The Algorithm of Collective Inaction
The flooding tragedy at Camp Mystic is just the latest instance of America’s shameful inability to protect its children through political action in the age of social media.
When you first see the child’s smiling eyes on the screen of your cellphone, you do not yet know her fate. If you take a moment to scroll down to the caption or click the story link in the Facebook Comments section, you will see one word that tells you what happened. Sometimes that word describes a joyful report of good fortune, like “rescued” or “saved.” More often, your heart sinks when you see the word “deceased” or “perished.” Other times, you see words like “recovered” or “lost,” words that are ambiguous until you read the article and realize that these girls also died in the flooding event that hit Central Texas in the early morning hours of America’s 249th birthday. At least 80 people have been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the flood, 27 of whom were campers at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian Camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River.
As a dad who has nervously dropped his daughters off at an overnight camp, it is sometimes too overwhelming to look into the eyes of the children lost in one of the worst floods to hit our country in decades. It is tempting to just scroll downward and numb yourself by watching a Facebook video of a middle-aged man opening packs of 1989 Upper Deck baseball cards or check out photos of RZA from the Wu Tang Clan attending a Phish concert. But even when you scroll downward, even when you turn off your phone, the eyes of the children lost in the flood haunt you, filling you with pangs of survivor’s guilt and the sinking feeling that in this age of unprecedented digital human connection we lack the ability to make meaningful changes that could honor the lives of the children lost by protecting other children who might be spared from the next climate catastrophe.
In a proper civilized society, our leaders would be moved by such a devastating loss of innocent life to seek any political solution that might prevent a similar tragedy from happening in the future. A proper civilized society would realize that the increasing frequency of these violent “once-in-a-century” meteorological events completely aligns with the warnings of climate scientists who have been pleading with us to address the threat of a warming planet for decades. A proper civilized society would take immediate action to reduce carbon emissions to fight global warming while increasing funding to enhance weather forecasting abilities and facilitate the exchange of information between meteorologists and local officials who can spread public awareness of weather threats and mobilize rescue operations before it is too late. Trump has done the exact opposite, gutting the Biden Administration’s green infrastructure projects and tax credits while enlisting Elon Musk and his DOGE goons to slash the budget and workforce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service. In a May open letter to the American public, former National Weather Service directors warned, “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.” Even Elon’s own Artificial Intelligence chatbot, Grok, affirmed the glaringly obvious logical conclusion that the Trump Administration’s policies contributed to the tragic loss of life at Camp Mystic.
Despite clear evidence that his policies exacerbated the death and suffering in Central Texas, Trump has shown no signs of contrition or self-reflection, instead pulling out the typical Republican talking point that any discussion of climate change or federal preparedness in the aftermath of the flooding is a “shameful and disgusting” act of politicizing a tragedy. To make matters far worse, the Congressional Democrats have defaulted on their duty as the supposed opposition to politicize a tragedy that was obviously worsened by the political choices of the Republicans. Both House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued statements that failed to mention climate change or NOAA cuts, and merely thanked first responders while adding weak promises to “closely monitor the situation.” With such a heartless ruling majority and such a gutless minority opposition, it is no wonder that average Americans feel powerless to advance political changes that could make themselves and their families safer.
