Growing the Swarm: Media Amplification of Desire in The Day of the Locust

    Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust shows how people’s desire for excitement is amplified by the media, and how their frustration with not being able to live the exciting lives they see in media will lead them to resent society as a whole because it prevents them from achieving that lifestyle, eventually resulting in a violent, swarming outburst. Today, that violent swarming outburst takes the form of outrage and cancel culture carried out over social media, a form of media that had not yet been invented when West wrote his book. In social media and in The Day of the Locust, The agitated swarm of people results from a combination of boredom, envy, and fear of missing out. Once given an excuse to start the riot, the swarm will all jump in and join in the violence, or its equivalent in text. Eventually the riot ends, leaving some form of destruction in its path.  Although the prophecy of a violent riot resulting in the destruction of Hollywood was never fulfilled, and The Day of the Locust’s swarm never acted out, the modern swarm does through outrage and cancel culture.

The Swarm in The Day of the Locust and in Modern Times

    In The Day of the Locust, the media amplifies the expectations of how much of an exciting life one can live. For those who had “come to California to die” (West 2), their original desire was for pleasure and leisure. They had a desire for the pleasure and leisure that they never enjoyed previously because “all their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts…” (West 125). They fulfilled their need for excitement during their working lives with newspapers and movies, and West writes “both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war.” (West 125). The media made the simple pleasures and leisure activities of California boring in comparison to what happens in the news and in movies. West writes that “Once there, they discover sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens” (West 125). As a result, many of these people go to Hollywood, where most of the exciting movies are produced to try to find some of that excitement that they cannot seem to obtain. Even there, their boredom continues to grow into resentment. In The Day of the Locust, the news and film comprise the media that creates the swarm. Today, however, social media creates the swarm that never arrived in real life as a result of the news or film.

    News and film never really created a swarm and accompanying riots. Hollywood never burned down. People may have been envious of what they saw in the media, but never enough to inspire violent action. However, social media does grows a swarm, and although there are no riots taking place out on the streets because of social media, there are riots going on constantly online. Today’s swarm results from envy and the fear of missing out. Social media is an engine for creating these feelings. Wortham discusses this in her article “Feel like a Wallflower? Maybe it’s your Facebook Wall,” writing “When we scroll through pictures and status updates, the worry that tugs at the corners of our minds is set off by the fear of regret, according to Dan Ariely… a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He says we become afraid that we’ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our time.” (Wortham). This feeling of regret stems from seeing event playing out in real time, and not being able to be a part of them. Wortham continues “It’s like a near miss in real life. ‘When would you be more upset?’ he asked. ‘After missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?’” (Wortham). People feel like they have to be a part of everything they see on social media. In The Day of the Locust, people’s envy grows from seeing actors act out movies. In today’s world, people’s envy grows from seeing their friends act out their ideal life on social media. For example, vacations are very commonly shared over social media and cause some of the highest rate of envy. In his article, “Hell is Other People’s Vacations,” Healy writes that “‘travel and leisure’ provoked envy… more than any other attribute examined (including ‘relationship and family,’ ‘appearance,’ and ‘money and material possessions’)” (Healy). People are likely much more envious of fake versions of people across social media because in social media, the accounts have the pretense of being real, even if the content posted there is highly curated. This fear of missing out extends to conversations occurring within social media. People feel the need to be involved in the conversation online, even if they have nothing new to say, resulting in a huge mob of people all interested in expressing the same ideas and opinions. In some situations, like people chiming in with similar experiences when someone goes through a mildly annoying situation, this is harmless. However, when people feel righteous outrage against something, this can cause a lot of harm.

    In The Day of the Locust, Once the people who had come to California to die arrive in Hollywood, they find something to do there that still does not completely fulfill their need for excitement. Some of them become cultists, “economic as well as religious” (West 131). Others hunt for drama, like for those who turned up at Harry’s funeral “…hoping for a dramatic incident of some sort, hoping at least for one of the mourners to be led weeping hysterically from the chapel” (West 73). It is those hunting for drama that made up the rioting crowd surround Kahn’s Persian Theatre at the end of the book. Once the crowd was riled up, they let their desire for excitement and drama take them over. Both physical and sexual violence was perpetrated all across the crowd, simply because everyone wanted to make things interesting. Over social media, this violence takes a different form.

What Does Today’s Riot look like?

    The violent mob of today is best described as outrage culture or cancel culture. Outrage culture is people on the internet’s tendency to group up and collectively express outrage and dislike towards something or someone. Cancel culture is a form of outrage culture, but it has the goal of getting a person or group that is usually well known, ‘canceled,’ which entails being outcast from the public sphere and career opportunities. The first step on the way to the modern-day swarm becoming agitated is the inciting incident. Someone or something does something that many people do not like or think is distasteful. Sometimes, there is good reason to challenge the person who people have perceived to have messed up. For example, a form of cancel culture did successfully remove Harvey Weinstein from filmmaking after sexual abuse allegations arose through the MeToo movement. However, cancel culture is not justified when in targets people who made a mistake in the past and have since grown from it. As more people begin to learn about the inciting incident, more people feel the need to join the conversation, desperate to get involved in the drama, just like the people eagerly awaiting drama outside the Persian Theatre. Eventually, the mob’s attacks are in full swing: all kinds of harassment and hatred are thrown at the person or group in question. Not many people are willing to sling death threats at others in real life, but with the feeling of anonymity and distance from real life that comes with being on the internet, death threats are far more common. Sometimes the ‘canceling’ is successful, and sometimes it is not. Regardless, what does outrage and cancel culture have to do with the American Dream?

Outrage and Cancel Culture and the American Dream

    Outrage and cancel culture are a result of relative success. Hochschild discusses this idea of relative success in her piece, “What is The American Dream?” In the piece, Hochschild expresses that “…success can be relative. Here achieving the American dream consists in becoming better off than some comparison point, whether one’s childhood, people in the old country, one’s neighbors, a character from a book, another race or gender—anything or anyone that one measures oneself against” (Hochschild). In the case of social media, being successful relative to others means having more followers: people who listen to you and value your thoughts and opinions. Missing out on getting involved in the latest topic to be outraged about means missing potential clout. Furthermore, the person or group involved in an incident that invokes cancel culture is usually famous, which invokes feelings that that person or group does not deserve their fame, thus, the desire for them to be ‘cancelled.’ Outrage and cancel culture are borne of envy of people who are more successful in the social sphere. Some people are even able to achieve a form of American Dream through social media itself, in the case of influencers, who use their following to advertise various products for sponsors, so acquiring social success can be financially lucrative.

The internet has proven to be a place where people are willing to act out what they would never do in real life. In the future, it would be wise for people to wait for evidence to come out and listen to the person or group in question before making hateful and uninformed comments Through outrage and cancel culture, the American dream takes on a monstrous form through the hatred and social exiling directed towards successful people who may not deserve that fate.

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