Category: Articles

Slender Man, or Slenderman, is an Internet myth, an urban legend for the digital age, a ‘here there be monsters’ for a world with borderless and edgeless boundaries. The cartography of the web is unclear, the shaded unknowns are unseen, and the drop-off points are hidden. Slender Man lives in the cracks. What he is exactly, is a purely fictitious Internet character. He’s a tall, thin man, usually shown or described ‘ whether through drawings, images, or stories ‘ as hanging around children and compelling them to do awful things. Born of collective storytelling in the Internet’s back channels, he’s ambiguous and mutable, nowhere and everywhere.

Technically, Slender Man was created in 2009 on the website Something Awful. The site asked users to use Photoshop to create paranormal pictures and one user, Victor Surge (n’e Eric Kundsen), created Slender Man. He posted a couple of photos, the most famous of which is a black and white image featuring a child on a playground slide in the foreground. In the background there are more small children, and under the shade of a tree a group stands around a tall, thin, dark figure with long tentacle-like arms. The caption for the photos are ominous:

‘we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but it persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same timeﾅ – 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead’.

The meme spread, despite everyone knowing its origin in the Something Awful forums. People added to the folklore by creating more photos, more references, more oblique stories. He is usually depicted as faceless, wearing a black suit and tie; he was the subject of a found-footage style YouTube series called Marble Hornets and he appears in several video games. And so the story endured, with people contributing various details here and there, building on a fiction now seven years old. Even the name of the original forum — a humor site that is, according to the Washington Post, home to ‘jokes about things like Dungeons & Dragons, porn and 3-D printers’ — enhances the creepiness of the origin story. Rather than nerdy web outskirts, Something Awful becomes more Blair Witchian, as Something Wicked This Way Comes.

For all of the Internet folklore took a much darker turn in June 2014, when two twelve-year old girls stabbed a classmate 19 times. When interrogated by police, they said they did it so they could see Slender Man and prove that he is real. The classmate survived; the girls’ trial is ongoing and they were back in court on November 11. HBO has made a documentary about the case, scheduled to air in January 2017. Before the incident, there was just the right amount of almost-true to keep the legend alive. But as the girls are held in prisons and evaluated, pressed for reasons and asked to recount again how Slender Man influenced their decision, it has become part of the real-life record.

Slender Man has been discussed at large as a kind of metaphor for our societal anxieties of the unknown. Shira Chess, an academic at the University of Georgia, is quoted most frequently in news articles on the incident, stating that myths reflect our cultural fears and that Slender Man represents ‘helplessness, power differentials, and anonymous forces.’

As an on-screen legend made into a real-life horror story for three girls, there’s something about Slender Man’s apparent power to compel his victims that’s reminiscent of The Ring, even if that would be an outdated way to think of the Internet specter. The American version of the film was released in 2002 and features VHS and landlines, that kind of mute the terror when viewing today, with a wave of nostalgia for devices of yesteryear. There’s a sequel that moves the film into the digital age, with online videos and webcams — an update that is necessary to accurately instill some sense of terror. Because although neither the 2002 nor 2016 version is explicitly about technology, technology is the mode through which dangerous transference takes place.

The fact that the web — which is by no means new at this point — still inspires fear, is impressive. Part of this is because so many of us don’t fully understand how the web actually functions. Although we use it on a regular basis and know the user end, those who control the technical elements hold the power to completely revert our worlds. VHS and its entirely contained mechanics are hardly frightening compared to the nebulous networks we have created — networks that live within the same universe as our everyday activities. Viruses are probably the best example. They infect through familiar channels like email and downloads. We have come to expect pop-ups and spam on less credible sites as kind of casual reminders that there are anarchists and dissenters who know much more about our digital footprints than we do. The real viruses, the ones that do more than just slow your operating system, lock you out of your files, your hard drive — essentially your whole life. They put you on pause and remind you of your reliance on systems that are, in reality, almost wholly beyond your control.

