The Butterfly Effect

STORYTIME: I Ate The Travis Scott Burger And Almost DIED!?!?!?

I’m on the toilet. My eyes are watering and I’m hugging my knees to my chest. I’m sweating. My Stewie from Family Guy pajama pants are pooled at my ankles, my Cartman “Respect My Authority!” t-shirt long since removed. The Cookie Monster flat-brim stays on. I’m struggling. In one long, fluffy stream, I extrude the filth and wretchedness of our age. The Travis Scott burger, the Charli D’Amelio Dunkin’ coffee, the Denny’s Chuck Schumer (scooped cantaloupe with low-fat cottage cheese), the Salman Rushdie Whopper, the Roseanne Combo from Wendy’s (triazolam-infused chili with baked potato), the Carlos Mencia Twinkies, the Chick-Fil-A Timmy Thick Spicy Ass Meat Sandwich… They spew forth from me. I am left barren and scorched, but finally clean.

Have you tried the Travis Scott burger yet, Dear Reader? I think it is the future. (Not gastronomically, per se, as the “burger” of the future will more likely be a cake of compressed cricket flour on sorghum bread that you reconstitute in a bag with desalinated seawater.) But there is a futuristic quality to the Travis Scott burger that I like. The Travis Scott burger is pure simulacrum, utter detachment from the real. Travis Scott, a rapper with no connection to McDonald’s or hamburgers, lends his name to a McDonald’s hamburger. The hamburger itself proves to be no different from any other McDonald’s menu item. It is different because it is Travis’s. It is special because we are told it is special. 

This all takes place amid the existing semiotic chaos of McDonald’s: beef so dementedly processed that it severs any connection to the cow from whence it came. It is food which bears no mark of the hand that cooked it; no consideration for the person who eats it; spread so globally as to lose any of the local techniques or ingredients which might define cuisine. McDonald’s is food destroyed and remade in the image of capital. It is focus-grouped, A/B tested, cost-optimized, supply chain-defined food, reverse-engineered to look like a long-gone original. What tethers the McNugget to chicken? Would we know it is chicken if we were not told so? So, what less sense does it make for a random burger to be Travis Scott’s? Why not?

Netflix’s new documentary, The Social Dilemma, posits that our shared reality is as nonsensical and artificial as the Travis Scott burger. A parade of fleece-clad nerds, dorks, geeks, poindexters, and goobers tell us that their social media inventions, such as the Like button and infinite scroll, are threatening humanity. By atomizing us into individual realities, we lose any sense of common truth. Without that, there can be no discourse, conversation, or collaboration, and so, we’re doomed. Of course, nowhere along the way do any of these people acknowledge that they’re sitting on 8 figures of employee stock options and bonuses they received for these weapons of mass distraction. And the refrain is “We had no idea!” -- but one has to imagine that plenty of people could have identified some moral quandaries in real time for the “Director of Monetization” at Facebook. And surely the practice of “growth-hacking” (growing your customer base at light speed using psychological tricks) presented some red flags along the way. Men In Your Area Are Hacking Their Growth With This One Weird Trick!

At one point, the main interviewee, Tristan Harris, former Design Ethicist at Google (seems like he crushed that job!) compares the situation to the invention of the bicycle. He says that when the bicycle dropped, nobody said it would ruin society. But this isn’t true. The bicycle caused seismic cultural ripples in the 1890s, particularly for women. With greatly improved physical mobility came social mobility. Of course, many men were terrified by this and lambasted the bicycle. In 1895, a doctor named A. Shadwell wrote that “bicycling is attended with serious evils which do not appear on the surface and have received too little attention.” (Chazzy’s Note: I agree. Anything which causes people to wear Lycra or wake up early is not good for the world.) 

