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The internet thinks Brian Szasz is a “piece of shit.” Even Cardi B has weighed in on the stepson of Hamish Harding, one of the billionaires currently on the missing OceanGate submarine that was headed to the site of the Titanic wreckage. Cardi “clapped back” at a Facebook post where Szasz explained his decision to attend a Blink-182 concert in the wake of his stepfather’s disappearance (in case you’re curious, the reason he gave was that seeing his favorite band helps him cope).
It wasn’t just the thirty-seven-year-old’s — yes, you read that correctly, thirty-seven — idiosyncratic defense of his concert-going that set the mob off, though. Szasz is a strange person — to put it lightly. His online behavior is cringe-inducing at best, potentially dangerous at worst: last year, he was detained on cyberstalking and harassment charges. Allegedly he threatened to “shoot up” an EDM festival, claims that a number of Indian websites have deigned to write up.
Szasz also has high-functioning autism; something that in our age of “awareness” and “sensitivity,” (or even just obsessive information gathering) has mysteriously been lost in the wash. He’s somebody who’s been — and reasonably so — called out within his own community for being a threat, or at the very least a nuisance. Yet now he’s receiving a torrent of attention, and abuse, from countless strangers.
It’s hard to feel sorry for the guy, especially if you don’t know the finer details of his life situation. It’s hard to feel sorry for him if you do know the finer details of his life situation, but forget that he’s a real person, not just a character in the exciting news story of the day.
Here’s what most people know: he’s rich; he’s ostensibly insensitive; he’s an awkward alleged “sex pest.” Without knowing exactly how old he is, which most people probably don’t, he looks too old to be behaving this way. New tidbits keep trickling out, too, reinforcing the idea that he’s an entitled prick.
His unlikability aside, there’s an unethical whiff to the whole Szasz situation. No one outside of his immediate environment would have cared about him if his stepdad wasn’t the subject of a major news story. Brian Szasz is a casualty of our collective hunger to learn everything we can about these periodic international tragedies.
Every now and then, something happens that makes it feel like we’re in a global movie theater, watching a film unfold. We offer our commentary from one scene to the next; we heckle bad writing or our least favorite characters; we choose our alliances, readying ourselves to pick a side. Some people have described this as a sort of gamification of reality, but it’s participatory media of another stripe. We aren’t players, engrossed in some kind of global video game: we’re fans, sitting in the audience, bullying the writers’ room to listen to our demands. And we’re rabid fans, at that. We have to know everything about the movie’s lore. We send out mercenaries to stake out clues and come back to us with information. We write fan fiction; we propose our own theories.
These events — West Elm Caleb being one of the last major ones — in some sense, are among the only unifying cultural activities we have. What so often is lost, however, is that it isn’t a film — it’s real. When we reach out to the “cast of characters,” we’re talking to flesh-and-blood people.
There’s more to it than just the harassment and scrutiny Szasz is facing, though. These fifteen-minute antiheroes get their lives carpet-bombed and are then immediately discarded, but the scars remain. There are no resources for how to pick up the pieces. You can’t lean into the attention and try to leverage it into something positive — certainly not anymore, in a climate where people are simultaneously maxed out on cancellation stories and still interested in the pile-on. But the damage these events do to your reputation remains — Google Szasz’s name, and you’re greeted with a smorgasbord of content, including from major celebrities, scrutinizing everything about him.
So what’s the solution? There’s no policing who gets attention and why. It’s in news outlets’ best financial interest to stoke the flames so long as they’re driving engagement.
On a more human level, these stories unite us in a world that’s increasingly fragmented — there are so few things you can count on everyone knowing about. But the people who end up at the center of these controversies now, more than ever, are left with nothing. Not even the promise of leveraging the attention into something bigger and better. All they get is scorched earth.
