A precious Tyson Glitch appears. Decades ago, when asked for comment on an opponent’s strategy, Mike Tyson famously said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” There’s the man you think you are, and the beliefs you think you hold, and then there’s the man left standing when our messy, chaotic world shocks you from your bullshit with a bolt of reality. Tyson’s off-the-cuff remark resonates to this day, with meaning that extends well beyond what one becomes in the boxing ring, up to and including, I guess, what one becomes while simply watching someone get hit in the face. Sunday night, Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Then Will Smith, Jada’s husband, got up from his seat, slapped Rock in the face, and sat back down. America watched in confused horror (and delight?) as Rock recovered with a dazed joke, and Smith shouted back. Finally, Rock weakly offered a few more comments, and the show carried on as if nothing had happened. All of it — every second of the conflict, up to and including the breezy skip past its conclusion — was bizarre. It was so bizarre, in fact, I’m still not convinced it wasn’t a hoax. But you can’t hoax a public reaction, and the public’s immediate reaction was also bizarre. Commenters rushed to the internet to share their opinion. But with no clear culture war angle guiding tribes to socially-acceptable positions, the result was an incoherent mix of awkward comparisons and rare, cross-tribal honesty. It was a kind of brief narrative crash, and for a minute everyone was naked. This was very weird, and very funny. It was also very telling.

Two days later, our relentlessly polarizing culture war has firmed up Official Positions, with early pitches for “assault is sometimes good” on the increasingly-tedious based right, and “this is really all Clint Eastwood’s fault” on the reliably-insane woke left. From the establishment, preachy, anodyne pieces on violence and therapy and Will Smith’s psychology are all now forthcoming. By the end of the week, even the memory of our brief, tribal liberation will mostly be lost. But in those early moments? Jokes and recaps. A colorful explosion of lunatic takes. A rare and precious little bit of truth.

Setting aside the most ridiculous positions and comparisons — clunky racial reaches from every direction, “Will Smith’s son wears dresses, by the way,” and what does Ja Rule think? — there was notable, seismic political division on the slap, and not only between expected extremes. On the internet right, young men could not decide if comedians were sacred, with arguments reminiscent of the glorious World War Chappelle, or if squeamish “violence is bad” takes were effeminate fear reactions to “honor culture,” an intolerable position to internet “chads” who’ve never thrown a punch. But even the niche, “trad” right was divided. Was Will Smith a good man for defending his wife’s name, or was Rock the victim of an emotional cuck who chose to hit a much smaller nerd in a performative act of violence rather than the man who slept with his wife, which Smith allowed? On the woke left, the New York Times’ Nikole Hanna-Jones of all people indicated mean words were not grounds to hit a person, torching years of leftist orthodoxy on the issue, then found herself besieged by angry fans who argued making fun of black women with alopecia was equivalent to real violence — obviously — and hitting Rock was therefore justified, as Smith was merely defending his wife’s life. Roman Polanski was invoked. The Bush-era invasion of Iraq was invoked. Judd Apatow thoughtfully suggested the slap could actually have killed Rock, which is less an interesting political point, I guess, than something I personally find incredibly funny.

To be clear, I understand all of this is stupid. Celebrities are stupid. Award shows are stupid. Turning actors into celebrities specifically, and celebrating them more than any other group of people in our country — these are ludicrous, surreal levels of stupid. But the enormous volume of reaction to the slap, and that brief, kaleidoscopic hurricane of color? It’s meaningful because of what it implies, in contrast, about our day-to-day reality. That there are so few news items that don’t immediately track to conventional woke or anti-woke narratives implies either “new” things almost never happen, or we are for the most part deeply blinded by identity. New things are, of course, happening, which leaves us with just the one answer.

Twenty years in, our social internet is a medium of communication that appears to tend naturally toward ephemerality, chaos, and mistrust, which in turn engenders a sense of insecurity among most people. This insecurity is addressed often, if in different languages depending on the tribes involved, from “cancel culture,” with implications that the internet would be safer were it not for the bluecheck hall monitors deputized by social media companies, to “targeted harassment campaigns,” with implications that the internet would be safer were no one allowed to disagree with the bluecheck hall monitors deputized by social media companies. As the human impulse under threat is to seek out strength in numbers, our instinct toward pack mentality was probably unavoidable in an environment so rife with the language of danger. And here we are.

For people more at home among establishment opinion, the natural enemies are anti-authoritarian dissent, as well as everything subversive, generally including anything new (technology, culture, politics). For people who find themselves on the outside of establishment opinion, dissent as a matter of style rather than substance has come into fashion. CNN is constantly wrong, but disagreeing with CNN is also a style. There are the sheep, and there are the “don’t be a sheep” sheep, which brings us, inevitably, to The Question:

Do you support the current thing?

