Atonement

Bluegrass, Jew fast, and a carcass

Thursday was Yom Kippur - the holiest day of the year for practicing Jews. For some, it’s a day of restraint, reflection, and ultimately, atonement. For others, an opportunity to strike.

I considered my sins, my flaws, my foibles. How I’m quick to anger. Petty. Bad at execution (sorry again about last week). Impulsive.

Seated in the corner table of Uncle Chen’s in Carpinteria, California, I told a friend a story during a post-California-Avocado-Festival, succulent Chinese meal. The story was one about myself that I didn’t want to be true. But one I feared might be.

The morning after Yom Kippur, I drove up to San Francisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a free bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park, mecca of bluegrass and safe haven for wookies, wannabe hillbillies, and techno futurists alike.

Saturday morning, before my drive from Redwood City up to the Mission to pick up a friend, I watched a climber fall to his death. His name: Balin Miller. His death was captured on livestream about two days earlier, sparking misinformation about who he was and what had occurred. The video I encountered was from the man whose livestream it was.

He wanted to explain firsthand what he witnessed. Clearly experiencing PTSD from the incident, the self-described Yosemite ‘superfan’ attempts to describe through shaky breath and shakier camera work how he was in the park for a charity organized trash pickup event and wanted to spend a few days documenting the climbers’ technical accomplishments and the park’s beauty. What he captured, inadvertently, was a freak accident, and he was discernibly freaked out.

While watching the video, I noticed the suggested search at the bottom: “ballin miller fall video.” It hung before me, begging to be clicked. To be watched. Witnessed.

Should I click it?

I did.

Would you have?

What appeared were multiple videos seeking to draft views off the young man’s accident; desperate, duplicate attempts to capture my fascination. My curiosity. My bloodlust. I caught myself: what was I doing? But I had already opened it. I might as well get what I came for, right?

After I selected one, what I found was optimized schadenfreude. A clip from the livestream accompanied by an AI voice narration and an insurmountable wall of keywords and hashtags, each addition a shameless attempt to coax the algorithm to shunt me towards this particular video.

That’s as far as I’m going to show you here, but I recognize that my mere mentioning of this incident may lead you to go search for the full video. I can’t stop you. We’re on the Internet. It’s your right. If you want to watch people die, you can.

But what happens when we do?

Mere days ago, we opened X to see footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in medium definition. Millions sat transfixed at the gory details: the immediately preceding and tragically ironic question of gun violence, the entrance wound, the sheer volume of blood that normally flows through the carotid artery, given a sudden exit route. We watched the crowd of people fleeing in panic from the safety of our bedrooms. Mass hysteria from personal comfort.

This phenomenon, however, is nothing new. Nor its victims whose dignities have become Internet fodder whether it be George Floyd, Charlie Kirk, or Balin Miller.

There is no shortage of places to see human beings experience pain on the Internet: WorldStar. LiveLeak. R/PublicFreakout. The list goes on. And will. But in our ease of access to a suffering that’s become as commodified and flows as freely as beer on tap, we fail to recognize that it’s not normal to see someone die. For hundreds of years, seeing something like that with your own eyes would require your life having taken a number of unfortunate turns. Now, it’s the almost the price of admission to use the Internet.

Did I click that link out of pure schadenfreude? A joy at his misfortune? An implicit desire for the recognition of my own safety when consuming the peril of another? Bloodlust for a human reenactment of what video games have simulated for me since early adolescence? Or just boredom at a man talking too slowly, fighting to hold back his tears?

Driving north of Redwood City on Saturday morning, I passed a dismembered carcass in the middle of the highway. The fleshy log tumbled underneath the tires of a truck ahead of me. I tried to make out the composition of this husk - some skeletal and muscular medley of a now indiscernible species. I wondered what it had been. Once I sped beyond it, I paid it no mind. I was running late.