10/22/19

Today I opened Apple News on my phone, which I rarely do. I scrolled down a few stories and found a bit from HuffPost about a commissioner in some rural county in Tennessee who made a Neanderthal comment about “queers running for president” and similar disparaging stuff about the Democratic presidential candidates. First I thought… God, what a moron!

But then I thought… “wait, why is Apple News showing me this?”

Out of all the events boiling over in the world right now, (riots in Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Brexit, negative interest rates worldwide, list goes on), Apple News serves me up a story about some guy in a county with a population probably lower than my three block radius. Ten years ago you would have had to have been his neighbor, or in the meeting itself, to ever hear about this. Now - here in LA and all over the US - this ignorant old guy’s comment to his local meeting is on my phone after a second of scrolling for “news”… driving clicks and outrage. (Let’s not forget, I was scrolling for NEWS. Today, Hong Kong is in flames, Turkey is engaged in “ethnic cleansing” the Kurds, a Brexit vote passed in Parliament finally , ALL TODAY,… and I didn’t see any of that).

Millions of people probably reacted to this story with righteous anger and outrage, like Pavlov’s dogs, slaves to whatever algorithm served this up. His life will be horrendously different for the next few weeks, and what brand of evil is he? A warlord? A human trafficker? No, he’s some old fool with a job on the county board in nowhere, Tennessee. We never used to hear about stuff so distant and local and small and irrelevant, and the only reason we do now is because IT SERVES A PURPOSE.

Do you know what that purpose is? You owe it to yourself to know. Do you?

Who wins from this? Who wins when you scale this up? Do you win? Do you get anything of value?

I don’t. Who does?

Certainly not the idiot in TN.

This poor old fool’s phone is ringing and ringing now. He’ll be up all night, he’ll be dealing with this for weeks. He has some ignorant and dumb opinions. I have had ignorant opinions, haven’t you? Why are we doing this to each other? What purpose does it serve?

Who wins when you scale this up?

I guarantee, it ain’t us.

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