliest and most visible results of Q ideology, left patrons and staff of a DC pizza parlor frightened for their lives.

Early in 2020, a baker in San Pedro was charged with derailing a train which he believed was “part of suspicious activities involving the coronavirus.” According to an affidavit, he wanted people to “see for themselves.” Most tragic, however, are the multiple stories of believers kidnapping or otherwise harming their own children or families. In the summer of 2020, a Massachusetts man kidnapped his wife and five children and led police on a 20-mile car chase. In a desperate livestream, he begged President Trump and QAnon for help: “Donald Trump, I need a miracle or something. QAnon, help me!” Shortly after, he turned to his children to explain why he’d forced them into the family van: “Hillary’s demonic. I know about Hillary cutting open a 10-year-old.” In an attempt to save his children from a mass of pedophilic Satanists, he left them terrified and scarred.

The QAnon movement is not harming its enemies any more than the Satanic Panic did. Instead, it is undercutting information hygiene, ruining families, and sucking believers deeper and deeper into a void of paranoia and misinformation.

The Fetish of Evil

What do we make of this information? What does it mean that swathes of people have been tricked into believing the Devil and his forces are out to fulfil some evil plot? First, I think we should look at a definition of what the Devil is, and what he represents.

In his 1986 book Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, Jeffrey Burton Russell defines the Devil as “the best-known symbol of radical evil.” He goes on to ask, “But does he [the Devil] exist, and in what sense?” Good question. I am not a theologist and have no personal relationship with the Devil, beyond a mild interest in the occult, so I can’t attempt to answer this. I have no interest in the Devil’s existence. What I am interested in is the Devil as a “symbol of evil.” Evil itself, in my opinion, does not exist. There is no such force that causes, for example, the deaths of ten people at a concert. There is no secret cabal of elites keeping children locked in basements to drink their blood. The rumors of Satanic pedophiles running childcare centers have since been entirely disproven. So why do we keep falling victim to these stories?

I propose we turn to Marx for an answer. In his chapter on commodities in Capital, Marx defines the concept of commodity fetishism. “A commodity appears at first sight,” he says, to be a “very trivial thing, and easily understood.” “In reality,” however, the commodity is a “a very queer thing” that “abound[s] in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” That Marx uses religious language here is no accident. The commodity-form of an object is infused with all sorts of “transcendent” and “mystical” qualities. Objects, once they become commodities, are somehow able to enter into relationships with other commodities, usually through the common language of money.

Marx makes the example of coats or boots sold in exchange for a bolt of linen cloth. The coat cannot take itself to market and swap itself for a bolt of linen. Indeed, the coat wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for an entire crew of tailors (to make the coat), spinners (to spin the wool to make the coat), sheep farmers (to raise the sheep that grow the wool to make the coat,) grain farmers (to grow the grain to feed the sheep to grow the wool to make the coat,) millers (to mill the grain to feed the sheep to grow the wool to make the coat), and many others. Hours of labor are “congealed,” to use Marx’s word, within the coat. Once it arrives in the market as a commodity, however, all this work is magically concealed.

Here is the power and the danger of commodity fetishism. Marx again: “the world of commodities… actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers” (emphasis mine.) Commodities have the incredible power to blind us to the time and effort that is contained within them.

More importantly, the commodity-form hides the nature of its own production. When I buy, for example, a bag of sugar, I am kept in the dark about the nature of the work that goes into it. Sugar harvesting is punishing work. About half of today’s sugarcane is harvested by hand: workers move from cane to cane, chopping the tall stalks with machetes at breakneck speed. Sugar cane cutters in Nicaragua are dying of renal failure at an alarming rate: chronic kidney disease, caused by long hours in the blazing sun, is decimating families. The process doesn’t stop there. Once the sugar has been cut, it has to be refined. This process requires sulfur, which bleaches the sugar crystals to a bright, pure white. Sulfur is found only in and around active volcanoes, and the work of mining it is unbelievably dangerous. Workers in Indonesia hike up and down the Ijen volcano each day, carrying nearly 200 pounds of raw sulfur on their backs. They are not paid enough to afford personal protection equipment; most cover their mouths and noses with a damp cloth. Clouds of corrosive gasses swirl around the mountain: 74 miners have died since 1971 after being suffocated by poisonous fumes.

