Random Acts of Emptiness: How Kindness is Commodified Online
The directive to “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” to lead a good life is attributed to Bay Area writer Anne Herbert, but the idea that genuinely kind acts needn’t be reciprocated, and should be practiced with one’s whole heart, has roots in just about every religion as well. Funny, then, that “random acts of kindness” are having a resurgence online, and that they are taking the form of ruthlessly senseless and totally banal solipsism. Forcing the logic of the internet world onto the material world has unsurprisingly unsavory results, and reproduces the trite and predictable context collapse that continues to divide us.
Take the example of Tiktoker Harrison Pawluk: he’s gained a following of millions by videoing himself performing “random acts of kindness” and posting them online. A recent video of him asking an elderly woman sitting alone in a mall to hold a bouquet of flowers before walking off, all while her reaction was being filmed, racked up an astounding 12.5 million likes. The woman on the receiving end however was neither flattered nor amused, saying she felt “dehumanized”: "He interrupted my quiet time, filmed and uploaded a video without my consent, turning it into something it wasn't, and I feel like he is making quite a lot of money through it,” she said in an ABC Radio Melbourne interview.
We’ve all seen those viral “good deed” posts on LinkedIn–I recall one wherein an executive patted himself on the back for declining to discipline an employee who was late to a meeting. In a recent public LinkedIn post from the owner of a decal company, the poster details a new branding strategy which involves handing out business cards attached to a beer koozie. “I am also happy to have a marketing tactic that spreads a bit of kindness,” the post concludes. Handing out a freebie that comes with a business card is hardly a new advertising tactic, but characterizing it as an act of kindness seems both new and an unpleasant contortion of the term.
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It begs the question, why do posts like these proliferate so much on LinkedIn, compared to other social media platforms? The proximity of accounts of one’s selfless good deeds next to what is essentially a personal brand page speaks volumes about the motivations behind these posts. In most cases the answer is clear–kindness is simply “good for business”. Kindness is zeitgeist-y, an au courant streak in society that is swiftly and reactively being leveraged as a new tool of (self) advertising.
The best contemporary self-advertisers, the Kardashians, have verbatim “spread kindness” as an advertisement. In the December 2021 “Spotlight Kindness Challenge” for Snapchat, Kim and Kris phone up family and friends to say nice things to them while a third party films the ordeal.
“What the f*** is going on,” Khloe asks confusedly after her mom and sister flatter her with comments about her appearance and character.
“We’re just spreading some kindness! Love you!” Kim replies.
In another recent example, a CEO of a company called Hypersocial, which characterizes itself as a “social selling powerhouse” poured his heart out on LinkedIn after laying off employees. Alongside a teary selfie he wrote: “I know it isn't professional to tell my employees that I love them. But from the bottom of my heart, I hope they know how much I do…. I've always hire (sic) people based on who they are as people. People with great hearts, and great souls. And I can't think of a lower moment than this.”
Perhaps this was his experience, but displaying it in this fashion comes across as absurd, even farcical. He turned himself into an advertisement for his own product through this radical display of solipsism.
But what does, and should, it look like to be kind online? We know what it looks like to be mean, and what meanness’ immature, petulant cousin–bullying–looks like. What being kind online, and how one can go about “spreading” it seems less so. Of course nothing is black and white, and “kindness” and “meanness”‘certainly exist on a context-specific continuum. Spreading kindness that another person wants or needs almost always requires asking them (if we do not know them personally) what they want or need. This is the crux of the difference between online and real life interactions. In the same way that people can seem to act so much more viciously in online interactions because they do not personally know the recipient of their vitriol (and will never meet them), this impersonal aspect necessarily reduces any act of kindness to a lowest common denominator, a milquetoast act, such as giving flowers to an elderly woman, that we the consumer can readily laud as “a good deed”. Seen through the prism of online interactions, meanness becomes more vicious; kindness becomes more bland.
Berkeley writer and radical theorist Ken Knabb’s translation of Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle grounds some of the more ephemeral bits and pieces of this phenomenon in media theory. Debord writes that, “When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings–figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.”
“Maybe if it’s difficult to fully articulate how to be kind online, we could do our best to behave ethically. Searching Google for “how to behave ethically online” yields some fascinating and hilarious results, including a Canadian government-sponsored digital literacy lesson for 7th and 8th graders.”
This exactly captures Pawluk’s mode of flattening the recipients of his goodwill into images, rendering them refractive figments upon which he maps his, and his audience’s, behavior. He sees the woman as an image–how she would appear online–assumes that because she’s old and sitting alone, she must be miserable and lonely, banks on the majority of his audience to experience the same innate prejudices, and decides to give her flowers to provide some relief from her doubtless miserable existence. A hollow, meaningless, useless gesture that nevertheless can be perfectly packaged up into a TikTok-sized bite for mass consumption. In the real world, something like volunteering at a senior’s home (where presumably there may actually be lonely elderly people), getting to know them, and becoming friends with them, is a) a lot more work, and b) not nearly as consumable as content–although I contest that such a thing would be possible!
Maybe if it’s difficult to fully articulate how to be kind online, we could do our best to behave ethically. Searching Google for “how to behave ethically online” yields some fascinating and hilarious results, including a Canadian government-sponsored digital literacy lesson for 7th and 8th graders. It’s telling that lessons exist for this purpose–it illustrates how the rules that govern behavior in the real world do not necessarily fully translate online or on social media, and it may be useful to offer a lesson in frameworks on how to interact. Of course, the idea of guidelines concerning cyber-bullying and harassment online seem familiar to us, and many of us have taken a mandatory course of this kind. But the idea of a framework for the contrapositive, for actively being kind online–seems confusing and foreign, and appears to have been deemed unnecessary thus far.
Words: Caroline McManus
