Arguing over ashes

The hellish online discourse around the Los Angeles wildfires reveals a city scarred by more than just flame

In college my friends and I frequented a place we came to call El Medio. Drive west on Sunset Boulevard, take a left on El Medio Avenue, follow it all the way to the end to find a neverending view of the coastline and some benches.

We went there to impress dates, smoke, drink and do all the dumb things college students do. I remember parking behind these tall hedges and feeling jealous of everybody who got to enjoy that view all the time. Part of me wondered if I would ever have a chance at owning a home like that. Maybe that’s why we took some pleasure in calling it our spot, despite having no real claim to it. We went there day and night for the exhilarating view and invigorating coastal breeze. It wasn’t ours, nor would it ever be, but still, we made El Medio a permanent part of our 20’s. As I moved across the city, I discovered and frequented countless places like El Medio, my way of trying to make this city feel mine.

El Medio is gone now, burned up with the rest of the Palisades, Altadena, Malibu and parts of Pasadena. And since the fire broke out, I’ve seen a stark divide form between the people who can feel the pain of what’s been lost, and those who can’t, or don’t. There’s an ongoing attempt to categorize these tragedies as “ours” or “theirs.”

News of the fire broke as I was packing for a cross county move and a two-week trip to Japan. I streamed David Ono on ABC on an iPad as I dismantled my Ikea bed, until the updates got so bad I abandoned both boxes and suitcase and began to prepare a go bag.

I kept toggling between Watch Duty’s fire map and Google Maps, trying to see which of my friends had lost their homes. It was hard to comprehend how much of the city had been erased, and how suddenly. It was even harder to watch people online immediately celebrate and politicize what may turn out to be the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history.

Variations on the above perspective proliferated on social networks almost immediately after the news of the fire broke, even at times drowning out essential information about the fire. The mercantilistic algorithms of indifferent billionaires did what they always do, which is magnify controversial content. Equally mercantilistic and indifferent content creators fed that algorithm, and for a few hours, the internet became this dystopian spectacle where every kernel of tragedy that broke through the noise was instantly farmed for content.

I have no way of knowing, but I like to think Mike Davis would have been pissed at the way his essay about letting Malibu burn was used to prop up so many clumsy critiques about how a wildfire that killed 11 people and destroyed more than 5 thousand homes is good, because of capitalism, or something.

The ghoulish timing of it all made a few things clear. First the internet looks way different when, according to a LinkedIn survey, some 12 million Americans work full time as social media influencers, about 7 percent of the work force. The posts were bad because people suck. But perhaps the posts were also bad because people with nothing to say had bills to pay.

When I scroll my feeds, I try to remind myself that roughly one out of every 12 posts is written by someone whose business is posting. Our job is to analyze not just what people say but also the financial incentives before them. We’ve reached an age of social media disaster capitalism that normalizes paparazzi-like behavior in the pursuit of a following (content creators rushed to fly drones over the wildfire’s destruction, even at one point damaging a firefighting aircraft) As more and more of us are tempted or forced into constructing jobs out of social platforms, we’ll face increasingly thorny moral and ethical quandaries, and the only code that seems to exist on the internet is apologize if people complain enough.

These messy reactions to the fire also made me think about this line I wrote in my first column for the LA Times.

“Everyone is everyone. Everyone is not just the people you agree with or look like, or the people who share your ZIP Code or speak your language. Everyone is everyone.”

Everyone is also the people cheering on the flames (and farming it for content). And at the moment, I’m really struggling to understand what it must be like to live with all that bitterness.

I can imagine it must be suffocating. Maybe that resentment sits so close to your throat that it jumps out as soon as you see that parts of the city are burning. Maybe you’ve seen sympathy and empathy denied to you and yours so many times that you can’t help but see any expression of it as political. Maybe your grandparents were robbed by redlining or incarceration and you grew up watching your parents suffer the traumas of poverty and pass them on to you. Maybe you’ve just got too many problems in your life to worry about anyone else’s.

But everyone is everyone, and there’s no getting around that. The loss of so many lives, homes and neighborhoods touched all of us in some way. How does someone conclude that not a single family in Malibu is deserving of their sympathy? Do we only feel for those who lost homes in Altadena because we’ve judged them all deserving? What’s the highest salary a wildfire victim can earn to be deserving of our sympathy?

Los Angeles is scarred not just by fire, but also the violence of a prolonged, one-sided battle over who gets to own property and live here. Who got a home loan before the 1960’s, and who didn’t? Whose home was destroyed to make way for a freeway? Whose home was seized during World War II? Who gets to stay, and who has to leave for cheaper rent in the Inland Empire, Antelope Valley, Arizona, Las Vegas, or Texas?

Those questions still haunt many of our current civic debates. And the pain of these injustices never leaves us, even after everything is ashes.

The only thing left to do now is to give that pain some purpose.