Brain rot has led to this.

Another juncture at the dumbest timeline.

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It is the nature of heated online debates to make you feel like what you’re witnessing is the most important thing ever to happen. Given how much news and discourse can clutter your newsfeed and your mind, it can be difficult to parse whether what you are witnessing is actually significant or if you need to reconsider your perspective on human nature. Stupid discourse should disorient you; stupid discourse around an even stupider topic will feel as if it surfaced from a dark and malignant dimension.

There is a whole disordered way of being on social media that is built around following that natural instinct to reassess everything all the way out and into recursive madness. Every time you log on, there will be millions of other people whose relationship to content amounts to constantly rearranging what is meaningful to them and then updating and itemizing a detailed personal taxonomy of any time they’ve been slighted by a differing opinion. As a general rule, I think it’s better to not be like that, and to just let the awe overtake you when and where it finds you. Not because it is smarter or more reasonable; no one who indulges in this shit will become smarter or more reasonable. Just because it is more amusing.

Anyway, it is with all that in mind that I can say that as soon as I saw Sabrina Carpenter’s “risqué” new album cover, it was easily identifiable as a portend for how the internet is irreversibly cooked. It’s like a weird Rorschach test where everyone is bringing their weird sexual baggage and repression to the discourse—but as someone who likes having hot candle wax poured onto my chest, I finally feel represented. My issue with the cover is that Sabrina’s music is way too boring for this kind of promiscuous provocateur branding. It feels so inauthentic and focus-group-tested. Imagine being in a string of boardroom meetings between a national PR firm and a major studio that resulted in this photoshoot. Multiple versions of 200-page slide decks brimming with Google trends graphs for the term “male gaze,” screenshots of tweets from sex-positive feminists, Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream, fauxmoi text posts about “cunting out” or whatever the fuck, pictures of Billie Eilish in her Rocawear fits. It’s like watching a Liquid Death ad and realizing they’re just selling canned water.

Or how all Rock stations will act like they play anything other than radio slop:

“This is FM 69 THE BIG DICK bringing you nothing but the hardest fucking rock. If you can’t handle the mosh, change the station because you’re a LITTLE BITCH who doesn’t like to ROOOOCK OUT! First, a word from our sponsors over at the Nissan Ultima Summertime BASED PATRIOT FREEDOM FIGHTERS Event this Saturday, then get ready for some HEAD THRASHING HARD ROCK! Here is… Imagine Dragons.”

Naturally, given the proclivities toward moral absolutism and false binaries that is endemic to social media, this album cover sparked a level of outrage and hysteria that’s completely disproportionate to the abject blandness of the music. I guess Sabrina is aiming for some satirical statement on submissive pick-me culture, but ultimately, we’re still trapped in the remnants of #resistance/Obama-era culture war that people either refuse to quit or are so hopelessly addicted to a demented dopamine rush that they don’t know how to log off and let live. There’s a rich heritage of online conflict like this, the type that sends glitches through your cognition. It’s still nonetheless jarring to watch grown-ass adults lose their fucking minds over disposable pop culture, just like they did when we were bickering over whether the Little Mermaid should be Black or whether the Barbie Movie is feminist.

It is not a boast and not an apology, but simply an assertion of fact: I could be awakened from a deep slumber, abducted from public transit, or otherwise have jumper cables clamped to my nipples and still be happy to rant about pop culture and online trends. I am fortunate enough, I think, that my youth overlapped with the dawn of social media and smartphones, and I write “I think” because I am aware that all the bits and songs and in-jokes and OG YouTube videos are taking up space in my brain that might otherwise be occupied by “practical life skills.” I don’t regret it, but sometimes my reality feels illegible, like a melted rainbow swirling in a puddle of gasoline. At times, I do wonder how the human psyche can contain the dissonance between goofy online content and something like the outsized, idiotic, and horrifying state response to protests happening in LA. This can’t be healthy.

