I would like to take you Inside The Game for a moment. In order for the content you read on this website to get from our brains to you, it must first be entered into VICE's content management system, which is where it waits to be edited and published. There are various drop-down menus, and a space for us to write the brief description of the piece that some people call a slugline and others a subhed, and to enter some meta-tags. For a long time—for long enough that it was notable, both given how quickly the ship in question sailed and sank and was forgotten—there was a headline reading "The Dress Is White, You Idiots." That's all there was. There was no post. There was just the ghost of this post, an attempt to tack some sports onto a charmless but persistent trending topic. It sat there for months, a yawning ghost waiting either to be given life at last—"How The Dress Is Or Is Not Like Deflategate, You Idiots" or whatever—or finally exorcised. At some point, someone set it free, and returned it to the essence. It never slipped the surly bonds of the CMS. There is, to this date, no official VICE Sports editorial position on The Dress.
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If you don't remember "The Dress," that is 1) absolutely great for you and 2) not really very surprising at all, as it was not built to last. The dress in question was the subject of a Buzzfeed post that briefly fascinated and then almost immediately exhausted social media. The premise of the post was like that there was a picture of a dress on a hanger, and it was lit in a peculiar fashion, and that some people viewing it would see the dress as being one color, and other people would see it as another. It was shared widely, and viewed many millions of billions of times. Some of those viewing it surely had a pleasurable experience doing so, clapping their hands and shimmying giddily in ergonomic office chairs and delighting in content that made them want to click and share that content on various platforms, the better for their friends to enjoy it and engage with it themselves. These people almost certainly do not remember The Dress either, but if they were to be reminded of it, they might recall it fondly. But they are remembering it as what it was when it was first that thing, and not when it became, so quickly after, a ghost haunting various Content Management Systems, whispering "THIS. SO MUCH THIS."Anyway: near the end of the most recent relentlessly unpleasant Presidential debate, an earnest and faintly dumpling-shaped man in a red cardigan stood up to ask a question about energy policy. You can read critiques of that question, now, and compilations of notable tweets about the man who asked the question, some of them endearingly silly and some of them wearyingly arch, but all of them grounded in the fact that his name is Kenneth Bone.
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And so Ken Bone was a meme by morning.
Which is fine, because Ken Bone seems like a nice guy and because talking about him kept us from talking about what a flaming toilet our political life has become.
Video: 'Yesterday I had 7 Twitter followers and 2 of them were my grandma… because she forgot her password and had to do it over.
If it's not quite right to say that all of this is happening by rote, without anyone ever really actively wanting any of it to happen, the process does quickly veer in that direction, with whatever initial surprise or delight there once was almost instantly humped to death. It's hard to say whether any of this is cruel to Bone or not, because it so quickly got beyond him and became a part of that other process. You know that process, if you spend any time on the internet. There is an initial bloom of collective experience and an uncanny sort of closeness. If that closeness is false, there is some small element of truth in it, and something authentically valuable and pleasant in the sense that all these atomized people, all of them bored in their individuated ways, are enjoying the same thing in that moment, more or less together. But once that shared thing generates sufficient exit velocity, it smashes through to someplace that's both totally airless and unbelievably crowded. This tends to happen fast, because that's how things happen #online, and when it does the whole thing is retroactively and forever emptied of whatever life it once had; all the headlines, written in the gormless rictus YAAAASSSS at which this sort of internet discourse is generally pitched, are not just hollow but actively sad and even a little insulting—to the reader, definitely, but also to the fleeting and authentic joy of the experience that made everything else come tumbling so thirstily after.
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And at that point, it's hard to tell what the thing even is anymore, although it is clearly no longer whatever it was. It's a referent, for sure, but now it refers mostly to itself, and its utility is mostly as a thing that can be gestured towards, when sufficiently out of things to talk about, in ways that say I, too, am aware of this thing. It becomes impossible to imagine that there was ever any joy in any of it, although of course it wouldn't exist at all if there hadn't been something there.
On Monday, Boston Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly offered to leave Kenneth Bone some tickets for tonight's American League Division Series game at Fenway Park!
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