Images of black people urinating on Austin Metcalf's grave are sweeping the internet right now. The only problem is...they aren't real.
@michaeljknowles lays into our "hyperreal, dopamine-drowning culture" that demands increasingly grand outrage and spectacle:
"It's not enough that there were people there saying, 'We want Karmelo to be exonerated.' That's crazy. But it's not crazy enough...you need something more. You need a member of Congress saying that the real victims in the Austin Metcalf murder are black people."
"There's this strange condition that we're living in now where politics doesn't seem to be connected to the actual political order...we're just talking about weird conspiracy theories about personalities who don't even make laws, but who are just in the media."
"In the society where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. This is why all the podcasters had to turn on Trump. Your ratings don't do as well—especially in independent media—when you're on the side of the people in power."
"We need an immense accumulation of spectacles. It cannot be the case that a Left-winger dating a trans furry killed Charlie Kirk. We can't believe that—even though that's what all of the evidence shows—because that's too mundane, that's too expected."
"Now it's all new media, on demand, independent. It's crucial, it seems to me, to maintain the via media. There are going to be some people who say there's really no racial strife in America. That's not true. And then there are going to be people who say black women are urinating on the grave of Austin Metcalf. That's not happening either. The reality is much more tense. It's much more full of anxiety. It's a little blurrier. It's a little more ambiguous."