Everyone Hates You

Not every protest is noble, certainly. People will turn up to a crowd scene without much provocation, even in a moment in history when crowd scenes can compromise your ability to continue breathing long-term. There's a compelling emotional gravity that grows in proportion to the numbers collected, in a positive feedback loop that globs humans together like a J.J. Abrams Big Red Ball, except less explicable.

Literally any human motivation can draw them there: passion, rage, curiosity, FOMO,* opportunity, memes, lolz, boredom, pressure... And a certain percentage are always people who picked the wrong day to try to run some errands in the area and just want to get back to their car.

We obviously saw a lot of this in action this year when Americans poured into the streets in a continuation of the righteous struggle against the structure of America itself. It's an enraging, tragically necessary cycle of insisting the country do the things it says on the outside of the box, like human rights and equality. As I said, a crowd by definition is motley, to put it politely, so you get all sorts, but sometimes the signal cuts through the orbiting static and something really profound shifts, like a football team will change its racist-ass name. Sorry, that sounded cynical, but the measurables take their sweet fucking time and sometimes you have to grab at something that isn't the typical result, which is literally nothing.

It's another, entirely odd thing--and this is a mint-new phenomenon to me--to watch humans rally in support of a literally nothing. I suppose that speaks to the weight and value of modern Republican thought, but I've never seen people get out in the streets and come together in support of literally nothing. Like a present with no pandemic, which is not a decision that can be taken, so literally means nothing. Or in support of a different outcome of the most recent election, which, again, is a resistance to facts on the ground that are indifferent to dopey passions of a crowd, however inarticulately hollered.

I guess the bet is that we can't actually move the votes, so let's move the people who say the votes count. So it's not just an absence of something they're rallying for I suppose, it goes farther: it's an actual negation of facts on the ground. It's taking a non-position and driving it into a double negative non-non-position, designed to collide with reality and destroy it, like anti-matter. I've made jokes about nihilism before, but that's because as an actual practice, it's an absurdity. It seems so unlikely I'd ever see it flexed by humans, I'm genuinely taken aback. It's like a group of people suddenly tried to make a viable public push to declare themselves to be Klingons. But wait, I've actually seen those, so that's a bad example...

What I'm saying here is: I was already wary of crowds as an idea, but now I've got current events to justify all the wariness. In the end, I guess the takeaway is, for now, don't associate with any people anywhere. Your intentions might be good, or at worst benign, but at some point one person is going to shout the wrong thing and the next thing you know, you're marching on a beer hall and some asshole is declaring himself emperor. It's all somehow both stupider and way more dangerous.

People are terrible. Stay home. For what it's worth, the CDC agrees with me.

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*You Only Live Once