A couple weeks ago, the professional basketball player Jaden Ivey went live on Instagram and criticized the NBA’s promotion of Pride Month, resulting in his dismissal from the Chicago Bulls. The video starts with him driving in a car, criticizing the league for celebrating “unrighteousness.” As he lays out the argument, you get the sense that he’s genuinely confused about some of the specifics. “How can a woman bear a child with a woman? How?” he asks searchingly, his voice cracking. “Unless they go to the doctor, it can’t happen physically,” he reassures himself. “They have the same body part. Bro, they cannot bear children unless they get something done.” (Whatever they could get done is left menacingly unclear.) By this point, he’s sitting parked in the driveway and transitions to extolling the beauty of the natural world. “He made things good,” Ivey earnestly proclaims. “He made the Sun. If the Sun was ever closer we would burn. But he made it in the proper place so we’d get the proper light in the day. He gave us water to drink,” Ivey continues. “If we didn’t have water we’d be dehydrated.”
The people closest to Ivey believe he’s suffering a public mental breakdown. (The video is hardly the only reason why; in another revealing anecdote, Ivey tried to convince the Bulls that he could play through a serious injury, claiming that “Jesus healed my knee” (despite an MRI showing otherwise.) Former teammates and coaches have publicly said they hope he receives help. His wife asked for privacy as “there is obviously a lot more going on.” Ivey admitted that much of his family has stopped talking to him, calling him “crazy” and a “psycho.”
Unfortunately, some of the most tedious people in the world saw the potential for a juicy, algorithm-friendly culture-war headline that might have looked like “Basketball Player CANCELLED for Preaching the Gospel,” and ran with it. “We live in a world that hates Christ and those who believe in Him, but that’s to be expected,” tweeted conservative activist Riley Gaines. “Just as He was persecuted, so will we be. Consider me a Jaden Ivey fan.” Soon, Ivey was on an evangelical podcast revealing the most intimate details of his life: that he was sexually abused as a child, that he himself had abused his wife, that he’d attempted suicide multiple times.
It would be easy to write a piece condemning religious influencers for doing the un-Christian thing of using a vulnerable person’s suffering for their personal gain. But as Matthew 7:3-5 wisely instructs, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own… First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” So, here’s my plank: I watched the video of Ivey and found it funny. I showed it to my friends and they did too. It genuinely sounds like he’s discovering gay people for the first time. Still, is it any better to laugh at someone in obvious mental distress than to exploit them?
To a larger degree than we probably realize, the internet’s structure mimics bullying. Find the kid who’s weird or weak and make jokes at their expense; it’s more fun when the victim doesn’t get what’s going on. This explains the phenomenon of Clavicular, a streamer who supposedly rose to fame because he simulates the experience of (misogynistically) interacting with beautiful women as an attractive man. For his most deranged incel fans, perhaps that’s the extent of the appeal. But the reason many people enjoy watching his clips is the subtext of his immense suffering. Here’s someone so troubled they smashed their face into place with a hammer; now you get to laugh at the freak as he awkwardly tries to flirt with women who despise him. A couple of weeks ago, he overdosed on a stream and nearly died. Afterwards, he promised to stop abusing drugs but admitted he didn’t know if he could stream sober because the anxiety might be too overwhelming.
People are pretty apathetic about this, but I’m not sure why. Sure, the internet isn’t real life; these videos just pop up in your feed. You can’t possibly be causing someone harm by viewing what they willingly posted. Besides, 1.7 million people had already viewed the video by the time it reached you. But “you are free, therefore choose,” philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre instructed. Why are you choosing this? In Norman Rush’s novel “Mating”, an anthropologist theorizes that young boys require unsupervised play because it teaches them to evolve from fascism to feudalism to democracy. Today, the internet short-circuits that process, channeling our diffuse desire to inflict pain upon others into fifteen-second video clips to smirk at.
Everyone agrees that if you spend too long scrolling, you’ll start to feel bad about yourself, the idea being that you’ve been “rotting” when you could have been doing something more productive. But people don’t feel bad about spending time watching movies, drinking with their friends or playing sports. You feel bad because the internet is a prison filled with people suffering for your attention. You know what you're doing online is ugly, that it’s wrong to voyeuristically consume another person’s suffering, that it’s depressing that your moral conscience has shriveled to the point where you can’t do something as simple as swipe up with your thumb. Yet you don’t have the decency to look away.
You’re probably reading this right now on your phone. The odds say that within two minutes, you’ll find your way back onto social media. Meanwhile, Clavicular is going to die soon, probably live on his stream. Jaden Ivey is spiraling even deeper, now preaching on street corners. I sincerely hope they both receive help — do you really think they’re the only ones who need it?
