Why does everything feel so undignified?

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Well. What an insane month. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the most effective anti-ageing treatment isn’t botox or retinols but simply not engaging with the news. Since we invariably ​“live in a society,” however, let’s get into it. 

On September 10^th, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a school campus while giving a racist answer to a question about gun violence. The fallout has been, even for this political climate, surprisingly unhinged. Social media platforms have been sodden with AI slop tributes; some depicting Kirk being embraced by Jesus, others creating fake images that show him being honoured by Bruce Springsteen and Robert Plant. The New College of Florida (not where he was shot, mind you) has commissioned a statue of him to be erected on campus. ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel accused the MAGA movement of using the killing as a political football in his opening monologue (the show has since been reinstated). Donald Trump, who recently gilded the entire Oval Office in 24-karat gold like Marie Antoinette if she knew about McDonalds, used his address at Kirk’s funeral to announce that his government has found a cure for autism in the form of not taking Tylenol while pregnant. 

Trump has also leveraged the incident to clamp down on free speech, threatening TV networks with license revocations and restricting access to journalists covering the Pentagon, while the right-wing at large has performed a 180 to embrace cancel culture. After spending the last ten years banging on about the left’s ​“woke agenda” to remove ideological opponents from public life, JD Vance has backed a vigilante mass doxxing campaign to identify and harass anyone critical of, or found to be not sufficiently mourning, Charlie Kirk.

In many ways, the response is as incoherent as the shooting itself. One TikTok user (@ELDERTIKTOK) present at Charlie Kirk’s shooting at Utah Valley University filmed a live face-to-camera video as people fled screaming, promoting his social media handles and the Book of Mormon (the religious text, not the award-winning broadway musical from the creators of South Park). Bullet casings found at the scene were inscribed with terminally online references to Helldivers 2, text-based furry roleplay (“Notices bulge OwO whats this?”), and, simply, ​“If you read this you are gay lmao.” The suspected killer, 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson, has been described as both a radical leftist and a Groyper. In reality, his politics so far appear inconsistent and his motive unclear.

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It would take a piece much longer than this one to get into the fine details, but reporters Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas of the web culture newsletter Garbage Day have provided some of the best analysis of the incident. Couching it in the rise of the ​“edgelord shooter” and the threat of Terrorgram networks like The Com, which encourage members to commit violent crimes in exchange for internet clout, they write that acts of political violence have become ​“just another meme you can participate in to go viral.” Rather than acting in accordance with a particular belief, they say, ​“Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”

So that’s all pretty horrible. Meanwhile, Gen Z protesters overthrew the government in Nepal and elected an interim Prime Minister over Discord. Tens of thousands of young people hit the streets in early October to oppose widespread political corruption, nepotism, and the alleged mismanagement of public funds. They torched government buildings, luxury hotels, and the residences of political leaders, and forced the (now former) Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to resign. Over 70 people were killed in clashes with police, making it one of the deadliest periods of unrest in modern Nepalese history. The catalyst for the protests was a nationwide ban on dozens of social media sites, but, rather than being an isolated issue, it was the lit match flicked into a tinderbox of discontent and disillusionment over grievous wealth inequality in one of the poorest countries in Asia.

Later in the month, over 100,000 people attended a so-called ​‘Unite the Kingdom’ march through central London. Organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known by his faux working-class alias Tommy Robinson), the demonstration was attended by a who’s who of far-right agitators and religious fundamentalists, including media shill Katie Hopkins, Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki, and a host of nationalist European party leaders (so much for ​“Brexit means Brexit”). Allegedly the largest demo of its type in British history, the streets were awash with St. George’s Cross flags worn as capes and Union Jack-print ephemera such as those little plastic bowler hat type things you get at children’s birthday parties, as well as anti-Labour and anti-Palestinian sloganeering. Elon Musk gave an address via videolink calling for the dissolution of parliament, and a group of New Zealanders performed the Haka for Charlie Kirk.

Undermining its use at Notting Hill Carnival last month and a ​‘Stop Starving Gaza’ march held the weekend prior, The Met declined to deploy facial recognition cameras at the rally, where 26 police officers were injured by protestors – four seriously. By contrast, 425 people were arrested at the Gaza demonstration, mostly for holding placards in support of the recently designated ​“terrorist group” Palestinian Action. Keir Starmer’s government has responded to the increasingly volatile division of UK society by proposing mandatory digital ID for all citizens, humiliatingly called a ​“BritCard.” 

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Also, Your Party – a burgeoning left-wing party comprised of Labour-turned-Independent MPs – has fallen apart before even managing to elect a leader, and Tony Blair (who pushed for digital ID during his term as Prime Minister) is back on the world stage doing what he loves most: entering high-level talks with the US administration regarding a war in the Middle East.

Not to peddle doom (although we are entering horror season), but it’s evident that as long as the two-party system holds nothing will ever change. All we’ll get is increasingly inept suits who have appointed themselves project managers of the very chaos they have created. Or fascism, obviously. 

It seems to me that the common thread between all these outbursts of violence and unrest is the fact that everything is utterly undignified. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Utah or Kathmandu or Orpington, or what your main source of stress is, there is simply very little dignity to be found in modern life. You apply for a job, go through a six-stage interview process, and receive an automatically generated rejection letter over email. You require basic healthcare attention and every point of contact redirects you to an app that doesn’t work. Your insurance company abandons you with six figure debt for the crime of getting cancer. You need to access a financial service and are asked for your passport details, bank statements, a biometric scan of your face and a vial of your blood only to be told your existence can’t be verified. Hell, you can’t even pay for parking without giving your birthday to a third party. You need to Google a piece of information, but the first thing you are given is a factually incorrect ​‘Gemini’ summary followed by four pages of SEO-boosted content written by ChatGPT. You vote for someone with generational wealth because they promised to raise your living standards to a basic level of acceptability, and they exploit your trust to usher in a new dawn of surveillance technology bankrolled by some of the most evil men on planet earth, or deport you.

All of this is a massive fucking problem, and unless people start to reclaim some sense of individual agency things will only get worse. Unfortunately the only answers anyone can come up with are either ​‘more AI customer service’ or ​‘how about another form of ID, only this one is riddled with data protection issues and could put you in prison for posting something unflattering about the IDF.’ To quote the immortal words of dril, ​“are you having a crap of me mate?? Are you, having a crap of me mate.”

Emma Garland is a culture writer and editor based in London. Follow her on Instagram.

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