I’m here to say I’m officially un-Jokerfied. And so are you. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules, but you are no longer allowed to become the Joker. If you are currently Jokerfied, guess what? We love and care about you and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Welcome to being un-Jokerfied.
“Jokerfied” is essentially the leftist version of the blackpill; a dark ironic distance built from pain and disappointment that lends itself to self-indulgent inaction and mockery without any sort of constructive input. It’s really not helpful and I’m glad to say that we’re at the point we’re not allowed to cosplay anymore.
Depression and anxiety are quite the dynamic duo when you’re isolated and a crisis appears with no end in sight. There’s only so much darkness our brains are capable of absorbing before we all just break down. I sympathize with the desire to simply laugh into the dark and rewatch all the MCU movies when you feel like you’re careening off a cliff. I have to ask myself, what can I do to stop what’s happening? I’m not a healthcare professional, logistical or essential retail worker, I don’t even have a job right now. Like 3.2 million other people, I’m currently unemployed as I got laid off last week. I have every right to feel desperate and defeated, but I simply don’t. I can’t. I refuse to just lie down and rot because of what I see happening everyday that fills me with a sincere hope that makes despair impossible.
I want to be clear that if you have depression, anxiety, OCD, or executive function disorders, this moment must seem insurmountable. Shutting down against such an onslaught must seem like a victory over your own demons. “At least they can’t hurt me anymore.” I am not here to tell you to “stop being sad” or to try yoga. I am also not here to evangelize the Rise and Grind Instagram lifestyle. You’re allowed to have your feelings and you don’t need my permission. I am here to say there is an enormous community out here reaching out its hand and all you need to do is take it. Please reach out to someone you know you can trust. It’s scary, but getting help takes courage, which I know you have because you’ve made it this far. This article is more aimed at the folks who are looking at this crisis from a place of comfort, not vulnerability.
Jokerification starts with ironic distance, not having anything to lose, and seeing the political situation as an aesthetic brand building exercise. It’s a type of faulty defense mechanism. I have been extremely guilty of this in recent months, and I can tell you it didn’t bring me a second of happiness or contentment. It didn’t make me feel more empowered, actually just the opposite. I just felt drained and just continually refreshing my timeline, making ad revenue for Twitter and little else.
There’s a freedom to simply saying “LOL everything is fucked, let’s get lit”. We’re in the middle of what I would consider to be the most immediate and extreme crisis of my lifetime, and those in charge are either thieves or incompetent media clowns. We couldn’t be further from power and the so-called opposition party is hardly that. Very few people in office genuinely seem to understand the severity of what’s happening. Real fun shit!
Step 1: Log Off
Our social media doesn’t really help. It simultaneously provides us with more information that we can possibly process and also the powerlessness to do anything about it. I’m not dismissing social media as some old man yelling at a cloud. Truthfully, social media is what’s allowed these mutual aid networks to flourish in the first place. There is a danger however to seeing a nonstop stream of content that has no real filter, and smashes the inconsequential up against the dire. Animal Crossing screencaps against COVID-19 death tolls. Trump yakking about his ratings against nurses working 13 hour shifts. Silly cat Tik Toks next to New York Op-Eds about people dying in coronavirus isolation.
This schizophrenic mashing of content without end is driving us fucking crazy. That’s what’s Jokerfying you, not just the situation, but your scrambled brain trying to make sense of all this information. It’s a false psychological release, and since you’re being bombarded with content that screams for immediate action, that catharsis must be a gift in its own way. The fact that we’re all isolated in our homes and these awful garbage platforms are the only thing keeping our threadbare social bonds together is some sort of cosmic joke.
The nature of social media favors engagement, not quality or your sense of well-being, in an amoral algorithmic way that pushes only what gets traction. Misery loves company and gets crazy numbers because this content allows you an out from actually doing anything. A wakeup call for me was I posted a casual “holy shit” tweet about potential coronavirus death counts and then woke up to crazy numbers on it. I checked the replies and I had not one, but several, health experts chiding me for spreading doubtful info from a secondhand source. I deleted the tweet and started thinking more carefully about what I was contributing to.
Step 2: Look Around
The reason I can’t and won’t despair is the simple sight of seeing my community band together in ways I’ve never seen before. This is an extraordinary time, and the response from ordinary people has been just as extraordinary. That radical, earth-shaking ideas are now so painfully obvious, it’s comical how arbitrary the refusal to enact them before has been.
We are witnessing a resurrection of solidarity. This word is often bandied about in ways it doesn’t deserve from people who just learned it 5 minutes ago. This is not solidarity, this is cynical marketing during a crisis:
One of our clearest moral voices had the appropriate response:
Some of the most beaten-down, defeated, and overstretched generations in American history are realizing their real power: their ability to simply say “no” to the worst aspects of our capitalist present. No to austerity, no to being put in harm’s way, no to getting fucked more than they already have been. For all their money and supposed power, the wealthy in this country are either realizing their zombie economy is just that, and the parts we do need are powered by actual living people, not their ineffable managerialism.
Even the most precarious Uberconomy workers at Instacart are realizing the sheer power of a general strike. Pittsburgh sanitation workers are holding a wildcat strike to demand better safety gear when hauling out, you know, filthy garbage. Perdue poultry workers walked off the production line. Amazon workers at Staten Island, real Trump Country, plan to strike over lack of protections. Rent strikes are happening everywhere, from Chicago to St Louis to the Bay Area. Independent field hospitals are being built in the wealthy’s backyards. Regular construction guys, like the ones they put in election ads, are standing up in front of their coworkers and saying “Nobody owns us” in the one of the clearest announcements of class solidarity I’ve seen recently. This guy gets it:
We don’t have true class solidarity yet in America. Yet. This general strike is not of our own making, but it could be. The coronavirus outbreak that crosses ideology, geography, age, race, religion is coalescing people into the main line that divides care versus callousness: wealth. We thought it would take decades, but all it’s done is taken a month to push everyone together, so to speak, and align them against an indifferent machine that would sacrifice us all to keep the stock line up. Imagine the results of a general strike if there wasn’t a pandemic and everyone just walked out until we got universal healthcare, for example.
Imagine the future we could have. This crisis won’t last forever, and I seriously doubt people will forget the knowledge and power they’re gathering now. A one-time $1200 check is not enough to buy us off when an incompetent federal government just pulled a national Katrina and ignored the problem for months, leading us to this avoidable crisis of both capitalism and nature.
Step 3: Help Out
In my own city, Cleveland, there are not one but two mutual aid networks that sprung up organically, with no central leadership or guidance and definitely no institutional support. These groups are called Mutual Aid North East Ohio (a public group) and Cleveland Pandemic Response (a lefty private group). Equality Ohio has a more formal hub for help.
These types of groups have spawned in nearly every major city in America and are independently coordinated relief efforts in a nation known for its lack of enthusiastic political life. Every city has a mutual aid network and if you can, contribute as much as you can. If you don’t find one, start one. This is the type of community activation we’ve always been talking about. It’s here. It’s right here. It’s happening. Be a part of it in any way you can. As socialists, this is exactly what we wanted people to do, and they’re doing it.
That’s why I’m not the Joker anymore. People could have gone back to sleep, ignored the problem, or sunk into despair. But they didn’t. They’re not going to. They did the exact opposite with a passion and drive that should make everyone laughing at the problem feel ashamed. If people with so little can do so much, no one gets the luxury of not caring any longer. You’ve been un-Jokerfied.
The practical joke was on us, sprung by our own learned helplessness from experiencing all of our politics through the apathetic distance of Twitter and Reddit. From depending on Bernie’s nomination to solve all our problems. From disappearing into our own ass. The only people we should be laughing at is us for tricking ourselves into thinking we could sit this one out. And if you’re already part of one of these networks, you’re not crazy, you’re just ahead of the curve.
We are not weak. We’re social distancing, but we’re not alone. In truth, we never really were. The greasepaint stays off.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.