When We Give In to Manufactured Internet Wars
When We Give In to Manufactured Internet Wars
I finally ate the Popeyes chicken sandwich and it tasted like existential dread
It’s only several days into 2020 and #WWIII is trending on Twitter because a high-ranking Iranian general was impulse-vaporized by the guy who once fired Gilbert Gottfried on TV. I’m not sure if my stream-of-consciousness is a kerfuffle of hyperbolic nonsense or if the whole world is in a Mexican standoff like the last scene of Reservoir Dogs, except everybody is pointing two guns to their own head. I flick my thumb across my iPhone screen in search of something to distract me from the hourly reminders that the world constantly tip-toes on the edge of Hanlon’s razor:
Baby Yoda is everywhere.
The Patriots’ dark reign over the hapless NFL is dead apparently.
Something about leaked emails and something about an impeachment over Ukraine blackmailing.
Ricky Gervais dunked on Cats as if it’s the James Corden of lackluster movies.
It is beyond comprehension that all these stories can dominate the same news cycle.
New decade, new us. Just kidding.
Greetings from a chaotic reality dismantling as breaking news banners cascade in intensity. Lunacy is now America’s default state. Our sense of truth is pummeled, the bubblegum that held it all together has become unstuck and trampled into the sidewalk. I sit idly in the Popeyes in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, trying to nurse my perma-bruised mental stability with some greasy goodness. Outside, the world is in a psychological tailspin into madness and conflict, the increasing momentum barely holding the broken pieces of our psyche together.
I’m several months late to #ChickenSandwichWars. Much like the United States’ foreign policy, Twitter spats are a never-ending conflict, and it’s hard to tell the last time we coexisted in harmony or when this whole ordeal began. Why I’m here is a question of metaphysics, psychiatry, a terrible sense of time, and finally surrendering to consumerist peer pressure from friends and social media trends. It’s most likely because I’m stoned.
One of the cashiers shouts my name, and I spring to the counter.
Admittedly, the snaking lines, congested drive-throughs, supply shortages, and that guy who was prison-shanked also had me ducking in the bunker of self-imposed isolation while I waited for a ceasefire. As General Patton once said, “the object of war is not to die for your chicken sandwich, but to read about some other bastard dying for theirs.”
This speaks to the most annoying aspect of the internet: It makes us fight over something we shouldn’t be fighting over. All these fast-food social accounts spar like they’re in a Real Housewives reunion show, jockeying for the love of some abstract ideal of whoever lands in their target demographic. Processed publicity for processed poultry. News headlines mostly read like bleak, polyphonic litanies of a falling-apart world, briefly overwhelmed by a tsunami of jubilant discourse about chicken sandwiches or feral hogs. Echoes of “Auld Lang Syne” jangle around in my skull. In my hands, I hold a Popeyes spicy chicken sandwich tucked neatly into a foil wrapper. This is fine.
Fried chicken represents a bizarre compression of American history, capitalist self-interest, communal identity, cultural appropriation, pop art, and food nirvana. For years, Chick-fil-A reigned supreme with its dark cloud of moral superiority that it flexes ever so often. The promise of Popeyes lies in the fact that I can indulge in the near holiness of deep-fried pseudo-food without the lingering guilt of attendant homophobia. Instead, I can focus on factory farms, inhumane labor practices, poultry processing, the exploitation of immigrant workers, the notoriously grim working conditions of fast-food joints, the occasional heart palpitation, and my impending flatulent hara-kiri.
What is wrong with me?
There is no chicken sandwich, metaphorically. We’re consuming its meaning. I watched friends and strangers and racist bots pass through stages of enlightenment: skepticism, curiosity, anticipation, capitulation, ecstasy. We participate in this social media ritual, this collective reverence that elevates its significance to something sacred, something beyond a slab of fried chicken breast cuddling between two pieces of bread.
In The System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard writes:
“Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a ‘philosophy’ of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society, individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.”
Have we reached the final stage of branding? The #ChickenSandwichWars is an odd fusion of voting with your wallet and canonizing commodities to make us feel like we’re participating in something bigger than us, that we can influence anything during a time of political and economic impotence.
In every human interaction, a person must put on a performance, something like playacting on stage, a theory Erving Goffman lays out in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Online, this metastasizes into a postmodern train wreck, where the stage becomes a panopticon full of funhouse mirrors distorting our sense of self, where our identities, opinions, and actions collapse into a perfectly manicured self-delusion.
We’re all high schoolers deep down, wanting to be a part of something cool, longing to feel like our voice is the decisive voice in declaring the victor in a viral Twitter feud. In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, a family visits the most photographed barn in the U.S. On their way, they are saturated with images of the barn plastered on billboards and postcards, and the proliferation of these images elevates the importance of the barn to something special. One character observes:
“Nobody sees the barn. Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn… [They’re] not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces an aura… We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism… They’re taking pictures of taking pictures.”
