The sad tale of Keaton Jones (and his mother)

It was one of those moments that happens far too often on social media. A young boy, filmed on a phone by his mother, weeps as he recounts his bullying at school. It leads him to ask some fundamental questions about life. Why is there evil? Why do people do bad things? Why must innocent people suffer?

It was moving stuff, and when the video hit social media something happened that’s much rarer than the familiar phrase suggests: it went viral. The world responded to the story of an innocent’s dawning realisation that the world can be cruel, and young Keaton Jones was inundated with messages of support from the “great” and the “good”. 

As is usually the case once one or two celebrities get involved, others followed, perhaps fearing that they might otherwise look callous. Captain America, Chris Evans, told him to “Stay strong, Keaton. Don’t let them make you turn cold.” Even Snoop Dogg offered the more cryptic “Say lil Man U gotta friend in me for life hit me on dm so we can chop it up love is the only way to beat hate”, and Justin Bieber recorded a video expressing his solidarity. In the space of a few days, there was a crowd-fund for Keaton’s education (at least $58,000 was raised on one fundraising page alone) and he has received dozens of invites to attend celebrity events. Sports stars wanted to befriend him. Good prevailed over evil and we all felt a little bit better… for a while.

And then there’s reality.

Photographs emerge of Keaton’s mother, Kimberly, posing with a gun and confederate flags. Suddenly there’s a racial dimension. Rumours begin to circulate from the real world beyond the viral video. MMA fighter Joe Schilling posts a video in which he describes a conversation with Keaton’s mother, who he suggests is only interested in maximising the profits from her son’s suffering. The narrative of the innocent is no longer quite so straightforward, and then it turns out that young Keaton might not have even been the victim…

Suddenly the story of Keaton Jones is no longer a story about Keaton Jones. It’s the story of the past few years and the role that social media plays in the deep deceptions of our lives.

It’s a familiar tale in which the atomic detail of reality interferes with the grand narratives we seek to believe. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if there were only good and evil? It would explain those rare demonic presences with names like “Hitler” and “Stalin” who do things because they are possessed by some elemental force beyond our understanding, but within the capacity of superheroes to defeat. Heaven and Hell are so much easier to conceptualise than Space/Time, infinity, and quarks and quasars. They are far more consoling than whatever reality might be unmasked by psychology or cognitive science.

This past week, Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook vice-president, described how social media “exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” and described what we’re now all too willing to acknowledge. Social media encourages us to create the ubiquitous “echo chambers” that we recognise but continue to construct. It exploits our natural instinct to seek simplicity. We invented the wheel millennia before we invented fractal space, and we live in a world where the simple seems inherently more true than the complex.

We are all, it seems, children of Occam’s Razor — “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” — which is translated as “More things should not be used than are necessary” but we generally remember as some variation of “the simplest solution is usually the best”. Yet we are slowly becoming aware that this is a falsehood. Simple solutions are usually best but the same does not hold for simple explanations.  

“May social media always be spaces that are rich in humanity!” said the Pope today, in a tweet, naturally. Our difficulty is reconciling that humanity with a world of almost infinite data. As we mature into creatures existing in an informational space, we are struggling to interface with that new world. We have more data available to us than at any time in our history yet we cling to truisms, clichés, and sound bites. Our humanity enables us to achieve great things but, in other ways, it holds us back, grounding our beliefs in superstitions.

Keaton Jones might not simply be the victim of bullying. He is a victim of our preference for mythic simplicity. His story is the same story behind the headline “immigrants steal out jobs” when compared with the economic figures that show a complicated picture. “We want our borders back” was always an ideal that had nothing to do with the difficult job of restructuring our nation’s relationships with the rest of the world. “Feed the world” seems easy to do but quickly runs up against the practical difficulties of resources, third world infrastructure, and the problems of large nations that suddenly emerge from the third world and into the first.

More deeply, Keaton Jones is the problem of a world in which our advances have actually made us regress. We hubristically believe that technology will provide the solution to every problem. The overt simplicity of our machines falsely instructs us that reality is similarly simple and knowable. With barely a thought of the technology that makes it possible, a mother records, edits, uploads, and shares a video to social media and the family is $56,000 richer three days later. If life were only that simple…

The problems of one boy weeping in Tennessee on Friday really are the problems of a world weeping tomorrow.