Everyone Is Freaking Out When We Watch Political Freakout Videos
Political freakout videos are a pandemic-and-protest era hit genre. But they show anger on the viewers' side of the phone, too. After that there's The Shorter Stuff, as always, and hopefully another issue this week.
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Everyone Is Freaking Out When We Watch Political Freakout Videos
In moments when I felt unmotivated, I used to hide in a subreddit dedicated to videos of public freakouts.
A quick wallowing in others’ disappointment in people, people who momentarily lost their patience at the supermarket or in a parking lot, reminded me that I was at least on the superior side of the phone, the screen side.
I can’t watch those videos anymore.
Because videos like them are everywhere now, watched by everyone. And they don’t make me feel like I’m on the right side of the phone now.
On Sunday, President Trump retweeted a video of anti-Trump #BlackLivesMatter protesters and Trump supporters both losing their shit at The Villages in Florida, in which one Trump supporter clearly yells “white power.”
This came after a viral video of a woman having a meltdown over the ideological implications of having to wear a mask inside a Trader Joe’s and just before another video of a woman having a complete breakdown over a mask in a different supermarket.
Political freakout videos are a second wave pandemic-and-protest era hit genre. But the people freaking out on camera are not the only ones fueled by anger.
These videos have caused the freakout video polarity to collapse in on itself. In the traditional public freakout video, you knew which side you were on. On the screen side, you were not freaking out. On the camera side, you were freaking out.
What’s changed is that the recent deluge of freakout videos are charged with so much political desperation that not only are they constantly in the news and on our feeds but viewer and subject are both suffering an angry freakout, just in different ways.
Each video is recorded, spread and viewed because they find a place in the rage-fueled political conversation we’re having right now.
Trump’s retweeted video clearly shows a bunch of older people having a bad time. But, as David Roth points out, anyone who objectively watches the video can tell that the guy who yelled “white power” did it as a “meta-commentary on our fractured and polarized political discourse.” In other words, the man was knowingly playing his part for the camera, the part of the racist white Trump supporter that the video demands. A complete fucking asshole, by the way, but one having a racist meltdown partly due to his racism and partly due to the phone filming him and everything that means.
The retweet was picked up the Times and the Washington Post, and it’s now proof that Trump and Trump supporters are racist, which was true long before this one asshole had his freakout.
It’s our political thirstiness, though, our desire to prove that what we see on cable news and social media is true, that is causing the freakout.
The Trader Joe’s “Karen” video was widely shared as proof that anyone who doesn’t wear a mask is clearly unwell and a psychotic Trump supporter. To be clear, I wear a mask and so should everyone in a supermarket. But to me it looks like someone who has been pumped full of conspiracy theory and misinformation from Facebook and Fox News who's then surrounded by angry name-calling and finger-pointing people with phones, phones that can easily make you the next most infamous person in the world for a day. In her world, we’re the ones angrily freaking out on her. She was pushed over the edge by her own outrage and the outrage of the other shoppers, outrage that then spread to millions more people who made the video spread.
These videos say, “Look, Trump supporters don’t wear masks” or “See? Trump supporters are racist.” Both are often true, of course. But at this point those potential or partial truths are self-fulfilling.
We will the freakouts into reality by insisting that regular people become famous online because we want examples of political malfeasance. The fear of that infamy or anger about being filmed makes them freak out even more.
Pandemic and protests, being glued to cable news and our phones, has pushed both freakout subject and freakout observer to the very edge of about-to-snap. On the subject side, the snap is obvious.
But on the observer side, the snap is subtle and silent. It’s just the push of a button or the tapping out of a few keystrokes. And it’s just as emotionally charged. Observer is angry, too.
By watching, I feel like I’m actually making these people lose their minds. And it doesn’t feel good.
The shorter stuff
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Screening "Inception" inside Fortnite was definitely the idea of someone who really likes Reddit, Elon Musk and "Rick & Morty." (Forbes)
Or maybe it was just to deflect attention away from the news that "Tenet" is delayed. (Variety)
HBO Max becoming TBS is not something I would have expected. (Twitter)
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Special "That Big Obama Article" Section
Stupefy-centric takeaways from the Obama piece in Monday's Times:
Barack was apparently annoyed when people commented on the speed with which Michelle finished her book, "Becoming." "She had a ghostwriter," he said.
Obama's media diet consists of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.
He shares links to those outlets with friends while on his Peloton.
And he's no better than any of us, really, in at least one way. He "takes pride in the fact that he has millions more Twitter followers than" Trump. (NYT)
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Maybe I'll start finding her videos funny now that I know Sarah Cooper is a devotee of the spiritual self-help book The Artist's Way. (THR)
Matt Taibbi on the writing style of White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo: "DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly." (Taibbi)
Makes me feel a little better about myself to know that Bob Iger also didn't see "Hamilton" until the original cast had left. (NYT)
It's starting to feel like streamers and shows are just pulling old episodes now out of desperation to be relevant. (The Hill)
Advertisers were already panic-slashing their ad budgets this year and I think this Facebook boycott is just a very conveniently timed excuse to do more of it. (CNN)
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A guy you've never heard of who's extremely famous got banned from a platform you don't use for reasons that no one knows. (The Verge)
Jon Stewart has been absolutely everywhere in the press run for his new movie but it is not getting good reviews. (VF)
Very curious to see how fast Netflix can get Colin Kaepernick's biopic from Ava DuVernay onto the platform. (Deadline)