Wake Island: Exploring the Imagery, Sickness, and Energy of 2025

July Edition

New dispatches, curated and written by David Leo Rice and Paul K, are released on the first of every month throughout 2025.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

— Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle campaign

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The Dawning of the Post-Paranoid Era

The film Eddington (about a small-town sheriff whose run for mayor during the pandemic spirals into paranoia and political chaos), released this month, led me to the following realization, perhaps obvious in its simplicity but not fully clear to me until now: the madness of the late 2010s and early 2020s marked the death throes of social media. The last time it felt possible to touch reality, to glimpse some shred of “what’s really going on,” to participate in the present moment in a heightened or undercover manner, to see beyond the news, to know more than the normies. Now all of these motivations seem absurd—social media is and surely always was nothing more than glorified (or further degraded) soap operas, weaponized melodrama and cartoons.

I don’t know why, during the Covid years, this wasn’t obvious. Or maybe it wasn’t true then the way it is now—after all, social media did move the needle of what actually occurred in the world to a measurable degree back then. Now I look back on the giddy, panic-stricken mentality of that time with a kind of nostalgia, as if it were a more innocent, even if also a less mentally healthy time: a time when it felt crucial to binge on the feed, like it was a public duty to see who’d claimed what and who’d debunked that claim and who’d debunked whoever had done the debunking and then what the next claim was, the next twist or branching-off in the conspiracy, the next crumb, the next clue along the path toward the Big Reveal…

Now this all seems like dinner theater or a scripted murder mystery at a child’s birthday party. A choose-your-own-adventure book from the grade school library.

The weird thing is, the real conspiracy might be bigger than anything those years could have accounted for, which is what Eddington seems to posit, however clumsily: while the citizens of that town fight over masks and child trafficking rumors and BLM and white privilege and which candidate is really “giving power back to the people,” and everything else that occupied us for the past 10 years, an ominous data center outside of town sets up shop unimpeded, doing god knows what with no one to stop it or even to ask what its plans are. Maybe this is what 2025 is all about: the thing beneath the surface all these years—whatever was propping up the Biden marionette, or whatever Trump actually represents, or whatever’s behind him, or whatever’s behind that, or whatever our interest in any question to do with Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is actually distracting us from, etc etc etc—has established itself more permanently underfoot than anyone knows or could ever admit, and it did so while we dithered around in our sweatpants, fighting over whatever psychedelic specks social media saw fit to feed us.

Now the feed feels undead, purged of the sick life force of the Covid years—who cares anymore where the disease really came from, or what the vaccines really do, or how and why the BLM protests occurred as they did, or whether it was wise to lock down for so long (or so short)? How could these issues ever have been as radioactive as they so recently were? What were people reacting to at that time, such that they let these questions consume them so fully and make monsters of them (us) all?

Maybe we all knew that something unnameable was establishing itself and we knew we’d never be able to even tiptoe toward it, so—dutiful subjects of the new regime, a regime whose shape and true intentions we can’t even guess at, a regime that, like the devil in The Usual Suspects, has pulled its greatest trick by convincing the world that it isn’t real (unless, of course, it isn’t, and something else is tricking us into thinking it is)—we pretended to fight over these sub-issues instead, until we burned ourselves out and ended up here, in the dead center of the 2020s, in a moment that feels at once still-livid with carnage and mania and yet also… eerily calm. Strangely quiet. Enervated, purged, beyond good and evil. For the first time ever, I delete all the newsletters and updates that enter my inbox. I’m tracking nothing, awaiting no news, listening to a 45-hour biography of Fernando Pessoa instead of any of the podcasts I used to consume with starving desperation.

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

Now, untethered from the zombie feed, with no skin in the game, I seek updrafts of meaning, undertows or secret pathways through the froth. The culture war is over, or it continues with no more import than an altercation between a pair of cats in an alley outside the window of the room I’m sleeping in. The factions have either dissolved or ossified into corn-maze versions of themselves, scarecrows and blow-up dolls yammering on loop.

This month’s (manufactured?) freakout over the Epstein Files feels exactly like that: a pantomime of outrage and curiosity, of betrayal and excitement, with nothing beneath it. Who still cares about the outcome of this story, or even believes there will be one? Who will know when this story fades away and is replaced by the next? Are we really arguing about Obama spying on Trump in 2016 yet again?? Maybe all the chattering voices are bots already. Maybe they always were. Maybe this era has been no more turbulent than any other.

Maybe the entire notion of culture has imploded and there’s no longer any larger story to track, no acceptance to strive for, no banishment to fear… it’s only you and the life you’re living, making what you can of it. Maybe the end of history people were right after all.

