The title phrase is said by one of the passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius, the one with 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 plea to anyone who sees his video not to be forgotten. He cries as he says it, and it's clear he's afraid, an objective and justified fear because he's on a ship where three people have already died. But then there's another fear that also makes him cry: the fear 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 user of social media, like everyone else, and he too has surely seen videos similar to the one he himself has recorded: people who were suffering, who were in terrible, desperate situations. Surely Jake Rosmarin had looked at these videos with indifference or with a brief shiver (of compassion, of anger, of disgust: this already depends on the specific emotion that each video seeks to excite), and then he hadn't thought about it anymore. It is not, by a long shot, 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, a passenger on the hantavirus cruise, asks of us is that we do not do this with him and his unfortunate companions. That we do not stop briefly before their tears and then move on to another video, who knows, of celebrities on a red carpet, or of funny animals, or of brothers-in-law formulating conspiracy theories.Jake Rosmarin's price arrives, surely, late. We have long been accustomed to contemplating people subjected to extreme pain on our mobile screens. We have long been accustomed to seeing people cry while we dine in front of the television: victims of bombings, immigrants shot in rafts, elderly women evicted by vulture funds, bodies harassed or violated or shattered. Sensationalism, banality, algorithms, and the pursuit of easy money (in other words, what we call "technocapitalism") come together to help us become spectators — more passive, more apathetic than ever — of the misfortune of others. People who have a hard time like flies trapped in a glass, which is the screen.The horror consists of going from being the spectator to being the fly. Jake Rosmarin rebels, with good reason, against this fright, but his tears will predictably follow the same path as those of so many people who leave crying every day from the screens. We will be moved, certainly, if in a while a film, or a series, is released narrating the adventure of the hantavirus cruise, with the corresponding claim: “Based on real events”.
