Viral
What Carly Rae Jepsen has to do with mass shootings
Back from vacation. Honestly, I missed you a little, but I had a great time.
Read: Ryan Holiday’s new book, which is not about dogfishing, Stendhal Syndrome, or why snow is turning pink, ride-hailing companies are making traffic worse, what gratitude and Prozac does to your brain, a fascinating public art project, what post-comedy is and how the alt-right has messed it up, how scientific literacy varies by race, why mental illness is not to blame for mass shootings, who is responsible for “all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018,” there is a cure for reducing authoritarianism. the new leading cause of death for young, American men, how motivated reasoning causes us to actually see things differently, the link between “midday napping and greater happiness, self-control, and grit,” and the specific trauma journalists undergo.
Watch: Marc Maron is really good in the new season of GLOW.
Listen: My nomination for the song of the summer.
But first: Why Carly Rae Jepsen has more to do with mass shootings than video games do.
This will blow your mind: Language is a virus. Not in the incomprehensible William S. Burroughs way that makes me feel guilty for not being able to sort my way through inscrutable prose. This isn’t a complicated construct or a even a simple metaphor. It’s quite literal. Language is a virus.
For millions of years we got by on signals and grunts and body language, all the automated unconscious that powers every other animal on the planet, and then a few hundred thousand years ago someone gave a name to a thing, and suddenly there wasn’t just this thing but a representation of it, and then there the idea of words standing in for things became its own thing. You can have your Big Bang Theory or God creating the universe in seven days. If I could witness anything, it would be to go back in time and witness our prehistoric ancestor come up with the word for “mastodon” or “run!” and then realizing that she now lived in a world in which a mastodon and its name both existed. An apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head? Please.
And then, in less time than it took us to stand up on two legs, language had taken over human brains. Language wasn’t like a virus. It is a virus. I love this description of it from Cormack McCarthy.
The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. …
Some influential persons have actually claimed that language could be up to a million years old. They havent explained what we have been doing with it all this time. What we do know—pretty much without question—is that once you have language everything else follows pretty quickly. The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing. From using colored pebbles for the trading of goats to art and language and on to using symbolic marks to represent pieces of the world too small to see.
Our brains are not sophisticated enough to know how to protect ourselves from viruses. You know that Mark Twain quote, “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”? It was first published after he died. There’s no way he said it, yet the telling of it gets into our brains easier than the truth of it gets it back out. It’s only through belated self-awareness of our monkey-like fragility that we can tag that fact with an asterisk.
Our brains are still essentially wired to be on the lookout for that mastodon, and so we unconsciously seek out things that are new, shocking, and disgusting. We like to think we are rational because we know how to read books, but that’s just a story our brains tell us while viruses carry in new stuff every waking hour. To paraphrase the old Jimmie Gilmore song, our minds still have minds of our own, functioning as carriers for cultural contagions. Divorce, songs, suicide, obesity, and innovative ideas can be contagious, possibly even the mass shootings.
After El Paso and Dayton, Rosie Phillips Davis, PhD, president of the American Psychological Association, snuck a disturbing bit of analysis into a press release. Blaming mass shootings on mental illness is ignorant, she wrote, when in fact mass shootings could be a social contagion, spreading the toxic mess like a virus.
“As our nation tries to process the unthinkable yet again, it is clearer than ever that we are facing a public health crisis of gun violence fueled by racism, bigotry and hatred. The combination of easy access to assault weapons and hateful rhetoric is toxic. Psychological science has demonstrated that social contagion — the spread of thoughts, emotions and behaviors from person to person and among larger groups — is real, and may well be a factor, at least in the El Paso shooting.”
The concept that "ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do" is so self-evident that Malcom Gladwell has made a career out of it. You can’t spend 10,000 hours proving this hypothesis, not because it’s too hard but because it’s too obvious. The only complication is that “Call Me Maybe” spreads like a virus not because it’s similar to a virus but because that song has characteristics that allow it to be classified as a virus. We are merely carriers.
The only difference now is that instead of spreading through human contact, now viruses spread over electronic social networks. And just as not all songs are equally catchy, we are not all equally susceptible to new catching viruses because of they way they spread. Virtual clusters of people are particularly susceptible.
The key is exposure. The more central you are to a network, the more connections you have to others, the more you are exposed to whatever’s going around the network–whether it’s Carly Rae Jepsen or H1N1. So if you want to hear the next great pop song, find out about the next great innovation, or catch the next great flu–the center is the spot for you. As Christakis notes, the people with the densest, most central connection form a “sensor group,” a kind of canary in the mineshaft for what’s going to be cool next–or give you a cold.
Therein lies the damn rub, folks. To be in the know is to make yourself vulnerable to infection. Wanting to find out what’s new in our culture is to expose oneself to what is most destructive to us. We can expose ourselves to art, but what can we catch in the bargain?
Social media has weaponized our vulnerability to viruses, whether it’s Carly Rae Jepsen or Ben Shapiro. Maybe we’ll adapt quickly to protect ourselves. Maybe we’ll develop immunities. We’ve developed behavioral immunities before, though this often manifests as an increase in xenophobia. And scientists have found a way to immunize people to fake news, which is encouraging. We adapted to the language virus and ended up with novels, poetry, and Hamilton: An American Musical. Perhaps the social networks that have connected our brains will, some day a long time from now, offer us the ability to distribute thinking and knowledge across the Internet, a bio-torrent if you will, creating a human super computer.