Earlier this month, in reaction to widespread enthusiasm for the Ukrainian cause, a meme began to circulate.

What was clearly a joke about Americans moved by the actions of Ukraine was, when challenged, defended as mere encouragement to think for oneself, and commentary on the dangers of blindly following popular sentiment (an incredibly popular sentiment in my corners of the internet, for what it’s worth). And sure, blind adherence to dogma is dangerous. I’ve written as much myself, for years. But association of groupthink with the plight of Ukraine, and in lieu of actual, robust critique of the Ukrainian cause, teeters uncomfortably close to “caring is stupid, no matter the cause.” Are the cool kids simply skeptical of what the New York Times wants us to care about, or are they skeptical of caring as a concept? Is the encouragement here to slow belief, or to belief in nothing? And how exactly will people who believe in nothing accomplish anything?

Still, caution against some knee-jerk distrust of everything aside, it’s true we can’t delude ourselves. Endemic distrust of “the current thing” didn’t mushroom bloom from nothing. It’s been pouring out here for years.

“Trust and safety” ;). A couple weeks back the New York Times reported on emails obtained from a laptop abandoned in a Delaware repair shop that once belonged to Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. The meat of the piece built on an ongoing “did he or didn’t he” corruption story concerning Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine. But, once again, when the news exploded across the internet it wasn’t actually because of the emails. The real tea is the New York Post already broke the news seventeen months ago, and was censored across the internet for doing so. Boiled down to its most essential components, the story is now this: our country’s largest social media companies, with assistance from our most respected media outlets, suppressed true information to protect a candidate these companies, by the numbers, overwhelmingly favored weeks before a major national election. The parties responsible for this decision? Professional “trust and safety” experts. There have been no apologies, and to the best of my knowledge no firings. For cynics who believe nothing, it was another huge victory.

The question, however, is not whether we can blindly trust social media executives, or journalists, or the government on such important topics as corruption, or Ukraine, or — another banger — public health. We know we can’t. But in order to progress in any meaningful way, we do have to learn about the world, and how do we that with so little trust?

Something I’ve been turning over, a sort of middle ground between believing every establishment narrative and believing nothing, is believing literally everything. Or, at least a little bit. Lately, I’ve been game for whatever: conspiracy theories, UFOs, ghosts, ESP, Biden won the election — calm down I’m kidding (about one of these things). Where the natural impulse in this cacophony of chaos is clearly retreat, I’ve found aggressive openness to be a natural kind of medicine for weak ideas and stories.

When some wild news breaks, or some wild news is censored, I wonder what the sleuths and madmen on Reddit have to say about it. What are the craziest possible versions of this story? What is the evidence for every take? Are there polls? Who is on the ground reporting? And what are the hall monitors actually saying? As with the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story, the conclusion of official fact checks are never useful. But in the body, there’s more often something to glean. Snopes is famously willing to self-own, and last year, when I dipped into the Washington Post’s fact check on the Hunter Biden fiasco, the Washington Post’s editors were honest. They stated plainly that they found the New York Post’s conclusions about the Hunter Biden emails suspicious, but said nothing substantial about the reality of the emails themselves. In other words, at the very top of this censorship drama the reporting that was censored was never technically called into question. So why was it banned? From here, many obvious questions follow, and I encourage everyone to follow their curiosity.

In a moment of uniquely ferocious loyalty to style and identity, disregard both. Consider every new piece of information. Take the new stuff with a grain of salt, and pay a little more attention to everything persistent. Our oldest truths have persisted the longest, and therefore require greatest evidence to the contrary, while our newest truths have endured the least amount of scrutiny, and therefore require considerably more skepticism. Simplest explanations should be favored always, and you will probably be wrong. A lot. Everyone is wrong. Never trust anyone who’s never been wrong, and never, under any circumstance, trust anyone who isn’t funny. Humor is the gateway. The internet is an insane clown world. If you aren’t laughing, you’re probably nowhere close to the truth.

It’s hard. From a place of belief, you have to look at everything, analyze everything, and even then there are very few definite answers. But when lightning strikes, and a Tyson Glitch appears, seize the opportunity. When everyone is laughing, and nothing makes sense? That’s a wormhole through the chaos, congruent with the cartoon physics of the internet, and there’s always plenty there to learn. This week, I learned a lot. Many of the greatest heroes on the woke left, for example, don’t really believe the crazy things they publicly profess — they have however convinced their followers. And the based right? Other than a hatred of the woke left, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t yet believe in anything.

So it goes.

-SOLANA