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You are never quite as safe as you should be is a central tenet of contemporary American life, although the nature and imminence of that hazard varies from what demographic group you belong to. An unreasoning horror at and fear of the unknown is at the heart of the nation’s dominant political movement, and much of that perceived hazard is built on a load of bullshit. Think of the seething, car-brained fear of liberal hellhole cities and all their crime that animates much of conservative media and agitates so many MAGA chuds into full-spectrum derangement, and their full-throated support for whatever “law and order” entails makes a lot more sense. That social anxiety tends to be directed toward big, cinematic threats, both because that sort of thing makes for entertaining TV and because it’s a ready-made affirmation of all their disturbing genocidal fantasies.

Despite circulating images of inflamed/graffitied Waymo vehicles and videos of a reporter getting shot with rubber bullets, the protests in Los Angeles in response to ICE raids have been, at least, not violent enough to warrant federal escalation. But that sort of banal reality doesn’t lend itself to the kind of comic-book-villain dada that informs much of authoritarian politics—and our president is driven by whatever gets and keeps Donald Trump on TV, and his supporters need to post and post and own the libs. There have been memes saying that the real invasion in LA is not from immigrants but from ICE agents, but that sort of empathetic logic is fundamentally incapable of swaying a movement that’s animated by refracted contempt and the permission Trump gives them to be the most selfish and sadistic version of themselves. So Trump authorized a historic deployment of military force on U.S. soil, even as the sitting governor of California pleaded him not to. And from a distance, all of this morphs into another online argument about whether this is fascist or a justified use of force.

Unleashing the military on LA seems a bit disproportionate to what’s at hand: Is Godzilla there? Are there Weapons of Mass Destruction that we’re unaware of? Trump’s response isn’t a matter of crowd control. This is a litmus test, a trial balloon to see what he can get away with. Well, this past May 8th marked 80 years since the Third Reich was ultimately ground to rubble, so apparently, it takes the span of roughly one human lifetime for a segment of Americans to collectively forget that fascism is… at least suboptimal. A wave of red hats handed a grifty demagogue a second crack at the presidency despite or because he attempted a hamfisted putsch—and since his inauguration, he has been evasive about whether it is his responsibility to uphold the constitution or respect due process and continues to illegally deport Americans to a hellish mega-prison in El Salvador. In more despondent moods, it’s enough to make you wonder if the allures of fascism got the long-term victory after World War II.

This is all, to say the least, disheartening. Leaving aside the reasons why it’s depressing to be a citizen of a crumbling democracy, there is a feeling of troubling opacity in my brain when I see news of a president in full bravo glam gleefully deploying troops against his citizens and lusting to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a military parade to celebrate his birthday. It’s also disturbing to see the White House hiring guidelines mandating loyalty tests to Trump or goonish MAGA sycophants bum-rushing and tackling a Democratic Senator at a press conference. In a more well-adjusted society, this trendline should be obvious disproof of our cherished American exceptionalism.

Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it, but those who do remember it (or have read up on it) get to watch with glum perspective as the rest of slavering humanity drags us all along into familiar, preventable hell. Even as an adolescent in post-9/11 suburbia, I recognized American exceptionalism as mindless chicken-fried jingoism, but this current mutant form is perverting and narrowing the definition of freedom into a partisan rationalization of horror. Donald Trump fits as a sort of rancid aspirational figure for the vinegary whims and furies of America’s business tyrants, for venal doughnuts who want to slip the surly bonds of human kindness and liberate themselves from any kind of broader responsibility. MAGA is pouty and tragicomically vain and grandiosely rageful and stupid in weird off-menu exchanges, but they are certain of their moral righteousness. In their wild, vicious, all-canceling ignorance, they cannot comprehend that their cartoonish ideology seeped out of the bowels of the American Dream and has congealed into everything they claim to hate.

