Chaotic 2022 in Review

I’m scared of you because you’re weird because you’re going through puberty

Published in issue 41 of Kaleidoscope.

Honestly, “chaotic” is feeling a bit tired. Almost three years since COVID, already six since Trump, and this unhinged era seems exhausted—and yet it still exhausts even the most jaded among us. While the deification of primordial darkness is ancient early human stuff—Egyptians worshipped Kek, while Greeks posited the goddess Khaos emerged at the dawn of creation—you can trace the roots of “chaos” as a buzzword to the post-nuclear midcentury, specifically mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s writings on chaos theory and the butterfly effect in the 1960s, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS (1967–74), and the popularity of Chaos Magic, which first emerged in the 1970s as part of the broader neo-pagan movement. The word “chaotic” entered a little later, with Britney Spears and Kevin Federline’s reality TV show taking the adjective as its title in 2005, and then memes inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart (X-axis: lawful–chaotic, Y-axis: good–evil) peaking in popularity around the time of Donald Trump’s election in November 2016. While being intentionally illegible is a way to break through the noise, classifying things as chaotic is a coping mechanism, a ritual of mock authority for a reality defined by anxiety.

There’s probably never been a time in human history when we weren’t going through a period of crisis from someone’s perspective. But, given our networked culture, today we witness more than ever, at the same time, and it’s all broadcast to us in ever increasingly fractal doses. Global systems are too big. High-frequency trading is too fast. Online platforms feed us too much. Reality is defined by content glut and lack of consensus, while alienation and acceleration mutate our circadian rhythms. As the weather grows more extreme and our perception of time more unreliable, our trust wanes in institutions and each other. Stuck in chaos mode, we indulge in dystopia and dabble in psychedelics, praying for a revelation. In the meantime, according to the customs of our capitalist hellscape, we’ve predictably commodified the unpredictable, turning the chaotic into an aesthetic category and marketing strategy. Season after season, disorientation is the new black. And so, in the spirit of self-soothing systemization, here are some of the most chaotic moments of 2022. (Maybe it’s an oversight to have skipped allegations Liz Truss killed the queen, the FTX polycule implosion, and Balenciaga’s pedo scandal, but this story was assigned in July; while I managed to squeeze in a few updates along the way, the BTS process was fittingly a bit chaotic!!)

Ye

No one seems as committed to wreaking havoc for the attention industrial complex as the artist formerly known as Kanye West. This fall, his antisemitic comments lost him his contracts with Gap, Balenciaga, and Adidas but he still owns our mental real estate, once again (at the time of writing) a trending topic on Twitter. So far in 2022, he’s had his wife file for divorce, harassed her with a truck of roses, threatened her now-ex Pete Davidson, stunted by dating both Julia Fox and Kim look-alike Chaney Jones, started a school, sent “white lives matter” shirts down the runway in Paris, which his team then allegedly donated to houseless people on Skid Row, found his social media accounts restricted, ranted to Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and defamed George Floyd on a now deleted episode of Drink Champs (plus that Infowars appearance now also). Ye is a veteran of leveraging unhinged behavior into attention for new projects, but his mania is always too compulsive to seem entirely manufactured. A longtime agent of chaos, his spiral keeps growing more destructive, yet we are all fueling the fire as no one can look away. 

Hadis Najafi and Kate Moss

Perhaps the most perplexing moment of the fall fashion weeks was that on September 24, the same day that Kate Moss walked Bottega Veneta in Milan, 20-year-old activist-TikToker Hadis Najafi was killed by Iranian forces during a protest against the police-inflicted death of Mahsa Amini. While Najafi is one of dozens who have been killed in anti-government rallies, she’s emerged as a symbol of the burgeoning civil unrest, and in the picture being shared most on social media, she’s dressed almost identically to Moss on the catwalk in Milan, whose image was at the time also trafficking heavily on the timeline. Both women’s blonde hair is worn straight, falling on the shoulders of an unbuttoned and untucked blue-and-green plaid shirt, layered over a white tank, and relaxed straight-legged jeans. The coincidence is eerie. There’s no meaning, only the urge to find it when we’re violently confronted by meaninglessness and the overwhelming feeling of our own impotence in the face of it.

