I blame the media
In the seventh inning of a competitive baseball game last weekend, somebody a few rows ahead of me at the stadium took it upon himself to try and single-handedly start a wave, getting everybody in the section to stand up and yell because he told them to. I thought for sure he would fail — people are here to watch the game, right? Nothing happened at first, but he was undeterred and kept yelling and exhorting and gesticulating — "One! Two! Three!" — making it impossible to follow the action on the field. A few people began to follow his lead, then a few more, and then several people nominated themselves to be his henchmen and began yelling at the other spectators too. Eventually enough people in our section stood up on cue that the section to our right followed suit, and then it was happening.
I had never directly seen how a wave got started before, and it gave me an ominous, unsettled feeling. People suddenly seemed that more conditioned to obey. Those who are initially indifferent or even annoyed eventually just go along with the crowd. The fact that the individuals who initiate these events blatantly have no other purpose than gratifying their ego and proving that they can command others is no deterrent. People obviously like to have leaders uncovered in their midst and submit to them. Even the powerful framework of a million-dollar spectacle unfolding before them, with its cast of celebrated "heroes" right there performing in the flesh to vicariously identify with, is not enough to prevent spontaneous hero worship and a mob mentality from erupting. Everyone is really just looking for a reason to drop the pretense of caring about "the game."
In the midst of it, I was transformed from an average ordinary home-team fan, cheering and booing at the appropriate times in response to the action on the field, to a conspicuous abstainer, a potential scapegoat, an easy target for whatever inchoate violence was aimlessly being stirred up. The wave wasn't a containment operation, dispersing the energies of the crowd; it was showing them instead what mark they could make if they concentrated their energy and focused it just on that, getting itself noticed. I clung to the game as if it could protect me. But there are riots after teams lose and riots after teams win.
The whole incident felt like a parable, about the instability of crowds maybe or the opportunistic nature of the will to power. I keep thinking of "the guy who started the wave" as an archetype, seeing him behind otherwise inexplicable "trending" moments. The wave itself seems to emblematize an inertial desire to "participate" with no particular goal in mind other than to have been seen participating, to have tokenized one's obedience at the appropriate time in the prescribed manner. The wave goes around and around on some obscure form of momentum that subsists when subject and object have been dissolved, intent on its own pure endurance, suffusing the enclosed population with its noisy meaninglessness.
Maybe Elon Musk should just buy Twitter and get it over with. That news struck me like the Slap, as one of things where everyone is already tired of the takes before they have been articulated, and exhaustion with takes itself becomes the most predictable take. In my feed, the possibility that Musk would buy Twitter was taken as an invitation to fantasize about being finally freed from ever having to use it again. It was in keeping with the ever-popular complaint among some of its most habitual users that Twitter is a "hell site" that has tapped into their own compulsive nature along with the worst impulses of everyone else.
Exhaustion with the takes is expressed as an aspiration: One day I won't feel obliged to stay here and have confirmed what I already think I know about what everybody already thinks about everything, and try to stage that knowingness to build my own profile. One day I will be so genuinely and truly tired I won't be able to get up out of my seat to do the wave, no matter how much the voices yell at me.