Although I’m American, I feel like an exile. I’ve spent the last few years living in Canada because Covid felt like an awful sneak preview of the dark avenues of possibility, and all of the Democratic Party’s actions since 2016 suggested to me that they’d rather lose to Trump than even halfheartedly embrace the Bernie Sanders basic decency agenda. Some days I feel like a coward for leaving, so when I come across these spates of thinkpieces about how protestors have a flag problem, it fills me with eye-rolling derision for these enlightened centrist keyboard warriors, and a deeper sense of respect for those standing up to Trump’s idle fury. Their snarky concern trolling scans as something that’s just so besides the point, and it travels through several dimensions beyond tone-deaf and veers into just debate the Nazis energy. If the LAPD is on horseback beating people in broad daylight and on live news coverage, what do you imagine is happening behind the scenes, and what is the appropriate response in a way that will garner sympathy from suburban moderates in Northern Virginia? Does the conversation about optics extend to ICE agents and abusive law enforcement, or is optics only a consideration for those being terrorized?

I’d like to disown this hateful, savage present, but anyone who’s ever read up on a book like Shock Doctrine can see this is American foreign policy directed inward. After spending decades treating millions of lives around the world as disposable, it is the logical conclusion for our ruling elite to shun the geopolitical construct that is national identity and begin treating American citizens with the same blithe and totalizing indifference to their well-being.

Given the feeling of doom in the face of brute stupid power, it’s easy to assume these are End Times—because of encroaching fascism, accelerating climate change, the AI utopia/dystopia hype machine. Our Beltway emperors, like all barbarians, are delighting in their smash-and-grab sadism as they piss all over the pillars of civilization. It’s hard to envision any future, let alone a better alternative that has nothing to do with the Abundance Agenda. In the misremembered-as-idyllic ‘70s and ‘80s, there was pollution and stagflation and acid rain, and before that, there was the threat of nuclear winters and annihilating global wars; there is cold comfort in the realization that apocalyptic fatalism is a feature of every generation.

It might be more helpful or heartening to think of ourselves at the beginning of history. Democracy is still a relatively new and fragile phenomenon, an experiment improbable to see success. Its survival and triumph throughout these last two centuries has been a tenuous, provisional victory in an ongoing battle against our baser instincts. We are undoubtedly trapped in a garbage timeline and what’s happening in America now is unprecedented in our history; Trump’s nomination in 2016 was made possible through the collapse of a discredited and rudderless GOP establishment, and its only viable option was to capitulate to its most seething voters and embrace the debased servility and rank fascism that was previously allowed to remain latent in Republican appeals. America has a rich tradition of flirting with authoritarianism; George Washington was offered to be crowned king and the Federalist Papers articulated some reservations about democracy. American capitalism was built on the backs of slaves on land stolen from Indigenous peoples that we’d eventually genocide—and that doesn’t even account for the Alien and Sedition Act, the Ku Klux Clan, Jim Crow, a Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden, internment camps, the Red Scare, our militarized police, our sprawling carceral state, and the PATRIOT Act. The brief and relative stability of the last few decades was the after-effect of a war that slaughtered 80 million people and obliterated the infrastructure of half the planet. Humanity was shocked at its capabilities for self-destruction, but the resolve “Never again” has proven to be as enduring as the promise to quit drinking when the hangover hits.

All of this dehumanizing viciousness is mediated through our smartphones, a device that straps us to an unreal present. The past blurs and the future is inconceivable. Seemingly unfathomable events pile up and materialize in headlines before they’re swiftly pushed to the recesses of our memories, where half-remembered events that have not been fully absorbed or processed just linger as the fading backdrop of this ongoing grotesque parade. To be outraged feels almost outdated. The words and images blur into a permission structure that tempts us to detach from reality. But the fascists are holding a gun to all our heads as we march closer to the edge of the earth, determined to herd everyone off a cliff for no other reason than to spite everyone asking them not to. So we have to fight for democracy like soldiers have done throughout history, forcing ourselves forward in disbelief that this shit keeps happening. But at least this is a fight worth fighting.

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