Shanghai Lockdowns

Officials responded to an Omicron outbreak in China’s capital with a strict lockdown. Reports of siege-like conditions detailed food shortages, government rations making people sick, starving animals, and talking robots patrolling the streets. Horrifying videos emerged of residents screaming and wailing from the windows of their high-rise towers. While dissent in China is usually squashed quickly and rarely seen by the general public, censors seemed to struggle to contain scenes of looting and unrest. Locals scuffled in the streets with officials in hazmat suits. Workers stormed factory gates. Neighbors rushed out of their barricaded building as other residents threw objects out their windows at health management staff. It took two months before restrictions were eased, but there are fears that an uptick in cases could trigger the nightmare all over again.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the writer-director duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once, explain that, with their multiverse mindfuck of a movie, they wanted to narrate the journey of finding empathy amidst chaos. Jumping between different dimensions was intended as a metaphor for the contemporary experience of information overload, which can make us feel too overwhelmed by stimuli and stressful news stories to care about any of it, triggering empathy fatigue set in.

Slapgate

Will Smith joked that he and Jada Pinkett Smith “chose chaos” in an Instagram caption posted hours before he marched onto the Oscars stage and slapped Chris Rock across the face. This comment, which seemed to foreshadow the actor’s impromptu reaction to Rock’s G.I. Jane joke made at the expense of Jada, has fueled conspiracies that the scuffle was all faked for ratings. Even if the general consensus is that this wasn’t a pre-written skit, Will Smith’s actions, assumed as spontaneous, suggest that our attention economy, supported by surveillance culture, rewards people calibrating in real-time behaviors that will maximize eyeballs and controversy. I imagine Will went home to Jada chewing him out for his “disgusting display of ego.” Negative attention is still attention. Months later, the drama was still making headlines.

Monkeypox

Foreboding a future where pandemics will become more and more frequent, in April, a COVID-weary public was informed there was a global outbreak of monkeypox. Twitter declared the virus sounded “cute,” “racist as hell,” and “post-apocalyptic,” as well as like “a band name,” “an 80s arcade game,” and “some Rick and Morty shit.” The name (which the World Health Organization wants to change), not to mention the lesions it causes, feels straight out of bad science fiction, and it’s that slipperiness between real and fake, the tendency to process calamities through a dissociative lens of make believe, that feels especially chaotic—not to mention the irresponsible way it’s being framed as an STI only gay men need to worry about, which suggests history is repeating itself, non-linear looping being another chaos mode trait.

Cara Delevingne at the Billboard Music Awards

The illegibility of Cara Delevingne and Meg the Stallion’s dynamic at the Billboard Music Awards turned it into a magnet for speculation. Nothing cuts through the noise like confusion and meme bait. The two attended together but didn’t pose for formal photos. Cara lurked fiendishly in the background of Meg’s red-carpet shots. Multiple images show Cara, tongue-out, all up in Meg’s irritated face. Later, Meg regrammed a pic that photoshopped Cara out. Whether or not the stars and their publicists engineer these awkward antics for attention, they are reliably provocative in prompting countless reads. Azealia Banks even chimed in, countering conclusions like “Cara’s a cokehead” or that she fetishizes Black women with her own take that people use the lonely pansexual model for fashion clout. Today we can’t get enough of celebrity conspiracy.

Roe v. Wade Leak

“A chaotic abortion landscape” and “health care chaos” are some of the ways the media has described the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overruling of federal protections that date back to 1973. Making it all the more disordered, the decision didn’t come out via official channels but via a draft that was initially leaked to the press by an anonymous clerk. The fact that a majority of Americans disagree with the decision has fueled skepticism of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, while the White House has appeared incompetent in the ruling’s wake. Shortly after Kamala’s bumbling interview on abortion rights, the VP was also accused of running a dysfunctional and hostile workplace. Overall, the government’s systems and authority have been undermined. Also, this roll back of protections has challenged assumptions that history is a linear narrative of progress, while the vitriol in response to inclusive language like “pregnant people” suggests how the dissonance and divergence of world views is deeply entrenched, infecting even the most foundational domains like semiotics.

Jurassic World Dominion

While it did well at the box office, this film’s roll-out already feels forgettable. But the volume of reboots, remakes, spinoffs, and sequels churned out each year is in its own way a sign of our chaotic times. It’s because the media landscape is so unpredictable that execs are looking for risk-averse derivatives. The dinosaur franchise’s latest throws together the stars from both the spinoff and the original (another financially driven attempt at crowd-pleasing), ergo the return of Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm, who in the 1993 film identifies the Tyrannosaurus Rex as the “essence of chaos,” mansplaining, to Laura Dern in a horny, handsy scene, chaos theory and the butterfly effect—“a butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.” This science was an inspiration for Michael Crichton’s original 1990 novel, which examines it with a little more depth than the movie version.