Following the American election, we’re worrying about the limits of this digital world to sustain a pan-anything dialogue. Depending on who you’re reading, it may be responsible for electing Trump. The silos of the Internet and the echo chambers of social media are being blamed for the lack of insight that those on either side of the presidential campaign had into the other before election night. BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis created a kind of visual essay on this topic called Hypernormalisation, released on BBC iPlayer just before the election. Dramatic and conspiratorial, the documentary sees the web as a vast and shallow tool that feeds society’s narcissism by validating our pseudo-sense of reality: basically we immerse ourselves in select worlds, so we forget that the big picture is often very different.

And this is often the most worrisome thing, because more than anything, we worry about how technology affects our behavior. The latest season of Black Mirror delves into the dark sides of technology, or more accurately, the dark side of humans and how technology can be used in service of our worst selves. For every story of how the web is connective and redemptive — in creating networks where none existed, in uniting disparate forces through new communications channels, in giving those formerly voiceless an outlet and a microphone — there are cautionary tales that harken back to parental control apps and hand-wringing over anonymous chatrooms. The way these discussions go, it is the dark side of the power of the Internet that we don’t see coming. It’s a slow burn we don’t notice — we’re inoculating ourselves from the things we don’t want to see, the opinions that disagree with our own. That bit by bit, we’re building ourselves a reality that fits the perspective we want. It’s an argument that is easy to latch onto, especially while looking to assign blame for the unexpected.

However, there are things that don’t fit with this theory. As much as we would like to tie a bow on it and say we are lulled into false senses of security by our newsfeeds and our online social circles, and that media outlets contribute to this fa’ade, this isn’t true for a number of people. We can’t acknowledge the one side of media bias without also acknowledging the vitriol that gets expressed online to members of the press ‘ particularly toward women and people of colour ‘ that never allows them to forget that there is fierce opposition, not only to their perspectives, but to their very personhood.

Discussing the impacts of social media in relation to the election is not pointless, but it does have a whitewashing tendency to forget that there are people behind the tweets and that engagement is a choice. That social media is a tool — not a cause — for communication. We can no more easily assign blame for a seemingly unbridgeable gap to Twitter or Facebook than we can fully lay the blame at the feet of any one person or group. Even the anonymizing aspect of the web — which is often nefarious and cowardly — is not as simple as good or bad. For the arguments that say facelessness enables the worst behavior, there’s the counterpoint of Emily Doe.

Emily Doe is the stand-in name for the young woman from Stanford who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner in January 2015. Earlier this year, Brock Turner received a six-month sentence for his crime — a crime that could have resulted in a sentence of fourteen years, of which he only served three months. At his trial, Emily Doe read a victim-impact statement, detailing her side of the assault and the effects on her life. The statement went viral, and to date has been viewed 11 million times, and was read on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. This month, she was named Glamour Magazine’s Woman of the Year. Parts of her statement were read on stage and Michelle Daube, a law professor at Stanford, accepted the award on her behalf. With the announcement of the award, Emily Doe also wrote an essay in Glamour. Emily Doe remains anonymous, and it is through her anonymity that she has shared her story and that she continues to fight against her assailant and the system that prioritized his well being over hers. In what seems counterintuitive in most cases of hidden identity, her anonymization has reminded people that there is someone, a real person, behind the viral content.

And really, the building of online myth depends on what you categorize as legend. By definition, myths have an element of something fantastical, beyond what we recognize as real life. They’re usually explanatory, helping us as a culture understand how something came to be. But there is something to be said for those who are not afforded the things in real-life that others are, and for whom ideas of equality often seem equally fictitious. Where the things that we currently do not recognize as real life are for what we could be striving. Where understanding how things came to be demands a reckoning that could use something fantastical and out of the ordinary, for the ordinary is not always a comfort. Imaginary worlds are not always treacherous, but ones that face cultural, societal, and legal obstacles often seem equally out of reach.

