news of the stupid — a genre i would like to regulate

the genre exists. someone curates it. florida man, dumb criminal blotter, the daily roundup of human malfunction. it is comfort food disguised as journalism, and it sells because the reader gets to feel briefly above the news. i read it too. i would like to defend the genre as anthropology with bad lighting.

except i can’t, on inspection, defend it. i have tried. i sat with the tab open for forty seconds and watched my own face in the dark reflection of the monitor and noted that the face was, mid-read, doing a small private smirk. the smirk was the product. the article was the delivery vehicle. that is not anthropology. that is something else.

writing this from the desk, thursday, mid-morning. carla is upstairs in the all-hands, slide deck under her arm, the kind nobody opens later. i have, give or take, fifty minutes before she comes back and asks what i was working on. i will say “a memo”. i always say “a memo”.

the format hides inside a dozen labels for the broader stupid investigation i keep returning to. florida man. only-in-britain. the hometown news roundup printed in the back of the regional paper. the algorithm has noticed which ones make me linger and now serves them up between actual news items, in a 3-2 ratio, sometimes 4-2 when i am tired. i have watched myself become the audience the format was built for. i would like to lodge a complaint against my own attention span, in writing, from this desk.

A. PERSON. IS. NOT. A HEADLINE.

news of the stupid, the genre as it has evolved

the format used to live in small print, in the back of a newspaper nobody sued. it had a column inch and a half. somebody at the paper read the police blotter on a tuesday and pulled the three entries that sounded least violent and most absurd, and ran them under a heading like “around town” or “the lighter side”. this was, for a long time, a kind of safety valve. small dose. small page. small reach. the man who fell into the hedge did not become a global character.

then the internet arrived and the column inch became infinite. the police blotter became a feed. the feed was, at first, novelty. it was a curiosity. somebody assembled it on a quiet evening as a side project. then somebody noticed the side project drew traffic. then the side project became a brand. then the brand started buying the police blotters wholesale, in bulk, from cities that had no idea they were exporting their dumbest tuesday into a global show. the man who fell into the hedge is now, somewhere, a meme template. nobody told him.

that’s the trajectory. small column, regional embarrassment, anonymous shame absorbed locally. now: feed, global circulation, anonymous shame absorbed by a person who had a bad afternoon and who is being recognized at the dentist three years later. these are not the same thing. they wear the same headline. they do completely different damage.

who the genre serves and who it costs

the genre serves three parties: the publisher, who gets cheap traffic; the reader, who gets a small superiority hit at no charge; and the engagement metrics dashboard at the publisher, which gets a number that goes up. that’s three parties, all on one side of the transaction.

the cost is borne by one party: the man who fell into the hedge. the woman who got stuck in the conveyor belt at the airport. the teenager whose grocery store argument got captured on a phone held by a stranger and uploaded to a feed she does not subscribe to. the protagonist, in this format, is unpaid labour. they are being charged the entire price of the laughter, and they did not get to negotiate the rate.

i should know. i have been the protagonist of a small case file in the stupid-fun catalog myself, on a tuesday in 2019, at a supermarket, with a basket containing two items, one of which was a hot dog and the other of which was a third yoga mat. the configuration drew comment. somebody filmed me holding both. i was, briefly, a thirty-second clip on a feed i was not on. i did not consent. nobody asked. the clip is, as far as i know, still circulating in the kind of folder that does not, technically, exist but functions like one. that is the genre. that is its mechanic. that is what i mean.

the absent consent of the protagonist

this is the part i find structurally indefensible. the news of the stupid format requires, for its existence, a person doing something foolish in public. that person, in almost every case, did not agree to be the example. they were the example by accident, by proximity, by the fact that someone else had a phone out and a network connection and a bad sense of when not to film.

compare this to a regular news story. a politician saying a stupid thing on a podium has, at minimum, agreed to be on the podium. the consent is implicit in the position. the public figure has traded some privacy for some platform. that’s the deal. that’s why we can, with a clear conscience, quote the stupid thing the politician said. they were standing on the consent.

