#45: the babel and bedlam of a morally corrupt culture.

surprise, surprise: the internet is not handling liam payne’s death well.

       The first tweet I saw about Liam’s passing did not  mention his name. I cannot  find the tweet for the life of me. It immediately refreshed (as many tweets on that aggravating app are wont to do), but I remember my eyes scanning quickly through the words and registering “ As if TMZ couldn’t go any lower. They published his dead body!” I remember wondering wildly whose dead body it was. A few scrolls up, and I found out that Liam Payne was dead. Like the rest of us, I had at first thought it was a prank.  Liam had been the subject of Twitter and TikTok discourse for the past few days and so I figured this must have been an off-colour joke started by some rando. Then I started to see  posts from news organisations. “Former One Direction star Liam Payne dead at 31.” You know it’s real when the BBC posts it. With sinking despair, I realised Liam was gone. He was here one minute, and the next he wasn’t.

Death is very sobering. It is so final. I think death never fails to knock us off our feet because apart from dealing with the shock that a life existed and is now snuffed out, we are reminded of our mortality; that realisation that we are one accident, one attack, one slip away from being washed off the earth like beach sand when the waves come crashing. I’ll admit, I cried. I found out at around eight p.m. My night was ruined. I couldn’t focus on whatever I was doing anymore. Shivers kept going down my spine. Liam Payne is dead. I kept thinking.  I was glued to my phone, alternating between Twitter and TikTok, seeking community in the baffled grief of faceless strangers on the internet. Before I  went to bed that night, I sent up a prayer for his soul. 

It’s so weird, grieving  someone you never knew or met. It’s even weirder, grieving someone like Liam, who in the past few years has not been the best of people.  But Liam was a part of a band that meant a lot to me as a child. He, along with the other members of 1D, infused a certain magic into my childhood. I remember my childhood best friend and I watching old One Direction concert videos on YouTube, laughing hysterically at the Best Song Ever music video, and singing  Steal My Girl at the top of our tween lungs. I graduated high school to the soundtrack of Night Changes and History.  We thought we knew them.  And at surface level , we did. It is no wonder we are grieving in our pocket-sized way. I think that’s okay. The One Direction fan base has come together and it is beautiful to see. Twitter is alight with memories of Liam and the 1D era. We reminisce about the good times and we are digesting the bad ones.  

Why can it not remain that way?

           The internet is a truly fascinating place in that a significant number of its active users seem to have lost an essential aspect of their humanity and that is their ability to empathise. Watching the tragic news of Liam Payne’s death unfold in real time has been horrifying. Seeing TMZ break the news of Liam’s death less than an hour after he died, with pictures of his dead body included when it was very likely that even his family did not know he was dead, was one the most morally corrupt things I have witnessed in a long time. How blood-chillingly  cruel and inhumane is that? How dystopian? That a human being,  someone’s  son,  brother,  father, someone’s loved one is treated with such indignity in death just because he happens to be a celebrity? People on the internet keep theorising  about his death, circulating pictures and videos of his supposed hotel room and picking apart the moments before and after his death as though this is some kind of entertaining puzzle, as though it isn’t a real human being we’re dealing with, a person who meant so much to the people in his life. 

And then there are the special twats on that aggravating app called Twitter blaming everything and everyone for his death. I’ve seen people blame Maya Henry, his ex-fiancée for causing him to spiral. I’ve seen people blame his girlfriend for leaving him in Argentina. Hell, I’ve seen people blame Niall Horan!!!! Only God knows what for. I’ve seen people over-analyse the tributes his former bandmates paid him, with some saying Niall and Harry used Chat-GPT to write their tribute. (What?!) 

What is the point of all this really, except that we are not minding our business and are deriving strange entertainment from real people’s pain? 

Megan Garber writes in her brilliant essay, We’re Already Living in the Metaverse, that a surefire sign of a dystopia is amusement. Our constant need to be entertained has blurred the line between fiction and reality.  It manifests in our actions on social media and even in our everyday lives.  She writes “ In the future, the writers [of dystopian novels]  warned, we will surrender ourselves to entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The results will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathise with each other, even how to govern and be governed. That future has already arrived.”

This can be said of the Directioners. A significant chunk of the fanbase treat the members of the band as characters in fanfiction, a phenomenon called RPF (Real Person Fiction) . They have created illusions and constructed characterisation about every member of the band, as though they are the authors of their lives. And I mean this in the most literal sense.  Everyone who was on Wattpad during  its heyday knew of and probably read One Direction fanfiction. Because they construct such a sophisticated fictional-world, one they are convinced is real, they react badly when the men dislodge their “reality” by acting as the autonomous beings that they are. For years they’ve constructed “theories” (e.g Larry Stylinson)  taking this fictional ship to sophisticated conspiracy theory levels despite the men in question begging them to stop.  They also infantilize their idols. A good example is referring to them as “the boys.” These are grown men in their 30s! It’s why they bully and harass almost every  person linked to these men. The Directioners are wildly misogynistic ( a real shame as a majority of them are women) 

          Liam Payne’s tragic death has revived all things 1D. It has signalled to a lot of us the beginning of the end of our childhood. It has also made us relive great moments and  appreciate the wonderful  community the fanbase has created. We are older now. I  think it’s high time we acted our age. The bullying, the harassment, the schadenfreude of it all should be echoes of a time gone by. Even as teenagers it was inexcusable but as adults?! It is disgusting.