The helpers aren’t helping
In November 2017, Kate McClure ran out of gas on I-95, just outside of Philadelphia. A homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt, Jr., spotted her plight and gave her his last $20 so she could get gas. Kate was moved by his selfless generosity and wanted to pay it forward, so she started a GoFundMe which ultimately raised over $400,000. Their warm and fuzzy photo ops leading up to the holiday season encouraged us all to be a little more generous with each other. She was a state worker, just like me, and it made me feel really good about being a public servant and one of the helpers.
Alas, we don’t get to have nice things.
What actually happened was that Johnny, Kate, and Kate’s boyfriend, Mark D’Amico, met at a casino one night and cooked up a plan to tug on everyone’s heartstrings for profit. They really sucked at doing crime, though. Kate and Mark didn’t give Johnny his fair share of their ill-gotten gains and HE SUED THEM (!!!!) to recover it. Thus began the unraveling of their story — gambling junkets, designer purses, exotic trips, drugs, and cars. The money was gone in a matter of months.
Kate and Mark were ahead of the curve on viral performative “charity.” By the time their story started falling apart in 2018, Mr. Beast entered the scene and TikTok found a foothold in the United States. If you couldn’t lip sync or dance, the surest path to clout and glory was casting yourself as the star in your own philanthropic channel, or at the very least filming yourself leaving an outrageously large tip for your local diner waitress. It’s now no longer enough to snap a photo of your receipt and post it on Facebook — footage of the waitress crying while thanking you for making it possible to make rent that month is where the view juice comes from.
On its face, this seems like a win-win-win-win. Someone is helped. You feel good. Sharing inspires others to pay it forward. You are rewarded with followers and views which may ultimately yield financial compensation which enables you to wash, rinse, and repeat acts of kindness throughout the land.
I’m not here to talk about how Mr. Beast has turned philanthropy into a transactional, self-serving brand.
I’m here to talk about Lieutenant Dan a/k/a Joe Malinowski.
We first met Lieutenant Dan just before Hurricane Milton smashed into Florida. He was living on a small sailboat, which he’d moored to a sea wall in Tampa. Despite having everyone from the local police to the mayor of the whole freaking city urging him to evacuate, Lieutenant Dan stayed put on his boat throughout the hurricane, meditating and focusing on creating a ring of protection around himself. God put him there and God would protect him, he said.
Lieutenant Dan survived the hurricane; God was true to his word.
For all his troubles, Lieutenant Dan has been rewarded with a pestilence of TikTokers happy to stand on his head for clout. Of course there’s a GoFundMe, doomed from the outset since (the story is) Lieutenant Dan has neither a bank account nor identification with which he could open one. He’s been seen sporting merch, for which he’s presumably been paid as an influencer. There have been offers for live-streaming deals, a new boat, and cash. These may or may not have been rescinded, depending on who you ask, because the TikTok detective squad went to work and dragged up what they allege to be Lieutenant Dan’s extensive criminal history, which he denies and/or defends depending on who asks.
An alleged long-lost daughter has come out of the woodwork and pleaded with everyone to stop. A nephew, who coincidentally runs a TikTok parody account, claims Lieutenant Dan ruined the family financially and then slunk off in shame. People who don’t even know Lieutenant Dan nor live anywhere near Florida are proclaiming what an awful man he is because in this one video among the thousands of videos they watched in the past five minutes it kinda looked like maybe he was nodding off a little, and obviously they believe his daughter.
Amidst all this we have angry mobs of people marching down to his boat, cameras in hand, demanding that Lieutenant Dan provide answers to them, the random strangers of TikTok, who deserve the truth. People have pointed fingers at everyone from Tampa Terrance to some guy with ratty hair and many tattoos to the Pope. Naturally, a police officer weighed in on who he thinks the real bad guys are.
They’ve all got it wrong, though. The bad guy is us. We did this. We created this monster. And when I say we, I’m including myself. As much as it pisses me off, these people and this platform are profiting because my eyeballs are on them. This positive feedback loop encourages them all to keep going.
And so we’ve got Lieutenant Dan, the parasites, and an ever-expanding supporting cast of vultures picking over the carcass of what was once a quasi-inspirational story of a man who put his life in God’s hands. It looks like a new and bigger boat has materialized, so now we can watch Lieutenant Dan livestream yacht parties and cheer while he goes down in flames, in the same way we cheer Joshua Block (worldoftshirts) as he livestreams slowly drinking himself to death.
It’s hard not to feel like we’re being collectively gaslit into thinking all of this is normal.
We’re told the problem with TikTok is that it’s owned by a Chinese company which may harvest our data and use it against us. I’m less concerned about China having my data (that horse has already left the barn) than I am about the way social media has manipulated us into behaving. Social media is engineered to be addictive. While it has our children’s rapt attention, the adults are setting a horrific example for them. Our public schools are now creating programs for students to specialize in content creation. We have affirmed that our children exploiting themselves for attention and profit is a legitimate career path.
We, the adults, know (or should know) this is bad. And yet we — the grownups in the room — are the problem. And we’re just sitting here watching this happen to ourselves; there’s fuck all we can do about it. We can barely manage important things like making presidential elections happen smoothly.
Part of the problem is that, because of money, our news has turned into entertainment and our entertainment into news. 54% of adults in the United States get their news from social media. Why wait for legitimate sources of information when you can get on-the-ground weather commentary from someone sitting in a kayak floating around in their living room? Never mind that whatever the algorithm pushes out to you has less to do with what’s important than what will make the platform the most money.
There’s no clear path out of this death spiral we’re in. We will have a reckoning. The only questions are when and how bad it needs to get.
I feel a little like Andy Rooney shaking my fist at the sky wondering why the doggone things just don’t work the way they used to. My dad’s favorite saying in his last few years was “this just isn’t my world anymore.” I’m with him, at this point you can stick a hammer in my hand and call me a Luddite. I’m exhausted by the way the technological tools we’re given always end up using us.
”If you’re worried about your image and who you have working for you, you should have done your due diligence and looked me up before you made me an offer of $100,000 sign-on bonus, $50,000 a month with a $100,000 boat,” Lieutenant Dan said.
I couldn’t agree more. Due diligence should have happened, but it didn’t. And also, regardless of his past, Lieutenant Dan is a human being worthy of compassion and grace. Purity testing people to determine whether they deserve help has been a thing since Ronald Regan popularized the welfare queen trope. And now, since all of us are the stars of our own shows, when we help the wrong sort of person it tarnishes our brand. This is the inevitable outcome of self-serving “philanthropy” and misses the entire point of what it means to serve others.
When we foist our “help” on others for the sake of views, do we even stop to consider whether that person wants the kind of assistance we’re offering or if they want to be filmed while receiving it? I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone ask Lieutenant Dan if he wants to be a TikTok star, or if he wants a giant ass yacht and all of the expenses and responsibilities that go along with it. Does he want the relentless barrage of drama llamas picking through his life like this? Maybe he just wants to be left alone on his boat with God and a few bucks for burgers and beer.
Our lack of curiosity about others and our unwillingness (inability?) to consider perspectives that exist beyond the confines of our own skulls will be what does us in. We are, pixel by pixel, creating the world we deserve to live in.
