"i'd have the good kind of Tourette's btw"

Cut from this week's report: an autopsy of this week's discourse as a poor Woke 2.0 appetizer.

This essay was the original first essay in this weekend’s Trend Report™, that was written on Friday/Saturday but felt dated by Sunday, given the weekend’s events. Interesting! But not as timely: enjoy, if you want something else to read this weekend!

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Everything about the BAFTA Tourette situation is bad. It is raw racism amplified, ableism expanded and exploded, wars of words — both in the literal room and in the metaphorical room — tearing us apart: everyone loses, an awful situation that coalesces centuries of cross-country traumas while collapsing a decade of trying to undo them. Mount one mountain only to discover you’ve been descending into a pit the whole time.

Why is this situation so bad? It’s a “woke” trolley problem, the intersectionality final boss. “Who will win?” the situation demands. “Black people or disabled people? You can only pick one!” It clears its phlegmy throat: “You must be racist or ableist. And you cannot be nuanced!” The circumstances require understanding and patience, deep breaths as you take in two parallel issues that inspire finger pointing at the main characters instead of the stage itself. (For background, as John Davidson — the man with Tourette’s who shouted the slur — noted in an interview with Variety, the BBC/BAFTAs promised his tics would be unheard. He realized too late his area was mic’d and, considering the program edited out a pro-Palestine call but not a racial slur, the real villain is revealed: a media company trying to play-it-evil for Trump.) There are too many takes to count — Jason Okundaye’s balancing of the issue while skewering the BBC; Jemele Hill’s observing culture demands Blackness be dehumanized; them pointing out how Davidson’s homophobic slurs were edited out; Tourette’s advocates Shay Amamiya and Jhónelle Bean offering context from from Black perspective; linguist Zay Dupree illustrating the fallacy of this discourse — all of which is made worse by Google Airdropping the slur as talk about disabled slave owners swirl.

This was a test that most failed, that will not be graded on a curve: the BBC and the BAFTAs did worst, but so did “we” given the need to talk and hot take this out in unregulated public forums, so close to the knives. This proves that Woke 2.0™ cannot and will not come to pass unless we unplug from these digital dialogue demands and operate from humanization. While extremely different, I think we can travel back to last June for a taste of what’s going on and going wrong here, to the discourse around Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover: that offered a glimpse at a future where everyone (“everyone”) is simultaneously a liberal genius but also a puritanical dumbass. There are literal wars happening domestically and internationally! And yet: “She is not being a feminist!” was something that dominated social and real media of a historically progressive figure, we flooding our zone to drown ourselves in piss as if baby chimpanzees. It’s exhausting — and we’re starting to realize that this is a defining feature of the Yuppie Dystopia, that we’re trained to pull knives on comrades instead of the system itself.

“I was annoying at a concert,” creator Sammy Sparkle explained this week, deconstructing the overwrought reaction to a viral video of them being drunk at a concert. “There’s a difference between accountability and moral spectacle…Everyday human mistakes become this big philosophical, moral judgement where people get to pile on about it. At the end of the day, no one’s a villain in this story.” I highly, highly recommend you watch their full analysis as it captures these Woke 2.0 failures well, which ties into how Doc Adam - Against Confusion also went viral this week for posting what was assumed to be a silly throwaway post in front of Trump signs on Threads. It turned into a pile-on offering a magnifying glass to the weapon at the wound’s site: we feed ourselves to the algorithmic maw. “We are like moths to a flame for high intensity moments (especially) when someone else is a victim,” Adam told me over chat. “This is a very Nietzsche by way of Deleuze take.” Much of this discourse → Discourse → DISCOURSE!! escalation is about the rush, as if doing drugs and seeking “a high” now comes from flagellating others more than you flagellating yourself. “Everything — when discussed in the public sphere — must be maxxed,” Adam said. “Even relaxing or being lazy or trying to moderate behavior somehow gets maxxed when it’s on camera.” The panopticon not as viewer but as megaphone.

There are so many more dramas like this recently — the rise of the Gen Z karen, the Heated Rivalry straight women versus gay men convo, the Wuthering Heights discourse, the return of the Try Guys chastity belting, the Fendi feminism thing, the Texas Roadhouse gender reveal bombing — that is shifting all of this (Online culture? Modern culture?) from fun to useless, inspiring the obvious stories about being chronically online correlating with bad taste. Real world issues from Minneapolis to Gaza, Jalisco to Tehran demand our unified action to quell hate and stop violence — but does that mean we have to carry the same gravity to personal situations that are not ours, greeting a seconds-long encounter with strangers as if the trauma of a lifetime? No. One day, empathy will be the new trend. Until then, we wait in this exhausting dungeon, watching our cellmates kill each other instead of organizing for collective freedom.

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