MEDIA: Media Events compatriot, well-known labor and metal journalist Kim Kelly, gets interviewed on CNN about a water crisis in Philadelphia.

EVENT: The CNN crew's lack of awareness that Kim is a prominent media figure allows her to say crazy stuff on TV and participate in a cycle that ultimately ends in Mayor Jim Kenney drinking a glass of water on TV.

ANALYSIS: On March 26, 2023, everyone in Philadelphia got a push notification sent to their phone at like 1:15 that said, “hey everybody it’s the city of philadelphia, just a heads up there was a chemical spill and it got into the water supply so everybody might wanna start drinking bottled water starting in 45 minutes hahahaha your so cute pls don’t be mad at us.” 

It turned out that the chemical spill had happened on Friday night, but that nobody had really noticed when the news broke because (A), a factory in West Reading that made chocolate Easter Bunnies had exploded that same evening, killing seven, the tragedy of which sort of crowded the non-fatal chemical spill out of the news cycle, and (B), we did not know that the chemicals, reportedly a “latex finishing solution,” would end up in our drinking water, OR that one of the ones that got spilled was also present in East Palestine. This is, sadly, how people operate — it’s a lot easier to care when the details are lurid or it’s actively your problem. 

I’m getting ahead of myself. The main issue at the moment was that it seemed like everyone was about to need a shitload of bottled water, and this was a thing that we did not have, which is how I found myself leaving the table halfway through lunch to buy as much water as I could at a Fresh Market across the street. The part of the city we were in wasn’t actually affected by the spill (a friend was in town so we took him to the fancy part of the city), but by no means did that stop the neighborhood’s residents from flooding the Fresh Market for some damn-ass VOSS. (The cut-off for stuff that the fancy people viewed as worth buying seemed to have been Mango Chainsaw-flavored Liquid Death, only a single case of which was on the shelves; there was plenty of store-brand seltzer and Smart Water to be had.) 

Down where we live, which was decidedly in the splash zone of the chemical water, things had gotten pretty wild. Basically all the stores were sold out of water, we still didn’t have enough ourselves, and then our friend Kim called us and was like “hey do y’all wanna go to New Jersey and get water there?” so that’s what we ended up doing. At some point in the 30 minutes before she and her partner met up with us, Kim had randomly been interviewed by CNN, which was very funny because she is a prominent labor journalist and therefore the sort of person who occasionally gets invited to talk about things on TV, but the CNN people apparently had had no idea who she was and probably wanted to talk to her because she had more tattoos than anyone else who had just failed to buy water at the Passyunk Avenue ACME. 

We ended up having to go to four different spots in New Jersey in order to buy enough water that we’d feel psychologically comfortable about the idea that our taps might start shooting out cancerous latex juice at the drop of a hat. But a weird thing happened as we shuffled around the southwest Jersey urban sprawl: The city held a press conference where they were like, “whoa whoa whoaaaaa, hold up everybody so we actually re-did the math and the water should be safe to drink until tomorrow night at 11:59 p.m. and after that the water will turn into a pumpkin and the pumpkin will be full of carcinogens, we definitely didn’t make this assessment due to all the panic-buying and whatnot.” Over the next two days, the city kept extending the deadline for when the water would stop being safe to drink, which felt confusing suspicious. 

The mindfuck of it all was that while a lot of experts said that eight to twelve thousand gallons of latex finishing solution was a drop in the bucket when your bucket is the Delaware River which contains millions of gallons of water, there were other experts, one of whom happened to be literal Erin Brockovich, who were like “yeah no that’s a buncha bullshit.”

All of this was very destabilizing, especially when out of nowhere on Tuesday evening the city was like “okay false alarm y’all the water’s actually fine,” AND THEN THE MAYOR DID A PRESS CONFERENCE WHERE HE DRANK THE WATER!!! Like sure it’s great that you’re saying the water’s okay, but classically, the point of the whole “powerful guy drinking the gross water on camera” thing is that the water is not, in fact, safe. That former Mayor Kenney’s hands were shaking as he lifted the glass to his mouth and then walked off camera without taking questions was not particularly confidence-inspiring, either. Through the whole ordeal, the city has often seemed more concerned with the appearance that it’s doing a good job of “handling the crisis” than actually “doing a good job of handling the crisis.” Consider these two headlines in the Inquirer, right below the headline giving everybody what Erin Brockovich might call “the bull shit ‘all clear’.” 

