Whether or not Freddy deserved to be hounded off the internet didn’t really matter. By the time he had been Milkshake Ducked he had become polarizing in the way that everything popular on social media eventually must.
I see hands in the air already. Okay, then: Freddy is a young German man with a Twitter account who has been traveling the US during the World Cup with a couple friends, enthusing over the places he visits, marveling over the size of the gas stations, the food servings, etc. Most people have been enjoying it, but as usual, there’s at least a small subgroup of psychotic cranks who have been scouring his old posts to find something to attack him for (he said something nice about Israel once!!!), accusing him of being a CIA propaganda creation, or, on a more mild note, accusing him of being a fake Clout-farmer putting one over on the rubes. So he deactivated his Twitter account. That was always his plan — he said the influencer life was definitely not for him — but reality sped up the timeline a bit. (“Milkshake Ducked” is internet slang for a popular viral figure who turns out to have a disreputable past.) What did Freddy do wrong? Nothing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
“Whether or not Freddy deserved to be hounded off the internet didn’t really matter.” To whom did it not matter? It presumably mattered to Freddy. It should matter to anyone attempting to judge the conduct of the people who hounded him. It ought especially to matter to a journalist who joined the hunt. Like a one-man Woodward ’n’ Bernstein, Oremus contacted the Houston Police Department, the Houston mayor’s office, representatives for Gordon Ramsay, J. J. Watt, and Ella Langley, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, the owner of a plausible LinkedIn profile, and the head of a German company where Freddy may once have interned. All this over an anonymous tourist. No, what Oremus means is that the moral question no longer matters to the explanatory scheme he prefers. Once he can classify the episode as a familiar social-media cycle, individual choices disappear into the pattern.
The comes the masterpiece: “He had become polarizing in the way that everything popular on social media eventually must.” Must! A law of nature. First comes virality, then polarization, just as spring follows winter. Nobody became suspicious for sport, or because of mental illness. Nobody searched old posts. Nobody stripped quotations of context. Nobody rewarded the behavior with attention. Nobody wrote an Atlantic article giving the suspicions prestige. Freddy simply became polarizing. People hounded Freddy off the internet, but in journalistic prose he “had been Milkshake Ducked.” The verb makes it sound like a piano fell on him.
The anonymity seems to offend the most. Freddy enjoyed mass attention while withholding the access that attention supposedly purchases: his surname, workplace, politics, face, and permanent availability for questioning. Oremus can understand intellectually that Freddy wanted privacy, but he still treats privacy as an evidentiary gap. Every unanswered email becomes another smoky corner of the case. The piece never quite asks the obvious question: why should Gordon Ramsay, the Houston police, or Freddy’s former internship supervisor disclose personal information about a tourist to a bottom-feeding scumbag reporter? Oremus presents all this as evidence of the scrutiny that “awaits” viral figures, as though the scrutiny were already waiting at the airport when he arrived. But he was not merely observing the investigation. He was conducting one. The passive voice conceals his agency more effectively than Freddy concealed his surname.
Good to see Laurene Powell Jobs’s money supporting the vital work of holding anonymous vacationers accountable. I cannot wait until the major papers and magazines are all staffed by AI and all the former journalists are trading fellatio for fentanyl in trash-strewn alleyways.