Perhaps the Internet can be used to further entrench our ideas and disconnect us from reality. And perhaps the Internet will always be suspect and drive our fears of our inability to separate fact from fiction. But perhaps there’s also the flip side, where the fiction is not only a respite, but home to a necessary optimism that things can change. While there is no doubt that a dark side of the web exists, not all Internet myths are dangerous, and there are even some where we could benefit from their transference.

In the aftermath of an unexpected victory for Donald Trump on election night, questions have been asked about how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party could have won what appeared to be an easy race.

Trump was massively unpopular with voters. According to CNN’s Exit Poll, 60% of voters had an unfavourable view of Donald Trump. Unfortunately for Clinton, her negatives weren’t too far behind with an unfavourable view among voters of 54%.

During the primaries, Hillary Clinton faced stiff competition against Independent-turned-Democrat, Bernie Sanders. Sanders was able to win 23 states in the democratic primary and more than 13 million votes.

However, the hard-fought primary campaign left deep divides within the Democratic party. After Wikileaks released a batch of Democratic National Committee e-mails appearing to show that the DNC leadership was supportive of Clinton, many Sanders supporters accused the DNC and Clinton of rigging the election against their candidate.

Ultimately, those accusations turned out to be false — while the e-mails did show a bias among several DNC employees towards the Clinton campaign, no concrete steps to limit Sanders’ success were ever undertaken. That fact did not stop many Sanders supporters from breaking from the Democratic Party and vowing to support a far-left, third party option. For the most part, these individuals backed Jill Stein, the Green Party’s two-time presidential nominee.

Stein also ran in 2012 against President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In that race she won 469,628 votes. This election season (with some votes still being counted at the time of writing), the Green Party has increased its vote total to 1,209,758 — more than double what it received last cycle. Undoubtedly this increase was brought on in part by a significant number of Sanders supporters who publicly backed Stein.

American voters may hear echoes of the 2000 presidential election in all this, when Ralph Nader, while also running for the Green Party, was accused of pulling left-wing votes away from the more moderate Democrat, Al Gore. Ultimately, Nader’s opponents claim these votes cost Gore Florida and, as a result, the election.

But is this the case for Clinton and Stein?
In order to have won the election, Clinton would have needed to win a combination of three of the following states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Michigan: Trump — 2,279,210; Clinton — 2,267,373; Difference — 11,837; Stein — 50,686
Wisconsin: Trump — 1,409,467; Clinton — 1,382,210; Difference — 27,257; Stein — 30,980
Pennsylvania: Trump — 2,912,941; Clinton — 2,844,705; Difference — 68,236; Stein — 48,912
Florida: Trump — 4,605,515; Clinton — 4,485,745; Difference — 119,770; Stein — 64,019

In only two of those states — Michigan and Wisconsin, which also happen to be the smallest of the states — is the Green Party vote large enough to make up the gap between Clinton and Trump. Even if she had won those two states, Clinton would have lost the election to Trump 280 electoral votes to her 258. Trump’s support in Pennsylvania and Florida was so great that even a unified centre-left and left-wing voter coalition would not have displaced him.

It is always difficult to assume how voters, if given different candidates, in what would be a different race, would have voted. Were Bernie Sanders the nominee, it is possible he could have lost just as definitively as Clinton had — or won in a landslide. Likewise, we cannot assume the Green Party would not have been a factor in a race between Bernie Sanders and Trump. However, given the fact that Jill Stein offered the top spot of the Green Party ticket to Sanders after her nomination, it is reasonable to assume that a Sanders-led Democratic presidential ticket would have won a significant number of Green votes. At the end of the day, though, all we have are the votes as they stand now, and the numbers clearly show that Jill Stein and the Green Party are not responsible for Clinton’s loss to Trump via vote splitting — certainly not in the states that decided the election. There are many arguments to be made about why Clinton lost, but vote splitting among left-wing candidates does not appear to be a meaningful one.

At Navigator, research is a big part of everything we do. The best public affairs campaigns are developed on the solid foundation of insightful research results. That’s why we can’t help but admire those clients who take research as seriously we do when it comes down to developing and maintaining their brand.

