Quick note: there are brief descriptions of graphic imagery in this letter.

Hey, quick question, why are you boycotting Starbucks? Are you doing it to show solidarity with the people of Palestine? Do you hate the idea that people are being systemically exploited and murdered, their land stolen, and climate change accelerating? Are you still buying from Shein and Pretty Little Thing? Do you feel like if you do one but not the other then the two cancel each other out? Do you know that the real world doesn’t work like that, and you’re actively trying to ignore the fact that you’re a part of the problem, but the luxury of shitty coffee and/or lead-laden plastic clothes is just too good for you to pass up? Well, I have great news for you, you can stop.

Starbucks is not pro-Isreal and never was. Starbucks doesn’t even have any locations in occupied Palestine. This may be amazing news for some of you who have probably already thrown your phone into the passenger’s seat and are backing out of the driveway to waste half a tank of gas in that long drive-thru queue for a grande pumpkin spice latte.

The truth is that the Starbucks workers union, which has been fighting tooth and nail for a livable wage and reasonable working conditions, put out a statement shortly after October 7^th in solidarity with Palestine. Starbucks the corporation didn’t want Zionists in their stores and on their social media dropping inane “do you support Hamas” comments and Starbucks the corporation is also evil, so they sued the union. That’s it. But there is still a reason to boycott Starbucks: they’re union busters who have been fighting tooth and nail with their pumpkin spice latte profits to shut down union efforts. I’m so sorry if union busting doesn’t get it up for you, but there’s the reality.

The spread of misinformation, including the Starbucks boycott based on false premises, is part of a broader issue of how social media amplifies performative activism in ways that concentrate on spectacle over substance.

There are people who take misinformation at face value and roll with it, spreading it and shaming others for not doing the fake social justice work that they themselves have taken up (imagine a hypothetical tweet that reads: “if you’re still drinking Starbucks, you’re a piece of shit, btw” (I’ve seen tweets and notes like this, I’m not far off)). Instead of taking real action, they are performing activism. The bigger issue is that the internet makes it very difficult to know for certain what’s real and what’s fake—to a certain extent, we are all performing. But when it comes to online activism, that performance becomes a little bit more inherently dubious.

In my own social media bubble, I coexist with the global northern liberal middle class. We all have a certain level of privilege, but also an awareness that things could be better or worse. When an atrocity happens, the bubble ranges from silent to sad to outraged. According to Moa Eriksson, this is the emergency phase. “When coping with an emotional disruption, individuals use social sharing as a way of constructing a collective script of the disaster. The usual social boundaries in society are temporarily suspended in this process.”1

The silent are self-explanatory; many of them are too worried about themselves, justifiably concerned with keeping their middle-class position, because they know things could be worse. They don’t follow this script. The sad are upset, again because they also know things could be worse, and they are witnessing it on the news and on social media. They will make a few posts in solidarity and move on in 2-3 weeks. The outraged are loud and incredulous; how could more people not care about this? There are people who have it worse than us, and sometimes they’re being systemically abused and even murdered by people who have it better than us. It is their tactics that interest me the most, particularly the posting of trauma porn, or the “fascination with the traumatic images of suffering by audiences that is not necessarily genuine. It's not about empathy. It's not about genuine consideration. It's much more fetishistic. It's about voyeurism.”2

People in the west are desensitized to trauma porn, in certain instances we welcome it. True crime is a million-dollar industry. Ryan Murphy has made a killing on exploitative true crime reenactments. Women listen to podcasts of other women getting murdered in great detail as they wrap up their nighttime routines and tuck themselves into bed. We welcome it because we were steeped in it. Those of us who grew up glued to the television remember the ad breaks between cartoons of all of the starving children in Africa, flies hovering over their distended bellies, their rib cages protruding over stretched, dull skin. In America specifically we remember Sarah McLachlan’s haunting rendition of Angel playing over a montage of battered animals looking longingly up from their cages as if they were begging to be loved by you specifically.

There seems to be this idea that if someone is shown the most extreme, graphic depictions of suffering, that it will invoke an urgent sense of humanity, that they will be called to do the right thing, to help someone in need and end the suffering. This was described in part by Piers Robinson as The CNN Effect. Television news outlets would show graphic depictions of war and humanitarian atrocities and based on that coverage, the exposure would cause governmental organizations to act.3

Now that so many people get their news elsewhere, namely social media, users have taken up the role of media outlets. This makes for a more jarring experience. The spread of misinformation not only misguides activism but also contributes to the normalization and dehumanization of suffering through trauma porn, reducing complex issues to shock value. Pictures of mutilated bodies are sandwiched between influencer hauls, memes, and ads for a new Marvel movie. But even Robinson has admitted through extensive research and reflection that the CNN effect is a delicate theory. Media influence is only effective in certain instances and weakens when it operates in opposition to elite power structures. And again, the news or even Instagram stories rarely capture the full picture. All media operates in the attention economy, and the best way to keep someone’s attention is to tell a story that keeps people interested, even if that means flattening the reasons why these atrocities are happening.

