MK3|Sept 14,2025
Every few months, it happens.
Your feed floods with hashtags, slogans, and profile-picture filters. Corporations suddenly have something to say. Politicians scramble to issue statements. Your friends quietly judge you if you don’t join in.
And like clockwork, we’re all asked the same question: Are you for it, or against it?
That’s The Current Thing.
Every few months, the world demands you care about something. A hashtag. A war. A protest. A slogan. Silence isn’t neutral — it’s suspicious.
What Exactly Is The Current Thing?
The Current Thing isn’t just the latest headline. It’s a loyalty test.
It’s the issue that hijacks the conversation, forces people into binary camps, and turns politics into a game of allegiance.
Here’s the recipe:
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A trigger event — a war, a pandemic, a viral video, a protest.
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Media framing — simplified into “good guys vs. bad guys.”
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Symbols and slogans — hashtags, flags, emojis, profile filters.
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Social pressure — silence suddenly equals complicity.
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Institutional bandwagon — corporations, governments, and NGOs line up.
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Peak saturation — it’s everywhere, all the time.
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The drop-off — it fades, replaced by the next thing.
By the time people stop arguing, you’re already onto the next Current Thing.
Why Do Current Things Matter?
They aren’t random — they’re how modern politics works.
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They give people identity badges. Display the right emoji, wear the right pin, and everyone knows which tribe you belong to.
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They offer moral clarity. Forget nuance — this is good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.
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They act as elite coordination tools. Governments, media, and corporations all get to signal they’re “on the right side.”
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And yes, they can be distractions.
While everyone fights over flags in their bios, bigger, slower issues — like rights being restricted or mass surveillance — slide under the radar.
The Ugly Side of the Current Thing
The problem isn’t that people care. It’s that the care is shallow, manic, and disposable.
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Hashtags don’t fix broken systems.
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Binary framing crushes complexity.
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Yesterday’s “moral emergency” is today’s forgotten headline.
Yesterday’s “moral emergency” is today’s forgotten headline. The victims remain. The policies stay. The crowd moves on.
Meanwhile, as Noam Chomsky pointed out decades ago, the media doesn’t just tell us what to think — it tells us what it’s acceptable to think about.
And corporations have learned to exploit this. They swap their logos during Pride Month, pledge solidarity during protests, or change colors for the flag of the moment. Then, once the spotlight fades, so does their commitment.
Corporations swap their logos during Pride Month, pledge solidarity during protests — then go silent once the spotlight moves on. Marketing masquerading as morality.
Some Examples You’ll Remember
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COVID-19: Masks and vaccines weren’t just health issues; they became political purity tests.
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George Floyd / BLM: Corporate logos went black, fists went up, and protest slogans were suddenly everywhere.
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Ukraine (2022): The blue-and-yellow flag emoji became unavoidable, as Western governments and companies pledged loyalty.
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Israel–Gaza (2023–2025): Competing Current Things (#StandWithIsrael vs. #FreePalestine) split publics down the middle.
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Meanwhile… Yemen, Congo, Sudan? Crickets. Some crises just never qualify as The Current Thing.
And it’s not only foreign policy. Think of the Flint water crisis or the opioid epidemic. Both were once national scandals. Both were described as urgent emergencies. And yet, both faded from public attention long before solutions were reached. That’s how the memory hole works.
Why You Should Care About The Current Thing (Even If You’re Sick of It)
You might think: so what? People always follow trends.
But here’s the kicker: Current Things aren’t just trends — they’re tools.
They show us:
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Who has the power to set the agenda. Why Ukraine, but not Yemen? Why Gaza now, but Congo never?
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How shallow engagement warps democracy. Politics gets reduced to virtue-signaling instead of real policy.
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How attention itself has become currency. If we’re always reacting to the Current Thing, who’s doing the long-term thinking?
If we’re always reacting to the Current Thing, who’s doing the long-term thinking?
A Historical Reminder
The Current Thing has always existed — what’s new is the speed.
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During World War II, Pearl Harbor transformed American opinion overnight.
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In the 1950s, McCarthyism forced Americans to prove their loyalty or risk ruin.
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In the 1960s and ’70s, Vietnam War protests dominated public life, splitting the country into hawks and doves.
Back then, it took weeks or months for public opinion to coalesce. Today, it happens in hours — because social media compresses outrage into viral bursts.
Final Thought
The phenomenon of The Current Thing is not trivial. It reflects how collective attention is orchestrated, how political identities are formed, and how moral clarity is manufactured in a media-saturated society.
While Current Things can mobilize the masses and bring urgent issues into focus, they also risk superficiality, polarization, and distraction from structural change. In the networked age, where attention is currency, politics is increasingly governed by spectacles of the moment.
The challenge for democratic societies is to find ways to engage beyond the Current Thing — to cultivate deeper deliberation, longer-term commitment, and more nuanced debate. Otherwise, we risk a politics permanently trapped in cycles of outrage and amnesia.
The Bezmenov Angle
If you want a deeper understanding of how these cycles work, a good place to start is with Yuri Bezmenov’s warnings about “ideological subversion.”
His four stages — demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization — describe exactly how societies can be manipulated. In many ways, Current Things are the perfect vehicles for this process:
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They demoralize by overwhelming people with outrage.
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They destabilize by polarizing groups.
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They create a sense of crisis that demands instant response.
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They normalize the new status quo once attention moves on.
Demoralization. Destabilization. Crisis. Normalization. Current Things are the perfect vehicles for ideological subversion.
Reader Challenge
When the next Current Thing hits, don’t just ask what it is. Ask:
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Who benefits?
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Who is ignored?
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What’s being buried while the spotlight shines here?
Because the spectacle will pass. The only question is: what will you remember when it does?