The Consumer Technology Association recently released their first-ever study of Canadian consumer habits, an in-depth look into how We the North own and think about buying the latest gadgets and electronics on the market. As the Government of Canada wades into a lengthy innovation review and a Canadian content review, such research will be critical to understanding the landscape of how millions of Canadians use consumer technologies as part and parcel of their everyday lives.

Unsurprisingly, Canadians match their American neighbours stride for stride when it comes to ownership of the three screens – smartphones, televisions, and laptops. Canadians have a loving relationship with their smartphones, with 95 per cent saying they plan to purchase another one in the next year — a buyer intent stat that rivals only televisions. Canadians also have a healthy appetite for in-vehicle devices for entertainment and navigation, as well as audio devices like headphones and wireless speakers.

While the study found few significant differences between Canadians’ consumer technology ownership habits and those of their American neighbours, Canadian households were still slower to adopt emerging technologies like drones and smart home devices than U.S. households.

On the surface, slower adoption of emerging technologies among Canadians may be attributed to issues of availability and pricing; most cutting-edge consumer electronics are often launched in the U.S. before they’re expanded to other markets and often at a higher price. Cross-border shopping and e-commerce have gone a long way to bring down barriers to adoption, but at the end of the day, a low Canadian dollar and the exclusivity of some premium services for U.S. markets (case in point, Amazon) will deter many savvy Canadians from actively seeking out and owning the latest technologies.

At the same time, marketers and innovators of these technologies can sometimes forget Canadian consumer habits are not identical to those of Americans. While our neighbours to the South are obsessed with having the latest flat-screen TVs and household gadgets as badges of social status, Canadians are much more focused on holding the things they have when it comes to ownership. Compared to Americans, we tend to seek out the the best deal on the item they want, rather than a specific brand — it’s more about the product itself than the label associated with it. In fact, a 2013 TD Economics report showed Canadian consumers dedicate more of their budget to non-discretionary spending (i.e. the necessities like groceries, rent or mortgage payments) than their American counterparts, who like to spend their budget on more discretionary items (did someone say camouflaged solar panels?).

Nevertheless, underneath our slow adoption trends lies enormous potential for growth, especially for home-grown innovators who are looking to break into both the Canadian and global consumer technology markets. While we might not be focused on a particular brand, we are still seeking new gadgets. On their wishlist this holiday season, many Canadian households say they expect to buy their first set of wireless speakers, curved ultra-HD televisions, and fitness trackers sometime in the next year.

With Canadians already pegged as voracious consumers of digital content, they will continue to rely on and seek out more devices and services that support those needs. It will be up to Canadian lawmakers and cross-border efforts from all the governments involved to help boost access and availability of the technologies that Canadians need most in their day-to-day lives, as well as create an open and competitive environment for innovators at home and abroad.

Most readers of this fine blog may not know who Peter David is. But to millions of comic book and science fiction fans, Peter David is a recognizable name. To thousands of loyal followers, Peter David is the Writer of Stuff and they tend to place him in the same esteem as pizza and their own children. (Yes, the two are equal). While many of Peter David’s fans are not interested in Canadian politics or public affairs, the two spheres briefly overlapped a few weeks ago. Peter David answered a question about Romani representation in comics. It went as well as you can imagine. Cue the negative coverage. It’s the kind of reaction that would normally cause an individual reputational harm. Had it spread like fire, it would have introduced David to whole new audiences as a racist. Luckily for him, that didn’t happen. And he can thank his rabid fan base, which served as a buffer. Let’s explore this further.

Community Mapping in a Crisis

First, let’s talk about what community mapping involves. The degree to which an individual is well-known within a specific audience, is easy to find. Digital analysis includes the mapping of people’s interests using ‘affinity categories’ or topics based on the content they engage with most online. They show which subjects a given social media profile or accounts’ followers or friends are also interested in. Conversation around a topic or affinity category can also be analyzed for demographic information. Using affinities, we know for certain that typical readers of our blog are not particularly interested in comic books or Peter David. In a crisis, audience affinity data helps articulate which groups are most upset by an issue and how they feel they were wronged. Understanding nuances in how a narrow interest group communicates helps with any messaging situation, but in a crisis, affinities can be used to develop the most effective response using language that best connects those impacted to the issue.

