“I don’t have much news”—Chantal Akerman 

I lie in bed in digital lethargy and my window is closed, slow rain and occasional silent flashes of lightning as words are spoken on my screen by an unseen woman on TikTok narrating Paris, Texas sedately—“I used to make up long speeches to you long after you left. I used to talk to you all the time. Even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you. Now I don’t know what to say. It was easier when I’d just imagine you. It was almost like you were there,” as 54 frames in only 38 seconds of a lonely man with a colorful red hat walking in a vast city and driving in the vast desert and walking in the vast desert and driving in a vast city in the backdrop of 54 frames in only 38 seconds and then I read the comments—there are 95 of them : “don’t make me cry,” “beautiful” I feel a specific sad, fluid, emotion that lasts and captivates me along with 105.1K other people I was grouped in with for montage after montage and I feel so moved but I cannot even explain why these types of videos are a sort of fast-moving opium where everything overflows like my neglected garbage can, sink, research, shower, hamper, my eyes go from my hamper to my screen, to bolded white Frank Ocean lyrics superimposed over 46 frames in 14 seconds including images of Cinque Terre architecture, Michael Jordan guarding Kobe Bryant, a USC football player running in for a touchdown, a group of kids in wetsuits coming home clutching surfboards, a pair of New Balance shoes, a kid with a Brazil football jersey on the rooftop of a favela, Mac Miller rapping, Kanye West producing, a young adult skateboarding, a blue race car skidding with smoke under its tires, Ice Cube in Friday, Ferris Bueller waking up, Messi dribbling for Barcelona, all with the sound of a guy narrating “I think that the main thing that stops us from sort of building an identity that we actually resonate with is how much we get attached, stuck, on our unchanging self” all of this in a single video with over 5,156K likes; this video makes me feel a semblance of external introspection, I must keep going though I don’t know why, then a woman, Suzanne Collins is on my screen saying, when I got the idea for the Hunger Games, I was lying in bed late at night one night and I was channel surfing and I found myself going in between reality television programs and footage of the Iraq War and these images sort of began to meld together in my mind in a very unsettling way and lightning fast images of Nicole Kidman, Sabrina Carpenter, explosions from the Hunger Games movie, Gaza on fire, children begging for food, more explosions, more children begging for food, Trump at a rally, Elon Musk raising his right hand in a Nazi -like salute, Charlie Kirk, Amy Poehler, Katniss Everdeen, pro-Palestine protests by the Big Ben, encampments at Columbia University, Netanyahu, Uighurs in China, a valedictorian giving a speech, a news report of Malawi women battling for their children to get vaccines—if I didn’t pause or slow down the video I wouldn’t have seen the headlines or had enough time to identify the celebrities—dramatic, captivating music plays in the background, there are 61 images in 30 seconds, 1 million views, and the comments read “its scary when you can’t tell the real videos from the film apart” and “I forced my father to watch this and he looked unsettled. He looked uncomfortable and he kept trying to look away, I point this behavior out and he defends himself and tries to change the subject. Don’t let people like this let the government do what they want because they’re afraid of looking and knowing. Some people in America are afraid of knowledge and others want to gatekeep it, then some yearn to learn more. There is nothing more dystopian than humans locked in a mental cage,” I try to make sense of what that comment means (I can’t), I try to record everything I see but the images, the sounds, the captions, the words evaporate before my eyes and all I can do is guess, lie, make mistakes—and then I am shown a comedy bit of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David’s voice pitched up and then lowered and then normalized by the TikTok account like a chipmunk as he argues with a Chinese woman who cannot speak English for her occupying the middle seat in a public bus—“I’ve never seen a person sitting in the middle it’s like using the middle urinal” and then the Chinese woman responds and Larry says “I  am not sure if you can understand me or not” they proceed to argue although they do not understand each other’s language, they understand the argument, there are these weird yellow orbs around their faces which makes me think the video is edited by AI—then I am shown a video captioned with “how dare you tear him away from us” directly on the screen and then with “This is my father, Julio. He was recently detained by ICE. Yes, he came here undocumented—but he did so out of necessity, not wrongdoing. He grew up in extreme child poverty in Guatemala, losing his mother at birth and practically being abandoned by his father. He is not a criminal. He’s a kind, selfless man who has always worked hard and helped others. Taking every opportunity