Last Sunday, in the final hours before the kickoff to one of the most boring Super Bowls ever, a scandal arose: Bad Bunny, the popular Puerto Rican reggaeton star who was slated to perform at half-time, was seen in a scandalous photo that flooded social media. He was wearing a strappy, low-cut dress and burning an American flag! The horror!
I saw it on Facebook and thought, no way in hell this is real. It took me about 30 seconds of googling to determine that the photo was AI-generated and even labeled as such, having originated on a “satire” website. That didn’t stop the usual outrage machine from jumping all over it and reposting the picture. It was on the internet, so it’s got to be real, right? Plus, he’s not even American (yes, he is)! Long live Kid Rock! And so on.
Confirmation bias is a powerful drug. And getting thousands of hits on a social media post is pure dopamine — and often profitable. Which brings me to another social media brouhaha last week, one that provided a lot of much-needed entertainment for Memphis during its recent “sleet-crete” era — and a lot of dopamine to the Memphis Flyer website.
For those of you who didn’t spend any part of the past three weeks in Memphis, let me bring you up to speed: Winter Storm Fern hit the city with a strange combination of sleet, freezing rain, and snow that formed a three- or four-inch layer of slippery, rock-hard white stuff. Snow in these parts usually lasts a couple of days. This impermeable coating lasted almost 10 days. It would not go away, and Memphis, a city with no discernible snow-removal equipment, was brought to its knees (and ass). Driving was terrifying and so was walking. And most places weren’t open, anyway, so people stayed home. And that’s when the real crazy stuff started.
A young woman (who shall remain nameless here) posted a video of herself holding a grill-lighter under a block of the “sleet-crete,” as it not-so-lovingly came to be called. Here’s what her caption said:“Idc idc…. What y’all learned in science class in grade school… That stuff outside still ain’t snow!!!!” In the video, she wondered aloud why the snow wasn’t dripping water and why it was turning black.
To be fair, those are interesting questions. So I googled, “Why doesn’t snow melt when you put a lighter under it?” and immediately got “actually-ed,” as in, “Actually, the snow is melting — it just doesn’t look like it. If you’ve seen those viral videos of ‘fake snow’ turning black and not dripping, here is the real science behind it: Under the high heat of a lighter, some of the snow skips the liquid phase entirely and turns straight into water vapor. This process, called sublimation, makes the snow ‘disappear’ into the air rather than drip.”
A second click took me to a video of scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson doing the same demo as the young woman, and explaining it, step by step. Unsurprisingly, “that stuff outside was snow.”
But the fun was just beginning, as two Memphis City Council members got in on the fun. I will not name them here, but they were mentioned in a story on the Flyer website that went viral, so … you know, google if you want.
One of them posted a slow-motion video of her husband doing the lighter-under-the-snowball thing. “It’s not melting,” she said. “It stinks when you set fire to it! OMG, Jesus Christ, what is happening!!!” As the video rolls, a dramatic slow song plays: “The Tragedy of Ignorance” by Simon Daum. Ouch. The other councilperson simply commented, “Man made.”
But there is a point to all of this, besides getting a chuckle or two: The Bad Bunny AI photo and the “fake snow” videos are both Rorschach tests of a sort. How we respond to things on the internet that seem amazing or impossible or fantastic says a lot about who we are. I’ve been fooled enough times to know the first thing to do when presented with something that seems a little too good to be true is to “research” it with a click or two. It’s a class that needs to be taught in every school in this country: How Not to be a Sucker 101.