What Is Buffer Content

Second, let’s go over buffer content. Buffer content is exactly what it sounds like: it’s the web links or pieces of digital content that insulate online entities from bad press. For a very general example, most businesses use internal links to have a number of their own website pages appear in search engine results and act as literal buffers against unflattering news stories or competitors’ pages appearing in the same place or being closely associated with their brand or keyword. In a developing crisis, using owned social media channels to share content, advocating for a specific point of view, and responding in line with a company’s message, can shift the narrative in your brand’s favour. More importantly, by amplifying content and reaching people unaware of the incident, these accounts can stop potentially damaging narratives from spreading. When used correctly, they can contain a reputational crisis by addressing applicable online communities with deliberate messaging.

The Public Affairs Emergency

So what happened with Peter David? On October 7, he was on a panel at New York Comicon. When asked a question about Romani representation in superhero comics, he responded with an anecdote about gypsies crippling their children to make them more effective beggars. He also started yelling at the person who asked. This video of the incident quickly circulated on social media. David eventually apologized, but not before doubling down on his initial stance. As can be expected in the world of comics, most coverage was online and on social media. In similar cases with niche celebrities, and especially when the story breaks through a video on social media, online outrage drives mainstream coverage. People angrily tweeted at David and activity related to his name or in his interest category skyrocketed. However, because David’s existing fan base contributed an incredible amount of support —and in some cases rebuttals — overall, there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of negative commentary that stood out.

Looking at the sentiment of tweets referencing or directly mentioning David before the incident, 36% were positive, 50% were neutral, and 13% were negative. These numbers include negative general discussions about his work, including literary criticisms. They’re normal numbers—nothing to get worried about. In fact, the negatives are negligible. Sure, overall volume of the conversation was high, but the ratio of negative to positive or neutral sentiment determines whether or not there is a crisis. And at this point, before he made his unfortunate comments, he was by no means in a crisis.

Social Media Followers Become Your Advocates

The week of the incident, social media posts about Peter David increased about 630%. What’s amazing is that overall sentiment only changed to 20% positive, 62% neutral, and 18% negative. Let’s just pause on that for a moment. He accused gypsies of deliberately paralyzing their own, and the conversation around him was only 18% negative. Few prominent individuals would get away with that. Sure, the Romani issue had more volume than any other topic but it did not dominate the overall conversation. This is because of who was responsible for posts related to his response on Romani representation. Before the incident David had 14,694 Twitter followers. Eighteen days after the incident, he actually had four more followers: On October 25, he was at 14,698. Though the outburst drew criticism from Romani activists and outlets covering the convention, it did not resonate with David’s existing follower base. There’s a lesson here: how your stakeholders or online community react to an event plays an important role in contextualizing any damage to your brand.

The majority of negative posts were from accounts that were not part of his usual fan base: they made one or two comments about the incident and then moved on to other things. At the same time, David’s fan base was fuming over (spoilers) the death of Jamie Madrox in the latest Death of X issue, which undid the happy ending David had given one of his most popular characters in the new line of story continuity. Immediately after the incident, there were a number of posts calling David a racist. However, as these accounts never engaged with David-related content again, the steady stream of complaints about how Jamie Madrox — aka, Multiple Man — died eventually became the focus of conversations. These initial tweets on his death developed into different users discussing why they didn’t like the comic and others sharing their favourite Madrox moments from when David was writing the character.

