The Static and The Signal

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players - William Shakespeare

A conversation with a friend from high school a few days ago, over drinks that cost too much.

I once saw her as a lead in our high school’s production of August: Osage County, a performance so raw and honest that I swore it was better than most Broadway shows. It felt like watching someone bare their soul on stage for three hours. Now, she produces events for some of the largest fashion houses. Pop-up installations. Designer dinners, which I can only assume are real events and not just a pleasant alliterative sounding fiction I invented for the benefit of this piece.

We were talking about the protests, of course. In LA. Chicago. New York. The images from downtown, the stories from friends on the front lines, the shared, frantic texts. We spoke of our desire to do something, a desire that felt as real and as hollow as the ice melting in our glasses. And in the space between our sentences hung the quiet, shameful truth: we could. We could be there. We chose not to be. We chose these drinks, this conversation about doing something, instead of the thing itself.

"Pick one thing," she said, her voice devoid of judgment, a simple diagnosis. "A book club that donates its funds. A food drive. Anything. Just anchor yourself to a single, tangible act, or you'll drown."

I nodded.

Sensible.

And yet.

Tonight I am drowning. The only signal is the blue light from my phone. Plato’s cave, reimagined through an iPhone 16 Pro (Max). There is no communal fire, only the private glow of a screen. The algorithm has become the master puppeteer, but its genius lies in its subtlety. It has studied my anxieties, my vanities, my specific curiosities, and it casts shadows on my own private cave wall that are shaped for me alone. Bizarrely, if the shadows are compelling enough, if they feel like they are about you, the prisoner will not only fail to notice the chains, he will begin to love them. He will call his prison a curated experience. My feed.

Grainy footage from a Home Depot parking lot, a line of men, their hands curled into small, tight fists against the chain-link, the knuckles white with a tension that has nowhere to go. The tangible result of a new directive. It is enacted with a chilling, bureaucratic efficiency by soldiers whose humanity is hidden behind Oakley sunglasses and tactical vests, their boots scuffing the pavement with a sound like grinding teeth.

This is the point where I am supposed to feel a thrum of pure, unadulterated RAGE. A righteous fire.

Instead, I get up. The phone’s glow feels slick, pornographic. The curated feed is a feedback loop of horror and its corresponding, pre-packaged reaction. To watch is to participate in a ritual that demands nothing but my attention. It feels like a lie. So I turn it off. The room plunges into a more honest darkness, and I go to the bookshelf. To the radio.

I found it years ago, moving out of my childhood bedroom. An old analog clock radio, a clunky rectangle of blue faux wood grain and silver-painted plastic, my aunt had given me for my twelfth birthday. And touching it, the tacky smoothness of the plastic, did not so much trigger a memory as it collapsed time, pulling a ghost of my fifteen-year-old self into the room with me. Lying in bed, long after my family was asleep, in that state of nocturnal solitude unique to teenagers alone, turning the heavy dial through the local stations, the hiss and crackle, and then landing, by pure chance, on a ghost of a signal from a college station no more than fifty miles away.

What emerged from the static wasn't a voice, but a raw, unpolished guitar riff, followed by a driving bassline and an explosive drum fill, so intricate and powerful even Chad Smith would’ve nodded in approval. It was a sound I’d never encountered, a band completely unknown to me. Their music wasn't just noise; it was a revelation, a whispered transmission from a world far more expansive and intriguing than anything I knew. It felt like a secret, a glimpse of an unmediated reality, proof that a different kind of world existed out there, waiting to be discovered, not handed to you. It was a promise that the static wasn't just empty space, but a wilderness teeming with undiscovered signals, waiting for someone to find them.

I packed the radio. I don’t know why.

I plug it in.

A low crackle, then the steady, oceanic hiss of static. White noise. A sound that pretends to be nothing. My hand finds the dial.

The current immigration policy is a moral travesty. And here, in the static, the personal flicker. The familiar fraudulence. My father, an immigrant. From the UK. England. London, to be exact. He brought with him a love of tea, a strong aversion to American fries, and an accent that helped him secure a job after the 2008 recession faster than he could post his resume on LinkedIn. And so my anger feels like a counterfeit emotion—a designer knockoff of the real thing. It’s an intellectual rage, a rage born of books and articles and podcasts, not of blood or memory. It has no texture. I have no inherited trauma to metabolize, no stories of checkpoints or perilous crossings, no muscle memory of fear. My outrage is a well-argued thesis, footnoted and sourced, but it is not a scream. It is the comfortable anger of someone who has never truly been afraid.

My fingers turn the weighted dial. I slide past a roar of Spanish-language talk radio, a blast of Top 40 so compressed and loud it feels like an assault.

The performance of it all.

After finding what I believe to be the perfect channel, I open my laptop. A law school classmate’s new LinkedIn post. Headshot, beaming. A slick banner with the logo of a certain firm—the one with a hundred years of blue-chip history, the one whose most notable client is a man who openly fantasizes about dismantling the Republic, a man who stages tinpot military parades for his own birthday, a sort of discount Caligula for the television age. You know the one.

And for a fleeting, satisfying moment, I feel… a sense of my own moral architecture. A sense of being on the right side of something. At least I didn't do that, I tell myself. I didn't send in those applications. I didn't take that meeting. My hands are clean.

But this, too, is a performance. The self-congratulatory narrative of the one who abstained. Even writing this now, critiquing them, is a way of reinforcing that narrative, of whispering to myself that my inaction is more noble than their action. It is its own hypocrisy, just quieter.

Thrilled to announce…!

This, the day after their Instagram story featured a stark, black-and-white infographic about the "atrocities in Los Angeles," accompanied by a monochromatic prayer hand that matched the post's aesthetic. The whiplash is stunning, not just because of the ideological reversal, but because of the sheer, unblinking confidence of its execution.