A similar thing happened at that time with electric streetlamps, which we of course now take for granted. As early as 1897, people were reckoning with the effects of electric lighting on the English environment. We now know well that rampant light pollution is deleterious for ecosystems and human health. As Jonathan Cary writes in his book 24/7, the entire climate crisis can be traced to electric lighting. With the electric light, work ceased to be a daytime activity and instead became permanent. Factories ran around the clock and shipping occurred at all hours. And in today’s globalized, technologized world, work is ceaseless. Just ask anyone now working from home: When does your day end? When does it begin? 

The understanding that big inventions have untold consequences is not new. Plato himself railed against the invention of writing. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,” he wrote. “They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” And he was right! Can any of you recite entire books from memory? Can you even go to the grocery store without a list? For every earth shattering innovation with supposedly unforeseen consequences, there’s probably someone pointing them out. To give credit where it’s due, Tristan Harris from The Social Dilemma did try to point this stuff out to Google while he worked there. But nobody gave a shit. 

And what does Travis Scott have to do with all this? Look only to his song “BUTTERFLY EFFECT”. The term comes from the physicist Edward Lorenz, who found that his model for the path of tornadoes could be altered by details as small as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings. Tiny changes can massively shift the course of events. Therefore, it’s naïve to think any big invention won’t shake things up. My high school history teacher used to say that you could never understand the meaning of an event until forty years later, so history must always run a generation behind the present. The world to come is malleable, a ball of clay that we’re constantly shaping. And like a pot you’re hoping doesn’t explode in the kiln, we must wait to see what we’ve made. 

Even the Travis Scott burger can be traced to one tiny flap of the wings: the New York City blackout of 1977. The two day power outage caused a massive wave of looting across the city. Electronics stores were pillaged. New York was flooded with sound systems and turntables. A new wave of DJs were armed with equipment which had once been priced far beyond their reach. The hip hop experiment, which had started with DJ Kool Herc at parties in the Bronx, proliferated across the city. And you know what happens next. Hip hop explodes, becomes one of the most important cultural innovations in American history, and is so popular on a global scale that its megastars can be consumed in fast food form.

I wonder what the butterfly effects of this pandemic will be. (Though Covid-19 is less a butterfly flapping its wings and more an Airbus A380 taking off.) The largest proportion of young Americans since the Great Depression, above 50%, are living with their parents. 63% (!) of American adults under 24 are suffering from anxiety or depressive disorder during Covid. A record low report being proud to be American. This is all very bad. History shows us quite clearly what happens when young people lose faith in their futures. But there are bright spots. In conversations with friends, I found that the combination of living at home and federal pandemic unemployment has allowed some young people to save more than ever before. And while we’re brooding at home, we’re changing our plans, realigning our priorities, and coming up with better, cooler visions for the future. We will emerge from the pandemic radicalized, but ready to do more with our lives. 

Signs of de-gentrification are popping up in America’s most expensive cities. Wildfires and corporate tax hikes are causing companies to leave San Francisco. Fear of crime and protests in the anarchist jurisdiction of New York are causing rents to collapse. Well-heeled transplants, who justified high rents with cultural opportunities, are going home. These cities could become affordable. They might incubate artists again. Art critic Jerry Saltz wrote this on Instagram: “Come to New York City. Start over. Commercial real-estate is devastated; prices will plummet. You are tasked with building a new art world and a new city. I and millions of others did this here once-upon-a-glorious-time. Now it is all of your turns. Grab your tools, brushes, kids and come to NYC. You are the luckiest people in the world.”

We are atomized right now. Stuck in our rooms plotting and making plans. Without the hives of interaction which feed culture, corporations step into define our time for us. McDonald’s seeks to do that with the Travis Scott burger, engineering a cultural moment as artificial as the product itself. And as The Social Dilemma points out, Facebook and Twitter and Tik Tok do the same, steering our attention and molding culture to the benefit of advertisers. Reject this. Refuse the top-down, force-fed outputs of global capital. Our future was never guaranteed; the only thing promised was that it would be derailed by the tiniest, most unforeseen circumstances. So ditch the plan. Create for yourself. Create for your friends and see what they create. Flap your little butterfly wings and see what happens.