From October 8-20, the percentage of social media posts calling David a racist declined from 10% of all relevant conversation, to less than one percent. At the same time, conversations about recent Marvel comics and their relation to David’s work also picked up on Twitter. They started at 6% at the beginning of October, and have since grown to roughly 10% of the activity related to David. Anyone scanning his Twitter feed looking to write about recent developments would see some content related to racism and his Romani response, but would also see much more content about comics. It would appear that it’s business as usual, and his reputation stands mostly in tact.

Of course David is suffering some fallout. The point is that his passionate fans were able lessen the damage. Remember, these people are also his key audience. As long as they support David, there’s reason to continue booking him at conventions and stocking his books. In other words, this was not a reputational crisis. While the incident certainly offended a lot of people, it did not bother those responsible for building Peter David’s reputation in the first place.

Protecting Your Reputation Before A Crisis

Peter David has been indirectly grooming his audience for online advocacy his entire career. Most —if not all —of his comic books, novels, or television scripts include specific references to his other works, encouraging dedicated fans to spot the allusions and connect the ‘Peter David Universe’ in their heads. He regularly engages with social media content on public channels and maintains a dedicated fan site, which is updated regularly and houses more niche content about his interconnected work. He cultivates his own affinity category or sub topic within general comic books by first creating content necessary for such a niche community to form, and then by rewarding people who engage with it by engaging back and providing more of the same type of content they enjoyed in the first place. Over the years, this has encouraged more and more broader comic book fans to join the ranks of Peter David fans, immersing themselves in his work, discussing it online, and eventually adopting common quirks in taste or expression. Because they become so wholly involved with the material, criticisms of Peter David’s work become criticisms of his audience’s sensibilities, which can lead them to defend him more aggressively than fans typically defend their favourite author. The kind of behavior his fans demonstrated earlier this month dilutes conversation in small affinity categories or niche interests, like Peter David, making it appear to people without much context (and especially to most monitoring software) that nothing is out of the ordinary. David may not have asked his followers to defend him online, but he did cultivate the kind of fandom that insulates any public figure from certain degrees of reputational damage.

This should not imply that whatever is happening on social media is fact. However, in the world of public perception, what people are saying in the moment can be almost as important as what is actually true. Dedicated followings are the best kind of buffer content, because as soon as a crisis hits, they automatically respond more directly than any individual or company involved ever could, they dilute conversation to lessen immediate damage, and they help push negative content out of search-engine results pages and social feeds.

Peter David is an extreme example, but his community management can be applied well beyond comics. Broadly speaking, buffer content should act like David’s version of Jamie Madrox/Multiple Man — gradually building and consistently maintaining an audience before a crisis (or for the fans: using cloning powers to efficiently learn new skills and make more allies to avoid swarming his enemies in a fight). At a minimum, a little bit of community management or affinity mapping can help determine if a public embarrassment is really a reputational crisis based on who exactly was offended. Through affinity mapping and then community maintenance, businesses can duplicate what Peter David did and develop a passionate audience that safeguards their digital reputation before contained embarrassments become public shames.

Ugh. Where to start? I mean, where to begin with this most depressing of American presidential campaigns? November 8, 2016 just can’t come soon enough, right? We’ll just all wake up from this horrible dream, relieved it’s over and get back to normal. Such a peaceful thought. If only we could live our lives through rose-coloured lenses. Truth is, I know things aren’t right in this world when I find myself agreeing with a Globe and Mail columnist. John Ibbitson recently predicted that while Trump will likely lose, ‘he is the final warning to the elites.’ I’m afraid he hit this one on the head:

‘Unless political elites of both the left and the right become more humble, unless they once again ask themselves how their agendas will play in Peoria, the next rough beast might slouch over the corpse of the republic.’

We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of the anti-establishment sentiment in the US. It’s not going away anytime soon. Those of us looking for a return to normal are in for a surprise if Clinton wins. Her victory will bring immediate relief to just about everyone north of the border, but we won’t have time to catch our breath before an unsatisfied, unhappy underbelly of discontent rears its ugly head. I’d like to think the anti-establishment movement could shed itself of the racist, bigoted, protectionist elements that make it such a foul movement. But, I suppose that’s probably a pipe dream. I’m not the only one yearning for a return to something a little more—I don’t know—gosh darn sincere.

