The Spectaclist
The Spectaclist loves the news. They love popular culture. They love to consume, to watch, to stay up to date. The Spectaclist feels they live in the now. Loud buzzing notifications are constantly blaring, and tabs of Twitter, YouTube, and news outlets proliferate their search engines. Their bookmarks and hotbars are all media outlets. Their YouTube subscriptions are all commentary channels, video essays, podcasts. They search for reactions, reactionary content of content creators who base their living on giving their take. They’re staying informed. Buzzing their ears, waterboarding their eyes with a sensory overload of the day’s spectacles.
I need to stay informed. I need to be miserable. How can I be happy seeing what’s going on in the world. I don’t deserve to be happy.
They’re miserable. Why is the world this way! The frustration of their helplessness to the misery they actively engage with eats at their soul. It eats at the core of their being. They seek to remedy their helplessness by posting stories of conflict on their private Instagram page. They change their profile photos, they include a Linktree with resources to educate and inform people on social movements.
They start commenting on public Instagram posts, responding to hateful comments on YouTube or Twitter. They post tweets that have been pored over for hours, receiving 4 likes and 1 repost (from their spam). The only response they get is a online business school pitching that AI will change the way we engage with education. Social media is a void they desperately aim to enact change in. Seeking meaning in a meaningless place. Not even able to see that their hopeless endeavor is a pit they’re digging with a plastic shovel held by arthritis-ridden hands.
And they love war footage. Gore, violence, dead civilians, dead children. It delivers an adrenaline short to the helpless heart. So overwhelmed with the tragedy and chaos of the world, we’re unable to separate what we see on the timeline from our daily life. This tragic and violent footage is consumed animalistically, as entertainment, as a violent entertainment. Adrenaline and anger course fear as natural reactions to what is seen, and their steps of action are emboldened by the animalistic fear they feel.
The Spectaclist is caught in a loop of tragedy. They want to do good, but the constraints of a capitalist society only allows them to express social change through social media. Protests are sometimes the only times there is a shared moment in society that aren’t communal mass watching of Squid Game. You think as many people would have gone to the BLM protest for George Floyd if they weren’t cooped up inside from COVID? Don’t misunderstand that point as one critiquing those who go to protest, but we need to think about the other factors at play that influence one’s political views, their thoughts on why they’re attending a mobilization or protest. It is the very way in which people now are informed about politics, news, thoughts, fears, love, these are the processes that have undergone the most radical change. We subliminate understandings through our traversal of our digital environment. This is no way to live, no way to think, no way to understand. But it is the easiest way, because scrolling is a societally diagnosed description of the current ailment of mass stupidity and shortened attention spans. Do not inform yourself by what you see a video or photo of, those are two mediums that are not capable of true understanding. Return to the textual medium, it’ll at least be better than what we have now.
It’s a pity the Spectalist doesn’t read. The last book they read was YA at the mature age of 22. All they consume is Reddit threads and smut guised as BookTok and NYT best sellers. Wow, I wonder what they have to say!