The smiling eyes of the children lost in the Central Texas floods haunt us even more when they bring to mind the eyes of children who died in past tragedies with political implications that were never resolved out of fear that seeking solutions would be labeled “politicizing a tragedy.” In particular, they remind us of the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. The senseless slaughter of an entire first-grade class by a deranged gunman with a Bushmaster AR-15 felt like a turning point in a long-stagnated national debate on gun control. Barack Obama, the “Hope and Change” president, had just been re-elected, and there were few things Americans hoped to change more than the country’s lax regulation of high-powered firearms. Not only was the President freed from the political constraints of a re-election campaign, but Americans also had Facebook at their disposal, a social media platform that at the time was hailed as a game-changing tool to mobilize collective political action. This was before the bitter disappointments of the Facebook-based Arab Spring democracy movements became apparent, before the massacre of Rohingyas was stoked by Myanmar’s ruling junta’s use of Facebook, before Cambridge Analytica would use Facebook data to aid in Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 Presidential election. Sharing photos of the Sandy Hook victims on Facebook felt like the kind of mass action that could get Congress to act on gun control. Instead, the Sandy Hook tragedy would establish the algorithm for collective political inaction that today looms like an impenetrable barrier to any progress being made in the aftermath of the Camp Mystic tragedy. Liberals call for action on an issue, conservatives condemn them for politicizing a tragedy and offer nothing but “thoughts and prayers” instead, liberals mock the meaninglessness of thoughts and prayers, conservatives condemn the mockery of their supposedly sincere religious sentiments, liberals become repulsed that conservatives would care more about their hypocritical religious feelings than the lives of innocent children, conservatives would say the liberals were actually the snowflakes obsessed with their own feelings. The loop would go on and on, exhausting the psychic and political energy of all involved with little more to show for it than increased Facebook profits and the Sandy Hook parents being the object of impotent liberal pity and the target of harassment by vicious conspiracist conservatives. No change would come, and only hopelessness would remain.
The faces of the girls who perished at Camp Mystic also bring to mind another tragedy, one that happened a century before Sandy Hook, before the age of social media, television, and even broadcast radio. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, most of them young women and girls. Many of the victims perished after jumping 9 stories to their deaths when they found some of the exits to the building had been locked by the company owners to make sure the garment workers stayed on task. Progressive reformers, union activists, and women’s suffragists were quick to politicize the tragedy, helping to galvanize widespread support for workplace safety regulations, labor rights, and child labor laws that we take for granted today.
Seeing recent Facebook posts blaming the tragedy at Camp Mystic on parents allowing their daughters to stay in cabins next to the Guadalupe River or Bill Gates and the Democrats for engineering artificial weather catastrophes, I wondered what would have resulted from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire had it happened in the age of social media. It is not hard to imagine how Facebook’s algorithm of collective political inaction might have stifled all the social progress made by the labor organizers and women’s rights advocates who unabashedly politicized that tragedy. Passionate voices of change would have taken primarily to their keyboards and cellphones rather than to the streets and the halls of political power. Principled and thoughtful discussion of social progress would have descended into a doomed loop of accusation and innuendo: blaming the workers themselves for smoking and dropping ashes into a basket of discarded cloth scraps, “thoughts and prayers” of factory owners mocked by their critics and defended by their supporters, completely unfounded conspiracy theories that socialists committed arson to advance their ideology, accusations of anti-Semitism against critics of the Jewish owners of the factory (even though most of the victims were also Jewish), mocking of the “luxury beliefs” of the upper class women who were advocates of reform, smug reminders that some of the exits were still left unlocked (no matter they were blocked by walls of flame), alarmist outcry about job losses that would result from stricter labor laws etc. The collective social momentum for change sparked by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire would have been exhausted on endless social media discourse rather than projected into domains of political power until meaningful legislation was passed.
Seeing Mark Zuckerberg standing front and center at Trump’s second inauguration should be definitive proof that social media is not a tool for collective political action on behalf of the masses but an instrument of social control used to protect the interests of an increasingly smaller and increasingly richer global elite. If we cannot honor the children who died at Camp Mystic by taking meaningful action on climate change, we should honor them by dismantling the social media giants who have made that kind of collective political action seem completely impossible. We should enact an aggressive Wealth Tax against the Zuckerbergs of the world, returning to the people the ill-gotten gains these tech oligarchs have made by destabilizing and demoralizing our society. We should convert social media platforms to public utilities that work on behalf of all of us rather than engines of rent-seeking profits for those who already have more money than they could ever hope to spend. Americans made real progress on child welfare, workplace safety, and labor rights in a time before Facebook. We should begin visualizing a future after Facebook if we want to make similar progress in fighting the scourges of gun violence and climate change that have taken the lives of far too many children without any meaningful change to show for it.