Watching the press conference that concluded with Kenney drinking the water, though, a narrative seemed to leak out from statements given by various public officials:

1. The water treatment plant has to take in a certain amount of water in order for its machinery not to break. The water it’s taken in from the river over the past couple days was not contaminated.
2. By triggering a run on bottled water, the water department created the conditions under which a bunch of people in the city had a shitload of bottled water, which they figured they might as well drink even as the city kept saying the tap water was safe.
3. Everyone drinking bottled water led to people consuming less tap water than usual, easing the strain on the water system.
4. This bought the water department a couple of extra days to let the contaminated water flow through the river past the treatment plant.
5. Oh by the way there’s a bunch of industrial runoff-style bullshit that gets dumped into the Delaware River and you’re not supposed to think about that. 

To be clear, no one explicitly said this, but that’s reallllllly what seems to have happened. I would call this — the city spurring its residents to panic-buy bottled water inadvertently led to an actual potential crisis passing — a localized Reality Distortion Field. This is a phrase that we used to jokingly use to describe the power that our small dog Nora (R.I.P.) had to cause our large, friendly dog Percy to bark like a maniac whenever they see another dog on a walk. If, when we saw a dog, I took Nora like ten feet away from Percy, though, he'd wag his tail and try to greet the other dog even as Nora barked at the dog as if it’s Actual Cujo From The Book Cujo. Once we identified that Nora’s Reality Distortion Field exists, we became able to remove Percy from it. As a result, our walks became much less stressful. 

I knew that I did not invent the phrase Reality Distortion Field, but I’d forgotten where I’d actually learned it. After a trip to google I learned that, like many things in this world, the RDF is Steve Jobs’s fault. It was originally used in a Star Trek episode called “The Menagerie,” but an early Apple employee named Bud Tribble (lmao) began to use it to describe his boss’s effect on people. Per this page linked to by the Reality Distortion Field wiki:

The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.

Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed.

There are probably a lot of different terms for this sort of social phenomenon, but I prefer Reality Distortion Field because of its ability to bring the metaphysical into the realm of the hyper-literal. When you’re in someone’s RDF, it can kind of feel like the floor has evaporated under your feet, your subjectivity is in freefall, and suddenly the only perspective you can grab onto is not your own. It’s not empathy as much as it’s unconsciously submitting to someone else’s worldview. 

Normal people tend to reaffirm the realities of those around them; those with the proper combination of charisma, power, and narcissism that produces a Reality Distortion Field (see above dumb graphic I spent way too much time on) hijack the realities of others. I’d like to think that Steve Jobs never even realized he had it, and instead traversed the world being like “hell yeah everybody who works for me agrees with me all of the time this is sick lol.” 

But once you’re aware of the phenomenon, you start seeing it everywhere — it becomes a frame through which you can view the world, just like how if you played enough Tony Hawk as a kid you might find yourself looking at a loading dock and thinking, “I bet I could do a 900 off that if I were in a video game right now.” Probably the three best contemporary examples of Reality Distortion Field-havers are Elon Musk, pre-antisemitic Kanye, and Donald Trump (Joe Biden obviously doesn’t have one). 

Kanye, at his peak, was able to shift the conventions of hip-hop by synthesizing the underground’s ideas and sounds and presenting them as his own — given Kanye’s stated fascination with Jobs, it’s not surprising that even the artists whose sounds he kinda bit ended up praising him for his originality. Trump’s Reality Distortion Field is more meme-y and specifically spread through his rallies and TV appearances and I’m not gonna talk about it because this is not a Resistance thing.

Elon, meanwhile, projects his Reality Distortion Field over Twitter. There’s been a general shift in tenor on the site ever since he took over, where it can feel like more people are posting more tech-y thought-leadership bs and even the shitposts have a house style, slowly but surely displacing the chaotic free-for-all that allowed people to dip in and out of different communal streams-of-consciousness. (To be clear, I am not saying that Twitter was better when it had different billionaires running it — Twitter has always been bad.) One way to think about this change is that, through the decisions he’s made at the helm, Elon has created the conditions where people are rewarded for using the site how he wants them to. 

People hate it when you reject their Reality Distortion Field, because it’s one of those things that’s real until it isn’t. Steve Jobs once convinced a programmer to reduce the Mac boot time by like half a minute because he implied the guy would effectively be killing a hundred people if he didn’t. What would have happened if the guy had just said no?

HIGH-LEVEL ANALYSIS: Distribution channels are almost as important as not hanging out with evil and/or charismatic individuals.