Thus, the era of Post-Paranoia begins, a time when it no longer matters which news sources or personalities are telling the truth and which are lying—it’s a purely poisoned time, or a time of renewed holiness, a time of deafening cacophony or sanctified silence, beyond doubt, beyond debate, beyond even the possibility of partisanship—a time of retreat, surrender, and renewal.

There’s nothing to wonder about anymore, no more needles in the digital haystack, just life as it unfolds moment by moment, for no reason or for reasons so intrinsic to the state of things that no account of their origins can justify any attention.

Trump on the Fourth of July.

And yet:

July begins with the floods in Texas that take the lives of 27 campers and counselors from the Christian girls’ summer camp, Camp Mystic, and ends with a tsunami hitting Russia, the U.S., and Japan. These events bookend a month defined by images of starvation, mostly in Gaza, but also in Haiti and Sudan, surfacing with grim determination into our timelines.

The most iconic of these images turns out not to be of a starving child, but of an already-sick one. The New York Times issued a statement:

We recently ran a story about Gaza's most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition. We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems.

In the idle moments of my day when I dip a toe back into the current of social media (mostly for the sake of this project), I feel the coldness of the feed seizing within the timeline. A kind of digital frost blurs my vision as I pull back far enough to see the entire sick tapestry, trying to understand the weight or significance these images are supposed to carry, as if they were signs from another world whose nature I’ve been tasked to determine. They churn and provoke dialogue, but never penetrate the conversations of my day-to-day life. Maybe everyone I know has seen them and has nothing to say, or maybe we wish there were more to say, but there isn’t enough bandwidth to articulate what was never meant to be witnessed on loop.

Throughout the month, I see: a woman in Ohio splayed unconscious on asphalt after being knocked out at a jazz festival. The Coldplay couple caught mid-infidelity, locked in a freeze-frame of perpetual public humiliation. Bodycam footage of a beaten cop with blood pouring from her mouth. Bryan Kohberger, the Idaho serial killer, smirking in an orange jumpsuit as he’s sentenced for murdering four university students. A Chuck E. Cheese mascot in handcuffs, arrested for fraud. A gunman walking calmly through midtown Manhattan to kill four people, setting off another string of conspiracies.

Within all of this, there’s no hierarchy anymore. No tactical media shaping what deserves reverence. No sense of what photography, as a medium, once tried to capture. That sacred space is now reserved for the images we’ll never see but can’t stop imagining, images we’re convinced must exist if the worst of what we fear and desire to make manifest is happening.

What we really want are the images we’re not supposed to want: Epstein and Trump tag-teaming an underage girl beneath the blue-and-white striped dome of a private temple, backlit by a burning Caribbean sun. Leaked tapes of Gonzo-style porn clips from Diddy’s Freak Offs with A-list celebrities and rappers, slathered in baby oil, hopped up on molly, ketamine, and cocaine, engaging in coerced chemsex parties. We want to see Israeli soldiers actively starving the people of Gaza, so we can post them, not out of voyeurism, we tell ourselves, but for proof. Proof that it’s real. Proof that it must be stopped. Proof that our eyes, and only our eyes, can make it stop.

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But what happens if those images finally appear? Is the old itch for the Big Reveal still there after all, no matter how hard we try to relegate it to 2019 or 2022?

Do we morph them into Ghibli-style animations? Into visually chopped and screwed brain rot? Something that, if you squint and pull back far enough, forms a kind of horrid mosaic of everything the internet is doing and refusing to admit it’s doing? Or will we collectively vomit, fully disgusted with ourselves and what we’ve been chasing? Left only to pontificate on justice in a world where there are no good guys, no bad guys, and nothing left to root for?

We’re past the obscene because we can’t imagine anything worse than what we already know is out there, whether we’ve seen it or not. We’re secure in the knowledge that life goes on no matter what, and yet haunted by this knowledge, unsure whether to trust it—or uncertain, if we do trust it, what kind of monsters that makes us.

A sheriff’s deputy while searching the banks of the Guadalupe River near Camp Mystic.

We live in a time of floods and starvation.

An overabundance of bullshit, and a literal embargo on food.

Empty calories on one end, empty bodies rotting on the other.

A population dying on our feeds, and a feed drowning in slop.

In the end, I guess you really can’t have it both ways. You can’t turn your head from the flood and be spared its damage. And even in doing so, you sense something is being withheld. Like an Escher drawing of a man staring at the back of his own head, looking away fuses with looking in, until you can’t separate walking away from walking toward.

We’re in a strange frontier now, where the horizon is as empty as it looks and there’s nothing left to mine. We’re finally free, or else free from the possibility of freedom.

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet