I’ve linked it, embedded it, and now here it is as a screenshot, just in case it gets deleted or the Twitter machine stops working or Elon just decides to pull the plug for a laugh.
This probably seems like overkill. It’s just a tweet, after all. There are many like it. It is a tweet by a prominent user of the site—nearly 400,000 followers and nearly 60,000 tweets—who works for NBC News covering “disinformation, extremism, and the internet.” His name is Ben Collins. He seems to be well liked by the mainstream media class, or the NPR class—what some annoying people often derisively call “the blue checkmark crowd,” though that insult has lost some of its currency now that anybody can buy a blue checkmark for eight bucks a month, like a total sucker.
Brief aside: There really isn’t a satisfactory label for this group of people. “The NPR Class” gets closest to the heart of it in my own head, but I’m afraid that what I consider that encompasses is both broader and more specifically defined than it would be in the minds of someone hearing it for the first time. This is the key to any good neologism—neophraseism?—it must be almost immediately grokkable by someone hearing it for the first time, or it must be fully legible with minimal explanation. “The Trumpenning” is an example of a good one that—at least for my purposes—I invented, and needs little explaining. “The NPR Class” is white collar and politically aware or at least thinks of themselves as politically aware; has at minimum a bachelor’s degree but possibly more; is not necessarily identitarian but genuinely sympathetic to, and always publicly deferential to identitarian claims; certain of the moral rightness of their generally liberal politics; and would never publicly voice any of their private disagreements with the prevailing sentiments on matters that might loosely fall into a category of “political correctness.” It is a club in which one maintains good standing by a strict adherence to unwritten rules that are explained in the subtext of trigger warnings and “as a [any identity marker here] statement qualifiers and by the participation in and witnessing of pile-ons. The tribe knows the worthy victims, can sense outsiders by their lack of proper deference, permits little irony about itself, or even a recognition of itself.
What the fuck were we talking about? Oh, yeah. A tweet. Here it is again.
Don’t scroll past it, just because you’ve seen it three times now. Read it again. Take it in. Absorb it. Let it become one with you, if for only a moment. Luxuriate it in. Remember that it has been viewed over two million times already. Imagine the series of events that had to take place for this apparent inevitability to transpire—not just the creation of a microblogging website in 2006 but also the video-sharing app that’s eating its lunch, and not just that but whatever Ben Collins had for breakfast on March 16th, 2023, the things he read and thought and heard, the butterflies that fluttered their wings in China that transformed the composition of the air in his lungs as he tapped away at the glass and metal in his hands while electrical impulses fired seemingly at random in his brain, a brain made of matter created 13 billion years ago, after which everything unfolded so that Ben Collins could have this thought, and decide to share it, for all of us to read and consider. To marinate in it. In a very meaningful way, this tweet, like any other moment in time, is an expression of the universe’s becoming, and it could be no other way. If you are the sort of person who expresses gratitude or prayer in a moment like this, now would be an appropriate time for that. “Here we are.” Or: “Peace be with you.” Or: “Amen.”
This tweet is not a rare breed, but it is an unusually potent example of its kind. It is simply one of the dumbest motherfucking things I’ve ever read.
Here is some context, I guess: TikTok is an app owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, and it is widely assumed that whatever TikTok knows, the Chinese government can know, and TikTok probably knows just about everything you’re doing on your phone, down to each individual tip-tap. Donald Trump wanted to ban TikTok from US phones, and now Democrats are making noise about banning TikTok. In his tweet, Ben is suggesting that a ban of TikTok would be politically disadvantageous for the party that is perceived to have done the deed.
“Politically disadvantageous” is putting it mildly, because what he said is that taking credit for banning TikTok would result in a generation of voters being turned “permanently and irreparably” against the party in question. Here is some more context: TikTok is a social media app for the creation, sharing, and viewing of short videos produced on smartphones, videos that are ideally about thirty seconds long. I say “ideally” because, apparently, videos longer than one minute cause a stress reaction in users.