to give any other human help” the video has 656.9K likes and 7,314 comments one of which references Anne Frank’s quote “Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes”—then I am shown a video of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the OKC Thunder warming up and mouthing the words to a Drake song with 203K likes, and then a video captioned with “Surprising my daughter by bringing her best friend whom she hasn’t seen in almost a year, to summer camp, after she was bullied for being different” this video has over 2.2 Million Likes, but I don’t want to watch this type of video so I keep scrolling—and I see an entirely AI generated video with 6.2 Million views and 555K likes of a raccoon doing street interviews with women : everything looks real except for the raccoon, he asks a Latina woman “Yo Mami you ever date a raccoon?” and she responds “Shit you cute but I ain’t catching rabies Papi” and laughs while walking away then he asks another woman rollerblading “Yo girl you down to date a raccoon or what?” and she responds “Bro you reek of garbage but that tail kinda cute… maybeee?” and laughs flirtatiously then a white woman with orange blue and purple hair is asked “yo Mami, date a raccoon, yes or nah?” she responds “why not it’s already an upgrade from my ex” and the raccoon says damn burn…. and asks an Asian woman “would you rather date a raccoon or a cheetah” and she says “cheetahs run….. raccoons cuddle, guess im team cuddle” and the raccoon says “you got it momma” and then he asks another Black woman “Date with a raccoon, yes or no?” and she responds “only if he’s as cute as you are” ; all of the women had curves, tight jeans, and crop-tops—the video is an AI generated caricature of racialized groups in the US, and its fictitious, strange aura/orbs are unsettling—the top comment has 50K likes and reads “my mom would believe this is real” ; as I watch the video I feel confused and uncomfortable, but that feeling is outweighed by the humor behind the video though I cannot tell whether I am laughing out of consternation at the fact that this video is made by AI, or whether I am laughing because the video is actually funny—I didn’t have the time to think all of this while watching the video, I realize that my feed is overwhelmed by AI because I kind of like watching it and then I am watching a kid who looks twelve in a white school uniform yelling at two women outside—what is up TikTok today I am going to be tickling people in blue jean jackets and pink tops—those clothes are exactly what the people he doesn’t even look at are wearing so they confront him and ask if he’s having a problem but he yells no i dont as he still doesn’t lift his eyes from his front-facing camera, he looks at us (the camera), that video has 13.4 million views ; then I am shown a compilation of a different guy with a short sleeve white shirt and a blue tie and black pants and socks and black sliders in a store saying to the guy filming him (and not to the cashier he’s standing right next to) “god you’re so lucky i turned a new leaf i’d drown you in fucking ice cubes” and the screen goes black and cuts to the next frame—he’s now wearing a blue and white shirt and yelling “look at this guy he thinks hes a tough guy i’m gonna wrap my dick around your neck buddy, move!” as a crowd of angry employees crowd him while calling security—then a different cut of him this time wearing blue boxers, a blue tie, and a white shirt filming the cameraman he pretends to get angry at again in the parking lot with another crowd of customers defusing the staged situation while the influencer yells “come on don’t be a tough guy i’ll twist your balls with your Justin Bieber haircut” and in the next frame he’s telling an employee “you think this is a joke but this is not a joke im gonna take my flip-flops off and stick them in this guy’s asssss!” and the whole time the word “mentality” is captioned on the screen and the video of that compilation has over 23.5K likes and 200 comments one of them reads “in 6 months this guy is gonna be huge”— and in the next video (what did I just watch…) the caption bolded in white says POV: childhood Mario Kart skills didn’t quite translate and a woman in a Go-Kart hits a pole on the track all of this while a woman narrates “I begin to pass out then my head hit the wall, pow” and that video has 763.4k likes and then I am shown a video of a Formula 1 car driving as fast as the frame switches as the camera switches to a screw being drilled into F1 wheels and different F1s racing and then we are taken inside of the cars with the driver and there are absolutely no black cuts or signs of editing in the video—everything in the video, about 40 different frames of different F1s are stitched together in the same video as everything appears continuous, unified, this video has 237.4 K likes and then dumblittlesillyguy is sitting on a picnic table eating pretzels and hummus while looking at us (the camera) telling us “if you are a man and you’re not pulling, it’s because you’re not twinkie enough, in this day and age you need to be twinkmaxing, look at me I’m gay as hell, and it works sooo…” that post has 250K likes—and