For some reason, this information isn’t printed on the back of the bag of sugar I can get at the grocery store. The commodity-form of sugar conceals not only the amount of work that goes into its production, but the quality of that work itself. The sugar simply appears, as if by magic, on the shelf. Capitalism is excellent at covering its tracks.

Apart from the brimstone, this may seem to have nothing to do with the Devil. I propose, however, that the concept of evil behaves in the same manner as the commodity-form. When we place stock in the force of “evil,” we fetishize it: we give it an undue power. Moreover, we prevent ourselves from looking closer. Evil is exceptional at concealing the machinations of suffering. In the case of Astroworld, for example, simply blaming the Devil lets Live Nation off the hook. Evil, and its personified form the Devil, can prevent us from looking more closely at the material conditions of the people around us. The Devil is spectacular; he “is the tempter, the seducer… he deceives, he blinds, he corrupts. To fetishize, to reify the concept of evil is to allow the Devil to blind us indeed.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt argues that Adolph Eichmann — the Nazi colonel instrumental in organizing the Holocaust — was not evil, not “perverted or sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Eichmann was a ladder-climber, a career man; his career just happened to involve crimes against humanity. It’s tempting to remember the Nazis as devils themselves, as inhuman monsters who thirsted for innocent blood. This makes it easier to place Nazism in a historical box, to make it simply a thing that rose, was overcome, and is now confined to the dust of the past: an evil defeated. Under this mode of thought, by hanging every Nazi official, we can cleanse the earth of Nazism. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The forces of evil only operate on the silver screen. In real life, suffering is caused by a thousand tiny actions. The Devil and his legions don’t possess people to cause mindless agony. Apathy and greed on every scale and at every pay point do.

Conclusion: Putting the Devil in His Place

I’ll be the first to admit that there is a great arrogance in asking people to dismiss the Devil entirely. Who am I to wholly dismiss an aspect of a major religion? The Devil has a purpose. He is an excellent symbol — a tool for storytelling. In Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, anthropologist Michael Taussig examines the relationship of the Devil myth to the advent of capitalism in South America. “The devil,” Taussig explains, “is a stunningly apt symbol of the alienation experienced by peasants as they enter the ranks of the proletariat.” The Devil serves as a shorthand for deception, for lies, and for mistrust. This is, of course, why believers and bakers alike have latched onto him as the perpetrator of great evil. But can we find another use for him?

Pope Francis, who has served as the leader of the Catholic Church since 2013, is reportedly “obsessed with” the Devil. In a sermon about the Devil, Francis warned his flock: “friends: the devil is a con artist… he tells us that we have to abandon our friends, and never to stand by anyone… He makes you think that your worth depends on how much you possess.” Francis’s Devil is not a cloven-hooved monster who lurks in the darkness; he is a symbol of greed, of Manichean division, and of fear. In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, the Devil is barbed wire, the wage system, and rent.

Proletarianization in South America and beyond brought with it a new way of talking about suffering. Consider, for example, the myth of the zombie. In her 2015 book The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death, Sarah Juliet Lauro describes the “walking dead Haitian zombie” as an “allegory for slavery.” The zombie’s master “retains power over the soulless, revivified corpse and forces it to labor for his or her profit.” The terror of enslavement captured in a story: endless slavery from which death is no escape.

This is the power of the Devil: he helps us tell stories. These stories in turn help us make sense of our lives. The forces behind the Astroworld crush are hard to reckon with. I don’t want to think about the fact that unchecked greed and sloppiness cost eleven people their lives. It would be so much easier just to blame the Devil and move on. QAnon offers people an explanation for their suffering. While I know Joe Biden isn’t sucking the lifeblood out of children, I am furious that Democrats recently failed to protect reproductive rights and have continued to let the coronavirus run amok. It would be quicker to say Biden is in the grip of the Devil and that he’s a pedophilic monster hell-bent on destroying America. The Devil can represent the forces that cause these ailments, but it is important that he doesn’t represent the meaningless concept of evil. Evil forces aren’t behind the Astroworld disaster any more than they’re behind the government’s movements. The only force behind this pain is money. The Devil is greed. He’s starvation wages and exorbitant rent prices. He’s union busting. He’s overwork; pay gaps; redlining; predatory loans; mandatory minimums; police violence; imperialist war; suicide nets; and constant, unrelenting alienation. They say the Devil is in the details. I would be inclined to agree. If we can find the Devil lurking in the crannies of capitalism, we will see him for what he truly is. Then, and only then, can we stamp him out.

