The Ballad Of Alan Bushmill

A 2020s icon, for a week anyway.....

Not for about two weeks anyway….

I know what you’re thinking; why is anyone dredging up this relic of a news story from thirty cycles ago? I waited for six weeks to write about this, though, in social media terms, that is about thirty news cycles. Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation had a shorter news cycle duration than the entrepreneur who imploded in his homemade submarine on a trip down to the wreck of the Titanic, but longer than the average Islamic terror attack. Yet, for those brief few days of social media fame, Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice to signal his opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza lit up the timeline like a meteor across a crisp, clear night sky.

Bushnell’s final address to the camera (of course), his setting himself alight, followed by screams of ‘‘Free Palestine’’ and then the curious way he stood and stamped, was the current thing. The arrival of a new Current Thing means discourse, and discourse means hot-takes, lots of hot-takes. Internet influencers pitched their stalls on the ashen corpse of Aaron Bushnell and began peddling their wares the moment the smoke cleared.

My own take was that it was a stupid act and would be forgotten about within a week. Many people disliked this seemingly nihilistic doom-mongering and told me so. After all, Aaron Bushnell was that rarest of creatures, a white man willing to die for his ideals. If you’re wondering what those ideals were, then Bushnell himself told us:

"I am an anarchist, which means I believe in the abolition of all hierarchical power structures, especially capitalism and the state… I view the work we do as fighting back in the class war which the capitalist class wages on the rest of humanity. This also informs the way in which I want to organize, as I believe that any hierarchical power structure is bound to reproduce class dynamics and oppression. Thus, I want to engage in egalitarian forms of organizing that produce horizontal power structures based on mutual aid and solidarity, which are capable of liberating humans."

As the hot-takes began to roll out, we once more bore witness to massively divergent attitudes and First Principles on the right. Many commentators mocked Bushnell’s death with some rather unpalatable memes. Others lauded Bushnell as a hero and martyr, not because they agreed with his leftism, but because they were in common cause against Zionism.

A long-time follower and supporter appeared in my messages on Xitter railing against me for ‘‘not seeing the big picture’’ or appreciating the heroic symbolism of Bushnell’s sacrifice. Bushnell would be this generation’s Thích Quảng Đức, the monk who self-immolated in Siagon in 1963, creating an iconic image of defiance in the face of injustice. And if that wasn’t enough, it was also a massive embarrassment for the Jews. I repeated my point that none of this particularly mattered, and it only seemed important because it was surfing the algorithm, as I outlined in the article ‘‘The Children of the Attention Economy.’’. Fundamentally, it being ‘‘Bad for the Zionists’’ was the first principle in play, but for whatever reason, this stance had to be post hoc embroidered with flowery ideals and noble sacrifices. Merely writing Bushnell off as a mad leftist dying for foreigners was to miss the symbolism and true meaning of sacrifice; only a soulless bugman would think this way.

Thus, the take industry churned and ground away for a couple of days. The social media node that I inhabit would’ve been rather dormant, whereas other internet influencers and pundits would have been flashing like Vegas’s strip. The individual ranting in disappointment at me in messages had, I concurred, been ‘‘influenced’’ by others with large platforms, larger than mine, in fact. I knew who they were, knew what platforms they used, and was keenly aware of how they would frame Bushnell’s immolation, why, and how it was dressed up as something more than it was to assuage doubts as to Bushnell’s own politics in the minds of those they influenced.

We tend not to think of the social media ecosystem in this way; it whiffs of self-aggrandizement while also questioning the agency that any of us actually have.

Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice would no doubt have made powerful people within the American Government feel a little embarrassed, and that is exactly why he didn’t become a martyr. It would fall to the ‘‘people’’ to keep the flame alight, so to speak, but nobody forgot about Bushnell faster than the people who claimed he was set to become an icon of the 2020s.

Instead, Aaron Bushnell, an anarchist who took inspiration from media-driven imagery of decades ago, died to create a two-day buzz on social media. Bushnell’s intention was clearly to make a lasting impression, but he didn’t because the days when the internet never forgot gave way to social media, in which the internet remembers nothing beyond a two or three-day news arc. Moreover, the baked-in incentives work against remembering, and when a user is confronted with a previously invested-in narrative, a story once hot but now ice cold, they feel the ick and scamper about vainly trying to recollect the details.

In this way, Aaron Bushnell is reborn as Alan Bushmill.

Alan Bushmill is the man we remember, not Aaron Bushnell. Bushnell is the subject hot and within the stream of consciousness of internet validation and the hot take industry. Alan Bushmill is the borderline cringe reminder after we ‘‘moved on’’ like piranhas scenting new blood in the water. Six weeks later, we don’t remember the person we said would be remembered forever, but it’s fine because nobody else remembers either. The influencers grabbed their framing tools and tattered grabbag of ideological priors and jumped off the timeline onto the new thing, and the Alan Bushmill line continued, shedding engagement and interest like ash in the wind.

How many people died because of the vaccine? No idea; the kooks made it cringe, and remembering became low status. Why did Anne Heche burst through that blanket and try to flee after being pronounced dead? Oh, that’s like 180 cycles ago give it up! What was all that about aliens and the Mexican Government again? How is East Palestine doing now after that mushroom cloud blew out from the trainwreck? It’s fine, all is fine; there’s a new line there now, the Bushmill Line.