then a woman showing half her face on camera without saying a word because the caption on the screen does the talking for us as it says If I heard this in the Vietnam war I’d actually go into psychosis and in the background a woman’s voice is playing “GI your government has abandoned they have ordered you to die. GI do not trust them. Defect. GI. It is a very good idea to leave a sinking ship” all while a scary, buzzing music plays, I hate this video so much because I can see the name of the sound she was playing and it’s called “american psychological warfare Vietnam” and then I read the comments—“wandering soul sound was worse,” “I’m sure some soldiers did,” “the war was famous for psychological warfare. The US also used to play recordings of screaming and ghost sounds because they found out the Vietnamese were superstitious. It was a horrifying time to be in Vietnam” there are 6,715 comments on this video and then I am shown a video of a guy wearing all yellow eating papayas, bananas, avocados while looking at us (the camera) responding to people asking him questions live while he records : he repeats the questions, “have I had ackee fruit yeah dude I’ve had every fruit man,” “have you had… yeah bro,” “have I tried rose apples? Yeah bro ive got a lot of videos with those, i’ve had every fruit” “have i had snake fruit, yeah I’ve had every fruit” “have you tried… yeah, yeah… If you’re asking me if I’ve had a fruit I’ve had it” and this video somehow has 2.9 Million Views and 10.3K likes—and then I see a video of a guy leaning inside a dark cave with his flashlight yelling “oh my god i’ve never seen anything so huge. Oh my god i’ve got to go” because, as the caption reads in bolded white letters “watch my bfs reaction to seeing cave spiders for the first time” ; i don’t know what word i could use to qualify TikTok other than labyrinth—is this the new (digital) realism—lightning momentarily lights up my bedroom—it feels good, comforting when that happens though I am not sure why, I am young, let me give you a clue, in between the ages of 12 and 24— the storm is so strong, it turns on the automatic motion sensor light in my bathroom, I fix my eyes at the light underneath the door, then I keep looking at my consciousness, this time I open up Instagram and a mugshot of a Black man with white sunscreen all over his face appears on 6ixBuzz TV— the main source of news for most of my friends, although they are not really ‘news’ they are ‘entertainment’ yet all their posts have headlines—above the Black man with crooked teeth, an orange jumpsuit, and sunscreen, the caption, the headline reads “District Attorney’s Office planning to drop charges against registered s*x offender after he allegedly tried to kidnap a boy from a schoolyard in Aurora, CO” and 6ixBuzz added terrifying music to discompose viewers ; and I think fact becomes so curated it becomes fiction—the next slide of the same post is a Zoomed in photo of the man’s horrifying face, there are 20K likes to this post, 2,351 comments, 30.3K shares, and the top comments say : “Canada is cooked” “He looks like he just came out of an air fryer”—“i legit just check if all my doors are locked” “Do NOT drop those charges” ; I stare at my bluelight screen but am I thinking— I scroll to 6ixBuzz’s very next post— a 17 year old white boy’s face in color, a woman’s picture in black and white : “17 year old Mackale Lavoie is wanted for second-degree m*rder after allegedly sh*oting at a group of Hamilton and k*lling Belinda Sarkodie, a 26-year old woman who was an innocent bystander” and one of the top comments is a poem She wasn’t in the fight. She wasn’t in the fight. She wasn’t in the crew. She wasn’t even in the damn headline Until the bullet made her one. Belinda Sarkodie walked this world with light in her hands and left it by mistake. Because a boy Still stuck in a sandbox warzone fired reality like it was a video game and logged off before the credits rolled. Now her name floats between hashtags. And rage and ritual silence. And the system? It prints his face in color. Prints hers in grayscale. Frames the loss like a scheduling error Instead of a soul theft. This wasn’t random. It was engineered apathy. A culture taught to aim before it asks. A city trained to react only after the flowers hit the sidewalk. She deserved more than a stray headline. She deserved more than a candle vigil algorithm and the next comment simply reads “Deport” (707 likes) and the next post is a photo of Drake and Central Cee with the caption “Drake officially wrapped up his insane 3-night run in London, UK for Wireless Fest over the weekend. You think this was his greatest performance ever?” and then the next post “Toronto rapper Top 5 was allegedly ambushed and stabbed in the neck in London, UK after calling the people there soft” and the top comment asks “sooooo What’s everyone doing for Caribana weekend?” (2,175 likes) “I honestly don’t care top5 is not a good person” “bumbaclaat, never say man sarf and then pull up the ends without your stick” (153 likes) ; and then I think about the back of my brain… is this disintegrating, then I remind myself that I am actually not stupid, I look underneath my