Sources

Introduction

Grosshandler et al. United States, Department of Commerce. “Report of the Technical Investigation of The Station Nightclub Fire.” June 2005.

Palmgren, Henrick [@Henrik_Palmgren]. “Travis Scott did a sacrifice. Look at the symbolism of the event. “See you on the other side” is the tagline. People walking into his mouth and through a doorway into another world on promo poster for “Astroworld.” Look at the depravity of the album art cover for Astroworld.” Twitter, Nov. 6, 2021, https://twitter.com/Henrik_Palmgren/status/1457086231787950081

Travis Scott Did a Sacrifice

“Travis Scott to give Astroworld Festival attendees full refunds after 8 died and hundreds injured.” ABC 7, ABC News, abc7chicago.com/travis-scott-astroworld-festival-fest-refundticket-day-nvegas/11212116/#:~:text=The%20event’s%20100%2C000%20tickets%20sold,for%20a%20two %2Dday%20pass.

“Mounting Mayhem: Counting down the chaos of the deadly Astroworld Festival tragedy.” The Houston Chronicle, edited by Maria Reeve, 3 Dec. 2021, www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2021/travis-scott-astroworld-timeline-houston-tragedy/.

“Houston concert-goers rushed gates before deadly stampede.” YouTube, uploaded by Reuters, 6 Nov. 2021, https://youtu.be/YkCbSFtTywQ

Despart, Zach, et al. “For 37 minutes after officials declared a ‘mass casualty’ at Astroworld, Travis Scott played on.” The Houston Chronicle, 8 Nov. 2021, www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/For-37-minutes-after-officialsdeclared-a-mass-16598473.php?utm_campaign=cards.

Blake, Matthew. “Live Nation Runs Lap Around Other Promoters.” The Los Angeles Business Journal , 19 July 2019, labusinessjournal.com/media/live-nation-runs-lap-around-otherpromoters/.

Tsioulcas, Anastasia. “Live Nation, a company behind Astroworld, has a long history of safety violations.” NPR, 8 Nov. 2021, www.npr.org/2021/11/08/1053548075/live-nation-acompany-behind-astroworld-has-a-long-history-of-safety-violations.

“LIVE NATION ENTERTAINMENT REPORTS FOURTH QUARTER & FULL YEAR 2021 RESULTS.” LiveNation, 23 Feb. 2022, www.livenationentertainment.com/2022/02/livenation-entertainment-reports-fourth-quarter-full-year-2021-results/.

Live Nation, Live Nation Entertainment, www.livenationentertainment.com/.

Bitukamica [@benromotokula]. “TRAVIS SCOTT SATANIC CONCERT Here is a summary of Travis Scott’s demonic Astroworld satanic ritual. Mind you this was not a concert, this was not merely performance ‘art’, and these are not coincidences. This is about as blatantly obvious as a public satanic ritual can get.” Twitter, 10 Nov. 2021, https://twitter.com/benromotokula/status/1458589973674790914.

Debenedetto, Paul, and Lucio Vasquez. “Houston police chief walks back theory that an Astroworld security guard may have been drugged.” Houston Public Media, NPR, www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminal-justice/2021/11/10/413162/houston-policechief-walks-back-theory-that-an-astroworld-security-guard-may-have-been-drugged/.

Palmgren, Henrik. “Europeans and descendants of Europeans (not matter where you live), listen up: They hate you and they want your children and grandchildren to bear no resemblance to you and your kin.” Twitter, 9 May 2022.

https://twitter.com/Henrik_Palmgren/status/1523802734880706560

Phillips, Whitney. This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. MIT Press, 2015.

London, Bianca. “Has ‘bikini bridge’ become the new thigh gap? Disturbing new selfie fad circulating on social media.” The Daily Mail, 5 Feb. 2014, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article2535098/Is-bikini-bridge-new-thigh-gap-Disturbing-new-selfie-fad-circulating-socialmedia.html.