But until we adapt as a species, it’s up to us to protect our own minds: meditate, pray, read, put down the phone and talk to a loved one, or, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, and call me maybe. We’ve walked on the moon and sent a truck to Mars, but mastering the domain between the ears is something humans have not quite figured out yet.
What I’m reading
Ryan Holiday’s new book, Stillness is the Key, packs a wallop. Useful and thoughtful.
Here’s some smart tips about writing from a real, live science editor.
Dogfishing, or dudes posing with dogs they don’t own on their dating profiles, is a thing.
Did you know about Stendhal Syndrome, a condition of being overcome with beauty?
Snow has a defense mechanism from high heat and UV rays. It turns pink.
I told you so! Ride-hailing companies make traffic congestion worse, almost 7 percent in Washington, D.C. alone.
I didn’t know gratitude and Prozac created the same chemical effect in your brain. Anyway, here are four brain tricks that will make you happier.
Hahahahaha: Hostage negotiation techniques are useful.
The President’s Daily Brief started out as a checklist in 1961.
This is a fascinating public art project.
There’s a new term called post-comedy to describe entertainment that uses the structure of comedy to create something that, while possibly funny, is not intended to generate laughs as a primary outcome. Hannah Gasby’s standup special is the archetypical post-comedy example. As per usual, Nazis have screwed this up as the alt-right has twisted post-comedy into a label for what it perceives as unfunny political humor.
Twitter is testing a snooze button for push notifications.
Speaking of misanthropic anti-social media apps, apparently there is a messing app for people who have been kicked off other messaging apps called Telegram, and it’s making it impossible for fact-checkers to stop the spread of misinformation.
Scientific literacy varies widely by race and ethnicity in the United States.
Willpower is a finite resource.
We need to talk about how the crisis of manhood in the United States contributes, if not causes, gun violence. It’s not ladies doing most of the shooting. Also, we can intuit that blaming mass shootings on gun deaths is a dodge to avoid gun reforms, but here’s why mental illness is not to blame.
In a 2018 report on 63 active shooter assailants, the FBI found that 25 percent had been diagnosed with a mental illness. Of those, three had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. In a 2015 study that examined 226 men who committed or tried to commit mass killings, 22 percent could be considered mentally ill.
“Alleged white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018,” according to a government report that the Justice Department did not share with the Senate when Democratic members asked for “precise information about the number of white supremacists involved in domestic terrorism.”
Speaking of racism, here’s an argument that race makes authoritarians dumber and more erratic and violent, but the good news is that there is a cure for reducing authoritarianism.
Latest studies indicate: only 12 percent of mass shooters liked violent video games, you are seven times more likely to be killed by a white nationalist than by a Muslim terrorist (if you’re in the U.S., that is), police shootings are now a leading cause of death for young, American men, the federal assault weapons ban resulted in a reduction of mass shootings, mass shootings can be contagious, and motivated reasoning causes us to actually see things differently. There is a link between “midday napping and greater happiness, self-control, and grit; fewer behavioral problems; and higher IQ.”
News nerds: a majority of U.K. teens are interested in news, and apparently the way to engagement them is to make stuff simple to understand, which come to find out is not dissimilar from how to engage adults. Also, therapists are now paying attention to the specific trauma journalists undergo.
And the last word goes to: my friend and role model T.P., who was going through some stuff I never saw but is now being brave.
What I’m watching
Marc Maron has had a fascinating career. He failed at nearly everything—Air America host, MTV host, stand-up, cocaine. He was only really good at the last one, but he had to give that up. His career was dead, so his agent told him about this thing where you could guy a couple microphones and record a conversation that people could listen to later. It was that or quitting show business, so Marc had his comedian friends come over to his garage and talk about stuff. This was before “podcasting” was a thing, before everyone had their own podcast.
For the first few years, he worked out a lot of bitterness and resentment. There is a multi-year story arch of why he didn’t get on Saturday Night Live that culminated in a two-episode interview with Lorne Michaels. His audience grew, and so did the industry. He started getting actors and writers on publicity tours. President Obama even came to his garage. The Simpsons did a bit about his podcast on the show. He had become a thing.
He got an eponymous and mostly unwatchable television show in which he played a resentful and unsuccessful comedian. There were small roles on Louie and Girls, bigger ones on Netflix’s Easy, in which he played a resentful and unsuccessful writer. But you could hear him on his podcast working through questions about acting, asking actors about their process. He’s curious now, clearly excited about what he’s doing and appreciative about these opportunities. The question of what to do with his hands came up a lot.
He’s figured something out. Sword of Trust, which we read about here, showed him doing new stuff. His character was still unsuccessful, but at least he was introspective. And in the latest season of GLOW on Netflix, he played a more interesting version of his character from the first two seasons, alternately brave and fearful, vulnerable and angry. He is far from the only reason I recommend the third season, which is all about having the courage to pursue happiness, but he was the most surprising.
What I’m listening to
Megan Thee Stallion finally dropped a single called “Hot Girl Summer” to capitalize on the meme she created with her first album, and it’ll be the de facto song of the summer, but that track is less a song than a crass marketing ploy.
The real song of the summer is HAIM’s “Summer Girl,” which hangs on a bass hook and sounds like you have all day to hang out and have just discovered Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” This is good, unhurried stuff.
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