bathroom door and the light is gone, the window in my bedroom is closed, then a post by this guy, a family friend, appears, “Syria Palestine and Iran have all been bombed backed by trump Jewish if u ask me Only thing I’ve bombed is my toilet” I scroll through his account and I see him standing in a gym with the caption “Just shining a light for the sheep” the next post is a meme that shows 6 Black people walking among Chinese people in China, it reads “China has an irrational fear of a “black invasion” bringing drugs, crime and interracial marriage” and my family friend writes in bolded white letters “They do say chinks r the smart ones. Real shit tho who tf is picking Canada’s line up of useless pakis and Indians? Theres a reason y their country in covered in shit” I unfollow him and open up TikTok as Earl Sweatshirt says “I had a friend that was talking about the importance of fantasy in terms of like liberation and like just what that means like, thinking outside the box, because you have to, because your thinking has literally been put in a box on purpose. You have to be fantastic. You have to go and see something that might not be there. Whenever I’ve not been attached to the truth, then I’m really really sad, dejected and lost”—then James Baldwin speaks like lightning “you know what happens if you can’t love anybody, doesn’t make any difference whether you can’t love a man or can’t love a woman, you can’t love anybody, you are dangerous because you have no way of learning humility, no way of learning that other people suffer, and no way of learning how to use your suffering and theirs to get from one place to another : in short you feel even a responsibility which is to love each other” this post has 7,900 likes the video of James Baldwin saying this in an interview is layered with handwritten, aestheticized fragments of literature, “(You) where should I go? (Universe); in new places where you can grow and my soul comes from better worlds and have an incurable homesickness of the stars and poem is a name ; and higher thoughts, higher energies, higher vibrations, higher frequencies, higher dimensions, higher experiences; sometimes you have to unlearn unlearn unlearn unlearn learn learn in order to change ; how odd, I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words ; shame says that I am flawed. I am unacceptable, grace says that…” all of this video layers all these words in a 25 second video without naming their writers ; and then because of what Earl Sweatshirt said I look up ‘realism’ in my search bar on TikTok and the first video out of many that comes up says realism emerged in France around the 1848 revolution as a rejection to romanticism and its drama and exotic subject matter, gustave courbet led the movement and was a huge proponent of realism courbet believed that art should be more relatable and highlight the trials and tribulations that ordinary people face and ultimately he paved the way for other modern movements such as impressionism and post-impressionism realism depicted people of all classes in ordinary life situations and engaging in real life activities such as work or labor or other mundane activities it wasn’t afraid to portray the unpleasant truths or aspects of life the most famous realist painters include Gustav Courbet of course Jean Francois Millet, Rosa Bonheur, Edward Hopper, Ilya Repin, and Edouard Manet” as this is narrated these artists’ realist paintings flood the screen and on the bottom of the post, TikTok warns the viewer : “contains AI-generated media”  and in the comments someone asks where he can buy the paintings: “I love this. I’m interested in this Art and how much does it cost, Send direct message http://z.me/mehdig0728” then the next video shown to me in the context of my ‘realism’ search is Mark Fisher saying “this privatization of stress, is normalized, like finding young people depressed who gives a shit, you know this is the idea, young people depressed that’s just part of life. It wasn’t part of life. It was not part of life. The increase of depression among young people is shocking. And that is ultimately the biggest possible indicator and condemnation of the world in which we now live in. It wasn’t normal for young people to be depressed in the 70s lets say, could have started off from the conditions young people live in are terrible conditions. You’ve been deprived of things. You’ve been deprived of things. And the things you’ve been deprived of are being sold to you as benefits. It’s a great new world, you’ve got all this stuff, you’ve got all this capacity to do things. It just isn’t like that”—as an ear-shattering static sound pervades the room after a microphone mishap Mark Fisher speaks up and says he has to read a passage from his new book “Ask yourself why the distortion, the deliberately buried voices, why all the half-heard insinuations, the audio-hallucinatory fragmentation, the wired-up screams? Why not communicate clearly? Because clear communication – and all it presupposes – is the fantasm the system projects as its vindication and necessarily always-deferred goal” I think he then says “Facebook haunts me. I see it and I realize the