We enlist ourselves in the #ChickenSandwichWars in part because we are fundamentally alone, and it’s natural human tendency to give yourself to a higher purpose. It makes us feel more connected in a time where constant connection disengages us from our very existence. The grand existential techno-joke of modernity is that we’ve convinced ourselves that moments like eating and judging a chicken sandwich—moments that won’t register on our eulogy, moments that are pop-cultural archipelagos drowning in a rising sea of information—are a direct commentary on our lives that makes for compelling content that will win minds and influence strangers.
Our economy is set up in a way that encourages us to partake in lies every day, like we’re in grift-stage capitalism. There’s an unreality to everything. High-frequency trading, influencing, speculation, and valuation are all premised on illusions and marketing and self-promotion.
Scott Galloway summarizes it:
“We are barrelling toward a country with 350 million serfs serving 3 million lords. We attempt to pacify the serfs with more powerful phones, bigger TVs, great original scripted television, and Mandalorian action figures delivered to your doorstep within the hour. The delivery guy might be forced to relieve himself in your bushes if not for the cameras his boss installed on every porch.”
The real trickle-down economics is how this has reshaped our interpersonal relations. We’re meandering through this distended quasi-reality propped up by curated personal narratives and para-social relationships, peoples’ attention we’ve yet to colonize, and companies pantomiming personality. Our world is dismembering itself with increasing momentum, and we’re struggling with how to fix it, let alone process it. We’re officially in the ’20s again, and it sure does look a lot like the 1920s: a bygone era where women fought for their rights, the upper-class lavished in hedonistic trappings while the proles starved, and the world teetering on the brink of financial ruin and war. We’ve just added memes and a looming climate catastrophe.
Time feels like a flat circle; Marxist theory says it’s a social construct devised by corporations to sell calendars. The amount of bad news that populates our iPhone screens reinforces the feeling that our agency is extremely limited, if not a fantasy altogether. Social media is a conversational treadmill, but it gives us this feeling of dominion over a sphere of influence and community. We’re a little dull when our public masks are peeled away. Most of us get up, go to an unenthusiastic job, pay the bills for shelter we don’t own, come home and sleep only to do it all over again, day after dreary day. We all share this quotidian reality, and yet we think we’re uniquely broken or interesting. The curated tales we tell ourselves and to the world become a form of escapism; the chicken sandwich adds a simple spice to our tofu existence.
All this amounts to a tweet like: “Popeyes is better than Chick-fil-A, @ me.”
Plopped on a bench, surrounded by a long lumbering line coursing through the Popeyes, I recognize the absurdity of what brought me here. I’m hit with a dose of irony upon realizing I’m not immune to these forces either. I text my cousin, “I’m finna eat this Popeyes spicy chicken sando.” My offline behavior mimics my online behavior, or perhaps the soft glow of our palm-sized pocket computers blurs and erodes the line between the two.
I peel back the foil-lined bag, and I see only truth. Steam wafts toward my face, I bask in the aura of deep-fried bliss. I sink my teeth and immediately taste the fusion of the salt, the fat, the sharpness, the softness coalescing into an ineffable, irresistible gestalt. Together, they’re what flavor scientists describe as “high amplitude.” The brioche bun is buttery and sweet and light, but has a distinctive feeling in my hand, firmly binding this thick, sea urchin-esque patty in my grip. The pickles — sizable rounds of cucumber crisp with vinegar — add the right kick of sour. The exquisite slab of chicken breast, hefty and flavorful and juicy and snow-white, is encased in a spiky, golden, crenelated armor of surprisingly light, uncommonly crispy fried batter. The spicy mayonnaise spiked with cayenne kicks in with some heat and fat that rounds out the texture of this piece of delectable Americana.
What I hold in my hands is not merely a Popeyes spicy sandwich, it’s a Rorschach test of consumerism in the digital age. With swarming media distorting our sense of reality, we all sort of feel estranged from the objective world, struggling to separate the information from the disinformation. I evaluate, reevaluate, then re-reevaluate my worldview on a weekly basis, and I’m unsure if this is even a productive exercise anymore.
How do I know if I genuinely like this sandwich or if expectations already planted a subconscious feeling in my head? Are my opinions really my opinions? Why am I actively participating in a brand campaign that I know is profiting off of manipulation and outrage? Can I criticize consumerism while contributing to it? Am I a hypocrite if I’m self-aware of my hypocrisy? Why am I psychoanalyzing a fast food item? Will I look bloated after eating this?
Alright, enough of this. It’s a new year, and for the sake of my sanity, I need to focus on the more positive aspects of my life.
For $4, this is a pretty good sandwich.