I used to pray for fire—big ones, unstoppable, blazes that could take out a town. I was a firefighter, and big fires meant lots of overtime, adventure, and cool pictures I could send to everyone I knew. Many guys I worked with had the same goals, but oftentimes, there were more respectable motivations layered on top. They wanted to provide for families and protect their communities. I wanted things to burn for my own benefit. When I see the devastation of the LA fires—families forced to flee their homes, everything they own turned to ash—I can’t help but remember that creeping sense of opportunism. Sure, I was helping, but that was a secondary effect. I never thought much about how scared the fires made those with something to lose, how long it could take to put yourself back together after watching your life crumble into char. I could only profit from the fires. In their aftermath, when people were putting their lives back together, I was busy counting how much money I had made.
I’ve thought about that (lack of) feeling a lot in the past few weeks, though not just because of the LA fires. It started with a little snuff film where a guy who, in a different life, could easily have been a friend of mine, executed a father of two who, in a different life, could have easily been a friend of my family. Then a car plowed through a few families at a Christmas market. I watched a burning woman slump over in the subway. And then, of course, the rape gangs, which caused Britain to devolve into a frenzy, eager to fill the world’s insatiable appetite for true crime. The transcripts were an inescapable horror, with pictures of them plastered across every available screen. They’ve now been swapped out by the face of the Southport child stabber—Axel Rudakubana’s once-innocent schoolboy pictures updated to reveal his current, demonic visage. Each of these stories has lit up the feeds for days and weeks, a cascade of cruelty and corresponding outrage, before disappearing into the next catastrophe.
As horrible as those events have been, it’s the rush to capitalize on their coverage that’s really bothered me. It's that shameless grasping which has reminded me of Lou Bloom, the vicious little ghost who haunts the neon-soaked streets of Los Angeles in Nightcrawler. Bloom patiently waits in the dark for the sounds of sirens so that he can chase down an ambulance, camera at hand, and then wade into all the blood and misery for his perfect shot. Technically, what Bloom does could be called news—people need to know about the crimes and crashes in their neighborhoods—but his “journalism” commands no respect. He’s not informing; he’s exploiting, orchestrating, all to serve his ego and bottom line. This opportunism might seem like grotesque outlier behavior crafted to sell a story, but in truth, it’s just a distillation of what we now see every day when we unlock our phones. As such, Bloom isn’t so much a character as he is a question: What happens when all your social and financial rewards are maximized by human suffering? If it bleeds, it leads, and that's okay for Lou as he doesn’t feel—he processes and prepares himself for the next opportunity, ready to extract personal rewards at any cost. That cynical mentality is hardly new; self-serving sensationalism thrived long before social media, but his character is embedded within our current moment. Bloom embodies the bleak algorithm of opportunism, sleazy math by which revulsion and rage are turned into ratings, ratings into revenue, the logical endpoint of an economy in which empathy is a liability and “engagement” is the product.
While Bloom himself is fictional, the world he inhabits is not. It’s ours, and we’ve industrialized his ethos to the point that it has taken on an unsettling life of its own. Social media has let a million Lou Bloom’s bloom. Each fresh horror that lurches into view is pounced on without a moment’s pause, bundled up into media designed for maximum outrage. Of course, very few people can come up with something novel to say when they see some wretch burning alive under the streets of NYC or smoke rising into the sky above LA, but that's alright because the tweets can (literally) write themselves. Even without AI, the correct opinions and phrasing for maximum virality come pre-fabricated— create an outgroup, cast blame, revel in the gory details, claim virtue, and then demand someone else do something to solve the problem. Once you notice the parallels to Bloom, it’s impossible to unsee his cold, transactional logic that has spilled out into our lives—tragedy as a commodity, outrage as currency.
Of course, the peddlers of these polemics, our own little Nightcrawlers, would never admit to being seized by this vast, devouring machine, one that demands misery before it bestows some meager reward. They wrap themselves in the language of justice and righteousness, convincing themselves their appetite for atrocity serves some greater good. As always, scratch a virtue, find a vice. All this endless perseveration is always for a higher principle— they are “raising awareness” or reporting on the “public interest.” And sure, we would all have to agree that cars driving into crowds or little girls being savaged need to be covered, and there are real political concerns behind these incidents and more that need to be addressed. While I believe in the causes, I have lost faith in many of their champions. Maybe I’ve just seen too much of what goes on behind the scenes, how terms like “journalist” and “writer” can be warped (“media personality” and “commentator” are, ironically, a bit more honest). Maybe I’m suffering from all the predictable symptoms of meeting too many of my heroes.
But, truth be told, and whatever the cause, this knowledge has been keeping me up at night. I’ve felt like someone who has wandered too deep into a story best left unread, no longer striving for salvation and now pleading only for ignorance. But there’s no going back—once you’ve seen it, it's impossible to forget the shapeless monstrosity that lurks behind all the spectacle. The worst part is that you have to beg before you're given a chance to behold this unfathomable parasite, one that feeds off anger and dread and rewards it with “followers.” Its existence is awful enough, but I can't seem to shake the image of the willing and ready line of supplicants. Each of them knows, somewhere, deep down, what it will cost for its eye to briefly gaze upon them but is unable or unwilling to resist the promise of relevance, of influence, of being someone who matters in the great churn of content and catastrophe.
The great lie this thing tells its eager avatars is that those followers are theirs. They aren't. They will move on to whoever can feed the beast the best. There will always be someone faster to post “Breaking News!” (ideally in all caps, likely next to an alarm emoji), someone willing to be more outraged, to scream louder with the comforting moral and ideological certainty that are the rewards of true zealotry. And when, inevitably, this thing discards them, when the news cycle moves on from their chosen cause, the avatars find themselves turned into husks, deprived of the dopamine that was their only reward (being a thrall pays very poorly) and desensitized to the very real suffering of those that they used to catapult themselves into its good graces. All that is left for them to do is pray, as I once did, for their chosen form of fire—perhaps a mass shooting or a terror attack, anything that can be capitalized on for clicks, something that will let them pretend, once again, that the followers are there for them.
I never stopped to think about what the fires I fought could cost others; I was too focused on the overtime. I worry about those who don't have the luxury of time, as I have had, to think about one of the few (unintentionally) honest things Lou says to someone else throughout the entire film, “Why you pursue something is as important as what you pursue.” Bloom could never have allowed himself to believe that the people who watched the snuff porn he peddled were there because of any loyalty to him. Cold and calculating, he was at least honest with himself from the very start about his selfish motivations. I’ve started to see shadows of Lou’s same haunted look more and more across my feed. I hear whispers of people being warped into something unrecognizable. I’m afraid that each day, we are all confronted, like Faust, with a cruel bargain, one in which the true costs are kept hidden from us, or perhaps could never understand from the start. And so I’ve written this hoping to cast some light on the fear that my feed has been feeding on me and to say one thing to those who might worry, as I do, that they may look into a mirror one day and see something devoured.
Don't pray for fire.