optimism, the culture, the humor shown and promoted on the app shows a sort of moment where users realize this isn’t how reality is supposed to be like. The 1990s were this period of huge optimism in the West. This was the end of history. The end of wars, and the incoming of a technological utopia. Hauntology is the feeling that we were robbed of some promised reality that does not correspond to what we actually see” that video has 22.3K likes ; I wonder what kind of people were grouped into this type of video, and then the next ‘realist’ result is a video of Duncan Trussel with Joe Rogan saying “the real truth which is like no one is gonna remember you in about 200 years. No one will think about you. No one is gonna remember you no one is gonna care about you no one will visit your grave there will be no one dreaming of you because they’re gonna be dead and you’re gone” as Rogan responds “and it doesn’t matter if you do care because you’re gone. You’re out. You’re out. Hope you did a good job of informing the people of everything you learned around you and hug as many people so they miss you, but that’s about it buddy, we’re all on some weird infinite journey” and this video has 942.5K likes and 6,619 comments, the top comment reads : the beauty of it all is that you can either let that fact destroy you, or free you” (55K likes) and the next one “why do people fixate on being remembered after death, when you won’t be here to see it” and then the next post is a man narrating : “Happy monday morning, family. Let’s take a minute to discuss naive realism which comes from the world of social psychology and it’s used to describe our tendency to believe that our perception of the world reflects the absolute truth unbiased and unfiltered. We don’t think though that our emotions, our lived experiences, our cultural identity can shape our perception, and we also believe that others share our perception of the world. And now as you can imagine that can cause interpersonal problems and limit our ability to grow and evolve as human beings so how does one manage naive realism?” that video has 83 likes and suddenly my bathroom door swings back and forth as the storm shakes my bedroom, the next post is a video of a British actress in a theater saying—“a work of art is only what an artist says. If there is no artist there is only silence” a man responds to her in a British accent “Not so… there are works of art that speak to me even though I don’t even know who the artist is. What matters is what is being said, not who says it” The woman interjects “I love you” and he says “indeed” then she says “when i say this it will provoke a different feeling in you than when let’s say your wife says it” “my wife..?” “and when my husband says I love you, that’s different too. The effect changes according to who is speaking. There is no statement without the person making it. There is no art without the artist” who picked all these videos and what do they have to do with realism? Then a post appears with a sweet song in the background playing— the title is Emotional Discipline, Not Delusion and the text reads : “Romanticising life requires emotional discipline. It takes effort to resist the pull of negativity. It takes maturity to find balance between realism and hope. These are not people who are blind to hardship. They are people who have refused to become bitter. They have chosen meaning over numbness, connection over cynicism, openness over defence. What may look like drama to some is often deep sensitivity shaped by experience. To feel deeply is not to be weak. To cry at beauty, to find joy in what others ignore, is a form of emotional fluency that allows for a more textured, meaningful life” if I am showing you what TikTok thinks engages me can I engage you as a reader? And then I am shown a video of the Zebra in Madagascar saying “I wished I could go to the wild” as 74 frames of the film are shown in 33 seconds with the same music I hear in every TikTok like this one and I see the savannah inhabited by beautiful animated animals, sunsets, pristine beaches, palm trees, blue skies, mountains, penguins, and then I am shown a video titled Cinema in 2004 that has 200.1K likes and 1,728 comments goes from a shot of Shrek and the donkey riding in an exceptionally beautiful, green forest landscape, to Garfield looking at his owner, to four beautiful women in Santa costumes, to Shrek, to a 0.5 second silent scene of White Chicks, to Ryan Gosling and Julia Roberts in The Notebook, to Harry Potter playing quidditch, to the dad from The Incredibles sadly looking at his computer screen during his 9 to 5, to 0.5 seconds from Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, same goes for Spider Man then Shark Tale then a few movies I don’t know then Chucky from the horror film, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to the kid from Polar Express standing outside the train in the snow, pointing at something, Scooby-Doo and the guy with the green shirt laughing together, Anne Hathaway smiling, and the weird bird creature from the Harry Potter movie flying away as I feel the storm start to calm down, I get up from my room and open the window