Freed Britney

Ever since a judge ruled to end her conservatorship in November 2021, Britney Spears has remained our ruling chaotic queen. Her first husband (their 2004 Vegas marriage only lasted 55 hours) tried to crash her June wedding to Sam Asghari and ended up arrested for felony stalking just hours before the home ceremony attended by Madonna, Donatella Versace, Selena Gomez, Paris Hilton, and Drew Barrymore. Implied nudes posted on Instagram, sometimes ten in a row, have sparked concerns that Spears is unwell, in turn triggering a her-body-her-choice clap back. Entire social accounts have emerged devoted to exposing inconsistencies and recycled content on Spears’s Instagram, fueling speculation that Asghari is using the pop star and has merely replaced her father as a controlling patriarchal figure. And, as it seems, the tabloid turbulence is never-ending—the “Toxic” songstress’s baby daddy, K-Fed, has exposed audio clips of her parenting her sons: “I’m scared of you, because you’re weird, because you’re going through puberty.”

Economic Turmoil

The stock market took a historic plunge in the first half of the year; meanwhile, inflation has soared to a four-decade high. According to the World Uncertainty Index (yes, that’s a thing), the war in Ukraine caused global uncertainty to surge. It’s the biggest spike since the initial outbreak of Coronavirus triggered unprecedented levels a couple years before. Uncertainty is an important driver of stock market volatility. The media, however, favors words like “turmoil” and “volatility” rather than “chaos” to describe market downswings; implicit in their choice of language is pro-capitalist propaganda that the market has its own ordering principles and can be trusted to tend towards equilibrium (even while r/wallstreetbets showed us how easy it is to manipulate the market). Experts promise rock-bottom prices will encourage investors to buy low, causing the market to stabilize and begin to recover. Let’s see.

Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard

The six-week televised trial was plenty messy with allegations that Amber Heard pooped in Johnny Depp’s bed, a vast divergence between how legacy media and TikTok were representing the case, and even conspiracy theories over why Amber wore a tie with a bee on it just days after Johnny wore a very similar tie. Then, after a ruling in Depp’s favor, headlines announced that the verdict was “thrown into chaos” as it was revealed that there was a juror mix-up. It turns out juror 15 was a different individual than was originally summoned (though a family member who shares the same name and address). Heard’s request for a mistrial was thrown out, so we didn’t get a sequel, but Depp stans paid for court documents to be unsealed that, rather than further exonerating him in the court of public opinion, actually made him look really bad and manipulative with a string of celebrities going back and “unliking” his post about winning the trial. Up next was Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna’s trial. Divorce court is the new content, and you know Kris Jenner will take full advantage.

Sri Lanka Uprising

Food and fuel shortages in Sri Lanka spurred a mass uprising demanding the president resign. Protests were ongoing from March to July, when crowds took over the presidential palace. While images of protestors swimming in the palace pool looked non-violent and joyous, the media declared, “Sri Lanka is in chaos.” Having previously fled to Singapore, the president then resigned by email, and a new interim president was installed who then cracked down on protests. Exemplifying the lack of consensus that defines our times, in China they’re calling the regime change a CIA-backed coup, while the CIA chief returned the blame, alleging that Sri Lanka leaning on high-debt investment from China contributed to its economic collapse.

Large Hadron Collider

In July, physicists restarted the Large Hadron Collider, smashing subatomic particles into each other at unprecedented energy levels, after the accelerator had been dormant for three years for maintenance and upgrades. Would it open a new portal? Rip a hole in the fabric of space-time? Half-jokingly, people posited that several years before, the collider must have transported us to some dystopian alternate reality, i.e. the darkest timeline. Their wish-fulfillment fantasy based on the multiverse theory suggests a collective yearning for an easy solution to our chaotic present.

Capitol Riot Hearings

The word “chaos” has been leaned on heavily to describe the January 6th riot at the Capitol. But over six weeks of public hearings, during which figures like an Internet troll dubbed “Baked Alaska” have pleaded guilty to the role they played in the breach, there’s been a very strategic decision to focus on Donald Trump as the clear villain. The overarching goal to reorder contemporary American politics comes across as somewhat naive. Boring televised hearings are not enough to universally convince a public divided into fervent factionalism that Trump is the number one enemy to American democracy. The raid of his Mar-a-Lago mansion might do more for the cause. But still, it feels like chaos can’t be that easily contained.

Lead image from the 22-page feature in Kaleidoscope #41 with artwork by PWR.