hurricane post

performative climate change and the question of rent

This free letter covers hurricane helene’s strange outpouring of live streamed climate catastrophe. Every Thursday I send out a free letter like this one, or this one; and every Monday I send out a letter only for paid subscribers, like this one.

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A couple weeks ago there was a viral news story that occupied my afternoon’s attention: two people had been hospitalized after injuries sustained participating in a Hunger Games reenactment in South Carolina.

This article wasn’t real and I had made it up, imagined it, but my substack publication is about huffing glue with your friends and is not at all a journalistic endeavor so I’ll dig into this article I made up here.

Logan Paul’s hunger games reenactment¹ went about as well as one would expect. 24 contestants were introduced to the South Carolina forests with a small team of ex marines surrounding the film crew to keep an eye out for the contestant’s safety, to make sure any contestant hurt, injured, or getting too excited about the violence would be escorted off the lot.

Unfortunately for everyone involved Hurricane Helene hit just as the game was entering its final quarter, twelve minutes into the hypothetical video’s runtime, with 3/4ths of the contestants having been either hit with a paintball pellet or a nerf sword, —or for one contestant, with a small tree branch considered a justifiable weapon in the opinion of one of the ex marines who was closest with the film crew; the waters began the rise, the wind picked up, the occasional splittersplatter of the raindrops drifted into full showers. Two of the contestants quit, holding their Prime branded vests above their heads and running to the exits. The two others remaining began to tussle in the rising waters.

By this point the “safety crew” of six ex marines and one “health expert” had lost their shit, reverted into a sort of PTSD haze running about and hiding behind trees, — despite their never having served in any sort of combat, — talking in conspiracies to each other and describing potentially ambushing aid workers who were “after them”. It was then that the production’s “health expert” took it upon himself and did the best he could to run out to snatch up the two drowning contestants who then, later, were coughing up brown water in the FEMA medical boat, with which the group of ex marines had made a sort of ill-conceived truce, while they continued to swing fists at one other under the watchful camera of a teenaged cameraman the FEMA workers couldn’t get rid of or stop filming for the sake of the reenactment video that would never actually be released. There would, however, be a video about the video as Logan Paul had been in LA while the disaster went down and was already putting it goether.

But why on Earth had Paul decided this youtube video should be shot under the wrath of a level 4 Hurricane? Well… what else could so appropriately represent our climate catastrophe in such cynical terms than recreating a dystopian cautionary tale under the rain of our very own dystopia? He didn’t think in these terms but he acted it out nonetheless.

The details were hazy and the names all changing around in my head because, again, I made it all up; — but the hurricane remained true, and Logan Paul still stands out to me as the foolish Id of the Youtube algorithm (sort of building here off of monday’s post on MrBeast), a figure who’s symbolic of a certain approach taken by very online people in the face of climate catastrophe (and tours through “suicide” forests in Japan). But doesn’t it feel like something that could have happened?

And then when Lindsey Graham was later asked about the incident, or rather when he was asked about the general humanitarian crisis taking place in the wake of the Hurricane, in like a general sense, he recited the following on Hannity: “but look what’s goin on in Israel, our friends in Isreal surrounded by people that wanna kill them, destroy them, a second holocaust in the making, and Biden says ‘be proportional,’ but what’s a proportional response to people want to kill you and your family. They’re runnin’ outta ammunition in Israel. We have to help our friends. To keep the war over there from coming over here.”

There have been two hurricanes, back to back, sweeping the Eastern seaboard over the past two weeks, — I didn’t make that part up, — and there has, at the same time, been a deeply strange grasping at online virality felt throughout these disparate channels of information.

Following the climate catastrophe this time around has felt all the more strange since so much of what we’re seeing on the disaster, outside of knowing anyone actually in the disaster, has been what it feels like to us is happening, rather than what’s actually happening. Stark difference there.

All over Facebook there’s AI slop of shocked crying children in life preservers in small boats holding small dogs while in the background a couple grown men stand like George Washington on the boat with the American flag. This image belw up on the #NorthCarolina Facebook page alongside pictures of Donald Trump in an uncharacteristic blue collared shirt wading through knee high waters and of course various iPhone videos of the damages and flooding shot by people whose houses have just been swept away.

And speaking of this AI slop, there’ve a number of conservatives on X/Twitter defending the fake images by claiming it hits at some deeper meaning:

(@ParkerMolloy on X/Twitter)

Maybe it does, who’s to say.

It makes me wonder what we’ve lost with the slow decay of mainstream news. The 24-hour CNN newsroom was probably best suited to natural disaster coverage back when CNN was culturally relevant, and not having constant coverage of things like this feels odd enough in a way that’s completely understandable considering how you and I consume our media (if you’re reading Substack articles, I’m going to assume your news lens is also a bit scattershot); but at the same time I feel a certain apathy for the old news climate too. It’s been such a corrosive influence on politics, general apathy, and especially international relations that I can’t stand to consider it positively anymore.

And oddly, there’s been rampant online accusing of FEMA workers of perpetrating the Hurricane on X/Twitter, — and like how the hell would they do that? — so much so that a handful of men in a local militia were arrested this week for making open death threats against aid workers.

And meanwhile, through all of this, Caroline Calloway waited out the storm in Sarasota, Florida, tweeting, “I’m not evacuating for the hurricane. I live in Sarasota, on the beach, in evacuation zone A. For more great advice, buy my second book! It’s called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life. It’s about to come out if I survive! It’s an advice book ;-) Cute!!!!! <3”, while she, I assume, paced back and forth around her third story apartment, feeling the storm approach through the changing air pressure.

Here we have it, survival as performance art in the age of online performativity. 

And I suppose this is a form of protest, — well, of course it is (though perhaps an unintentional one), but it’s attempting to work its protest magic through the means of the hegemonic mass media structures it ought to be working against. These voices crying out in despair, even if they’re not onsite of the disaster, are screaming out a collective hope for change muddied by their own sense of needing to do something (so why not post something?) because platforms like Facebook demand that everyone have something to say thus resulting in a crazyass amount of noise. But also, careerist livestreamer living in the path of these climate catastrophes take on the full brunt of climate change, standing in the path, with a main character mindset and a camera held at an arm’s length from themselves.

How different is this really from other viral climate protests? “Well,” you could say, “pipelines have been blown up, and encampments have proven to be sustainable forms of protest through their agonizing the power elite,” and this is true; I would agree we need more of this. But otherwise it seems as though most climate change protests resound in more a deeply performative mode rather than an urgent one, — and this strategy remains as flawed as anyone would imagine it to be.

From throwing soup on Van Gogh paintings to tossing orange powder all over Stonehenge, it’s all for the sake of a certain visual aesthetic and only really deeply felt through the machinations which it’s supposed to be against. In some ways one is a more effective prostest, but in some ways the other is too. These streamers riding out the Hurricane on a mattress out in their back yards for $70,000 are making a pretty startling statement, whether they mean to or not.

But what does any of it do? What does AI slop depicting what generative software thinks disasters look like do for the greater cause of averting these disasters in the future?

Just as it’s impossible to fix a broken system of government through the systems of said system of government, it’s as impossible to protest climate change through a media system whose outgrowths are from the same capitalist decadence that led to climate change, right?

Any sort of real climate change protest would involve something akin to the George Floyd protests of 2020 on a wider scale with more coordination. The 2020 protests didn’t change the laws necessarily, but they changed the political climate irrevocably for the better in a lot of ways. There’s a lot more awareness at the very least, — and hey that’s something. Even small changes count, but even small changes come only from impassioned overwhelming protests. Either we know no other way or no other way works. But it seems the only way anything can be done about climate change. It’s unfortunate but I don’t see how it’s not accurate: we may need to be angry enough about all of this to commit property damages and antagonize the powerful through mass demonstrations if we want to survive as a collective peoples. Because what’s the alternative? I don’t want to livestream the end of the world as it rips through my home and I don’t want to watch houses of the people I love be destroyed, and I’d bet you wouldn’t be down to drown so easily either.

Rain comes down rain comes down drown drown drowning the ground ground ground... (At this point in the drafting process for this substack post, I tap my pencil on my knee and look out the window. Chicago is beautiful this time of year but it’s getting colder with each and every day, the halloween decorations are up. Someone jogging on the street is wearing a hoodie with a cat shooting laser beams out of its eyes. This fills me with a bit of hope, not going to lie.)

Running through rolling hills, the hurricane sweeps away everything and wait, — what you’re saying is that I still need to pay rent for my monthly rent of $1400 while my apartment building is underwater? How the hell is that fair? My apartment building doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s gone. I can’t even go in to work to make the paychecks that pay for the apartment you’re charging me rent for… Wait you’re saying you’re going to evict me?… Evict what? My belongings are downriver! My apartment’s a garden unit!

Another last point here is that these climate disasters contradict the American system of rentals so much so that this can no longer be tenable going forward. Among all the other things, I know. Rental prices are already far too high across the country and if our apartments and homes are to be underwater for three months of the year, — and if we’re still expected to pay rent while we’re evacuated from the area, —  how on Earth can this system be justifiable in any sense anymore? How many contradictions can be stacked on top of one another? Is there any limit?

But it’s so dismal to me sometimes how we have a system that’s murdering us with the decades and when we scream out we can only scream in the voice of the machine causing the murdering monster to come barreling our way, but it’s fair, — I can’t condemn it, because these seem to be the only means available to us. I can’t condemn it. Here I am yelling at clouds on Substack. How different are any of us here really than those making up and generating stupid AI images to depict a very real climate catastrophe that’s steadily coming for all of us? How different is this Substack post from that? Please tell me. I want to know.

1. titled, tastefully “hungover games”