So what Ben is saying, here, is that if a political party takes ownership of the banning of an app from mobile devices in the United States, that political party can expect to never again have the support of people born between approximately 1997 and 2012. He further suggests that they will “outlive us all,” presumably meaning…actually, I’m not sure just what the fuck to presume from that assertion. When you first read it, it seems like it logically follows from what came before, just in terms of the natural rhythm of the form. “Yes, this is how tweets sound,” your brain tells you. But why do we need to be reminded of Gen Z’s relative generational longevity? The rest of us will be dead! Are we meant to worry about the fate of the world after we have passed from this mortal coil, in an altruistic sense, or in a “what sort of a world will my grandkids grow up in” sense? Specifically, are we meant to worry about the political fate of the world after we are dead because a generation of voters will vote in lockstep against the Democrats, giving the Republicans a permanent supermajority on the reactionary backlash to the banning of a video-sharing app? But most importantly, what does us dying before them mean in terms of the first part of this tweet? I would be much more concerned about the rest of my time here on earth, if suddenly a single age demographic wielded absolute political power, and it was the youths. The sweet release of death would be a blessing after a lifetime of bowing to the political will of a generation who permanently shunted aside all other ideological considerations besides fury at being denied access to an app on their phones.
But I am allowing myself to get distracted. This is not about the non sequitur masquerading as dire warning at the end. This is about a journalist who believes that the banning of a video-sharing app would result in the destruction of one of our nation’s two political parties as a relevant entity—which is, even now, striking me as so audaciously dumb that I cannot believe it actually happened.
THIS IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS
Imagine having that thought. Imagine having that thought, believing it to be right and true, and telling someone about it. Imagine telling 400,000 people, who then go on to tell some other unknowable number of people about that thought that you had. Imagine thinking that thought still, with the benefit of some time having passed. Imagine the humiliation. Somehow worse: imagine not feeling the humiliation. Imagine being so convinced of the permanence of your position in the social order which has elevated you to such prominence that you could tweet such a galactically stupid thing and believe that it will have no negative reputational impact on you—and being right! You will still be asked on television to explain the world to people. You will still be tasked with writing articles about disinformation, extremism, and the internet that will be disseminated by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates to millions of people. All of your pals will still like you and won’t tell you that you are wrong and dumb, in this instance, at least.
Imagine believing something so monumentally idiotic, and following it up with this:
Ben Collins believes that making TikTok a slightly less attention-mongering addiction for millions of Americans will unleash unknowable and terrible political consequences in perpetuity, though such action might actually be good for all involved. One way to understand Ben here is that he takes as profoundly dim a view of anyone younger than him as can be imagined. This is how stupid Ben Collins thinks Generation Z is—that they would refocus the entirety of their political will around the fact that someone took their favorite app away. This is how infantile he believes they are, what myopic little idiotic grudge-holding animals they are. People walking around living their lives reasonably normally, just doing their best, and Ben Collins believes them to be so catastrophically stupid that they would enact a lifetime of vengeance against the political party that takes away their current preferred method of distraction.
That’s all. That’s why we were here. To gaze upon one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. To contemplate the void in the void from the void. To imagine a world where such a thing was not just possible, but necessary. To marvel at the sincerity of the stupidity, the confidence of it, the otherworldly shamelessness of it—the unawareness even that the stupidity of it matters at all. Did he take it one single step further? Did he imagine how his life would change, not just if he really believed what he said, but if what he said turned out to be true? What would it be like to live in a world where what Ben said about Gen Z was true? Would it resemble this one? The unaccountable power that could be exercised over a group of people who could be so moved! The unaccountable power apparently already being wielded by ByteDance, and therefore by China! What nation wouldn’t go to existential war over such power? What sort of a nation wouldn’t fight for its very survival against such an enemy, besides one already long dead? What does believing such a thing to be true say about the virtue of government by the people? How can we possibly endure another single day under the fickle tyranny of democracy, if Ben Collins is right about this?
This tweet, that he somehow has still not attempted to obliterate from the record, will immediately spring to mind whenever I see the name Ben Collins on Twitter, or atop some article, or in some video clip. I will laugh about this staggeringly stupid opinion about the way the world really is whenever I see that little NBC peacock. Lester Holt could be telling me about a tsunami that wiped out a quarter million people and flashing before my eyes will be an image of Joe Biden signing a bill banning TikTok that immediately transitions into a montage of 300 years of Republican rule.
He’ll be dragging this tweet around like Marley’s chains. For me, anyway, he will.
What is “the NPR class?” This tweet is the NPR class. This stupid tweet and the attendant inconsequentiality of it. How little the stupidity of it matters.
The No. 1 way to permanently and irreparably nuke your chances of not tweeting one of the single dumbest things ever I’ve ever read is to tweet. And, remember, Ben, it’s going to outlive us all.