Oh No, Does This Mean We Have to Talk About QAnon?

USA Headline News, 5 Jan. 2019, mfamediagroup.com/archives/858467.

Gil, Charlie [@JULS35]. “I’m sure just another conspiracy ” Twitter, 2 May 2022.

https://twitter.com/JULS35/status/1521006026773786624

Kang, Cecilia, and Sheera Frankel. “‘PizzaGate’ Conspiracy Theory Thrives Anew in the TikTok Era.” The New York Times, edited by Dean Baquet, 14 July 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/technology/pizzagate-justin-bieber-qanon-tiktok.html.

Malak of 5th Avenue [malakof5thave]. “The celeb/sports world celebrates a Greatest Of All Time aka GOAT Now you can see it with clear eyes ” Twitter, 9 May 2022.

https://twitter.com/Malakof5thAve/status/1523686171619979264

“Baphomet.” Salem Art Gallery, Satanic Temple of Salem, www.salemartgallery.com/pages/baphomet.

Lesco Brandon. AKA Gary 🇺🇸 [@LescoBr66342236]. “Save our children from the demonic cult of the left. #SaveOurChildren” Twitter, 7 May 2022. https://twitter.com/LescoBr66342236/status/1522930582388359170

O’Grady, Joan. The Prince of Darkness. Element Books, 1989.

McCarthy, Bill. “Stew Peters film ‘Watch the Water’ ridiculously claims COVID-19 is snake venom. That’s Pants on Fire.” PolitiFact, 19 Apr. 2022, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/apr/19/watch-water/stew-peters-film-watch-waterridiculously-claims-c/.

“2021 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents.” ADL, Anti-Defamation League, www.adl.org/audit2021w.

The Devil’s Been Around this Block Before

Yuhas, Alan. The New York Times, edited by Dean Baquet, 31 Mar. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/satanic-panic.html.

Ahktar, Allana. “Nurses say patients are getting more abusive, and simple questions can set them off.” Insider, 18 Oct. 2021, http://www.businessinsider.com/frontline-registered-nursessee-rise-in-physical-and-verbal-abuse-2021-10.

Hanbury, Mary. “A Family Dollar security guard was killed after he refused to let a customer into the store because they weren’t wearing a mask. Experts say acts of aggression are a terrifying trend on the rise in the rise in the retail sector.” Insider, 6 May 2020, www.businessinsider.com/retail-workers-face-violence-from-shoppers-over-new-pandemicrules-2020-5.

Haag, Matthew, and Maya Salam. “Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison.” The New York Times, edited by Dean Baquet, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html.

Winton, Richard. “FBI looks for ties to extremist groups in train derailment near hospital ship Mercy.” The Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-02/fbi-trainderailment-mercy-naval-ship-extremist-groups.

Sommer, Will. “QAnon Promotes Pedo-Ring Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Stealing Kids. .” The Daily Beast, 16 Aug. 2020, www.thedailybeast.com/qanon-promotes-pedo-ringconspiracy-theories-now-theyre-stealing-kids.

The Fetish of Evil

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. Cornell University Press, 1986.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Fredrick Engels, Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1896.

Lakhani, Nina. “Nicaraguans demand action over illness killing thousands of sugar cane workers.” The Guardian, edited by Katharine Viner, 16 Feb. 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/-sp-nicaragua-kidney-disease-killing-sugar-caneworkers.

Lane, Megan. “Sulphur mining in an active volcano.” BBC News, The BBC, 9 Feb. 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-12301421.

de Tonquedec, Joseph. Satan. Edited by Père Bruno De Jesus-Marie, Sheed & Ward, 1951.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Classics, 1963.

Conclusion: Putting the Devil in His Place

Rosica, Thomas. “Why is Pope Francis so obsessed with the devil?” CNN, edited by Meredith Artley, 20 July 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/living/pope-francis-devil/index.html.

Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay is crackling. Every line, every word, every scripted pause is perfect; the script is lean and mean. Not a single word is wasted and there are none to be spared. This has the curious effect of achieving two things: of being deliciously unrealistic and, at the same time, of being agonizingly familiar. Let’s start by recognizing that, much to his disappointment, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t talk like Eisenberg does in this movie. Is he a jackass? Yes. Is he, at all times and all costs, convinced he’s 100% right and smarter than everyone else in the room? Most certainly. Don’t believe me, watch his Harvard Commencement Speech. He practically admits it. Does he, however, have the ability to talk circles around everyone in Silicon Valley, like he does in the movie? I truly, sincerely doubt it. How do I know? Because Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is fictional. This isn’t meant to be a slander of Mr. Sorkin, far from it. The Social Network is entertaining because it’s entertaining to watch one character verbally annihilate another. The breathtaking speed and acuity in every line is a testament to the prowess of the screenplay. Watching The Social Network is like gripping a live wire: I find myself rooted to the spot, hair on end, every nerve singing. It is an otherworldly thrill.

Why, then, does the language in The Social Network feel paradoxically familiar? To answer this, we have to examine what the movie is really about. There are two plots that we cut between throughout: the invention and creation of Facebook, and the legal fallout Zuckerberg faces as a result of it. These plot lines are clearly connected by cause and effect. The editing pulls a great deal of weight here: we see Zuckerberg ignore the Winklevi (a plural that delights me to no end) in real time, then we cut to Zucc’s lawyer defending him from accusations of the (now alleged) neglect.

I would argue, however, that there is a deeper, stronger thread that twines around nearly every scene in The Social Network. That is simply Zuckerberg’s (and Parker’s, and the Winklevoss’s, and pretty much every other character’s) disdain for women. Misogyny drives this movie.

In the opening scene, Zuckerberg’s girlfriend dumps him. Instead of handling this rationally, he gets drunk, rants about her on his blog, and creates the violently sexist FaceMash. Zuckerberg builds The Facebook on an idea that he (allegedly) stole from the Winklevi; namely, the idea that people (girls) would be more interested in meeting (sleeping with) people they met on a site with an electronic doorman — that most lauded of educational email domains: @harvard.edu. Just before he launches the site, Zucc adds a critical element: the relationship status. In his mind, it’s what “drives life at college. ‘Are you having sex or aren’t you?’” The Facebook offers users more than just a chance to meet girls, but the chance to know if they’re available. It’s an instant success. Facebook (sans the The) explodes; Zuckerberg becomes Silicon Valley’s darling, and his early investor and CFO Eduardo Saverin is left in the dust. Saverin, furious at being left behind, accosts Zuckerberg and delivers that sublime line, “lawyer up, asshole.” And so we arrive at the final scene. Zuckerberg’s cases aren’t going well: he is going to end up settling with Saverin for a good deal of money. He sits alone in a conference room, slumped in his chair, repeatedly refreshing his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page, waiting for her to friend him. Blackout.

The sexism that lurks throughout this movie is painful because it’s believable. I, admittedly, did not attend an Ivy League school, but I did spend my share of time at college parties. I’ve been in those “girls to the front” lines we see at the Final Clubs. I’ve had men speak to me the way Zuckerberg speaks to Albright in the opening scene. (Would that I was so witty to give the reply she does.) I’ve spelunked through Facebook and Instagram and Tinder, etc. ad nauseum and seen the misogynism that infests each one. The dismissive, supercilious way Sean Parker speaks to every girl he encounters (the waitresses, the VS model, the “bong hits!” girls) hits me like a blow because I’ve been those girls.

So here is where I am really blown away by Sorkin’s screenplay. How did he so perfectly capture the experience of being a woman on a college campus and a woman online? Each snide remark, each dismissal, each “bitch” is perfectly placed. The sexism is there, but it’s not the main focus. The Social Network isn’t about Mark Zuckerberg being shitty to girls, although it could have been. Instead, we see the misogyny creep alongside the plot, always present, but carefully hiding. This is how I, a student and a Facebook user, most frequently experience misogyny. I’ve been called a bitch, yes, but more often I am brushed aside, talked over, or used as a prop. Cheers to Sorkin. His screenplay clearly shows the same devotion to creating a misogynistic atmosphere for its female characters as it does to creating a fantastic one for the men. Either that, or it was a complete mistake and he just hates women. But I sincerely doubt that.

You can find Margo on Twitter

How The Social Network Nails Sexism was originally published in The Cinegogue on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.