"We are not a story, we are not headlines, we are people"

The title phrase is said by one of the passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius, the one with the hantavirus, in a video that has become, precisely, one of the most viewed stories on social media this week. The passenger's name is Jake Rosmarin and he makes a call to whoever sees his video not to be forgotten. He cries as he says it, and you can see he is afraid, an objective and justified fear because he is on a ship where three people have already died. But then there is another fear that also makes him cry: that of not being able to count on the support or empathy of others, of us who are watching his video. Of becoming, as he says, a story, which in social media language is a video or an image that circulates for an ephemeral time and then simply disappears.Jake Rosmarin expresses this fear from the other side of the black mirror of the screen. He too is a social media user, like everyone else, and he too has surely seen videos similar to the one he recorded himself: people who were suffering, who found themselves in terrible, desperate situations. Surely Jake Rosmarin had looked at these videos with indifference or with a brief shiver (of compassion, of rage, of disgust: this already depends on the specific emotion that each video seeks to excite), and then had not thought about it anymore. It is, by no means, any reproach to Jake Rosmarin: it is how more or less all of us behave as users, or as consumers, of social media. What Jake Rosmarin, passenger of the hantavirus cruise, asks of us is that we do not do this to him and his unfortunate companions. That we do not pause briefly at their tears and then move on to another video, who knows, of celebrities on a red carpet, or of funny animals, or of in-laws formulating conspiracy theories.Jake Rosmarin's plea surely comes late. For a long time now we have been accustomed to contemplating people subjected to extreme pain on the screens of our mobile phones. For a long time now we have become accustomed to seeing people cry while we dine in front of the television: victims of bombings, immigrants shot down in boats, elderly women evicted by vulture funds, bodies abused or raped or blown up. Sensationalism, banality, the algorithm, and the desire to make easy money (in short, what we call technocapitlism) come together to help us become spectators — more passive, more abulic than ever — of the misfortune of others. People who suffer like flies trapped inside a glass, which is the screen.The horror is to go from being the spectator to being the fly. Jake Rosmarin rebels, with good reason, against this horror, but his tears will predictably have the same trajectory as those of so many, so many people who appear crying every day on our screens. We will be moved, of course, if in a while a film, or a series, is released narrating the ordeal of the hantavirus cruise, with the corresponding tagline: “Based on true events.”