As Eriksson explains, “the focus in the mass media tends to be on mystifying these events rather than trying to explain the rationale behind them, thereby contributing to uniting the public in their fear of the unknown and inexplicable.” It’s easy to sensationalize traumatic incidents instead of facing the systemic issues that lead to them. In a capitalist society where time, energy, and attention are precious commodities, we need quick, simple narratives – the bottom line is there is something sad that happened or is happening to a person that is not you, and you may or may not be able to do something about it. Whether you ever want to is an entirely different story. The more they played out, the easier they became not only to manufacture, but to consume. It is so easy to forget that these stories are about sentient beings. Their lives go on after the cameras drop.

Anita Bressi says that pain “is essentially a private matter” that “’unmakes’ the subject, reducing and objectifying him/her in the eyes of others; only the successful expression of pain can help span this divide.”4 But that successful expression comes at a huge cost. As Luma Makari writes for The New Humanitarian:

But the first time it became real to me was a year after the August 2020 Beirut blast, a shocking event that destroyed a large part of the city, coming about a year into an already devastating economic collapse. During that time of remembrance, I felt there was no term other than trauma porn that described the incessant sharing and re-sharing of bloody war-like scenes of the explosion’s aftermath on social media and in the media, in a country that is only 30 years removed from its own civil war.

By then, I had taken a year to process the explosion, and how it was impacting my close friends and community. I also witnessed some collective healing. That’s why I was so disappointed to see that both individuals and the media seemed to have no problem with spreading visuals of the blast victims who had not given their consent. Videos of people desperately trying to find their way home through the rubble of Beirut were continuously broadcast on local and international media.

Trauma porn reduces human suffering to voyeuristic consumption. Viewers feel a fleeting sympathy rather than a call to meaningful action. It’s a cycle that dehumanizes victims and distracts from systemic solutions. People don’t see the images and wonder how they can change that situation, instead many are thinking “wow, this is so bad, there is absolutely nothing I can do about this. I can only be grateful it isn’t happening to me.” This reliance on graphic imagery also reflects a deeper issue: the hyper-individualistic approach to activism, where the emphasis is on personal outrage rather than collective solutions.

I also find the activism (slacktivism) of sharing trauma porn to be a way not only for the outraged to show you just how outraged they are, but also to balance out all of the activism they aren’t doing. Sure, they’re doing hauls from fast fashion companies, who produce their clothes in the global south, where women are paid poverty wages and work in dangerous conditions, often risking their bodily and mental health so someone in the global north can wear a top twice before it starts to disintegrate and is donated to charity and somehow ends up polluting the ocean off the coast of Kenya. Sure, they’re always in line for the newest Apple product, which is only made possible by the African child slave laborers who mine for cobalt. Sure, they’re getting their 15^th package from Amazon Prime this week. But best believe you me they’re going to post a picture of a man burning alive, tied to his hospital bed or a dead toddler whose head has been decapitated from their body, or pictures of mass graves or blood and guts and gore.

It’s like posting the most extreme thing signifies the most important and effective activism— they are the most good, doing the most good because they are looking at and showing others the most bad. But this isn’t true in reality. When those depressing commercials would come on television, I changed the channel and counted to 30. At the start of the pandemic, I started listening to true crime podcasts, but the detail would be too much to stomach, and that coupled with the traumatic images that came out of 2020, I really couldn’t handle it. In the same way, if someone is posting 10 consecutive Instagram stories of bombing victims, I’m probably going to mute them.

Maybe this is where I should stop and talk briefly about why I’m writing this. I am writing this piece because I do not like logging onto Instagram (I could just end the sentence there lol) and looking at dead bodies. It’s that simple. It used to be normal to open any given app and not see a dead body. When did that change? Why have we normalized casually traumatizing and re-traumatizing users?

Posting mutilated and dead bodies in an attempt to force others to care about something is a fruitless endeavor. 2020 happened and four years after a mishandled pandemic and a race war, the central figure at the heart of all of that chaos, the mascot for incompetence and white supremacist patriarchy was elected not only by an archaic electorate process, but also by popularity. Was posting the barrage of dead black bodies worth it? Was bypassing their consent and dignity worth it? Was traumatizing and retraumatizing their loved ones and people in their communities worth it? Was turning them into memes worth it? The answer is a resounding no.

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A post shared by @turnupactivism

There’s a disconnect between intention and impact. It is popular to look like you care instead of listening to activists and grassroots organizers. It is easier to be in a movement of one than talk to others who are trying to make real change happen. Its simpler to become addicted to and contribute to doomscrolling than it is to figure out an effective way to reach those who are silent out of apathy. But, based on my own personal experience, I know that there are things we can do to change that.

Misinformation, trauma porn, and hyper-individualism have turned activism into a convenient aesthetic we curate rather than commit to. Posting the goriest images you can find on the internet isn’t activism, and neither is latching onto the latest viral boycott without bothering to figure out if it’s even real. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up. Change work isn’t always convenient, and it’s not about proving that you are the best, most special social justice warrior. If we actually want things to change, we have to take the time to educate ourselves, listen to people who are already doing the work, and find ways to support them. Most of that happens off screen.

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