A while back, I was doing one of my old favourite timekillers; searching for videos of weirdos on the internet. It's the kind of thing that's been around since the old, old internet. Liveleak, Pain Olympics, there's never been a shortage of, frankly, insane things to be found online. When I was a kid, this was all just completely without context; you're 14, a lot of the nuance of this sort of thing is lost on you. These days, if you're paying attention, you find out about things a long time before they start making traditional media cycles. Off the top of my head, incels; they were a known quantity for years before you started seeing news panics about them being the next big terrorist threat.
Anyway, the video hole I had fallen down was candid footage of people getting caught intoxicated, on things that are embarrassing to get caught doing. A big one was guys caught huffing paint, and at first I had that nostalgia for those old trash tv shows that would be on Fox or Spike TV, the at-the-time version of dashcam footage. There were lots of these videos with lots of different people, and eventually it just had this hollow, pathetic feeling. The algorithm eventually brought me to people huffing cans of compressed air, the kind you use for blasting dust out of your computer. It was the same kind of sad thing, and I couldn't help but think about the situations. Most of these videos were in the same kind of dying town, the same kinds of places that got fucked in the opioid crisis.
The general vibe I always got from content of that nature on tv shows was usually an extremely judgemental one; look at these horrible pieces of shit. They're bad people! The online content wasn't really all that much better, but at least it was usually just presented in it's raw form, without a narrator. The judgemental nature of it gets to me a little now, I think. We all need to hold ourselves to standards of accountability, but think about what's going on when a situation like the opioid crisis is unfolding. Nobody flipped a switch on thousands of people from "good" to "bad", the economy is dying and everyone is seeing increasing levels of crisis. To quote Carlin AGAIN, "PEOPLE. UNDER. PRESSURE." The idea of just taking a person and unloading on them at their lowest is losing some appeal. I feel like it's a cop-out to say it's all just a numbers game, but the fact of the matter is, it's a numbers game. As things get worse, people get worse.
And where this has landed me, unfortunately, is feeling bad for people that end up becoming lost in online delusion. I watched a video by a Qanon guy, who was telling a story about how he joined the US military for the invasion of Afghanistan, and over the next few years realized a lot of the things he believed were lies. Tracks so far, right? Then it starts sliding downhill into the usual "if that's a lie, EVERYTHING'S A LIE!" stuff like flat earth. But man, if you were already a completely isolated weirdo, not only would this guy seem really nice, he'd probably chat with you if you commented on his videos! Since he's also an isolated weirdo! This ball of weirdos has been building for years, years longer than anyone called it Qanon. That was just the name of the posting game that breached containment and ended up chain-lettering it's way through the global psyche.
Speaking of people who it's becoming hard to be mad at, what do you do about someone who undergoes a personality change after a brain injury? Like I know Hercules makes cringe posts on twitter all the time, but Sorbo had a pretty huge stroke a while back. Maybe he was like that before, I don't know, but there's always this notion in my head about it. Same thing with Roseanne, she got a pretty severe brain injury when she was young that altered her behavior. How much agency does a person have when you're talking about literal brain damage?
So this probably comes off as me suggesting that people who disagree have brain damage etc etc. Unfortunately, there's probably nothing I can do about that.
Speaking of brain damage,
There are still some line mistakes in this draft, at the time of writing this I've gone back over and corrected them. What I consider mistakes, anyway.