It suggests a belief that these two performances, the righteous dissenter and the aspiring functionary of power, can occupy separate, hermetically sealed spheres, and that no one will notice, or maybe even care, about the toxic leakage between them. And so it plays out:

Yesterday, the performance: a post, a carefully constructed tableau of moral outrage—a map, perhaps, of supposed principles. Today, the reality is a job accepted in the very territory that map was meant to condemn, if not obliterate. The chilling truth, unacknowledged, is that the map was never meant to lead anywhere; it was the destination itself. We are all complicit, living within that elaborate deception, like inhabitants of a parched land offered a glossy, perfected photograph of an oasis. They post this "evocative" image, we click "like," and together, in a shared, desperate charade, we all pretend it is water, because the alternative, the vast, empty, terrifying expanse of the actual desert, is simply too much to bear.

What makes the choice so indefensible is that it wasn't born of necessity, but of preference, selected from a sea of other prestigious and ethical alternatives. Every other law firm of that caliber, firms full of lawyers who didn't debase themselves, full of lawyers who still believe in the sanctity of democratic institutions, believe no man is above the law, believe that their duty is to the Constitution, believe that truth is a real and verifiable thing, believe in the quiet, steady work of justice, believe in the courts, believe in the law. These firms that offer the exact same salary, the exact same benefits, the exact same prestige.

"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue."

This wasn’t a choice born of necessity. It was a choice born of moral convenience, of a profound spiritual laziness.

It’s a choice that undermines the central, sacred principle of our entire legal education, the inviolable sanctity of the rule of law, and treats it not as a bedrock foundation, but as an inconvenient variable to be discarded when a more attractive offer comes along. It is an intellectual and ethical capitulation of the highest order.

Fuck. Why am I even writing this?

For who? Is this just another performance? Another way to arrange my thoughts into an aesthetically pleasing shape? To prove that I am a person who has these kinds of thoughts? It’s just another shadow on the wall, is it not? A slightly more articulated, self-aware shadow, perhaps, but a shadow nonetheless, flickering for no one but myself.

My friend and I sit at a bar and discuss the abyss… and then we order another round.

So, what then?

To simply accept the absurd? I am left with art. But art is no refuge.

And before I continue this thought, I must admit: I am aware, acutely so, of the paradox of a person of my particular privilege (white, straight, male, ivy-league educated… I can go on) attempting to critique these systems of performative diversity. It is a hall of mirrors. But the reflection is still true.

I have seen theater companies hire young, BIPOC assistant company managers for a single show, just long enough to qualify for the multi-million-dollar diversity tax credit, and then never hire them again, their name a temporary shield on a press release. I have seen a parade of films about a sensitive young man who is gay, which is his only defining characteristic, a safe, palatable trauma for a liberal audience that wants to feel progressive without being challenged.

I tell myself that my documentary work is different, that it’s authentic, that I am giving a platform to a real story, the right way. And some days I even believe it. But then I catch my own reflection in the mirror. I see a photo of myself sipping a Corona by a pool in Florida while crafting a narrative, selecting the most compelling sound bites, and heightening the drama. Am I amplifying a voice, or am I curating it for a specific audience, for those same “forward-thinking” viewers?

It is all performance. It is all product.

And it forces the question inward: is this desire to make art, about this moment, just another performance? Am I just trying to find my own frequency in the static, to carve out a niche in the market of concern, crafting my brand as an "artist who cares"? Am I any different from my classmate?

I turn the dial again, changing the channel, and for a moment, I land on something. A voice, late-night and weary, talking about crop yields, or maybe a lost pet. It’s quiet, local, unproduced. It feels authentic. A ghost of that college station, a whisper from the wilderness. Then it’s gone, swallowed by the static between stations.

And that’s when the thought lands. A certain kind of romantic ending. An ending where one finds a sort of grim nobility in the gesture. Perhaps the point is not to anchor oneself, as my friend suggested, because any anchor in this landscape is a fiction. Perhaps the only authentic position left to a person who sees the whole machine is not to pick one small part of it to fix, but simply to bear witness to its static. To turn the dial, to listen, not for a clear signal, which no longer exists, but to the shape of the noise itself. To sit with the vast, unformed chaos of it all and not look away. It’s a sound that promises nothing. It is, in its own way, a kind of truth.

New York, NY

June 13, 2025

- J.B.H-H

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No.

That’s the tidy conclusion. The ending of what I would write. I maybe should write. In reality, the dial lands on another station. A preacher, his voice a smooth, reassuring baritone, selling salvation for three easy payments. His broadcast just as polished as Elvis Duran's for Z100.

The 'authentic' farmer? For all I know, an actor in a bit for a late-night comedy show. The static itself? It’s not a wilderness. It’s just an absence of a signal. An empty space between advertisements. I turn the knob again, faster this time, a frantic slide, the thin red line a blur illuminating nothing but the names of cities that are burning in ways I cannot comprehend, listening to voices that are not for me. The radio is just another box of curated noise. A piece of furniture. I unplug it and the room is silent. Truly silent this time.

A silence that is worse than the static. The static, at least, was a presence. It was the sound of millions of transmissions failing to connect, a testament to the possibility of a signal. This silence is different. It’s a void. A confirmation of utter solitude. It’s the sound of the line having gone dead.

I pick up my phone. I don’t want to. I hate it. I hate myself for telling myself I need to. But the silence is too loud. And I have to. And my thumb, acting on its own, with a will I no longer possess, swipes up. The blue light floods the darkness again.

I find a well-designed infographic. And I post it.