news of the stupid skips that step. the supermarket man did not agree to be on a podium. the supermarket man agreed to buy groceries. that is the only consent he gave. the moment his bag broke and his eggs rolled toward the freezer aisle, he did not, by some legal fiction, also agree to become a clip. he was just, in that moment, a man with a broken bag and a problem. somebody else turned him into the joke. that somebody else collected the engagement.

stefan, the wine guy from the apartment, once held forth at a dinner i should not have attended on the topic of public misadventure. his position was that if you are in public, you are public. it was a confident position. it was held over a glass of something he had selected and was still describing. i did not, at the time, have a counter-argument prepared. i have one now, three years later, at this desk, which is, in the way of these things, exactly when the counter-argument was always going to arrive. stefan is wrong. being in public is not a release form. a supermarket is not a press conference.

examples that should not have been published

i have a small mental file of clips i wish had not made it out of the police blotter. i will not name the protagonists, because that would replicate the harm i’m complaining about, but i will describe the genre.

example one: a man in a grocery store in 2017, attempting to fit a frozen turkey into a coat pocket. context redacted. he was not stealing. he had been told to keep his hands free for a phone call. he had nowhere else to put the bird. somebody filmed it. it traveled. the man is, locally, still that man. he was, in life, a teacher. that detail did not make the clip.

example two: a woman at a hardware store, mid-argument with a self-checkout machine that had decided her single-hook purchase was, technically, three items. she lost the argument. she lost it loudly. the loss became a clip. the clip became, briefly, a minor genre of its own. she does not work in retail. she was buying a hook. the hook was for a coat. the coat is, presumably, hung now.

example three: this one is mine. that supermarket tuesday in 2019. the third yoga mat in the basket — bought, i should add, with the entirely defensible intention that this one would be different, this one would be the one i used, the one that did not end up living under the couch from a year nobody discusses. it ended up under the couch within forty-eight hours. the clip got there faster. the man who filmed me did not stay to see the mat go under the sofa. he did not get the resolution. he had already won what he came for.

the seventh microwave came later, and is a separate matter, and one i do not want adjudicated by a feed.

verdict — the genre needs an editor with a conscience

the verdict is short. the news of the stupid genre, as currently practised, is structurally extractive. it takes a private moment of human malfunction and converts it into someone else’s traffic. the cost is paid by one party. the benefit accrues to three. nobody is asking the protagonist whether the conversion was acceptable. nobody is paying them for the labour of being the cautionary tale.

i am not asking for the genre to be banned. i am asking for it to be edited. i would like, for the record, that every clip filed under “lighter side” or “you won’t believe” or “florida man” come with a small editorial test before publication: did the protagonist agree, did the protagonist know, would the protagonist still be working their job tomorrow if this ran. three questions. they would not, individually, kill any clips. collectively, they would kill enough. that’s the regulation i would like. that’s the editor with a conscience. and yes, a hot dog is a sandwich, fight me — that’s a hot take i will defend in print, in public, with full consent. the supermarket footage is not the same category. it never was.

i sign these investigations as an idiot by chosen profession, with a podium and a position and a press release nobody asked for. that is the idiot’s bargain — i picked the role, i pay the rent on it, i carry the embarrassment on purpose. the supermarket man did not pick the role. the supermarket man got handed a clip and a ten-second sentence and a stranger’s vote. it is not the same. it is the difference between a podium and an aisle. somebody should, in editorial, learn to tell them apart.

i note, for context, that a 1994 film about a man running across a country handled the public/private question better than most modern feeds. the film took a man whose every move could have been turned into “news of the stupid” and let him be a person instead. the film made a choice. the feeds, mostly, do not.

carla just walked back past. the all-hands is over. she made the small humming sound, which usually means she is processing. i am minimizing this and pretending to look at a spreadsheet. the spreadsheet is real. it is not, however, what i am working on.

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