Youtube

Ten years ago today, Adam Lanza murdered twenty-seven people in Sandy Hook, Connecticut: his mother, six educators, twenty first-graders. Then he shot himself. Speculating about what might have motivated Lanza to commit an atrocity of this scale was difficult in 2012. What information was available about Lanza was sparse; what we did have was difficult to make sense of. A bug-eyed photo of him. A single mother who loved guns. A crazy, isolated kid — maybe it was the medication? There was very little to weave a story out of. It was haunting; it was horrifying; but it made no sense. There was no ready-made narrative for a twenty-year-old who could step into a first-grade classroom and open fire. There was nothing we could compare it to. Mental health, probably. Guns, probably.

Summarizing the tale of Christian Weston Chandler in a paragraph is like trying to squeeze an octopus into a bottle. You can’t. Chris is known for being the ‘most documented person on the internet’. A biographical documentary on YouTube has 59 episodes, all 40 minutes long, which add up to over 40 hours footage. Imagine that there was a remake of The Truman Show, except that instead of being a fairly functional married insurance broker, Truman Burbank was a mentally ill aspiring cartoonist who lived with his aged mom. Do you get the picture? Well, not any more. Chandler, who claims to be transgender and now goes by Christine, has been arrested after appearing to admit in online conversations to raping said aged mom, and faces up to 10 years in prison.

(If this were a documentary, I would open with the track ‘Turning Japanese’ by The Vapors which, yes, I know that’s the wrong ones, but I still think it would work so please have that song in mind as you read the opening paragraph.) Today something beautiful happened. A tortured soul was finally able to present themselves to the world as their authentic self. YouTube star, songstress and social media guru Oli London came out as Korean. Oh, and also nonbinary too, but to be honest all that gender stuff is getting a little old these days. When almost every social media influencer is either nonbinary or genderqueer, the market becomes somewhat oversaturated. Like what happened with Beyblades.

A New Hampshire man has turned himself into the police after setting off 80 pounds of explosives as part of a 'gender reveal' party. NBC reports that the explosion, which was apparently caused by a legal explosive called Tannerite, led to fears of an earthquake and cracked the foundations of nearby homes. 'Are you kidding me?' said one local, 'I’m all up for silliness and what not, but that was extreme.' Extreme? Yes. Unique? No. 'Gender reveal' parties, for those who are unfamiliar, involve the announcement of whether a couple’s new child is a boy or a girl through the release of blue or pink smoke or other substances. Sounds innocent? Sure. But the elaborate risk-taking that goes into these events has escalated to frightening, fascinating levels.

It’s easy to hate Jake Paul. No, really, it is easy. It is easier than fixing a bowl of instant soup or making your way home from your next door neighbor’s house. It is easier than beating a three-year-old at golf or the US triumphing in a war with Liechtenstein.The well-known YouTuber is immensely unlikable. His face conveys gormlessness and smugness simultaneously. His voice is off-puttingly nasal yet serenely self-assured. He is so insanely, shamelessly money-hungry that he put out a Christmas song with the refrain ‘buy that merch’.  His videos appeal to an audience largely consisting of young teenagers with thumbnails of women’s backsides and titles like ‘SURPRISING Best Friend with EMILY WILLIS STRIPTEASE.