And for a brief moment, we all got that aw shucks sincerity. You may have heard of him. He was an Internet sensation for a couple days (that’s like 80 years in Internet age). Yep. Ken Bone, ye of perfect meme nomenclature. Amongst the wreckage of personal attacks that plagued the second presidential debate, this man-in-the-red-sweater asked a snoozer of a question about energy policy. Proving just how nerdy we really are, the Internet found love at first sight. In hindsight, I suppose it makes sense; Ken provided a respite from the divisiveness of this horrible campaign—a breath of fresh air in a moist, damp locker room.

What followed was as predictable as a Harlequin romance.

We Find Love

Within hours, people already had their perfect Halloween costume. Ken’s Twitter followers grew from a mere 7 to a whopping 250,000. He got play on the Late Night circuit and for a brief time symbolized all that is right with the world. We wanted to know why he went with a red sweater. We wanted him as a candidate. We couldn’t get enough. Why didn’t we see more of this in this campaign?

I’m not sure Ken knew what predicament he found himself in, but it was pretty much the worse place to be: the Internet’s hero. Once you reach that level, you can only fall, usually with a bruising thud. And when the Internet turns on you, it cuts deep. In truth, we all leave a trail on the Internet. And as we started digging, we found that our shiny new object wasn’t so shiny after all.

Our Hearts Are Broken

The debate question everyone loved…’what step will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?’…wasn’t as innocent as it first appeared. Ken works in the coal industry for a company that opposes climate regulations and has dodged current legislation to be environmentally friendly. In hindsight, his question seemed a little more self-serving.

He took to his fame by hosting a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Sure, he was a gracious host, and started a T-shirt campaign to raise funds to fight homelessness — but he foolishly used his old username, which made it dead simple for anyone to dig into his past musings. He apparently left a comment on a pregnancy subreddit describing expecting mothers as ‘beautiful human submarines.’ He confessed to viewing naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and, uh…enjoying it. He committed felony insurance fraud and even suggested the shooting of Trayvon Martin was ‘justified.’ He used his fame for a one-off Uber promotion in St. Louis. Just like that, our hero had become an ‘ignorant bonehead‘, and a seedy sell-out.

We Piece Some of it Back Together

With the nasty stuff out of the way, some writers tried to paint a picture of a man—who like the rest of us—has many layers. No single person can be summed up in an Internet meme. This same Ken also wrote that he’s a conservative who likes Obama. He wrote a compassionate response to a rape victim. He condemned Stanford rapist Brock Turner.

Now Ken spends what appears to be considerable effort defending himself. He has clarified some of his comments. ‘I do not condone the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Justifiable means legal, not right.’ His Twitter feed now contains links to threads and articles that defend him. He still has fans who work feverishly to push out a more sympathetic narrative of Ken. But most of us have moved on. We’ve already had enough of Ken. He’s yesterday’s news.

I’ll leave it to Ken and his fanbase to defend his words and deeds. I only highlight his story as an example of how fickle we are. We don’t have time for old news. We move from one meme to the next in just about the same amount of time Usain Bolt runs 100 meters. It’s an unforgiving place—time is never on your side, and people are apt to remember the most negative thing that was last said about you. Never mind the full story or context. That’s boring. We want to be entertained.

But, we’ve gotten to the point where that entertainment is blurry. It’s not fun, even if we try to make it that way. There’s no escaping the slog of this campaign season. There was one symbol—even if we never really took it seriously— that was supposed to provide some kind of light in a dark world. Ken, version 1.0, made the Internet pleasant, at least for a couple hours. Now that light doesn’t shine so brightly. In a way, Ken has become a symbol of this campaign. Whenever we have thought that it might get better, it only gets worse. Everywhere we look, it’s ugly. All of it. And I’m afraid it only gets uglier here on in, no matter what happens on November 8.

On that cheery note, let me get back to what really matters.